I'm five years old, standing on the couch leaning against the backrest, scared, and engrossed in the scene before me. My dad is trying to force my younger brother to poop in a potty chair. My brother is dead set against it.
"Poop!" demands Dad, getting pissed now.
"Mm mmm." says Scott standing up from the potty, shaking his head, his face fixed in a fierce scowl.
"Poop!" insists the man.
"Mm mmm" insists the boy.
Dad picks him up and thrusts him on the potty. "Damn it I want you to sit there until you poop. And I mean business!" He storms from the room.
Scott watches him go, stands up, takes two steps and glaring at our disappearing father shits on the rug.
I carry this memory, still warm after 41 years and lay it before you. Why?
Because my brother's actions seemed so amazing, so dangerous and insane to me. Because I'd already given in to and accepted being afraid of my father. Unlike my brother I was meek and unspirited around him.
I wasn't close to my father. He scared me. He didn't hit us much but I still recall the physical sensation, the vibrations from his rich, powerful, angry baritone cutting through me, invading me, shaking me all up inside. I do remember one time he hit me. I was an adolescent in the back seat of his microbus with my brothers. We were in Las Vegas where he had finally surfaced eight or nine months after driving his old Cadillac convertible out of Lincoln Nebraska where we had lived together my whole life. The top of his convertible had been slashed open the night before by a thief who had stolen everything he was taking with him. I was very upset that he had been ripped off but he smiled and took it in stride. Then he was gone. Now in Las Vegas he is driving and a younger woman, his associate or maybe girlfriend, is up front with him. This is a couple years after his divorce from my mother. He's on a political tirade as is his wont and I sarcastically disagree with him. I've never done this before. Instantly my face is on fire. I know something's coming. He turns and backhands me in my burning face. I'm wearing headgear. A stiff wire anchored in my teeth protrudes from my mouth. The blow hurts like hell but the wire hurts him too. "God Damned headgear!" he says shaking his hand. I feel ashamed and avenged.
Seems a lot of people I know have painful father stories. I tell mine not to unburden myself or expose him or to seek sympathy. Nor do I pretend to understand my father, I'm only beginning to understand myself. These father stories are not meant to be a portrait of the man, nor is their goal to illuminate our relationship. I tell these stories because I'm working to become my own true man and my vision of and responses to my father have long stood in the way of that task. I tell my father stories because my relationship to my father has been tied up with my relationship to God, and I'm working on disentangling that mess so I can be closer to my father God.
In the fifth grade I was confirmed into the Presbyterian church. I stood with others my age at the front of the sanctuary and like them received a Bible signed by the pastor commemorating the event. I liked that Bible. I still do. I suppose the event was meant to be a sort of passage into the congregation like a Bar Mitzvah. But unlike my Jewish friends I had nothing to do or present or accomplish. I just stood there and took the book. I remember being the youngest member of the small choir and occasionally drinking grape juice and eating a small morsel of bread at service. I remember a boy vomiting in Sunday school and running from the room afraid I would otherwise follow suit. But I don't remember learning anything about how to feel God's presence or how to walk with Him.
Nor do I recall having a deep sense of who my earthly father was. I knew that he was angry. I knew to keep out of his way. I knew too, early on. that in spite of his rage and my fear I still wanted his love and attention. I remember feeling the promise of that love which is mixed in my mind with the smell of his cologne, sweet and masculine. But I don't recall much in the way of fulfillment. One evening when I was six or seven my mother told me I could go downtown with my father to see a movie if I wished. Did I ever, it was near bedtime - I think I had school the next day - my younger brothers were already in bed, my dad was in a good mood, I'd have him to myself and a movie all on stolen time. What could be better? Then the smell of his cologne as he whisks into the living room.
"You ready Sport?"
"Yeah."
And away we go.
Dad knows the theatre manager so we get in free, this just keeps getting better. The movie's already started. My dad leads me to seat. I sit on the aisle, but instead of moving past me to the empty seat beside me he squats down in the aisle next to me and explains that he has some business with the manager and he's gone. And I'm alone. I'm alone for the rest of the movie, trying to convince myself that it's okay that he's gone, trying to convince myself that I'm still having fun. I'm already too distant from myself to feel my pain and disappointment, too distant from myself to complain, too distant from myself to cry.
Now I'm thirteen, standing on the banks of the Niobrara river in northwestern Nebraska. I'm listening to some older toughs talk about scary men. We're on a boy scout canoe trip. My dad came along. My response to his being there is mixed. He's hard to be around but this was one of the few times he actually participated in my life, and I feel valued by that. He wasn't really there for Little League or fishing or golf or much of anything I did. He took my brothers and me camping and traveling and though he gave us some say about where we'd go and what we'd do he seldom tried to engage in activities that interested us. "I'm no fisherman." he'd say to friends and strangers alike "but the boys like it." Ditto for golf, card games, board games, model rocketry, pretty much everything we enjoyed. One summer he did teach me to water ski, he was very good at it. This was great. I could have used a pocketful of such times with him but they were few and random. What my brothers and I remember most from our travels with him wasn't the Golden Gate Bridge or the Grand Canyon or Washington Square Park it was that everything from how to stow the dishwashing liquid to how to fold sheets had to be done precisely his way or chances were good he'd throw a fit and demean us. Everywhere there were eggshells to be avoided.
A couple weeks before the boy scout canoe trip he joined some of the other fathers to paint the heavy canvas canoes. He painted one a beautiful burnt red with exquisite Indian signs that meant something like "safe journey over calm waters." It was by far the coolest paint job in the fleet, many scouts and fathers commented on it. I was proud of his work on that canoe but it was becoming increasingly difficult to be proud of anything he did.
So I'm standing on the banks of the Niobrara river and some tough scouts are talking about Mr. Herndon, a favorite topic. Mr. Herndon is the assistant scout master. He used to be a Marine drill sergeant and is currently a state trooper. He's a hard, tough man and we're all afraid of him. One of the toughs says "But you know who's even scarier than Mr. Herndon?" "Who?" "Mr. Keene, he's really mean." They all agreed, then began citing examples. They had known him for two days.
I felt elevated in their eyes for a brief time. Even though I was a bit of a wimp, I was surviving the meanest dad of them all.
As I boy I imagined and wanted a God who was everything my father wasn't. But God isn't simply some notion we imagine to compensate for our life's hardships and to comfort ourselves. God is a force, a real force independent of our imagination and powerful. God was in my life before I started this work but how did I see Him? I remember a recurring dream I had when I was five or six.
This dream came up in a session with Marc. We were talking about my fear of God and my father. When God came toward me in that five year old dream I experienced Him as a scary force, in the same way I experienced my father only more so; angry, powerful, noisy, unstoppable. But I can hide from Him and I do. How do I know this was God? Because my fear of the force in the dream was so specific; that it would see me and know me completely. Only God can know me completely. In the dream I was also afraid that in knowing me it would have complete power over me. I know now that God doesn't want me to be his slave. I once responded to an Archetype slavishly in a dream thinking it was the right thing to do. But Marc corrected me. "God doesn't want slaves" he said "He wants us in our passion." That's how we know his will, through our heart, through our passion. Now forty years after that dream I want Him to know me completely, I want to follow him with complete passion. It's hard for me to give in to Him day after day, hour by hour. Much of the time I fail but the piece I have now, the piece that was missing in my five year old life is the experience of the love that comes with that surrender.
Still, much of the time, in spite of my hard won knowledge and out of fear, I hide from God. I hid from my father as well. I was afraid to express myself around him so I became submissive and hid my true responses, feelings, passions and thoughts from him. This suppression of my true self created a vacuum inside me and into that vacuum rushed a pathological pride. I was sure that I was better than he was, more loved by my mother, more loved by his mother, more loved by God. What I didn't know at the time was that the true self I thought I was protecting by hiding it from my father was growing weaker. My true self is like a muscle, if I don't exercise it, it grows weak and the pathology creeps in. I'm still afraid of this world; bosses, customers, failure, disappointment but at least I see the trade offs and I want more. Dear God I want more. In hiding from my father I hid from God, the dream makes this clear, and I moved closer to my mother and to the dark mother within me. I'll talk more about the dark mother in the next chapter, for now I'll just say that she is the pathology that emasculates me.
I think now that if I'd been braver and confronted my father things might have gone better for both of us. I responded to him the same way my mother did, by hiding from and discounting him. So he got little true feedback from us. My younger brother, Scott, the floor shitter, stood his ground but by that time I think Dad was already pulling away from his phantom family. Scott was able to be more real with him but he spent far more time with my mom and me and we weren't standing up to the bully so Scott became angry at all of us. Anyway this work is not about "should have dones." My point here is that even as a small boy I was hiding from God and I continued to do so for nearly forty years.
I'm not blaming myself, I was just a kid, but by writing my father off as I did, I unwittingly signed away great regions of my own soul. All anger, especially my own, seemed stupid and inexcusable to me. I distrusted strong men and was attracted to strong women. I thought I didn't need any men around, I could figure it all out on my own thank you very much. Later I saw all things Judeo/Christian as the expressions of violent men who wished to oppress women and sensitive boys like me. In fact I saw the world in these terms.
One thing that really infuriated me as a boy and young man was that pretty girls liked strong boys. See, there's the seductress working in me again. Remember her from my first dream? I was attracted to pretty girls, nothing unusual there but I also looked to them for spiritual food, and that's crazy. I wanted to be saved by women. I wanted to have sex with an angel, with a whole heaven full of angels. Crazy. I thought my sensitivity should have been far more attractive than the ways of strong boys. The other side of this bad coin was that men, especially athletic men who talked dirty and wanted sex with women from a raw animal place in themselves were evil. In fact all things animal in men, and in myself seemed bad to me. This made me popular with my grandmother who spent her life trying to drive the animal out of her four boys. She succeeded a generation later in me. In giving up my animal wildness to get strokes from my grandmother, mother and teachers I unwittingly bargained away my passion.
But there's more. I also wanted to impress these same animal men. Just like I wanted to impress my father. I wanted to impress God too, be his special boy, like Jesus was. Surely those same smart, good boy, emasculating qualities that worked with the women in my life would work with men and God as well. They don't.
Remember that first dream I worked with Marc? I still couldn't see God, he was just a voice from within a dark kitchen. The next time he comes to me was a month or two later. This time he's a tall, powerful, graceful man with long, straight black hair walking away from me. I'm a boy in the dream and I feel there's something familiar about him. I follow. He climbs a stairway then disappears through a door. A couple weeks before I had this dream my wife Ellen sensed something numinous about a figure in a dream and said "I'm here to follow you." It was a good thing to do. It's much more common, especially in the early stages of the work, to run from the divine, or ignore it, or beat it up, or try to control it. Those of us who spend most of our time in a secular world have to learn and relearn to submit and follow, submit and follow. In my dream I remember what Ellen did in hers and I say the same thing. "I'm here to follow you." The man reappears in the doorway looking at me. I feel a rush of energy. The dream ends.
Marc had me gestalt the man. I'm not sure about the origins of gestalting. Gestalt is a German word meaning roughly that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. To gestalt something is to grasp the whole not by rationally adding up the parts but intuitively and directly. I once read a book by Fritz Perls, I think it was called "Gestalt Verbatim." or "Gestalt Therapy Verbatim." It was transcripts from sessions with his clients. Perls would ask a client to imagine that a figure from their dream was sitting or standing in front of them. The client would ask the figure a question then move to the space occupied by the imagined figure and answer the question. Perls often worked with groups of people and they would take turns asking questions of the dream figure. The actor in me thought that was pretty cool. I'm not sure if Perls was the first to do this, he may well have been. I guess the connection to the original German word is that we tend to separate off parts of our self that make us uncomfortable or that we dislike and Perls was attempting to reintegrate these rejected selves publicly and theatrically. I have no idea to what extent Marc was influenced by Perls. The practice of gestalting dream characters is the only overlap I'm aware of. I don't believe Perls tried to distinguish between divine and pathological dream figures. He just wanted to get a conversation going and reintegrate rejected parts of the self. Anyway that's what I recall.
So Marc has me gestalt the man. Marc says: "Man, why do you come back into the doorway?" I repeat the question then move to the empty chair across from me. "Because I love you." I say, answering for the man.
I'd never actually done gestalts before I started working with Marc. At first I felt rather proud, calling on my actor's improvisational skills to fully embody the dream figures, answering with characteristic intonation, choice of words, syntax, the whole nine yards. I don't think this got in the way but it doesn't seem to have helped much and I don't do it anymore. Sometimes gestalts are simple, other times I just sit dumb in the dream figure's chair having no idea how they'd respond. Sometimes I'm able to gestalt from a place of innocence but often I'm thinking; "Does this character seem archetypal or pathological?" and my silent internal answer to that question influences my spoken response.
Marc uses the gestalt in many ways. Sometimes he knows who the dream figure is and what they're trying to tell me and I get the feeling he's just checking in to see if I'm on the same page. In addition the simple act of gestalting can help set a feeling or insight into my soul in a more powerful way than if Marc just tells me what's up. There are also times when Marc doesn't know what the heck is going on in the dream and he's using the gestalt to question the dream figure in the same way a detective might question a witness or a suspect.
The example I cited , the response of the powerful man with the long black hair, was very straightforward. I think Marc knew his answer word for word. "Why do you come back?" I ask "Because I love you." replies the figure through my gestalt. In the dream I then felt a rush of energy. Before the gestalt I hadn't thought of this energy as love, I'd just experienced it in the dream as a good buzz. But Marc said "That's what the Father's love feels like." This is news to me: I can feel love and not recognize it. I'm also learning that I can feel other things quite different from love and believe they are love. This awareness opens such strange and unfamiliar vistas. Who am I? What is this thing I feel for my wife? What are these things I feel for other women? What are these things I feel for men? What is the significance of all these stories I've told myself and others about my past? Are they no longer true? Were they ever true? My homework was to return to the moment in the dream when the man returns, feel that energy and know it's God's love.
The next dream in which I am blessed by this love begins with an intense, confusing, disturbing sequence in a house that brings up feelings similar to those in the race dream from the previous chapter. In this dream I run from the pathological mess out into the front yard and call to God and then it's raining - a wonderful warm, soft, steady rain and I know this is God's love and it feels great.
In my early work with Marc I felt proud sharing dreams like this. In fact I'm still prone to this particular pride. When the archetypes support me, when the love is present and flowing in a dream I feel it's because of something good I've done and like a boy showing off a trick or skill I want to show Marc that I'm doing good work. Of course it doesn't really work that way. We can't earn good dreams, though we can get out of the way enough to let them through. Marc says such dreams can be agents of transformation throwing everything we think we know into complete chaos. I believe that dreams flowing with love are often simply a gift, perhaps sent to encourage, perhaps to remind, perhaps sent as a gesture of love as when I spontaneously buy my two year old an unexpected something.
In the session I feel that I've somehow arrived. Oh, the myriad false arrivals I have known over the years. Marc warns me that this wonderful rain of love in the dream isn't enough. It's love alright, the real thing and omnipresent and visceral and if I lived in the natural world and practiced a primitive religion it might well be enough but this work like Christ's church calls me to a personal relationship with God. Marc warned me that God would soon come as a person, someone more intense than the man with the long black hair, and that my task would be to have a relationship with that person and that that relationship would be far more demanding, far more difficult, far more threatening than standing face uplifted in a warm rain of love. He nailed that one.
A couple months later God comes to me as a gangland boss. He comes as the Godfather. And he kills me.
But first a more peaceable dream:
I'm playing basketball with Randy Cipriano. Randy was short but he was very athletic. His father was head coach of the Nebraska Cornhusker basketball team. In the dream, unlike in real life, I can't miss. I'm making all sorts of stupid shots. Then Randy's dad joins us and I'm scoring against him. We go inside for lunch and I don't know much about basketball but I'm telling the coach my brilliant theories on the game because I want to impress him, because I want to earn his love and respect.
My homework this time was simply to ask for his love and the crazy thing is that that didn't feel as juicy as trying to impress him. That's how far from love I was living. We have to hunger for God's love to receive it. And I was hungering for other things. It's like learning to chose and appreciate nutritious food over junk food. It's really tough for some of us. I wasn't getting it. I wasn't open to God's love. My pride was in the way. The Archetypes had to shake me up. They had to scare me. Fear melts pride.
I was 15 or 16 when Coppola's "Godfather" came out. I never read Puzo's book but it had a reputation around my high school. Students mysteriously referred to page 38 I think it was, which must have been the scene where Sonny bangs the wedding guest against the bedroom door. But it wasn't sex I was thinking about when a friend's mother offered to take us to see it, (we were too young to go alone). It was the rumors of violence that haunted and excited me.
The night before we went I had a tough time sleeping. Finally I dreamt of mobsters running each other through with 10 foot sections of sharpened metal rain gutter. Sharpened rain gutters pretty much rip out everything in their path, clothing, organs, bones, but these bloody guys just kept going at each other. I felt sick. Yet as hard as I tried I physically couldn't close my eyes or turn my head. Some force stronger than me insisted that I witness this violence. Something wanted me to be afraid and horrified and powerless.
I remember standing in the lobby waiting to go in the next day, but I don't remember much after that except for the killings: the bloody horse's head, Luka Brodski's garroting, his hand pinned to the bar with a switchblade, Michael's restaurant assassinations, Sonny's last stand, Pauli getting three slugs in the back of his head, the garroting of the brother in law, Carlo, who set up Sonny, his feet kicking out the windshield as he died, and the final operatic massacre. All this killing cut into my sheltered life, hit a nerve, enriched me. What a strange thing to say about murder but I was such a putz, such a mommy's boy, I needed a kick in the pants. I can't say I was transformed in any deep way back then but seeds were planted, and I am now called to walk in those gardens of death, honor and mystery. I've returned to that movie and it's sequels many times, drawn to their mythology.
In the late 80's I lived in Carole Gardens, an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn. A retired Godfather lived on our block, just a few doors down. The brownstones formed a sort of fortress that surrounded all the back yard gardens. My roommate had a cat that would jump out our back window and wander the gardens. He couldn't get out to the streets so he was safe back there. A great big world for an apartment cat. The Godfather used to lean against the gate that led from his front yard to the sidewalk. He was there most of the time most days watching the street. For years I passed within a few feet of him, two, three, four, five times a day. We never spoke. Then one day he called me over. His voice came out of a gravel pit lodged somewhere in his lower throat.
"That your cat?"
"What?" I replied.
"Big gray cat, that your cat?"
"Oh, yeah, he's my roommate's."
"Nice cat, big cat." he says. I wonder where the hell this is going.
"My roommate's cat."
"He comes into my garden" continues the Godfather, "pees on my peppers"
I laugh, a nervous, small laugh.
"Your cat is killing my peppers."
"He's my roommate's cat."
"Nice cat, big cat." Then he looks me in the eye. "I'd hate to hafta kill your cat."
"It's my roommate's cat."
"Nice cat."
"I'll tell my roommate" I say.
My roommate got a screen for the rear widow and that was that.
Every video store in Carole Gardens featured Godfather posters in their front windows. Before these movies came out I don't think many Italian Americans even acknowledged the existence of a Mafia. Now that world had become a source of pride and identity.
Less than a year into the dream work God is appearing in my dreams as the Godfather.
In the first Godfather dream I'm in a building under construction and I think it's being done in an odd way. I think they should hire me to do this work. In my session Marc asks me if I ever did construction work. It would be just like my pride to make me feel I could do something I know nothing about better than those who do. But in this case it turns out I did do quite a bit of carpentry but I didn't like the work. So why would I want to be hired to do it? Pride again, because I felt I could do a better job. My dislike of construction work was so buried I wasn't even aware of it in the dream. In my pathological world pride trumps desire. Then in the dream I'm with Ellen in Carole Gardens, near where I once lived. I ask her where our apartment is. She says "If you're ever lost go to the Real Estate Office" In the dream this makes sense to me and then Ellen is gone and I'm lost. I find the Real Estate Office. The walls are pink, the sofa's pink, a female client at the counter is dressed in pink, and I'm eating pink cotton candy. I'm the only man in the place, Georgie Porgie in Pink World. This is comfort land; Pepto Bismal, overstuffed sofas, fruffy women, the place I'm told to go if I'm lost, drugs, sleep, masturbation, warm baths, all the hiding places. No men. I should be with the men. That's what I need. In the dream I'm alone on the street again, lost again. This is good. Lost is far better than comfortable, though I'm just coming to know this. Suddenly this big guy is weaving all over the street and sidewalk in a golf cart. He's outa control and I'm afraid he might hit me. Then his assistant is walking along beside him and I recognize the man in the cart. It's the Godfather. He tells his assistant that one of his hit men was taken out, then he asks his assistant about me.
I figure I better cut my hair and change my clothes if I ever come back this way. I don't want to be recognized. The golf cart disappears into a warehouse complex. I'm lost again.
Marc says the Archetypes wanted me to be scared and lost. They need something to cut through my pride. God gave me a shot at a more peaceful path to relationship in the basketball dream. But I was feeling pumped up after playing so well and I tried to impress Him instead of basking in and asking for His love.
My homework was to walk alongside the Godfather's golf cart. Just stay with him, feel the fear, feel that I'm lost, just stay with him. It was so common for me in my life to feel intimidated and give up on things. When I do this homework I feel afraid of the Godfather but I'm staying with him and slowly, slowly I begin to change inside, and later dreams will reflect these changes and pose new challenges.
I awake feeling sick.
My homework is to be a boy with the Godfather, to be the son, not the know it all meddler. In my homework I go back to the moment of my beheading. I stand there headless, not seeing or hearing anything. I feel a boy's hand take mine and lead me to a couch where we sit down. Marc generally discourages us from trusting waking fantasies but I think this one scans, it fits, it's true.
No matter how smart I am, no matter how eloquent, no matter how clever, concerned and compassionate I am, I can't impress God. I can't impress God. And I can't win His love. God is telling me to get out of my head, stop trying to impress him, stop trying to ingratiate myself, stop trying to figure out this life, stop trying to fix this life. He's telling me to sit unknowing like a boy and to wait and to accept. Accept my ignorance, accept His ways as I couldn't accept my father's and wait, eventually I'll get hungry for his love and like a boy, ask for it.