Category: Personal Essays

Autobiography, Memoir, Personal Essays

Bait

stephenzuckerman

Here’s the third installment of my ongoing autobiography project, where I post chapters from my life’s story every Friday.

Fishing and swimming—those were my summer joys at Lake Hopatcong. Swimming required only a bathing suit. Fishing, some basic gear. A line, bobber, hook and, of course, the bait.

On those long-ago summer days when I was four or five, sunfish were my specialty game. The flat, bony swimmers are carnivores. They require live animal bait that, after being pierced by the hook in a non-fatal way, twist and turn in their agony to escape, providing irresistible allure.

For me, young and eager to catch any fish I could, bait animals came down to two species: grasshoppers and worms. There were two types of grasshoppers that were local, plentiful, and catchable by a hunter killer such as me. Camouflaged green ones that hopped from one blade of greenery to another, and those that were dull brownish in color and had adapted the means to fly. The brownish ones hung out on brownish dirt patches where their excellent camouflage thwarted detection. When fearing their camouflage had failed, those brown hoppers propelled themselves into the air with a snapping sound. Then they spread their wings—that for no seemingly good reason were colored black and yellow. Off they flew, erratically darting this way and that. Chasing them down was dizzying. Those fliers were the hardest to catch, as there was hardly any way to sneak up on them. With sharp eyes, quick hands, and a cat’s hunting fervor, I learned to track down the flying grasshoppers where they landed and pounce without squashing them, thus rendering them useful as bait. Struggle as they might, I would single-handedly pierce the insect’s exoskeleton with the sharp hook—just past their head in the thorax area—and soon I was ready to fish with a wiggling bait.

Hunting worms was a much greater challenge than hunting grasshoppers, especially the brand of worms that I targeted, the mighty nightcrawler (lumbricus terrestris). Nightcrawlers only rise to the surface of the earth after the noxious sun has set. Their purpose in doing so? Sex! The worms are hermaphrodites and so, to them, sex is a double-edged pleasure. Once out of their holes and slithering about in the evening grass, they seek out one another and, when successful, they match their male to female and female to male sex organs head to tail, tail to head, and proceed to copulate. Double the pleasure. I wasn’t allowed out late at night and so was never able to take advantage of nature’s zest for procreation in order to capture nightcrawlers during their nocturnal debaucheries.

Instead, a fellow Briefite, two years my elder, unveiled to me the secret method used to coax nightcrawlers to come to the surface during the rule of the sun.

Step 1: concoct a caustic brew to be poured down the nightcrawler’s hole. This brew would make the worm seek relief by rapidly coming to the surface, whether it was day or night. To make the offensive liquid, I would covertly borrow the tin of Coleman’s Dry English Mustard from my mother’s pantry. I then mixed the powder with water in an empty quart milk container with its most utilitarian spout. The brew was ready when it took on a bright yellow color and tangy smell.

Step 2: the art of locating the nightcrawlers’ home and preparing it for the delivery of the liquid mustard preparation. To find the holes, we crawled on all fours in the thick grass, searching with our hands for the mounds of worm poop that covered the creature’s hole. The trick was to uncover the hole without letting any poop fall in it, clogging it up. The worm poop was then used to carefully build a funnel around the hole, making sure none of the poop clogged it, to direct the liquid. Down the yellow liquid heat would rush, and in twenty anticipatory seconds, the stillness would explode. Out of the mouth of the hole came this large, pinkish-brown, fleshy, pointed, herded, faceless thing, writhing with mustard burn. When the inflamed beast was halfway out of his tunnel, he would hesitate, offended by the sunlight.

This was the most crucial moment of the hunt, for it required all the discipline a four-year-old could muster. When to strike! Too early and the nightcrawler would seize up so that half his body would be stuck in the tunnel—a hard pull would tear him apart. So my friend taught me to have patience, to wait. Patience paid off, because inevitably the nightcrawler’s pain overcame his distaste for sunlight and he’d slither out of his hole and become easy pickings. Sometimes, the nightcrawler would get stuck, half in and half out, so it took a keen eye to judge when he relaxed his powerful muscles. Then with a quick grasp at his protruding half, before he could tense up again, he could be plucked whole and put into the can of water used to wash off the offending mustard, and then into the dirt holding pen, ready to be sold for bait.

My sister, Bernice, four years older than me, handled the bookkeeping. We sold a dozen nightcrawlers for $.10 and by summer’s end, our tin can bank was full of dimes to the tune of $9.00.

Every now and then, I think back to my nightcrawler hunting days and how exciting it was. Do I have nightmares where giant nightcrawlers are threatening to avenge the mayhem and murder my sister and I perpetrated against their brethren? No! But, as of recently, I began to think of nightcrawlers, those faceless creatures, as having feelings, a soul, especially now that I have come to contemplate my own demise. Even without Darwin, it is now intuitively obvious that all living creatures are my brethren.

Autobiography, Memoir, Personal Essays

Hopatcong Heaven

stephenzuckerman

Please enjoy the second installment of my ongoing autobiography project, where I post chapters from my life’s story every Friday. 

From ages 4½ to 11½, summers were heaven. For two delicious months, my family and I escaped our tenement confinement in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by heading to Brief’s Bungalow Colony on the western shore of Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey’s largest lake. Uncle Philly, who was married to Aunt Lena, my father’s younger sister, was a fish monger. He sold to rural New York and New Jersey hotels, which were kept hopping with Jewish vacationers escaping the summer swelter of the city. Philly had discovered Lake Hopatcong on one of his Pisces peddling sojourns and couldn’t wait to tell my father about it.

“Max, you won’t believe it!” he told my father. “I found Gan Eden [Garden of Eden in Hebrew], minus that grumpy, self-righteous landlord, just a couple of hours from here. What are you going to do this summer to get Helen and the kids out of Brooklyn’s schvitz bath and bad tempers? I’ll tell you what! You send them up to Brief’s Bungalow Colony on Lake Hopatcong for two months! Cheap, $400 for the summer. And you? You can visit them on the weekends!”

Philly’s enthusiasm successfully persuaded my father, although I will never be sure if it was because Dad thought it was truly a great deal or because he couldn’t wait to get rid of Philly. Philly traveled with a miasma about him from the fish he sold—mostly of the northern Atlantic variety—that he purchased wholesale at the Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan at three o’clock in the morning. Lake Hopatcong’s fish did not smell like that, nor did they reek of alcohol like Philly did. How memorably embarrassing was his commandeering the emcee’s microphone to blurt out his own version of Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn, or To Me You’re Beautiful, at one relative or another’s Bar Mitzvah or wedding. Like most Jewish families, ours were righteous teetotalers. Only ceremonial Manischewitz and Schnapps were sanctified. Whiskey, Philly’s favorite, was not. It was not unusual to hear one relative or another say, “Who invited that Shmegegee [buffoon]?” or “Why doesn’t Lena divorce that Shikker [drunkard]?” or “Look, nobody has the Chutzpah to take the microphone away from that pisher.” But that was just Uncle Philly.

My mother’s family were all experienced swimmers. Her father, Grandpa Joe, a candy store owner, loved the ocean, and as soon as his children could walk, he taught the three of them to swim in the waves at Rockaway’s public beaches.

When my mother’s brother, my Uncle Myer, heard of Lake Hopatcong, he joined the summer exodus with his wife, Ester, and his three children. This was great for us, because Uncle Myer owned a hand-me-down woody station wagon. It was a gift from his Uncle Lionel, the artist, who, amongst other things, created the MGM Lion! Into the woody would go our suitcases, fishing lines, towels and bedding, and then we would set off for summer heaven. Even the trip to the lake was itself an adventure, because the woody was old and cranky and would overheat at the hint of any grade over five degrees. Lake Hopatcong was 60 miles away on winding, hilly roads from Brooklyn. We would all be on alert for steam rushing out from under woody’s hood, the signal for the caravan to circle. Myer stocked woody’s running-boards with five gallon water tanks, strapped down securely and ready for action. After guzzling a couple of gallons of water, the old timer settled down and the caravan would round us kids up and move on. We’d replicate this ritual four or five times on the way to Lake Hopatcong.

Brief’s Bungalow Colony sat on the western shore of the lake. The area had a foreboding name—the River Styx—and it included a two lane, narrow bridge. Our bungalow had three bedrooms and an all-purpose kitchen, living room, and dining area. The bungalow’s screen doors and windows invited summer breezes to pass unhindered through the bungalow, blurring the lines between outdoors and in.

There, at Brief’s, we escaped the squalor of Brooklyn with its locked doors and windows used to keep out winter and thieves, and the relentless noise and traffic pollution of Bedford Avenue, a major thoroughfare that was right outside our door.

Brief’s Bungalow Colony owned 50 feet of lakeshore. Its dock extended far into the lake before making a sharp turn to the left. Doing so, it created a rectangular “pool,” or safe area. It was here that my mother taught me, an already accomplished swimmer at age 4½, how to float. I remember floating effortlessly on top of Lake Hopatcong’s gentle waters, arms and legs outstretched, relaxed, completely enchanted by the billowing clouds that moved lazily across the blue sky above.

I never did, as a youth, fathom the length and depth of Lake Hopatcong. From Brief’s dock, I could see the white plumes of speed-boats in the distance as they crisscrossed the main body of the lake. It was probably smaller than I imagined then, but in my mind it stretched on forever, blue waves and endless water.

It wasn’t just the water. My whole Hopatcong world seemed vast, though it mostly consisted of our bungalow, the grassy commons of the larger colony where I hunted night crawlers, and the long dock where I caught upwards of 400 sunfish every summer. I spent a good deal of time diving under the water, trying to become like those very fish I spent so much time catching, beheading, gutting, scaling, frying (though my mother did that part), and eating.

I remember lying on my belly, fishing on the dock with a drop line, hook and worm dangling in the clear lake water, watching the brightly speckled orange-bellied sunfish dart about my hook, just two feet from my nose. Those sunfish never failed me.

When I was fifty, I revisited Lake Hopatcong and tried to locate Brief’s Bungalow Colony. I drove back and forth about four or five times, unable to figure out where Brief’s was. It finally dawned on me that I was looking for Brief’s with my child’s eye. The actual area, sans bungalows, was so small compared to my memory of it that I had passed by it time and time again without recognizing what it was.

Autobiography, Memoir, Personal Essays

Beginnings: First Memories

stephenzuckerman

This is the first real installment of my ongoing autobiography project, where I post chapters from my life’s story every Friday. Enjoy!

On a bright day, when sunrays danced on water so pure that every grain of sand glimmered on the sea bottom, I was launched into conscious life. I was two and a half at the time. My mother held my hand as she led me gently up to my waist in the briny water. She cuddled me under my belly and laid me facedown in the warm sea. I instantly panicked, arching my back to get my face out of the water. Then she did it again, speaking to me calmly. I couldn’t breathe, the water rushing into my nose and mouth. She urged me to kick, to splash with my arms and, assuming that there was purpose to her dunking me, I frantically obeyed. Two, three, four times she patiently lowered my face into the water. Each time I came up sputtering and coughing from the salt that stung my eyes and lodged in the back of my throat. Finally, my tears, my protest, convinced her that I’d had enough that day.

“Take my hand little one,” she said and led me up onto the warm, sandy beach. We were at Long Beach in New York, the summer of 1943. It was the only time we ever vacationed there, but I remember my swimming lesson vividly. Everything was new, and my senses were glutted with that newness. The feel of sand under my feet, the taste and smell of the salt water. I can still feel those waves on my body. Eventually, I got the hang of having my face in the water and, from that point on, the umbilical cord was severed. I was my own boy!

After swimming, I remember lying on the beach with my mom. A large propeller-driven airplane zoomed overhead, menacingly low, flying over the water. I jumped at the time, startled by the noise and how close it seemed to crashing into the waves. Now, I assume it was a military plane taking off for war from nearby Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. WWII had been declared two years before I was born.

It was a time of chaos, when my country was fighting to save itself and the rest of the world from the evils of despotism, fascism, communism and anti-Semitism. A great struggle for good-over-evil was taking place, one that would dramatically impact my life.

My parents were both first generation Americans, the children of Polish Jews who had emigrated to New York City in 1913—just before immigration from Eastern Europe was shut down. Both had grown up in the stifling, overcrowded tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

My mother’s family, while as poor as many of the immigrants who passed through Ellis Island—those who inspired Emma Lazarus to write the sonnet, “The New Colossus”—were of artistic and intellectually rich stock. My father’s family, in contrast, were street-smart, working class shtetl Jews. Their grit and humor transformed Manhattan’s garment district from predominantly uniform manufacturing to women’s wear and eventually to Haute Couture.

Not long after the summer of 1943, I first encountered the man who would be one of the great influences in my life. Dr. Gabriel Kirschenbaum practiced general medicine out of a three-story brownstone across the street from us on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. That day, he had crossed the avenue and climbed the stairs up to our third story walk-up apartment to extract the whole pistachio nut that I had, personally and intentionally, lodged up one of my nostrils. Even though he was a bear of a man with a gruff roar, Dr. Kirschenbaum was surprisingly un-scary. I stood in my crib, unrepentant as he approached, arm-in-arm with my short, round, loquacious mother. She beamed up at him, and he affectionately scowled at her and then nudged me under my chin. My mother then began her trademark barrage aimed at educating Dr. Kirschenbaum on the finer nuances of nostril nut removal. He finally turned to her with glaring eyes and declared, “Shut up, Helen,” and by G-d, she did. She closed her mouth, still looking way up at Kirschenbaum with those adoring eyes. I don’t remember the extraction, but I do remember the power he had in that moment—to help me, and to make my mother stop her verbal stream.

Seven decades later, with all the retrospect wisdom that comes along with stiff muscles, aching joints, and decreased libido, I offered up a heartfelt thank to you Kirschenbaum. He impregnated this infant’s mind with the goal of a tireless and selfless effort to be of help to others, and therefore to be loved. Kirschenbaum: the father of my dreams.

Memoir, Personal Essays

Foreward to My New Book

stephenzuckerman

Dear Readers: I realize that it has been a little while since we last connected. There’s a valid reason for that, I assure you: I’ve been hard at work on getting my latest manuscript ready to be published! I’m happy to say that I’m almost there, and that I will be posting clips from that memoir to this blog over the next few months. In the meantime, I’m posting a Foreward by my former editor that will be included in the memoir. This writing dives into the heart of my story, and posits questions to the reader that I hope you’ll find as engaging as I do. It can sometimes be very flattering to read what others think about you, which is certainly the case with this Foreward. I’m very grateful to Stephanie for her lovely piece of writing, and I think it will make a wonderful addition to my new book. Enjoy!

Forward by Stephanie Ericsson

When I began working with Dr. Stephen Zuckerman in 1998 on his first book, it quickly became apparent that his ideas were multilayered, often built upon one another, even, at times, holographic in their dimensions. These were concepts that pummeled at comfortable paradigms to make way for new ways of thinking. Some were not really so new but rather were more complete, or more compassionate, or more far reaching. In this age of the almighty sound byte and TV’s 7-and-a-half-minute-attention-span, the very art of thinking is in jeopardy of becoming extinct. It is easier to think in clichés or stereotypes, especially with the information overload that we live in.

It is the mark of enduring idea when it continues to bear fruit even after many pluckings. Over the years of working with Dr. Zuckerman and his ideas, I am still discovering layers of meaning within his words and concepts that on first, second or even fiftieth glance had escaped me. Many of these ideas are disguised in such simplicity that it is easy to believe one caught the entire meaning right away. Yet again and again, surprising ah ha’s! have burst upon me from ideas that I thought I’d understood in total. The interconnection of one idea to another, or a larger meaning tucked into a goofy word-play or a concept that suddenly offers a new tool for dealing with some private torment of my own—these experiences have captured me as much as a reader as they have as his editor.

No idea of Zuckerman’s was more challenging than his experience of hearing G-d’s voice. Who, in their right mind, would believe such a thing? Certainly no one who values their credibility! Not other doctors, not psychiatrists, not upstanding businessmen in today’s techno-culture. Certainly, it succeeded in getting him incarcerated in his own Kesey-ian Cuckoo’s Nest. But it also proved to be a brilliant co-conspirator, taskmaster, conscience, mentor and spiritual guru. It succeeded in testing the medical legal system, the patience of his associates, and the odds at the racetrack. It outsmarted doctors, judges, and the DMS-4. It forced him to throw his professional and personal credibility to the dogs and literally got him a prognosis so hopeless that he spent 3 months in the kind of state institution where most inmates never leave. Even so, in taking so much from him, it did not leave him bankrupt.

When Zuckerman first described The Voice and the story of his encounter with G-d, I had a difficult time believing that he was fully sane. But over time, I found that there was nothing about him that supported those doubts. Nothing in his past history, his medical or familial history supported the diagnosis of psychosis. He’d lived a life that was relatively unscathed by misfortune—no physical or emotion abuse from childhood that pointed toward the pathological. Nor was he religiously fanatical—or religiously savvy, for that matter. He’d been raised by his parents as a secular Jew—typical of their generation—who attended synagogue once a year on Yom Kippur, held a Seder at Passover and the rest of the time worked long, hard hours to provide opportunities for their children. He’d never been traumatized like so many men of his generation who’d been drafted into the insanity of Vietnam. And although he was passionate about his work, he wasn’t drive to obsession, but rather led a balanced life most people would have envied for its sanity. He had no history of alcohol or drug abuse and he was physically fit and had been healthy his entire life.

His parents loved him and raised him in relative middle class comfort so he wasn’t tormented by the privation of poverty as so many Jewish families had been during and after World War II. His sense of humor and playful nature seemed to make his long hours as a doctor not only bearable, but thoroughly enjoyable. He had endless patience, was quick to forgive, slow to judge and nearly impossible to rouse to anger. Although he was brilliant, his wasn’t a tormented intelligence, as so many highly gifted people suffer from. In short, there was nothing that pointed to Stephen Zuckerman as a nutcase.

So, I believed him when he told me that he and G-d had conversed over a period of months just after he’d turned 50. His descriptions, both in conversations and in his writing, were always consistent, never indulgent or dramatic, and just quirky enough to be believable.

But when I decided to ‘believe’ his story, I found that I had to do so on more than just a personal level—I had to believe him on a professional level as well. I had to believe him as his editor, otherwise I would find myself either condescending to him as my client, or entirely unable to work with him. Naturally, the process of writing is an intensely interior one, and in order for an editor to be effective, he or she must enter that concentrated interior with the writer, as an observer, as a guide, as a muse and as a critic. Since the nature of the writing is to express what is seen through the eyes of the writer’s soul, the editor must perform all of these roles invisibly and unobtrusively. An editor must coax the writer’s ideas into maturity while being careful not to inject his own ideas into the process or the message of the writer. Often a writer is unaware at first of what he is trying to say—he is merely being pushed along by some deep compulsion to say it. Words themselves are alive and know exactly where they belong so the writer must discover his role as the vehicle of the message by getting out of the way while at the same time surrendering to the forces that are compelling the message. For this to happen, the writer has to disengage from his own ego, while, at the same time, he must so deeply believe in the idea that he will not give up through its arduous birth.

It is the role of the editor to walk beside the writer through this journey. Believing that Dr. Zuckerman had a three month conversation with God was more of a challenge to me personally than professionally. I had to suspend the part of me that was agnostic. I had to challenge the skeptic modernist in me while calling on the Catholic training of my childhood. I read everything I could find that might lead me to the key. I wrote in my own personal journal about it, and even went back to the church. I meditated on my own and secretly hoped that Zuckerman’s God would pay me a visit too. I spoke to mystics and found that things like visions and apparitions were more of a pain than a blessing and anyone with any sense would not wish for one. St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila had said the same thing, both being infinitely down-to-earth and pragmatic.

Ultimately, it was a matter of letting go of my blocks to believe and having the courage to simply listen to the message. Did it make sense? Did it sound real? Did it speak to me?

These are the questions that anyone who has picked up this book will have to answer for themselves. Some of what Zuckerman describes is supported in scripture, tradition and history and some will be debatable.

And so, Gentle Reader, in the end, it will be as it always has been—a matter of faith.

 

Memoir, Personal Essays

Asylum, Part 3

stephenzuckerman

Third and final part of my time spent at Brainard Hospital. If you missed the previous posts, be sure to catch up on part one and part two. 

In time, I began to frequent a room we called the Smoker, and, although not a smoker myself, I adjusted to the languid smoke-filled terrain of our den of inequity. Layer upon layer, the yellow walls were stained nicotine brown. Scraped, scarred and slashed Salvation Army chairs circled eight-foot round rough-hewn tables that were scattered in clusters. A myriad of ashtrays — both on the floor and the tables — were always full of ashes, butts, and spittle. At the head of the Smoker stood two wooden rectangular tables under the naked glare of ceiling lights that cast shadows into the grimy recesses of the large room.

The head tables were for the employees in charge of maintaining decorum in the Smoker. They doled out cigarettes to momentarily abate the incessant cravings of the inmates. One cigarette per customer per 15 minutes 24 hours a day. The line established itself just before the quarter-hour and the dolers regularly shortchanged the clock to avoid being nagged. I supposed it was also a gesture of good will.

The rights to cigarettes were obtained in a variety of ways that included exchanging your disability welfare check for your favorite brand, being a beneficiary of the covert founder of the cigarette endowment, guilting what family and friends still recognized your existence, theft and, above all, mooching. The cigarette cult permeated our society-in-exile and the Smoker was its capital.

I had met a woman in Brainard named Jeanne. Soon she became ‘my woman’ and we had a sort of romance that was born of necessity as much as desire. She and I held intriguing meetings in the Smoker, where we shared butts, kissed and fondled each other in the dingy shadows.

Jeanne liked to deny my fondling both inside and outside of that drab room. With a lean, poised body, darting clear blue eyes, and subtle breasts, she entertained herself by play-acting a fear of being defiled by men. Her mind was seeded with paranoia and she spent most of her free time calling lawyers and begging for their help. She demanded that they comprehend her plight and secure her freedom. In every call, she recanted the sins heaped upon her that were now destroying her brain and infesting her body. A sexy child-woman, over-medicated, frightened and pushy, she was beyond even electro-shock to pull her back from the edge of sanity.

One random morning at two am, all was well in the smoker. John had his head-set radio scattered all over the large round wooden table and was attempting to use black tape to repair its bare guts. For four dollars, he’d just bought at least twenty dollars’ worth of radio from a new incarcerate. Fixing, breaking, re-fixing—his hands flew between waist-attached tape players with head-phone privacy, an army of batteries, double AA, alkaline, triple AAA-used, new, no good at all, and the prized cassette tapes. Barter, borrow, buy and hide away for the needy day. He was hoping to tap into that electronic music sub-culture, an elitist indulgence for the intelligentsia. How utterly sublime to soar through one corridor after another, to sit in the dank Smoker while enveloped in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique! And only he would be able to hear and dance to its rhythms.

Randy, another inmate, postured out of the gloom. His presence was ostensibly to help John, but we all knew he would fail as usual. Randy’s air of monotonous superiority was more boring than offensive, even a bit entertaining at times. John wouldn’t give in to Randy’s attempt to help — or dominate, one could say — and he collected the pieces of his electronic world and left. Randy bantered on, pointing fingers and sermonizing on the need for order and rules. He bragged, as he often did, that his myriad of contacts on the ‘outside’ were waiting for his release. Then he paraded proudly up to the head table and preached at the cigarette dolers. Was it to provoke, ingratiate or simply to relieve his boredom? Maybe all three. But the people in charge were used to his biteless bark and even admired him as they would a strutting peacock.

It was a shame that Randy ran off John. He was the sweetest, brightest and most caring soul I have met in a long time. Like with the radio, he was always tinkering with something, piecing together parts into a whole that never quite came together. I didn’t believe that his Rube Goldberg-style inventions were a sign of what got him institutionalized, but rather the result of 22 years of drugs and institutions. Often he launched into a tirade that lacerated drug psychiatry. “None of this shit works,” he’d say. Because according to John, he “ain’t really sick.”

I was always fully entertained and pleasantly distracted by John’s lectures on bizarre, erudite articles, published by the psychiatric towers of Babel that preach success through correct labeling within their 280 categories. John had spent most of his 35 years in institutions, and reveled in his theory that he was blowing the hell out of the State’s mental health budget. It was his way of killing them as they’d tried to kill him over the years.

One day, Jeanne simply disappeared. Word was she’d been discharged, though no one had informed any of us, her friends. Thanks to our conversations, I knew the only place she had to go was back to her drunken, abusive father. She was back in a week with fresh tales of mistaken identities, demonic psychiatrists, drug blackouts and a new pair of cowboy boots that accentuate her slender sexiness. Our romance resumed its former function — as a calming background noise that distracted me and allowed her to obsess over the brain damage she sensed was slowly, invisibly enveloping her. She was terrified that the drugs were permanently “fixing” her.

“Can I stay at your house?” she asked me once. “Won’t you take care of me?” Sure I would. Just give me $50,000 a year and a social worker who actually cared. It was clear that our relationship didn’t have much shelf life outside the institution and we both knew it. Jeanne could barely function in the real world and I didn’t have the resources to care for her. She was one of those poor souls doomed to be institutionalized until the monster was slain and a rational treatment for humans with emotional disturbances was invented. For the time being, it was easier to lock her up and drug her: out of sight, out of mind.

Close to my release, someone informed on me and I was caught spitting out my pills. After that I got mouth checks. I could no longer be trusted. I also couldn’t afford to dwell on the fifty years of being sane that I already had under my belt. They did not recognize my credibility in Brainard, and arguing to the contrary would have only set me back further. Like my fellow inmates, I was quite cognizant of the dangers in this prison — after all, we aren’t that crazy.

John had begun to posture — his body became distorted, his arms and hands askew. He took a step and re-postured, another step and again re-postured. With his wicked sense of humor, I first mistook this for a new parody he was creating. But I suddenly realized that it was the tradive dyskinesia of Haldol. Because of the meds, his face became fixed in a grimace to which he added his own sardonic flare. Seasoned by my own suffering, I convinced John to mouth his poison and advised him to be more careful than I was. He needed to use the water fountains to dump the pills and avoid the toilets with their prying eyes.

John had already informed the monster about his previous problems with Haldol (which he did not need in any case), but this is the world of which Kafka wrote. Orders were issued from The Great Oz, who may or may not have read John’s chart, who may have erred but was beyond reproof, and whose capriciousness always wreaked havoc. John mouthed his Haldol, recovered, and the balance was restored again.

Life in Building One went on, with its inhabitants, myself included, trying to piece together our shredded selves into some form of supportive society. All the while, our Keepers fought a stiffly organized resistance against our need to belong. I groped for love, for kindness, for hope — blurred as I was, I was instinctually drawn to this community of comrades.

The time finally came when I became expendable. The system did not need me any longer. It had justified my incarceration, my diagnosis, my druggings, and finally, my disgorgement. Ironically, the admonishment I received upon being vomited from the belly of the beast was, “Don’t come back!” (Almost all do — again and again.) My prognosis was “guarded,” a polite medical term for “hopeless.”

I left my sheltered world, my comrades, and was folded into the darkest cocoon of my mind. By my keepers’ standards, I was cured. Months later, in the sanctuary of my sister’s home, I picked up the trail of my life and hesitantly emerged, clinging to the thought that today was a millimeter better than yesterday. In the face of the monumental incline ahead, it took only minute signs of progress to rally me forward. I had survived in order to live anew — now metamorphosed into yet a deeper understanding of what it is to be human.

The Voice paid a final visit to me during those months of reconstitution when, as a free man, I could finally stop the medications. I was delighted at first, for I had learned to love that mysterious voice in my deaf ear and had feared the drugs had destroyed it. But the Voice told me that it would no longer speak to me. There was no more reason to continue a dialogue it said. And thought I was disappointed, I understood what it meant. It would never truly leave me — it couldn’t. The Voice was me. My inner, most intuitive me. If it were to remain ‘a voice in my head,’ it would always be something separate from me, not part of me. Therefore, it was time to end the dialogue and begin to act on what I had learned. It was time to be what I had become.

Memoir, Personal Essays

Asylum, Part 2

stephenzuckerman

Here’s a continuation of my 3-part story, Asylum. To read part 1, click here. And check back on the blog next week for the final installment of my time spent in the Brainard State Hospital.

Asylum, Part 2

Before the first court hearing, most of my time at the University Psych ward was filled with these conversations with The Voice. I began to see a pattern in our talks, a purpose in all the seeming strangeness, not only in regard to my own little world, but to the world at large. Step by block, my spiritual house was taken apart and analyzed down to its foundation — its fundamental intuitive self. I began to see that I was being re-made through the drama of these dialogues with what appeared to be an all-knowing, purposeful mountebank.

But The Voice in my ear was not content simply with dialogue alone. Before being locked up, it had challenged me to drop my social decorum and call people on their dishonesty. At a board meeting where I was a member, The Voice asked if it could ‘take over’ and give hell to a member whose smugness had always irritated me. Hesitantly, I agreed to allow what I, myself, would never have contemplated doing on my own. WHAM! The Voice took off on a diatribe fit for my father’s Manhattan schmatah business. On four or five more occasions, The Voice led outbursts that caused serious concern among my colleagues. But what really got me into trouble with the Mind Police was when The Voice told me I was God.

Initially, I objected vehemently — I was absolutely NOT God! No way, no how. I was just one of the 6 billion schmucks on earth with no special talents or successes. However, The Voice persisted. Being a good human, not superhuman, was all that was necessary to be God. Any human could be God too, The Voice helped me realize, each with a unique ability to express godliness. This line of reasoning impressed me and I began preaching it whenever I felt there was a reason to do so. To talk of God is, of course, anti-psychiatry, which is a religion of its own, built on atheism. Fundamental to psychiatry is the belief that hearing voices (known as auditory hallucinations) is the most dire symptom of psychosis — not a spiritual intervention.

During the time I was entranced in dialogues with The Voice, I tried, as a scientifically trained professional, to figure out what it actually was. Could it be a telepathic alien who’d come to infect me as a means of establishing itself on planet Earth? Or could it really be The Voice of God in my ear?

I wasn’t much of a believer in God but I wasn’t an atheist, either. I considered myself to be more of an a-religious Jew. It was difficult to buy that The Voice, who at times cursed and threatened me in a very un-God-like manner, was really a spiritual voice in my ear. Maybe it was an alien being reaching out from another world? Or just my own mind playing tricks on me? But try as I might, I could not reconcile The Voice’s brilliant explanations and insights with those of my own. It constantly enlightened me on new ways of seeing the world, and possessed information that I could not have known on my own. After a while, I was convinced that The Voice had to be a superior intelligence that had somehow, for whatever reason, slipped into my mind and was speaking through my deaf ear. Or else, I really was cuckoo.

Regardless, The Voice was certainly trying to be useful. It promised to bail me out of my commitment hearing, and as we were filing out of the courtroom it suddenly told me: “Tell the judge you have a brain tumor.”

So I did. But I had no idea that my ‘off-the-record’ comment would create a major dilemma for the judge. If I was acting strangely due to a ‘real’ medical disorder, then incarceration and the use of neuroleptics were actually dangerous. If a tumor was my problem, the court couldn’t permit the university to force anything on me. The judge was compelled to grant the University only the right to incarcerate me, but denied them the right to force neuroleptic medications on me until they had proven that I did not have a brain tumor.

I had won an advantage: unless I allowed them to examine me, the University could never prove that I didn’t have a brain tumor. At that point, I became psychiatry’s Catch-22.

For two months and two stalemated trials, I remained incarcerated at the University’s psyche ward. Then, early one morning, I was shanghaied to Brainard State Hospital.

That fateful morning, I was awakened violently by two sheriff’s deputies who ambushed me with handcuffs and threatened to get rough if I resisted. I’ll never forget the helplessness I felt as those two hostile officers threw my possessions in a bag and dragged me to their police van, where they locked me in a steel-mesh cabin.

Ten years earlier, I’d been a medical consultant at the very hospital they were transferring me to. I remembered the vast, isolated and desolate campus of archaic institutional buildings. To be locked up at Brainard State meant you were beyond hope. Now, it was my turn to be on the inside of this somber hell.

The university psychiatrists had made a final appeal to the Attorney General and won. His signature erased my human rights. When I arrived at Brainard State Hospital, I was held down by six aids, injected with a sedative and forced through a CAT scan to prove that my brain tumor was a hoax, which, of course, it was. I wondered how many of those aids would have denied their actions under penalty of perjury if I had taken them to court. But for now, like all prisoners, I was forced to accept that the system held all the cards.

Throughout my tribulations, I always felt that I was in control of the seemingly out-of-control me. Even though I went on to try and outsmart the system, to this day I believe that my loss of freedom and nearly all hope were my destiny—one I desired on some level and brought on myself.

After the CAT scan found no tumor, I was put on a multi-drug neuroleptic cocktail that was in vogue at the time. Even though the drugs severely impaired my thinking, I still had the wherewithal to know I would die unless my medications were changed or stopped. I wasn’t wrong. Not long after they started the medications, I was rushed to the area medical hospital with a toxic reaction.

My medications were adjusted, but the manic pacing continued. I still knew I had to persuade the rarely visible wizard of our Oz, Dr. Walker, into changing my drugs or I would crash again. I’d wait in ambush for him, obsequiously badgering his nurses on his whereabouts within the hospital. Was he even here yet? Was he in a meeting? Would he be here by 3 P.M.? Why was he delayed? I worked them over daily, but it only seemed to fuel their disdain for me as some annoying and disenfranchised creature.

I tempered my own anger until it became a white glow in the middle of my brain. I knew that the day would come when I would ensnare them all — Dr. Walker and this infernal, inhuman monster-machine of psychiatric incarceration. One day, I would try to destroy it. But for now, guerrilla warfare was my only available tactic. If I bit the monster directly on the neck, it would label me untreatable. Then it could crush me with more drugs, solitary confinement, shock therapy and lock-up forever.

I finally succeeded in cornering Dr. Walker, who listened to my pleadings for all of 30 seconds and later changed my medications. But to what? The new mix, of course, was none of my business, according to the nurses — after all, I was incapable of any rational comprehension.

Four times a day, the announcement blared out: “Medication time!” All of us inmates lined up dutifully for drugs at the tellers’ windows. Only then would we know our medication had been changed as the pills and liquids changed colors and shapes and turbidity.

I balked at being forced to swallow them and crossed an invisible line by asking questions. The drug teller tersely rattled off the names of a half dozen drugs. When I objected, she threatened to call the guards, who would gladly force my medication on me.

How I dreaded swallowing those multi-colored toxins that had caused me all forms of psychological and physiological aberrations! Once downed, the side effects were unavoidable. In truth, they weren’t side effects at all, but effects of poisons. I adapted, somewhat, to the debilitating effects of the drug regime, but I braced myself for new horrors. After a while, Walker put me on another concoction, and this time the results were less devastating. The anxiety, the pacing and the showers all stopped.

With my medication stabilized, I searched for a way out. Day after day, I beseeched my social worker, Tom Littlehawk, to clarify my status. He was a busy man—which meant, in his limited vocabulary, that a mere stroke of his pen could cause me either great harm or great good.

In the end, Tom Littlehawk turned out to be one of ‘us.’ He’d returned to the system to milk it for dough and power. He now had the best of all worlds, considering the blows life had dealt him as a Chippewa Indian who’d been alcoholic and ‘crazy’ to boot. He knew the system inside and out. He had the power to torment us or help us. He did both. But I found that he generally kept his word when he gave it.

I begged Tom for a transfer to Sector B, and got it.

My new room faced north. The summer sun no longer inflamed my bed. Best of all my new roommates were old-timers who’d calmly settled into the horror, with savvy and without guilt. My new compadres.

These new roommates taught me the art of mouthing pills so I could spit them out later. They taught me about radios and tape players and how to hustle our keepers to get batteries. They showed me the secrets of getting smokes day or night, how to protect your coffee stash, who to share it with, how to tap hot water from a myriad of out-of-bound faucets and—most vitally—how one should act if one is caught. In short, they taught me how to retain my humanity while trapped in the belly of the monster.

Memoir, Personal Essays, short story

Asylum

stephenzuckerman

This is the first of a three-part essay about my time spent in Brainard State Hospital.  

Asylum: Part 1

“How can it be,” asked the spider of his brother,

“that the fly ensnared only one of us?”

“Good fortune,” lied his brother.

 

For five days I had suffered an overwhelming drug-induced anxiety that didn’t allow me a moment’s respite. I fed my body in five-minute forced spurts, afraid of starving, but unable to alight for a second longer. I hobbled about my prison corridors in a daze, sleep alluding me. I lay down a thousand times, but only tossed and turned in agony.

At some point I hit critical mass and my sweat-drenched body frantically righted itself — fatigued beyond fatigue — pulled on its clothes, shoes and socks to, once again, thrust itself into the openness of those shadowy corridors. The incessant anxiety drove me to pace my confinement: down Corridor A, the suicide protection unit, then through the blue fumes of the Smokers’ Inferno where bleary-eyed lobotomized puffers hid in its smoky recesses. On to Corridor B, rank with the piss- stench of communal toilets. Past the stark 4-bed dormers strewn with other prisoners. Creeping by the cloudy surveillance mirror, I barely recognized my reflection, seemingly headed in an opposite direction. Lastly, I’d reach the padded lock-up room that marked the end of my pilgrimage and the beginning of my next revolution. The only relief from my jangling nervous fits were the 15 or 20 cold showers I took daily, dutifully charted in my dossier by the nursing wardens.

And so it went again and again.

I existed. Period. My mind was full of mandatory medication and involuntary exhaustion. My bedroom was filled with stifling August heat and three menacing strangers who were also newly imprisoned and besieged by ominous tomorrows.

Like me, my cellmate, Nervous Cat, performed his own yo-yo-like ritual. He’d fling himself violently onto his cot, thrash about amidst his sheets, kick his locker and then curse himself into a frenzy, only to finally bolt upright and disappear down Corridor A, dressed only to the waist, to vent his rage in the Smoker.

My other two roommates were barely visible. We communicated to one another in grunts and gestures — each of us recently trapped, caged and helpless. Our four bare cots were each adorned with black striped mattresses of 2” thickness, a coarse pillow, a sheet that no one bothered using, and a thin cotton blanket. Each cot had matching rickety, green metal lockers, battered by previous inmates as their only legacy — perhaps in hopes someone would remember them. We each had a crude, waist-high dresser with four sticky drawers and no mirror. The two large windows, sans drapes, welcomed in the summer swelter, with only smaller-than-human-girth transoms to prevent suffocation. This was my ‘personal’ space in captivity.

Brainard State Hospital was my fall from grace. At 50-years-old, I’d gone stark raving mad (so some said), to the horror and intrigue of my family, business associates and friends, who had never expected this emotional rock to crumble.

Personally, I sensed why, but how it came about had shocked everyone, including myself. Spiritually, I’d been pregnant for some time with an overwhelming need to change my life. Now this pent up force had taken over. Frightened, but willing (did I have a choice?), I plunged forward.

Those around me, many of whom were in the medical field — psychiatrists included, assumed that I was in the throes of an attack of mania. Not unexpectedly, four months into my evolution, I was arrested by a psychiatrist at the behest of a good doctor friend and my brother, both of whom assumed I was mad. I was locked up in the rather gentile psychiatric ward at the University of Minnesota. My prevailing impulse was to resist any and all treatment offered by my jailers — a common reaction among those like myself who are involuntarily detained.

The psychiatrists’ protocol was to threaten resistors with a court commitment hearing, which almost always resulted in being committed for six months. I was told that if I voluntarily committed myself, I would be treated less harshly. But I firmly believed in myself, my sanity and my purpose for changing. I refused to volunteer.

The ensuing series of unfathomable, legal maneuvers first allowed a doctor to lock me up for 72 hours (actually 120 hours because weekends don’t count), and then be brought before a county mental health judge for a “dual-commitment hearing.” It all seemed like a mad comedy of errors to me, but evidently, it was standard operation for the University Psychiatric Department. In this hearing, the judge would decide not only if I should be locked up for a prolonged period, but also whether or not the psychiatrists could use their frightening neuroleptic drug arsenal on me.

The day of the hearing, my lawyers told me that my chances of avoiding commitment were one in a hundred. But I had done my own research. I hired my own psychiatrist to examine me and testify in my defense. I never allowed the psychiatrists from the University or the county psychiatrist to interview me. In spite of this, both of them testified at the hearing that I was seriously ill and needed commitment as well as neuroleptic medication.

My own shrink came to my defense. He testified that I could easily be treated as an outpatient and expressed his doubts that neuroleptics were necessary. Out of the three expert opinions, none suggested that I was, in any way, a threat to others or suicidal, only that my behavior had become bizarre and was “disrupting” my societal status. A few other witnesses: my brother, my ex-girlfriend, and a close friend gave ragtag testimonies under oath, which, considering their own character twitches, made the hearing more of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta than a serious decision about my destiny. Not that their testimonies mattered. Apparently, standard procedure dictated that only the doctored-evidence gathered while I was imprisoned at the University and the arresting psychiatrists’ statements would actually be considered by the judge.

Just as we were leaving the courtroom, I was suddenly inspired to tell the judge I had a brain tumor — shooting an arrow into the Achilles heel of psychiatry. The inspiration for mentioning a “brain tumor” is another story.

One evening, months before my commitment, I heard a voice in my deaf ear. Although it terrified me, I was also intrigued by this sudden presence. Over the next four months, an on-going dialogue with The Voice took place and ransacked every nook and cranny of my belief system.

These were not benign conversations. Initially, they were full of The Voice’s threats, accusations and seeming attempts to degrade me. But I soon recognized that The Voice was unearthing all my secret pockets of shame and inadequacies.

The first issue that The Voice had made me tackle was the question of whether or not I was a good person. I insisted that I was. But The Voice responded with a single haunting word: “Evil.” I defended myself with a litany of good deeds, but again, The Voice only said, “Evil.” Again and again, I protested, but the answer I got was the single word: “Evil.” Finally, I succumbed. Maybe I was evil? All the times I had acted selfishly, ignored others in need, lied, came flooding in. But after an agonizing moral inventory, I realized I wasn’t evil. Just human. Full of human frailties. I was not exceptionally good or exceptionally bad — merely perfectly imperfect.

I came to the conclusion that there was no such thing as “Evil” or the “Devil” but rather that everything was about love and God. What we call “evil” I concluded was really the inability to express love. Once I understood this, I felt no further need to focus on my unworthiness. I also felt a contentment that I had not felt before in my life.

Following this, I developed a repartee with The Voice that was filled with humor, delight — even wonder. Each conversation was like an advanced yeshiva on the Big Picture: What is our purpose as human beings on this planet? Did the future already exist? How did spiritual forces give form to the material universe? And always, these were integrated with intimate dissections of my own relationships. I examined the nature of my personal loneliness, which in turn, gave me insight into the loneliness of others.

Check back on the blog next week for Asylum, Part 2!

Humor Writing, Inventions, Memoir, Personal Essays, short story, zuckerisms

Dining Out

stephenzuckerman

“How are you doing?” Our waitress smilingly greets us with the usual intro. I am ready. I am prepared to strike. I will not tolerate mindless gibberish.

“Good for my religion,” I calmly say. The waitress does a double take. She is caught off guard, expecting at most a grunted, “Okay.”

Hesitatingly she asks, “What did you say?”

“Good for my religion,” I repeat.

This time she gets it and it makes her uncomfortable. “Eh, that’s ok, uh…”

I switch to rescue mode. “I used to say good for my age, but that got old.” The heat’s off, the waitress’ posture shifts to relaxed, but her brain is on alert—she is engaged. She laughs. I tell her my response is an original. Next up, when someone asks me how I’m doing, I’ll say, “Good for my creed.”

My wife has to sit through this exchange. It’s not the first time, and I know she views it as waitress harassment. Worse, she is hostile to the repetition she has to bear: she has heard my spiel 1,000 times at least. I tell her once again that the waitress will now give us better service. I have made a stranger’s evening, personalized the server-servee relationship. Often, the truth is the opposite. The waitress, jarred out of her routinized server relationship, gets our orders all screwed up. To me that means ‘contact’ of one mind to another—I am gratified by the interpersonal exchange. To my wife, it means lousy service: pot roast instead of chicken pot pie, forgotten requests for champagne, bloody medium-rare instead of medium-well-done filet mignon. I’m the culprit in her mind, not the waitress.

Later, I pull off another challenge. “I’d like a diet coke with a slice of slime,” I say, emphasizing the slime. Jill, our waitress—we are now on familiar terms—does another double take, but clearly hears the word “slime.” She laughs and tells me she thinks that’s pretty funny.

I correct myself. “I mean lime.” Then I tell her why I said slime. “It’s not a mistake, I’m not dyslexic. In the past whenever I ordered lime, I’d mostly get knee-jerk lemon. When I ask for slime, I always get lime!” My wife gives me her standard derogatory non-verbal dirty look.

It’s hard to be a prophet in your own marriage.

Memoir, Personal Essays

The Shower

stephenzuckerman

Yes, I have felt the tugging guilt of obscene waste. The profligate use of treated water, heated by polluting fuels extracted from the earth’s bosom. Yet, tormented as I am by these thoughts, I lie in the bathtub’s embrace as bouquets of hot droplets shower upon my naked flesh.

It had been a cold, raw, overcast day on Lake Mille Lacs – hour after hour tolerating an incessant bone-chilling wind punctuated by bouts of icy rain and chilling lake spray coming off a white capped sea. At last I was on shore and indoors, in my heated car, and heading off to the Grand Casino Hotel at Vineland. My standardized, sanitized, Grade C room at the hotel was somehow unexpectedly discomforting. For a full ten minutes I only suffered, not thinking of why.

Then, there it was – the room was suffused with a cool breeze! Air conditioning gone wild! The thermostat setting was flush on 60, on cool. it was late spring, but outside it was overcast and 58 degrees Fahrenheit.

I calculatingly reversed the thermostat’s goal and it joyously served up hot air out of its conditioner vents. My goal: 70 degrees! Still the chill of the day remained. “A hot shower, that’s the ticket,” I thought, “The whole room, bathroom, shower, and tub are all mine – and I don’t have to report to dinner with my brother and his family for a whole hour!”

The shower/bath combo was as straightforward and plain as could be. Figuring out the standard water flow and temperature controls and bath vs. shower valve was a snap. There was only a curtain to prevent water from the shower escaping onto the bathroom floor.

I dialed the temperature control to hot, as hot as could be. Cold water gushed out of the spigot. Thirty seconds and still ice cold water. Well, thought I, I have been through this before – either the hot water heater died or more likely the installing plumbers pulled their standard prank. Sure enough, within five seconds after dialing in “cold water,” steaming hot water emerged. Lifting the valve mechanism on the water spigot shut down the bath water flow and two sputtering seconds later, the shower head exploded, sending anxiously awaited relief to my chilled core. I wanted the heated waters to touch me everywhere at once. I wanted my bones, my muscles, my nerves to melt in joy. But standing in a shower requires mental and physical effort – no letting go. What if I sat in the shower? I have often done just that and with joyous outcomes. Two memorable showers came to mind, both with seating areas and glass enclosures. One in the Junior Suite at Treasure Island Casino in Las Vegas. The other in the Sauna Suite at the Holiday Inn in Grand Marais, MN. My present circumstances were nowhere as luxurious as either of those two – no seating area, no marble, no glass enclosure – just a tub, a plastic shower curtain and a shower head and of course – hot water!

I lowered myself with great caution and awkwardness, remembering all those like John Glenn, the astronaut, who, though physically able, injured himself taking a shower. I am also physically able, for a 69-year-old with an arthritic hip and 30 pounds of extra weight. Safely having lowered myself to the sitting position, facing the shower head above, it suddenly came to me to lie flat on my back in the tub. There it was, I was in position to be totally flaccid, totally at the will of the shower. Flat on my back I could, even with my limited hip agility, use my left foot to dial the rotary temperature control knob. As I had ascended further and further below the shower head, the water cooled as it descended through the air before reaching me. No problem: a flick of my ankle and thermal joy was restored.

There I lay for at least a full fifteen minutes. Finally, concluding I deserved no more joy at the expense of the planet, I reluctantly halted the flow of ecstasy. This shower had topped all others. To lie down, with no muscle taut, with no need for brain activity, made me conjure up the image of a contented third trimester fetus, floating aimlessly in a well cared for womb – a state I labeled, “Fetal Rapture.”

Humor Writing, Personal Essays

The Baking Soda Acid Test

stephenzuckerman

A tip about stomach acid from a friendly doctor:

Recently there has been described in the literature a simple, inexpensive and safe method for detection and quantification of stomach acid production. This tool should prove most valuable in diagnosing those with hyperacidity (too much stomach acid) and also the effectiveness of antacid treatments such as Tums and Rolaids.

The fundamental principal involved in the acid quantifying procedure involves well understood chemical interactions. Sodium Bicarbonate, Na2HCO3, also known as baking soda, dissolved in water, is ingested by the human subject to be tested. This leads to an almost instantaneous reaction of the dissolved sodium bicarbonate and stomach acid (hydrochloric acid or HCL). The results of this interaction produces water (H20), table salt (NaCl) and carbon dioxide (CO2). The carbon dioxide production leads to eructation (belching). The subject being tested eructates into a scored Zuckerman acid quantifying balloon. The amount of eructated CO2 in the balloon is roughly equivalent to the amount of acid in the subject’s stomach. The subject’s height, weight, sex, age, race have no proven effect on the accuracy of this simple inexpensive test that any person can perform on themselves once they have obtained a carton of baking soda and a scored Zuckerman acid balloon!

Note of caution – suppressing the desire to belch can lead to gastro-explosion, stomach rupture, and ensuing death!

Note – use of baking soda for diagnosis. The baking soda acid test can also be used to help diagnose chest pain. Immediate relief of chest pain symptoms, on ingestion of baking soda, indicates the pain was due to acid indigestion and not angina, heart pain. Many a visit to the emergency room has been avoided by the baking soda acid test.