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HOME > Library > Books > The Variations Of Popery by Samuel Edgar (1850)
The Variations Of Popery
Rev. Samuel Edgar, D.D.
(1850 Edition)
HAIL & FIRE REPRINTS 2008
excerpt:
on Heresy
The popedom, raised to the supremacy in church and state, challenged a controlling power over the partisans of heresy, schism and apostacy, as well as over kings. The sovereign pontiffs, in the madness of ambition and despotism, affected the dominion over all mankind, and called the arm of the civil magistracy to their aid, to enforce their pretensions. Schismatics and heretics, accordingly, though separated from the Romish communion, are reckoned subject to its authority, as rebels and deserters are amenable to the civil and military laws of their country. The traitor may be punished by the state for his perfidy; and the apostate, in like manner, may, from the church, undergo excommunication and anathemas. He may even, according to Aquinas, Dens, and the University of Salamanca, followed by that of Valladolid, be compelled by arms to return to the profession of Catholicism. This assumption of power and authority has given rise, as might be expected, to long and sanguinary persecutions.
Christendom, on the subject of persecution, has witnessed three distinct periods. One commenced with the era of Redemption, and ended at the accession of Constantine, the first Christian emperor. During this period, Christians disavowed all persecution both in theory and action. The second period extended from Constantine till the Reformation. This long lapse of years was more or less characterized by continual intolerance and persecution. The third period occupies the time which has intervened between the Reformation and the present day. This interval has been diversified by many jarring opinions on the topic of persecution, the rights of conscience, and religious liberty.
The world saw more than three ages pass, from the era of Christianity till the accession of Constantine, before its professors disgraced their religion by the persecution of heathenism or heresy. Intolerance is a manifest innovation on the usage of antiquity, and one of the variations of Romanism. The ancients, Du Pin remarks, 'inflicted no ecclesiastical punishment but excommunication, and never employed the civil authority against the abettors of heresy and rebellion.' Du Pin has been followed by Giannon, Mariana, Moreri, and Du Hamel.
The Messiah, the apostles, and the fathers for several ages, opposed, in word and deed, all compulsion and persecution. The Son of man came not to destroy but to save the lives of men. This he stated to his apostles, when, in mistaken zeal, they wished, like Elias, to command fire from heaven to consume the Samaritans, who, actuated by the spirit of party, were hostile to the Jews. His empire, he declared, is spiritual; and is not, like Paganism, Popery, or Islamism, to be established or enlarged by the roar of artillery, the din of battle, or the horrors of war. When Peter struck Malchus, Jesus healed the wound, and condemned, in emphatical language, the use of the sword in the defence of his kingdom.
No two characters, indeed, ever displayed a more striking contrast than the Messiah and an inquisitor. The Messiah was clothed in mercy. The inquisitor was drenched in blood. The tear of compassion stained the cheek of the divine Saviour. The storm of vengeance infuriated the face of the inquisitorial tormentor. The Son of God on earth was always persecuted; but never retaliated. His ardent petitions, on the contrary, ascended to heaven, supplicating pity for his enemies' weakness and pardon for their sins.
The apostles walked in the footsteps of their divine master. The inspired heralds of the Gospel recommended their message by holiness and miracles, accompanied with the influence of divine energy. Persecution from the powers of earth and hell, from demons and men, was their predicted destiny. But these messengers of peace, when execrated, blessed, and when persecuted, showed no wish for retaliation; but, in submission to their master's precept, returned good for evil.
The fathers, for several ages, copied the example of their Lord and the apostles. The ancients, Du Pin observes, taught with unanimous consent the unlawfulness of compulsion and punishment in religion.' The sentiments of Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius, and Bernard on this topic are worthy of transcription and imitation. Christians, says Origen, 'should not use the sword.' Religion, according to Tertullian, 'does not compel religion.' According to Cyprian, 'the king of Zion alone has authority to break the earthen vessels; nor can any claim the power which the Father hath given to the Son.' Lactantius, in the following statement, is still more full and explicit, 'Coercion and injury are unnecessary, for religion cannot he forced. Barbarity and piety are far different; nor can truth be conjoined with violence or justice with cruelty. Religion is to be defended, not by killing, but by dying; not by inhumanity, but by patience.' Bernard, at a later date, enjoins, in similar language, the same toleration. 'Faith is conveyed by persuasion, not by constraint. The patrons of heresy are to be assailed, not by arms, but by arguments. Attack them, but with the word, not with the sword.' Du Pin has shown that the ideas of Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius, and Bernard were entertained by Gregory, Athanasius, Chrysostom, Augustine, Damian, and Anselm.
The second period, from Constantine till the Reformation, was characterized, more or less, by uninterupted persecution and constraint, as the former was by toleration and liberty. This emperor's proselytism to Christianity, in the beginning of the fourth century, commenced a new era in the Christian commonwealth. The church, in his reign, obtained a new establishment: and the civil power began to sanction the ecclesiastical authority. The magistracy learned to act in unison with the clergy. The emperor, however, was not a persecutor of Paganism. He extended to Heathenism the toleration which he withheld from heresy. The prudent monarch, unwilling to alarm Pagan suspicion, advanced with slow and cautious steps to undermine the irregular and decayed fabric of gentilism. He condemned indeed the arts of divination, silenced the oracles of Polytheism which had been convicted of fraud and falsehood, and demolished the temples of Phoenicia, which, in the face of day, displayed all the abominations of prostitution to the honour of Venus. But he tolerated the priests, the immolations, and the worship of the Grecian and Roman gods of antiquity.
Constans and Constantius imitated the example of Constantine. Facts and monuments still remain, to attest the public exercise of idolatry during their whole reign. Many temples were respected or at least spared: and the patrons of Paganism, by permission or connivance, enjoyed, notwithstanding the Imperial laws, the luxury of sacrifices, processions, and festivals. The emperors continued to bestow the honours of the army and the state on Christians and Heathens: whilst wealth and honour, in many instances, patronized the declining institutions of Polytheism.
Julian's reign was characterized by apostacy, and Jovian's brevity. Valentinian was the friend of toleration. The persecution of Paganism commenced in the reign of Gratian, and continued through the reigns of Theodosius, Arcadius, and Honorius. Gratian and Theodosius were influenced by Ambrosius Archbishop of Milan: and the clergy, in general, misapplied the laws of the Jewish theocracy and the transactions of the Jewish annals, for the unchristian and base purpose of awakening the demon of persecution against the mouldering remains of Grecian and Roman superstition. Gratian abolished the pretensions of the Pagan pontiff, the honours of the priests and vestals, transferred their revenues to the use of the church, the state, and the army, and dissolved the ancient fabric of Polytheism, which had dishonoured humanity for the lengthened period of eleven hundred years.
Theodosius finished the work of destruction which Gratian had begun. He issued edicts of proscription against eastern and western gentilism. Cynegius, Jovius, and Gaudentius were commissioned to close the temples, destroy the instruments of idolatry, and confiscate the consecrated property. Heavy fines were imposed on the use of frankincense and libations. The temples of the gods were afterwards demolished. The fairest structures of antiquity, the splendid and beautiful monuments of Grecian architecture were, by mistaken and barbarian zeal, levelled with the dust. The saintified Martin of Tours in Gaul, marched at the head of its tattered monks to the demolition of the fanes, the idols, and the consecrated groves of his extensive diocese. Martin's example was followed by Marcellus of Syria, whom Theodorus calls divine, and by Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria. A few of these grand edifices however, were spared by the venality or the taste of the civil, or ecclesiastical governors. The Carthaginian temple of the celestial Venus was converted into a Christian church; and a similar consecration rescued from ruin the majestic dome of the Roman pantheon.
Gentilism, by these means, was, in the reign of Arcadius and Honorius, expelled from the Roman territory. Theodosius, who was distinguished by his zeal for the extermination of Polytheism, questioned whether, in his time, a single Pagan remained in the empire. Its ruin affords perhaps the only example in the annals of time of the total extirpation of an ancient and popular superstition, and presents, in this point of view, a singular event in the history of the human mind.
But the friend of Christianity and his species must, in many instances, lament the means by which the end was effected. Paganism was indeed an unwieldly and hideous system of abomination and folly: and its destruction, by lawful means, must have been the wish of every friend of God and man. But the means, in this case, often dishonoured the end. Coercion, in general, was substituted for conviction, and terror for the Gospel. One blushes to read of a Symmachus and a Libanius, two heathen orators, pleading for reason and persuasion in the propagation of religion; whilst a Theodosius and an Ambrosius, a Christian emperor and a Christian bishop, urge violence and constraint. The whole scene opens a melancholy but striking prospect of human nature. The Christians, while few and powerless, deprecated the unhallowed weapons of persecution wielded with such fury by the Pagans. But the situation of the two is no sooner reversed, than the heathens, who were the former partizans of intolerance, recommend forbearance; and the Christians, the former advocates of toleration, assume the unholy arms of proscription.
The hostility of the secular arm under the Emperors was not restricted to Gentilism. Heresy, as well as heathenism, became the object of imperial persecution. Constantine, till he was pervented by the tuition of the clergy, seems to have possessed correct views of religious liberty and the rights of conscience. The imperial edict of Milan, conceived in the genuine spirit of liberality, was the great charter of toleration, which conferred the privilege of choosing his own religion on each individual of the Roman world. The beauty of this fair picture, however, as usual, was fading and transitory. Its mild features were soon dashed with traits of harshness and severity. The emperor, influenced by his ecclesiastical tutors, imbibed the maxims of illiberality, and learned to punish men for consulting their own reason in the concerns of their own souls.
Sovereigns, according to the sacerdotal theology of the day, acted in a two-fold capacity; as Christians and as governors. Considered as Christians, kings, in their personal character, should believe the truth as well as practise duty, which, as governors and in their official relation, they should enforce on their subjects. Offences against man, according to these clerical casuists, were less criminal than against God. Theft and murder, of course, were less heinous than schism and heresy. The edicts of emperors, in consequence, came to be substituted for the Gospel of God. Error, according to these theologians, was to be remedied by proscription; which, according to common sense, may produce hypocrisy, but can never enlighten the understanding or subdue the heart. Constantine, therefore, in conformity with this new or rather old plan of instruction, and proselytism, issued two penal laws against heresy; and was followed, in the hopeful project, by Valentinian, Gratian, Theodosius, Arcadius, and Honorius. Theodosius published fifteen, Arcadius twelve, and Honorius no less than eighteen of these inhuman and Antichristian statues. These are recorded in the Theodosian and Justinian codes, to the eternal infamy of their priestly and imperial authors.
The chief victims of persecution, during this period, were the Arians, Manicheans, Priscillianists, and Paulicians. Valentinian, Gratian, and Theodosius overwhelmed Arianism with destruction, and clothed Trinitarianism with triumph. The. Arians, however, under Constantius and Valens, Roman emperors, and Genseric and Hunneric, Vandal kings, retaliated, in their turn, in dreadful inhumanity and vengeance. Valentinian fined the Manichean doctors and interdicted the Manichean assemblies. Theodosius exposed them to infamy and deprived them of the rights of citizens. Constantine, Gratian, Maximus, and Honorius harassed and ruined the factions of Donatism, Priscillianism, and Pelagianism. The Paulicians were persecuted in the most dreadful manner, during the reigns of Constans, Constantine, Justinian, Leo, Michael, and Theodora. Ammianus, a heathen historian, and Chrysostom, a Roman saint, compare the mutual enmity of Christians at this time, to the fury of wild beasts.
Heresy, during this period, was punished with more or less severity, according to the offender's supposed criminality or obstinacy. The penalty was banishment, fine, confiscation, infamy, disqualification of buying and selling, or incapacity of civil and military honour. The Roman code contained no law, sentencing persons guilty of heresy to death. Capital punishments, indeed, in some instances, were inflicted. This was the ease with the unhappy Priscillian and some of his partizans, who were prosecuted by the inquisitorial Ithacius and sentenced by the usurping Maximus. But Maximus, on this occasion, exercised an illegal authority as he had usurped the imperial power. The unlawful and unhallowed transaction displayed the baseness of the prosecutor and the tyranny of the emperor. The few that suffered capital punishment for sectarianism were, in general, also guilty or supposed to be guilty of treason or rebellion.
The Roman laws, on the topic of persecution, continued in this state till the year 800, and in the eastern empire till its dissolution in 1453 by the Ottomans. An important change happened about the commencement of the ninth century. This consisted of the great eastern schism. The Greek and Latin churches were rent asunder and ceased to be governed by mutual laws. A new era, on the subject of heresy and its punishment, began at this time in the west, and lasted till the year 1100 of our redemption, comprehending a lapse of 300 years. This period was distinguished by superstition, ignorance, insurrection, revolution, and confusion. Sectarianism, in the European nations, seemed, for three centuries, to be nearly extinguished. Egyptian darkness reigned and triumphed over learning and morality. The world sunk into a literary lethargy: and, in the language of some historians, slept the sleep of orthodoxy. Learning, philosophy, religion, error, and sectarianism reposed in inactivity, or fled from the view, amidst the wide and debasing dominion of ignorance, immorality, and superstition, which superseded the use of the inquisitor and crusader.
The revival of sectarianism followed the revival of Letters. Many denominations of this kind appeared, in the beginning of the twelfth century, among the European nations, such as the Paulicians, Catharians, Henricians, Waldenses, and Albigenses. The Waldenses and Albigenses were the most numerous and rational, and therefore the most formidable to the Papacy. All these concurred in hostility to Romanism, as a system of error and superstition. The usurpation and despotism of the Popedom were the chief objects of their enmity and opposition. The despotism and immorality of the clergy exposed them to the indignation of sectarian zeal. Philosophy in its first dawn, learning in its feeblest glimmerings, discovered the deformity and shook the domination of the Papacy. The revival of literature, however, was not the only cause of opposition to Romanism. Many reasons concurred. The reign of superstition; the traffic of indulgences; the dissensions between the emperors and the pontiffs; the wars, which, for two hundred years, had desolated the Christian world; the luxury of the bishops and inferior clergy; all these tended to arouse the hostility of men against the overgrown system of ecclesiastical tyranny.
This hostility against the principles of Popery produced a reaction and enmity against the partizans of sectarianism. Rome plied all her spiritual artillery, and vented her rage in excommunication and massacre. Heresy or rather truth and holiness were assailed by kings, theologians, popes, councils, crusaders, and inquisitors.
Princes wielded the secular arm against the abettors of heresy. Frederic the German emperor, and Lewis the French king, as well as many other sovereigns, enacted persecuting laws against the Waldenses and Albigenses. Frederic, in 1224, promulgated four edicts of this kind from Padua. His majesty, in his imperial politeness, began with calling the Albigenses vipers, snakes, serpents, wolves, angels of wickedness, and sons of perfidy, who were descended from the author of iniquity and falsehood, and insulted God and the church. Pretending to the authority of God for his inhumanity, he execrated all the patrons of apostacy from Catholicism, and sentenced heretics of every sect and denomination alive to the flames, their property to confiscation, and their posterity, unless they became persecutors, to infamy. The suspected, unless they took an oath of exculpation, were accounted guilty. Princes were admonished to purify their dominions from heretical perversity; and, if they refused, their land might without hesitation be seized by the champions of Catholicism. This was the first law that made heresy a capital offence. The emperor also patronized the inquisition, and protected its agents of torture and malevolence.
Lewis, in 1228, issued similar enactments. He published laws for the extirpation of heresy, and enjoined their execution on the barons and bailiffs. He rendered the patrons and protectors of error incapable of giving testimony, making a will, or succeeding to any honour or emolument. The sainted monarch encouraged the work of death, and in the language of Pope Innocent, diffused through the crusading army ' the natural and hereditary piety of the French kings.' He forced Raymond, Count of Toulouse, to undertake the extermination of heresy from his dominions, without sparing vassal or friend. Alfonso, king of Arragon, and several others copied the example of Frederic and Lewis.
The emperors were sworn to exterminate heretics. The emperor Henry, according to Clement, in the council of Vienna took an oath, obliging his majesty to eradicate the professors and protectors of heterodoxy. A similar obligation was imposed on the emperor of Germany, even after the dawn of the Reformation. He was bound by a solemn oath to extirpate, even at the hazard of his life and dominions, all whom the pontiff condemned.
Saints and pontiffs, in these deeds of inhumanity, imitated emperors and kings. Lewis, who enacted such statutes of cruelty, was a saint as well as a sovereign. Aquinas was actuated with the same demon of malevolence, and breathed the same spirit of barbarity. 'Heretics,' the angelic doctor declares, 'may not only be excommunicated but justly killed. Such, the church consigns to the secular arm, to be exterminated from the world by death,' - 'Haeretici possuut non solum excommunicari, sed et juste occidi. ... Ecclesia relinquit eum judici saeculari mundo exterminandum per mortem.' Aquinas, II 11. III. p.48. Dominic, Osma, Arnold, Conrad, Rainer, Guy, Castelnau, Guido, Rodolf, and a long train of saints and doctors might be named, who, for supporting the work of murder and extermination, were raised to the honours of canonization.
The pontiffs, like the kings and saints, encouraged, with all, their influence, the system of persecution and cruelty. Urban, Alexander, Lucius, Innocent, Clement, Honorius, and Martin gained an infamous notoriety for their ruthless and unrelenting enactments against the partizans of Albigensianism, Waldensianism, and Wickliffism. Urban the Second, in 1090, decided that the person, who, inflamed with zeal for Catholicism, should slay any of the excommunicated, was not guilty of murder: 'Non enim eos homicidas arbitramur, quos adversus excommunicatos, Zelo Catholicae matris ardentes, aliquis eorum trucidasse contingerit.' Pithou. The assassination of a man under the sentence of excommunication, his infallibility accounted only a venial crime. His holiness must have excelled in the knowledge of casuistry. His morality, however, Bruys characterized by the epithets diabolical and infernal. Lucius the Third fulminated red-hot anathemas against the Waldenses, as well as against their protectors and patrons, and consigned them to the secular arm, to undergo condign vengeance in proportion to their criminality. Innocent the Fourth sanctioned the enactments of Frederic, which sentenced the partizans of error and apostacy to be burned alive. He commanded the house in which an Albigensian had been sheltered to be razed from the foundation. All these viceroys of heaven concurred in consigning to infamy any who should give the apostate from the faith either counsel or favor; and in driving the magistracy to execute the sanguinary statutes, by interdicts and excommunication. The crusaders against the Albigenses enjoyed the same indulgences as those who marched to the holy land. Supported by the mercy of Omnipotent God and the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, Innocent granted these holy warriors a full pardon of all sin, and eternal salvation in heaven, - 'Plenam peccaminum veniam indulgemus, et in retributione justorum salutis aeternae pollicemur augumentum.'
Provincial and national councils breathed the same spirit of persecution, as kings and pontiffs. These were many. But the most sanguinary of them met at Toledo, Oxford, Avignon, Tours, Lavaur, Montpellier, Narbonne, Albi, and Tolosa. Anno 630, the national council of Toledo, in its third canon, promulgated an enactment for the expulsion of all Jews from Spain, and for the permission of none in the kingdom but the professors of Romanism. This holy assembly made the king, on his accession, swear to tolerate no heretical subjects in the Spanish dominions. The sovereign who should violate this oath, and all his accomplices, would, according to the sacred synod, 'be accursed in the sight of the everlasting God, and become the fuel of eternal fire.' This sentence, the holy fathers represented 'as pleasing to God.' Spain, at an early date, began those proscriptions, which she has continued to the present day.
The council of Oxford, in 1160, condemned more than thirty of the Waldenses who had emigrated from Gascony to England, and consigned these unhappy sufferers to the secular arm. Henry the Second ordered them, man and woman, to be publicly whipped, branded on the cheek with a red-hot iron, and driven half-naked out of the city: while all were forbid to grant these wretched people hospitality or consolation. None therefore showed the condemned the least pity. The winter raged in all its severity, and the Waldenses in consequence perished of cold and hunger, - 'Praecepit haereticae infamiae characterem frontibus eorum inuri; et spectante populo, virgis coercitos, urbe expelli, districts prohibens, ne quis eos vel hospitio recipere, vel aliquo solatio confovere, praesumeret. ... Algoris intolerantia (hyems quippe erat), nemine vel exiguum misericordiae impendente, misere interierunt.'
The councils of Tours, Lavaur, Albi, Narbonne, Beziers, and Tolosa issued various enactments of outlawry and extermination against the Albigenses and Waldenses. These, according to the sentence of those sacred synods, were excommunicated every Sunday and festival; while, to add solemnity and horror to the scene, the bells were rung and the candles extinguished. An inquisitorial deputation of the clergy and laity was commissioned for the detection of heresy and its partisans. The barons and the magistracy were sworn to exterminate heretical pollution from their lands. The barons who through fear or favor should neglect the work of destruction, forfeited their estates, which were transferred to the active and ruthless agents of extirpation. The magistracy, who were remiss, were stripped of their office and property.
All were forbidden to hold any commerce in buying or selling with these sectarians, that, deprived of the consolations of humanity, they might, according to the council of Tours, 'be compelled to renounce their error.' No person was allowed to afford them succour or protection. The house, in which the Albigensian sheltered his head, was, as if contaminated with his presence, to be demolished and the ground confiscated. The grave itself could not defend the heretical tenants of its cold domains from the fury of the inquisitor. The body or the bones of the Albigenses that slept in the dust were to be disinterred, and the mouldering remains committed, in impotent and unavailing vengeance, to the flames.
The council of Tolosa, in 1229, waged war on this occasion against the Bible as well as against heresy. The sacred synod strictly forbade the laity to possess the Books of the Old and New Testament in the vernacular idiom. A layman, in the language of the holy fathers, might perhaps keep a Psalm-book, a breviary, or the hours of holy Mary; but no Bible. This, Velly admits, was the first prohibition of the kind. Twelve revolving ages from the commencement of Christianity had rolled their ample course over the world, and no assembly of men had dared to interdict the book of God. But a synod, in a communion boasting unchangeability, arrogated at length the authority of repealing the enactment of heaven and the practice of twelve hundred years.
These provincial synods were sanctioned by general councils; which therefore were blessed with infallibility. These comprehended four of the Lateran, and those of Constance and Sienna. Anno 1139, the second council of the Lateran, in its twenty-third canon, excommunicated and condemned the heretics of the day who affected a show of piety. These, the infallible assembly commanded the civil powers to suppress; and consigned their protectors also to the same condemnation.
The Third general council of the Lateran issued a canon of a similar kind; but of greater rigour and severity. This unerring assembly, in its twenty-seventh canon, and supported by the mercy of God and the authority of Peter and Paul, excommunicated on Sundays and festivals, the Cathari of Gascony, Albi, and Tolosa: and the sentence extended to all their protectors, who admitted those sons of error into their houses or lands, or to any kind of traffic or commerce. Their possessions were consigned to confiscation and themselves to slavery; while any who had made a treaty or contract with them, were acquitted of their engagement. Crusaders were armed against these adherents of heresy; and the holy warriors were encouraged in the work of extermination and death by indulgences and the assurance of eternal felicity. But no oblation was to be offered for the souls of the heretics, and their dead were refused Christian burial on consecrated ground.
The fourth general council of the Lateran, in 1245, surpassed all its predecessors in severity. These persecuting conventions seem to have risen above each other by a regular gradation of inhumanity. The third excelled the second on the scale of cruelty; and both again were exceeded by the fourth, which indeed seems to have brought the system of persecution to perfection. This infallible assembly pronounced excommunication, anathemas, and condemnation against all heretics of every denomination, with their protectors; and consigned all such to the secular arm for due punishment, - 'Excommunicamus et anathematizamus omnem haeresim, condemnantes universos haereticos, quibuscumque nominibus censeantur.' Labb. 13. The property of these sons of apostacy, if laymen, was, according to the holy fathers, to be confiscated, and, if clergymen, to be conferred on the church. The suspected, unless they proved their innocence, were to be accounted guilty, and avoided by all till they afforded condign satisfaction. Kings were to be solicited, and, if necessary, compelled by ecclesiastical censures, to exterminate all heretics from their dominions. The sovereign, who should refuse, was to be excommunicated by the metropolitan and suffragans: and, if he should prove refractory for a year, the Roman pontiff, the vicar-general of God, was empowered to transfer his kingdom to some champion of Catholicism and absolve his vassals from their fealty. The populace were encouraged to engage in crusading expeditions for the extinction of heterodoxy. The adventurers in these holy wars enjoyed the same indulgences and the same honours as the soldiery that marched to the Holy Land. The prelacy were enjoined to bind the people of their vicinity by oath to inform, if they knew any guilty or suspected of heresy. Any, who should refuse to swear, were to be considered as guilty: and the bishops, if remiss in the execution of their task, were threatened with canonical vengeance.
The general council of Constance, in 1418, sanctioned the canons of the Lateran. The holy and infallible assembly, in its forty-fifth session, presented a shocking scene of blasphemy and barbarity. Pope Martin, presiding in the sacred synod and clothed with all its authority, addressed the bishops and inquisitors of heretical perversity, on whom he bestowed his apostolic benediction. The eradication of error and the establishment of Catholicism, Martin represented as the chief care of himself and the council. His infallibility, in his pontifical politeness, characterized Wickliff, Huss, and Jerome, as pestilent and deceitful heresiarchs, who, excited with truculent rage, infested the Christian fold, and, in his supremacy's beautiful style, made the sheep putrify with the filth of falsehood. The partizans of heresy through Bohemia, Moravia, and other kingdoms, his holiness described as actuated with the pride of Lucifer, the fury of wolves, and the deceitfulness of demons. The pontiff, then, supported by the council, proceeded, for the glory of God, the stability of Romanism, and the preservation of Christianity, to excommunicate these advocates of error, with their pestilent patrons and protectors, and to consign them to the secular arm and the severest vengeance. He commanded kings to punish them according to the Lateran council. The above mentioned inhuman enactments of the Lateran, therefore, were to be brought into requisition against the Bohemians and Moravians. These, according to the holy synod, were to be despoiled of all property, Christian burial, and the consolations of humanity, - 'Haeresiarcha, Luciferina superbia et rabie lupina evecti, daemonum fraudibus illusi. Oves Christi Catholicas haeresiarchae ipsi successive infecerunt, et in stercore mendaciorum fecerunt putrescere. Credentes et adhaerentes eisdem, tanquam haereticos indicetis et velut haereticos seculari Curiae relinquatis.' Bin. 8. 1120.
The general council of Sienna, in 1423, which was afterward continued at Basil, published persecuting enactments of a similar kind. The holy synod assembled in the Holy Ghost, and representing the universal church, acknowledged the spread of heresy in different parts of the world through the remissness of the inquisitors, and to the offence of God, the injury of Catholicism, and the perdition of souls. The sacred convention then commanded the inquisitors, in every place, to extirpate every heresy, especially those of Wickliff, Huss, and Jerome. Princes were admonished by the mercy of God to exterminate error, if they would escape divine vengeance. The holy fathers and the viceroy of heaven conspired, in this manner, to sanction murder in the name of the God of mercy: and granted plenary indulgences to all who should banish those sons of heterodoxy or provide arms for their destruction. These enactments were published every Sabbath, while the bells were rung and the candles lighted and extinguished.
The fifth general council of the Lateran, in 1514, enacted laws, marked, if possible, with augmented barbarity. Dissembling Christians of every kind and nation, heretics polluted with any contamination of error were, by this infallible gang of ruffians, dismissed from the assembly of the faithful, and consigned to the inquisition, that the convicted might undergo due punishment, and the relapsed suffer without any hope of pardon, - 'Omnes ficti Christiani, ac de fide male sentientes, cujuscumque generis aut nationis fuerint, necnon haeretici seu aliqua haeresis labe polluti, a Christi fidelium, coetu penitus eliminentur, et quocumque loco expellantur, ac debita animadversione puniautar, statuimus.' Crabb.
The general council of Trent was the last of these infallible conventions that sanctioned persecutions. This assembly, in its second session, 'enjoined the extermination of heretics by the sword, the fire, the rope, and all other means, when it could be done with safety.' The sacred synod again, in the last session, admonished 'all princes to exert their influence to prevent the abettors of heresy from misinterpreting or violating the ecclesiastical decrees, and to oblige these objectors, as well as all their other subjects, to accept and to observe the synodal canons with devotion and fidelity.' This was clearly an appeal to the secular arm, for the purpose of forcing acquiescence and submission. The natural consequence of such compulsion was persecution. The holy fathers, having, in this laudable manner, taught temporal sovereigns their duty, concluded with a discharge of their spiritual artillery, and pronounced, an 'anathema on all heretics,' - 'On devoit les destruire par le fer, le feu, la crode, ou tout autre moyen.' Paolo. The unerring council, actuated according to their own account, by the Holy Ghost, terminated their protracted deliberations, not with blessing mankind, but with cursing all who should claim religious liberty, assert the rights of conscience, or presume to differ from the absurdity of their synodal decisions.
The principle of persecution, therefore, being sanctioned, not only by theologians, popes, and provincial synods, but also by general councils, is a necessary and integral part of Romanism. The Romish communion has, by its representatives, declared its right to compel men to renounce heterodoxy and embrace Catholicism, and to consign the obstinate to the civil power to be banished, tortured, or killed.
The modern pretenders to liberality in the Popish communion have, in general, endeavoured to solve this difficulty by dividing the work of persecution between the civil and ecclesiastical powers. This was the solution of Crotty, Slevin, and Higgins at the Maynooth examination. The canons of the Lateran, these doctors pretend, were the acts of both church and state. These councils were conventions of princes as well as of priests, of kings as well as of clergy. Their enactments therefore were authorized by the temporal as well as by the spiritual authority.
But the laity never voted in councils. The prelacy, accordingly, Crotty admits, had the sole right of suffrage, and these canons, in all their barbarity, were suggested by the episcopacy, by whom they were recommended to princes and kings. The clergy even urged the laity to these deeds of carnage by interdicts and excommunication.
The solution, even on the supposition of concurrence or collusion between the church and state, is a beautiful specimen of Shandean dialectics. Tristram invented a plan of evading sin by a division similar to the logic of Crotty, Slevin, and Higgins. The process was simple and easy. Two ladies between them contrived to repeat a word, the pronunciation of which by one would have entrenched a little on politeness and morality. Each lady, therefore, rehearsed only half of the obnoxious term, and, of course, preserved a clear conscience and committed no offence against propriety or purity. Our learned Popish doctors, in like manner, and by equally conclusive reasoning, have, by a similar participation, been enabled to transubstantiate sin into duty, and excuse murder and massacre.
The authority of the Lateran, Constantian, and Siennan canons may be shown in another way. Popish Christendom, without a single murmur of opposition, acquiesced in these decisions, and in their accomplishment in the massacre of the Albigenses. None, among either the clergy or laity, remonstrated or reclaimed. But a Papal bull, received by open or tacit assent and by a majority of the Popish clergy, forms a. dogma of faith. This, at Maynooth, was, in the clearest language, stated by Crotty, Brown, and Higgins. Many pontiffs, such as Urban, Innocent, Clement, and Honorius, issued such decretals of persecution. These, without the objection of a solitary clergyman or layman, were approved and executed without justice or mercy on the adherents of heresy. These principles, therefore, obtained the sanction of the whole Romish church, and have been marked with the sign manual of infallibility.
All the Popish beneficed clergy through Christendom profess, on oath, to receive these persecuting canons and councils. They swear on the holy evangelists and in the most solemn manner, 'to hold and teach all that the sacred canons and general councils have delivered, defined, and declared.' The rejection of these enactments would amount to a violation of this obligation. Any person, who should infringe or contradict this declaration, will, and commandment, incurs, according to the bull of Pius the Fourth, the indignation of Almighty God and the blessed apostles Peter and Paul.
The legislation of kings, pontiffs, and councils was no idle speculation or untried theory. The regal, papal, and synodal enactments were called into active operation: and their practical accomplishment had been written in characters of blood in the annals of the papacy and the inquisition.
Pope Innocent first sent a missionary expedition against the Albigenses. His holiness, for this purpose, commissioned Rainer, Guy, Arnold, Guido, Osma, Castelnau, Rodolf, and Dominic. These, in the execution of their mission, preached Popery and wrought miracles. Dominic, in particular, though distinguished for cruelty, excelled in the manufacture of these 'lying wonders.' But the miracles and sermons, or rather the imposition and balderdash, of these apostles of superstition and barbarity, excited only the derision and scorn of these 'sons of heresy and error.' The obdurate people, says Benedict, 'shewed no desire for conversion; but, on the contrary, treated their instructors with contempt and reproach.' ' An infinite number,' says Nangis, 'obstinately adhered to their error.' According to Mariana, 'The Albigenses increased every day and, in their stupidity, rejoiced in their own blindness.' The gospel of Castelnau, Rainer, and Arnold, Velly grants, 'met with no attention;' and, therefore, according to Giannon's admission, 'made no impression.' 'Les deux legats travaillerent quelque annees avec beaucoup de zele, et peu de fruit. Sans qu'il parut que les heretiques fussent touchez d'aucun desir de conversion.' Benedict and Mariana. 'Alii, quorum infinites erat numerus, suo pertinaciter inhaerebant errori.' Nangis and Dachery. 'Tous les trois se mirent a faire des sermons, qui ne furent point ecoutes.' Velly, Giannon.
His infallibility, Pope Innocent the Third, finding the inefficiency of his gospel as preached by Dominic, proclaimed, by his bulls, a crusade against the Albigenses. Supported by divine aid, his holiness, in the name of the Lord of Hosts, granted all who should march against the Albigensian pestilence, the pardon of sin, the glory of martyrdom, and the possession of heaven. The pontiff, by special favour and indulgence, gave the hero of the cross, if he fell in battle, an immediate passport, by a short way, to heaven, without ever touching on purgatory, -'Nos per indulgentias innovatas Crucesignatos et fideles alios excitamus, ut ad extirpandam pestem hanc, Divino freti auxilio, procedant in nomine Domini Saboaoth.' Alex., Velly, Thuan., Benedici. These rewards assembled half a million of HOLY WARRIORS, composed of bishops, soldiers, canons, and people, from Italy, France, and Germany, ready to riot in blood for the honour of God, the good of society, the defence of Romanism, and the extinction of heresy.
This army was led by the Earl of Montfort, whom ambition and hypocrisy marked for the hero of a holy war. The archbishop of Narbonne, at an early period, painted Montfort's ambition, stratagems, malice, violence, and duplicity. But the contemporary historians ascribed his exploits to zeal and piety; while Raymond, Count of Thoulouse, who was Montfort's rival, and protector of the Albigenses, was, on the contrary, characterized as a member of the Devil, the son of perdition, the eldest born of Satan, the enemy of the cross, the defender of heresy, and the oppressor of Catholicism, - 'Vrai membre du diable, fils de perdition, fils aine de Satan, ennemi de la croix.' Velly; Mariana.
This holy war, during its campaigns, exhibited a great diversity of battles and sieges. The storming of Beziers and Lavaur will supply a specimen of the spirit and achievements of the crusading army.
The city of Beziers was taken by storm in 1209, and the citizens put to the sword without distinction of condition, age, sex, or even religion. When the Crusaders and Albigenses were so mixed that they could not be discriminated, Arnold, the Papal missionary, commanded the soldiery to 'kill all and God would know his own,' - 'Tuez les tous, Dieu connoit ceux qui sont a lui. Soixante mille habitans passerent par le fil de l'epee.' Velly. Seven hundred were slain in the church. Daniel reckons the killed at thirty thousand. Mezeray and Velly as well as some of the original historians, estimate the number who were massacred at sixty thousand. The blood of the human victims, who fled to the churches for safety and were murdered by the HOLY WARRIORS, drenched the altars, and flowed in crimson torrents through the streets.
Lavaur was taken by storm in 1211. Aimeric the governor was hanged on a gibbet, and Girarda his lady was thrown into a well and overwhelmed with stones. Eighty gentlemen, who had been made prisoners, were slaughtered like sheep in cold blood. All the citizens were mangled without discrimination in promiscuous carnage. Four hundred were burned alive, to the extreme delight of the crusaders, - 'Quatre-vingt gentils hommes prisonniers furent egorges de sang froid. Quatre cents heretiques furent brules vifs avec une joye extreme de la part des croises.' Velly. One shudders, says Velly in his history of these transactions, while he relates such horrors.
Languedoc, a country flourishing and cultivated, was wasted by these desolators. Its plains became a desert; while its cities were burned and its inhabitants swept away with fire and sword. An hundred thousand Albigenses fell, it is said, in one day: and their bodies were heaped together and burned, - 'En un seul jour, on egorgea cent mille de ces heretiques.' Bruys. Detachments of soldiery were, for three months, despatched in every direction to demolish houses, destroy vineyards, and ruin the hopes of the husbandman. The females were defiled, - 'En violant filles et femmes.' Bruy. The march of the HOLY WARRIORS was marked by the flames of burning houses, the screams of violated women, and the groans of murdered men, -'On promit indulgence et absolution pleniere a ceux qui tueroient des Vaudois.' Moreri. The war, with all its sanguinary accompaniments, lasted twenty years, and the Albigenses, during this time, were not the only sufferers. Three hundred thousand crusaders fell on the plains of Languedoc, and fattened the soil with their blood.
All this barbarity was perpetrated in the name of religion .The carnage was celebrated as the triumph of the church, the honour of the Papacy, and the glory of Catholicism. The pope proclaimed the HOLY WAR in the name of the Lord. The army of the cross exulted in the massacre of Lavaur, and the clergy sung a hymn to the Creator for the glorious victory, - 'Le clerge chantoit avec beaucoup de devotion l'hymne Veni Creator.' Velly. The assassins thanked the God of mercy for the work of destruction and bloodshed. The soldiery, in the morning, attended high mass, and then proceeded, during the day, to waste the country and murder its population. The assassination of sixty thousand citizens of Beziers was accounted, says Mariana, ' the visible judgment of heaven.' According to Benedict, 'the heresy of Albigensianism drew down the wrath of God on the country of Languedoc.'
The Crusaders were accompanied with another engine of horror and inhumanity. This was no less than the INFERNAL INQUISITION. The inventor of this inquisition, according to Benedict, was Dominic, who was also the first Inquisitor General. This historian, indeed, seems doubtful whether the benevolent and Christian idea suggested itself first to Dominic or to Innocent, to the saint or to the pontiff. But Dominic first mentioned it to Arnold. The saint also established, as agents of this tribunal, a confraternity of knights whom he called the MILITIA OF JESUS, 'Il nomma les Freres de la Milice de Jesus.' Bened. 2. 131. These demons of destruction, these fiends of blood, the blasphemer had the effrontery to represent as the warriors of the Captain of Salvation. Gregory the Ninth, in more appropriate language, styled the knights the MILITIA OF DOMINIC. These, in Italy, were called the knights of the inquisition, and in Spain the familiars of the holy office.
Benedict is quite out of temper with some historians, who would rob Dominic of the glory of being the first inquisitor, and who bestow that honour on Rodolf, Castelnau, and Arnold. The invention of the holy office, and the title of Inquisitor-general, in this author's opinion, crowns his hero with immortal renown, Bened. 2. 131. The historian of Waldensianism therefore, has eternalized his patron's name, by combining it with an institution erected for human destruction, associated with scenes of blood, and calculated to awaken horror in every mind which retains a single sentiment of humanity.
Dominic, it must be granted, was well qualified for his office. He possessed all that impregnable cruelty, which enabled his mind to soar above every feeling of compassion, and to extract pleasure from scenes of torture and misery. The torments of men or, at least, of heretics were his enjoyment. The saint, in satanic and unsated malignity, enjoyed the spectacle of his victim's bleeding veins, dislocated joints, torn nerves, and lacerated limbs, quivering and convulsed with agony.
Proofs of his inhumanity appeared, in many instances, in the holy war and in the holy office. During the crusade against the Albigenses, though a pretended missionary, he encouraged the holy warriors of the cross in the work of massacre and murder. He marched at the head of the army with a crucifix in his hand; and animated the soldiery to deeds of death and destruction, - 'Dominique animoit les soldats, le Crucifix a la main. Dominique marchoit a la tete de l'armee, avec un crucific a la main.' Bened. 1. 248, 249. 'Les Catholiques animes par les exhortations de S. Dominique. Marian. 2. This was the way of disseminating Dominic's gospel. The cross which should be the emblem of peace and mercy, became, in perverted application, the signal of war and bloodshed; and the professed apostle of Christianity preached salvation by the sword and the inquisition.
The holy office as well as the holy war showed Dominic's cruelty. The inquisition, indeed, during his superintendence, had no legal tribunal; and the engines of torment were not brought to the perfection exhibited in modern days of Spanish inquisitorial glory. But Dominic, notwithstanding, could, even with this bungling machinery and without a chartered establishment, gratify his feelings of benevolence in all their refinement and delicacy. Dislocating the joints of the refractory Albigensian, as practised in the Tolosan Inquisition, afforded the saint a classical and Christian amusement. This kind operation, he performed by 'suspending his victim by a cord, affixed to his arms that were brought behind his back, which, being raised by a wheel, lifted off the ground the suspected Waldensian, man or woman, who refused to confess 'till forced by the violence of torture,' - 'In chorda levatus aliquantulum. Negans se quicquam de haeresi de confessum nisi per violentiam tormentorum.' Limborch, IV. 29. Innocent commissioned Dominic to punish, not only by confiscation and banishment, but also with death; and, in the execution of his task, he stimulated the magistracy and populace to massacre the harmless professors of Waldensianism. 'His saintship, by words and MIRACLES, convicted a hundred and eighty Albigenses, who were at one time committed to the flames,' - 'Fuerunt aliquando simul exusti CLXXX haeretici Albigenses, cum antea e verbis et miraculis eos S. Dominicus convicisset.' Bell, de Laic. III. 22. Velly 3.
Such was the man or monster, who, to the present day, is a full-length saint in the Roman Calendar. The miscreant is an object of worship in the popish communion. The Roman breviary lauds 'his merits and doctrines which enlightened the church, his ingenuity and virtue which overthrew the Tolosan heretics, and his many miracles which extended even to the raising of the dead.' The Roman missal, having eulogized his merits, prays for 'temporal aid through his intercession,' - 'Deus, qui ecclesiam tuam beati Dominici confessoris tui illuminare dignatus es meritis et doctrinis, concede ut ejus intercessione, temporalibus non destituatur auxiliis.' Miss. Bom. 463. Brev. Rom. 906. The holy infallible church, in this manner, perfers adoration to the canonized Dominic, who was the first Inquisitor-General, and one of the greatest ruffians that ever disgraced humanity.
The inquisition was first established in Languedoc. The council of Thoulouse, in 1229, appointed a priest and three laymen to search for the partizans of heresy. The synod of Alby, in 1254, commissioned a clergyman and a layman to engage in the same odious task: and this commencement constituted this infernal institution in its infancy. The tribunal afterward received various alterations and fresh accessions of power, till, at length, it was authorized in Spain, Portugal, and Goa to try the suspected, not only for heresy, but also for blasphemy, magic, sorcery, witchcraft, infidelity, and Judaism, and to punish the convicted with infamy, imprisonment, galley-slavery, banishment, outlawry, confiscation of property, and consignment to the flames in an ACT of FAITH. Labb. 13.1236. et 14. 153. Velly, 4. 132. Dellon. c. 2. Mariana, 4. 362.
The holy office admitted all kinds of evidence. Suspicion alone would subject its object to a long course of imprisonment in a dungeon, far from all intercourse with friends or society. A malefactor or a child was allowed to be a witness. A son might depose against his father, or a wife against her husband. The accuser and the accusation were equally unknown to the accused, who was urged by the most treacherous means to discover on himself. His feelings, in the mean time, were horrified by a vast apparatus of crosses, imprecations, exorcisms, conjurations, and flaming piles of wood, ready to consume the guilty. Mariana, 4. 362, 363. Moreri, 5. 130. Dellon, c. 13. Giannon, XXXII. 5.
The RACK in defect of evidence, was applied. The accused, whether man or woman, was, in defiance of all decency, stripped naked. The arms, to which a small hard cord was fastened, were turned behind the back. The cord, by the action of a pulley, raised the sufferer off his feet and held him suspended in the air. The victim of barbarity was, several times, let fall, and raised with a jerk, which dislocated all the joints of his arms; whilst the cord, by which he was suspended, entered the flesh and lacerated the tortured nerves. Heavy weights were frequently, in this case, appended to the feet, and when the prisoner was raised from the earth by the arms, strained the whole frame, and caused a general luxation of the shattered system. The cord was sometimes twisted round the naked arm and legs, till it penetrated to the bone through the ruptured flesh and bleeding veins. Limborch, iv. 29.
This application of the rack, without evidence, caused many to be tortured who had never committed the sin of heresy. A young lady, who was incarcerated in the dungeon of the inquisition at the same time with the celebrated Bohorquia, will supply an instance of this kind. This victim of inquisitorial brutality, notwithstanding her admitted attachment to Romanism, endured the rack till all the members of her body were rent asunder by the infernal machinery of the holy office. An interval of some days succeeded, till she began, notwithstanding such inhumanity, to recover. She was then taken back to the infliction of similar barbarity. Small cords were twisted round her naked arms, legs, and thighs, till they cut through the flesh to the bone; and blood, in copious torrents, streamed from the lacerated veins. Eight days after, she died of her wounds, and was translated from the dungeons of the inquisition to the glory of heaven.
The celebrated Orobio endured the rack for the sin of Judaism. His description of the transaction is frightful. The place of execution was a subterranean vault lighted with a dim lamp. His hands and feet were bound round with cords, which were drawn by an engine made for the purpose, till they divided the flesh to the excoriated bone. His hands and feet swelled, and blood burst, in copious effusion, from his nails as well as from his wounded limbs. He was then set at liberty, and left Spain the scene of persecution and misery. Moreri, 6. 7. Limborch, 323.
The convicted were sentenced to an ACT of FAITH. The ecclesiastical authority transferred the condemned to the secular arm, and the clergy in the mean time, in mockery of mercy, supplicated the magistracy in a hypocritical prayer, to shew compassion to the intended victim of barbarity. But the magistracy, who, through pity, should have deferred the execution, would by the relentless clergy, have been compelled by excommunication to proceed in the work of death. The heretic, dressed jn a yellow coat variegated with pictures of dogs, serpents, flames, and devils, was then led to the place of execution, tied to the stake, and committed, amid the joyful acclamations of the populace, to the flames. Such has been the death of myriads. Torquemada, on being made Inquisitor-general, burned alive, to signalize his promotion to the holy office, no less than two thousand of these 'sons of heresy,' - 'On le faisoit publiquement bruler vive.' Mariana. 4. 362, 365. Dellon. c. 28. Moreri, 5. 130.
The inquisition, in all its horrors, was founded and fostered by the whole Romish church or popish hierarchy. Several popish kingdoms indeed deprecated and expelled this enemy of religion and man. The only places in which this tribunal, prior to the Reformation, obtained a permanent establishment, were Languedoc, and in modern times Spain, Portugal, and Goa. The holy office, with all its apparatus of inquisitors, qualificators, families, jailors, dungeons, racks, and other engines of torture, was driven, with indignation and ignominy, out of the Netherlands, Hungary, France, Germany, Poland, and even Italy. The Neapolitans and Romans expelled the inhuman nuisance with determined resolution. Spain itself, notwithstanding its red-hot persecutions, witnessed a scene of a similar kind. The citizens of Cordova, on one occasion, rose in insurrection against this infernal tribunal, stormed the palace of the inquisition, pillaged its apartments, and imprisoned the jailor. Mariana, 5. 535, 572. Giannon, XXXII. 5. Thuan. 1. 788. Paolo, 1. 444. el 2. 57, 566.
All this opposition, however, was the work, not of the priesthood, but of the people. The populace dreaded its horrors, deprecated its cruelty, and therefore prevented its establishment. The clergy, on the contrary, have, with all their influence, encouraged the institution in all its inhumanity. The pope and the prelacy, who, in the Romish system, are the church and possess infallibility, have, with the utmost unanimity, declared in favor of the holy office. No Roman pontiff or popish council has ever condemned this foul blot on pretended Catholicism, this gross insult on reason and man.
The inquisition, beyond all other institutions that ever appeared in the world, evidences the deepest malignancy of human nature. Nothing, in all the annals of time, ever exhibited so appalling and hateful a view of fallen and degenerate man, demoralized to the lowest ebb of perversity by Romanism and the popedom. No tribunal, equally regardless of justice and humanity, ever raised its frightful form in all the dominions of Heathenism or Mahometanism, Judaism or Christianity. The misanthropist, in the contemplation of the holy office, may find continual and unfailing fuel for his malevolence. He may see, in its victim, the wretchedest sufferer that ever drained the cup of misery; and in the inquisitor, the hatefullest object, Satan not exempted, that ever defiled or disgraced the creation of God. No person, in a future world, would own an inquisitor, who dies in the spirit of his profession, but the devil, and no place would receive him but hell.
Such is a faint view of the persecutions which distracted Christendom, from the accession of Constantine till the era of the Reformation. The third period occupies the time which intervened between the Reformation arid the present day. This long series of years displays great variety. Its commencement was marked by persecution, which was afterwards repressed by the diffusion of letters, the light of Revelation, and the influence of Protestantism.
The popish clergy and kings wielded the civil and ecclesiastical power against the Reformation, during its rise and progress. The whole Romish hierarchy, through the agency of theologians, popes, and councils, laboured in the work of persecution. The theologians and historians, who have prostituted their pen for the unworthy purpose, have been many. From this multitude may be selected Benedict, Mariana, Bellarmine, Dens, the college of Rheims, and the universities of Salamanca and Valladolid.
Benedict the Dominican, in his history of the Albigenses, approves of all the inhumanity of the holy office and the holy wars. The inquisitor and the crusader are the themes of his unqualified applause. Mariana the Jesuit, in his history of Spain, has, like Benedict, eulogized persecutions and the inquisition; though these, he admits, 'are innovations on Christianity.' The historian recommends 'fire and sword, when mild means are unavailing and useless. A wise severity, in such cases, is the sovereign remedy,' - 'Il faut recourir au fer et au feu dans les maux, ou les remedes lents sont inu tiles. Uu sage severite est le remede souverain.' Mariana, 2. 686.
Bellarmine's statements, as well as those of Dens, on this subject, are distinguished by their ridiculousness and barbarity. He urges, in the strongest terms, the eradication of heretics, when it can be effected with safety. Freedom of faith, in his system, tends to the injury of the individual and of society; and the abettors of heterodoxy therefore are, for the honour of religion, to be delivered to the secular arm and consigned to the flames. The cardinal would burn the body for the good of the soul. The prudent Jesuit, however, would allow even the advocates of heresy to live, when, owing to their strength and number, an appeal to arms would be attended with danger to the friends of orthodoxy. The apostles, he contends, 'abstained from calling ire the secular arm only because there were, in their day, no Christian princes.' This, in all its horrors, he represents as the common sentiment of all the patrons of Catholicism, - 'Libertas credendi perniciosa eat. Libros haereticorum jure interdici et exuri.' Bell. De Laic. III. 18. 'Huss asseruit, non licere haereticum incorrigibilem tradere seculari potestati et permittere comburendum. Contrarium decent omnes Catholici.' Bell. III. 20. 'Ecclesia, zelo salutis animarum, eos persequitur. Sunt proculdubio extirpandi.' Bellarmin. 1. 1363. 'Haeretici notorii privantur sepultura ecclesiastica. Bona eornm temporalia sunt ipso jure confiscata. Exilio, carcere, &c. merito afficiuntur. Falsarii pecumiae vel alii rempublicam fidei et turbantes, justa morte puniuntur: ergo etiam haeretici, qui sunt falsarii fidei et rempublicam graviter perturbant.' Dens, 2. 88, 89. Bellarmine's arguments, in favor of his system, are a burlesque on reason and common sense. Dens, patronized by the Romish clergy in Ireland, follows Bellarmine. He would punish notorious abettors of heresy with confiscation of property, exile, imprisonment, death, and deprivation of Christian burial. 'Such falsifiers of the faith and troublers of the community,' says the precious Divine, 'justly suffer death in the same manner as those who counterfeit money and disturb the state.' This, he argues, from the Divine command to slay the Jewish false prophets, and from the condemnation of Huss in the council of Constance.
The college of Rheims commended the same remedy. These doctors, in their annotations, maintain that the good should tolerate the wicked, when, in consequence of the latter's strength, punishment would be attended with danger. But heresy or any other evil, when its destruction could be effected with safety, should, according to this precious exposition, be suppressed and its authors exterminated. Testam. in Matth. XIII. 29. [see Footnote 1, H&F] Such is the instruction, conveyed in a popular commentary on the Gospel of peace and good will to man. The university of Salamanca followed the college of Rheims. The doctors of this seminary, in 1603, maintained 'the Roman pontiff's right to compel, by arms, the sons of apostacy and the opponents of Catholicism.' The theory taught at Salamanca, was also inculcated by the professors of Valladolid. Rheim. Mageogh. 3. 595.
These are a few specimens of the popish divines, who have abetted the extirpation of heresy by violence and the inquisition. The list might be augmented to almost any extent. Immense indeed is the number of Romish doctors, who, in the advocacy of persecution, 'have wearied eloquence and exhausted learning.'
Pontiffs, as well as theologians, have enjoined persecution. This practical lesson has, for a thousand years, been uniformly taught in the school of the popedom. The viceroys of heaven have, for this long succession of ages, acted on the same satanic system. From these pontifical persecutors, since the Reformation, may, as a specimen, be selected the names of Leo, Adrian, Paul, and Pius.
Leo, in a bull issued in 1520, ordered all to shun Luther and his adherents. His holiness commanded sovereigns to chase the abettors of Lutheranism out of their dominions. Adrian, in 1522, deprecated the spread of Lutheranism, and admonished princes and people against the toleration of this abomination; and, if mild methods should be unavailing, to employ fire and faggot. Labb. 19. 1050, 1068. Du Pin, 3. 170. 'Se servir de remedes plus violens, et l'eployer le feu.' Paolo, l. 48.
Paul the Fourth distinguished himself by his recommendation of the inquisition for the extermination of heresy. This tribunal, his infallibility accounted the sheet-anchor of the papacy, and the chief battery for the overthrow of heresy. The pontiff reckoned the Gospel, with all its divine institutions, as nothing, compared with the holy office for the defence of the holy see. Paul was right. The Gospel may support the church, but the inquisition is the proper instrument to protect, the popedom. The inquisition, accordingly, was the darling theme of his supremacy's thoughts. He conferred additional authority on the sacred institution, and recommended it to the cardinals and his successors with his parting breath, - 'II donna toutes ses pensees aux affaires de l'inquisition, qu'il disoit etre la meilleure batterie, qu'on put opposer a l'heresie, et la principale defense du Saint Siege.' Paolo, 2. 45, 51. Bruys, 4. 636. 'Sanctissimum iuquisitionis officium, quo uno sacrae sedis auctoritatem niti affirmabat, commendatum haberent.' Thuan. XXIII. 15. 'Sacrae inquisitionis tribunali majorem auctoritatem dedit.' Alex. 23. 216. When the cold hand of death was pressing on his lips, and the soul just going to appear before its God, he enjoined the use of the inquisition, and expired, recommending murder and inhumanity.
These enactments of doctors and pontiffs were supported by the canons of councils. The council of Lyons, in 1527, commanded the suffragans to make diligent inquiry after the disseminators of heresy, and to appeal, when necessary, to the secular arm. Anno 1528, the council of Sens enjoined on princes the extermination of heretics, in imitation of Constantine, Valentinian, and Theodosius. Labb. 19. 1127. 1180. Du Pin, 3. 257.
The general council of Trent, in the same manner, patronized persecution. Ciaconia, a Dominican, preached before this assembly on the parable of the tares. The preacher, on this occasion, broached the maxim afterward adopted by Bellarmine and the Rhemish annotators. He urged 'that the adherents of heresy should be tolerated, when their extermination would be attended with danger; but when their extirpation can be effected with safety, they should be destroyed by fire the sword, the gallows, and all other means.' All this Ciaconia declared, the sacred synod itself had inculcated in its second session: and the Dominican's sermon and declaration were heard in the infallible assembly without objection or contradiction. The sacred synod again, in their last session, admonished 'all princes to exert their influence to prevent abettors of heresy from misinterpreting or violating the, ecclesiastical decrees, and to oblige these objectors, as well as all their other subjects, to accept and to observe the synodal canons with devotion and fidelity,' - 'On devoit les detruire par le fer, le feu, la corde, ou tout autre moyen.' Paolo, IV p. 604. 'Le concile ensuite exhortait tous les princes a ne point souffrir que ses decrets fussent violez par les heretiques, mais a les obliger aussi bien que tous leurs autres sujets a les observer.' Paolo, 2. 660. This was clearly an appeal to the secular arm, for the purpose of forcing acquiescence and submission: and the natural consequence of such compulsion was persecution.
The canon law and the Roman ritual extend the spirit of persecution even to the dead. The canon law excommunicates any, who, with his knowledge, bestows Christian burial on heretics. The Roman ritual, also, published by the command of Paul the Fifth, and in general use through the popish communion, 'refuses sepulchral honours to heretics and schismatics.' The offender, in this case, to obtain absolution and be freed from excommunication, must, with his own hands and in a public manner, raise the interred from the hallowed sepulchre. He must, to be uncursed, unearth the mouldering remains of the corpse, and violate, by an act of horror, the sanctuary of the tomb.
The enactments of popes and councils were sanctioned and enforced by emperors and kings. Charles the Fifth, emperor of Germany and king of Spain and the Netherlands, persecuted the friends of the Reformation through his extensive dominions. His majesty in 1521, supported by the electors in the Diet of Worms, declared it his duty, for the glory of God, the honour of the papacy, and the dignity of the nation, to protect the faith and extinguish heresy; and in consequence proscribed Luther, his followers, and books, and condemned all, who, in any manner, should aid or defend the Saxon Reformer or read his works, to the confiscation of their property, the ban of the empire, and the penalty of high-treason.
The emperor's edicts against the Lutherans in the Netherlands were fraught with still greater severity. Men who favoured Lutheranism were to be beheaded, and women to be buried alive, or, if obstinate, to be committed to the flames. This law, however, was suspended. But inquisitorial and military executions rioted in the work of death in all its shocking forms. The duke of Alva boasted of having caused, in six weeks, the execution of eighteen thousand for the crime of Protestantism. Paolo reckons the number, who, in the Netherlands, were, in a few years, massacred on account of their religion, at fifty thousand; while Grotius raises the list of the Belgic martyrs to a hundred thousand, - 'Poena in viros capitis, in feminas defossionis in terrain, sin pertinaces fuerint exustionis.' Thuan. 1. 229. Brand. II. 'Dana les Pais Bas, le nombre de ceux, quo I'on avoit pendus, decapitez, brulez, et enterrez vifs, moutat a cinquante mille hommes.' Paolo, 2. 52. 'Carnificata hominum non minus centum millia.' Grotius, Annal. 12. Brand. IV. X. Du Pin, 3. 656.
Charles began the work of persecution in Spain, and with his latest breath recommended its completion to his son Philip II. The dying advice of the father was not lost on the son. He executed the infernal plan in all its barbarity, without shewing a single symptom of compunction or mercy. His majesty, on his arrival in Spain, commenced the work of destruction. He kindled the fires of persecution at Valladolid and Seville, and consigned the professors of Protestantism without discrimination or pity to the flames. Among the victims of his fury, on this occasion, were the celebrated Pontius, Gonsalvus, Vaenia, Viroesia, Cornelia, Bohorquia, Aegidio, Losado, Arellan, and Arias. Thirty-eight of the Spanish nobility were, in his presence, bound to the stake and burned, - 'Spectante ipso Philippo, XXXVIII ex praecipua regionis nobilitate palis alligati ac cremati sunt.' Thuan. XXIII. 14. Du Pin, 3. 655. Philip was a spectator of these shocking scenes, and gratified his royal and refined taste with these spectacles of horror. The inquisition, since his day, has, by relentless severity, succeeded in banishing Protestantism from the peninsula of Spain and Portugal.
Francis and Henry, the French kings, imitated the example of Charles and Philip. Francis enacted laws against the French Protestants; and ordered the judges, under severe penalties, to enforce them with rigor. These laws were renewed and new ones issued by Henry. His most Christian Majesty, in 1549, entered Paris, made a solemn procession, declared his detestation of Protestantism and attachment to popery, avowed his resolution to banish the friends of the Reformation from his dominions and to protect Catholicism and the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He caused many Lutherans to suffer martyrdom in Paris, and lent his royal assistance in person at the execution, - 'Ce Prince fit executer plusieurs Lutherieus a Paris, aux supplices desquels il voulut assister lui-meme. II vouloit exterminer de tout son royaume les nouveaux heretiques.' Paolo, 1. 484. Thuan. VI. 4. 10. Henry, like Philip, had, on this occasion, an opportunity of indulging the refinement and delicacy of his taste, in viewing the expiring struggles of his heretical subjects in the pangs of dissolution.
Instances of French persecution appeared in the massacres of Merindol, Orange, and Paris. The massacre of Merindol, planned by the king of France and the parliament of Aix, was executed by the president Oppeda. The president was commissioned to slay the population, burn the towns, and demolish the castles of the Waldenses.
Oppeda, thirsting for blood, executed his commission with infernal barbarity. The appalling butchery has been related by the popish historians, Gaufridus, Moreri, Paolo, and Thuanus with precision and impartiality, - 'Les troupes passerent au fil de l'epee tous ceux qui n'avoient pu s'enfuir, et etoient restez exposez a la merci du soldat, sans distinction d'age, de qualite, ni de sexe. On y massacra plus de 4000 personnes.' Paolo, 1. 190. The president slaughtered more than three thousand Waldenses, who, from age to age, have been the object of papal enmity. Man, woman, and child fell in indiscriminate and relentless carnage. Thousands were massacred. Twenty-four towns were ruined and the country left a deserted waste. Gaufrid, XII. Moreri, 6. 46. Thuan. VI. 16.
The massacre was so appalling that it excited the horror even of Gaufridus, the Roman historian of these horrid transactions. The men, women, and children, in general, at the approach of the hostile army, fled to the adjoining woods and mountains. Old men and women were mixed with boys and girls. Many of the weeping mothers carried their infants in cradles or in their arms; while the woods and mountains reechoed their groans and lamentations. These were pursued and immolated by the sword of popish persecution, which never knew pity.
A few remained in the towns and met a similar destiny. Sixty men and thirty women surrendered in Capraria, on condition that their lives should be spared: and, notwithstanding plighted faith, they were taken to a meadow and murdered in cold blood. Five hundred women were thrown into a barn, which was then set on fire; and when any leaped from the windows, they were received on the points of spears or halberts. The rest were consumed in the flames or suffocated with the smoke.
The women were subjected to the most brutal insults. Girls were snatched from the arms of their mothers, violated and afterward treated with the most shocking inhumanity. Mothers saw their children murdered before their face, and were then, though fainting with grief and horror, violated by the soldiery. The champions of the faith forced the dying women, whose offspring had been sacrificed in their presence. Cruelty succeeded violation. Some were precipitated from high rocks; while others were put to the sword or dragged naked through the streets, - 'Foeminae a furentibus violate, et satiata libidine tarn crudeliter habitae, ut pleraeque, sive ex animi moerore, sive fame et cruciatibus perierint.' Thuan. 1. 227. 'Cruaute alla jusqu'a violer des femmes mourantes, et d'autres, a la veue desquelles on avoit egorge leurs enfans.' Gaufride, 2. 480. 'Les troupes apres avoir rempli tout les pais de crimes et de debauches.' Paolo, 1. 190.
The massacre was not merely the work of Oppeda and the soldiery; but approved by the French king and parliament; and afterward by the popedom, and all, in general, who were attached to Romanism. Francis and the city of Paris heard the news of the massacre with joy, and congratulated Oppeda on the victory. The parliament of Aix also, actuated, like the French monarch and nobility, with enmity against Waldensianism, approved of the carnage, and felicitated the president on the triumph.
The rejoicing, on the occasion, was not confined to the French sovereign and people. The pope and his court exulted. The satisfaction which was felt at the extirpation of Waldensianism was, says Gaufrid, in proportion to the scandal caused by that heresy in the church, by which the historian means the popedom. The friends of the papacy, therefore, according to the same author, 'reckoned the fire and sword well employed, which extinguished Waldensianism, and forgot nothing that could immortalize the name of Oppeda. Paul the Fourth made the president Count Palatine and Knight of Saint John; while the partizans of Romanism styled the monster, 'the defender of the faith, the protector of the faithful, and the hero of Christianity,' - 'Tous ceux de la cour feliciterent le premier President de sa victoire. Rome et la Cour du Pape y prirent leur part. Ceux-la trouverent le fer et le feu bien employes.' Gaufrid. 2. 481. 'Ils le traiterent de deffenseur de la foi, de heros de Christianisme, et protecteur des fideles.' Gaufrid. 2. 494.
The massacre of Orange, in 1562, was attended with the same horrors, as that of Merindol. This was perpetrated against the Protestants, as the other had been against the Waldensians. Its horrifying transactions have been related with impartiality by the popish historians Varillas, Bruys, and Thuanus. Varillas, III. Bruy. 4. 654. Thuanus, XXXI. 11. The Italian army, sent by pope Pius the Fourth, was commanded by Serbellon, and slew man, woman, and child in indiscriminate carnage. Infants, and even the sick were assassinated in cold blood. Children were snatched from the embraces of their mothers, and killed with the blows of bludgeons.
The work of death was carried on by various modes of torture and brutality. Some were killed with the sword, and some precipitated from the rock on which the city was built. Some were hanged and others roasted over a slow fire. Many were thrown on the points of hooks and daggers. The soldiery mutilated the citizens in such a shameful manner as modesty forbids to name, 'Ils prirent plaisir a couper les parties secretes.' Varillas, 1. 203. Women with child were suspended on posts and gates, and their bowels let out with knives. The blood, in the meantime, flowed in torrents through the streets.
Many of the boys were forced to become Ganymedes, and to commit the sin of Sodom. The women, old and young, were violated; the ladies of rank and accomplishments were abandoned to the will of the ruffian soldiery; and afterward exposed to the public laughter, with horns and stakes thrust into the body in such a manner as decency refuses to describe, - 'Pueri multi item rapti, et ad nefandam libidinem satiandam ad miseram captivitatem abducti.' Thuan. 2. 228. 'Les dames furent exposees nues a la risee publique, avec des cornes enfoncees dans les parties, que la pudeur defend de nommer.' Varillas, 1. 203. 'Productis mulierum cadaveribus, et in eorum pudenda bourn cornibus, et saxis, ac stipitibus ad ludibrium injectis.' Thuan. 2. 228. 'Exudante passim per urbem cruore.' Thuan. 31. 11.
The massacre of Paris, in 1572, on Bartholomew's day, equalled those of Merindol and Orange in barbarity, and excelled both in extent. The facts have been detailed with great impartiality by Bossuet, Daniel, Davila, Thuanus, and Mezeray. Bossuet, Abreg. XVII. Daniel, 8. 727-740. Mezeray, 5.151-162. Davila, V. Mezeray, 5. 151-162. The queen laid this plan, which had been two years preconcerted, for the extinction of heresy. The execution was entrusted to the Duke of Guise, who was distinguished by his inhumanity and hatred of the Reformation. The duke, on the occasion, was aided by the soldiery, the populace, and the king. The military and the people attached to Romanism thirsted for the blood of the Hugonots. His most Christian majesty, Charles the Ninth, attacked, in person, his unresisting subjects with a gun, and 'shouted with all his might, KILL, KILL,' - 'II dechargea sur les Calvinistes.' Sully, 1. 34. 'Le Roi tiroit sur eux lui-meme avec de longues arquebuses, et crioit, de toute sa force, 'tuez, tuez.'' Dan. 8. 731. Mezeray, 5. 155. Davila, V. One man, if he deserve the name, boasted of having, in one night, killed a hundred and fifty, and another of having slain four hundred.
The tocsin, at midnight, tolled the signal of destruction. The assailants spared neither old nor young, man nor woman. The carnage lasted seven days. Mezeray reckons the killed, in Paris, during this time, at 5000, Bossuet at more than 6000, and Davila at 10,000, among whom were five or six hundred gentlemen. The Seine was covered with the dead which floated on its surface, and the city was one great butchery and flowed with human blood. The court was heaped with the slain, on which the king and queen gazed, not with horror, but with delight. Her majesty unblushingly feasted her eyes on the spectacle of thousands of men, exposed naked, and lying wounded and frightful in the pale livery of death, - 'Tout le quartier ruisseloit de sang. La cour etoit pleine de corps morts, que le Roi et la Reine regardoient, non seulement sans horreur, mais avec plaisir. Tout les rues de la ville n'etoient plus que boucheries.' Bossuet, 4. 537. 'On exposa leurs corps tout nuds a la porte du Louvre, la Reine mere etant a une fenestre, qui repaisoit ses yeux de cet horrible spectacle.' Mezeray, 5. 157. Davila, V. Thuan. II. 8. 'Frequentes e gynoeceo foeminae, nequaquam crudeli spectaculo eas absterrente, curiosis oculis nudorum corpora inverecunde intuebantur.' Thuan. 3. 131. The king went to see the body of Admiral Coligny, which was dragged by the populace through the streets; and remarked in unfeeling witticism, that the 'smell of a dead enemy was agreeable.
The tragedy was not confined to Paris, but extended, in general, through the French nation. Special messengers were, on the preceding day, despatched in all directions, ordering a general massacre of the Hugonots. The carnage, in consequence, was made through nearly all the provinces, and especially in Meaux, Troyes, Orleans, Nevers, Lyons, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and Rouen. Twenty-five or thirty thousand according to Bossuet and Mezeray, perished in different places. Davila estimates the slain at 40,000, and Sully at 70,000. Many were thrown into the rivers, which, floated the corpses on the waves, carried horror and infection to all the country, which they watered with their streams.
The reason of this waste of life was enmity to heresy or Protestantism. A few indeed suggested the pretence of a conspiracy. But this, even Bossuet grants, every person knew to be a mere pretence. The populace, tutored by the priesthood, accounted themselves, in shedding heretical blood, 'the agents of Divine justice,' and engaged 'in doing God service,' - 'Les Catholiques se regarderent comme les executeurs de la justice de Dieu.' Daniel, 8 738. Thuan. 3. 149. The king accompanied with the queen and princes of the blood, and all the French court, went to the Parliament, and acknowledged that all these sanguinary transactions were done by his authority. 'The parliament publicly eulogised the king's wisdom,' which had effected the effusion of so much heretical blood. His majesty also went to mass, and returned solemn thanks to God for the glorious victory obtained over heresy. He ordered medals to be coined to perpetuate its memory. A medal accordingly was struck for the purpose with this inscription, PIETY EXCITED JUSTICE, - 'Pietas excitavit justitiam. II fit frapper un medaille a l'occasion de la Saint Barthelemi.' Daniel, 8 786. 'Apres avoir oui solemnellement la messe pour remercier Dieu de la belle victoire obtenue sur l'heresie, et commande de fabriquer des medailles pour en conserver la memoire.' Mezeray, 5. 160. 'II fremissoit malgre lui, au recit de mille traits de cruaute.' Sully, 1. 33. Piety, forsooth, propelled to murder, and the immolation of forty thousand people was an act of justice. Piety and justice, it seems, aroused to deeds of cruelty, the idea of which afterwards, says Sully, caused even the inhuman perpetrator Charles, in spite of himself, to shudder.
The carnage, sanctioned in this manner by the French king, parliament, and people, was also approved by the pope and the Roman court. Rome 'from her hatred of heresy, received the news with unspeakable joy. The pope went in procession to the church of Saint Lewis, to render thanks to God for the happy victory.' His Legate in France felicitated his most Christian majesty in the pontiff's name, 'and praised the exploit, so long meditated and so happily executed, for the good of religion.' The massacre, says Mezeray, 'was extolled before the king as the triumph of the church,' - 'La haine de l'heresie les fit recevoir agreablement a Rome. Ou se rejouit aussi en Espagne.' Bossuet, 4 545. La Cour de Rome et le Conseil d' Espagne eurent une joye indicible de la Saint Bartelemy. Le Pape alla en procession a l'eglise de Saint Louis, rendre graces a Dieu d'un si heureux succes, et l'on fit le panegyrique de cette action sous le nom de Triomphe de l'Eglise.' Mezeray, 5. 162. Sully, 1. 27.
Spain rejoiced also in the tragedy as the defeat of Protestantism. This nation has ever shown itself the friend of the papacy, and the deadly enemy of the Reformation: and this spirit, on this occasion, appeared in the joy manifested by the Spanish people for the murder of the French Hugonots.
England, like Germany, France, Spain, and the Netherlands, was the scene of persecution and martyrdom. Philip and Mary, who exercised the royal authority in the British nation, issued a commission for 'the burning of heretics.' The queen, in this manifesto, 'professed her resolution to support justice and Catholicism, and to eradicate error and heresy: and ordered her heretical subjects, therefore, to be committed before the people to the flames.' This, her majesty alleged, would shew her detestation of heterodoxy, and serve as an example to other Christians, to shun the contagion of heresy, - 'Haereticos juxta legem, ignis incendio comburi debere; praecipimus, quod prafatos coram populo igni committi, et in codem igne realiter comburi facias.' Wilkin, 4. 177.
Orleans acknowledges Mary's rigour, and her execution of many on account of their Protestantism. In this, he discovers, the queen followed her own genius rather than the spirit of the church, by which he means the popedom. This historian, nevertheless, represents Mary as 'worthy of eternal remembrance for her zeal,' - 'Reine digne d'une memoirs eternelle, per son zele. On en fit, en effet, mourir un grand nombre.' Orleans, VIII. P 174, 175. Such is his character of a woman who was a modern Theodora, and never obliged the world but when she died. Her death was the only favour she ever conferred on her unfortunate and persecuted subjects.
Popish persecution raged, in this manner, from the commencement of the Reformation till its establishment. The flow of this overwhelming tide began at the accession of Constantine to the throne of the Roman empire: and, having prevailed for a long period, gradually ebbed after the era of Protestantism. The popedom, on this topic, was compelled, though with reluctance and inconsistency, to vary its profession and practice. A change was effected in an unchangeable communion. Some symptoms of the old disease indeed still appear. The spirit, like latent heat, is inactive rather than extinguished. But the general cry is for liberality or even latitudinarianism. The shout, even among the advocates of Romanism, is in favor of religious liberty, unfettered conscience, and universal toleration. The inquisition of Spain and Portugal, with all its apparatus of racks, wheels, and gibbets, has lost its efficacy, and its palace at Goa is in ruins. The bright sun of India enlightens its late dungeons, which are now inhabited, not by the victim of popish persecution, but by 'the owl, the dragon, and the wild beast of the desert.'
This change has, in some measure, been influenced by the diffusion of literature and the Reformation. The darkness of the middle ages has fled before the light of modern science: and with it, in part, has disappeared priestcraft and superstition. Philosophy has improved, and its light continues to gain on the empire of darkness. Protestantism has circulated the Book of God, and shed its radiancy over a benighted world. The advances of literature and revelation have been unfavourable to the reign of intolerance and the inquisition.
But the chief causes of this change in the papacy are the preponderance of Protestantism and the policy of popery. The Reformation, in its liberalizing principles, is established over a great part of Christendom. Its friends have become nearly equal to its opponents in number, and far superior in intelligence and activity. Rome, therefore, though she has not expressly disavowed her former claims, has according to her ancient policy, allowed these lofty pretensions to slumber for a time in inactivity, and yielded, though with reluctant and awkward submission, to the progress of science, the light of revelation, and the strength of Protestantism.
A late discovery has shewn the deceitfulness of all popish pretences to liberality, both on the continent and in Ireland; Dens, a doctor of Louvain, published a system of theology in 1758, and in some of the succeeding years. This work, fraught with the most revolting principles of persecution, awards to the patrons of heresy, confiscation of goods, banishment from the country, confinement in prison, infliction of death, and deprivation of Christian burial. Falsifiers of the Faith, like forgers of money and disturbers of the state, this author would, according to the sainted Thomas, consign to death as the proper and merited penalty of their offence. This, he argues from the sentence of the Jewish false prophets, and from the condemnation of Huss in the general council of Constance, - 'An haeretici recte puniuntur morte? Respondet S. Thomas affirmative: quia falsarii pecuniae vel alii rempublicam turbantes juste morte puniuntur: ergo etiam haeretici qui sunt falsarii fidei et rempublicam graviter perturbant. Confirmatur ex eo quod Dens in veteri lege jusserit oocidi falsos Prophetas. Idon probatur ex condemnatione articuli 14, Joan. Huss in Concilio Constantiensi.' Dens, 2. 88, 89. 'Haeretioi notorii privantur sepultura ecclesiastica.' Bona. &c. Dens, 2. 88.
This production in all its horror and deformity, was dedicated to Cardinal Philippus, and recommended to Christendom by the approbation of the University of Louvain, which vouched for its 'orthodox faith and its Christian morality.' It was ushered into the world with the permission of superiors, and the full sanction of episcopal authority. Its circulation on the continent was, even in the nineteenth century, impeded by no Romish reclamation, nor by the appalling terrors of the expurgatorian index. The popish clergy and people, in silent consent or avowed approbation, acknowledged, in whole and in part, its Catholicism and morality. Dens, 4. 3. 'Eas reperi nihil continere a fide orthodoxa et moribus Christianis alienum.' Dens, 5. 1. Horne's Protest. Mem. 95, 96.
The University of Louvain, on this occasion, exhibited a beautiful specimen of Jesuitism. A few years after its approbation of Dens' Theology, Pitt, the British statesman, asked this same university, as well as those of Salamanca and Valladolid, whether persecution were a principle of Romanism. The astonished doctors, insulted at the question, and burning with ardour to obliterate the foul stain, branded the insinuation with a loud and deep negation. The former, in this case, copied the example of the latter. The divines of Salamanca and Valladolid, questioned on the same subject in 1603, in reference to the war waged by the Irish against the English in the reign of queen Elizabeth, patronized the principle of persecution, which, in their answer to Pitt, they proscribed, - 'Tanquam certum est accipiendum, posse Romanum Pontificem fidei desertores, et eos qui Catholicam religionem oppugnant, armis compellere.' Mageogh. 3. 595. Slevin, 193. Such, on the European continent, were the candour and consistency of the popish clergy, who, in this manner, adapted their movements, like skilful generals, to the evolutions of the enemy, and suited their tactics to the emergency of the occasion.
This complete body of theology, unconfined to the continent, was, in a special manner, extended to Ireland. The popish prelacy, in 1808, met, says Coyne and Wise, in Dublin, and unanimously agreed that this book was the best work, and safest guide in theology for the Irish clergy. Coyne, in consequence, was ordered to publish a large edition, for circulation among the prelacy and priesthood of the kingdom. Coyne, Catal. 6, 7. Wyse, Hist. Cath. Ass. App. N. 7. Horne's Protest. Mem. 95.
The work was dedicated to Doctor Murray, Titular Archbishop of Dublin. The same prelate also sanctioned an additional volume, which was afterwards annexed to the performance with his approbation. Murray, Doyle, Keating, and Kinsella made it the conference book for the Romish clergy of Leinster. The popish ordo or directory, for five successive years, had its questions for conference arranged as they occurred in Dens, and were, of course, to be decided by his high authority. The Romish episcopacy, in this way, made this author their standard of theology to direct the Irish prelacy and priesthood in casuistry and speculation, - 'Rererendissimo in Deo, Patri ac Domino.' Danieli Murray, &c. Dens, I. l. Coyne, 7. Horne, 95, 96. Dens, therefore, possesses, with them, the same authority on popish theology as Blackstone with us, on the British Constitution, or the Bible on the principles of Protestantism.
Accompanied with such powerful recommendations, the work, as might be expected, obtained extensive circulation. The college of Maynooth, indeed, did not raise Dens to a text-book. This honour was reserved for Bailly. But this seminary received Dens as a work of reference. His theology lay in the library, ready, at any time, for consultation. Doctor Murphy's academy in Cork had fifty or sixty copies for the use of the seminary and the diocesan clergy. The precious production, indeed, has found its way into the hands of almost every priest in the kingdom, and forms the holy fountain from which he draws the pure waters of the sanctuary.
The days of persecution, notwithstanding, will, in all probability, never return to dishonor Christianity and curse mankind. The inquisition, with all its engines of torment and destruction, may rest for ever in inactivity. The Inquisitor may exercise his malevolence, and vent his ferocity in long and deep execrations against the growing light of philosophy and the Reformation; but will never more regale his ears with the groans of the tortured victim, or feast his eyes in witnessing an Act of Faith. The popedom may regret its departed power. The Roman pontiff and hierarchy may indulge in dreams of future greatness, prefer vain prayers for the restoration of persecution or, in bitter lamentation, weep over the ashes of the inquisition. But these hopes, supplications, and tears, in all likelihood, will be forever, be unavailing. Rome's spiritual artillery is, in a great measure, become useless; and the secular arm no longer, as formerly, enforces ecclesiastical denunciations, or consigns the abettors of heresy to the flames.
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FOOTNOTES Hail & Fire:
1. See "The Rheims New Testament by the English College at Rheims" (1582) online for the annotation on Matth. XIII. 29
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"They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service. And these things will they do unto you, because they have not known the Father, nor me. But these things have I told you, that when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of them." Joh 16:2-4 KJV
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Monday, December 30, 2013
Files (Journals) I-III
Files (Journals) I-III
JOURNAL I 2/29/2012 9:28 PM
Eric Abrahamson
I want to sue my family and their doctors [maybe for $2 billion] for attempted murder, false imprisonment, elder abuse, elder financial abuse, medical malpractice, psychiatric malpractice, and psychiatric and psychological torture. I want to write the story of my surgeries, around the year 2000. I was living with Laurie Senit, in her apartment at 3956 Inglewood Blvd in Venice, CA, West Los Angeles, and a junior computer science major at Cal State Northridge. She still lives there, her parents live nearby on Stoner St., and my sister and brother-in-law still live on 10575 Fontenelle Way in Bel-Air. Jonathan Aronson, my brother-in-law, is still a professor at University of Southern California. Laurie is a UCLA grad, a Bruin. I went to UCI for two years, and got into the Information and Computer Science major. My sister and I both went to Yale and my sister is Chairman of the Barbara Bush Literacy Campaign and was Assistant Chief-Of-Staff to Vice-President H.W. Bush in the Reagan White House. My mother, Lucille Abrahamson, at 29 West Clay Park, San Francisco, was President of the San Francisco School Board and San Francisco Human Rights Commissioner. My father, James Abrahamson, a restauranteur and institutional furniture salesman, died several years ago. I am still a senior computer science and pre-law major at Cal State East Bay in Hayward, and I say I may try to obtain a JD like my sister and/or a MSCS. I also work as an IT Assistant at the SEVA Foundation in Berkeley.
My brother-in-law, who had become trustee of my trust fund, told me, “If your car breaks down, you're not going to get another one,” which turned out to not be true. I had a 1992 white Toyota Tercel my mom had bought for me new and I had driven off the showroom floor, and when that broke down they bought me an old blue 1987 Geo Metro. I was driving around near the L.A. airport one day and I got chest pains so bad I went to the emergency room with my Blue Cross card. The chest pains subsided and they referred me to a cardiologist. This had happened once before, when I was living in Las Vegas, New Mexico, near Santa Fe. I drove to an ER with chest pains, they did an EKG, said my heart was OK, and it never bothered me again. I didn’t have a local doctor, I was so healthy, and I ate a lot of McDonalds. But this time I got a referral to a cardiologist, somewhere near the Howard Hughes Center. Somehow I missed the appointment, called them, and they referred me to Dr. Ravi Dave`at UCLA-Santa Monica Cardiology, probably because I had been seeing a doctor near there at the Urgent Care on Wilshire, Dr. Mark Grossman.
[3/1/2012 10:24 PM]Dr. Dave`examined me and said, “I want to do an operation right away, an angiogram and an angioplasty.”I went over to UCLA-Santa Monica Hospital and they prepped me. They wanted to do the operation in five days, but my sister Joan said wait, and they did it in three weeks. Later Dr. Dave` told me, “I said five days.” Laurie drove me to the hospital. I went in the OR and Dr. Dave`was there. They put a wire with a small video camera on it up through my thigh into my heart and made a live video of my heart beating from the inside. Dr. Dave`said, “Look at that screen, that’s a live video of your heart beating from the inside,” but I couldn’t really look at it much. That’s called the angiogram. The angioplasty is
where they put a wire through the heart artery, clean the plaque out, and sometimes put in a stent to hold it open. Dr. Dave`had my blood all over his smock. After the operation he said, “You did not have good success.” He was unable to get the wire through the artery due to the particular physiology of my heart, and did not put in a stent. He said, “We’ll treat it with medication.” I said something about President Clinton having a bypass and he said, “You will never need a bypass.”I woke up in the Intensive Care Unit, ICU. My sister Joan was there, and we joked about how Vice-President Cheney had coincidentally had heart surgery during the same week. She had been Assistant Chief-Of-Staff to Vice-President H.W. Bush in the Ronald Reagan White House and Chairman of the Barbara Bush Literacy Campaign when he was President, and lives near the Reagans’ house in Bel-Air. She said that as soon as I was recuperated they were going to give me my sister-in-law’s car, a Ford Escort.
Before the operation, my brother Robert had driven it out from Sedona, and I met with them at Joan’s house in Bel-Air. Robert showed it to me and said, “This is your car.” He also had my
$700 Sony stereo from Sears in pieces and said, “I couldn’t find any speakers.” My dad had told me to go to my stuff in storage in Las Vegas, New Mexico, near Santa Fe, where I had lived for a year as a computer science major at New Mexico Highlands University, where my friend Jeff Kline got his Masters. It’s about an hour and a half, too far, from Llano, where Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm used to be and my friends Alberto and Karen Castagna live. I was on the phone with Laurie from there one day and she said, “Come home! You can live in my apartment and go to UCLA or CSUN.” It sounded better than that dead town, so I put all the stuff in the house I was renting in storage and drove the Toyota back to L.A. My sister held back on the moving truck because when I moved to New Mexico from Bakersfield, where I had an apartment in The Springs across from CSUB (with four swimming pools and four Jacuzzis) where I lived with Laurie for several years and was a computer science major, U-Haul quoted me $600 for a big moving truck and when I got to the counter it was $1300.
So my dad told me to go to the storage in New Mexico, get what I wanted, and give the rest away. Then he called me and I had forgotten to do it. So he said, “I’ll get Robert to do it.”
He called back and said, “Give [brother-in-law] Jonathan the keys to the storage!” Jonathan gave Robert the keys, and he called me and said he was going to get my stuff, what did he want me to save. I said I wanted to drive out there and meet him and go through it myself, but he refused. I’d already been back and brought back my Mac computer, so I said my stereo, some books, etc. He must’ve left my couch, coffee table, globe, expensive $500 office desk I bought at an Irvine office supply store, $300 ergonomic swivel desk chair, all of my kitchen equipment, silverware, pots and pans, dishwashing stuff, knives, my mom had bought me Macy’s plates, bowls, cups, and glasses, placemats, napkin holders, the dining room table and four chairs, two bookshelves, a vacuum cleaner, a bureau still full of hippie stuff, lots of clothes, another computer desk and chair, a nightstand, Sony cordless phone, a bunch of art my antique store friend sold me, lots of cleaning supplies, broom, mop, bucket, etc., all the bathroom stuff, old vitamin bottles, etc.
3/11/2012 10:29 PMSo Robert had what was left of the stereo, some books in boxes, and other stuff I had told him over the phone, in the Ford Escort at my sister’s house. I had another operation, too. Around the same time I got stomach pains and Laurie took me to the emergency room at UCLA. We were triaged because it was a Saturday night, waited around all night, and
went home. It still hurt later so we went to the emergency room at UCLA-Santa Monica where Dr. Grossman practiced. They said I had diverticulitis, an infection of the colon, and a surgeon there, Dr. Schechter, almost did an emergency operation right away, a colon resection. Instead, they admitted me for five days and it improved with the Dilaudid IV drip, the pain went away, and they scheduled me for an operation later. They gave me an appointment with Dr. Schechter, in the same building as Dr. Dave`, to discuss the operation. I was ushered from the waiting room into the consultation room but for some reason I didn’t meet with him, maybe he was called away on an emergency and they rescheduled. Maybe there was something about all the Latino families in the waiting room or the messiness of the consultation room—it looked like they had just done a surgery in there and not cleaned it up yet—but I had a negative feeling about the whole place and I thought about looking for a “better” doctor to do the operation. In retrospect, all of those feelings came from other patients and the nurses—had I met with Dr. Schechter in his office as is usual in a doctor’s appointment it is likely I would have had positive feelings about him as I had had up until then.
I was driving around near the Beverly Center Mall where our friends had an apartment in Beverly Hills and I saw a billboard advertising Cedars-Sinai Hospital, with a doctors’ referral number 1-800-CEDARS1. All I knew was that UCLA was rated the #1 hospital in L.A. and #5 west of the Mississippi and Cedars-Sinai was #2 in L.A. I didn’t really know anything, I just called it, said, “colo-rectal surgeon”, and they referred me to Dr. Gary Hoffman on Canon and Brighton in Beverly Hills. It’s across from Smith and Hawken.He said I had to have a primary care from Cedars, too, why not use Dr. Edward Riceberg downstairs, so I did, for the colon resection.
After the angioplasty I had an appointment with Dr. Grossman and he gave me a bottle of nitroglycerin and said, “If you get chest pains, take one, put it under your tongue, wait 5 minutes, if you still have chest pains take another one, wait 5 minutes, if you still have chest pains, take another one, wait 5 minutes, if you still have chest pains, go to the nearest emergency room.”
The cardiologist, Dr. Dave`, made plans for me to attend cardiac rehabilitation at the hospital and put me on a list of heart meds: Plavix, Lipitor, Toprol XL, Benzepril, Ecotrin 81mg. Aspirin, and Isosorbide.
So a week or two after I was out of the hospital and back home with Laurie we went out to see a friend of hers’ band play at the Canyon Club in Agoura Hills, Joel and Highw a y 61 Revisited, the Bob Dylan Tribute.We were walking around in the parking lot before it started and I thought I had enough of a chest pain to take 3 nitroglycerins. Knowing what I know now if I just had found a quiet place and relaxed for a few minutes, I probably wouldn’t have needed to take any nitroglycerin, the chest pains would have subsided on their own, and I would have fine. But this was the first time. So we went back inside and asked the band to call an ambulance.
They took me to the West Hills Hospital in the Valley. I asked the emergency room doctor if my old case of chronic prostatitis could have caused the heart disease and he said it might have
contributed to it. The chest pains had soon gone away on their own, but they decided to do another angiogram and angioplasty. This one, too, was unsuccessful, for the same reason, and I was in the hospital for a few days. However, the doctor came to me and said, “When we did your blood test we found out you had diabetes,” which was quite shocking. Jerry Garcia had died of a diabetic heart attack. Later someone confirmed that my heart problems (coronary artery disease) were complications of diabetes, and that the diabetes had been a side effect of Risperdal. Heart disease and diabetes is called metabolic syndrome. I was in denial about the diabetes for a long time; I couldn’t face it.
He gave me a bottle of Avandia for diabetes and I never took it. I was afraid that someone would see it. That is virtually the only time I have ever been non-compliant about meds. I was just in such shock about learning I had such a terrible disease. Later I found out that Laurie has diabetes, too, from Seroquel. You also get it from Zyprexa. I don’t know if it’s what we ate.
I told Dr. Riceberg and he said, “It’s a mild case, you don’t need insulin. We’ll treat it with diet.” He also said, “You can work and live independently,” and, “You will live twenty or thirty more years.”
Dr. Dave` had scheduled me for the cardiac rehabilitation at the hospital, and my sister was going to give me the car. I went over to the cardiac rehab, had the tour, and talked to the head nurse, who worked with Dr. Dave`. It took three times a week for several months, early in the morning. They teach you about exercise, diet, and taking your meds. I told her that I didn’t want to take the bus over three times a week, that my family was giving me a car imminently, and we agreed that I would call her when I got the car.
Joel, the band leader, Laurie’s friend, had told me when I got home, “You’d better get yourself a cell phone,” in case I ever had to call 911 again for taking nitroglycerin for chest pains, so I did. I was talking to my brother-in-law Jonathan from Laurie’s apartment and he was telling me to give up the cell phone because I couldn’t afford it. Joan, my sister, had been telling me that she
had been talking to my doctors and following my progress through the medical system and it was only later that I questioned this when Dr. Riceberg said he never talked to her, “It was a bad connection.” So I thought he knew I needed the phone to call an ambulance in case I took nitro for chest pains in an emergency and he was just being cruel in his normal self and I argued with him to keep the phone, thinking my life is at stake.I should have explained why I needed the phone even if I thought he already knew and I was doing it again. He may not have known. He said, “The phone or the car.” Later he said, “You got the phone.” They never did give me the car. He would keep saying, “Next week,” and then putting it off again. Then he said, “I’ll give you the car next week if you don’t overdraw your bank account.”
He had a joint checking account at the Brentwood Bank of America with Joan and me; I had checks and an ATM debit card. Every week he would put in $300 from the savings account he and Joan had in the same bank, and one in West Hollywood.They were called trustees of my trust fund, which was first $40,000/yr. and then $60,000/yr. My mom would send them the money from San Francisco.
As luck would have it, that week, Laurie was in hurry to go out to dinner, and said, “Don’t wait
to count the money,” and we overdrew the $300/wk.—no car. I saw Jonathan driving it himself later.I forgot to call the nurse-I never knew when I was going to get the car, I was waiting for
it forever and I never did get it-and she called and said, “You didn’t call me. I’m canceling you.”
I got the diabetic neuropathy complication a year later and now I think that maybe if I’d attended the cardiac rehab as I was supposed to, they’d have taught me to manage the diabetes which I learned a year after that from the endocrinologist (diabetes specialist), and avoided the rest of the complications, if Jonathan and Joan had given me the car as promised.
Laurie got a job at the UCLA Chabad House on Gayley as a telemarketer. She went down to the Jewish Federation Super Sunday phone telethon and raised thousands of dollars—she just has a knack for that. Since I had no car, I used to ride to work with her and hang around, and her boss, Daryn Edelman, hired me, too. I rented a new Ford Focus from Budget Rental Cars. But I tapped the guy in front of me in a traffic jam on the I-10 and I didn’t have insurance. I just didn’t think of it, so my license was suspended for a year. Joan said, “If you’re caught driving without a license they’ll impound your car and if they put you in jail, I won’t get you out,” and she’s a lawyer. So I got fired from Chabad because I argued with Daryn how if Rabbi Schneerson was the Messiah, why is nothing changed? and why mistreat the Palestinians?
When I had to have two emergency (non-elective) operations (colon resection and angioplasty) I withdrew from CSUN in good standing. The only thing I had to do was the final project for a computer science course for Dr. Peter Smith, who was also my advisor. I went out to my storage in Las Vegas, New Mexico and brought back my Mac to do it. But a day or so before it was due, near Christmas, the computer actually blew up while I was working on the project, started smoking I was working so hard. I emailed Dr. Smith on Laurie’s computer but I had run out of extensions and he said he had to disqualify me, but I could appeal to the Dean of Engineering. I did that and was immediately reinstated, all I had to do was reapply. I did that and was readmitted, but somehow I missed the registration date and applied again and was again readmitted. My brother had said to me once at my sister’s house: “Our parents want you to stop going to Grateful Dead shows. They don’t like the acid.” I refused; I said I was 54 and I did what I wanted. I didn’t know what they meant. There was no Grateful Dead anymore. Phil Lesh and Friends and Ratdog with Bobby Weir came through town once in a while. I knew-had actually lived with-people that had worked on the crew for the Grateful Dead, been Grateful Dead roadies, probably in the Grateful Dead Family, rock royalty, and I wasn’t going to listen to my square family because they were responding to some pan they heard. They used to like it.
They probably meant the local Grateful Dead tribute band scene. When Dr. Shadoan was trying to talk me into going to UCI I said, “I don’t want to take my dad’s money because he’ll try to tellme what to do.” Dr. Shadoan said: “You can take your parents’ money and you don’t have to do what they say.”
This was something I got into after the operations to speed my recovery. I wasn’t really going to the big shows, just the local tributes, but some friends of mine from their were trying to convince me, showing me photos from the Internet where they ran into the four original Dead
members in an airport on the way to a show and got their picture taken with them. That was just
too much to resist. I was talking on the phone with Richie, the Hog Farmer who was on the Grateful Dead Crew whose wife worked in the Grateful Dead office near their apartment in San Rafael that I met at Woodstock, and I said, “I stopped going to Grateful Dead shows when Jerry died,” and he said, “So did I.”
As I said, I was admitted to CSUN for that Fall, 2003. But I had been talking to a friend of mine for a long time about visiting her in Washington State again in April and I had some idea she might let me stay up there and I could invite Laurie up and she might want to stay. Somehow my family got wind of this. I put it on the Internet somewhere, saying maybe I’d get a job up there and return the $60,000/yr. to my family except for meds, medical bills, and Blue Cross PPO premiums. It’s not unheard of for computers to be hacked and wiretapped. Later this person had to move because her landlord would not keep renting it after 3 years, grandkids and all.
That was just the decision I made; hindsight is 20/20. The previous year I had gone to the Rainbow Gathering with a friend of mine from Bakersfield, so we went this year. A couple came up to me and the woman said, “His parents tried to commit him.” He said, “I just told the judge that I was happy living in a tent by the river and he let me go.”
I need to rewind a few years. I moved to Bakersfield to go to CSUB from Irvine in 1989. Laurie moved in in 1990. In 1992, my mother said, “We’re going to send you and Laurie to Hawaii for two weeks, pick out a hotel!” When we got back we went to see my parents and I told my mom, “I proposed to Laurie on the beach in Kona,” and she said, “Tell your father.” We were staying in the Kona Hilton. My dad said, “Don’t marry Laurie. I sold my restaurants to
Mama’s, they went bankrupt and didn’t pay, we sued them, went to court, and the judge fined me
$160,000. They wanted me to declare bankruptcy. Don’t marry Laurie, I can’t afford her.” My brother said later, “Dad’s business partner, Bill Munro, cooked the books, the judge saw them and that’s why he fined them.”
Then skip ahead to when I was living with Laurie in her apartment in Venice, and my parents came down to visit my sister. I went over, they said let’s go out to lunch in Joan’s car, and we went to Dr. Lisa Fine, a psychiatrist at Edelman Center, L.A. County Mental Health where they had an appointment for me. I should have refused and left, but instead I agreed to start seeing Dr. Fine and did regularly about every 2 weeks for about 5 years. Her phone number was 310-966-6500 and she specialized in deconverting/deprogramming ex-Christians. Before Joan had asked me to find a psychiatrist and I found Dr. Robert Newport online from Bruce Eisner and the Island Group online, a psychedelic advocacy group. Dr. Newport used LSD and ayahuasca therapy.
He got in a fight with my sister, they said about his rates being too high, and she said he had lost his medical license for prescribing meds without seeing the patient, which he did with me at the end. He first gave me the Risperdal (a long time after Dr. Perelli-Minetti in Bakersfield, when it first came out.) I called him later and he said, “Has your sister let up on you yet? I’m not a psychiatrist any more, I’m a painter.”
Then my dad said, “If you go on SSI, I’ll get you a new car.” That was supposed to be my sister- in-law’s Ford Escort, except they never gave it to me. Dr. Fine and a social worker and another “expert” there were going to fill out everything, and Joan was there. The expert lady said,
“Looted the bank account and put his things in the street,” portentious. They asked if I’d make Joan the payee, send the money to her; Joan said, “we don’t know where you’ll be”.
My parents asked me to see Dr. Auerbach, their psychiatrist, when I was a senior in high school. I told him I’d gotten in to Yale, Stanford, Dartmouth, Princeton, Brown, Penn, and UCSC and he suggested, “Yale, because it’s farther away from your dad.” I was at the Hog Farm in Llano, NM, and they said to go to this same guy to get a note to get out of the draft, and he wrote “paranoid schizophrenic”, but I have read the diagnostic criteria for that disease and I am sure I don’t have it. I talked to psychiatrist Dr. Moshe Forman from UCSF-Langley-Porter shortly afterwards, who I met at the House of Love and Prayer, in his office at Parnassus, and he stated, “You do not have schizophrenia.”
I went to Lowell High School in S.F., graduated in 1967, went to Yale University, and of course my parents supported me there. Then I went to Friends World College in Westbury, Long Island for semester, went on a project in Manhattan the next semester, went to the Woodstock Music Festival, and never went back. I went to live in New Mexico with the Woodstock Security, Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm, and for a while my parents didn't support me. I got on Tommy's Bus to be on the crew for the Indian Creek Pop Festival in San Luis Obispo with the Jefferson Starship right after Altamont which was canceled because of that. Since I was planning to visit my parents after the show Steve got a ride for us from this place in Topanga Canyon in L.A. where the Wavy Gravy and the whole Hog Farm was spending Christmas to San Francisco and I dropped in on my parents. They convinced me to stay for a few days. I was going to leave after New Years, but that day I went to their doctor, Dr. Arthur Cerf at Mt. Zion, and he wanted me in the hospital for pneumonia. I refused and he let me stay at my parents’ house for 3 months or until he said, which he never did. Steve went back to New Mexico with Charlene and I followed 3 months later on the Greyhound, the pneumonia had cleared up in 2 weeks with Dr. Cerf's penicillin, but I came back to California to see a Vassar-UCSC girl I'd met who dumped me and left me at my parents', who got me to promise to call them weekly. I went with Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach's House of Love and Prayer to the Boulder, Colorado Holy Man Jam and a Texan Christian hippie girl ex of mine, Strawberry, Cynthia Harrington, I'd met at the Dallas Pop Festival after Woodstock who’d gotten me backstage at Led Zeppelin got us on the Hog Farm bus Blunderbus to New Mexico somehow.
Then she went back to Texas and I was hanging out at Llano where they'd made me Head of Household by seniority, so I didn't have to do any work any more, just supervise. The real, inner circle Hog Farmers came through making their movie with B.B. King and Alice Cooper, Medicine Ball Caravan, filmed us, and later cut us out and left us on the cutting room floor. Ditto for Kris Kristofferson's movie, Cisco Pike.
I had to call my dad every week. He mailed me my draft notice Friends World College had mailed him. I'd had a 2-S student deferment there (and at Yale) that had expired when I didn't go back. It said, "Greetings...." you're drafted, report for a physical, and then they ship you to Vietnam. It was just a joke. I wrote, "No Such Person At This Address" and put it back in the mail box. They never would have found me. There were no cops up there. Nobody would have told anybody where I was, even assuming they would have looked, which I doubt was their practice. The only law enforcement I'd ever seen was once, a highway patrol who was there for 20 minutes, said he was looking for Linda Kasabian, the Manson killer, heard she might be living in one of those communes in New Mexico. We hadn't seen her or heard of her.
My dad wanted me to go to his psychiatrist in San Francisco, Dr. Alfred Auerbach and get a note to get out of the draft. If I'd known the full implications of his request, I'd have firmly refused, but I didn't. He said, "Just this one thing is all I ask." He wasn't supporting me with one dime. So he persuaded me; he was a salesman. A friend of mine, Joe Sims, who brought another friend, Alberto Castagna, from the East Coast was going and he agreed to take me New Years Day, 1971, with another couple, and then on that day a couple more, Charlene and her daughter, jumped in and we drove to S.F. Auerbach saw me at 450 S,utter for half an hour, no follow-up, no meds, no nothing, just pick up the note at the nurse’s apartment downtown and take it to the appointment at the Oakland Induction Center. On the way I looked at the note and it said "paranoid schizophrenia". They said, "Show it to the Army psychiatrist". He said, "You're very, very sick." I just laughed because I knew I wasn't. Two weeks later I received in the mail: "4-F, Unfit For Military Duty". Draft resistance was widespread at that point. This was all my dad's and Dr. Auerbach's idea. People were shooting themselves in the foot, wearing dresses to the draft physical, and running away to Canada. In 1976, after the fall of Saigon in 1975, Republican President Ford officially pardoned all the wartime draft resisters, gave them amnesty, and allowed them to legally return home from Canada. The draft, or SSS, or Selective Service System, was so unpopular that it was abolished and never reinstated; to this day we still have an all-volunteer military. [7/14/2012 Some guy suggested recently, “Ask the President for an honorable discharge!” I should just copy this page into the contact page at whitehouse.gov, what can it hurt? and add my sister Joan Abrahamson, was a White House Fellow, Asst. Chief-of-Staff to V.P. H.W. Bush, and Chairman of the Barbara Bush Literacy Campaign, fwiw.]
I was at my mom’s house, a missionary took me to a Christian house where I accepted Christ, I went home, and my sister said, “Dr. Bradman is on the phone.” Dr. Bradman is Dr. Auerbach’s partner. He said, “Do you want to go to a mental hospital?” I didn’t know what that was, and said, “Yes,” and went to Ross General Hospital for 3 months, and he diagnosed me with acute anxiety reaction. He didn’t say for worrying about going to hell. The Christians picked me up again, and I spent 3 years as a music minister in nondenominational neo-Pentecostal Lighthouse Temple in Colorado Springs until my parents came out and took me to Dr. Walsh with the same question, “Do you want to go to a mental hospital?” I wished I’d told Dr. Bradman, “No,” and Pastor Dunbar had preached not to go, “They’ll make you lose your faith,” so I said, “No,” and I’ve never seen him again. But somehow they got me in Belmont Psychiatric Center when I passed by there on my way from the same Christian house as 3 years before where they’d agreed to pay to let me stay.I’d already lost my faith through Walsh’s process. Dr. Caulfield had me tested by a psychologist and said, “He says you’re a schizophrenic,” but I suppose it’s possible they could make a mistake in favor of the first misdiagnosis to get out of the draft. You don’t find out until later how life-destroying the stigma of these diagnoses are. I had a lawyer from Vincent Hallinan's (Kesey's old attorney) office, Lloyd Crenna, and they let me go back to New Mexico in a month and Jeff Kline gave me a house. Crenna asked me when I was leaving for New Mexico if I wanted to sue my parents but some of the Hog Farmers had convinced me to try to reconcile with them at that time. First I went back to where the Hog Farm used to be, then to the Castagnas, then back to Lighthouse Temple.
Much later, I got a job as a timekeeper for Cleveland Wrecking Co. at SFO and my dad bought me a new Nissan Sentra. I drove it out to the Michigan Rainbow Gathering and my mom said
on the phone, “Please go see Dr. Shadoan,” so I did when I got back. He, too, had me tested by a psychologist and they said, “schizophrenic”. I didn’t know there was anything bad about it then. Dr. Shadoan said: “I have a schizophrenic patient that works in a bank and is fine, although he still hears voices, they don’t bother him,” so they believed in recovery then. That’s when I first started on meds. He got me to go to UCI and study computer science and he got my dad to give me $100,000/yr; if you count the credit cards, $120,000/yr., including a car and an apartment in the graduate student housing. He called me “a success story”. Laurie is diagnosed as schizophrenic, and all of her family are really mean to her. I guess they figure, the worse she gets, the more money they make from the insurance. They don’t even care if the doctors blame them. The guy who started Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett, was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and the band completely ostracized him, wrote horrible mean songs about him, and he died young in his early ‘60’s, of diabetes. In the days I went to Dr. Shadoan, a lot of doctors didn’t believe that drugs caused schizophrenia or any mental illness, and the evidence was all the successful rich and famous rock stars, etc. I saw an article recently, a study that mental patients, in general, die 25 years earlier. I would guess that is from something else that I read, that they get inferior medical treatment. [07/23/2013 I saw another study recently where mental patients are the victims of violent crimes nearly three times the average for normal people.] That is why I got the Anthem. Every medical condition I have was caused by the mental health system. I read in a nursing book in a textbook store that psychiatric institutions are designed to be like prisons--punishment. That’s why I’ve learned to always tell them no. It was OK to be a preacher in a church. In the Mind Freedom newsletter, Dr. Thomas Szasz wrote that psychiatrists will try to come back at people years later, and they may even be married and working, and try to rehospitalize them for the insurance money. Or, one mental health advocate told me, “For social control and to suppress dissent.” I think they may use anything the patient is doing as a reason.
Something else I read is that psychiatric diagnoses are not accurate and that is why the same person can receive so many different ones. The doctors and the families cash in on each one and the different meds and therapies paid for by the insurances.For the SSI, Dr. Fine wrote, “schizoaffective disorder”; I don’t know what that is. To skip ahead, when I was going to Pete Linnett and the Life Adjustment Team, my friend Mike Bernath the clinical psychologist in practice in Lancaster said, “They’re trying to get a Dual Diagnosis, with Substance Abuse, which is bad.” Since he told me, they were never able to pin me with Substance Abuse or Dual Diagnosis. I told him about the first diagnosis, which I have just explained, that my parents and Dr. Auerbach were just trying to get me out of the draft when I was living on the Hog Farm. People were shooting themselves in the foot, wearing dresses to the draft physical, and running away to Canada. President Ford pardoned them all in 1975, gave them amnesty, and abolished the Selective Service, the draft, it was so unpopular. Arlo Guthrie had a whole album about a draft physical story, “Alice’s Restaurant”, where he tells the induction sergeant, “I wanna kill!” and they let him out. He’s pretending he’s too crazy to serve. Mike said, “Go to a clinical psychologist and get retested and rediagnosed.” That is next on my list. I told that to both psychiatrists Drs. Fine and Shadoan and they agreed.
I said to them, “I want to be diagnosed sane, OK, well, healthy, fine, cured, normal, and with a clean bill of health.” Dr. Shadoan said something about “depression.” I said, “I’ve never been
depressed a day in my life.” He said, “How about anxiety?” I said, “I don’t have anxiety either.” I guess they need something they can charge the insurance company, like smoking cessation or weight loss.
I said all that to psychiatrist Dr. Bill Stubbeman, the one they forced me to see, and when they forced me into the board-and-care, Joan handed them a letter from him saying only: “paranoid schizophrenia”, exactly the thing from Dr. Auerbach I had asked him to take away, if he could. I have not had any contact with him yet since then.[7/17/2012I thought after writing this that maybe he was writing the second half of a “Dual Diagnosis” (which I’ve never seen, if it exists), that goes after the “Substance Abuse”.]
Back to the summer of 2003, I was home from the Rainbow Gathering.I was getting my license back soon and my plan was to rent another Budget Rental Car and drive it up to Washington to my friend’s and see if I could work it out to move up there and maybe get Laurie to come. I was just sick of L.A.This was just two years after 9/11, the Twin Towers, and things there were still a mess. [7/14/2012 I’m adding that before the Gathering Dr. Fine was talking about “weaning you off the meds” and there I somehow slept without the Ativan she gave me for a sleeping pill every night. When I got back I missed an appointment and for some reason just decided, since I thought I was leaving for Washington State in a week or two, not to make another appointment and to just stop all 3 meds on my own, the sleeping pill, the Risperdal, and an anti-depressent, Desyryl. Nobody told me I shouldn’t; she said she was going to do just that. I see now that really you’re supposed to let the doctor do it, and taper you off. I was correct that she didn’t care, though. When my family finally made me go back to her and take those meds again she took me off them again! She had already told me to stop them.] So Laurie and I were out driving around one day and she said, “Your sister and brother- in-law are meeting us for lunch at La Tostada [I forget the name of the Mexican restaurant by the Museum of Flight in Santa Monica].” Jonathan wasn’t there, but Laurie’s parents were. She told me years later that her psychiatrist, Dr. Nadel, who has retired, set up this meeting. Joan said, “Do you agree to go to a nursing home?” I said no, they poured on the pressure, I said yes,they left, I firmly determined, no, I was pressured, coerced. Of course not, that’s where terminal patients go to die. Every day there are headlines about nursing home abuses. My doctor said I was healthy. At the meeting, I asked Joan what she was thinking, and she said, “I went to your apartment and the door was open, I let myself in, and it was messy.” I said, “My leg has been hurting.” It was later diagnosed as a diabetic neuropathy, “burning feet”, a complication of diabetes. At that point I had only been to the chiropractor, who had said, “If your knees buckle, it might be your back. Go to an orthopedist (sports medicine).” Later I told that to a clinical psychologist I met who said, “It’s your room, you have a right to be messy.” I had also called Dr. Riceberg for an appointment for the painful leg and he had spoken with me on the phone and didn’t think I needed an appointment and ordered 600mg. prescription Advil (over-the-counter is 200mg.) over the phone. Later I went to [I can find the name], the orthopedist who had X- rayed my back when the couch threw it out who had moved from Century City to Westwood and put “Sports Medicine” on the plate glass door and he said it wasn’t my back and diagnosed it as a diabetic neuropathy and sent me to physical therapy. A new physical therapist at Beverly Hills Physical Therapy (way too ritzy for what I needed) came in and said, “Diabetic neuropathy shouldn't be treated by physical therapy but by the person treating the diabetes,” and sent me
back to the person treating the diabetes, Dr. Riceberg, and I called my friend the diabetes educator and she said 1) Get referred to a neurologist 2) Ask for Neurontin 3) A diabetes specialist (endocrinologist) 4) A nutritionist. Since learning to manage diabetes I haven’t had any more complications. Laurie and I had volunteered at a nursing home one day to sing with them and help them plant flowers—I was 54! Also, her friend gave Laurie $10 to take her friend’s mother from her room in a nursing home across the street from Sony Studios to the doctor and we went in there and picked her up, not for me! My friend the social worker called it being “pushed in a corner in a wheelchair”. I am still trying to guess the reason, I don’t know why.
Right after 9/11, Laurie saw on TV people upset at the Twin Towers being counseled and she called up her psychiatrist, Dr. Nadel, and got the substitute,[7/14/2012 She has since told me Dr. Holstein from Kaiser on La Cienega] who had her go to the Kaiser mental hospital downtown in Chinatown. Joan had asked me to see Dr. Nadel along with Laurie and I had gone once, talked to her for about 10 minutes, didn’t like it, and never went back. I thought that Laurie was OK, she’d never been in a mental hospital, I wanted her home, so I went down there and brought her home. I’ve been going to an MFCC here, Barbara Gabriel, and I said maybe the reason Dr. Nadel secretly arranged all this (there’s more) is retaliation for getting Laurie out of there and this therapist thinks I may be right. [7/14/2012 Another later thought, maybe they were trying to hinder me from going to the orthopedist for the correct diagnosis and later to the neurologist for treatment and the endocrinologist to learn to manage diabetes and prevent such devastating complications. Also, I read an article about diabetes deaths from Zyprexa being covered up because the Bushes had lots of stock in Eli Lilly and thought it was possible that was true of Johnson & Johnson and their subsidiary Janssen, who have not settled diabetic personal class action suits yet as have Lilly and Astra-Zeneca for Seroquel. And my sister was an employee of the H.W. Bush White House. I’m just guessing. I’m not even sure whether or not my brother- in-law is in the CIA, which was once run by H.W. My mother just said once, “Is Jonathan in the CIA?” That’s just how it feels sometimes.]So I resented a lot Joan saying , “Do you agree to go to a nursing home?” and forcing me to reply, “Yes”. So I decided not only not to listen to her any more, but not to listen to or submit to a n y authority, to rebel against eve r y bo d y. I thought then I’d be safe, and maybe I would have, but I should have run for a lawyer. I went over to Joan and Jonathan’s house and he said, “You have to go back to Dr. Fine and take all those meds or we’ll cut off the $60,000/yr.” I thought about doing it. At the end Joan said, “And go look at the nursing home, we have to see about getting SSI to pay for it,” and I thought, “They’ll want me to go to a nursing home and cut off the money even if I do go to Dr. Fine,” so I didn’t go back to Dr. Fine. They were really on their high horse since W. Bush had gotten elected since she was Asst. Chief-of-Staff to his dad, H.W. Bush, when he was V.P. and Chairman of the Barbara Bush Literacy Campaign when H.W. was President, and Jonathan is on the Council of Foreign Relations with Cheney and my mom suspects C.I.A. They expected obedience now, but to me they were still the same, I guess.At the Rainbow Gathering I slept without the sleeping pills, one of the 3 meds from Dr. Fine, and when I got home I missed an appointment and then decided to quit the meds, just like that. She had been saying she was going to wean me off of the meds. When I went back later she took me off of all of the meds and told me, “Don’t come back,” anyway.
Awhile later Joan showed up in my apartment with a card:
Pete Linnett
Psychiatric Social Worker
CEO
Life Adjustment Team Psychiatric Rehabilitation “Learn To Live Well”
11936 W. Jefferson Blvd., #B Culver City, CA 90230
310-572-7000
I said, correctly, for once, “No! No way,” and that was that. A few weeks later, Laurie and Pete show up at the door, and Pete comes barging in uninvited. Oh yeah, before all this started, Eric Asa-Dorian, a psychologist from the Life Adjustment Team, had come over to Laurie’s when I was living there, ostensibly to help her “make it neater”. He claimed he was a Deadhead, which is not true, his aim is to entrap Deadheads.Back to Pete and Laurie, they wanted me to go with them to the office, and I refused, I was cooking dinner. He insulted my Fender Stratocaster sitting there and left. I had never invited him in, and he had somehow gotten my partner to bring him over. She later told me her psychiatrist set this up. Then two weeks later, I was at her apartment two blocks away and she said, “Let’s go out for breakfast,” a totally normal thing for her to say. Instead, she took me to Pete’s office where they had an appointment. I could/should have walked around the corner and taken a bus. Eric Asa-Dorian was on the sidewalk, bragging with one of his phony stories about how he had two front-row seats to the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young concert. I went in and met with Pete anyway, as I had with Dr. Fine with the same set-up, and agreed to meet with him regularly, to my doom, as the guy is Satan.
He has all these statues of motorcycles that are supposed to be expensive on his desk. Once he said that Hells Angels are “loyal”. I think Life Adjustment Team is some kind of drug rehab, but I only came to realize this years later. They have pictures of rock stars dead from drugs on the wall, except for one living one, Carlos Santana. The dead ones are like Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and John Cipollina. That’s in his brother, Chris’s office, and he finally showed me his card: Clinical Alcohol and Drug Counselor. He’d been asking me, “Did you ever take acid?” playing Grateful Dead tapes and saying, “The Hells Angels have methamphetamine labs.” Once I saw the card, I never spoke to him again. They bought me a Sprint cell phone, Comcast Broadband, and left some of those and pharmacy bills unpaid. They said if I went back to Dr. Fine and took the meds they’d buy me a new car and pick it out: a 2006 Toyota Prius hybrid, blue, w/ GPS navigation & 6-disc CD player. I even went down to Santa Monica Toyota and test drove one for a few blocks, and they were completely deceiving me. Pete said, “They want me to put you in a board-and-care home.” On the National Association of Social Workers website it lists “force, fraud, coercion, deceit” as violations of their Code of Ethics and basis for filing of a complaint and Request for Professional Review against a member social worker where they can be disciplined and sanctioned.
Once, in 1985, Richie from the Hog Farm said he’d called my parents and they’d pay for me to stay in a board-and-care home on Fairview in Berkeley near the old Hog Farm where Wavy
Gravy’s brother-in-law, Brook Beecher, stayed, and I did it, for a short time. I had a car, I never spoke to the psychiatrist, and still it was horrible. Brook was really screwed up, and they beat him constantly. It was a joke on me. I caught something there, had to see my parents’ doctor and he had an idea for a job my dad could get me. Then later Dr. Shadoan had me stay in a board-and-care in the Haight with a tubercular old man I couldn’t stand and I had a car so I left & went on a Dead tour to the East Coast. When I got back I was in the worst of the three with murderers and car thieves so I got out ASAP and got my own apartment. I swore I’d never do that again. I wish they’d take no for an answer instead of that scam. When they signed me up for SSI to pay for that 3rd dump somebody told me Wavy Gravy was on SSI; that was in 1985. Obviously that board-and-care and SSI stuff was just hippies playing jokes. Before that last board-and-care Dr. Shadoan had a social worker take me to look at it and they said I had to look at it first and I had to say I was sure I liked it—it was completely voluntary. So I thought the process would still be the same in Los Angeles in 2003. After I'd been there awhile and found out what it was really like I hated it, got out as fast as I could, and promised never again, no matter what. The black lady who owned it would grab almost all of the $600 SSI each month and give me a few dollars, the black guy who was out of San Quentin for murder would threaten to murder me right there on the stairs unless I bought one of his stolen watches, my roommate had been in Napa State Hospital he said for stealing a car, I had to chain my TV to the bed and get a locked footlocker and chain that to the bed too because there were no locks on any room or the front door either and they would steal anything that wasn't locked down.
At Pete's they'd give me my $300/`mo. $50 on MWF & take me to the supermarket to spend the other $150 so I wouldn’t buy drugs and sign each time I got the $50. Once I ran out of meds on a Wed. and was waiting for Fri. to get the money and go to the pharmacy and I didn’t take meds for 2 days. On Fri. I got the money and on the way to the pharmacy I fell down at the bus stop, called 911, went to the ER in an ambulance, and they told me it was from not taking Toprol XL for 2 days. Later I found out that you can get a heart attack from not taking Toprol XL for one day. These guys are supposed to be some kind of medical personnel and they almost killed me, Pete. I told them that and they responded it was psychological, and that my cardiologist, Dr. Ravi Dave`, UCLA Cardiology, was some kind of spiritual guru quack. Missing those pills for just two days caused me to develop some kind of permanent palpitations. In the following days I went to the ER four times and to the cardiologist twice. Once I went to the ER on the way to the cardiologist, with the sensation I was dying. The Dx said “Tachycardia” and under that that includes “fear of impending death”. It said, “Tachycardia, palpitations, anxiety.”Pete said the palpitations were caused by anxiety, not by missing the Toprol XL, and he wanted me to see psychiatrist Dr. Bill Stubbeman, “who specializes in palpitations and anxiety” and not Dr. Fine. The ER nurse had already told me it was caused by missing the Toprol, and as soon as I took it I was much better, but Pete said she was wrong. Dr. Dave` may have chewed him out on the phone for me missing the meds, because he insulted Dr. Dave` to Dr. Stubbeman in front of me: “He has this doctor called Dr.Dave [pronouncing Dave with a long “a”, like the proper name]”
When he picked me up at Dr. Dave`s he was playing a tape by Deepak Chopra, also an East Indian, and he insulted Ram Dass, a Hindu name. At that time W. Bush appointed for the new Surgeon-General an anti-gay cardiologist. When Obama came in he appointed Sanjay Gupta, an East Indian like Dr. Dave`--I actually believed the whole scandal went all the way to the White
House. It’s a true, true saying: “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Dr. Dave` had me wear a holter, a device that sends your EKG to him over the phone, 2 weeks to make sure they weren’t bad palpitations; he never said they were psychological. Dr. Stubbeman is also a psychiatrist for drug addicts—he has pictures that looks like ships loading heroin in Turkish ports. He had long hair and looked a little like an early Bobby Weir, but he’s not cool at all.
[Added 4/6/2012 3:10 AM] I tried to refuse to be coerced into going to Dr. Stubbeman. They told me if I didn’t go they would cut off the $60,000/year and if I went they’d give me the car and then I went and they cut it off anyway. Even my dad got on the phone and said, “If you don’t go to Dr. Stubbeman the $60,000 will dry up.” I researched other types of therapy and asked Pete if I could go to Primal Therapy and he refused, and then I asked him if I could still go back to Dr. Fine and he bellowed: “You cannot go back to Dr. Fine!!” I called Little Richie from the Hog Farm where he was living with Andrea working in the Grateful Dead office in San Rafael and he said, “What’s wrong?” but I didn’t want to tell him on the phone and I had written something up so I asked him if I could email it to him and he didn’t have an email so I let it go. Then I called Alberto and Karen but they were busy so I called Jeff Kline and read it to him. He said, “Go to the psychiatrist. Tell him you want to lose weight or you want your dick to be harder when you fuck your girlfriend. Be funny. You’ll get your money and everything will be fine,” so I did.
[7/14/2012 A later thought: Maybe they’re trying to cover-up for Johnson & Johnson and the Risperdal. I wrote some of this to then-CA Attorney General Jerry Brown and his website came up with some cases labeled “Medicaid Fraud and Elder Abuse”. Just a few months ago the State of Arkansas settled for $2.2 billion with Johnson & Johnson and their subsidiary Janssen (a fraction of some $350 billion) for exactly Medicaid Fraud and Elder Abuse for concealing evidence of diabetes in selling it to their Medicaid program.I found a book about “psychiatric rehabilitation” at the CSUEB textbook store that explains that is where mental patients go after the hospital, and Laurie was at the Life Adjustment Team and a place nearby called SHARE (Self-Help and Recovery Exchange) that had AA and NA, and s h e, not me, had just come out of the Kaiser mental hospital. She never took any drugs, that I knew of. Maybe they were implying that the diabetes was caused by drugs, like Jerry Garcia, who died of a diabetic heart attack in a drug rehab, and not by the Risperdal, which many doctors have said, and not one has ever said, nor have I ever read, of a link between diabetes and drugs. Joan said she talked to my primary care, Dr. Riceberg, and he said they never did, “It was a bad connection.” She said, “Dr. Riceberg says you don’t have diabetes.” When I questioned that because it was impossible, she said, “The nurse told me,” and when I questioned that for the same reason, she dropped it.
At Brentwood Manor, they made a big deal about not putting the diabetes red spot on my place and making me eat the sugar ice cream instead of the sugar-free ice cream, and the #3 in charge nurse said several times, “You don’t have diabetes,” thinking she could intimidate and cower me into believing that, nurse on Yalie. I went to endocrinologist Dr. Hohnichter on Rexford in Beverly Hills anyway, learned to manage the diabetes, and no more complications, which are what kill you. The cardiologist up here, a very good one from UCSF-Mission Bay, Dr. Nelson Schiller: “Metabolic syndrome (diabetes and heart disease) from Risperdal.” UCSF Cardiology is #6 in the country in U.S. News and World Report rankings.
I wasn’t taking any drugs; I had just had three surgeries. I called Bruce Margolin, the famous NORML lawyer who I’d met at Timothy Leary’s house in Beverly Hills (his client) when he was running for State Senate. He said he was a criminal lawyer, said my case was complicated, and referred me to a probate lawyer, who declined to take my case. I wish I’d perservered and found another probate lawyer. I still don’t understand the issues.]
Dr. Stubbeman said they were going to get me the car, which they didn’t, and pay for two classes at the UCLA Extension and I should pick them out. I picked out two classes in Digital Video that were all lies. He was going to get me a credit card for the Internet. He said, “You should stay away from dogmatic religion.” One day I went to Pete’s and they put out a Time Magazine cover: “Women Of The Bible”, and some kind of Wired Magazine or something like that. Dr. Stubbeman said, “You studied Philosophy and Religious Studies at Yale so that’s why you’re interested in religion.” I walked in one day and sitting in the waiting room was some guy with a big beard and a huge cross hanging around his neck. Once Dr. Stubbeman said, “How’s your meditation?” [07/09/2013 I was going to psychotherapist Trudy Goodman's vipassana meditation class. They have vipassana, mindfulness, here at UCSF-Mt. Zion Osher Center for Integrative Medicin e. Trudy is doing a retreat with Ram Dass this December in Hawaii. Dr. Stubbeman had a little Zen sculpture with a bonsai tree and a waterfall to make fun of meditators.]He said to Pete, “I can’t commit him because he isn’t a danger to self or others.”
He always used to say, “Hey, Eric!” One day I was on my way to an appointment and I emailed Ken Babbs at skypilotclub.com, “Post something I can show my psychiatrist today,” and he posted a story about a man he said whose parents were responsible for the death of Ken Kesey and the assassination of JFK. Once he said, “You could go homeless.” “You can go to a board and care, you can go homeless, or you can go to vocational rehabilitation.”
When my parents had wanted me to see a psychiatrist in 1974 I had been going to a fundamentalist church, Lighthouse Temple, and a big issue had been that they were homophobic, anti-gay, so I thought that maybe they were criticizing the fact that I was in a straight relationship, living with a straight woman, Laurie. So I went down to the gay district, Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, and somehow got involved in the Metropolitan Community Church, the gay church, there for awhile, and I know that worked against me when W appointed the anti-gay cardiologist Surgeon-General.
JOURNAL II 1/12/2012 8:55 AM
I was just thinking—maybe the reason my sister wanted to put me in a nursing home and eventually in a board-and-care home was because I switched surgeons for my second operation.
I was thinking was it for the diabetic neuropathy (burning feet)? or the diabetes itself? or the complication of coronary artery disease and the angiogram and angioplasty operations? or the nitroglycerin? or drugs? or politics? or being a Deadhead? or associating with the Hog Farmers? or Democratic Party? or Laurie, my ex’s, work with Chabad Jewish Charities at UCLA and Temple Beth-el? or going to the Rainbow Gathering with the NORML medical marijuana guy?or stopping going to Dr. Fine and taking her meds? Or planning to move up north? Or having an appointment with cardiologist Dr. Harvey Mandel at Southwestern Cardiovascular Medical Group at Cedars-Sinai, who scheduled a stress test, with the intention of moving all my doctors there and dismissing doctors Dave`, Grossman, and Schechter from UCLA-Santa Monica and the doctors from West Hills? (my family could have advised me about this one) Or because my family had become secret Christians without my becoming aware of it and psychiatrist Dr. Fine, who I had been seeing for 5 years, was in an organization dedicated to “deconversion/deprogramming” of ex-Christians they felt had been damaged by Christian fundamentalism—their phone was 310-966-6500. Dr. Fine “preached” scientific atheism, ala` Freud. George W. Bush, a Christian fundamentalist, was now President, and my sister was Chairman of the Barbara Bush Literacy Campaign. After Eric Asa-Dorian came over Laurie's mother asked me to move back to my apartment a few blocks away and Eric's partner said don't go in Laurie's apartment, where the TV was. Laurie came in and offered me a TV from a client Robert, but I didn't want it, being preoccupied by the computer. I had no TV at all up to the time they took the apartment and sent me to the Lama Foundation. Maybe there was information on TV about obeying authority in ways Dr. Fine had told me were wrong that my family was now using? At Lama the TV was only for tapes. At Brentwood Manor I had no TV for 2 years. My roommate would not let me watch his, the only one. I still have only the lowest-level Direct TV and before it was the lowest-tier AT&T, although I had top-tier Comcast for a few months at my apartment when I received my the inheritance of my dad's life insurance annuity. I had no TV at all for 5 or 6 years, torture. Or because of Laurie's psychiatric problems, not mine?
Honestly, I’ve spent hours thinking about it, I still don’t know, and I’m always speculating about it and coming up with a possible new reason. Nobody’s ever told me, except that it was all wrong and illegal, not to go and to walk away and leave.
To retell the journey, I was driving around L.A. around 2000, felt a chest pain, and went to an emergency room with my Anthem Blue Cross PPO. They said I was OK for now and gave me a referral to a cardiologist near the Howard Hughes center. I remembered the appointment too late, called them, and they referred me to another cardiologist, Dr. Ravi Dave` at UCLA-Santa Monica Hospital Cardiology. Dr. Fine tested my memory (as well as a neuropsychologist) and said it was fine, even for higher mathematics and advanced computer science theory courses
which require lots of memorization of formulas. I was pretty healthy at that time, and the only doctors I had were at an “Urgent Care” center near there on Wilshire, where a general practitioner Dr. Mark Grossman practiced. I had last seen him about an ear infection. I had found that place because I called some referral service from where I lived in Laurie’s apartment in Venice and asked specifically for a nearby Urgent Care, meaning one that you could drop in on anytime without an appointment, and they had referred me to the one on Wilshire, so I would just drop in there for anything and see whatever doctor was working, for just minor things. I remember there was one female Persian doctor who was very nice who left, and Dr. Grossman came, I think fresh out of med school. That was probably why I was referred to Dr. Dave`--because it was near Dr. Grossman, the closest thing I had to a primary care physician at that time.
Dr. Dave` said, “I want to operate right away and do an angiogram and angioplasty.” That’s where they put a wire into your thigh up through your heart, first with a video camera, the angiogram, and then they try to scrape the plaque out of your arteries with a wire and put a stent in to hold it open, the angioplasty. My dad had three. I found out later the heart disease was caused by diabetes from Risperdal I had been taking from psychiatrists my family insisted that I see. I have a diagnosis of “paranoid schizophrenia” my dad’s psychiatrist wrote to get me out of the draft when I was living on the Hog Farm in 1971. A clinical psychologist friend says I should go to a clinical psychologist and get retested and rediagnosed. I’ve seen the diagnostic criteria for that disease and I’m pretty sure I don’t have it. Dr. Moshe Forman, a UCSF psychiatrist, told me in his office right after I saw Dr. Auerbach, “You’re not a schizophrenic,” and we used to go to Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach’s House of Love and Prayer together. I’m pretty much the only one around the Hog Farm to whom this happened, and Wavy Gravy calls me “Anonymous” (and I like it!). [7/23/13 There's also Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, “Dismount”, from the original “Furthur” bus in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (who also went to Yale). When Ken Babbs wrote about his death by a heart attack at a Catholic retreat at a Franciscan monastic retreat center recently on skypilotclub.com he dissed him. We don't know why; I can guess mental illness stigma or that's why they called him “Dismount”.] I don’t know why it makes (lay)people mad when you say you don’t have it, it was a misdiagnosis, the truth; I guess it costs them money. [7/23/13 I guess Mark Vonnegut, son of writer Kurt Vonnegut, author of The Eden Express, and Just Like Normal, But Moreso, or something like that, is doing OK, having become a pediatrician.] Laurie, my ex, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, firmly believes she has it, and everyone in her family is mean to her, and Syd Barrett, the founder of Pink Floyd, is dead at my age—you’re dead, that kind of mental illness turns out to be a death sentence. Hitler gassed mental patients (and physically disabled) before the 6,000,000 Jews. And before you die they torture you to death, Yalie or not, incarcerated or not. I digress.
Actually, my sister made Dr. Dave` wait 3 weeks to do the operation, and he said later he said, “Five days.” Around the same time, I got intense stomach pains and Laurie took me to UCLA Medical Center emergency room, on the campus. We were triaged because it was full on a Saturday night and we got tired and went home. It still hurt so we went to the emergency room at UCLA- Santa Monica, where Dr. Grossman practiced. They admitted me for five days and put me on a steady drip of Dilaudid, which temporarily stopped the pain. I had diverticulitis, a colon infection, and an emergency room surgeon, Dr. Schechter, almost did an emergency colon
resection right away, but when the Dilaudid worked he was waiting a few weeks. So I had to have two emergency operations at once, the angioplasty and the colon resection, which is quite stressful.
They gave me an appointment with Dr. Schechter, downstairs in the same building across the street from the hospital as Dr. Dave`. First, there were all these Latino families in the waiting room and when I went into the consulting room it looked like they had just done some kind of procedure in there on somebody and hadn’t cleaned it up yet and somehow I got the impression that Schechter was some kind of butcher or something—it made me nervous. I see now that whoever arranged that room had done it deliberately to intimidate whichever patient came in there next, I guess for a joke. There were knives and stuff lying around, etc., it was deliberately scary.
So I was driving around Beverly Hills near the Beverly Center Mall and I saw a billboard advertising Cedars-Sinai Hospital with a referral number for Cedars-Sinai doctors, 1-800- CEDARS1, and I wrote it down, called it, and was referred to a colorectal surgeon in downtown Beverly Hills on Canon and Brighton across from Smith and Hawken named Dr. Gary Hoffman.
All I knew about Cedars-Sinai was that UCLA was the #1 ranked hospital in L.A. and #5 west of the Mississippi and Cedars-Sinai was #2 in L.A., a private Jewish hospital. Since it was #2 I thought it might be cheaper than UCLA but now that I’ve been there I realize it might be more expensive, a “movie star’s hospital”, and overkill for a colon resection. I didn’t know anything and nobody was advising me. Also, I figured Blue Cross was paying for everything. I’m not saying that my family should have communicated more with me about the expenses involved with these two operations.
Dr. Hoffman wanted me to change my primary care physician to this ritzy Beverly Hills doctor downstairs, Dr. Edward Riceberg, so I did. But I never did dismiss Dr. Grossman, who was acting as primary care for both surgeons Drs. Dave` and Schechter, partly because after the angiogram-angioplasty (which Dr. Dave` continued to treat with medications), Dr. Grossman in his office handed me a bottle of nitroglycerin with instuctions to take three in the event of chest pains, and if they remained to go to an emergency room.
[07/23/2013 Also, once before the surgery I was talking to Dr. Riceberg about all that psychiatric background and he told me to forget about it, and I thought he was implying that all of that was wrong and that he thought I was psychiatrically, mentally healthy, and he is a top Beverly Hills doctor. I've believed that ever since, although it has angered people like my family. Why won't they just drop it, especially if the doctors know it's killing me?]
There was part of the story I called “Journals” that was missing when I showed it to Matthew, from where I'm recounting my conversations with Dr. Stubbeman to where I met with Joan and
Jeff at Hamburger Hamlet on San Vicente in Brentwood, Los Angeles, so I'm going to rewrite it now.
I think the last thing I wrote at the end of Journal I was Dr. Stubbeman said, “You could go homeless,” and at a later meeting he said, “You can go homeless, you can go to a board-and-care home, or you can go to vocational rehabilitation.” I'm still not sure what he meant. I had been going to vocational rehabilitation at Edelman Center with psychiatrist Dr. Fine with Sherwood Brown, but they had refused to let me go back to Dr. Fine and forced me to go to Dr. Stubbeman instead. Dr. Stubbeman gave me a bunch of “leads” for vocational rehabilitation. I followed up on all of them and most of them turned out to be bogus. I was also performing songs on acoustic and electric guitar at open mics.
Then they had a meeting with him, me, and Joan. They said, “We're going to cut your allowance in half [from $60,000/year to $30,000/year] but we will match every dollar you earn by giving you a dollar.” If the manager or the neighbors would invite me over for dinner, I started to go. Bobby Weir and Ratdog were playing at the House of Blues in West Hollywood, and I felt like I could still afford the ticket, especially if I rode the bus there and back, and no one would be the wiser. Years later I started wondering if Life Adjustment Team was a drug rehab, because they never told me and I didn't know, but I had gone completely drug-free, I wasn't even smoking pot, just in case. I decided not to smoke any pot at the show, and I didn't, although it certainly would have been easy. I ran into a friend of mine, an attorney, John Franklin. He was really insistent about giving me a ride home, so we climbed into his new SUV with 2 other guys, but first he wanted to go to Barney's Beanery.
I'd already eaten, and I really wanted to go home, and then they pulled into an empty parking lot to smoke pot. I refused to smoke it, and when I passed it without smoking to the guy next to me, who happened to be some Latino guy that John knew, he got mad and insisted that I smoke some, so I did. He had probably gotten paranoid and was worried that I was a cop out to bust him, so he made me smoke it.
John was telling me some story I could hardly believe about how his new SUV had caught on fire so flames were actually coming out. [7/23/13 Also Laurie says our friend, Debbie Behar, got a job as an elementary school teacher on the East Coast somewhere, her apartment caught on fire, and she got blamed for it somehow. I haven't talked to her. Debbie once went over to Joan and Jonathan's house with us, heard Jonathan talking to me, and said afterwards to me, “He gets paid to talk to you like that?”] When we got to Sepulveda somehow it was like he wanted to go right back home to the Valley, and I said that's cool, I'll just hop out right here and jump on the Sepulveda bus. But somehow I found out that the buses had already stopped running for the night, at 11pm. It started to rain, and because they had just halved my allowance, I didn't have the $20 the taxi company I called on my cell phone wanted. Then I used up the battery.
I was in Westwood, and pretty much the only thing open was the Subway on the corner. I bought a meal and asked the manager if it was OK if I waited in there all night out of the rain until the sun came up, and he agreed. I was there about half an hour and everything was fine. The
manager went home for the night, the night manager came, and he said that he didn't have to honor the other manager's agreement with me, so I went out on the sidewalk in the rain. The only place to get out of the rain was at the 76 station near Wilshire, and there really was no room in the cashier's booth and standing under the roofs by the pumps got in the way of the customers, and there was a pay phone just up Gayley. So I decided it was time for a desperation measure to get out of the rain, so I called up Joan and Jonathan from the pay phone and told them I went to the Bobby Weir and Ratdog show and got let out in the rain in Westwood after the last bus, with a dead phone battery, and without cab fare.
They were mad, but Jonathan came down in about half-an-hour in his Jaguar S3 and gave me a $20 dollar bill for the taxi. He was angry and he said, “You're gonna pay,” and, “You're gonna lose your apartment!”
So everything was fine, and going along as normal, and about three weeks later I was making my [then weekly] trip to Pete's office to pick up my $150 for the week (and I guess they were taking me to the supermarket to spend the other $150/week). So Pete says, “I have some news for you. I'm fired. And you're fired too. They're cutting off your $60,000/year except for meds, medical bills, and Blue Cross PPO.” I said, “How soon are they going to do this?” He said, “A month. In a month they will stop paying rent on your apartment and you will have to move out!”
I called Joan and she confirmed what he said, “We're cutting you off except for meds, medical bills, and Blue Cross PPO.” The funny thing is that I had written somewhere on the computer that they had seen without me knowing, like in an email to someone, or in a journal or diary-type thing, that maybe when I got my license back I would rent another Budget rental car, drive it up to see Charlene, and maybe if it was cool in Okanagan I would stay and get a job. Maybe Laurie could come up and visit and stay if she liked it. And then I had written, if I could get a good enough job, maybe I would tell my family I didn't need their $60,000/year anymore, just the meds, medical bills, and Blue Cross PPO, exactly that language, meaning after I rented or bought a house and had a job that paid for that, my car,and everything else. They must've been trying to kill me. Joan said, “You have a month to move out of your apartment.” I said, “Suppose I don't move?” She said, “I guess the sherriff will carry you out!” They only paid $700/month to Laurie's mother's associate.
I didn't know what to do, so I called attorney Bruce Margolin, the NORML criminal lawyer who ran for State Senate and was Timothy Leary's lawyer. At Pete's office, he wouldn't talk to Joan; I thought he was afraid. Pete stepped outside and started locking the door of his building. As I was leaving, while I was still inside, he handed me a piece of paper saying “Brentwood Manor” and their phone number, where eventually I ended up. I immediately wasn't interested and walked off down the sidewalk I took the bus to the pharmacy and on the way I called Bruce back and he said, “Do you have anything saved up, savings, in a savings account?” and I said, “No,” and he said, “An attorney is a business and we need to make money,” hung up the phone, and I've never spoken with him again.
I called Jeff Kline, my old landlord from Las Trampas, and he said, “I'm flying out to Los
Angeles on business and I'll be glad to meet with you and your sister and mediate.” This sounded like a good plan. Hindsight, they say, is 20/20; I wish I'd asked them to restore the $60,000/year. Instead I'd been looking on the Internet and I'd stumbled on the website of the Lama Foundation in New Mexico. One of their summer programs was called “Summer Stewardship”, and it only cost $275/month because essentially you were a staff member, working in the kitchen, teaching classes, washing dishes, cleaning for the guests, etc. It's basically a retreat center. People pay big bucks to spend a weekend, or a week, or more with renowned spiritual teachers on a retreat in a beautiful setting with vegan food. It was founded by a guy from San Francisco they called “Sufi Sam”.
When I first got to New Mexico right after Woodstock, they were building the place, and they came over to the Hog Farm one day because they needed volunteers. Me and Steve went over there, to San Cristobal, baked adobe bricks in the sun all day, and they even let us put a few in the wall and put mortar on them, same as now. They have some of the greatest still-existing hippie architecture from that late-'60's New Mexico communal back-to-the-land movement. The main dome, still standing and upgraded, is adobe on the bottom and a plywood geodesic dome on top, with windows. Steve Durkee, some rich spiritual hippie, owns the place. They printed Ram Dass' famous hit first book, Be Here Now, and they still hawk hand-made [by us!] Tibetan prayer flags. They're also into permaculture and house-building.
So I'd been there before, several times, first with Steve. Later I went to some Sunday Service or something and ran into a guy I knew from the House of Love and Prayer from San Francisco Josh, and a girl I had been friends with at Llano, Marigold. At the New Mexico Rainbow Gathering in [look up the year later] they announced a workshop I went to. They invited everybody basically to that or they have other similar programs. Also before when I was living in Jeff's house there was a poster for some event in Taos, their local town, and I talked to them there and they invited me again. The Summer Steward pays $275/month for about three months during the summer. At the end of the summer they vote on them and if they pass they get a house for the winter, a stipend, medical expenses, and a tuition stipend. They can stay for up to seven years. I also liked the idea of them cooking lots of vegan food, because that is pretty much the recommended diet for diabetes and heart disease.
So I printed out the whole website, met with Joan and Jeff at Hamburger Hamlet on San Vicente in Brentwood. They agreed right away, and Joan said that I had $600/month SSI, that she would send the Lama Foundation $275/month from my SSI check, since she was the payee and they mailed it to her, and she would send me $300/month, the rest of it. But, “just one thing”, “just agree to go to look at board-and-care homes just in case it doesn't work out and you have to come back,” it seemed harmless enough, and I innocently agreed.
A few days later Joan and I went to look at a board-and-care home on Melrose, a few blocks from where Laurie used to be in the Groundlings Improv. Joan said she had been referred to two, but we never did look at the 2nd one then, which happened to be Brentwood Manor on Santa Monica Blvd. and Wellesley, the one where I ended up, the one on Pete's paper. I just want to run over my history with board-and-care homes, because I think it is relevant. Once, in the mid-eighties,
I was staying in the Berkeley Inn, a hotel on Telelgraph and Dwight, now torn down, and Jeff had helped me buy a red Toyota pickup for $1000.
Little Richie from the Hog Farm, also now deceased, was living at Wavy Gravy's House at 1600 Woolsey. He had dinner with me and my parents at my parents' house at 29 West Clay Park in San Francisco, and one day he said to me: “I was talking to your parents on the phone. Wavy Gravy's brother-in-law, Brook [also deceased], lives in a board-and-care home on Fairview and your parents want to pay for you to stay there,” and I went ahead and agreed to that, right away, and it was horrible.
I thought it would be “fun” to hang out with Wavy Gravy's own brother-in-law, but it wasn't, he was too messed up. Everybody fought all the time, the owner put all my washed clothes folded neatly on my bed and they stole all of them, the rest of them were mostly worse derelicts than Brook, and the food was terrible. I spent all of my time driving around. I caught something from one of them, and I went to my parents' doctor in San Francisco. I told him my last job I was a demolition laborer with Fred the Fed from the Hog Farm demolishing a Chinese laundry for the French Hotel on Shattuck, and he said, “Your father knows a guy in a demolition company, Judd Bosley in Cleveland Wrecking Co.”, and they got me a job as a timekeeper at the San Francisco Airport checking the laborers [which I wanted to be, paid more, and they wouldn't let me] in and out, adding up their hours and payroll [before computers], and counting how much equipment they rented each day. Judd and Art, the Superintendant, got me interested in Computer Science. My mom rented me an apartment, and Joe Sims from the Hog Farm came to town and invited me to live in his back bedroom on Russell and Adeline, with him and his caretaker, him being a quadriplegic confined to a wheelchair, Bruce, and Mikey Katz from Katz Antiques [still there!] lived there sometimes, in the front apartment. My dad bought me a new Nissan Sentra, and we finished demolishing the Main Terminal to make room for 747's so there was nothing left to demolish and they laid off everybody except the Superintendent and the Project Manager, I took off for the Rainbow Gathering in Idaho.
I decided to go the next one in Michigan. My parents were depositing an allowance in a bank account with a credit card and I drove back and forth across the country, but on the way my mom suggested that I go to see psychiatrist Dr. Richard Shadoan, I don't know why exactly, I called her from the Hebrew Union College, reform rabbi grad school, in Cincinnatti, but I was a sophmore or junior. I just wanted to see it, and I'm glad I did; the buildings are very impressive, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the main Reform Jewish rabbinical school, that's how we were raised. Pastor Dunbar once told me personally to go home and attend my parents' synagogue, maybe that's why? I've always liked Dr. Shadoan; he lives around the corner from my mom. Once I ran over there when I was fighting with my dad; that was how I met him. Then, when I was living in Joe's back bedroom, I saw an ad in the paper for a “sex surrogate”, I was worried about a chronic STD, you had to work with a therapist, and somehow Dr. Shadoan signed off on it so I could work with Joanne but I wasn't really working with him much. So basically I brought Shadoan into the equation, and now my mother again. I didn't think much of it, but there was a point near the Spring Council where I was thinking that I needed more medical help with the STD and I didn't know how to get health insurance or even that I needed to get it, so I thought Dr.
Shadoan maybe could help me get medical attention for it.
He actually did, because at the end I was going to UCI with $100,000/year. The doctors say urethritis can't affect your memory, it isn't syphillis, they call it a learning disability, so I couldn't get good enough grades, so I wound up at Cal State Bakersfield, but still with the $100,000/year. So when I got an ad in the mail for Blue Cross PPO for $200/month I bought it from a local insurance broker. Right away I got in to the Infectious Disease Clinic at the UCLA Medical Center and Dr. Katona diagnosed me with chronic prostatitis and ran me through another course of antibiotics. It causes discomfort, but you can live with it (I'd caught it in 1976).
To cut to the chase, I came back to San Francisco, began seeing Dr. Shadoan regularly, and got an apartment near my parents' house, where I eventually moved, before I went to UCI. Even then, it was hard to find apartments in the whole Bay Area, so I was staying in residence clubs. Dr. Shadoan suggested board-and-care homes. He took me in his car to look at one in the Haight Ashbury, which looked at first like it might have been OK, but I had a bad interaction with one of the women who lived there, and decided against it. Dr. Shadoan had me work with a social worker and they took me to another board-and-care in the Haight, on Clayton, a few blocks up from Haight Street, where I moved into my own room in the attic.
There were really only two residents there, an older Chinese lady, who didn't speak much English, who had been displaced from her home, and a very old man with a terrible cough that I immediately feared was contagious tuberculosis. I was driving down Market by the Embarcadero and the motorcycle next to me had a steal-your-face sticker and I started talking to him. He said the next Grateful Dead concert was this weekend at Frost Amphitheatre on the Stanford Campus. That was a good excuse to get away from those guys, and as I was packing for the 2-show weekend I was inspired to throw everything in the car, just in case a new direction should present itself at the show, which it did. This guy used to print up a list of the whole tour, and they were going all up and down first the West and then the East Coasts, so I just went on tour. When it was over I visited my old school, Friends World College, in Westbury, Long Island, and they convinced me into coming back, but when I called them from my mom's house something had gone wrong.
So while I was waiting to see if I was going to go back East and get my car out of storage and go to Friends World College, I was again staying at a residence club downtown called the Ansonia.
A girl came over, spent the night, and had sex, and the next day I was thinking about the STD [before I had health insurance] and called Dr. Shadoan. He said, “Put your fingers on your wrist and take your pulse.” “You sound fine to me.” So I went back to bed and thought, “If I took a taxi to the Crisis Center at Mt. Zion Hospital, maybe they would give me treatment for this STD.” Dr. Shadoan had sent me to my parents' doctor, Dr. Cerf, and they had come back with a negative test. I thought they were wrong, and, not having health insurance, didn't know how to ask for a second opinion. So I did just that.
The Crisis Center people were very nice. They kept saying there was nothing wrong with me, and they seemed to understand I was doing this because I wanted more medical attention because
I thought I had an STD. I had already once been diagnosed with non-specific urethritis (“it'll go away by itself, don't drink coffee”) by some clinic doctor. I spent the night in the mental hospital at San Francisco General and then they took me right out and put me in the Mt.Zion mental hospital. Dr. Shadoan came in that afternoon and took me out, back to the Ansonia.
The same social worker came back and came to take me to look at a board-and-care on Broderick St. just above California. He kept saying, “You've got to be sure you like it,” and I kept saying, “I do, I do.” They had me in a day care at St. Mary's Hospital and I kept saying, “I love it!” but for a while.
I moved into that place and they signed me up for $600/month SSI, almost all of which went to the black lady who, with her family, ran the house. It was very horrible. One of the black guys had actually been released from prison where he'd been for murder, and he was illiterate; he could hardly read. He was a big bully; he would confront you on the stairs and try to sell you one of the watches he had strapped on his arm. My roommate had actually been an inmate at Napa State Hospital, he said for stealing a car. Everybody stole everything, you had to have a bike lock to lock your TV to the bed frame and a footlocker with a key or they'd take everything you had there. My friend said, “This is a dump!” Well, yeah! We were all in trouble. You know those old pictures of the British mental hospital, Bedlam, Pandemonium. There was a better-dressed woman in there with a heavy cast on her ankle and I determined that somehow they must have thought that they couldn't fix her foot where she'd fallen in her apartment or it was damaged so badly it was too expensive for anyone to pay for. Maybe she worked it out to get out later, I don't know. Just in case she couldn't care for herself, there at least they were sure she would have food and a bed to stay alive. She accepted it all heroically, stoically, with a very happy, cheerful, spirit. Everybody does the best they can.
Now I saw why they have to give you a tour first of those places and get you to agree. How could I ever agree to such a snakepit as that now that I knew firsthand what it was like? I swore I would never agree to that again, anymore than I'd agree to let the cops arrest me if they were willing to let me go. I never thought about it in terms of needing $600/month; I never got much of it They were telling me at that time, “Wavy Gravy is on SSI,” which I never heard. So the social worker helped me get an apartment near my parents house, got my parents to help with the rent, but, as I say, I eventually ended up back at my parents' house, and then at UCI with $100,000/year, another car, an apartment in graduate student housing, and that was the last I hoped I'd ever see of board-and-care homes.
4/14/2012 8:25PM
I called Jeff and he said, “I’m flying into L.A. on business and I’ll meet with you and your sister and mediate.” We set up a meeting for the three of us at the Hamburger Hamlet in Brentwood on San Vicente.I prepared for the meeting and, in retrospect, I wish I had decided to stay in L.A. and fight to get the $60,000/yr. back and keep my apartment and, say, keep going to CSUN where I was admitted. But I was hot to get out of town and I’d been looking on the Internet and I saw an ad to be a “Summer Steward” at the Lama Foundation in San Cristobal, New Mexico, near Taos. When I was at the New Mexico Rainbow Gathering a group of people from there had made a presentation about living/working there that had interested me and sounded pretty good. I had visited there when I was living there around 1979 and there was a girl who used to live at the Hog Farm in Llano, Marigold, and a guy from the San Francisco Shlomo Carlebach House of Love and Prayer, Josh, living there.When they were building the first buildings in the fall of 1969, right after Woodstock, me and Blond Steve and some guys from the Hog Farm went over one day and helped them build the weird main meditation hall, baking the adobe bricks with straw in the sun and piling them up with mud mortar.
The Summer Stewards, since they worked in the kitchen, paid only $275/mo., I was getting
$600/mo. SSI, got free vegan meals, and slept in a tentground. I liked the vegan meals because I had read about good diets for diabetes and heart disease, metabolic syndrome, in retrospect, a good idea.The place was beautiful, right on the edge of the forest and the mountains by the Taos Ski Resort.
To explain the SSI, I’ll have to flashback again.
4/17/2012 5:19 AMLaurie and I were living in The Springs apartment complex across from Cal State Bakersfield and my parents offered to send us to Hawaii, the Big Island, for 2 weeks. When we got back we went to see my parents in S.F., and I think I told how my dad explained his business loss. Then they cut my allowance from $100,000/year to $40,000/year, called it a trust fund, and Joan and Jonathan trustees of the trust fund. Then I moved near Santa Fe, New Mexico for a year, Laurie came and visited me, moved back to L.A., and convinced me to come live in her apartment and go to CSUN.
[07/26/2013 One of the first things that Joan did when she became trustee of my trust fund was request me to send her all of my credit cards. Eventually I mailed her all 12. She called me back and said, “I defaulted on all of your credit cards. You are in debt $17,000 to the credit card companies.” I said, “I thought it was $13,000.” Years later Jonathan said to me, “You'll never pay that back.” When my dad had his birthday party at my uncle's in Scottsdale he said to me , “Seven years!” meaning that's how long all that stays on your credit record. When I got the financial aid, I talked about it to the CSUEB financial aid counselor, and he recommended talking to the Consumer Credit Counseling. They said that if I paid $500/mo for two years I could restore my Equifax credit rating to normal, but they didn't have time to quote me for Trans-Union and Experian.]
[07/28/2013 At that same birthday party when my dad flew all of us to Scottsdale we were the whole family was sittting around a table in a restaurant and we were talking and I said to Jonathan in front of all of them, intending them to hear, “You abuse me!” Jonathan replied, “You abuse us!” I said, “There's abuse on both sides!” and that was the end of the argument, for then.]
Jonathan said, “If your [1992 Toyota Tercel] breaks down, your father isn’t going to get you another car.” I thought it was just his blustering trying to scare me; he couldn’t possibly mean it. The dealer had said it would last 10 years. In 1997, when it was 5 years old, I had it serviced at the Toyota dealership near CSUN in the Valley, and I told the service manager it was leaking oil. When I picked it up, he told me he had fixed the oil leak. The service manager and Jonathan talked on the phone when Jonathan paid him. I was on my way up Frazier Park to go cross-country skiing and the oil light came on, and I decided to stop and put more oil in on the way back. But on the way back, on the way to the gas station, it seized up from lack of oil and that totaled it, because it was still leaking oil even though he had said he had fixed the leak. But as I expected, my family said they’d buy me another car. Jonathan said they’d give me just $3000 for one, and Laurie had a friend with a used car lot. Mistakenly at the lot I put the guy on the phone with Jonathan and they agreed on a car that everybody hated, an old blue 1987 Geo Metro with a missing hubcap. Laurie always refused to ride in it, claiming she believed it wasn’t safe, and we got it from her friend! When we got home and she talked to him on the phone and they told me I was getting the Geo I called him back immediately and told him no, please, I don’t want it, I don’t like it, but he said, “It’s too late, your brother-in-law and I have already made the deal, you have to take it, you can’t take it back.” So I drove that car until the engine died on a job interview trip in Irvine, and maybe fumes from that or something gave me the heart disease for which I had two operations, I don’t know. The engine died on the way back from the Rainbow Gathering near Flagstaff, and Jonathan had to put me up in a motel for 2 days while a mechanic put in a new engine in the middle of nowhere. I think we put in a total of 3 new engines, each time for about $600; Laurie’s friend really burned us. That’s probably why she thought it was unsafe to ride in—because she knew her friend. He also was a lawyer. I think she used to live with him and take care of his daughter.
I think Jonathan talked to the service manager at the Northridge Toyota when he paid him and the manager said he'd fixed the oil leak but hadn't. Also, right after Joan and Jonathan became trustees of the trust fund Jonathan used to be so mean on the phone I called an attorney about him who said, “Jonathan is arbitrary, capricious, abusive, and he keeps you in the dark. Is he taking some of your money to tide himself over?” I said I couldn't imagine that but now I think I was wrong. When he'd ask me to send him receipts, Jonathan would arbitrarily switch back and forth between mailing them and faxing them so I would never know what he would ask. Both he and Joan told me then that they “had it in” for me. Once I jokingly said to him, “Why don't I make a will giving you everything I have and then commit suicide,” and he replied, “That's a concept,” and later I thought maybe I had given him the idea. He's such a good liar that for years I believed that he was older than me when he is six months younger and that he went to Harvard as a freshman, as I did to Yale, when he transferred into Harvard as a sophmore from George Washington University or whatever in his hometown, St. Louis. We saw he has serious communication problems when he sat next to supposedly his best friend, a
UCSD professor, in Ixtapa, Mexico on his friend's birthday and couldn't say a word to him for an hour. The one time he gave me a written accounting he said it was supposed to add up to $40,000 but it only added up to $35,000 somehow. He never pinched pennies on himself, however, buying his Jaguar S3, remodeling his mansion in Bel-Air, on his world travels, his Italian marble bathtub, widescreen TV, art collection, gold plumbing fixtures, two nannies, two Nintendos, baby grand piano, pirates' table, Persian rugs, etc. Years ago I copied out the whole chapter of the Bible with the story of Lazarus and Dives and sent it to them, and the story of Nathan, David, Bathsheba, and Uriah, but it doesn't help..
And somewhere around that time Jonathan had said, “Come over, I want you to sign something.” I was hesitant to sign anything for him because when they opened the joint checking account at the Brentwood Bank of America for the “trust fund” with his, Joan’s, and my signature on it, they both signed it and he put a big “X” on the third line (his dad, Adam Aronson, was a banker in St. Louis) and sent it to me and I signed by the “X”. Later I thought about that they could withdraw my money with their signature.
So I didn’t go over, and later they told me that my grandmother had left me $10,000 and they had taken it “for your expenses”. What do you expect when you tell a guy you want a car for
$3000? When it broke down in Irvine, I became a pedestrian.
And then my dad said, “If you apply for SSI from Dr. Fine I’ll get you another car.” So I went through this whole rigamarole with Joan, a Latino social worker, and an SSI specialist who said, portentiously, “They looted the bank account and put everything out in the street.” Dr. Fine wrote them a diagnosis of “schizoaffective disorder”, whatever that is, for it, without discussing it at all with me. They never did give me a car.Dr. Fine later told me she and the meds were paid for by the SSI and MediCal.
So I was getting $600/mo. SSI, and it only cost $275/mo. to be a Summer Steward, since you worked in the kitchen for the paying retreatants, it’s a spiritual retreat center.You can even teach your own classes (for free) if you want. I taught a guitar class. It was great. A Summer Steward stays all summer, and, if they like you, they can vote if you can have a house for the winter, and, if you pass that, you can get voted to stay for 7 years, with a stipend and medical stipend. One of the other reasons probably why it didn’t work out for me is that they were thinking twice about taking over responsibility for my somewhat complex medical care, which is reasonable. But I was moving in the direction of independence from my family after recovering from three surgeries.
So I met with Joan and Jeff at Hamburger Hamlet and showed them the Lama Foundation website about the Summer Stewards and made my presentation and they accepted it. Joan promised to send them the $275/mo. from my SSI and another $300 from the $600/mo. for just living expenses. But she said, “I’d just like to have you look at a couple of board-and-care homes just in case it doesn’t work out and you have to come back,” and I agreed to that.We only went to one, the other was closed, that was really a horrible snakepit, of course all of them must be, on Melrose near where Laurie used to go to the Groundlings. A dirty drug addict in a dirty, sweaty tank-top lay on a dirty mattress in a room with a bare lightbulb, roaches, and the paint peeling.I absolutely refused to have anything to do with anyplace like that. I said
something to the woman in charge, who said she had a masters in psychology, about how I “majored in homelessness at Yale”.Honestly, that’s what people like her and my sister think of hippies.
Jonathan and Joan came over and we put a bunch of my stuff in a storage they have, where it still is, and left the rest of it on the sidewalk for people to scavenge. Joan bought me a tent, sleeping bag, and hiking boots and put me on the bus for Taos. Lama was wonderful. Living in a tent is OK when everybody is doing it in a tentground. One night I came home and there was a deer outside my tent. Everybody on the staff, and lots of the retreatants, were really nice and friendly. The speakers and spiritual teachers were mostly pretty interesting and enlightening.
They put me to work playing guitar for the spiritual dancing, and drumming. I don’t mind eating healthy food, since I have to, and cooking it and cleaning up wasn’t all that hard. The views from up there on the mountain are spectacular.
This one guy that worked there said he had room in his van for a swimming trip to the hot springs by the Rio Grande. Walking down to the river he pulls out a joint, and since he was the driver, I partook, the first I’d had since I’d gotten there. The rules were none on the property; they didn’t care outside, where we were, and he was seemingly acting as an official.
A week or so later, I had finished all my chores and was sitting in on an adobe house-building class for fun and to help out and I got a sudden chest pain that didn’t go away, probably from hauling heavy adobe bricks around. So I took nitroglycerin, and there was still chest pain, and rather be safe than sorry I asked if someone would take me to the emergency room, turns out at Holy Cross Hospital in Taos, where Karen used to work as a social worker.My doctor knew both of the Castagnas. As usual I was OK, the pains went away, and they sent me home. This is guaranteed to make people worried about you mad.
So the next day they called me before, I forget what they called the ruling council. Essentially they were asking me to leave. They said it wasn’t about taking nitroglycerin and going to the ER, but it probably was, especially since, if I were to succeed in the program, they would be taking over responsibility for my medical care. But the guy who had driven us to the Rio Grande Gorge and passed me the joint got up and said that when I was high someone had seen his 9-year old daughter sitting on my lap, a totally ridiculous, made-up story I denied and threatened to get a lawyer to defend myself. So they drummed me out. When I got back I found out that Joan had never sent the $275/mo. or the $300/mo. to me, so someone always had to buy me lunch when we went to town. Those are also pretty good reasons for getting expelled from “paradise”. I forgot to mention that Alberto and Karen only live an hour or two away and I had called them and they were going to come over and bring me to their house for dinner and back, but never got a chance to.
So they said, “Where do you want to go?” The only place I could think of was back to L.A. Somehow magically money appeared for a bus ticket to L.A. and to stay in a motel in Taos overnight and wait for the next bus in the morning. They drove me to the motel in Taos. I called Laurie and asked her to pick me up at the L.A. bus station, which she did. I didn’t sleep for 36 hours on the bus, it was so noisy.
Laurie took me back to her apartment and called Joan.
4/22/2012 2:51 PM
I’m where Laurie took me back to her apartment from the Los Angeles Greyhound bus station. She called my sister, got off the phone and said, “Joan is coming to take you to an interview at Brentwood Manor Board-and-Care Home. If you don’t pass the interview you will be without a home.” I always thought Joan set her up to tell me that. I had 2 suitcases, my Fender Stratocaster, Super Reverb Amp, and Yamaha Acoustic Guitar and I didn’t want to lose them, especially by Joan setting me out of her silver Jeep Grand Cherokee on a street corner in the middle of nowhere. Laurie took all my stuff and piled it outside her door, and my sister came and put it all in her jeep. I hadn’t slept for 36 hours, and I lay in the back seat and fell into a tortured sleep.
4/24/2012 12:21 PM
First, she had some kind of appointment at Edelman Center, where Dr. Fine worked. It was with some guy I didn’t know, and I really gave it to him, I remember. He said, “You wanted to see me about a housing problem?” I started yelling and didn’t stop, it was such a phony setup.
They had just moved me out of my apartment when I was sick and recuperating from 3 operations, cutting off my allowance except for meds, medical bills, and Anthem, didn’t send the SSI to the Lama Foundation they’d agreed to let me go to, I threatened to call Mind Freedom Int’l, National Empowerment Center, 1-800-POWER-2U, lawyers, these online psychiatric assault sites, like Network Against Psychiatric Assault, I realize now I should have called them, but of course, I hadn’t slept for 36 hours on the bus and it was important to her not to let me sleep. It was reasonable to expect to stay at Laurie’s where I’d lived for 5 years for at least a day to rest after the trip—obviously they must’ve planned the whole thing. Brentwood was the 2nd board-and-care home that Joan was going to have me look at after the one on Melrose before I went to New Mexico, “just in case it doesn’t work out and you have to come back”—they planned the whole thing. I caught COPD from all the smokers in Brentwood and I heard on the radio today it was the 4th leading cause of death, although I use the Advair inhaler 2x/day, costing Anthem an untold amount, $200/inhaler. I was just reading online Hannah Arendt’s
Eichm a nn in J erus a lem: A Report On The B a n ality of Evil and they were asking, “Why did all those Jews get on those trains for Auschwitz when they outnumbered the Nazi troops at the station? Why didn’t they fight back instead of going like sheep to the slaughter?” If they fought back, it was more courageous than receiving a relatively easy death in the gas chamber or soap factory and being made into a tattooed lampshade or lying down in line to be shot and buried in a mass grave by a bulldozer. She says they shouldn’t be blamed for their own deaths for not fighting back because nobody else would have fought back. Lots of them, like her,
fought back and won, at least were Holocaust survivors, I saw some on TV with the President yesterday, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, hope springs eternal.
So the guy realized I was totally resistant to whatever psychiatric “housing” scam he was running, gave up, sat down, they let me go, and we left.On the way Joan threatened to leave me and all my stuff on some street corner, and if I didn’t pass the interview at Brentwood Manor, like Laurie said, I would be, “without a home”.
The head of Brentwood Manor, June Gatewood, R.N., was almost like a cartoon character, Head Nurse Ratched from Ken Kesey’s One F lew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest or Cruella D’Ville from Disney’s 101 D a lmation s . I read later that the owners of those places often hire foreign nationals to run those places so they can make more profits because they don’t have to pay certain American taxes. June, the Head Administrator, was English, and the Assistant Administrator, Herr Oscar Montoya, was Mexican. June had been a psychiatric nurse in the British Army, look out! The meanest one, probably. Once I waited in a line to see her and she said (it had spilled at breakfast, 20 minutes ago, in the pandemonium), “Look at that spot on your shirt! It’s disgusting! Go up and change your shirt this minute!” and I went, and came back and got at the end of the line, like the lines for the doctors at Auschwitz. At the Santa Monica Library I was reading E s cape F rom Auschwitz, a true survivor story, how he hid in the woodpile by the gate, snuck out when the trucks came in, and made his way to Switzerland and thence to the USA. Like the film The G r e at Esc a p e, where American POW Steve McQueen steals the Nazi soldiers’ motorcycle and rides it across the border to Switzerland. To cut to the chase, I passed the interview. She said, “Are you violent?” And I said, “No.”
I wrote this earlier today:
To outline the account, I could start from where I was living in the UCLA Co-op and a computer science major at CSUN, near my sister’s house, and she asked me to find a psychiatrist, and I went to Dr. Robert Newport. Going to her house when my parents were visiting and being tricked into seeing Dr. Lisa Fine at Edelman Ctr., L.A. County Mental Heath Dept., Sepulveda & Olympic, 310-966-6500, and going every 2 weeks for 5 years, catching the diabetes, having 2 heart surgieries and a colon resection for diverticulitis at Cedars-Sinai Hospital with my Anthem Blue Cross PPO. Then my sister asking me to go in a nursing home, then Life Adjustment Team, then forcing me to go to Dr. Stubbeman, then taking away my $60K/yr. w/ my apartment for going to a Ratdog show. I go to Lama Foundation in New Mexico, they never pay, I’m kicked out under mysterious circumstances, they force me into Brentwood Manor Board-and-Care Home for 2 years against my will, Joan hands the Head Nurse, Chief Administrator, June Gatewood, R.N. a letter from Dr. Stubbeman, all it says is “paranoid schizophrenia”, exactly the misdiagnosis from Dr. Auerbach to get me out of the draft when I was living on the Hog Farm in 1971 that I asked him to rediagnose, and told clinical psychologist Mike Bernath and he told me to, “Go to a clinical psychologist, get retested and rediagnosed.” So of course I protest it; I had a l r e a d y protested it. I went to Yale, Class of ’71, Pierson College; I’m no bloody axe murderer.
Back to the present:
The interview took two days because June claimed she had some other work to do. Part of the time we had to wait across the street in an art store while Joan shopped for art supplies for her
son. She put me up in a youth hostel down by the beach in Santa Monica in a room shared with four Norwegian tourists. They could have put me there for a few bucks in the first place—there was no need to threaten to leave me with all my valuable equipment on some street corner to coerce me into signing myself into Brentwood. It took me 2 years to get out because I had to earn the money to get out. All they gave me was $25/mo., about $1/day, barely enough for a candy bar and a soda, that was all I had at the start. I ran around looking for work and got a telemarketing job selling Sprint cell phones B2B to small businesses in the South.Joan said, “Don’t go back to Dr. Stubbeman, go to Dr. Fine,” and I did, but I never told her what happened. She had a meeting with me and Joan and she said, “If you get the money you can do anything you want.” I also worked as Inside Sales Representative for Investors Business Daily, a competitor to the Wall Street Journal, selling subscriptions on the phone, they advertise you can make $2000/week, I’ve seen it done. The co-worker who drove me to the Furthur New Years Eve show at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium had a bad cough and I started coughing, was it COPD? He said he caught it from the administrative asst. who went to the ER w/ a cough & kept it—later the dr. said chronic bronchitis then COPD but they say from smoking, not contagious. Everybody at Brentwood smoked and they made me, that’s all, I know better, secondhand smoke was everywhere. My roommate had real OCD where he would compulsively check the doorknobs everytime he went through a door and he could lie so well he actually convinced me for months that he was a lawyer. It was the lowest level of a RCFE, Residential Care Facility for the Elderly, just on Medi-Cal, the cheapest, no frills. The residents said that private places that cost more were nicer. Assisted Living. I don’t need assisted living of any kind and have never been certified for it or asked for it. A lot of the residents were just poor, old people who couldn’t afford to stay alive and they just put them there for a low-rate
death on Medi-Cal. I saw three people die, three dead bodies, my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in my life.
The first was I was taking the Stockton bus in Chinatown and the ambulance stretcher came out of the doorway with the body of a Chinese man. That was the first dead person I ever saw in my life, I guess in the ‘80’s. I guess the paramedics were having fun showing me that.
In Brentwood I saw my second, third, and fourth dead bodies. A woman who was really out of it wandered out in the intersection of Santa Monica Blvd. and Wellesley where there are no signals and got hit by a car and died right there in the middle of the street, of negligence, somebody should have been taking care of her, she didn’t do anything. I came outside and her dead body was lying there in the pedestrian zone in the middle of Santa Monica Blvd., her clothes covered with blood, the cars just driving by, the second body I’d seen. The third was when the old man choked on something at lunch and the nurse came up and tried to do the Heimlich Maneuver but she didn’t know how and he ended up choking to death and dying sitting at the table right there in front of everyone, I saw him die, accidentally. And the fourth was already dead, a corpse being wheeled out the side door in the middle of the night, an old guy.
And there were a lot of younger residents who had had drug busts. I figure what happened is Laurie was watching 9/11, and she saw people being counseled for being upset, called her psychiatrist, Dr. Nadel, who I had met because Joan wanted us both to go to her before Dr. Fine after Dr. Newport, and Nadel’s substitute, I just found out Dr. Holstein from Kaiser put her in the Kaiser mental hospital downtown. I missed her and went down, got her out, and brought her
home without thinking about it. This therapist, MFCC, Barbara Gabriel, that I was seeing, thinks maybe Holstein was getting retaliation for getting Laurie out of the hospital, and I was saying she didn’t need to be there. I was reading a little about psychiatric rehabilitation, what Life Adjustment Team is, where Laurie was going, and that’s where you’d go after a mental hospital, and Laurie was going to Dr. Holstein’s office at Kaiser Hospital on La Cienega and Venice.But why would they want me at LAT and I never knew what it was? Maybe they thought Laurie needed drug treatment. I thought Laurie never used drugs. Maybe she squealed about the Cubensis shows and the Dead shows I used to take her to, and she had become friends with the Bob Dylan Tribute guy, Joel, the singer of Highway 61Revisited and he always got us in backstage and when he played with Cubensis, too, a Grateful Dead Tribute, and the keyboard player Tom, actually sat in with Dark Star Orchestra.But she told me recently that Dr. Nadel, and I guess Holstein, arranged the whole meeting about the nursing home, and I guess both with Pete Linnett from the Life Adjustment Team, and therefore Dr. Stubbeman and Brentwood Manor, and I never met Dr. Holstein and Dr. Nadel for 10 minutes, didn’t like her, and never
saw her again. So I’ll sue them; they took almost everything, I’m lucky to be alive, and other people were hurt. There’s probably more I don’t know. Laurie said Nadel retired. They got Laurie to spill and she went to LAT and SHARE, Self-Help and Recovery Exchange, and she was in AA, NA, etc. and running her own groups. And none of them ever discussed drugs with me, except in really bad ways that made me decide never to speak to them again. I did not nark, squeal, snitch, stool, ever, and I was certainly subjected to professional, high-pressure interrogation, many times, and I never cracked. That is probably the #1 reason they punish me. Compared to me, Laurie knows nothing to squeal anyway. Once Pete said, disparagingly, “Hells Angels are loyal.” They had been giving me some crap I was denying, they said, about “Hells Angels have methamphetamine labs.” I told him, “They’ll kill someone for $25, they don’t care.” I told that to my brother-in-law once, during an argument about money, and I wish I hadn’t, because, it gave him ideas, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He said later, “You wouldn’t have a biker gang break in here and steal my art?” But it’s in a Mickey Hart song, “Aiko, Aiko”: See that boy all dressed in red/For $35 he’ll kill you dead.
They turned—she was essentially my wife, we’d been together 15 years, and lived together 5 or 10, our parents just opposed the marriage—and now they got her to squeal on me and the scene and used her as bait to steal my whole $60K/year that had been $100K/yr. after 3 surgeries and institutionalize me for 2 years.
It was really bad in there with those derelicts and drug addicts, and no money. Where they put terminally ill broke people to die. But I’d had $60K/yr., Anthem, and primary care Dr. Riceberg from Cedars-Sinai in Beverly Hills where my sister used to have an office and he told me I was OK: “You can work and live independently,” and, “You will live twenty or thirty more years.” And I still had the Anthem and they were paying for meds, the pharmacy, and medical bills; I was still going to Dr. Riceberg I knew I was OK physically and that they were lying I was going to die. A friend inside said, “Your sister is trying to kill you.” They hadn’t let me, and still haven’t, get the Cardiac Rehab cardiologist Dr. Dave` had prescribed because they promised the car and reneged but I had gotten a basic education in heart and diabetes diet from my own reading in bookstores. The nurses said I didn’t have diabetes and wouldn’t give me the red dot that got you the sugar-free ice cream, etc., and they wanted me to eat the sugar, the low-
grade meat, the salt, the canned vegetables, other processed foods, coffee all the time. The diet is no cholesterol, meat, dairy, egg yolks, fat, sodium, calories, carbs, sugar, and processed food— plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, of which they had essentially none. You always had to sit in the same place with these crazy guys and fight over this garbage food—but I knew I wasn’t dying, that they were lying, and here I am. They were trying to give me the opposite diet. I even went to the doctor and got a note saying I must have fresh fruits and vegetables, etc. and they completely ignored it. The Mexican nurses stole my cell-phone charger, my nice purple North Face sleeping bag I’d bought in the South Coast Mall in Costa Mesa, etc. [7/23/13 Joan asked me to ask UCSF-Mission Bay cardiologist Dr. Nelson Schiller for his permission for her to speak to him at our last appointment, at which he said all my numbers were “fantastic”. He refused, saying, “Sometimes family members say they're going to die to steal the inheritance.” She had told me she “disagreed with his diagnosis” of diabetes from Risperdal. He said he wasn't going to change his diagnosis.]
Somehow through it all I managed to treat the diabetic neuropathy, which I’ll detail later, I guess they were trying to stop me. My friend Karen, a nurse, is a diabetes educator, and she said go to an endocrinologist, and from Blue Cross I found Dr. Hohnichter on Rexford in Beverly Hills.
He suggested I ask my cardiologist, Dr. Dave` to prescribe Viagra.It was no problem for Dr. Dave`, “But be sure they take you off the Isosorbide, because that’s a nitrate, and if you take the two together, IT COULD KILL YOU!” He was really emphatic about not taking it with nitrates. It says it in the commercials, “could cause a sudden loss of blood pressure.” I had to buy it myself, because Joan won’t pay for it, and I told the people at the home who gave the pills to stop the Isosorbide, but they wouldn’t. The nurse would bring it to me at dinner and try to force me to take it, in front of everyone. My friend said, “Your sister is trying to kill you.” I refused, but I took all the other pills, but I wouldn’t take the Isosorbide.The nurses did this several times and finally I called Dr. Dave` and got his nurse. She said, “Tell the administrator [Oscar] that this patient, Eric Abrahamson, has been prescribed Viagra and nitrates are contraindicated at any time.”They still brought me the Isosorbide and tried to force me to take it. Oscar said that if I wouldn’t take it he would evict me. I didn’t think he’d do it.
I called Dr. Dave`again, the nurse tried to get him, and he took me off the Viagra, so I could take the Isosorbide. He was the one who had done the first angiogram and angioplasty, we later
found out was caused by diabetes from Risperdal. When Pete made me miss the Toprol, Bush appointed an anti-gay cardiologist Surgeon-General.
There was a guy in there, a musician, who got in a fight with the brother he was living with and he made him homeless. I heard June say once, “Violation!” They had a list of the rules for those places up, meaning they broke every one, like interfering with the residents’ basic life functions. And the Bill of Rights, the broke every one. We had lost all our rights. They had pictures of rich people on the walls for a joke on these poor old sick people. The curtains and sheets all had holes in them, my bathroom had all of these patches in the wall, trying to drive you crazy, and I always say I’m not crazy, that drugs don’t make you crazy because the great majority of ‘60’s rock stars are sane. Especially if you don’t count drug and alcohol problems.
It’s never a psychiatrist, it’s always my family who wants to play the system. That just doesn’t work anymore, for hippies, if it ever did. Laurie, who I call “straight”, is diagnosed as a “schizophrenic”, and everybody in her family was really mean to her all the time, her brothers and her parents. I figured that the worse she got, the more money they made from the government. She believes herself that she is really mentally ill and that she needs all that. I always thought that she’s not that bad, but I don’t see how she can get out of it. She used to go to this place in Santa Monica called Step Up On Second, and we’d visit residents there, and actually, if I’d had a chance to choose, it seems a lot nicer place than Brentwood Manor. But they all said it was really noisy, you bet. She had a friend who wanted to be an actor, and then he attempted suicide, you know they drove him to it, they get paid plenty for treating him after a suicide attempt. Another one they gave what maybe could have been an OK apartment but no money for furniture so he slept on the floor and took the bus, like me. He tried to self-publish some poetry, and then he attempted suicide, too, well, I saw the pattern, feed them with peanuts and they attempt suicide, they’re in forever.One of them told me, “They want me to look for work doing[some menial job] and I was a grad student in [something fancy]!” The last one gave me diabetes, coronary artery disease with two heart surgeries, a diabetic neuropathy, “burning feet” with a crippled left leg. It seems that if you get “cured” or “recover” you’re just on your own like everybody else so I won’t get involved with any of it again, any therapy, treatment, psychology, or psychiatry. It’s all voluntary, and if they make a misdiagnosis, it is very difficult to erase from your record, the art and science is constantly evolving, and there are a lot of quacks and abuse. I read in a nurses’ handbook in a textbook store that “all psychiatry is punishment” like prisons, so why would one ever enter into it voluntarily if he knew? “I don’t want to be punished, go fuck yourself!” is healthy, in my belief. Erich Fromm, the psychoanalyst, wrote Escape F rom F reedo m . I’m not saying that a lot of those people don’t deserve, need, to be there, just not me. My sister wants me to get SSI again and they want me to go to their psychiatrist and I’m going to refuse to go, I’m not going to pretend to be crazy for $10,000/year, even for a car, because I have to clean up my psych record like it is. It’s permanent and then some other psychiatrist comes back years later and gets your wife to snitch and takes away everything and locks you up for two years for a diagnosis from 30 years ago to get out of the draft that everyone forgot, but it’s bucks to the psychiatrist, the facility, and the family. And they wanted to get a dual diagnosis, throw in substance abuse, drug addict, for being a Deadhead and friends with the crew, some people I met at Woodstock working as Security in the Hog Farm. I’m going to get their attorneys, the best rock, drug, and mental
health lawyers in the world, to read this. I never did anything, I’m a Yalie, they came for me. They took all my stuff with no bust, no charges, no trial, like indefinite detention at Brentwood Manor with $25/month.
They never found any drugs, and as far as I know, there is no evidence of any drugs. I wasn’t in jail.They never gave a reason to go to the nursing home or board-and-care, except “your room was messy”.I have to go because they said, and it’s wrong medically. Joan said she talked to Dr. Riceberg and he said he never talked to her, “It was a bad connection.” She said,” Dr. Riceberg says you don’t have diabetes.” When I said that couldn’t possibly be true she said, “The nurse told me,” which is also impossible. I was correct to refuse. Attorney Bruce Margolin said, “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
JOURNAL III 4/24/2012 11:51 AM
I’ve started to say that my family tried to kill me for the inheritance. A woman told me, “They’re trying to make you look crazy to steal the inheritance.” And all the people I used to know, my so-called “friends”, will take their side because my sister was in the Bush White House and my mother in San Francisco City Hall, so I’m on my own. I’m going to sue my family and all their doctors for two billion dollars. I used to say for attempted murder, false imprisonment, elder abuse, elder financial abuse, medical malpractice, psychiatric malpractice, and psychiatric or psychological torture. And also personal injury against Johnson and Johnson and Janssen, for getting diabetes, coronary artery disease, and diabetic neuropathy from Risperdal. So in these journals I am attempting to document the history of what happened to show them to attorneys I will select.
To outline the account, I could start from where I was living in the UCLA Co-op and a computer science major at CSUN, near my sister’s house, and she asked me to find a psychiatrist, and I went to Dr. Robert Newport. Going to her house when my parents were visiting and being tricked into seeing Dr. Lisa Fine at Edelman Ctr., L.A. County Mental Heath Dept., Sepulveda & Olympic, 310-966-6500, and going every 2 weeks for 5 years, catching the diabetes, having 2 heart surgieries and a colon resection for diverticulitis at Cedars-Sinai Hospital with my Anthem Blue Cross PPO. Then my sister asking me to go in a nursing home, then Life Adjustment Team, then forced to Dr. Stubbeman, they take away my $60K/yr. w/ my apartment for going to a Ratdog show. I go to Lama Foundation in New Mexico, they never pay, I’m kicked out under mysterious circumstances, they force me into Brentwood Manor Board-and-Care Home for 2 years against my will, Joan hands the Head Nurse, Chief Administrator, June Gatewood, R.N. a letter from Dr. Stubbeman, all it says is “paranoid schizophrenia”, exactly the misdiagnosis from Dr. Auerbach to get me out of the draft when I was living on the Hog Farm in 1971 that I asked him to rediagnose, and told clinical psychologist Mike Bernath and he told me to, “Go to a clinical psychologist, get retested and rediagnosed.”So of course I protest it; I had al r ea d y protested it. I went to Yale, Class of ’71, Pierson College; I’m no bloody axe murderer.
5/11/2012 11:53 PM
So I went over the 2 years of hell and torture in Brentwood Manor, and Dr. Fine said, “If you get the money you can do anything you want.” I was working selling Sprint cell phones
telemarketing B2B to small businesses in the South and looking online for money, and I thought I might be able to get financial aid from Cal State, where my dad had been paying for me to be a junior computer science major before my operations. Sure enough, I was offered financial aid, $16,500, by San Francisco State, Cal State East Bay in Hayward, and Humboldt State in Arcata. Hindsight is 20/20—maybe if I’d chosen Arcata my family wouldn’t have blocked it and gotten the Hog Farmers to help them, I don’t know. I chose Hayward because I’d lived with Joe Sims who called himself a Hog Farmer in Berkeley before and I thought that they would be friendly. I didn’t know that, as one of them said when I first got there,”People come from India to join the Hog Farm,” and I was asking for trouble.
I wrote an email to Wavy Gravy’s wife, telling her my plan, and for some dumb reason I added at the end asking to join the Hog Farm—I was foolish expecting them to be friendly. First, in general, 2nd coming there out of an institution where I didn’t have much money and the financial aid wasn’t that much. I guess I was trying a “Hail Mary”-type maneuver to save, rescue the situation. She wrote back that it was impossible to join the Hog Farm, that you had to be born to one, that they were old and set in their ways. I guess I was too desperate to pay attention. I could have seen that “No means no,” and decided to go to Arcata and not pressed on to Berkeley. I had to get out of there. The mental health advocate had said people were sometimes in those places “to suppress dissent” and “for social control” and to “walk away”.
A lawyer had told me that I had signed myself in and it was my fault, and I could leave. Dr. Fine offered to make me my own SSI payee so I could get an apartment there if my sister would give her permission, but she wouldn’t. Deacon Sam said it was an “SSI scam, somebody else from the church had one, get another psychiatrist”. Later I wrote something to Jerry Brown when he was Attorney-General and he had a bunch of “Medi-Cal Fraud, Elder Abuse” cases on his government site. When the nurses stole my sleeping bag I went down to the local police station to file a report, an officer came to the facility to take the theft report, and when we were talking about how dangerous it was there and how the police were not able to protect me there she said to me, “Why don’t you leave?”
I showed Dr. Fine the award I had accepted for $16,500 financial aid and told her that they told me I was almost sure to be accepted for Spring, 2006 as a computer science major as soon as they received the rest of the transcripts. She had already taken me off all of my psych meds and she said, “When you go to Cal State, don’t come back,” and I didn’t. A year or so before I had put my sister Joan on the pay phone with Richie from the Hog Farm at Laytonville who used to be on the Grateful Dead Crew and whose wife worked in their office in San Rafael where he lived and I talked to him a few weeks later and he had terminal liver cancer. He moved to Camp Winnarainbow and invited me to visit him before he died and I asked Joan for $100 for a bus trip but she refused. My friend Alberto from New Mexico went and carved a tombstone with his name and birth date, leaving out the death date, and Tinker, also now deceased, carved a coffin from wood he selected, and I was locked down in Brentwood Manor. Later Joan let me take the bus up and stay with Mikey for a few days, after Richie died.
[07/26/2013 It's not really possible that Richie's death had anything to do with him talking to Joan on the phone. It's just that he told me of the terminal diagnosis on the phone right after he spoke to her on the phone, the same with Jerry Garcia, even though Rolling Stone Magazine said the CIA had an “Operation Dead End” at shows to entrap Deadheads and what I've said about Jonathan, that's really all I know. My dad said once, “I wish the Grateful Dead were dead!” and
when Bill Graham was killed in a helicopter crash he said, “I hope it didn't hurt the helicopter!” and Graham had his funeral at my dad's synagogue, Temple Emanu-el, and joined his Jewish men's club, Concordia-Argonaut. When I got to San Francisco, Vince Welnick, Grateful Dead keyboardist, had just committed suicide, upset about Jerry's death, although, of course, I have no reason to connect anything about that to me or my family. While I was in Brentwood he played nearby and I ran into him in the men's room and exchanged about two sentences and at the end I saw him get in his limousine—that is no reason to infer any type of connection. The same with Gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson, who I've never met or seen, who committed suicide after a hip replacement operation. A while after I got here Lou Todd and Tinker from the Hog Farm passed, as well as my old friend Alberto Castagna from Llano—I must always think of blaming my family when anyone dies, gets hurt, or anything happens! I have no proof of anything. If Ken Babbs put a story on the Internet about a man whose parents were responsible for the death of Ken Kesey and the assassination of JFK, I shouldn't take it so seriously—it's just art; if it means anything maybe it's just talking about me. My mom never went for that Ken Kesey One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest legend stuff, decided to oppose it, and when I accidentally told her he was thinking of running for the Eugene School Board, she ran for the San Franciso School Board and won—maybe Babbs was thinking of that. Shortly after he wrote that, I repeated it online to Kesey's son, Zane Kesey, and he got really mad, wrote me back, “Don't say that about my dad!”etc. And Babbs sure writes a lot of stuff and the first time I ever spoke to him and talked to him about an email he wrote me he said, “It wasn't me!” so he might not back up that story he wrote; I doubt he cares. Mike had a copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test where he was speaking and I showed him the part at the end where Kesey's saying, “We blew it!”, and he's saying, “We didn't blow it!”, back and forth, and they're arguing, and I asked him, and he said, “We blew it but we didn't blow it!”]
So when it was getting near the beginning of the Spring Quarter, I asked Mikey if I could stay with him again for two weeks, planning to pick up the financial aid, rent a car, rent an apartment on Grizzly Peak across from Tilden Park, and buy a top-of-the-line workstation computer to be a computer science major. I picked up my pay check and signed out from work and made a reservation to Oakland Airport. All I had to do was pick up my meds, pack, and call the shuttle for the airport. I hadn’t told my sister or the facility because I was afraid they would try to stop me, thinking that I had made the plan with Dr. Fine and she would back me up if there was any question. I was just going.
I went to the pharmacy across the street and he insisted that Oscar, the Assistant Administrator, give approval before he release the meds. I went to Oscar’s office and he insisted on calling my sister. Joan was at first, don’t go, even though Dr. Fine had approved and she had been there when Dr. Fine said I could do anything I wanted if I got the money. Joan said I could go, and asked me the names of the people in the CSUEB administration with whom I had been speaking on the phone, and I gave her the names and telephone numbers.
I don’t remember how the school contacted me in the next few days, by phone, email, or mail, but all of a sudden, I was not going to be admitted, my GPA was slightly too low. Right then I wondered if Joan had tampered with my acceptance. When we met with Tina last month Joan admitted that she has something to do with the fact that to this date the CSUEB undergraduate evaluator has never counted a whole year of Yale grades, B average, though they have the
transcript. It says 36 units, 0 GPA, because they say Honors, High Pass, Pass, and Fail may not be A, B, C, and F, like everybody else has always agreed. I didn’t notice this until this year. I thought right then that Joan got me disenrolled for her own purposes. They said I had to go to a junior college, where I could probably get the same financial aid, take English 1A which I had already taken, get an A, and one other class, bring my GPA up to 2.0, and I would automatically be accepted to CSUEB. I never thought about going to Dr. Fine and saying, “I’m not going.”
I decided against Diablo Valley College for Berkeley City College, making Wavy Gravy say, “On my sidewalk!”They were then called Vista and the Vista Contact Person, Mirella Medina, at CSUEB, said just what I said above. The financial aid person at BCC, Robert, I guess, was trying to tell me on the phone that they were lying, at least about there, but I’m so optimistic about getting out of scrapes I talked him into saying, “I’ll give you $10,000; see you when you get to Berkeley,” persuading myself that he certainly meant he’d give me the whole $16,500.
I got to Mikey’s and there was just a hundred or so for tuition; they had all duped me completely into risking my life. I have to take about 10 meds after 2 heart surgeries caused by diabetes from Risperdal, and I have a heart med, Toprol XL, that if you miss one day causes a myocardial infarction, heart attack, life-threatening. Dr. Fine had taken me off the Risperdal and said, “Don’t come back, “ but Mikey wanted me to make an appointment at Berkeley Mental Health.
I don’t know why he wouldn’t take no for an answer—maybe he was talking to Joan or Jonathan on the phone—but he said he’d throw me out if I didn’t go, so I went. Then, after I found out there was no financial aid, he got Joan, my mother, my old friend and dentist Don Nguyen, and Wavy’s wife Jahanera all on the phone and they tried to talk me into going to a mental hospital. Dr. Fine had just said, “Don’t come back.” The lawyer blamed me for letting them pressure and coerce me into signing in to Brentwood and now they were doing it again, so I kept saying, “No.” I kept remembering something I’d read in the anti-psychiatry literature by Howie The Harp, who I met once, and jammed with him, him playing the harp, “It’s better to be homeless than to be in a mental hospital”. I figured he oughta know. I was trying to make a case that I was sane and had been misdiagnosed. They were setting me up for this. They had the school do these things, maybe to make me look crazy to steal the inheritance, like that woman said.
If you go to a mental hospital, you’re just going to look crazier, whether you are or not. Dr. Riceberg, during the colon resection at Cedars-Sinai, had made a big deal of teaching me I was not mentally ill, that I was sane. Maybe it suited his practice. I read on MindFreedom.org at that time, and they are still saying it, that all of the diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual are wrong. Recently they talk about going to the APA meeting and “tearing up your labels”. Ken Babbs had had a story about Neal Cassady getting a job driving a bus for mental patients from an institution on skypilotclub.com.I had just gotten this “sane” place from these classy doctors and I was staying in it, and they really were/are trying to drive me crazy for their profit. It’s said that they have to win and kill you—that you have to die young if you’re a mental patient, that you have to die 25 years early. Well, in Escape F rom Aus c hwitz they had less time to live, 3 months if you can work, 0 time for pregnant women, elderly, disabled, etc.
and he got to America to write the book—I’m trying to beat the odds like him, or maybe things might change. After all, I’m still alive and kicking, and many others have probably had similar or worse situations. I think, “I’m the family of high-ranking Republican leaders, and I’m alive after the putsch!” Solzhenitsen was in the gulag with a false psychiatric diagnosis for writing capitalist poetry in a Communist country. I left out how they were tapping my computer on Courtleigh. I heard of a peace demo at the Federal Building in March 20 0 3 and went, got invited to Coalition For World Peace at the Peace Center, maybe got listed. Move On said forward this email and I did to Feinstein, Boxer, telling them my mom & sister, and then to the White House, telling my sister is Chairman of the Barbara Bush Literacy Campaign, don’t invade Iraq, and maybe they got mad? Jonathan wrote me: “Stop blogging!”
When I was at UCI I went to Hillel and met a girl, an English major, and later she got a bad grade and was moving out.She said, “They wanted me to go to a mental hospital or go homeless.”That was the first time I ever heard of that, I guess that’s what I got, two bad ideas. She didn’t really go homeless; she moved in with a girlfriend in a cheap hotel in Santa Ana because her dad had taken out loans for her education that weren’t happening now. So that’s what they were doing to me. If I went it would be a big effort to get out and I would be back where I started, but with more stigma. I had just gotten out of a less restrictive institution. Dr. Fine, the psychiatrist, had approved going to CSUEB, but my sister maybe was going to turn this into an attempt to commit me just because I was trying to keep her from finding out. Then Mikey forced me to sign up for the homeless center, and he said I could go back to L.A. The homeless lady said she’d made an appointment with some doctor it turned out my mother knew later, a psychiatrist at Berkeley Mental Health, and if I didn’t go I would lose all kinds of things, so I went. The nurse refused to let me see the doctor, saying, “It has to be voluntary.” She said I could find a place and have the landlord call my sister and she would give her credit card for rent, which was false. They put me out on the bench in front. Then they threw me out of the homeless shelter for some ridiculous, obscure rule I didn’t break, and I was on the street with my heavy suitcase, which was soon stolen, everything I owned.
In addition, the school had said get your SSI and I had been paying something like $95/mo. to a storage in L.A. where I’d left the stuff that I’d had at Brentwood: my computer, Fender Stratocaster, Deluxe Reverb amp, Yamaha Acoustic guitar, and lots of clothes, books, camping equipment, etc. They said I was a few dollars wrong on the amount and sold everything at auction before I could contact them—I was on the streets. The suitcase had lots of nice pants, coats, my cell phone, etc. At another (nightly) homeless shelter my glasses were stolen, and
$175 cash from my wallet, although the preacher who preached that night’s sermon returned the empty wallet. It was worse in San Francisco, where my mother had used to be on the School Board and the Human Rights Commission. I’m in my 9th year of being slowly tortured to death by my own government, no police, no arrest, no charges, no trial, no prison, no jail. I think sometimes of Wilson and Plame, who were high-ranking government officials, especially Plame, who was punished for what her husband did, whistleblower, and he just wanted to be truthful for the record. My father died two years ago and maybe they did that to him. He was so proud of the White House match books H.W. gave him on the tour of his daughter’s office there, and the photo at Kennebunkport with H.W. with his arm around Joan and Barbara with her arm around Jonathan. [07/27/2013 When H.W got elected in 1988 I emailed them at the White House,
where my sister was Assistant Chief-Of-Staff, “Congratulations. May the Lord bless you and keep you, may the Lord make his face to shine upon you, may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.” Barbara Bush sent me back a formal thank-you note. And now all of them and all of us are born-again Christians.] I saw W. on TV once saying of his enemies, “make ‘em retire broke”. I suppose I’d take that over waterboarding. He was a couple years ahead of me at Yale, at the same time, though I never met him, I know the type of preppy.
I saw a black man get a heart attack with no one making a move to help him in a homeless shelter, hurray for me. Attempted murder, wrongful death? Somehow through all of it (mostly the Hog Farmers being merciful occasionally and letting me hang out at their places for a while for old times’ sake) I managed to get the A’s I needed and get into Cal State East Bay, and they gave me the $16,500, in Fall, 2007.[7/14/2012 Can’t help it: Grampa Henry was a Holocaust Survivor, and he used to say, “They can take away everything, but they can’t take away your education.”][7/23/13 Clinton said: “Mandela said: 'They can take away everything but your mind and your heart.'.”]
7/18/2012 10:45 PM
I thought of another possible reason for the things which have befallen me. I’m still playing phone tag with Mike Bernath, the clinical psychologist from L.A. When I first started going to psychiatrist Dr. Bill Stubbeman, I was talking with Mike on the phone one night on the bus on La Cienega. He said, “They should have let you pick your own therapist.” He said, “They’re trying to get a dual diagnosis,” and explained that that was something I already had mixed with drugs, which I found out was called “substance abuse”, and he said, “that’s bad, you don’t want that.” He said, “You can keep going to shows [he’s a Deadhead]; you can go to Wharf Rats.” I told him about how I had been diagnosed with “paranoid schizophrenia” by Dr. Auerbach to get me out of the draft when I was living on the Hog Farm and he said, “Go to a clinical psychologist and get retested and rediagnosed.” Then when Joan brought me back from the Lama Foundation and forced me to go to Brentwood Manor, she handed them a paper from Dr.
Stubbeman where he had again written “paranoid schizophrenia”, after I had told him the story in hopes he could/would remove the diagnosis. Maybe he was unable to get the “dual diagnosis” and he put down “paranoid schizophrenia”, a repeat from Dr. Auerbach 33 years before, as the second part of an attempted dual diagnosis, as Mike warned, that never materialized. [As far as I know; I should get a copy of my medical records and look at them.]
I had just had two angioplasties, heart operations, and at the second one they had diagnosed diabetes as the cause, and psychiatrist Dr. Lisa Fine said that diabetes was linked to Risperdal, and she had prescribed it. She had diagnosed me with “schizoaffective disorder”, but she never discussed it or explained what it meant, and I just found out what it means recently, 12 years later, so I think it’s normal to question if I have that, too. She told me once, “You know why I like you? Because you went to Yale and you’re married to Laurie!”
There was an article in Str e et S piri t , one of the few I’ve seen, about diabetes and Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel, that claims that deaths from diabetes from these drugs, “atypical anti-
psychotics”, have been covered up, actually just Zyprexa, because the Bush family owns piles of stock in the Lilly Pharmaceutical Co., manufacturers of Zyprexa. Since my sister is Chairman of the Barbara Bush Literacy Campaign and was Asst. Chief-of-Staff to Vice-President H.W. Bush in the Reagan White House, that is a possibility. That could be the reason they got Laurie to take me to the Life Adjustment Team, which may be a drug rehab, and Laurie was going to the nearby SHARE, Self-Help and Recovery Exchange, which has AA and NA. Laurie got committed just for calling Dr. Nadel, by Nadel’s substitute Dr. Holstein, when she saw a program about 9-11 people in NYC receiving counseling, and I went downtown to the Kaiser Mental Hospital and brought her home because I missed her and I didn’t think she should have been put in there for nothing, her first time in a mental hospital. Since Life Adjustment Team is “psychiatric rehabilitation”, I’m reading a book about psychiatric rehabilitation I got at the Cal State textbook store, and it’s for people coming out of mental hospitals, I’m just guessing they prescribed that for her and dragged me into it without ever telling me what it was. I guess I thought it was some kind of marriage counseling that might be useful is why I co-operated.
They had a picture of Jerry Garcia and other dead rock stars on the wall. Maybe Mike said they were trying to get a dual diagnosis, and they were trying to bring up all this stuff about drugs, because Jerry died in a drug rehab in Lagunitas after checking out of Betty Ford Clinic of a diabetic heart attack.I have never heard any doctor say my diabetes was caused by drugs, but Dr. Nelson Schiller at UCSF-Mission Bay Cardiology says it’s a metabolic syndrome (diabetes
& heart disease) caused by Risperdal. Maybe they were trying to get a dual diagnosis to save Johnson & Johnson and their subsidiary, Janssen, who make Risperdal, the inevitable lawsuits (which the Zyprexa diabetes cases won, for billions) by trying to make it look like the diabetes was caused by drugs and mental illness, not Risperdal. Laurie said Astra-Zeneca paid her a settlement for catching diabetes from Seroquel.
Stubbeman administered taking away my $60,000/year allowance, except for meds, medical bills, and Blue Cross, apparently for going to a Bobby Weir and Ratdog show and for planning to visit an old hippie friend in Washington, and locking me down penniless in Brentwood Manor for two years, and he’s a psychiatrist. Brentwood claimed I didn’t have diabetes and it was
while I was there that I finally saw an endocrinologist (diabetes specialist) on the advice of my Hog Farm friend diabetes educator in New Mexico and a neurologist who prescribed meds for the diabetic neuropathy, “burning feet”.
Are they treating me like this to cover up my diabetes case for Janssen and Johnson & Johnson, makers of Risperdal? I’m only guessing. I didn’t do anything. This is for the attorney.
7/18/2012 11:04 PM
I’m always thinking about what happened to me in ’03, with the diabetes operations, losing my
$60K/year, going to Brentwood for 2 years, and still not knowing the reason why, still speculating. Thinking about the diabetic neuropathy, “burning feet”, that happened right before Laurie took me to the meeting with Joan and her parents where they asked me to “agree” to go to a nursing home. It had not been diagnosed correctly yet. It had just started hurting while I
was walking the 3 blocks from my apartment on Courtleigh Dr. to Laurie’s at 3956 Inglewood Blvd. I called my primary care physician, Dr. Edward Riceberg, from Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where I had the colon resection for diverticulitis, to make an appointment. I said to him maybe the pain was from my chronic prostatitis, we didn’t know. He didn’t think it was very serious, not even serious enough to make an appointment and come in. Over the phone he prescribed 600mg. tablets of Ibuprofen, Advil, for the pain. The ones you get over-the-counter in the store are 200mg. He said don’t worry about it, and the pills did help a lot.
But it still bothered me in a few weeks, so I went to my chiropractor, also covered by Blue Cross. He said if your knees buckle it might be your back--go to an orthopedist. I’d been to an orthopedist for my back, which turned out fine, before, and he’d moved to Westwood and added the title “Sports Medicine” to his door for the UCLA students. Eventually I went there and he asked me some questions and said it wasn’t my back, it was diabetic neuropathy and go to physical therapy. Then the second physical therapist sent me back to Dr. Riceberg for the diabetes and my diabetes educator friend recommended an endocrinologist, neurologist, nutritionist, and Neurontin, which, along with Topomax, Cymbalta, and Alpha-Lipoic Acid, pretty much killed all of the pain completely. Now I have Lyrica instead of Neurontin and it’s even better.
But at the point where I met with Joan and Laurie’s parents, I’d just been to the chiropractor who’d said if your knees buckle it might be your back, go to an orthopedist, and I was planning my visit to the orthopedist I’d seen before. Perhaps somehow my sister, Laurie, Laurie’s parents, and Laurie told me years later that her psychiatrist, Dr. Nadel had arranged the meeting, found out what the chiropractor had said, or maybe even I told them. I was limping around with my left leg in great pain. Maybe the reason they wanted me to go in the nursing home was they considered me a cripple, like all the people in wheelchairs in there. Eventually they got me in Brentwood, which is called “assisted living”, which I don’t need, and nobody, especially doctors, ever said I ever needed, but they might have thought I did. And many times my family has demonstrated that they don’t believe in (at least my) doctors, and other legalities. Maybe they wanted to take back the $60K/year, maybe take away my inheritance, lock me down forever on Medi-Cal without me knowing the reason, that’s why I could never accept it. Maybe they really thought it was my back. Maybe they were trying to stop me from going to the orthopedist, but I refused the nursing home, did anyway, and got diagnosed with a diabetic neuropathy. Maybe after the neuropathy was diagnosed and my friend told me to go to an endocrinologist, neurologist, and nutritionist, they were trying to stop me from doing that. At Brentwood they claimed I didn’t have diabetes and Joan claimed that Dr. Riceberg told her I didn’t have diabetes, folded when I said that he couldn’t have said that and claimed the nurse told her, equally impossible. She said she talked to him and he said he never talked to her, “It was a bad connection.” As I said, maybe they were covering up for Johnson & Johnson and Janssen getting diabetes from Risperdal, the true diagnosis all the doctors said. I said even in 2004 I would sue all of them for $2 billion for attempted murder. It’s life-threatening if you don’t manage it, and everybody still tries to stop me. I could have avoided the neuropathy if I’d began managing it when I was diagnosed in 2000, but nobody told me. I was supposed to go to the Cardiac Rehab at UCLA-Santa Monica Hospital as soon as Jonathan gave me my sister-in- law’s Ford Escort, but when he never gave it to me, the nurse in charge, who worked for the
cardiologist who did my angioplasty operation there, Dr. Dave`, called up and dropped me. If I’d gone as I was supposed to they probably would have told me how to manage diabetes because it was diagnosed at the second angioplasty, and I wouldn’t have come down with the complication of a diabetic neuropathy.. Since the endocrinologist taught me the correct diet and how to blood test myself and keep the numbers low by eating right, the neuropathy has not only not gotten worse, it’s gotten better, and I haven’t gotten any more complications, which are what kill you, and the complications are caused by high blood sugar numbers. Those are caused by wrong eating. I finally learned that from the endocrinologist, Dr. Hohnichter, on Rexford St. in Beverly Hills, and I lived to tell. I’m going to study more about diabetes discrimination, in the workplace and in education, which the American Diabetes Association claims is based upon a 5-4 Bush Supreme Court decision against the Federal Government paying for the school nurses required for diabetic children to self-administer insulin injections and glucose pills in schools. Insulin, which lowers the blood sugar numbers, is expensive, although it's still covered by Anthem, and I haven't needed it yet, or Metformin or other diabetes meds, my numbers are always so low; I exercise, test daily, and keep them around 100.
[07/26/2013 I was thinking to look up the emails of attorneys to send this under Wills and Probate, Trusts and Estates, Personal Injury, and Medical Malpractice, but I just stumbled on a complete list of specialties, and all of these seem relevant: Americans with Disabilities Act, Assault, Asset Protection, Asset Recovery, Civil Litigation, Civil Practice, Civil Rights, Contested Wills, Elder Law, Estate Litigation, Family Law, Family Mediation, Guardianship and Conservatorship, Health Care, Homicide, Hospital Law, Identity Theft, Inheritance, Long Term Care, Medical Malpractice, Negligence, Nursing Home Litigation, Personal Injury, Social Security Disability, Theft, Trusts and Estates, Whistleblower Litigation, Wills and Probate, and Wrongful Death.]
Eric Abrahamson
I want to sue my family and their doctors [maybe for $2 billion] for attempted murder, false imprisonment, elder abuse, elder financial abuse, medical malpractice, psychiatric malpractice, and psychiatric and psychological torture. I want to write the story of my surgeries, around the year 2000. I was living with Laurie Senit, in her apartment at 3956 Inglewood Blvd in Venice, CA, West Los Angeles, and a junior computer science major at Cal State Northridge. She still lives there, her parents live nearby on Stoner St., and my sister and brother-in-law still live on 10575 Fontenelle Way in Bel-Air. Jonathan Aronson, my brother-in-law, is still a professor at University of Southern California. Laurie is a UCLA grad, a Bruin. I went to UCI for two years, and got into the Information and Computer Science major. My sister and I both went to Yale and my sister is Chairman of the Barbara Bush Literacy Campaign and was Assistant Chief-Of-Staff to Vice-President H.W. Bush in the Reagan White House. My mother, Lucille Abrahamson, at 29 West Clay Park, San Francisco, was President of the San Francisco School Board and San Francisco Human Rights Commissioner. My father, James Abrahamson, a restauranteur and institutional furniture salesman, died several years ago. I am still a senior computer science and pre-law major at Cal State East Bay in Hayward, and I say I may try to obtain a JD like my sister and/or a MSCS. I also work as an IT Assistant at the SEVA Foundation in Berkeley.
My brother-in-law, who had become trustee of my trust fund, told me, “If your car breaks down, you're not going to get another one,” which turned out to not be true. I had a 1992 white Toyota Tercel my mom had bought for me new and I had driven off the showroom floor, and when that broke down they bought me an old blue 1987 Geo Metro. I was driving around near the L.A. airport one day and I got chest pains so bad I went to the emergency room with my Blue Cross card. The chest pains subsided and they referred me to a cardiologist. This had happened once before, when I was living in Las Vegas, New Mexico, near Santa Fe. I drove to an ER with chest pains, they did an EKG, said my heart was OK, and it never bothered me again. I didn’t have a local doctor, I was so healthy, and I ate a lot of McDonalds. But this time I got a referral to a cardiologist, somewhere near the Howard Hughes Center. Somehow I missed the appointment, called them, and they referred me to Dr. Ravi Dave`at UCLA-Santa Monica Cardiology, probably because I had been seeing a doctor near there at the Urgent Care on Wilshire, Dr. Mark Grossman.
[3/1/2012 10:24 PM]Dr. Dave`examined me and said, “I want to do an operation right away, an angiogram and an angioplasty.”I went over to UCLA-Santa Monica Hospital and they prepped me. They wanted to do the operation in five days, but my sister Joan said wait, and they did it in three weeks. Later Dr. Dave` told me, “I said five days.” Laurie drove me to the hospital. I went in the OR and Dr. Dave`was there. They put a wire with a small video camera on it up through my thigh into my heart and made a live video of my heart beating from the inside. Dr. Dave`said, “Look at that screen, that’s a live video of your heart beating from the inside,” but I couldn’t really look at it much. That’s called the angiogram. The angioplasty is
where they put a wire through the heart artery, clean the plaque out, and sometimes put in a stent to hold it open. Dr. Dave`had my blood all over his smock. After the operation he said, “You did not have good success.” He was unable to get the wire through the artery due to the particular physiology of my heart, and did not put in a stent. He said, “We’ll treat it with medication.” I said something about President Clinton having a bypass and he said, “You will never need a bypass.”I woke up in the Intensive Care Unit, ICU. My sister Joan was there, and we joked about how Vice-President Cheney had coincidentally had heart surgery during the same week. She had been Assistant Chief-Of-Staff to Vice-President H.W. Bush in the Ronald Reagan White House and Chairman of the Barbara Bush Literacy Campaign when he was President, and lives near the Reagans’ house in Bel-Air. She said that as soon as I was recuperated they were going to give me my sister-in-law’s car, a Ford Escort.
Before the operation, my brother Robert had driven it out from Sedona, and I met with them at Joan’s house in Bel-Air. Robert showed it to me and said, “This is your car.” He also had my
$700 Sony stereo from Sears in pieces and said, “I couldn’t find any speakers.” My dad had told me to go to my stuff in storage in Las Vegas, New Mexico, near Santa Fe, where I had lived for a year as a computer science major at New Mexico Highlands University, where my friend Jeff Kline got his Masters. It’s about an hour and a half, too far, from Llano, where Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm used to be and my friends Alberto and Karen Castagna live. I was on the phone with Laurie from there one day and she said, “Come home! You can live in my apartment and go to UCLA or CSUN.” It sounded better than that dead town, so I put all the stuff in the house I was renting in storage and drove the Toyota back to L.A. My sister held back on the moving truck because when I moved to New Mexico from Bakersfield, where I had an apartment in The Springs across from CSUB (with four swimming pools and four Jacuzzis) where I lived with Laurie for several years and was a computer science major, U-Haul quoted me $600 for a big moving truck and when I got to the counter it was $1300.
So my dad told me to go to the storage in New Mexico, get what I wanted, and give the rest away. Then he called me and I had forgotten to do it. So he said, “I’ll get Robert to do it.”
He called back and said, “Give [brother-in-law] Jonathan the keys to the storage!” Jonathan gave Robert the keys, and he called me and said he was going to get my stuff, what did he want me to save. I said I wanted to drive out there and meet him and go through it myself, but he refused. I’d already been back and brought back my Mac computer, so I said my stereo, some books, etc. He must’ve left my couch, coffee table, globe, expensive $500 office desk I bought at an Irvine office supply store, $300 ergonomic swivel desk chair, all of my kitchen equipment, silverware, pots and pans, dishwashing stuff, knives, my mom had bought me Macy’s plates, bowls, cups, and glasses, placemats, napkin holders, the dining room table and four chairs, two bookshelves, a vacuum cleaner, a bureau still full of hippie stuff, lots of clothes, another computer desk and chair, a nightstand, Sony cordless phone, a bunch of art my antique store friend sold me, lots of cleaning supplies, broom, mop, bucket, etc., all the bathroom stuff, old vitamin bottles, etc.
3/11/2012 10:29 PMSo Robert had what was left of the stereo, some books in boxes, and other stuff I had told him over the phone, in the Ford Escort at my sister’s house. I had another operation, too. Around the same time I got stomach pains and Laurie took me to the emergency room at UCLA. We were triaged because it was a Saturday night, waited around all night, and
went home. It still hurt later so we went to the emergency room at UCLA-Santa Monica where Dr. Grossman practiced. They said I had diverticulitis, an infection of the colon, and a surgeon there, Dr. Schechter, almost did an emergency operation right away, a colon resection. Instead, they admitted me for five days and it improved with the Dilaudid IV drip, the pain went away, and they scheduled me for an operation later. They gave me an appointment with Dr. Schechter, in the same building as Dr. Dave`, to discuss the operation. I was ushered from the waiting room into the consultation room but for some reason I didn’t meet with him, maybe he was called away on an emergency and they rescheduled. Maybe there was something about all the Latino families in the waiting room or the messiness of the consultation room—it looked like they had just done a surgery in there and not cleaned it up yet—but I had a negative feeling about the whole place and I thought about looking for a “better” doctor to do the operation. In retrospect, all of those feelings came from other patients and the nurses—had I met with Dr. Schechter in his office as is usual in a doctor’s appointment it is likely I would have had positive feelings about him as I had had up until then.
I was driving around near the Beverly Center Mall where our friends had an apartment in Beverly Hills and I saw a billboard advertising Cedars-Sinai Hospital, with a doctors’ referral number 1-800-CEDARS1. All I knew was that UCLA was rated the #1 hospital in L.A. and #5 west of the Mississippi and Cedars-Sinai was #2 in L.A. I didn’t really know anything, I just called it, said, “colo-rectal surgeon”, and they referred me to Dr. Gary Hoffman on Canon and Brighton in Beverly Hills. It’s across from Smith and Hawken.He said I had to have a primary care from Cedars, too, why not use Dr. Edward Riceberg downstairs, so I did, for the colon resection.
After the angioplasty I had an appointment with Dr. Grossman and he gave me a bottle of nitroglycerin and said, “If you get chest pains, take one, put it under your tongue, wait 5 minutes, if you still have chest pains take another one, wait 5 minutes, if you still have chest pains, take another one, wait 5 minutes, if you still have chest pains, go to the nearest emergency room.”
The cardiologist, Dr. Dave`, made plans for me to attend cardiac rehabilitation at the hospital and put me on a list of heart meds: Plavix, Lipitor, Toprol XL, Benzepril, Ecotrin 81mg. Aspirin, and Isosorbide.
So a week or two after I was out of the hospital and back home with Laurie we went out to see a friend of hers’ band play at the Canyon Club in Agoura Hills, Joel and Highw a y 61 Revisited, the Bob Dylan Tribute.We were walking around in the parking lot before it started and I thought I had enough of a chest pain to take 3 nitroglycerins. Knowing what I know now if I just had found a quiet place and relaxed for a few minutes, I probably wouldn’t have needed to take any nitroglycerin, the chest pains would have subsided on their own, and I would have fine. But this was the first time. So we went back inside and asked the band to call an ambulance.
They took me to the West Hills Hospital in the Valley. I asked the emergency room doctor if my old case of chronic prostatitis could have caused the heart disease and he said it might have
contributed to it. The chest pains had soon gone away on their own, but they decided to do another angiogram and angioplasty. This one, too, was unsuccessful, for the same reason, and I was in the hospital for a few days. However, the doctor came to me and said, “When we did your blood test we found out you had diabetes,” which was quite shocking. Jerry Garcia had died of a diabetic heart attack. Later someone confirmed that my heart problems (coronary artery disease) were complications of diabetes, and that the diabetes had been a side effect of Risperdal. Heart disease and diabetes is called metabolic syndrome. I was in denial about the diabetes for a long time; I couldn’t face it.
He gave me a bottle of Avandia for diabetes and I never took it. I was afraid that someone would see it. That is virtually the only time I have ever been non-compliant about meds. I was just in such shock about learning I had such a terrible disease. Later I found out that Laurie has diabetes, too, from Seroquel. You also get it from Zyprexa. I don’t know if it’s what we ate.
I told Dr. Riceberg and he said, “It’s a mild case, you don’t need insulin. We’ll treat it with diet.” He also said, “You can work and live independently,” and, “You will live twenty or thirty more years.”
Dr. Dave` had scheduled me for the cardiac rehabilitation at the hospital, and my sister was going to give me the car. I went over to the cardiac rehab, had the tour, and talked to the head nurse, who worked with Dr. Dave`. It took three times a week for several months, early in the morning. They teach you about exercise, diet, and taking your meds. I told her that I didn’t want to take the bus over three times a week, that my family was giving me a car imminently, and we agreed that I would call her when I got the car.
Joel, the band leader, Laurie’s friend, had told me when I got home, “You’d better get yourself a cell phone,” in case I ever had to call 911 again for taking nitroglycerin for chest pains, so I did. I was talking to my brother-in-law Jonathan from Laurie’s apartment and he was telling me to give up the cell phone because I couldn’t afford it. Joan, my sister, had been telling me that she
had been talking to my doctors and following my progress through the medical system and it was only later that I questioned this when Dr. Riceberg said he never talked to her, “It was a bad connection.” So I thought he knew I needed the phone to call an ambulance in case I took nitro for chest pains in an emergency and he was just being cruel in his normal self and I argued with him to keep the phone, thinking my life is at stake.I should have explained why I needed the phone even if I thought he already knew and I was doing it again. He may not have known. He said, “The phone or the car.” Later he said, “You got the phone.” They never did give me the car. He would keep saying, “Next week,” and then putting it off again. Then he said, “I’ll give you the car next week if you don’t overdraw your bank account.”
He had a joint checking account at the Brentwood Bank of America with Joan and me; I had checks and an ATM debit card. Every week he would put in $300 from the savings account he and Joan had in the same bank, and one in West Hollywood.They were called trustees of my trust fund, which was first $40,000/yr. and then $60,000/yr. My mom would send them the money from San Francisco.
As luck would have it, that week, Laurie was in hurry to go out to dinner, and said, “Don’t wait
to count the money,” and we overdrew the $300/wk.—no car. I saw Jonathan driving it himself later.I forgot to call the nurse-I never knew when I was going to get the car, I was waiting for
it forever and I never did get it-and she called and said, “You didn’t call me. I’m canceling you.”
I got the diabetic neuropathy complication a year later and now I think that maybe if I’d attended the cardiac rehab as I was supposed to, they’d have taught me to manage the diabetes which I learned a year after that from the endocrinologist (diabetes specialist), and avoided the rest of the complications, if Jonathan and Joan had given me the car as promised.
Laurie got a job at the UCLA Chabad House on Gayley as a telemarketer. She went down to the Jewish Federation Super Sunday phone telethon and raised thousands of dollars—she just has a knack for that. Since I had no car, I used to ride to work with her and hang around, and her boss, Daryn Edelman, hired me, too. I rented a new Ford Focus from Budget Rental Cars. But I tapped the guy in front of me in a traffic jam on the I-10 and I didn’t have insurance. I just didn’t think of it, so my license was suspended for a year. Joan said, “If you’re caught driving without a license they’ll impound your car and if they put you in jail, I won’t get you out,” and she’s a lawyer. So I got fired from Chabad because I argued with Daryn how if Rabbi Schneerson was the Messiah, why is nothing changed? and why mistreat the Palestinians?
When I had to have two emergency (non-elective) operations (colon resection and angioplasty) I withdrew from CSUN in good standing. The only thing I had to do was the final project for a computer science course for Dr. Peter Smith, who was also my advisor. I went out to my storage in Las Vegas, New Mexico and brought back my Mac to do it. But a day or so before it was due, near Christmas, the computer actually blew up while I was working on the project, started smoking I was working so hard. I emailed Dr. Smith on Laurie’s computer but I had run out of extensions and he said he had to disqualify me, but I could appeal to the Dean of Engineering. I did that and was immediately reinstated, all I had to do was reapply. I did that and was readmitted, but somehow I missed the registration date and applied again and was again readmitted. My brother had said to me once at my sister’s house: “Our parents want you to stop going to Grateful Dead shows. They don’t like the acid.” I refused; I said I was 54 and I did what I wanted. I didn’t know what they meant. There was no Grateful Dead anymore. Phil Lesh and Friends and Ratdog with Bobby Weir came through town once in a while. I knew-had actually lived with-people that had worked on the crew for the Grateful Dead, been Grateful Dead roadies, probably in the Grateful Dead Family, rock royalty, and I wasn’t going to listen to my square family because they were responding to some pan they heard. They used to like it.
They probably meant the local Grateful Dead tribute band scene. When Dr. Shadoan was trying to talk me into going to UCI I said, “I don’t want to take my dad’s money because he’ll try to tellme what to do.” Dr. Shadoan said: “You can take your parents’ money and you don’t have to do what they say.”
This was something I got into after the operations to speed my recovery. I wasn’t really going to the big shows, just the local tributes, but some friends of mine from their were trying to convince me, showing me photos from the Internet where they ran into the four original Dead
members in an airport on the way to a show and got their picture taken with them. That was just
too much to resist. I was talking on the phone with Richie, the Hog Farmer who was on the Grateful Dead Crew whose wife worked in the Grateful Dead office near their apartment in San Rafael that I met at Woodstock, and I said, “I stopped going to Grateful Dead shows when Jerry died,” and he said, “So did I.”
As I said, I was admitted to CSUN for that Fall, 2003. But I had been talking to a friend of mine for a long time about visiting her in Washington State again in April and I had some idea she might let me stay up there and I could invite Laurie up and she might want to stay. Somehow my family got wind of this. I put it on the Internet somewhere, saying maybe I’d get a job up there and return the $60,000/yr. to my family except for meds, medical bills, and Blue Cross PPO premiums. It’s not unheard of for computers to be hacked and wiretapped. Later this person had to move because her landlord would not keep renting it after 3 years, grandkids and all.
That was just the decision I made; hindsight is 20/20. The previous year I had gone to the Rainbow Gathering with a friend of mine from Bakersfield, so we went this year. A couple came up to me and the woman said, “His parents tried to commit him.” He said, “I just told the judge that I was happy living in a tent by the river and he let me go.”
I need to rewind a few years. I moved to Bakersfield to go to CSUB from Irvine in 1989. Laurie moved in in 1990. In 1992, my mother said, “We’re going to send you and Laurie to Hawaii for two weeks, pick out a hotel!” When we got back we went to see my parents and I told my mom, “I proposed to Laurie on the beach in Kona,” and she said, “Tell your father.” We were staying in the Kona Hilton. My dad said, “Don’t marry Laurie. I sold my restaurants to
Mama’s, they went bankrupt and didn’t pay, we sued them, went to court, and the judge fined me
$160,000. They wanted me to declare bankruptcy. Don’t marry Laurie, I can’t afford her.” My brother said later, “Dad’s business partner, Bill Munro, cooked the books, the judge saw them and that’s why he fined them.”
Then skip ahead to when I was living with Laurie in her apartment in Venice, and my parents came down to visit my sister. I went over, they said let’s go out to lunch in Joan’s car, and we went to Dr. Lisa Fine, a psychiatrist at Edelman Center, L.A. County Mental Health where they had an appointment for me. I should have refused and left, but instead I agreed to start seeing Dr. Fine and did regularly about every 2 weeks for about 5 years. Her phone number was 310-966-6500 and she specialized in deconverting/deprogramming ex-Christians. Before Joan had asked me to find a psychiatrist and I found Dr. Robert Newport online from Bruce Eisner and the Island Group online, a psychedelic advocacy group. Dr. Newport used LSD and ayahuasca therapy.
He got in a fight with my sister, they said about his rates being too high, and she said he had lost his medical license for prescribing meds without seeing the patient, which he did with me at the end. He first gave me the Risperdal (a long time after Dr. Perelli-Minetti in Bakersfield, when it first came out.) I called him later and he said, “Has your sister let up on you yet? I’m not a psychiatrist any more, I’m a painter.”
Then my dad said, “If you go on SSI, I’ll get you a new car.” That was supposed to be my sister- in-law’s Ford Escort, except they never gave it to me. Dr. Fine and a social worker and another “expert” there were going to fill out everything, and Joan was there. The expert lady said,
“Looted the bank account and put his things in the street,” portentious. They asked if I’d make Joan the payee, send the money to her; Joan said, “we don’t know where you’ll be”.
My parents asked me to see Dr. Auerbach, their psychiatrist, when I was a senior in high school. I told him I’d gotten in to Yale, Stanford, Dartmouth, Princeton, Brown, Penn, and UCSC and he suggested, “Yale, because it’s farther away from your dad.” I was at the Hog Farm in Llano, NM, and they said to go to this same guy to get a note to get out of the draft, and he wrote “paranoid schizophrenic”, but I have read the diagnostic criteria for that disease and I am sure I don’t have it. I talked to psychiatrist Dr. Moshe Forman from UCSF-Langley-Porter shortly afterwards, who I met at the House of Love and Prayer, in his office at Parnassus, and he stated, “You do not have schizophrenia.”
I went to Lowell High School in S.F., graduated in 1967, went to Yale University, and of course my parents supported me there. Then I went to Friends World College in Westbury, Long Island for semester, went on a project in Manhattan the next semester, went to the Woodstock Music Festival, and never went back. I went to live in New Mexico with the Woodstock Security, Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm, and for a while my parents didn't support me. I got on Tommy's Bus to be on the crew for the Indian Creek Pop Festival in San Luis Obispo with the Jefferson Starship right after Altamont which was canceled because of that. Since I was planning to visit my parents after the show Steve got a ride for us from this place in Topanga Canyon in L.A. where the Wavy Gravy and the whole Hog Farm was spending Christmas to San Francisco and I dropped in on my parents. They convinced me to stay for a few days. I was going to leave after New Years, but that day I went to their doctor, Dr. Arthur Cerf at Mt. Zion, and he wanted me in the hospital for pneumonia. I refused and he let me stay at my parents’ house for 3 months or until he said, which he never did. Steve went back to New Mexico with Charlene and I followed 3 months later on the Greyhound, the pneumonia had cleared up in 2 weeks with Dr. Cerf's penicillin, but I came back to California to see a Vassar-UCSC girl I'd met who dumped me and left me at my parents', who got me to promise to call them weekly. I went with Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach's House of Love and Prayer to the Boulder, Colorado Holy Man Jam and a Texan Christian hippie girl ex of mine, Strawberry, Cynthia Harrington, I'd met at the Dallas Pop Festival after Woodstock who’d gotten me backstage at Led Zeppelin got us on the Hog Farm bus Blunderbus to New Mexico somehow.
Then she went back to Texas and I was hanging out at Llano where they'd made me Head of Household by seniority, so I didn't have to do any work any more, just supervise. The real, inner circle Hog Farmers came through making their movie with B.B. King and Alice Cooper, Medicine Ball Caravan, filmed us, and later cut us out and left us on the cutting room floor. Ditto for Kris Kristofferson's movie, Cisco Pike.
I had to call my dad every week. He mailed me my draft notice Friends World College had mailed him. I'd had a 2-S student deferment there (and at Yale) that had expired when I didn't go back. It said, "Greetings...." you're drafted, report for a physical, and then they ship you to Vietnam. It was just a joke. I wrote, "No Such Person At This Address" and put it back in the mail box. They never would have found me. There were no cops up there. Nobody would have told anybody where I was, even assuming they would have looked, which I doubt was their practice. The only law enforcement I'd ever seen was once, a highway patrol who was there for 20 minutes, said he was looking for Linda Kasabian, the Manson killer, heard she might be living in one of those communes in New Mexico. We hadn't seen her or heard of her.
My dad wanted me to go to his psychiatrist in San Francisco, Dr. Alfred Auerbach and get a note to get out of the draft. If I'd known the full implications of his request, I'd have firmly refused, but I didn't. He said, "Just this one thing is all I ask." He wasn't supporting me with one dime. So he persuaded me; he was a salesman. A friend of mine, Joe Sims, who brought another friend, Alberto Castagna, from the East Coast was going and he agreed to take me New Years Day, 1971, with another couple, and then on that day a couple more, Charlene and her daughter, jumped in and we drove to S.F. Auerbach saw me at 450 S,utter for half an hour, no follow-up, no meds, no nothing, just pick up the note at the nurse’s apartment downtown and take it to the appointment at the Oakland Induction Center. On the way I looked at the note and it said "paranoid schizophrenia". They said, "Show it to the Army psychiatrist". He said, "You're very, very sick." I just laughed because I knew I wasn't. Two weeks later I received in the mail: "4-F, Unfit For Military Duty". Draft resistance was widespread at that point. This was all my dad's and Dr. Auerbach's idea. People were shooting themselves in the foot, wearing dresses to the draft physical, and running away to Canada. In 1976, after the fall of Saigon in 1975, Republican President Ford officially pardoned all the wartime draft resisters, gave them amnesty, and allowed them to legally return home from Canada. The draft, or SSS, or Selective Service System, was so unpopular that it was abolished and never reinstated; to this day we still have an all-volunteer military. [7/14/2012 Some guy suggested recently, “Ask the President for an honorable discharge!” I should just copy this page into the contact page at whitehouse.gov, what can it hurt? and add my sister Joan Abrahamson, was a White House Fellow, Asst. Chief-of-Staff to V.P. H.W. Bush, and Chairman of the Barbara Bush Literacy Campaign, fwiw.]
I was at my mom’s house, a missionary took me to a Christian house where I accepted Christ, I went home, and my sister said, “Dr. Bradman is on the phone.” Dr. Bradman is Dr. Auerbach’s partner. He said, “Do you want to go to a mental hospital?” I didn’t know what that was, and said, “Yes,” and went to Ross General Hospital for 3 months, and he diagnosed me with acute anxiety reaction. He didn’t say for worrying about going to hell. The Christians picked me up again, and I spent 3 years as a music minister in nondenominational neo-Pentecostal Lighthouse Temple in Colorado Springs until my parents came out and took me to Dr. Walsh with the same question, “Do you want to go to a mental hospital?” I wished I’d told Dr. Bradman, “No,” and Pastor Dunbar had preached not to go, “They’ll make you lose your faith,” so I said, “No,” and I’ve never seen him again. But somehow they got me in Belmont Psychiatric Center when I passed by there on my way from the same Christian house as 3 years before where they’d agreed to pay to let me stay.I’d already lost my faith through Walsh’s process. Dr. Caulfield had me tested by a psychologist and said, “He says you’re a schizophrenic,” but I suppose it’s possible they could make a mistake in favor of the first misdiagnosis to get out of the draft. You don’t find out until later how life-destroying the stigma of these diagnoses are. I had a lawyer from Vincent Hallinan's (Kesey's old attorney) office, Lloyd Crenna, and they let me go back to New Mexico in a month and Jeff Kline gave me a house. Crenna asked me when I was leaving for New Mexico if I wanted to sue my parents but some of the Hog Farmers had convinced me to try to reconcile with them at that time. First I went back to where the Hog Farm used to be, then to the Castagnas, then back to Lighthouse Temple.
Much later, I got a job as a timekeeper for Cleveland Wrecking Co. at SFO and my dad bought me a new Nissan Sentra. I drove it out to the Michigan Rainbow Gathering and my mom said
on the phone, “Please go see Dr. Shadoan,” so I did when I got back. He, too, had me tested by a psychologist and they said, “schizophrenic”. I didn’t know there was anything bad about it then. Dr. Shadoan said: “I have a schizophrenic patient that works in a bank and is fine, although he still hears voices, they don’t bother him,” so they believed in recovery then. That’s when I first started on meds. He got me to go to UCI and study computer science and he got my dad to give me $100,000/yr; if you count the credit cards, $120,000/yr., including a car and an apartment in the graduate student housing. He called me “a success story”. Laurie is diagnosed as schizophrenic, and all of her family are really mean to her. I guess they figure, the worse she gets, the more money they make from the insurance. They don’t even care if the doctors blame them. The guy who started Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett, was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and the band completely ostracized him, wrote horrible mean songs about him, and he died young in his early ‘60’s, of diabetes. In the days I went to Dr. Shadoan, a lot of doctors didn’t believe that drugs caused schizophrenia or any mental illness, and the evidence was all the successful rich and famous rock stars, etc. I saw an article recently, a study that mental patients, in general, die 25 years earlier. I would guess that is from something else that I read, that they get inferior medical treatment. [07/23/2013 I saw another study recently where mental patients are the victims of violent crimes nearly three times the average for normal people.] That is why I got the Anthem. Every medical condition I have was caused by the mental health system. I read in a nursing book in a textbook store that psychiatric institutions are designed to be like prisons--punishment. That’s why I’ve learned to always tell them no. It was OK to be a preacher in a church. In the Mind Freedom newsletter, Dr. Thomas Szasz wrote that psychiatrists will try to come back at people years later, and they may even be married and working, and try to rehospitalize them for the insurance money. Or, one mental health advocate told me, “For social control and to suppress dissent.” I think they may use anything the patient is doing as a reason.
Something else I read is that psychiatric diagnoses are not accurate and that is why the same person can receive so many different ones. The doctors and the families cash in on each one and the different meds and therapies paid for by the insurances.For the SSI, Dr. Fine wrote, “schizoaffective disorder”; I don’t know what that is. To skip ahead, when I was going to Pete Linnett and the Life Adjustment Team, my friend Mike Bernath the clinical psychologist in practice in Lancaster said, “They’re trying to get a Dual Diagnosis, with Substance Abuse, which is bad.” Since he told me, they were never able to pin me with Substance Abuse or Dual Diagnosis. I told him about the first diagnosis, which I have just explained, that my parents and Dr. Auerbach were just trying to get me out of the draft when I was living on the Hog Farm. People were shooting themselves in the foot, wearing dresses to the draft physical, and running away to Canada. President Ford pardoned them all in 1975, gave them amnesty, and abolished the Selective Service, the draft, it was so unpopular. Arlo Guthrie had a whole album about a draft physical story, “Alice’s Restaurant”, where he tells the induction sergeant, “I wanna kill!” and they let him out. He’s pretending he’s too crazy to serve. Mike said, “Go to a clinical psychologist and get retested and rediagnosed.” That is next on my list. I told that to both psychiatrists Drs. Fine and Shadoan and they agreed.
I said to them, “I want to be diagnosed sane, OK, well, healthy, fine, cured, normal, and with a clean bill of health.” Dr. Shadoan said something about “depression.” I said, “I’ve never been
depressed a day in my life.” He said, “How about anxiety?” I said, “I don’t have anxiety either.” I guess they need something they can charge the insurance company, like smoking cessation or weight loss.
I said all that to psychiatrist Dr. Bill Stubbeman, the one they forced me to see, and when they forced me into the board-and-care, Joan handed them a letter from him saying only: “paranoid schizophrenia”, exactly the thing from Dr. Auerbach I had asked him to take away, if he could. I have not had any contact with him yet since then.[7/17/2012I thought after writing this that maybe he was writing the second half of a “Dual Diagnosis” (which I’ve never seen, if it exists), that goes after the “Substance Abuse”.]
Back to the summer of 2003, I was home from the Rainbow Gathering.I was getting my license back soon and my plan was to rent another Budget Rental Car and drive it up to Washington to my friend’s and see if I could work it out to move up there and maybe get Laurie to come. I was just sick of L.A.This was just two years after 9/11, the Twin Towers, and things there were still a mess. [7/14/2012 I’m adding that before the Gathering Dr. Fine was talking about “weaning you off the meds” and there I somehow slept without the Ativan she gave me for a sleeping pill every night. When I got back I missed an appointment and for some reason just decided, since I thought I was leaving for Washington State in a week or two, not to make another appointment and to just stop all 3 meds on my own, the sleeping pill, the Risperdal, and an anti-depressent, Desyryl. Nobody told me I shouldn’t; she said she was going to do just that. I see now that really you’re supposed to let the doctor do it, and taper you off. I was correct that she didn’t care, though. When my family finally made me go back to her and take those meds again she took me off them again! She had already told me to stop them.] So Laurie and I were out driving around one day and she said, “Your sister and brother- in-law are meeting us for lunch at La Tostada [I forget the name of the Mexican restaurant by the Museum of Flight in Santa Monica].” Jonathan wasn’t there, but Laurie’s parents were. She told me years later that her psychiatrist, Dr. Nadel, who has retired, set up this meeting. Joan said, “Do you agree to go to a nursing home?” I said no, they poured on the pressure, I said yes,they left, I firmly determined, no, I was pressured, coerced. Of course not, that’s where terminal patients go to die. Every day there are headlines about nursing home abuses. My doctor said I was healthy. At the meeting, I asked Joan what she was thinking, and she said, “I went to your apartment and the door was open, I let myself in, and it was messy.” I said, “My leg has been hurting.” It was later diagnosed as a diabetic neuropathy, “burning feet”, a complication of diabetes. At that point I had only been to the chiropractor, who had said, “If your knees buckle, it might be your back. Go to an orthopedist (sports medicine).” Later I told that to a clinical psychologist I met who said, “It’s your room, you have a right to be messy.” I had also called Dr. Riceberg for an appointment for the painful leg and he had spoken with me on the phone and didn’t think I needed an appointment and ordered 600mg. prescription Advil (over-the-counter is 200mg.) over the phone. Later I went to [I can find the name], the orthopedist who had X- rayed my back when the couch threw it out who had moved from Century City to Westwood and put “Sports Medicine” on the plate glass door and he said it wasn’t my back and diagnosed it as a diabetic neuropathy and sent me to physical therapy. A new physical therapist at Beverly Hills Physical Therapy (way too ritzy for what I needed) came in and said, “Diabetic neuropathy shouldn't be treated by physical therapy but by the person treating the diabetes,” and sent me
back to the person treating the diabetes, Dr. Riceberg, and I called my friend the diabetes educator and she said 1) Get referred to a neurologist 2) Ask for Neurontin 3) A diabetes specialist (endocrinologist) 4) A nutritionist. Since learning to manage diabetes I haven’t had any more complications. Laurie and I had volunteered at a nursing home one day to sing with them and help them plant flowers—I was 54! Also, her friend gave Laurie $10 to take her friend’s mother from her room in a nursing home across the street from Sony Studios to the doctor and we went in there and picked her up, not for me! My friend the social worker called it being “pushed in a corner in a wheelchair”. I am still trying to guess the reason, I don’t know why.
Right after 9/11, Laurie saw on TV people upset at the Twin Towers being counseled and she called up her psychiatrist, Dr. Nadel, and got the substitute,[7/14/2012 She has since told me Dr. Holstein from Kaiser on La Cienega] who had her go to the Kaiser mental hospital downtown in Chinatown. Joan had asked me to see Dr. Nadel along with Laurie and I had gone once, talked to her for about 10 minutes, didn’t like it, and never went back. I thought that Laurie was OK, she’d never been in a mental hospital, I wanted her home, so I went down there and brought her home. I’ve been going to an MFCC here, Barbara Gabriel, and I said maybe the reason Dr. Nadel secretly arranged all this (there’s more) is retaliation for getting Laurie out of there and this therapist thinks I may be right. [7/14/2012 Another later thought, maybe they were trying to hinder me from going to the orthopedist for the correct diagnosis and later to the neurologist for treatment and the endocrinologist to learn to manage diabetes and prevent such devastating complications. Also, I read an article about diabetes deaths from Zyprexa being covered up because the Bushes had lots of stock in Eli Lilly and thought it was possible that was true of Johnson & Johnson and their subsidiary Janssen, who have not settled diabetic personal class action suits yet as have Lilly and Astra-Zeneca for Seroquel. And my sister was an employee of the H.W. Bush White House. I’m just guessing. I’m not even sure whether or not my brother- in-law is in the CIA, which was once run by H.W. My mother just said once, “Is Jonathan in the CIA?” That’s just how it feels sometimes.]So I resented a lot Joan saying , “Do you agree to go to a nursing home?” and forcing me to reply, “Yes”. So I decided not only not to listen to her any more, but not to listen to or submit to a n y authority, to rebel against eve r y bo d y. I thought then I’d be safe, and maybe I would have, but I should have run for a lawyer. I went over to Joan and Jonathan’s house and he said, “You have to go back to Dr. Fine and take all those meds or we’ll cut off the $60,000/yr.” I thought about doing it. At the end Joan said, “And go look at the nursing home, we have to see about getting SSI to pay for it,” and I thought, “They’ll want me to go to a nursing home and cut off the money even if I do go to Dr. Fine,” so I didn’t go back to Dr. Fine. They were really on their high horse since W. Bush had gotten elected since she was Asst. Chief-of-Staff to his dad, H.W. Bush, when he was V.P. and Chairman of the Barbara Bush Literacy Campaign when H.W. was President, and Jonathan is on the Council of Foreign Relations with Cheney and my mom suspects C.I.A. They expected obedience now, but to me they were still the same, I guess.At the Rainbow Gathering I slept without the sleeping pills, one of the 3 meds from Dr. Fine, and when I got home I missed an appointment and then decided to quit the meds, just like that. She had been saying she was going to wean me off of the meds. When I went back later she took me off of all of the meds and told me, “Don’t come back,” anyway.
Awhile later Joan showed up in my apartment with a card:
Pete Linnett
Psychiatric Social Worker
CEO
Life Adjustment Team Psychiatric Rehabilitation “Learn To Live Well”
11936 W. Jefferson Blvd., #B Culver City, CA 90230
310-572-7000
I said, correctly, for once, “No! No way,” and that was that. A few weeks later, Laurie and Pete show up at the door, and Pete comes barging in uninvited. Oh yeah, before all this started, Eric Asa-Dorian, a psychologist from the Life Adjustment Team, had come over to Laurie’s when I was living there, ostensibly to help her “make it neater”. He claimed he was a Deadhead, which is not true, his aim is to entrap Deadheads.Back to Pete and Laurie, they wanted me to go with them to the office, and I refused, I was cooking dinner. He insulted my Fender Stratocaster sitting there and left. I had never invited him in, and he had somehow gotten my partner to bring him over. She later told me her psychiatrist set this up. Then two weeks later, I was at her apartment two blocks away and she said, “Let’s go out for breakfast,” a totally normal thing for her to say. Instead, she took me to Pete’s office where they had an appointment. I could/should have walked around the corner and taken a bus. Eric Asa-Dorian was on the sidewalk, bragging with one of his phony stories about how he had two front-row seats to the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young concert. I went in and met with Pete anyway, as I had with Dr. Fine with the same set-up, and agreed to meet with him regularly, to my doom, as the guy is Satan.
He has all these statues of motorcycles that are supposed to be expensive on his desk. Once he said that Hells Angels are “loyal”. I think Life Adjustment Team is some kind of drug rehab, but I only came to realize this years later. They have pictures of rock stars dead from drugs on the wall, except for one living one, Carlos Santana. The dead ones are like Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and John Cipollina. That’s in his brother, Chris’s office, and he finally showed me his card: Clinical Alcohol and Drug Counselor. He’d been asking me, “Did you ever take acid?” playing Grateful Dead tapes and saying, “The Hells Angels have methamphetamine labs.” Once I saw the card, I never spoke to him again. They bought me a Sprint cell phone, Comcast Broadband, and left some of those and pharmacy bills unpaid. They said if I went back to Dr. Fine and took the meds they’d buy me a new car and pick it out: a 2006 Toyota Prius hybrid, blue, w/ GPS navigation & 6-disc CD player. I even went down to Santa Monica Toyota and test drove one for a few blocks, and they were completely deceiving me. Pete said, “They want me to put you in a board-and-care home.” On the National Association of Social Workers website it lists “force, fraud, coercion, deceit” as violations of their Code of Ethics and basis for filing of a complaint and Request for Professional Review against a member social worker where they can be disciplined and sanctioned.
Once, in 1985, Richie from the Hog Farm said he’d called my parents and they’d pay for me to stay in a board-and-care home on Fairview in Berkeley near the old Hog Farm where Wavy
Gravy’s brother-in-law, Brook Beecher, stayed, and I did it, for a short time. I had a car, I never spoke to the psychiatrist, and still it was horrible. Brook was really screwed up, and they beat him constantly. It was a joke on me. I caught something there, had to see my parents’ doctor and he had an idea for a job my dad could get me. Then later Dr. Shadoan had me stay in a board-and-care in the Haight with a tubercular old man I couldn’t stand and I had a car so I left & went on a Dead tour to the East Coast. When I got back I was in the worst of the three with murderers and car thieves so I got out ASAP and got my own apartment. I swore I’d never do that again. I wish they’d take no for an answer instead of that scam. When they signed me up for SSI to pay for that 3rd dump somebody told me Wavy Gravy was on SSI; that was in 1985. Obviously that board-and-care and SSI stuff was just hippies playing jokes. Before that last board-and-care Dr. Shadoan had a social worker take me to look at it and they said I had to look at it first and I had to say I was sure I liked it—it was completely voluntary. So I thought the process would still be the same in Los Angeles in 2003. After I'd been there awhile and found out what it was really like I hated it, got out as fast as I could, and promised never again, no matter what. The black lady who owned it would grab almost all of the $600 SSI each month and give me a few dollars, the black guy who was out of San Quentin for murder would threaten to murder me right there on the stairs unless I bought one of his stolen watches, my roommate had been in Napa State Hospital he said for stealing a car, I had to chain my TV to the bed and get a locked footlocker and chain that to the bed too because there were no locks on any room or the front door either and they would steal anything that wasn't locked down.
At Pete's they'd give me my $300/`mo. $50 on MWF & take me to the supermarket to spend the other $150 so I wouldn’t buy drugs and sign each time I got the $50. Once I ran out of meds on a Wed. and was waiting for Fri. to get the money and go to the pharmacy and I didn’t take meds for 2 days. On Fri. I got the money and on the way to the pharmacy I fell down at the bus stop, called 911, went to the ER in an ambulance, and they told me it was from not taking Toprol XL for 2 days. Later I found out that you can get a heart attack from not taking Toprol XL for one day. These guys are supposed to be some kind of medical personnel and they almost killed me, Pete. I told them that and they responded it was psychological, and that my cardiologist, Dr. Ravi Dave`, UCLA Cardiology, was some kind of spiritual guru quack. Missing those pills for just two days caused me to develop some kind of permanent palpitations. In the following days I went to the ER four times and to the cardiologist twice. Once I went to the ER on the way to the cardiologist, with the sensation I was dying. The Dx said “Tachycardia” and under that that includes “fear of impending death”. It said, “Tachycardia, palpitations, anxiety.”Pete said the palpitations were caused by anxiety, not by missing the Toprol XL, and he wanted me to see psychiatrist Dr. Bill Stubbeman, “who specializes in palpitations and anxiety” and not Dr. Fine. The ER nurse had already told me it was caused by missing the Toprol, and as soon as I took it I was much better, but Pete said she was wrong. Dr. Dave` may have chewed him out on the phone for me missing the meds, because he insulted Dr. Dave` to Dr. Stubbeman in front of me: “He has this doctor called Dr.Dave [pronouncing Dave with a long “a”, like the proper name]”
When he picked me up at Dr. Dave`s he was playing a tape by Deepak Chopra, also an East Indian, and he insulted Ram Dass, a Hindu name. At that time W. Bush appointed for the new Surgeon-General an anti-gay cardiologist. When Obama came in he appointed Sanjay Gupta, an East Indian like Dr. Dave`--I actually believed the whole scandal went all the way to the White
House. It’s a true, true saying: “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Dr. Dave` had me wear a holter, a device that sends your EKG to him over the phone, 2 weeks to make sure they weren’t bad palpitations; he never said they were psychological. Dr. Stubbeman is also a psychiatrist for drug addicts—he has pictures that looks like ships loading heroin in Turkish ports. He had long hair and looked a little like an early Bobby Weir, but he’s not cool at all.
[Added 4/6/2012 3:10 AM] I tried to refuse to be coerced into going to Dr. Stubbeman. They told me if I didn’t go they would cut off the $60,000/year and if I went they’d give me the car and then I went and they cut it off anyway. Even my dad got on the phone and said, “If you don’t go to Dr. Stubbeman the $60,000 will dry up.” I researched other types of therapy and asked Pete if I could go to Primal Therapy and he refused, and then I asked him if I could still go back to Dr. Fine and he bellowed: “You cannot go back to Dr. Fine!!” I called Little Richie from the Hog Farm where he was living with Andrea working in the Grateful Dead office in San Rafael and he said, “What’s wrong?” but I didn’t want to tell him on the phone and I had written something up so I asked him if I could email it to him and he didn’t have an email so I let it go. Then I called Alberto and Karen but they were busy so I called Jeff Kline and read it to him. He said, “Go to the psychiatrist. Tell him you want to lose weight or you want your dick to be harder when you fuck your girlfriend. Be funny. You’ll get your money and everything will be fine,” so I did.
[7/14/2012 A later thought: Maybe they’re trying to cover-up for Johnson & Johnson and the Risperdal. I wrote some of this to then-CA Attorney General Jerry Brown and his website came up with some cases labeled “Medicaid Fraud and Elder Abuse”. Just a few months ago the State of Arkansas settled for $2.2 billion with Johnson & Johnson and their subsidiary Janssen (a fraction of some $350 billion) for exactly Medicaid Fraud and Elder Abuse for concealing evidence of diabetes in selling it to their Medicaid program.I found a book about “psychiatric rehabilitation” at the CSUEB textbook store that explains that is where mental patients go after the hospital, and Laurie was at the Life Adjustment Team and a place nearby called SHARE (Self-Help and Recovery Exchange) that had AA and NA, and s h e, not me, had just come out of the Kaiser mental hospital. She never took any drugs, that I knew of. Maybe they were implying that the diabetes was caused by drugs, like Jerry Garcia, who died of a diabetic heart attack in a drug rehab, and not by the Risperdal, which many doctors have said, and not one has ever said, nor have I ever read, of a link between diabetes and drugs. Joan said she talked to my primary care, Dr. Riceberg, and he said they never did, “It was a bad connection.” She said, “Dr. Riceberg says you don’t have diabetes.” When I questioned that because it was impossible, she said, “The nurse told me,” and when I questioned that for the same reason, she dropped it.
At Brentwood Manor, they made a big deal about not putting the diabetes red spot on my place and making me eat the sugar ice cream instead of the sugar-free ice cream, and the #3 in charge nurse said several times, “You don’t have diabetes,” thinking she could intimidate and cower me into believing that, nurse on Yalie. I went to endocrinologist Dr. Hohnichter on Rexford in Beverly Hills anyway, learned to manage the diabetes, and no more complications, which are what kill you. The cardiologist up here, a very good one from UCSF-Mission Bay, Dr. Nelson Schiller: “Metabolic syndrome (diabetes and heart disease) from Risperdal.” UCSF Cardiology is #6 in the country in U.S. News and World Report rankings.
I wasn’t taking any drugs; I had just had three surgeries. I called Bruce Margolin, the famous NORML lawyer who I’d met at Timothy Leary’s house in Beverly Hills (his client) when he was running for State Senate. He said he was a criminal lawyer, said my case was complicated, and referred me to a probate lawyer, who declined to take my case. I wish I’d perservered and found another probate lawyer. I still don’t understand the issues.]
Dr. Stubbeman said they were going to get me the car, which they didn’t, and pay for two classes at the UCLA Extension and I should pick them out. I picked out two classes in Digital Video that were all lies. He was going to get me a credit card for the Internet. He said, “You should stay away from dogmatic religion.” One day I went to Pete’s and they put out a Time Magazine cover: “Women Of The Bible”, and some kind of Wired Magazine or something like that. Dr. Stubbeman said, “You studied Philosophy and Religious Studies at Yale so that’s why you’re interested in religion.” I walked in one day and sitting in the waiting room was some guy with a big beard and a huge cross hanging around his neck. Once Dr. Stubbeman said, “How’s your meditation?” [07/09/2013 I was going to psychotherapist Trudy Goodman's vipassana meditation class. They have vipassana, mindfulness, here at UCSF-Mt. Zion Osher Center for Integrative Medicin e. Trudy is doing a retreat with Ram Dass this December in Hawaii. Dr. Stubbeman had a little Zen sculpture with a bonsai tree and a waterfall to make fun of meditators.]He said to Pete, “I can’t commit him because he isn’t a danger to self or others.”
He always used to say, “Hey, Eric!” One day I was on my way to an appointment and I emailed Ken Babbs at skypilotclub.com, “Post something I can show my psychiatrist today,” and he posted a story about a man he said whose parents were responsible for the death of Ken Kesey and the assassination of JFK. Once he said, “You could go homeless.” “You can go to a board and care, you can go homeless, or you can go to vocational rehabilitation.”
When my parents had wanted me to see a psychiatrist in 1974 I had been going to a fundamentalist church, Lighthouse Temple, and a big issue had been that they were homophobic, anti-gay, so I thought that maybe they were criticizing the fact that I was in a straight relationship, living with a straight woman, Laurie. So I went down to the gay district, Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, and somehow got involved in the Metropolitan Community Church, the gay church, there for awhile, and I know that worked against me when W appointed the anti-gay cardiologist Surgeon-General.
JOURNAL II 1/12/2012 8:55 AM
I was just thinking—maybe the reason my sister wanted to put me in a nursing home and eventually in a board-and-care home was because I switched surgeons for my second operation.
I was thinking was it for the diabetic neuropathy (burning feet)? or the diabetes itself? or the complication of coronary artery disease and the angiogram and angioplasty operations? or the nitroglycerin? or drugs? or politics? or being a Deadhead? or associating with the Hog Farmers? or Democratic Party? or Laurie, my ex’s, work with Chabad Jewish Charities at UCLA and Temple Beth-el? or going to the Rainbow Gathering with the NORML medical marijuana guy?or stopping going to Dr. Fine and taking her meds? Or planning to move up north? Or having an appointment with cardiologist Dr. Harvey Mandel at Southwestern Cardiovascular Medical Group at Cedars-Sinai, who scheduled a stress test, with the intention of moving all my doctors there and dismissing doctors Dave`, Grossman, and Schechter from UCLA-Santa Monica and the doctors from West Hills? (my family could have advised me about this one) Or because my family had become secret Christians without my becoming aware of it and psychiatrist Dr. Fine, who I had been seeing for 5 years, was in an organization dedicated to “deconversion/deprogramming” of ex-Christians they felt had been damaged by Christian fundamentalism—their phone was 310-966-6500. Dr. Fine “preached” scientific atheism, ala` Freud. George W. Bush, a Christian fundamentalist, was now President, and my sister was Chairman of the Barbara Bush Literacy Campaign. After Eric Asa-Dorian came over Laurie's mother asked me to move back to my apartment a few blocks away and Eric's partner said don't go in Laurie's apartment, where the TV was. Laurie came in and offered me a TV from a client Robert, but I didn't want it, being preoccupied by the computer. I had no TV at all up to the time they took the apartment and sent me to the Lama Foundation. Maybe there was information on TV about obeying authority in ways Dr. Fine had told me were wrong that my family was now using? At Lama the TV was only for tapes. At Brentwood Manor I had no TV for 2 years. My roommate would not let me watch his, the only one. I still have only the lowest-level Direct TV and before it was the lowest-tier AT&T, although I had top-tier Comcast for a few months at my apartment when I received my the inheritance of my dad's life insurance annuity. I had no TV at all for 5 or 6 years, torture. Or because of Laurie's psychiatric problems, not mine?
Honestly, I’ve spent hours thinking about it, I still don’t know, and I’m always speculating about it and coming up with a possible new reason. Nobody’s ever told me, except that it was all wrong and illegal, not to go and to walk away and leave.
To retell the journey, I was driving around L.A. around 2000, felt a chest pain, and went to an emergency room with my Anthem Blue Cross PPO. They said I was OK for now and gave me a referral to a cardiologist near the Howard Hughes center. I remembered the appointment too late, called them, and they referred me to another cardiologist, Dr. Ravi Dave` at UCLA-Santa Monica Hospital Cardiology. Dr. Fine tested my memory (as well as a neuropsychologist) and said it was fine, even for higher mathematics and advanced computer science theory courses
which require lots of memorization of formulas. I was pretty healthy at that time, and the only doctors I had were at an “Urgent Care” center near there on Wilshire, where a general practitioner Dr. Mark Grossman practiced. I had last seen him about an ear infection. I had found that place because I called some referral service from where I lived in Laurie’s apartment in Venice and asked specifically for a nearby Urgent Care, meaning one that you could drop in on anytime without an appointment, and they had referred me to the one on Wilshire, so I would just drop in there for anything and see whatever doctor was working, for just minor things. I remember there was one female Persian doctor who was very nice who left, and Dr. Grossman came, I think fresh out of med school. That was probably why I was referred to Dr. Dave`--because it was near Dr. Grossman, the closest thing I had to a primary care physician at that time.
Dr. Dave` said, “I want to operate right away and do an angiogram and angioplasty.” That’s where they put a wire into your thigh up through your heart, first with a video camera, the angiogram, and then they try to scrape the plaque out of your arteries with a wire and put a stent in to hold it open, the angioplasty. My dad had three. I found out later the heart disease was caused by diabetes from Risperdal I had been taking from psychiatrists my family insisted that I see. I have a diagnosis of “paranoid schizophrenia” my dad’s psychiatrist wrote to get me out of the draft when I was living on the Hog Farm in 1971. A clinical psychologist friend says I should go to a clinical psychologist and get retested and rediagnosed. I’ve seen the diagnostic criteria for that disease and I’m pretty sure I don’t have it. Dr. Moshe Forman, a UCSF psychiatrist, told me in his office right after I saw Dr. Auerbach, “You’re not a schizophrenic,” and we used to go to Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach’s House of Love and Prayer together. I’m pretty much the only one around the Hog Farm to whom this happened, and Wavy Gravy calls me “Anonymous” (and I like it!). [7/23/13 There's also Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, “Dismount”, from the original “Furthur” bus in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (who also went to Yale). When Ken Babbs wrote about his death by a heart attack at a Catholic retreat at a Franciscan monastic retreat center recently on skypilotclub.com he dissed him. We don't know why; I can guess mental illness stigma or that's why they called him “Dismount”.] I don’t know why it makes (lay)people mad when you say you don’t have it, it was a misdiagnosis, the truth; I guess it costs them money. [7/23/13 I guess Mark Vonnegut, son of writer Kurt Vonnegut, author of The Eden Express, and Just Like Normal, But Moreso, or something like that, is doing OK, having become a pediatrician.] Laurie, my ex, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, firmly believes she has it, and everyone in her family is mean to her, and Syd Barrett, the founder of Pink Floyd, is dead at my age—you’re dead, that kind of mental illness turns out to be a death sentence. Hitler gassed mental patients (and physically disabled) before the 6,000,000 Jews. And before you die they torture you to death, Yalie or not, incarcerated or not. I digress.
Actually, my sister made Dr. Dave` wait 3 weeks to do the operation, and he said later he said, “Five days.” Around the same time, I got intense stomach pains and Laurie took me to UCLA Medical Center emergency room, on the campus. We were triaged because it was full on a Saturday night and we got tired and went home. It still hurt so we went to the emergency room at UCLA- Santa Monica, where Dr. Grossman practiced. They admitted me for five days and put me on a steady drip of Dilaudid, which temporarily stopped the pain. I had diverticulitis, a colon infection, and an emergency room surgeon, Dr. Schechter, almost did an emergency colon
resection right away, but when the Dilaudid worked he was waiting a few weeks. So I had to have two emergency operations at once, the angioplasty and the colon resection, which is quite stressful.
They gave me an appointment with Dr. Schechter, downstairs in the same building across the street from the hospital as Dr. Dave`. First, there were all these Latino families in the waiting room and when I went into the consulting room it looked like they had just done some kind of procedure in there on somebody and hadn’t cleaned it up yet and somehow I got the impression that Schechter was some kind of butcher or something—it made me nervous. I see now that whoever arranged that room had done it deliberately to intimidate whichever patient came in there next, I guess for a joke. There were knives and stuff lying around, etc., it was deliberately scary.
So I was driving around Beverly Hills near the Beverly Center Mall and I saw a billboard advertising Cedars-Sinai Hospital with a referral number for Cedars-Sinai doctors, 1-800- CEDARS1, and I wrote it down, called it, and was referred to a colorectal surgeon in downtown Beverly Hills on Canon and Brighton across from Smith and Hawken named Dr. Gary Hoffman.
All I knew about Cedars-Sinai was that UCLA was the #1 ranked hospital in L.A. and #5 west of the Mississippi and Cedars-Sinai was #2 in L.A., a private Jewish hospital. Since it was #2 I thought it might be cheaper than UCLA but now that I’ve been there I realize it might be more expensive, a “movie star’s hospital”, and overkill for a colon resection. I didn’t know anything and nobody was advising me. Also, I figured Blue Cross was paying for everything. I’m not saying that my family should have communicated more with me about the expenses involved with these two operations.
Dr. Hoffman wanted me to change my primary care physician to this ritzy Beverly Hills doctor downstairs, Dr. Edward Riceberg, so I did. But I never did dismiss Dr. Grossman, who was acting as primary care for both surgeons Drs. Dave` and Schechter, partly because after the angiogram-angioplasty (which Dr. Dave` continued to treat with medications), Dr. Grossman in his office handed me a bottle of nitroglycerin with instuctions to take three in the event of chest pains, and if they remained to go to an emergency room.
[07/23/2013 Also, once before the surgery I was talking to Dr. Riceberg about all that psychiatric background and he told me to forget about it, and I thought he was implying that all of that was wrong and that he thought I was psychiatrically, mentally healthy, and he is a top Beverly Hills doctor. I've believed that ever since, although it has angered people like my family. Why won't they just drop it, especially if the doctors know it's killing me?]
There was part of the story I called “Journals” that was missing when I showed it to Matthew, from where I'm recounting my conversations with Dr. Stubbeman to where I met with Joan and
Jeff at Hamburger Hamlet on San Vicente in Brentwood, Los Angeles, so I'm going to rewrite it now.
I think the last thing I wrote at the end of Journal I was Dr. Stubbeman said, “You could go homeless,” and at a later meeting he said, “You can go homeless, you can go to a board-and-care home, or you can go to vocational rehabilitation.” I'm still not sure what he meant. I had been going to vocational rehabilitation at Edelman Center with psychiatrist Dr. Fine with Sherwood Brown, but they had refused to let me go back to Dr. Fine and forced me to go to Dr. Stubbeman instead. Dr. Stubbeman gave me a bunch of “leads” for vocational rehabilitation. I followed up on all of them and most of them turned out to be bogus. I was also performing songs on acoustic and electric guitar at open mics.
Then they had a meeting with him, me, and Joan. They said, “We're going to cut your allowance in half [from $60,000/year to $30,000/year] but we will match every dollar you earn by giving you a dollar.” If the manager or the neighbors would invite me over for dinner, I started to go. Bobby Weir and Ratdog were playing at the House of Blues in West Hollywood, and I felt like I could still afford the ticket, especially if I rode the bus there and back, and no one would be the wiser. Years later I started wondering if Life Adjustment Team was a drug rehab, because they never told me and I didn't know, but I had gone completely drug-free, I wasn't even smoking pot, just in case. I decided not to smoke any pot at the show, and I didn't, although it certainly would have been easy. I ran into a friend of mine, an attorney, John Franklin. He was really insistent about giving me a ride home, so we climbed into his new SUV with 2 other guys, but first he wanted to go to Barney's Beanery.
I'd already eaten, and I really wanted to go home, and then they pulled into an empty parking lot to smoke pot. I refused to smoke it, and when I passed it without smoking to the guy next to me, who happened to be some Latino guy that John knew, he got mad and insisted that I smoke some, so I did. He had probably gotten paranoid and was worried that I was a cop out to bust him, so he made me smoke it.
John was telling me some story I could hardly believe about how his new SUV had caught on fire so flames were actually coming out. [7/23/13 Also Laurie says our friend, Debbie Behar, got a job as an elementary school teacher on the East Coast somewhere, her apartment caught on fire, and she got blamed for it somehow. I haven't talked to her. Debbie once went over to Joan and Jonathan's house with us, heard Jonathan talking to me, and said afterwards to me, “He gets paid to talk to you like that?”] When we got to Sepulveda somehow it was like he wanted to go right back home to the Valley, and I said that's cool, I'll just hop out right here and jump on the Sepulveda bus. But somehow I found out that the buses had already stopped running for the night, at 11pm. It started to rain, and because they had just halved my allowance, I didn't have the $20 the taxi company I called on my cell phone wanted. Then I used up the battery.
I was in Westwood, and pretty much the only thing open was the Subway on the corner. I bought a meal and asked the manager if it was OK if I waited in there all night out of the rain until the sun came up, and he agreed. I was there about half an hour and everything was fine. The
manager went home for the night, the night manager came, and he said that he didn't have to honor the other manager's agreement with me, so I went out on the sidewalk in the rain. The only place to get out of the rain was at the 76 station near Wilshire, and there really was no room in the cashier's booth and standing under the roofs by the pumps got in the way of the customers, and there was a pay phone just up Gayley. So I decided it was time for a desperation measure to get out of the rain, so I called up Joan and Jonathan from the pay phone and told them I went to the Bobby Weir and Ratdog show and got let out in the rain in Westwood after the last bus, with a dead phone battery, and without cab fare.
They were mad, but Jonathan came down in about half-an-hour in his Jaguar S3 and gave me a $20 dollar bill for the taxi. He was angry and he said, “You're gonna pay,” and, “You're gonna lose your apartment!”
So everything was fine, and going along as normal, and about three weeks later I was making my [then weekly] trip to Pete's office to pick up my $150 for the week (and I guess they were taking me to the supermarket to spend the other $150/week). So Pete says, “I have some news for you. I'm fired. And you're fired too. They're cutting off your $60,000/year except for meds, medical bills, and Blue Cross PPO.” I said, “How soon are they going to do this?” He said, “A month. In a month they will stop paying rent on your apartment and you will have to move out!”
I called Joan and she confirmed what he said, “We're cutting you off except for meds, medical bills, and Blue Cross PPO.” The funny thing is that I had written somewhere on the computer that they had seen without me knowing, like in an email to someone, or in a journal or diary-type thing, that maybe when I got my license back I would rent another Budget rental car, drive it up to see Charlene, and maybe if it was cool in Okanagan I would stay and get a job. Maybe Laurie could come up and visit and stay if she liked it. And then I had written, if I could get a good enough job, maybe I would tell my family I didn't need their $60,000/year anymore, just the meds, medical bills, and Blue Cross PPO, exactly that language, meaning after I rented or bought a house and had a job that paid for that, my car,and everything else. They must've been trying to kill me. Joan said, “You have a month to move out of your apartment.” I said, “Suppose I don't move?” She said, “I guess the sherriff will carry you out!” They only paid $700/month to Laurie's mother's associate.
I didn't know what to do, so I called attorney Bruce Margolin, the NORML criminal lawyer who ran for State Senate and was Timothy Leary's lawyer. At Pete's office, he wouldn't talk to Joan; I thought he was afraid. Pete stepped outside and started locking the door of his building. As I was leaving, while I was still inside, he handed me a piece of paper saying “Brentwood Manor” and their phone number, where eventually I ended up. I immediately wasn't interested and walked off down the sidewalk I took the bus to the pharmacy and on the way I called Bruce back and he said, “Do you have anything saved up, savings, in a savings account?” and I said, “No,” and he said, “An attorney is a business and we need to make money,” hung up the phone, and I've never spoken with him again.
I called Jeff Kline, my old landlord from Las Trampas, and he said, “I'm flying out to Los
Angeles on business and I'll be glad to meet with you and your sister and mediate.” This sounded like a good plan. Hindsight, they say, is 20/20; I wish I'd asked them to restore the $60,000/year. Instead I'd been looking on the Internet and I'd stumbled on the website of the Lama Foundation in New Mexico. One of their summer programs was called “Summer Stewardship”, and it only cost $275/month because essentially you were a staff member, working in the kitchen, teaching classes, washing dishes, cleaning for the guests, etc. It's basically a retreat center. People pay big bucks to spend a weekend, or a week, or more with renowned spiritual teachers on a retreat in a beautiful setting with vegan food. It was founded by a guy from San Francisco they called “Sufi Sam”.
When I first got to New Mexico right after Woodstock, they were building the place, and they came over to the Hog Farm one day because they needed volunteers. Me and Steve went over there, to San Cristobal, baked adobe bricks in the sun all day, and they even let us put a few in the wall and put mortar on them, same as now. They have some of the greatest still-existing hippie architecture from that late-'60's New Mexico communal back-to-the-land movement. The main dome, still standing and upgraded, is adobe on the bottom and a plywood geodesic dome on top, with windows. Steve Durkee, some rich spiritual hippie, owns the place. They printed Ram Dass' famous hit first book, Be Here Now, and they still hawk hand-made [by us!] Tibetan prayer flags. They're also into permaculture and house-building.
So I'd been there before, several times, first with Steve. Later I went to some Sunday Service or something and ran into a guy I knew from the House of Love and Prayer from San Francisco Josh, and a girl I had been friends with at Llano, Marigold. At the New Mexico Rainbow Gathering in [look up the year later] they announced a workshop I went to. They invited everybody basically to that or they have other similar programs. Also before when I was living in Jeff's house there was a poster for some event in Taos, their local town, and I talked to them there and they invited me again. The Summer Steward pays $275/month for about three months during the summer. At the end of the summer they vote on them and if they pass they get a house for the winter, a stipend, medical expenses, and a tuition stipend. They can stay for up to seven years. I also liked the idea of them cooking lots of vegan food, because that is pretty much the recommended diet for diabetes and heart disease.
So I printed out the whole website, met with Joan and Jeff at Hamburger Hamlet on San Vicente in Brentwood. They agreed right away, and Joan said that I had $600/month SSI, that she would send the Lama Foundation $275/month from my SSI check, since she was the payee and they mailed it to her, and she would send me $300/month, the rest of it. But, “just one thing”, “just agree to go to look at board-and-care homes just in case it doesn't work out and you have to come back,” it seemed harmless enough, and I innocently agreed.
A few days later Joan and I went to look at a board-and-care home on Melrose, a few blocks from where Laurie used to be in the Groundlings Improv. Joan said she had been referred to two, but we never did look at the 2nd one then, which happened to be Brentwood Manor on Santa Monica Blvd. and Wellesley, the one where I ended up, the one on Pete's paper. I just want to run over my history with board-and-care homes, because I think it is relevant. Once, in the mid-eighties,
I was staying in the Berkeley Inn, a hotel on Telelgraph and Dwight, now torn down, and Jeff had helped me buy a red Toyota pickup for $1000.
Little Richie from the Hog Farm, also now deceased, was living at Wavy Gravy's House at 1600 Woolsey. He had dinner with me and my parents at my parents' house at 29 West Clay Park in San Francisco, and one day he said to me: “I was talking to your parents on the phone. Wavy Gravy's brother-in-law, Brook [also deceased], lives in a board-and-care home on Fairview and your parents want to pay for you to stay there,” and I went ahead and agreed to that, right away, and it was horrible.
I thought it would be “fun” to hang out with Wavy Gravy's own brother-in-law, but it wasn't, he was too messed up. Everybody fought all the time, the owner put all my washed clothes folded neatly on my bed and they stole all of them, the rest of them were mostly worse derelicts than Brook, and the food was terrible. I spent all of my time driving around. I caught something from one of them, and I went to my parents' doctor in San Francisco. I told him my last job I was a demolition laborer with Fred the Fed from the Hog Farm demolishing a Chinese laundry for the French Hotel on Shattuck, and he said, “Your father knows a guy in a demolition company, Judd Bosley in Cleveland Wrecking Co.”, and they got me a job as a timekeeper at the San Francisco Airport checking the laborers [which I wanted to be, paid more, and they wouldn't let me] in and out, adding up their hours and payroll [before computers], and counting how much equipment they rented each day. Judd and Art, the Superintendant, got me interested in Computer Science. My mom rented me an apartment, and Joe Sims from the Hog Farm came to town and invited me to live in his back bedroom on Russell and Adeline, with him and his caretaker, him being a quadriplegic confined to a wheelchair, Bruce, and Mikey Katz from Katz Antiques [still there!] lived there sometimes, in the front apartment. My dad bought me a new Nissan Sentra, and we finished demolishing the Main Terminal to make room for 747's so there was nothing left to demolish and they laid off everybody except the Superintendent and the Project Manager, I took off for the Rainbow Gathering in Idaho.
I decided to go the next one in Michigan. My parents were depositing an allowance in a bank account with a credit card and I drove back and forth across the country, but on the way my mom suggested that I go to see psychiatrist Dr. Richard Shadoan, I don't know why exactly, I called her from the Hebrew Union College, reform rabbi grad school, in Cincinnatti, but I was a sophmore or junior. I just wanted to see it, and I'm glad I did; the buildings are very impressive, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the main Reform Jewish rabbinical school, that's how we were raised. Pastor Dunbar once told me personally to go home and attend my parents' synagogue, maybe that's why? I've always liked Dr. Shadoan; he lives around the corner from my mom. Once I ran over there when I was fighting with my dad; that was how I met him. Then, when I was living in Joe's back bedroom, I saw an ad in the paper for a “sex surrogate”, I was worried about a chronic STD, you had to work with a therapist, and somehow Dr. Shadoan signed off on it so I could work with Joanne but I wasn't really working with him much. So basically I brought Shadoan into the equation, and now my mother again. I didn't think much of it, but there was a point near the Spring Council where I was thinking that I needed more medical help with the STD and I didn't know how to get health insurance or even that I needed to get it, so I thought Dr.
Shadoan maybe could help me get medical attention for it.
He actually did, because at the end I was going to UCI with $100,000/year. The doctors say urethritis can't affect your memory, it isn't syphillis, they call it a learning disability, so I couldn't get good enough grades, so I wound up at Cal State Bakersfield, but still with the $100,000/year. So when I got an ad in the mail for Blue Cross PPO for $200/month I bought it from a local insurance broker. Right away I got in to the Infectious Disease Clinic at the UCLA Medical Center and Dr. Katona diagnosed me with chronic prostatitis and ran me through another course of antibiotics. It causes discomfort, but you can live with it (I'd caught it in 1976).
To cut to the chase, I came back to San Francisco, began seeing Dr. Shadoan regularly, and got an apartment near my parents' house, where I eventually moved, before I went to UCI. Even then, it was hard to find apartments in the whole Bay Area, so I was staying in residence clubs. Dr. Shadoan suggested board-and-care homes. He took me in his car to look at one in the Haight Ashbury, which looked at first like it might have been OK, but I had a bad interaction with one of the women who lived there, and decided against it. Dr. Shadoan had me work with a social worker and they took me to another board-and-care in the Haight, on Clayton, a few blocks up from Haight Street, where I moved into my own room in the attic.
There were really only two residents there, an older Chinese lady, who didn't speak much English, who had been displaced from her home, and a very old man with a terrible cough that I immediately feared was contagious tuberculosis. I was driving down Market by the Embarcadero and the motorcycle next to me had a steal-your-face sticker and I started talking to him. He said the next Grateful Dead concert was this weekend at Frost Amphitheatre on the Stanford Campus. That was a good excuse to get away from those guys, and as I was packing for the 2-show weekend I was inspired to throw everything in the car, just in case a new direction should present itself at the show, which it did. This guy used to print up a list of the whole tour, and they were going all up and down first the West and then the East Coasts, so I just went on tour. When it was over I visited my old school, Friends World College, in Westbury, Long Island, and they convinced me into coming back, but when I called them from my mom's house something had gone wrong.
So while I was waiting to see if I was going to go back East and get my car out of storage and go to Friends World College, I was again staying at a residence club downtown called the Ansonia.
A girl came over, spent the night, and had sex, and the next day I was thinking about the STD [before I had health insurance] and called Dr. Shadoan. He said, “Put your fingers on your wrist and take your pulse.” “You sound fine to me.” So I went back to bed and thought, “If I took a taxi to the Crisis Center at Mt. Zion Hospital, maybe they would give me treatment for this STD.” Dr. Shadoan had sent me to my parents' doctor, Dr. Cerf, and they had come back with a negative test. I thought they were wrong, and, not having health insurance, didn't know how to ask for a second opinion. So I did just that.
The Crisis Center people were very nice. They kept saying there was nothing wrong with me, and they seemed to understand I was doing this because I wanted more medical attention because
I thought I had an STD. I had already once been diagnosed with non-specific urethritis (“it'll go away by itself, don't drink coffee”) by some clinic doctor. I spent the night in the mental hospital at San Francisco General and then they took me right out and put me in the Mt.Zion mental hospital. Dr. Shadoan came in that afternoon and took me out, back to the Ansonia.
The same social worker came back and came to take me to look at a board-and-care on Broderick St. just above California. He kept saying, “You've got to be sure you like it,” and I kept saying, “I do, I do.” They had me in a day care at St. Mary's Hospital and I kept saying, “I love it!” but for a while.
I moved into that place and they signed me up for $600/month SSI, almost all of which went to the black lady who, with her family, ran the house. It was very horrible. One of the black guys had actually been released from prison where he'd been for murder, and he was illiterate; he could hardly read. He was a big bully; he would confront you on the stairs and try to sell you one of the watches he had strapped on his arm. My roommate had actually been an inmate at Napa State Hospital, he said for stealing a car. Everybody stole everything, you had to have a bike lock to lock your TV to the bed frame and a footlocker with a key or they'd take everything you had there. My friend said, “This is a dump!” Well, yeah! We were all in trouble. You know those old pictures of the British mental hospital, Bedlam, Pandemonium. There was a better-dressed woman in there with a heavy cast on her ankle and I determined that somehow they must have thought that they couldn't fix her foot where she'd fallen in her apartment or it was damaged so badly it was too expensive for anyone to pay for. Maybe she worked it out to get out later, I don't know. Just in case she couldn't care for herself, there at least they were sure she would have food and a bed to stay alive. She accepted it all heroically, stoically, with a very happy, cheerful, spirit. Everybody does the best they can.
Now I saw why they have to give you a tour first of those places and get you to agree. How could I ever agree to such a snakepit as that now that I knew firsthand what it was like? I swore I would never agree to that again, anymore than I'd agree to let the cops arrest me if they were willing to let me go. I never thought about it in terms of needing $600/month; I never got much of it They were telling me at that time, “Wavy Gravy is on SSI,” which I never heard. So the social worker helped me get an apartment near my parents house, got my parents to help with the rent, but, as I say, I eventually ended up back at my parents' house, and then at UCI with $100,000/year, another car, an apartment in graduate student housing, and that was the last I hoped I'd ever see of board-and-care homes.
4/14/2012 8:25PM
I called Jeff and he said, “I’m flying into L.A. on business and I’ll meet with you and your sister and mediate.” We set up a meeting for the three of us at the Hamburger Hamlet in Brentwood on San Vicente.I prepared for the meeting and, in retrospect, I wish I had decided to stay in L.A. and fight to get the $60,000/yr. back and keep my apartment and, say, keep going to CSUN where I was admitted. But I was hot to get out of town and I’d been looking on the Internet and I saw an ad to be a “Summer Steward” at the Lama Foundation in San Cristobal, New Mexico, near Taos. When I was at the New Mexico Rainbow Gathering a group of people from there had made a presentation about living/working there that had interested me and sounded pretty good. I had visited there when I was living there around 1979 and there was a girl who used to live at the Hog Farm in Llano, Marigold, and a guy from the San Francisco Shlomo Carlebach House of Love and Prayer, Josh, living there.When they were building the first buildings in the fall of 1969, right after Woodstock, me and Blond Steve and some guys from the Hog Farm went over one day and helped them build the weird main meditation hall, baking the adobe bricks with straw in the sun and piling them up with mud mortar.
The Summer Stewards, since they worked in the kitchen, paid only $275/mo., I was getting
$600/mo. SSI, got free vegan meals, and slept in a tentground. I liked the vegan meals because I had read about good diets for diabetes and heart disease, metabolic syndrome, in retrospect, a good idea.The place was beautiful, right on the edge of the forest and the mountains by the Taos Ski Resort.
To explain the SSI, I’ll have to flashback again.
4/17/2012 5:19 AMLaurie and I were living in The Springs apartment complex across from Cal State Bakersfield and my parents offered to send us to Hawaii, the Big Island, for 2 weeks. When we got back we went to see my parents in S.F., and I think I told how my dad explained his business loss. Then they cut my allowance from $100,000/year to $40,000/year, called it a trust fund, and Joan and Jonathan trustees of the trust fund. Then I moved near Santa Fe, New Mexico for a year, Laurie came and visited me, moved back to L.A., and convinced me to come live in her apartment and go to CSUN.
[07/26/2013 One of the first things that Joan did when she became trustee of my trust fund was request me to send her all of my credit cards. Eventually I mailed her all 12. She called me back and said, “I defaulted on all of your credit cards. You are in debt $17,000 to the credit card companies.” I said, “I thought it was $13,000.” Years later Jonathan said to me, “You'll never pay that back.” When my dad had his birthday party at my uncle's in Scottsdale he said to me , “Seven years!” meaning that's how long all that stays on your credit record. When I got the financial aid, I talked about it to the CSUEB financial aid counselor, and he recommended talking to the Consumer Credit Counseling. They said that if I paid $500/mo for two years I could restore my Equifax credit rating to normal, but they didn't have time to quote me for Trans-Union and Experian.]
[07/28/2013 At that same birthday party when my dad flew all of us to Scottsdale we were the whole family was sittting around a table in a restaurant and we were talking and I said to Jonathan in front of all of them, intending them to hear, “You abuse me!” Jonathan replied, “You abuse us!” I said, “There's abuse on both sides!” and that was the end of the argument, for then.]
Jonathan said, “If your [1992 Toyota Tercel] breaks down, your father isn’t going to get you another car.” I thought it was just his blustering trying to scare me; he couldn’t possibly mean it. The dealer had said it would last 10 years. In 1997, when it was 5 years old, I had it serviced at the Toyota dealership near CSUN in the Valley, and I told the service manager it was leaking oil. When I picked it up, he told me he had fixed the oil leak. The service manager and Jonathan talked on the phone when Jonathan paid him. I was on my way up Frazier Park to go cross-country skiing and the oil light came on, and I decided to stop and put more oil in on the way back. But on the way back, on the way to the gas station, it seized up from lack of oil and that totaled it, because it was still leaking oil even though he had said he had fixed the leak. But as I expected, my family said they’d buy me another car. Jonathan said they’d give me just $3000 for one, and Laurie had a friend with a used car lot. Mistakenly at the lot I put the guy on the phone with Jonathan and they agreed on a car that everybody hated, an old blue 1987 Geo Metro with a missing hubcap. Laurie always refused to ride in it, claiming she believed it wasn’t safe, and we got it from her friend! When we got home and she talked to him on the phone and they told me I was getting the Geo I called him back immediately and told him no, please, I don’t want it, I don’t like it, but he said, “It’s too late, your brother-in-law and I have already made the deal, you have to take it, you can’t take it back.” So I drove that car until the engine died on a job interview trip in Irvine, and maybe fumes from that or something gave me the heart disease for which I had two operations, I don’t know. The engine died on the way back from the Rainbow Gathering near Flagstaff, and Jonathan had to put me up in a motel for 2 days while a mechanic put in a new engine in the middle of nowhere. I think we put in a total of 3 new engines, each time for about $600; Laurie’s friend really burned us. That’s probably why she thought it was unsafe to ride in—because she knew her friend. He also was a lawyer. I think she used to live with him and take care of his daughter.
I think Jonathan talked to the service manager at the Northridge Toyota when he paid him and the manager said he'd fixed the oil leak but hadn't. Also, right after Joan and Jonathan became trustees of the trust fund Jonathan used to be so mean on the phone I called an attorney about him who said, “Jonathan is arbitrary, capricious, abusive, and he keeps you in the dark. Is he taking some of your money to tide himself over?” I said I couldn't imagine that but now I think I was wrong. When he'd ask me to send him receipts, Jonathan would arbitrarily switch back and forth between mailing them and faxing them so I would never know what he would ask. Both he and Joan told me then that they “had it in” for me. Once I jokingly said to him, “Why don't I make a will giving you everything I have and then commit suicide,” and he replied, “That's a concept,” and later I thought maybe I had given him the idea. He's such a good liar that for years I believed that he was older than me when he is six months younger and that he went to Harvard as a freshman, as I did to Yale, when he transferred into Harvard as a sophmore from George Washington University or whatever in his hometown, St. Louis. We saw he has serious communication problems when he sat next to supposedly his best friend, a
UCSD professor, in Ixtapa, Mexico on his friend's birthday and couldn't say a word to him for an hour. The one time he gave me a written accounting he said it was supposed to add up to $40,000 but it only added up to $35,000 somehow. He never pinched pennies on himself, however, buying his Jaguar S3, remodeling his mansion in Bel-Air, on his world travels, his Italian marble bathtub, widescreen TV, art collection, gold plumbing fixtures, two nannies, two Nintendos, baby grand piano, pirates' table, Persian rugs, etc. Years ago I copied out the whole chapter of the Bible with the story of Lazarus and Dives and sent it to them, and the story of Nathan, David, Bathsheba, and Uriah, but it doesn't help..
And somewhere around that time Jonathan had said, “Come over, I want you to sign something.” I was hesitant to sign anything for him because when they opened the joint checking account at the Brentwood Bank of America for the “trust fund” with his, Joan’s, and my signature on it, they both signed it and he put a big “X” on the third line (his dad, Adam Aronson, was a banker in St. Louis) and sent it to me and I signed by the “X”. Later I thought about that they could withdraw my money with their signature.
So I didn’t go over, and later they told me that my grandmother had left me $10,000 and they had taken it “for your expenses”. What do you expect when you tell a guy you want a car for
$3000? When it broke down in Irvine, I became a pedestrian.
And then my dad said, “If you apply for SSI from Dr. Fine I’ll get you another car.” So I went through this whole rigamarole with Joan, a Latino social worker, and an SSI specialist who said, portentiously, “They looted the bank account and put everything out in the street.” Dr. Fine wrote them a diagnosis of “schizoaffective disorder”, whatever that is, for it, without discussing it at all with me. They never did give me a car.Dr. Fine later told me she and the meds were paid for by the SSI and MediCal.
So I was getting $600/mo. SSI, and it only cost $275/mo. to be a Summer Steward, since you worked in the kitchen for the paying retreatants, it’s a spiritual retreat center.You can even teach your own classes (for free) if you want. I taught a guitar class. It was great. A Summer Steward stays all summer, and, if they like you, they can vote if you can have a house for the winter, and, if you pass that, you can get voted to stay for 7 years, with a stipend and medical stipend. One of the other reasons probably why it didn’t work out for me is that they were thinking twice about taking over responsibility for my somewhat complex medical care, which is reasonable. But I was moving in the direction of independence from my family after recovering from three surgeries.
So I met with Joan and Jeff at Hamburger Hamlet and showed them the Lama Foundation website about the Summer Stewards and made my presentation and they accepted it. Joan promised to send them the $275/mo. from my SSI and another $300 from the $600/mo. for just living expenses. But she said, “I’d just like to have you look at a couple of board-and-care homes just in case it doesn’t work out and you have to come back,” and I agreed to that.We only went to one, the other was closed, that was really a horrible snakepit, of course all of them must be, on Melrose near where Laurie used to go to the Groundlings. A dirty drug addict in a dirty, sweaty tank-top lay on a dirty mattress in a room with a bare lightbulb, roaches, and the paint peeling.I absolutely refused to have anything to do with anyplace like that. I said
something to the woman in charge, who said she had a masters in psychology, about how I “majored in homelessness at Yale”.Honestly, that’s what people like her and my sister think of hippies.
Jonathan and Joan came over and we put a bunch of my stuff in a storage they have, where it still is, and left the rest of it on the sidewalk for people to scavenge. Joan bought me a tent, sleeping bag, and hiking boots and put me on the bus for Taos. Lama was wonderful. Living in a tent is OK when everybody is doing it in a tentground. One night I came home and there was a deer outside my tent. Everybody on the staff, and lots of the retreatants, were really nice and friendly. The speakers and spiritual teachers were mostly pretty interesting and enlightening.
They put me to work playing guitar for the spiritual dancing, and drumming. I don’t mind eating healthy food, since I have to, and cooking it and cleaning up wasn’t all that hard. The views from up there on the mountain are spectacular.
This one guy that worked there said he had room in his van for a swimming trip to the hot springs by the Rio Grande. Walking down to the river he pulls out a joint, and since he was the driver, I partook, the first I’d had since I’d gotten there. The rules were none on the property; they didn’t care outside, where we were, and he was seemingly acting as an official.
A week or so later, I had finished all my chores and was sitting in on an adobe house-building class for fun and to help out and I got a sudden chest pain that didn’t go away, probably from hauling heavy adobe bricks around. So I took nitroglycerin, and there was still chest pain, and rather be safe than sorry I asked if someone would take me to the emergency room, turns out at Holy Cross Hospital in Taos, where Karen used to work as a social worker.My doctor knew both of the Castagnas. As usual I was OK, the pains went away, and they sent me home. This is guaranteed to make people worried about you mad.
So the next day they called me before, I forget what they called the ruling council. Essentially they were asking me to leave. They said it wasn’t about taking nitroglycerin and going to the ER, but it probably was, especially since, if I were to succeed in the program, they would be taking over responsibility for my medical care. But the guy who had driven us to the Rio Grande Gorge and passed me the joint got up and said that when I was high someone had seen his 9-year old daughter sitting on my lap, a totally ridiculous, made-up story I denied and threatened to get a lawyer to defend myself. So they drummed me out. When I got back I found out that Joan had never sent the $275/mo. or the $300/mo. to me, so someone always had to buy me lunch when we went to town. Those are also pretty good reasons for getting expelled from “paradise”. I forgot to mention that Alberto and Karen only live an hour or two away and I had called them and they were going to come over and bring me to their house for dinner and back, but never got a chance to.
So they said, “Where do you want to go?” The only place I could think of was back to L.A. Somehow magically money appeared for a bus ticket to L.A. and to stay in a motel in Taos overnight and wait for the next bus in the morning. They drove me to the motel in Taos. I called Laurie and asked her to pick me up at the L.A. bus station, which she did. I didn’t sleep for 36 hours on the bus, it was so noisy.
Laurie took me back to her apartment and called Joan.
4/22/2012 2:51 PM
I’m where Laurie took me back to her apartment from the Los Angeles Greyhound bus station. She called my sister, got off the phone and said, “Joan is coming to take you to an interview at Brentwood Manor Board-and-Care Home. If you don’t pass the interview you will be without a home.” I always thought Joan set her up to tell me that. I had 2 suitcases, my Fender Stratocaster, Super Reverb Amp, and Yamaha Acoustic Guitar and I didn’t want to lose them, especially by Joan setting me out of her silver Jeep Grand Cherokee on a street corner in the middle of nowhere. Laurie took all my stuff and piled it outside her door, and my sister came and put it all in her jeep. I hadn’t slept for 36 hours, and I lay in the back seat and fell into a tortured sleep.
4/24/2012 12:21 PM
First, she had some kind of appointment at Edelman Center, where Dr. Fine worked. It was with some guy I didn’t know, and I really gave it to him, I remember. He said, “You wanted to see me about a housing problem?” I started yelling and didn’t stop, it was such a phony setup.
They had just moved me out of my apartment when I was sick and recuperating from 3 operations, cutting off my allowance except for meds, medical bills, and Anthem, didn’t send the SSI to the Lama Foundation they’d agreed to let me go to, I threatened to call Mind Freedom Int’l, National Empowerment Center, 1-800-POWER-2U, lawyers, these online psychiatric assault sites, like Network Against Psychiatric Assault, I realize now I should have called them, but of course, I hadn’t slept for 36 hours on the bus and it was important to her not to let me sleep. It was reasonable to expect to stay at Laurie’s where I’d lived for 5 years for at least a day to rest after the trip—obviously they must’ve planned the whole thing. Brentwood was the 2nd board-and-care home that Joan was going to have me look at after the one on Melrose before I went to New Mexico, “just in case it doesn’t work out and you have to come back”—they planned the whole thing. I caught COPD from all the smokers in Brentwood and I heard on the radio today it was the 4th leading cause of death, although I use the Advair inhaler 2x/day, costing Anthem an untold amount, $200/inhaler. I was just reading online Hannah Arendt’s
Eichm a nn in J erus a lem: A Report On The B a n ality of Evil and they were asking, “Why did all those Jews get on those trains for Auschwitz when they outnumbered the Nazi troops at the station? Why didn’t they fight back instead of going like sheep to the slaughter?” If they fought back, it was more courageous than receiving a relatively easy death in the gas chamber or soap factory and being made into a tattooed lampshade or lying down in line to be shot and buried in a mass grave by a bulldozer. She says they shouldn’t be blamed for their own deaths for not fighting back because nobody else would have fought back. Lots of them, like her,
fought back and won, at least were Holocaust survivors, I saw some on TV with the President yesterday, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, hope springs eternal.
So the guy realized I was totally resistant to whatever psychiatric “housing” scam he was running, gave up, sat down, they let me go, and we left.On the way Joan threatened to leave me and all my stuff on some street corner, and if I didn’t pass the interview at Brentwood Manor, like Laurie said, I would be, “without a home”.
The head of Brentwood Manor, June Gatewood, R.N., was almost like a cartoon character, Head Nurse Ratched from Ken Kesey’s One F lew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest or Cruella D’Ville from Disney’s 101 D a lmation s . I read later that the owners of those places often hire foreign nationals to run those places so they can make more profits because they don’t have to pay certain American taxes. June, the Head Administrator, was English, and the Assistant Administrator, Herr Oscar Montoya, was Mexican. June had been a psychiatric nurse in the British Army, look out! The meanest one, probably. Once I waited in a line to see her and she said (it had spilled at breakfast, 20 minutes ago, in the pandemonium), “Look at that spot on your shirt! It’s disgusting! Go up and change your shirt this minute!” and I went, and came back and got at the end of the line, like the lines for the doctors at Auschwitz. At the Santa Monica Library I was reading E s cape F rom Auschwitz, a true survivor story, how he hid in the woodpile by the gate, snuck out when the trucks came in, and made his way to Switzerland and thence to the USA. Like the film The G r e at Esc a p e, where American POW Steve McQueen steals the Nazi soldiers’ motorcycle and rides it across the border to Switzerland. To cut to the chase, I passed the interview. She said, “Are you violent?” And I said, “No.”
I wrote this earlier today:
To outline the account, I could start from where I was living in the UCLA Co-op and a computer science major at CSUN, near my sister’s house, and she asked me to find a psychiatrist, and I went to Dr. Robert Newport. Going to her house when my parents were visiting and being tricked into seeing Dr. Lisa Fine at Edelman Ctr., L.A. County Mental Heath Dept., Sepulveda & Olympic, 310-966-6500, and going every 2 weeks for 5 years, catching the diabetes, having 2 heart surgieries and a colon resection for diverticulitis at Cedars-Sinai Hospital with my Anthem Blue Cross PPO. Then my sister asking me to go in a nursing home, then Life Adjustment Team, then forcing me to go to Dr. Stubbeman, then taking away my $60K/yr. w/ my apartment for going to a Ratdog show. I go to Lama Foundation in New Mexico, they never pay, I’m kicked out under mysterious circumstances, they force me into Brentwood Manor Board-and-Care Home for 2 years against my will, Joan hands the Head Nurse, Chief Administrator, June Gatewood, R.N. a letter from Dr. Stubbeman, all it says is “paranoid schizophrenia”, exactly the misdiagnosis from Dr. Auerbach to get me out of the draft when I was living on the Hog Farm in 1971 that I asked him to rediagnose, and told clinical psychologist Mike Bernath and he told me to, “Go to a clinical psychologist, get retested and rediagnosed.” So of course I protest it; I had a l r e a d y protested it. I went to Yale, Class of ’71, Pierson College; I’m no bloody axe murderer.
Back to the present:
The interview took two days because June claimed she had some other work to do. Part of the time we had to wait across the street in an art store while Joan shopped for art supplies for her
son. She put me up in a youth hostel down by the beach in Santa Monica in a room shared with four Norwegian tourists. They could have put me there for a few bucks in the first place—there was no need to threaten to leave me with all my valuable equipment on some street corner to coerce me into signing myself into Brentwood. It took me 2 years to get out because I had to earn the money to get out. All they gave me was $25/mo., about $1/day, barely enough for a candy bar and a soda, that was all I had at the start. I ran around looking for work and got a telemarketing job selling Sprint cell phones B2B to small businesses in the South.Joan said, “Don’t go back to Dr. Stubbeman, go to Dr. Fine,” and I did, but I never told her what happened. She had a meeting with me and Joan and she said, “If you get the money you can do anything you want.” I also worked as Inside Sales Representative for Investors Business Daily, a competitor to the Wall Street Journal, selling subscriptions on the phone, they advertise you can make $2000/week, I’ve seen it done. The co-worker who drove me to the Furthur New Years Eve show at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium had a bad cough and I started coughing, was it COPD? He said he caught it from the administrative asst. who went to the ER w/ a cough & kept it—later the dr. said chronic bronchitis then COPD but they say from smoking, not contagious. Everybody at Brentwood smoked and they made me, that’s all, I know better, secondhand smoke was everywhere. My roommate had real OCD where he would compulsively check the doorknobs everytime he went through a door and he could lie so well he actually convinced me for months that he was a lawyer. It was the lowest level of a RCFE, Residential Care Facility for the Elderly, just on Medi-Cal, the cheapest, no frills. The residents said that private places that cost more were nicer. Assisted Living. I don’t need assisted living of any kind and have never been certified for it or asked for it. A lot of the residents were just poor, old people who couldn’t afford to stay alive and they just put them there for a low-rate
death on Medi-Cal. I saw three people die, three dead bodies, my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in my life.
The first was I was taking the Stockton bus in Chinatown and the ambulance stretcher came out of the doorway with the body of a Chinese man. That was the first dead person I ever saw in my life, I guess in the ‘80’s. I guess the paramedics were having fun showing me that.
In Brentwood I saw my second, third, and fourth dead bodies. A woman who was really out of it wandered out in the intersection of Santa Monica Blvd. and Wellesley where there are no signals and got hit by a car and died right there in the middle of the street, of negligence, somebody should have been taking care of her, she didn’t do anything. I came outside and her dead body was lying there in the pedestrian zone in the middle of Santa Monica Blvd., her clothes covered with blood, the cars just driving by, the second body I’d seen. The third was when the old man choked on something at lunch and the nurse came up and tried to do the Heimlich Maneuver but she didn’t know how and he ended up choking to death and dying sitting at the table right there in front of everyone, I saw him die, accidentally. And the fourth was already dead, a corpse being wheeled out the side door in the middle of the night, an old guy.
And there were a lot of younger residents who had had drug busts. I figure what happened is Laurie was watching 9/11, and she saw people being counseled for being upset, called her psychiatrist, Dr. Nadel, who I had met because Joan wanted us both to go to her before Dr. Fine after Dr. Newport, and Nadel’s substitute, I just found out Dr. Holstein from Kaiser put her in the Kaiser mental hospital downtown. I missed her and went down, got her out, and brought her
home without thinking about it. This therapist, MFCC, Barbara Gabriel, that I was seeing, thinks maybe Holstein was getting retaliation for getting Laurie out of the hospital, and I was saying she didn’t need to be there. I was reading a little about psychiatric rehabilitation, what Life Adjustment Team is, where Laurie was going, and that’s where you’d go after a mental hospital, and Laurie was going to Dr. Holstein’s office at Kaiser Hospital on La Cienega and Venice.But why would they want me at LAT and I never knew what it was? Maybe they thought Laurie needed drug treatment. I thought Laurie never used drugs. Maybe she squealed about the Cubensis shows and the Dead shows I used to take her to, and she had become friends with the Bob Dylan Tribute guy, Joel, the singer of Highway 61Revisited and he always got us in backstage and when he played with Cubensis, too, a Grateful Dead Tribute, and the keyboard player Tom, actually sat in with Dark Star Orchestra.But she told me recently that Dr. Nadel, and I guess Holstein, arranged the whole meeting about the nursing home, and I guess both with Pete Linnett from the Life Adjustment Team, and therefore Dr. Stubbeman and Brentwood Manor, and I never met Dr. Holstein and Dr. Nadel for 10 minutes, didn’t like her, and never
saw her again. So I’ll sue them; they took almost everything, I’m lucky to be alive, and other people were hurt. There’s probably more I don’t know. Laurie said Nadel retired. They got Laurie to spill and she went to LAT and SHARE, Self-Help and Recovery Exchange, and she was in AA, NA, etc. and running her own groups. And none of them ever discussed drugs with me, except in really bad ways that made me decide never to speak to them again. I did not nark, squeal, snitch, stool, ever, and I was certainly subjected to professional, high-pressure interrogation, many times, and I never cracked. That is probably the #1 reason they punish me. Compared to me, Laurie knows nothing to squeal anyway. Once Pete said, disparagingly, “Hells Angels are loyal.” They had been giving me some crap I was denying, they said, about “Hells Angels have methamphetamine labs.” I told him, “They’ll kill someone for $25, they don’t care.” I told that to my brother-in-law once, during an argument about money, and I wish I hadn’t, because, it gave him ideas, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He said later, “You wouldn’t have a biker gang break in here and steal my art?” But it’s in a Mickey Hart song, “Aiko, Aiko”: See that boy all dressed in red/For $35 he’ll kill you dead.
They turned—she was essentially my wife, we’d been together 15 years, and lived together 5 or 10, our parents just opposed the marriage—and now they got her to squeal on me and the scene and used her as bait to steal my whole $60K/year that had been $100K/yr. after 3 surgeries and institutionalize me for 2 years.
It was really bad in there with those derelicts and drug addicts, and no money. Where they put terminally ill broke people to die. But I’d had $60K/yr., Anthem, and primary care Dr. Riceberg from Cedars-Sinai in Beverly Hills where my sister used to have an office and he told me I was OK: “You can work and live independently,” and, “You will live twenty or thirty more years.” And I still had the Anthem and they were paying for meds, the pharmacy, and medical bills; I was still going to Dr. Riceberg I knew I was OK physically and that they were lying I was going to die. A friend inside said, “Your sister is trying to kill you.” They hadn’t let me, and still haven’t, get the Cardiac Rehab cardiologist Dr. Dave` had prescribed because they promised the car and reneged but I had gotten a basic education in heart and diabetes diet from my own reading in bookstores. The nurses said I didn’t have diabetes and wouldn’t give me the red dot that got you the sugar-free ice cream, etc., and they wanted me to eat the sugar, the low-
grade meat, the salt, the canned vegetables, other processed foods, coffee all the time. The diet is no cholesterol, meat, dairy, egg yolks, fat, sodium, calories, carbs, sugar, and processed food— plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, of which they had essentially none. You always had to sit in the same place with these crazy guys and fight over this garbage food—but I knew I wasn’t dying, that they were lying, and here I am. They were trying to give me the opposite diet. I even went to the doctor and got a note saying I must have fresh fruits and vegetables, etc. and they completely ignored it. The Mexican nurses stole my cell-phone charger, my nice purple North Face sleeping bag I’d bought in the South Coast Mall in Costa Mesa, etc. [7/23/13 Joan asked me to ask UCSF-Mission Bay cardiologist Dr. Nelson Schiller for his permission for her to speak to him at our last appointment, at which he said all my numbers were “fantastic”. He refused, saying, “Sometimes family members say they're going to die to steal the inheritance.” She had told me she “disagreed with his diagnosis” of diabetes from Risperdal. He said he wasn't going to change his diagnosis.]
Somehow through it all I managed to treat the diabetic neuropathy, which I’ll detail later, I guess they were trying to stop me. My friend Karen, a nurse, is a diabetes educator, and she said go to an endocrinologist, and from Blue Cross I found Dr. Hohnichter on Rexford in Beverly Hills.
He suggested I ask my cardiologist, Dr. Dave` to prescribe Viagra.It was no problem for Dr. Dave`, “But be sure they take you off the Isosorbide, because that’s a nitrate, and if you take the two together, IT COULD KILL YOU!” He was really emphatic about not taking it with nitrates. It says it in the commercials, “could cause a sudden loss of blood pressure.” I had to buy it myself, because Joan won’t pay for it, and I told the people at the home who gave the pills to stop the Isosorbide, but they wouldn’t. The nurse would bring it to me at dinner and try to force me to take it, in front of everyone. My friend said, “Your sister is trying to kill you.” I refused, but I took all the other pills, but I wouldn’t take the Isosorbide.The nurses did this several times and finally I called Dr. Dave` and got his nurse. She said, “Tell the administrator [Oscar] that this patient, Eric Abrahamson, has been prescribed Viagra and nitrates are contraindicated at any time.”They still brought me the Isosorbide and tried to force me to take it. Oscar said that if I wouldn’t take it he would evict me. I didn’t think he’d do it.
I called Dr. Dave`again, the nurse tried to get him, and he took me off the Viagra, so I could take the Isosorbide. He was the one who had done the first angiogram and angioplasty, we later
found out was caused by diabetes from Risperdal. When Pete made me miss the Toprol, Bush appointed an anti-gay cardiologist Surgeon-General.
There was a guy in there, a musician, who got in a fight with the brother he was living with and he made him homeless. I heard June say once, “Violation!” They had a list of the rules for those places up, meaning they broke every one, like interfering with the residents’ basic life functions. And the Bill of Rights, the broke every one. We had lost all our rights. They had pictures of rich people on the walls for a joke on these poor old sick people. The curtains and sheets all had holes in them, my bathroom had all of these patches in the wall, trying to drive you crazy, and I always say I’m not crazy, that drugs don’t make you crazy because the great majority of ‘60’s rock stars are sane. Especially if you don’t count drug and alcohol problems.
It’s never a psychiatrist, it’s always my family who wants to play the system. That just doesn’t work anymore, for hippies, if it ever did. Laurie, who I call “straight”, is diagnosed as a “schizophrenic”, and everybody in her family was really mean to her all the time, her brothers and her parents. I figured that the worse she got, the more money they made from the government. She believes herself that she is really mentally ill and that she needs all that. I always thought that she’s not that bad, but I don’t see how she can get out of it. She used to go to this place in Santa Monica called Step Up On Second, and we’d visit residents there, and actually, if I’d had a chance to choose, it seems a lot nicer place than Brentwood Manor. But they all said it was really noisy, you bet. She had a friend who wanted to be an actor, and then he attempted suicide, you know they drove him to it, they get paid plenty for treating him after a suicide attempt. Another one they gave what maybe could have been an OK apartment but no money for furniture so he slept on the floor and took the bus, like me. He tried to self-publish some poetry, and then he attempted suicide, too, well, I saw the pattern, feed them with peanuts and they attempt suicide, they’re in forever.One of them told me, “They want me to look for work doing[some menial job] and I was a grad student in [something fancy]!” The last one gave me diabetes, coronary artery disease with two heart surgeries, a diabetic neuropathy, “burning feet” with a crippled left leg. It seems that if you get “cured” or “recover” you’re just on your own like everybody else so I won’t get involved with any of it again, any therapy, treatment, psychology, or psychiatry. It’s all voluntary, and if they make a misdiagnosis, it is very difficult to erase from your record, the art and science is constantly evolving, and there are a lot of quacks and abuse. I read in a nurses’ handbook in a textbook store that “all psychiatry is punishment” like prisons, so why would one ever enter into it voluntarily if he knew? “I don’t want to be punished, go fuck yourself!” is healthy, in my belief. Erich Fromm, the psychoanalyst, wrote Escape F rom F reedo m . I’m not saying that a lot of those people don’t deserve, need, to be there, just not me. My sister wants me to get SSI again and they want me to go to their psychiatrist and I’m going to refuse to go, I’m not going to pretend to be crazy for $10,000/year, even for a car, because I have to clean up my psych record like it is. It’s permanent and then some other psychiatrist comes back years later and gets your wife to snitch and takes away everything and locks you up for two years for a diagnosis from 30 years ago to get out of the draft that everyone forgot, but it’s bucks to the psychiatrist, the facility, and the family. And they wanted to get a dual diagnosis, throw in substance abuse, drug addict, for being a Deadhead and friends with the crew, some people I met at Woodstock working as Security in the Hog Farm. I’m going to get their attorneys, the best rock, drug, and mental
health lawyers in the world, to read this. I never did anything, I’m a Yalie, they came for me. They took all my stuff with no bust, no charges, no trial, like indefinite detention at Brentwood Manor with $25/month.
They never found any drugs, and as far as I know, there is no evidence of any drugs. I wasn’t in jail.They never gave a reason to go to the nursing home or board-and-care, except “your room was messy”.I have to go because they said, and it’s wrong medically. Joan said she talked to Dr. Riceberg and he said he never talked to her, “It was a bad connection.” She said,” Dr. Riceberg says you don’t have diabetes.” When I said that couldn’t possibly be true she said, “The nurse told me,” which is also impossible. I was correct to refuse. Attorney Bruce Margolin said, “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
JOURNAL III 4/24/2012 11:51 AM
I’ve started to say that my family tried to kill me for the inheritance. A woman told me, “They’re trying to make you look crazy to steal the inheritance.” And all the people I used to know, my so-called “friends”, will take their side because my sister was in the Bush White House and my mother in San Francisco City Hall, so I’m on my own. I’m going to sue my family and all their doctors for two billion dollars. I used to say for attempted murder, false imprisonment, elder abuse, elder financial abuse, medical malpractice, psychiatric malpractice, and psychiatric or psychological torture. And also personal injury against Johnson and Johnson and Janssen, for getting diabetes, coronary artery disease, and diabetic neuropathy from Risperdal. So in these journals I am attempting to document the history of what happened to show them to attorneys I will select.
To outline the account, I could start from where I was living in the UCLA Co-op and a computer science major at CSUN, near my sister’s house, and she asked me to find a psychiatrist, and I went to Dr. Robert Newport. Going to her house when my parents were visiting and being tricked into seeing Dr. Lisa Fine at Edelman Ctr., L.A. County Mental Heath Dept., Sepulveda & Olympic, 310-966-6500, and going every 2 weeks for 5 years, catching the diabetes, having 2 heart surgieries and a colon resection for diverticulitis at Cedars-Sinai Hospital with my Anthem Blue Cross PPO. Then my sister asking me to go in a nursing home, then Life Adjustment Team, then forced to Dr. Stubbeman, they take away my $60K/yr. w/ my apartment for going to a Ratdog show. I go to Lama Foundation in New Mexico, they never pay, I’m kicked out under mysterious circumstances, they force me into Brentwood Manor Board-and-Care Home for 2 years against my will, Joan hands the Head Nurse, Chief Administrator, June Gatewood, R.N. a letter from Dr. Stubbeman, all it says is “paranoid schizophrenia”, exactly the misdiagnosis from Dr. Auerbach to get me out of the draft when I was living on the Hog Farm in 1971 that I asked him to rediagnose, and told clinical psychologist Mike Bernath and he told me to, “Go to a clinical psychologist, get retested and rediagnosed.”So of course I protest it; I had al r ea d y protested it. I went to Yale, Class of ’71, Pierson College; I’m no bloody axe murderer.
5/11/2012 11:53 PM
So I went over the 2 years of hell and torture in Brentwood Manor, and Dr. Fine said, “If you get the money you can do anything you want.” I was working selling Sprint cell phones
telemarketing B2B to small businesses in the South and looking online for money, and I thought I might be able to get financial aid from Cal State, where my dad had been paying for me to be a junior computer science major before my operations. Sure enough, I was offered financial aid, $16,500, by San Francisco State, Cal State East Bay in Hayward, and Humboldt State in Arcata. Hindsight is 20/20—maybe if I’d chosen Arcata my family wouldn’t have blocked it and gotten the Hog Farmers to help them, I don’t know. I chose Hayward because I’d lived with Joe Sims who called himself a Hog Farmer in Berkeley before and I thought that they would be friendly. I didn’t know that, as one of them said when I first got there,”People come from India to join the Hog Farm,” and I was asking for trouble.
I wrote an email to Wavy Gravy’s wife, telling her my plan, and for some dumb reason I added at the end asking to join the Hog Farm—I was foolish expecting them to be friendly. First, in general, 2nd coming there out of an institution where I didn’t have much money and the financial aid wasn’t that much. I guess I was trying a “Hail Mary”-type maneuver to save, rescue the situation. She wrote back that it was impossible to join the Hog Farm, that you had to be born to one, that they were old and set in their ways. I guess I was too desperate to pay attention. I could have seen that “No means no,” and decided to go to Arcata and not pressed on to Berkeley. I had to get out of there. The mental health advocate had said people were sometimes in those places “to suppress dissent” and “for social control” and to “walk away”.
A lawyer had told me that I had signed myself in and it was my fault, and I could leave. Dr. Fine offered to make me my own SSI payee so I could get an apartment there if my sister would give her permission, but she wouldn’t. Deacon Sam said it was an “SSI scam, somebody else from the church had one, get another psychiatrist”. Later I wrote something to Jerry Brown when he was Attorney-General and he had a bunch of “Medi-Cal Fraud, Elder Abuse” cases on his government site. When the nurses stole my sleeping bag I went down to the local police station to file a report, an officer came to the facility to take the theft report, and when we were talking about how dangerous it was there and how the police were not able to protect me there she said to me, “Why don’t you leave?”
I showed Dr. Fine the award I had accepted for $16,500 financial aid and told her that they told me I was almost sure to be accepted for Spring, 2006 as a computer science major as soon as they received the rest of the transcripts. She had already taken me off all of my psych meds and she said, “When you go to Cal State, don’t come back,” and I didn’t. A year or so before I had put my sister Joan on the pay phone with Richie from the Hog Farm at Laytonville who used to be on the Grateful Dead Crew and whose wife worked in their office in San Rafael where he lived and I talked to him a few weeks later and he had terminal liver cancer. He moved to Camp Winnarainbow and invited me to visit him before he died and I asked Joan for $100 for a bus trip but she refused. My friend Alberto from New Mexico went and carved a tombstone with his name and birth date, leaving out the death date, and Tinker, also now deceased, carved a coffin from wood he selected, and I was locked down in Brentwood Manor. Later Joan let me take the bus up and stay with Mikey for a few days, after Richie died.
[07/26/2013 It's not really possible that Richie's death had anything to do with him talking to Joan on the phone. It's just that he told me of the terminal diagnosis on the phone right after he spoke to her on the phone, the same with Jerry Garcia, even though Rolling Stone Magazine said the CIA had an “Operation Dead End” at shows to entrap Deadheads and what I've said about Jonathan, that's really all I know. My dad said once, “I wish the Grateful Dead were dead!” and
when Bill Graham was killed in a helicopter crash he said, “I hope it didn't hurt the helicopter!” and Graham had his funeral at my dad's synagogue, Temple Emanu-el, and joined his Jewish men's club, Concordia-Argonaut. When I got to San Francisco, Vince Welnick, Grateful Dead keyboardist, had just committed suicide, upset about Jerry's death, although, of course, I have no reason to connect anything about that to me or my family. While I was in Brentwood he played nearby and I ran into him in the men's room and exchanged about two sentences and at the end I saw him get in his limousine—that is no reason to infer any type of connection. The same with Gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson, who I've never met or seen, who committed suicide after a hip replacement operation. A while after I got here Lou Todd and Tinker from the Hog Farm passed, as well as my old friend Alberto Castagna from Llano—I must always think of blaming my family when anyone dies, gets hurt, or anything happens! I have no proof of anything. If Ken Babbs put a story on the Internet about a man whose parents were responsible for the death of Ken Kesey and the assassination of JFK, I shouldn't take it so seriously—it's just art; if it means anything maybe it's just talking about me. My mom never went for that Ken Kesey One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest legend stuff, decided to oppose it, and when I accidentally told her he was thinking of running for the Eugene School Board, she ran for the San Franciso School Board and won—maybe Babbs was thinking of that. Shortly after he wrote that, I repeated it online to Kesey's son, Zane Kesey, and he got really mad, wrote me back, “Don't say that about my dad!”etc. And Babbs sure writes a lot of stuff and the first time I ever spoke to him and talked to him about an email he wrote me he said, “It wasn't me!” so he might not back up that story he wrote; I doubt he cares. Mike had a copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test where he was speaking and I showed him the part at the end where Kesey's saying, “We blew it!”, and he's saying, “We didn't blow it!”, back and forth, and they're arguing, and I asked him, and he said, “We blew it but we didn't blow it!”]
So when it was getting near the beginning of the Spring Quarter, I asked Mikey if I could stay with him again for two weeks, planning to pick up the financial aid, rent a car, rent an apartment on Grizzly Peak across from Tilden Park, and buy a top-of-the-line workstation computer to be a computer science major. I picked up my pay check and signed out from work and made a reservation to Oakland Airport. All I had to do was pick up my meds, pack, and call the shuttle for the airport. I hadn’t told my sister or the facility because I was afraid they would try to stop me, thinking that I had made the plan with Dr. Fine and she would back me up if there was any question. I was just going.
I went to the pharmacy across the street and he insisted that Oscar, the Assistant Administrator, give approval before he release the meds. I went to Oscar’s office and he insisted on calling my sister. Joan was at first, don’t go, even though Dr. Fine had approved and she had been there when Dr. Fine said I could do anything I wanted if I got the money. Joan said I could go, and asked me the names of the people in the CSUEB administration with whom I had been speaking on the phone, and I gave her the names and telephone numbers.
I don’t remember how the school contacted me in the next few days, by phone, email, or mail, but all of a sudden, I was not going to be admitted, my GPA was slightly too low. Right then I wondered if Joan had tampered with my acceptance. When we met with Tina last month Joan admitted that she has something to do with the fact that to this date the CSUEB undergraduate evaluator has never counted a whole year of Yale grades, B average, though they have the
transcript. It says 36 units, 0 GPA, because they say Honors, High Pass, Pass, and Fail may not be A, B, C, and F, like everybody else has always agreed. I didn’t notice this until this year. I thought right then that Joan got me disenrolled for her own purposes. They said I had to go to a junior college, where I could probably get the same financial aid, take English 1A which I had already taken, get an A, and one other class, bring my GPA up to 2.0, and I would automatically be accepted to CSUEB. I never thought about going to Dr. Fine and saying, “I’m not going.”
I decided against Diablo Valley College for Berkeley City College, making Wavy Gravy say, “On my sidewalk!”They were then called Vista and the Vista Contact Person, Mirella Medina, at CSUEB, said just what I said above. The financial aid person at BCC, Robert, I guess, was trying to tell me on the phone that they were lying, at least about there, but I’m so optimistic about getting out of scrapes I talked him into saying, “I’ll give you $10,000; see you when you get to Berkeley,” persuading myself that he certainly meant he’d give me the whole $16,500.
I got to Mikey’s and there was just a hundred or so for tuition; they had all duped me completely into risking my life. I have to take about 10 meds after 2 heart surgeries caused by diabetes from Risperdal, and I have a heart med, Toprol XL, that if you miss one day causes a myocardial infarction, heart attack, life-threatening. Dr. Fine had taken me off the Risperdal and said, “Don’t come back, “ but Mikey wanted me to make an appointment at Berkeley Mental Health.
I don’t know why he wouldn’t take no for an answer—maybe he was talking to Joan or Jonathan on the phone—but he said he’d throw me out if I didn’t go, so I went. Then, after I found out there was no financial aid, he got Joan, my mother, my old friend and dentist Don Nguyen, and Wavy’s wife Jahanera all on the phone and they tried to talk me into going to a mental hospital. Dr. Fine had just said, “Don’t come back.” The lawyer blamed me for letting them pressure and coerce me into signing in to Brentwood and now they were doing it again, so I kept saying, “No.” I kept remembering something I’d read in the anti-psychiatry literature by Howie The Harp, who I met once, and jammed with him, him playing the harp, “It’s better to be homeless than to be in a mental hospital”. I figured he oughta know. I was trying to make a case that I was sane and had been misdiagnosed. They were setting me up for this. They had the school do these things, maybe to make me look crazy to steal the inheritance, like that woman said.
If you go to a mental hospital, you’re just going to look crazier, whether you are or not. Dr. Riceberg, during the colon resection at Cedars-Sinai, had made a big deal of teaching me I was not mentally ill, that I was sane. Maybe it suited his practice. I read on MindFreedom.org at that time, and they are still saying it, that all of the diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual are wrong. Recently they talk about going to the APA meeting and “tearing up your labels”. Ken Babbs had had a story about Neal Cassady getting a job driving a bus for mental patients from an institution on skypilotclub.com.I had just gotten this “sane” place from these classy doctors and I was staying in it, and they really were/are trying to drive me crazy for their profit. It’s said that they have to win and kill you—that you have to die young if you’re a mental patient, that you have to die 25 years early. Well, in Escape F rom Aus c hwitz they had less time to live, 3 months if you can work, 0 time for pregnant women, elderly, disabled, etc.
and he got to America to write the book—I’m trying to beat the odds like him, or maybe things might change. After all, I’m still alive and kicking, and many others have probably had similar or worse situations. I think, “I’m the family of high-ranking Republican leaders, and I’m alive after the putsch!” Solzhenitsen was in the gulag with a false psychiatric diagnosis for writing capitalist poetry in a Communist country. I left out how they were tapping my computer on Courtleigh. I heard of a peace demo at the Federal Building in March 20 0 3 and went, got invited to Coalition For World Peace at the Peace Center, maybe got listed. Move On said forward this email and I did to Feinstein, Boxer, telling them my mom & sister, and then to the White House, telling my sister is Chairman of the Barbara Bush Literacy Campaign, don’t invade Iraq, and maybe they got mad? Jonathan wrote me: “Stop blogging!”
When I was at UCI I went to Hillel and met a girl, an English major, and later she got a bad grade and was moving out.She said, “They wanted me to go to a mental hospital or go homeless.”That was the first time I ever heard of that, I guess that’s what I got, two bad ideas. She didn’t really go homeless; she moved in with a girlfriend in a cheap hotel in Santa Ana because her dad had taken out loans for her education that weren’t happening now. So that’s what they were doing to me. If I went it would be a big effort to get out and I would be back where I started, but with more stigma. I had just gotten out of a less restrictive institution. Dr. Fine, the psychiatrist, had approved going to CSUEB, but my sister maybe was going to turn this into an attempt to commit me just because I was trying to keep her from finding out. Then Mikey forced me to sign up for the homeless center, and he said I could go back to L.A. The homeless lady said she’d made an appointment with some doctor it turned out my mother knew later, a psychiatrist at Berkeley Mental Health, and if I didn’t go I would lose all kinds of things, so I went. The nurse refused to let me see the doctor, saying, “It has to be voluntary.” She said I could find a place and have the landlord call my sister and she would give her credit card for rent, which was false. They put me out on the bench in front. Then they threw me out of the homeless shelter for some ridiculous, obscure rule I didn’t break, and I was on the street with my heavy suitcase, which was soon stolen, everything I owned.
In addition, the school had said get your SSI and I had been paying something like $95/mo. to a storage in L.A. where I’d left the stuff that I’d had at Brentwood: my computer, Fender Stratocaster, Deluxe Reverb amp, Yamaha Acoustic guitar, and lots of clothes, books, camping equipment, etc. They said I was a few dollars wrong on the amount and sold everything at auction before I could contact them—I was on the streets. The suitcase had lots of nice pants, coats, my cell phone, etc. At another (nightly) homeless shelter my glasses were stolen, and
$175 cash from my wallet, although the preacher who preached that night’s sermon returned the empty wallet. It was worse in San Francisco, where my mother had used to be on the School Board and the Human Rights Commission. I’m in my 9th year of being slowly tortured to death by my own government, no police, no arrest, no charges, no trial, no prison, no jail. I think sometimes of Wilson and Plame, who were high-ranking government officials, especially Plame, who was punished for what her husband did, whistleblower, and he just wanted to be truthful for the record. My father died two years ago and maybe they did that to him. He was so proud of the White House match books H.W. gave him on the tour of his daughter’s office there, and the photo at Kennebunkport with H.W. with his arm around Joan and Barbara with her arm around Jonathan. [07/27/2013 When H.W got elected in 1988 I emailed them at the White House,
where my sister was Assistant Chief-Of-Staff, “Congratulations. May the Lord bless you and keep you, may the Lord make his face to shine upon you, may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.” Barbara Bush sent me back a formal thank-you note. And now all of them and all of us are born-again Christians.] I saw W. on TV once saying of his enemies, “make ‘em retire broke”. I suppose I’d take that over waterboarding. He was a couple years ahead of me at Yale, at the same time, though I never met him, I know the type of preppy.
I saw a black man get a heart attack with no one making a move to help him in a homeless shelter, hurray for me. Attempted murder, wrongful death? Somehow through all of it (mostly the Hog Farmers being merciful occasionally and letting me hang out at their places for a while for old times’ sake) I managed to get the A’s I needed and get into Cal State East Bay, and they gave me the $16,500, in Fall, 2007.[7/14/2012 Can’t help it: Grampa Henry was a Holocaust Survivor, and he used to say, “They can take away everything, but they can’t take away your education.”][7/23/13 Clinton said: “Mandela said: 'They can take away everything but your mind and your heart.'.”]
7/18/2012 10:45 PM
I thought of another possible reason for the things which have befallen me. I’m still playing phone tag with Mike Bernath, the clinical psychologist from L.A. When I first started going to psychiatrist Dr. Bill Stubbeman, I was talking with Mike on the phone one night on the bus on La Cienega. He said, “They should have let you pick your own therapist.” He said, “They’re trying to get a dual diagnosis,” and explained that that was something I already had mixed with drugs, which I found out was called “substance abuse”, and he said, “that’s bad, you don’t want that.” He said, “You can keep going to shows [he’s a Deadhead]; you can go to Wharf Rats.” I told him about how I had been diagnosed with “paranoid schizophrenia” by Dr. Auerbach to get me out of the draft when I was living on the Hog Farm and he said, “Go to a clinical psychologist and get retested and rediagnosed.” Then when Joan brought me back from the Lama Foundation and forced me to go to Brentwood Manor, she handed them a paper from Dr.
Stubbeman where he had again written “paranoid schizophrenia”, after I had told him the story in hopes he could/would remove the diagnosis. Maybe he was unable to get the “dual diagnosis” and he put down “paranoid schizophrenia”, a repeat from Dr. Auerbach 33 years before, as the second part of an attempted dual diagnosis, as Mike warned, that never materialized. [As far as I know; I should get a copy of my medical records and look at them.]
I had just had two angioplasties, heart operations, and at the second one they had diagnosed diabetes as the cause, and psychiatrist Dr. Lisa Fine said that diabetes was linked to Risperdal, and she had prescribed it. She had diagnosed me with “schizoaffective disorder”, but she never discussed it or explained what it meant, and I just found out what it means recently, 12 years later, so I think it’s normal to question if I have that, too. She told me once, “You know why I like you? Because you went to Yale and you’re married to Laurie!”
There was an article in Str e et S piri t , one of the few I’ve seen, about diabetes and Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel, that claims that deaths from diabetes from these drugs, “atypical anti-
psychotics”, have been covered up, actually just Zyprexa, because the Bush family owns piles of stock in the Lilly Pharmaceutical Co., manufacturers of Zyprexa. Since my sister is Chairman of the Barbara Bush Literacy Campaign and was Asst. Chief-of-Staff to Vice-President H.W. Bush in the Reagan White House, that is a possibility. That could be the reason they got Laurie to take me to the Life Adjustment Team, which may be a drug rehab, and Laurie was going to the nearby SHARE, Self-Help and Recovery Exchange, which has AA and NA. Laurie got committed just for calling Dr. Nadel, by Nadel’s substitute Dr. Holstein, when she saw a program about 9-11 people in NYC receiving counseling, and I went downtown to the Kaiser Mental Hospital and brought her home because I missed her and I didn’t think she should have been put in there for nothing, her first time in a mental hospital. Since Life Adjustment Team is “psychiatric rehabilitation”, I’m reading a book about psychiatric rehabilitation I got at the Cal State textbook store, and it’s for people coming out of mental hospitals, I’m just guessing they prescribed that for her and dragged me into it without ever telling me what it was. I guess I thought it was some kind of marriage counseling that might be useful is why I co-operated.
They had a picture of Jerry Garcia and other dead rock stars on the wall. Maybe Mike said they were trying to get a dual diagnosis, and they were trying to bring up all this stuff about drugs, because Jerry died in a drug rehab in Lagunitas after checking out of Betty Ford Clinic of a diabetic heart attack.I have never heard any doctor say my diabetes was caused by drugs, but Dr. Nelson Schiller at UCSF-Mission Bay Cardiology says it’s a metabolic syndrome (diabetes
& heart disease) caused by Risperdal. Maybe they were trying to get a dual diagnosis to save Johnson & Johnson and their subsidiary, Janssen, who make Risperdal, the inevitable lawsuits (which the Zyprexa diabetes cases won, for billions) by trying to make it look like the diabetes was caused by drugs and mental illness, not Risperdal. Laurie said Astra-Zeneca paid her a settlement for catching diabetes from Seroquel.
Stubbeman administered taking away my $60,000/year allowance, except for meds, medical bills, and Blue Cross, apparently for going to a Bobby Weir and Ratdog show and for planning to visit an old hippie friend in Washington, and locking me down penniless in Brentwood Manor for two years, and he’s a psychiatrist. Brentwood claimed I didn’t have diabetes and it was
while I was there that I finally saw an endocrinologist (diabetes specialist) on the advice of my Hog Farm friend diabetes educator in New Mexico and a neurologist who prescribed meds for the diabetic neuropathy, “burning feet”.
Are they treating me like this to cover up my diabetes case for Janssen and Johnson & Johnson, makers of Risperdal? I’m only guessing. I didn’t do anything. This is for the attorney.
7/18/2012 11:04 PM
I’m always thinking about what happened to me in ’03, with the diabetes operations, losing my
$60K/year, going to Brentwood for 2 years, and still not knowing the reason why, still speculating. Thinking about the diabetic neuropathy, “burning feet”, that happened right before Laurie took me to the meeting with Joan and her parents where they asked me to “agree” to go to a nursing home. It had not been diagnosed correctly yet. It had just started hurting while I
was walking the 3 blocks from my apartment on Courtleigh Dr. to Laurie’s at 3956 Inglewood Blvd. I called my primary care physician, Dr. Edward Riceberg, from Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where I had the colon resection for diverticulitis, to make an appointment. I said to him maybe the pain was from my chronic prostatitis, we didn’t know. He didn’t think it was very serious, not even serious enough to make an appointment and come in. Over the phone he prescribed 600mg. tablets of Ibuprofen, Advil, for the pain. The ones you get over-the-counter in the store are 200mg. He said don’t worry about it, and the pills did help a lot.
But it still bothered me in a few weeks, so I went to my chiropractor, also covered by Blue Cross. He said if your knees buckle it might be your back--go to an orthopedist. I’d been to an orthopedist for my back, which turned out fine, before, and he’d moved to Westwood and added the title “Sports Medicine” to his door for the UCLA students. Eventually I went there and he asked me some questions and said it wasn’t my back, it was diabetic neuropathy and go to physical therapy. Then the second physical therapist sent me back to Dr. Riceberg for the diabetes and my diabetes educator friend recommended an endocrinologist, neurologist, nutritionist, and Neurontin, which, along with Topomax, Cymbalta, and Alpha-Lipoic Acid, pretty much killed all of the pain completely. Now I have Lyrica instead of Neurontin and it’s even better.
But at the point where I met with Joan and Laurie’s parents, I’d just been to the chiropractor who’d said if your knees buckle it might be your back, go to an orthopedist, and I was planning my visit to the orthopedist I’d seen before. Perhaps somehow my sister, Laurie, Laurie’s parents, and Laurie told me years later that her psychiatrist, Dr. Nadel had arranged the meeting, found out what the chiropractor had said, or maybe even I told them. I was limping around with my left leg in great pain. Maybe the reason they wanted me to go in the nursing home was they considered me a cripple, like all the people in wheelchairs in there. Eventually they got me in Brentwood, which is called “assisted living”, which I don’t need, and nobody, especially doctors, ever said I ever needed, but they might have thought I did. And many times my family has demonstrated that they don’t believe in (at least my) doctors, and other legalities. Maybe they wanted to take back the $60K/year, maybe take away my inheritance, lock me down forever on Medi-Cal without me knowing the reason, that’s why I could never accept it. Maybe they really thought it was my back. Maybe they were trying to stop me from going to the orthopedist, but I refused the nursing home, did anyway, and got diagnosed with a diabetic neuropathy. Maybe after the neuropathy was diagnosed and my friend told me to go to an endocrinologist, neurologist, and nutritionist, they were trying to stop me from doing that. At Brentwood they claimed I didn’t have diabetes and Joan claimed that Dr. Riceberg told her I didn’t have diabetes, folded when I said that he couldn’t have said that and claimed the nurse told her, equally impossible. She said she talked to him and he said he never talked to her, “It was a bad connection.” As I said, maybe they were covering up for Johnson & Johnson and Janssen getting diabetes from Risperdal, the true diagnosis all the doctors said. I said even in 2004 I would sue all of them for $2 billion for attempted murder. It’s life-threatening if you don’t manage it, and everybody still tries to stop me. I could have avoided the neuropathy if I’d began managing it when I was diagnosed in 2000, but nobody told me. I was supposed to go to the Cardiac Rehab at UCLA-Santa Monica Hospital as soon as Jonathan gave me my sister-in- law’s Ford Escort, but when he never gave it to me, the nurse in charge, who worked for the
cardiologist who did my angioplasty operation there, Dr. Dave`, called up and dropped me. If I’d gone as I was supposed to they probably would have told me how to manage diabetes because it was diagnosed at the second angioplasty, and I wouldn’t have come down with the complication of a diabetic neuropathy.. Since the endocrinologist taught me the correct diet and how to blood test myself and keep the numbers low by eating right, the neuropathy has not only not gotten worse, it’s gotten better, and I haven’t gotten any more complications, which are what kill you, and the complications are caused by high blood sugar numbers. Those are caused by wrong eating. I finally learned that from the endocrinologist, Dr. Hohnichter, on Rexford St. in Beverly Hills, and I lived to tell. I’m going to study more about diabetes discrimination, in the workplace and in education, which the American Diabetes Association claims is based upon a 5-4 Bush Supreme Court decision against the Federal Government paying for the school nurses required for diabetic children to self-administer insulin injections and glucose pills in schools. Insulin, which lowers the blood sugar numbers, is expensive, although it's still covered by Anthem, and I haven't needed it yet, or Metformin or other diabetes meds, my numbers are always so low; I exercise, test daily, and keep them around 100.
[07/26/2013 I was thinking to look up the emails of attorneys to send this under Wills and Probate, Trusts and Estates, Personal Injury, and Medical Malpractice, but I just stumbled on a complete list of specialties, and all of these seem relevant: Americans with Disabilities Act, Assault, Asset Protection, Asset Recovery, Civil Litigation, Civil Practice, Civil Rights, Contested Wills, Elder Law, Estate Litigation, Family Law, Family Mediation, Guardianship and Conservatorship, Health Care, Homicide, Hospital Law, Identity Theft, Inheritance, Long Term Care, Medical Malpractice, Negligence, Nursing Home Litigation, Personal Injury, Social Security Disability, Theft, Trusts and Estates, Whistleblower Litigation, Wills and Probate, and Wrongful Death.]
