The Deep End

Part 1,
because this is obviously going to run long so maybe it's best to chop it up. By the way, yeah, I'm kind of feeling out what the hell to write about because currently not many people read this, so I can play around. That may remain true, of course. I had a piece of luck at my old blog, a link from someone with a metrick fuckton of readers. This may turn out to be more of a Marsha Brady writing in her diary type of situation. And if that's true, I have all the time in the world to futz around with content.

With that out of the way...

I was thinking earlier about my first job out of school, and I've told people about it about a billion times but never really written out the story. So if that sounds at all interesting, stick around. It is, oh, pretty much a tale of woe in which things go not so very well. Read on if you are a Schadenfreudian. This is Schadenfreude with consent.

2004. I had completed my degree in a town that was not the town I wanted to live and work in. Clampett-like, I loaded up the truck and moved not so much to Beverly but to Manhattan with a sublet and no job. Somehow this did not strike me as especially foolish.

Went on a few interviews for jobs that would have been the death of me. I was in over my head one way or another, never did a stitch of social work before starting my MSW program and had no idea what I was doing. In some ways this has not changed, but I fake it a lot better. One interview was in Far Rockaway, working in the dilapidated high rises by the beach that are full of elderly Russians and people from the former republics, the ones who are not doing nearly well enough to live in Sheepshead Bay, I suppose. I would have had an enormous caseload and really my Russian was in lousy shape by then. I think the woman interviewing me took one look and knew I'd be a disaster.

Weeks pass. I'm wondering if I'm going to have to leave New York. I get another call out to Far Rockaway, and I go out for the interview, and it's immediately clear that it's a good match, even though of course this turns out to be untrue on a scale that is tragicomic, possibly epic. But I do have experience as a therapist in community mental health. I speak Russian (though they determine this by having me exchange exactly two sentences with a native speaker.) They are openly very enthusiastic about me, and....they seem surprised that I want to work there. Which is never a good sign.

If you want to picture them, the two people interviewing me are in their late 40's, tanned to a crisp, blonde in a way that nature may or may not have intended but Ashkenazic DNA pretty much forecloses, and have intense Long Island accents. The director, who I'll call Aunt Slappy if I have occasion to speak of her again, will later pronounce "poignant" as it looks in some conversation about Billy Crystal's doubtless utterly poighnant Broadway show*, and being a word snob, I'll say to myself "I really should have known about this one."

They introduce me to my supervisor who I'm going to call Murgatroid. She has a look of blank, stative panic in her eyes. "Working with Murgatroid," I am told by Aunt Slappy, "is a great clinical opportunity."

I get my first client. I couldn't tell you her name or her story if I wanted to. We'll briefly call her Hellacia because she's not in this story long, and if you're noting a dread of my clients in this name that doesn't speak well of my ability to treat them, you're noting right. Let's all sit around the fire and read "Hate & the Countertransference" (sort of like "Sex & the City" but no, not really) aloud, the fire composed of drafts of the conference paper I was going to write on difficult clients and what helps us do something for them. Not on that list: supervisors like Murgatroid. I had 11th grade English. That's called "foreshadowing."

What I remember about Hellacia is that I was told right away she was infamous at the clinic, had been there for years, had a chart you could use to boost a small child at the dinner table and Borderline Personality Disorder, which is a salient diagnosis but also something a clinician hangs around the neck of anyone that pushes his/her buttons.

The session is totally fine. She makes some overquick cathexes, tells me I remind her of her brother or something, and we're done. Except five minutes later Murgatroid comes in and says my client has completely decompensated in the waiting room and is screaming at the receptionist.

I've been a professional for one hour. I have no pride to swallow. I skip any hedging and say to Murgatroid, my supervisor, my holding environment, my safety net, "what should I say to her?" Murgatroid looks at me with the same blank panic I saw during my interview and will see for the next nine months of my life and says "I don't know what to say to her!" and basically walks off.

The universe takes pity and by the time I get out there, the client has not only calmed down but left. Just the same, I'm a dead man. I am suddenly aware that I am fucked. Murgatroid will turn out to be only one of my problems, but my basic impression is correct. The person who has been charged with managing my transition from student to professional is an addled, not particularly bright person who appears to have been shattered by years at this clinic. We will have a total of maybe 45 minutes discussing anything about my clients over my 10 months at the clinic**. The rest will be about their charts, because that kind of clinic exists not for the sake of clients, but for that of charts.

About the clinic itself, I should mention that the general air of the place was something between an emergency room and central booking. It's the nature of the neighborhood, in part--socioeconomically at the bottom of the barrel, and also through some accident or "accident" of the deinstitutionalization process, it's where a ton of group homes ended up so they wouldn't have to look at them in patchily wealthier western Nassau County.

A lot of people who want to be therapists have the same naive fantasy I had going in: working with the "worried well," on their depression/anxiety/other manageable problem. That's what happens on a tv show, maybe. This was what actually happens, in concentrated form. Clients who don't show. Clients who have to be hospitalized. Clients who are there for their meds and can't possibly fill ten minutes, not to speak of an hour, with introspection or even perhaps conversation...

Um this is not really a cliffhanger here but to be continued...

*Uh, this is maybe so far off-topic as to be of no interest, but the Billy Crystal thing is what we would call diagnostic in the biz. The people I worked with live in Nassau County and treat New York City with a kind of Victorian dread. It seems to me this is not exactly healthy for social workers. They express alarm that I'm taking the A train home, not because I have to catch it at the Far Rockaway station which genuinely was worrisome at the time, but because I'll be going through Bedford Stuyvesant. In truth I 1) am going under it, and 2) looked at an apartment I couldn't afford there, so. Anyway, I find myself wondering why they don't move to another part of the country, but I guess the dread is a giant, overwhelming garnish to a tiny sundae of delight, because all of them maybe once a year will go in and see a Broadway show or something. I think of them when Carmela takes Meadow to the Plaza for tea on The Sopranos. It's something I'll never understand, as someone who worked pretty hard to live in this urban hell. I can understand getting tired of it, but I can't understand never being a little in love with it, at least.

**I eventually start referring to Far Rockaway as Far the Fuckaway and the clinic as the Fuckaway Center for the Farblondjet or something like that. I'll just stick with that.