Electroboy (22 page)

We arrive in Basel and check in at the hotel, and I immediately become suspicious of any men with blond hair, which is kind of ridiculous, but I’m on the lookout for Kostabi, who never misses this show. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to say to him if I see him. Maybe I’ll try to sell him a painting. Or maybe I’ll sign his autograph for him. I take a quick shower and get dressed in my art-dealer suit—I’m an art dealer again. Annike puts on her female version—a taupe knee-length skirt, a beige silk blouse, and heels—which is very conservative for her. Briefcases in hand, we go to the exhibition hall, which consists of what seems like miles and miles of booths, in which exhibiting gallery owners and dealers are selling “our” wares—including our $25,000,000 van Gogh, the very same one we have received a slide of from a dealer in Chicago and passed on to another dealer who supposedly had a bank interested in acquiring it. There’s not a chance that anybody will ever buy this painting through us; we just don’t have those connections. After about two hours, I realize we’re not making much progress. We have arranged some meetings with dealers and gallery owners in advance, but we haven’t met anybody on our list yet and we’re just looking at booths. I’m not finding this very helpful and I’m getting tired, so we decide to call it a day.

At 10:00 the next morning I meet with Stephen Curtis, a Los Angeles–based private dealer, to discuss the sale of a $3.2 million Renoir painting that his client is interested in purchasing. Annike is having coffee with a German dealer at a café, and I’m going to meet her for lunch at noon. We’re sitting in the lobby lounge of his hotel having breakfast, and he assures me that his client is prepared to make a deposit on the painting and then view it. If he likes it, he’ll wire the balance directly into Stephen’s account and the deal will be done. I have access to the portrait of a mother with child through another dealer in Los Angeles, who tells me that she has direct access to its owner. There really is no reason for
the meeting except it gives me a chance to meet him face-to-face. I really believe that Stephen has a client for the painting, and by the eager look on his face I can see he thinks I really do have access to it. So I give him another transparency and we agree to talk again when we get back to the States. In my mind I’m already calculating my commission; in reality I don’t even know if my contact has access to the painting. I can only hope that she’s not jerking me around. Basically, we’re talking about something that might not even exist.

Things aren’t exactly going as planned. I wake up the next morning and realize I don’t know if Annike really has an itinerary for this trip to Europe. I tell her I’m a bit angry and am not sure it was worth borrowing the money to make it happen, and she calms me down, pushing me into the shower. When I come out I see that she has taken a thick black Magic Marker and drawn on the white wall a huge map of Germany complete with all of our stops and our route—literally our itinerary. I’m shocked and think she’s getting a little crazy. But this is how she makes her point—she knows exactly where we’re going. I’m impressed but at the same time somewhat nervous that the maid is going to walk into the room and see the wall before we leave. Now we just have to escape from this desecrated hotel room without paying.

We won’t be deterred. We convince ourselves that the $20 left in my pocket is the mark of astounding success and it’s time for us to leave Basel and head to Germany. Our first stop is Munich, to meet Annike’s family. Her parents, a robust couple in their sixties, greet me warmly and offer us all kinds of food—meats, cheeses, breads, vegetables, salads, and drinks—in the middle of the afternoon. Annike’s father is proud of his relatively good English, and her mother gestures very well. We accept their offer to stay overnight, and busy ourselves putting together slides and typing letters to dealers. I sense they actually believe we’re dealing art successfully. After all, we have flown from New York to Hamburg, rented a car, stayed in luxury hotels, and brought them gifts.

Dachau is our next stop. I don’t know exactly what to expect, but for some reason I imagine a huge sign with ten-foot-tall letters.
Something like the
HOLLYWOOD
sign. I’ve been obsessed with Holocaust documentaries for as long as I can remember. It seems as though one day Jews are leading relatively normal lives, and the next they’re being rounded up by the SS and shipped off to concentration camps by train. It all seems to happen so quickly. Now I’m standing outside one of those concentration camps. The trees are so unbelievably green, like the trees I grew up with in the suburbs. They’re blowing in the wind and it’s summer and it seems so peaceful. I’m confused by the beauty. I didn’t imagine all of this color. We walk past the gates.
MONTAGS GESCHLOSSEN.
Mondays closed. That strikes me as very peculiar. Where do they all go on Mondays?

ARBEIT MACHT FREI,
read the words over the gatehouse. “Work makes one free.” I’m overwhelmed by the quiet. We walk over to the memorial to those who were murdered at the camp and tour the ovens and gas chambers. I feel like I’ve stepped onto the set of one of the documentaries and there’s no one there to direct me. I feel like I’m on sacred ground. I’m looking for all of the extras in their striped prison garb, but there is nobody in sight. I guess they aren’t needed anymore. This is a deserted prison camp, a graveyard that’s filled in with green trees and grass. I look down at my feet. There is a dandelion growing between the cracks in the concrete.

Walking around the grounds, I feel numb, disconnected from what happened here almost fifty years ago. “I’m ready to leave,” I tell Annike. I walk back through the gates and leave Dachau behind as an emerald-green memory. We drive on to Cologne and Düsseldorf, visiting private dealers and galleries, making more empty deals along the way, collecting more promises and adding more charges to my credit cards. When we finally return to the airport, we just leave the car in front of the terminal, so as not to cause any trouble at the car-rental return area. Someone will find it.

October 6, 1992. New York
.

I’m not taking Prozac because I can’t afford it—it’s $3 a pill—and I’m not even sure it’s doing anything for me. I don’t have any way of paying for a psychiatrist, and I can’t seem to articulate to my parents how urgently I need professional help again. My mother calls me and tells me that they’re coming into the city for dinner and asks me to join them, so I meet them that night at Demarchelier on the Upper East Side. I’m not used to eating at restaurants like this anymore, so I feel a bit out of place. They ask about what’s going on in my life, specifically the progress I’m making finding employment, and I tell them some concocted story about having looked for PR work with a couple of different agencies, with no luck. I tell them I’m looking into other things, and that I can’t afford to see a therapist again right now and I desperately need to see one. But they’ve been through a rough time with me—my ongoing unemployment and my legal problems—and they’re a bit confused about my mental state and where I’m headed and my future plans. I feel really uncomfortable about asking them to bail me out again like they have so many times in the past. They feel that I’ve seen more than my fair share of therapists and hope I’ll find some type of job and make a living. They offer many suggestions. I should try something new. Something creative, perhaps. Or try to go to work for somebody in a stable environment. I could think about going back to school to get a business or law degree, or rebuild my PR company. They even talk about my going to work for my mother’s recruiting business. They’re extremely encouraging, but they want me to pull myself out of this ditch on my own. And I don’t really expect them to rescue me this time either. That night I call my sister and I tell her about the severity of my situation. I try to explain my condition to her as best I understand it. She agrees without hesitation to pay for me to see a psychiatrist once a week. I’m shocked. This is an extremely kind offer on her part, since we really haven’t had the
closest relationship in years, but more important, it’s a critical moment for me because I realize that my problem is very serious—serious enough that she will reach out this far for me. I set up an appointment with Dr. Golub, a psychiatrist on the Upper East Side. He’s tall and lanky, in his early forties, and looks frighteningly like Abraham Lincoln, a physical resemblance I can’t quite get out of my head. During our first session I start from scratch, again, repeating my psychiatric history, talking about my symptoms, and giving my background information. He asks if he can speak with any of my previous psychiatrists, and it just so happens that he knows two of them. In the meantime, without making a definitive diagnosis, he suspects that I might be manic depressive, and he puts me on lithium, Prozac, and Anafranil. It’s the first time I remember hearing the term
manic depression
, and it sounds serious to me, conjuring up images of patients running around a mental ward half-naked in terrycloth slippers—it sounds like the word
maniac
. The first thing I ask is if my condition is going to degenerate. I just naturally assume his diagnosis is accurate and don’t ask too many other questions. I’m more concerned with how he can treat me. He assures me that he can stabilize my condition with the right balance of medication. I leave his office feeling rather positive.

October 8, 1992. New York
.

I call Sandy, an old friend and colleague from Nancy’s PR agency, and ask her if she wants to get together to talk about starting our own agency. I know that she’s relatively unhappy at her job, and after a few meetings we’re confident that together we can find a few clients to promote and work out of my apartment. At this point my sister is doing well enough that my poaching an employee is not going to upset her, and we discuss it before the actual transition. Sandy and I give ourselves the name Agency 4, and soon we are promoting everything from authors and doctors to restaurants and gyms. After a few months we are doing well enough to move both our office and my apartment to executive office space on 51st Street and Seventh Avenue, next door to the
Michelangelo Hotel, a few blocks from Times Square. This isn’t the safest location for me because I like to wander at night and because there is so much sex available. Soon I’m back to where I was years ago, but it only matters that I’m having a good time. I’m taking the Prozac, lithium, and Anafranil cocktail, speeding through my days and not feeling much of a change in my moods. In fact, I live life a little more dangerously again and my mania is back in full swing. I entertain friends—and strangers—at the bar and restaurant, where they extend me a tab, probably because I spend so much time in the hotel lobby and just become a regular. Big mistake. The hotel becomes my living room. I make drinks for customers, entertain and serve as the master of ceremonies at the hotel bar. After hours I wander aimlessly around Times Square, which at 2:00
A.M.
looks oddly suspended between night and day because of all the neon lights. I stop in bars for drinks or porn stores looking at magazines and videos. I want to stay up all night and then have breakfast. This way I’ll never die.

A bunch of Jonathan’s actor friends tell him about an excellent therapist they all go to on the East Side. So after Jonathan has seen Dr. Solnick a few times and recommends him, I decide to give him a try. I cancel my appointments with Dr. Golub and tell him that I no longer can continue treatment with him for financial reasons. I’m also not feeling like I’m making much progress. Although I feel he has properly diagnosed me, I’m not responding well to the medication. Lithium is not effective for all manic-depressives, and Prozac is usually not used to treat manic-depressives; it can induce mania. I tell my sister that I have found a doctor I can afford on my own and make an appointment to see Dr. Solnick, who is opposed to treating his patients with medication. I am curious about this because I feel open to a new approach to my psychological problems. When I tell Dr. Solnick, a middle-aged psychiatrist with a hint of a British accent, about my pharmacological regimen, he immediately dismisses it as “overmedication” without really listening
to my diagnosis of manic depression. He advises me to go off the lithium, Prozac, and Anafranil cold turkey.

Within a few days I notice that my thoughts are becoming increasingly unhinged. It’s as if chunks of my brain have been scooped out, like the part that edits my thoughts before they become speech. I talk nonstop to friends and family about the case, babbling about anything that comes to mind. It’s sort of like that nervous energy you feel right before you have to give a speech, or what actors must feel before they go on stage. Only I feel it all the time. “Andy, relax,” my father says rather gruffly one morning when it’s clear he’s exasperated by my chatter.

I’m beginning to wonder if Dr. Solnick has done the right thing. But those times when I’m able to focus on winning my case, I feel a powerful euphoria wash over me, filling me with a sense of confidence that I hope will last through this trial.