Brooklyn Zoo

A few months before I began the yearlong clinical internship necessary to complete my doctorate in psychology, my sister, a voracious reader, suggested I write this book. I went into psychology after some years spent as a magazine writer with the vague notion that I would eventually write about my field for a popular audience, so when she made her suggestion, I thought it was a good idea, and then I was never without my notebook during my time at Kings County Hospital. While names and identifying information of the people in this book have been changed, most of what is recounted here comes directly from my careful and copious notes.

IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF A JUNE SO HOT YOU WOULDN’T WISH
it on anyone, the last weeks of the last month of my internship year at Kings County Hospital. I was in a gypsy cab—the only kind of hired car to be found on the streets of East Flatbush—on my way to a job interview at a clinic in another marginalized Brooklyn neighborhood. (“The worst neighborhood you’ll ever work in,” the psychologist doing the hiring told me over the phone.) It was late in the afternoon when I flagged the driver down outside the hospital. Looking at the Kings County ID hanging low around my neck, he asked me where specifically I worked.

“G Building,” I said, waiting for some version of what I knew by then would follow.

“Oh.” He made eye contact, then looked away. “You work with the cuckoos.”

I was pleased to be able to discern the driver’s nationality, Haitian, from his intonation. Almost a year of working in that West Indian neighborhood had taught me to greet others
with a smile and slow “good morning,” and to distinguish the Jamaican lilt from the St. Lucian, the Haitian drawl from the Guyanese. I was less pleased with his words. After almost a year of working in and around the hospital’s inpatient adult psychiatric building—known locally as G—I took them personally.

“They’re just like everyone else,” I said. He didn’t reply. I protested further: “We all have our problems.”

I would not convince him. Seven years of graduate school and just a dissertation short of doctor, I was only myself beginning to understand the elusive continuum that runs from psychosis to neurosis, from the wildly manic to the mildly depressive. The driver’s attitude toward the mentally ill—the cuckoos—pervaded the neighborhood, if not the borough, the city, the country. We disdain in others what we disavow in ourselves.

From the beginning of my internship at Kings County Hospital, that much hadn’t been hard to get. I had been a psychology intern for less than a week when I first learned the lore of the G Building from a Caribbean X-ray technician who was herself just starting at Kings County Hospital. We were at new-employee orientation, waiting together for an elevator. She was friendly. Everyone in East Flatbush was so friendly. After more than a decade spent in New York City neighborhoods where even a wan smile and a nod toward a neighbor recognized on the street were taken as intrusions, I had to make a conscious switch into that brand of solicitude. For me it was like the initial movement of a tape deck right as you pushed play. It felt effortful.

“You’re a psychologist?” the X-ray tech asked, reading from my ID, which actually said “psychologist-in-training,” but that was a mouthful. When I told her yes, she asked where
in the hospital I would be working. Each of the buildings on the square mile of Kings County’s campus was lettered, in no order that I could make out. J next to N. T next to A. “G Building,” I told her. She laughed. I waited. When she stopped, she asked, not unkindly: “That’s a real place?”

I looked puzzled, and she continued. “I grew up around here,” she explained. “ ‘G Building’ was like this slang. Instead of saying someone was crazy, you might say, ‘He belongs in G Building.’ Or some kids, if they were acting up, their parents might say, ‘If you don’t behave, we’re going to send you to G Building.’ I’d always heard that. I just didn’t know G Building actually existed.”

I was there to tell her that it did.

MY RELATIONSHIP WITH PSYCHOLOGY BEGAN WHEN I WAS
eight. My mother started seeing a therapist she called Sylvia, and soon enough my father began going, too, after—as he would tell me many years later—my mom suggested the problems he was having in their marriage were not solely about her. What my mother meant was that my father was reexperiencing old feelings from his earliest formative relationship in the context of a new and different one. In other words, he felt treated by his wife how he’d felt treated by his mother. No one who knew my grandmother Mina (who openly derided every gift she’d ever gotten and had once shown up at my parents’ apartment with just-purchased underwear for her newly wed son) could have imagined my father’s old feelings to be benevolent. So my parents embarked on separate journeys of self-understanding, which I inferred allowed them to remain together. It was 1981, and we lived in the western suburbs of Detroit. Ronald Reagan had just become the country’s first divorced president, and many of the fathers on our street were
moving on. That therapy had facilitated my family’s escape from the hovering menace of dissolution was no small thing to me.

And so I became curious about psychotherapy, but I never asked my parents to describe it. Like all of the adult concerns that evoked pointed interest in me, it seemed illicit. I also wanted badly to discourage all open discussion of their latest pastime, lest they feel comfortable enough to mention it in front of my friends, whose families I vehemently believed had stepped straight off the soundstages of the late-1950s sitcoms I’d seen in reruns. That my parents went to therapy became one more dreary secret that I added to a list, though what I was really most desperate to keep under wraps was how much they disliked me. Were others to know, they could only reject me as well.

Not long after they started seeing Sylvia, my mother went back to school to become a social worker, a therapist herself. I was in the fourth grade and my sister in kindergarten, and though my mom had once been a teacher, she’d been at home, more or less, since I was born. After her graduation from social work school, she started seeing patients, and like anyone else she would talk about her work. Her stories were more anecdotes than case presentations, but I didn’t know enough to distinguish between the two. By the time I got to college, I assumed psych classes could only be superfluous, and I refused to sign up for any, defying all expectations of my gender and ethnicity. But also, as determined as I was at eighteen and twenty and even twenty-five to be sublimely unlike my mother, it never crossed my mind that I would become a therapist. I thought I’d be a lawyer—like my father.

It did occur to me to become a patient. The first time was my senior year of college after my mom suggested it. She
thought I was “too anxious,” a pronouncement I felt she might have delivered in any number of gentler ways, but still I considered it. She had colleagues near my campus in Ann Arbor, and she gave me a number. I called and got an answering machine but could not think of a thing to say. The second time was a couple of years later. I had finished undergrad and moved to New York to take an internship at a rock-and-roll magazine, but more to the point to live somewhere exciting. If things were going fine on paper, I often felt rotten. I couldn’t make any sense of myself. One lesson I had learned from half-listened-to conversations from my adolescence was that there were a lot of bad therapists out there, and so I got another referral, from a friend of my mother’s who knew a psychologist in Manhattan. I made an appointment but showed up on the wrong day, leaving Dr. Aronoff’s office in angry tears when nobody answered the buzzer. As I walked south on Fifth Avenue along the park on the way back to the entertainment magazine where I had by then become an editorial assistant, I thought, “I am trying so hard and still cannot get any help,” a masochist’s mantra.

Years later I would learn from the therapist’s side of the experience that the way in which a patient begins the therapy relationship is a proclamation of sorts—a snapshot of what he or she is struggling with—and I sometimes thought back on the way I began my own treatment. When I called Dr. Aronoff after that first afternoon to tell her that I’d traveled all the way from midtown at her behest just to find her absent, I was demonstrating this expectation: I would be the victim here and she my giddy torturer. “I teach on that day,” I remember her responding kindly. “I don’t think I would have scheduled an appointment then.” Look now, she was alerting me, we have some other options.

What relieved me most in those first years with Dr. Aronoff was a nascent appreciation for my own internal consistency. Where my feelings had once seemed arbitrary and free-floating as particles of dust, it was now clear that they related to one another and also to the entire span of my backstory. As I had grown up fed and clothed and never so much as smacked on the bottom, it was easy to maintain a dogged belief that everything had been fine. It hadn’t felt fine, but I’d learned to ignore that—hands over my ears as I hummed—because certainly that was my fault, a confirmation of my innate and immutable decrepitude. Only slowly and with Dr. Aronoff’s listening could I begin to know more about my old feelings and the imprint those feelings had left.