Electroboy (26 page)

February 24, 1994
.

U
.S. Probation is going to visit my parents at their house in order to prepare a profile of the family for the judge, for the purpose of sentencing. It’s about 9:30
A.M.
on the appointed day, and my parents and I have just finished breakfast and are nervously awaiting our visitor. My father is straightening up newspapers, and my mother is cleaning up the kitchen while I watch television. My father and I both wear khakis and a sweater; my mother is dressed in a skirt and jacket. A guy who looks no older than nineteen arrives to interview us, and we greet him as if he’s a salesman. My father invites him in, and he sits on a chair next to the couch and begins to ask us questions about our educational backgrounds, employment and financial histories, and our living situation in general. We must appear to this interviewer like a relatively stable family. I don’t think he’s going to leave with the impression that I come from a family of crime, and he ends up putting together a picture-perfect report of the family for Judge Nickerson. But I’m actually not living at this quiet, safe, and cozy home—I don’t want to stay in New Jersey. I’m just bumming around at night or sleeping in my office or on friends’ couches in Manhattan. And I’m running around drinking excessively, talking to complete strangers that I meet in bars and on buses about my recently acquired felony conviction. I’m not lucid. In fact I’m losing it quickly.

At night I roam the streets, spending my time in bars and clubs, ending up in diners at 5:00
A.M.
, begging one waiter to serve
me Jack Daniel’s in a paper coffee cup because it’s after hours. I find myself talking incessantly and feeling agitated, constantly needing to be on the move and involved in several activities at once. My friends are becoming more and more concerned about my mental health, and one of them insists that I see her therapist for a consultation. At this point I can’t even keep track of how many doctors I’ve seen, but I figure I’ll give another one a shot. Dr. Rector is a young therapist who after about a half hour of talking to me gently tells me that there’s nothing that he’s going to be able to do to help me with my problem. He feels strongly that I need to see a psychiatrist and arranges for me to meet with a colleague on the Upper East Side, Dr. Caroline Fried. I feel like I’m being bounced back and forth from East Side to West Side. How many times will I have to cross Central Park before someone will be able to help me? But this is the first time I’ve been referred to a female psychiatrist or psychotherapist since my days at Wesleyan, and I feel oddly hopeful about seeing a woman.

When I arrive at Dr. Fried’s office, I decide not to judge her on her bad magazines:
Redbook. Parenting. Colonial Home
. She shares the office with another psychiatrist, and I’m hoping that they’re his. She opens the door to her office and smiles. She looks like she is in her late thirties. I sit down on a small leather couch and spend the first few minutes of our session trying to figure out who she reminds me of. I decide it’s Sally Field, with her short, dark, straight brown hair and her friendly but serious nature. She’s petite. She has a contagious laugh. Glasses. I take an instant liking to her. I’m in the right place. She seems to approach the session like a science project. She’s methodical in her questioning and collecting background information. She asks me about my spending habits (which surprises me), my drug and drinking habits, my sleeping schedule, and my sexual promiscuity. I even offer to talk to her about my suicidal thoughts and my impulsive behavior in general. I tell her that there are some days that I feel like jumping in front of a bus and back away at the last second. Nothing I say frightens her. I feel her taking an imaginary giant breath to figure out how she is going to attack my problem. She doesn’t panic, but
I can tell she’s not exactly sure how bad my situation is yet. At the end of the session she prescribes Klonopin, an antianxiety medication, for the time being, to try to stabilize things. I make an appointment for another session and leave her office feeling that I have found the doctor who’s going to rescue me from hell. No other doctor that I have ever met is ever going to help me. Not even Dr. Golub. He was going to treat me like another one of his twitching psychiatric patients in his waiting room. Over the next sessions, Dr. Fried and I talk about everything from my recent conviction to my manic trips around the world to my obsessions with food, spending, exercise, and sex. She asks lots of questions. During the third session she starts talking to me about moods. Mood swings. Highs. Lows. Cycles. What is this mood thing she’s talking about? The more I talk about my activities—sleepless nights, drug and alcohol abuse, sexual promiscuity, overspending, and breaking the law—the more convinced she is that I have manic depression, or bipolar disorder. Her diagnosis sounds so definitive that it feels like a life sentence. Hearing it from her, I’m frightened that this “energy” floating around
my
brain and attacking
my
neurons, this force that has already wrecked my life, is going to continue to destroy me and that she won’t be able to help. There’s got to be some combination of medication to quickly put an end to this hopelessness. Her goal now is to stabilize me on medication before I am sent away to prison. We’ve got some time to work things out before I’m sentenced. But the Klonopin doesn’t seem to do anything for me, and I start to abuse it, randomly popping a handful every so often. One night at dinner with Pamela at E.J.’s Luncheonette I order an ice cream sundae and just for fun sprinkle ten or twelve of the little blue pills on top and eat them off the top with the whipped cream. I don’t really seem to care what happens or if I have to be taken out by an ambulance. It’s just an urge I need to satisfy, a chance I take. I joke to myself that I shouldn’t be too anxious after I’m done with this sundae.

A week later, my mind racing as if I’m on speed, I tell Dr. Fried that I’m fighting off sleep and feeling manic and suicidal
again. She prescribes Depakote, a mood stabilizer and alternative to lithium. My problem with Depakote, the peach pills, is that I take too many at once, too, sometimes up to ten or twelve at a time—not because they’re addictive, just because I can’t resist the urge. I like experimenting with the medication to see what kind of reaction I have, and my mania seems to shield me from fear. I’m aware that I’m sabotaging my own treatment. I report back to Dr. Fried that I obviously can’t be trusted with either Klonopin or Depakote, and that anyhow they both make me dull. Usually it’s the doctor who makes the decision that the patient isn’t trustworthy, but in this case I do. So we switch to lithium, which I haven’t been on since Dr. Golub prescribed it for me, and after a while my racing thoughts slow down. I see Dr. Fried twice a week but give her daily updates on how I’m feeling so that she can adjust my medication. Soon I feel stabilized, more centered and without any dramatic highs or lows.

Dr. Fried insists that I see a psychotherapist as well, since my stabilized mental state allows me to think more coherently about my situation. She refers me to Dr. Arlene Marks, whom I start seeing once a week for therapy. We have so much to talk about: impending incarceration, IRS problems, manic depression, medication, suicide, sexuality, family, career. My level of anxiety has registered an all-time high. I’m still dealing with the aftershock and fallout from the trial, sorting through the hype from the
New York
magazine article and a television segment that has just aired on
Eye to Eye with Connie Chung
, am juggling five clients at work, and am extremely frightened about the sentencing. I’m also in the process of giving up the office space on Fifth Avenue after three months because it’s not practical and I need a real apartment to live in. I move to a one-bedroom apartment in a new luxury building on 86th Street and Broadway, which I also plan to use as an office. I actually draw a flow chart for Dr. Marks and include “dry hair” as one of the issues I feel we need to address in our therapy. I’m under attack from all sides—there’s almost too much for this woman to sort out and deal with once a week. I feel like I’m overburdening her.

In a letter to Dr. Marks, I write, “My seams are coming apart and my insides are on the outside. I can’t feel my being, I can only think of freebasing or masturbating—of getting high. Nobody loves me. I can’t perform. I’m waiting for the drugs to take effect and to send shocks into my brain. I am suffering.”

March 11, 1994. New York
.

I am becoming paranoid and having psychotic thoughts. I won’t answer the telephone and think that the words on the pages of books and newspapers can hurt me like sharp objects. I’m walking down Broadway to the cash machine when all of a sudden I start feeling a razor blade slicing my tongue from all different angles. I twist my face in agony and hope that nobody notices. The psychotic episode only lasts for about thirty seconds, but I can’t get the image of razor blades out of my head, or the belief that my tongue is a bloody mess. It creeps into my mind every so often and frightens me when I least expect it. After I call Dr. Fried in a panic, she puts me on the antipsychotic Risperdal, which relieves me of these visions but has several bizarre side effects. For instance, I become very stiff and walk with a shuffle, I lose facial expression and don’t blink, and I can’t urinate in a straight line any longer (I spray all over the toilet). I have a noticeable tremor in my hand and find it difficult to hold utensils or write. I’m put on Propranolol to counterbalance the tremor, which seems to help a bit, and Symmetrel for the stiffness. I am taken off the lithium and put on a different mood stabilizer, Tegretol, but it makes the backs of my hands itch and gets me revved up, so I have to stop using it. I’m talking very fast and under more pressure since I’m about to be sentenced.

11:30
P.M
. Rihga hotel bar, New York
.

I’m sitting drinking a Pilsener Urquell, just for a change, when I hear a couple speaking German, sitting on a couch nearby. They’re in their midthirties and dressed in jeans, black turtlenecks, and boots. They have blond hair and tans. They’re splitting a bottle of champagne and smoking, so I walk over to them. “Can
I borrow a cigarette?” I ask, even though I don’t really smoke. “Sure, do you need a light?” the man asks. “Thanks,” I answer. “Are you from New York?” he asks me. “Yes, just waiting for a friend,” I tell him. “We’re here from Germany for a week,” he says. I’ve now gotten myself into a conversation. “What do you do in New York?” he asks me. “I do public relations. I used to be in the art business,” I say. “Oh, what kind of art?” she asks. “I work for a gallery in Düsseldorf,” she says. Small world. “I used to work for an American artist named Mark Kostabi,” I tell them. They look at each other and start laughing. “Kostabi? Kostabi?” he asks. “Such crap. You’re not the guy who reproduced his paintings, are you?” he asks. I nod. “We hate that stuff, but we would love to own a fake one,” he says. I’m not sure if he’s joking. “Here, have some of our champagne,” he says as he asks the waiter for another glass. We spend the next two hours talking about the entire saga.

May 20, 1994. Brooklyn
.

Five months after the trial, after a sleepless night at my parents’ house, I return to court with Stuart, my sister, my parents, and the same loyal group of friends who had attended the trial. I have no idea what kind of sentence Judge Nickerson will give me, but I’ve been considering all the possibilities for the last five months, and I’m hoping for less than a year in prison, although there is the possibility of as much as five years. Stuart goes before the judge and speaks for quite a while about the case and about my character. “Andy, in his own mind and heart, has difficult feelings about what happened here but, in any event, honestly didn’t believe that he committed a crime, and I realize that that issue has been resolved. But that is the feeling of the person, and I’ve come to have some exposure to that,” he says. “I think that under any view, Kostabi World was an ethical swamp that Andy Behrman had the misfortune to be working at.”

Judge Nickerson has been provided with letters from my
friends and family asking for his leniency in sentencing. I read a prepared statement, which I have written out on note cards. “Your Honor, I’d like to start by saying that I do respect the decision of the jury, and I do take full responsibility for this incident. I’m sorry I have to rely on these note cards. My nerves. It’s been more than three years since my involvement with this case began. From that time on, the normal routine of my life came to an abrupt end. My conviction in December and the anxiety of waiting for this day has devastated myself, my family, and my friends. Not only am I sorry for what has happened, but I take full responsibility for it. In 1990, while I was working eighteen-hour days and closing $2 million deals for my employer, on the outside my life seemed perfectly in control. Inside, however, I was falling apart. By early October of 1990, my mental health reached an all-time low. I was bouncing between manic episodes and, at the same time, working in a world in which it was not uncommon to attend an opening in Munich one night and one in Tokyo the next. I was drawn to a world whose rules were different from any I had known before. Because at the time my manic depression was not being properly treated, I was wide open for trouble. I clearly remember the day that I was invited to a neighborhood bar near the art studio. There, I was presented with a plan that ultimately led to this case. I constantly remind myself that I had the choice to say no that day. For reasons I still don’t entirely understand, I didn’t. This was the greatest mistake I ever made. Because of this mistake, I am the convicted defendant in
United States
v.
Andrew Behrman
. I have humiliated myself, but even worse, I have shamed my family. I will never be able to forgive myself for this. I hope that I will be given the opportunity to prove to the court that I have something of value to offer the community, and that this mistake in judgment does not define my character. I am deeply sorry for what I have done. I take full responsibility. I am sorry for the pain I have caused others. Regardless of what happens here today, I will carry the burden of this mistake for the rest of my life.”