Shrinking Brownstone

This week a prospective customer interview was with an octogenarian shrink
who wants his brownstone facade fixed up. He started out the meeting by
asking me to sit in the leather chair next to his desk -- I'm used to people
briskly hauling me out to the front sidewalk to look at the work... hurry
hurry no time to waste -- he wanted to sit down and do an interview.

"What can you do to the front of my building?" "Make it look nice." "Oh, how
do you do that?" "I look at it and write a proposal and you read the proposal
and ask questions." "I read it and ask questions?" "Yeah." "Where were you
born?"

The conversation quickly went off into his specialty, my poetry, suicides and
depression (his specialty), and my writing poems about other's suicides.
Inquiring as to when I write poetry I told him usually waking up late at
night I would write poems down that I had been worrying for years before.

"You write like Byron. Do you know Byron?" "I've heard of him. How so?"
"Byron asked Shelley when it was he wrote his poetry. Shelley said between
when he put on his clothes and took them off. Shelley then asked Byron when
he wrote his poetry. Between taking my clothes off and putting them on."

"You don't sit down at a desk and write poetry?" "No, not efficient. It only
ends up in a lot of wasted paper with garbage on it. I write poetry when I
need to. No sense bothering people with too much garbage." "Do you publish?"
"I used to, but I don't worry about it." "And you fix buildings for a
living?" "Yeah, I fly away with the poetry and the buildings hold me down.
Beside that, I have to do something. I'm good at this." "At what?" "Wandering
around and talking to people."

At one point he remarked, "This is very odd." To which I replied, "What is
odd? We are having a conversation."

I believe he was expecting a contractor to fit his stereotype and not a book
reading somebody that would be interested in whether he was a Freudian or
Jungian shrink -- he proclaimed himself an eclectic, which I said was even
better. He said that he had been a Freudian but had gotten over it. I asked
him how long it took him to get over it. Thirty-five years. "Do you know a
good electrician?"

English, arrived in America 1958, admires Churchill, painted a bust of
Churchill, has a painting beside his artwork on the office wall, including a
pencil sketch of Freud, that was done by Churchill's daughter of Churchill
(she committed suicide at the age of 32) and he has a leak in the rear room
of his office that looks like forty-two years of rusty plaster boil and is
probably from the window sill on the second floor above. He believes in the
power of chemicals to alleviate the hassles of manic-depression. I wanted to
ask him about Tourrette's syndrome, but figured that may be pushing it. I did
not go into my lingering suspicion that my most interesting friends all have
ADD. Nor did I mention that he lives next-door to a schizophrenic, daughter
of our current customer.

I ended off by saying I would send some poems along with the proposal. He
offered to give me a book on Freud... I told him to wait until he decided if
he liked the work.

Later in the week I looked into a copy of Childe Harold, not read since high
school and I don't recall what of it or why, in a bookstore in Grand Central
Terminal, I read a few lines, then put it back on the shelf.

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