We Are What We Pretend to Be (12 page)

Berman: “The next thing I knew, the knockers and I were somehow in a suite at the Ritz Carlton in Boston, one of my dad’s old stomping grounds with babes. Monkey see, monkey do. The knockers, who was chain-smoking weed, may have asked to meet my mother out in Knightsbridge. That seems possible. I mean, what the hell? I had by then sworn off LSD and was limiting my intake to a crystal-clear detox medicine called ‘Absolut.’

“So she said she was pregnant, and was so happy because she had always wanted a little baby to cuddle and nurse and so on. ‘No abortion.’ If she said ‘No abortion,’ it stands to reason that at some point in time I might have recommended that identical surgical procedure. Sometimes time flies, sometimes it creeps. On that particular occasion, time chose to fly, and the next thing I knew I was in a jail cell, just like the ones in the movies, and they told me my wife was in Massachusetts General Hospital with several teeth missing and a broken jaw, but that the baby inside her was still O.K. In my baroque experience, it is only in jokes that there’s both good news and bad news: ‘There’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news is such-and-such, but the good news is such-and-such.”

None of the above has been part of a public performance. It is a transcript of Berman’s recorded admissions interview sixteen years ago, again: the first time he committed himself to Caldwell. Had he and his psychiatric social worker wished to fill in gaps in the tale, they had only to read accounts in the
Boston Globe
. When three policemen and a reporter brought Berman down from his suite at the Ritz on a freight elevator, for example, he said over and over again, “I am not Lee Harvey Oswald, I am not Lee Harvey Oswald.”

On his “perp walk” through the lobby to the street, he said to the many people who just happened to be there, people of all ages, mostly educated and well-to-do, “Completely atypical, folks, utterly out of character, one hundred percent anomalous. Keep calm, keep calm.”

In his admissions interview he was able to recall at least the flavor of the perp walk: “I am captain of the unsinkable ship
Titanic
, which is sinking, and I want all the spoiled, ritzy motherfuckers aboard not to make things worse by going nuts.”

In a long piece two days later, the
Globe
concluded that hitting anybody was for Gilbert Lanz Berman, from one of the most distinguished old families in Knightsbridge, indeed “uncharacteristic,” “atypical,” and “one hundred percent anomalous.” Ms. Florence Pate Glass, an English teacher at Knightsbridge High, where Berman had been president of the National Honor Society, testified: “Gilbert never fought, or even considered fighting. If there was a confrontation, Gilbert always turned the other cheek, although he was as manly and strong as three-quarters of the boys here. In one essay he wrote for me, and he was one of the
eight best students I ever had, he said a formula as earthshaking as Einstein’s ‘E equals MC square.’ It was ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ No more ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ No more revenge!”

The reporter asked Ms. Glass, since the business about forgiving trespasses was in the New Testament, if Berman had shown an interest in Christianity while in high school. “On a sub-zero Christmas day in Hell,” she said. “But I remember Gilbert asked me one time, ‘Ms. Glass, if what Jesus said was good, why should anybody care a rat’s ass whether he was God or not?’”

Ms. Glass said: “One thing really puzzles me though, along with beating up that poor woman, of course, is that he is now a comedian. I saw him on the
Tonight Show
two weeks ago, and I couldn’t believe how funny he was. He used to be the most serious boy in Knightsbridge, too serious, I thought. I wanted to say to him, ‘Gilbert Lanz Berman, can’t you put down the world and all its troubles for at least ten minutes? It’ll still be there when you pick it up again.’”

Ms. Glass asked the reporter what drugs Berman had been taking when he beat up his wife and was told it was alcohol and nothing else, and she said, “Sometimes all it takes is two martinis to transmogrify Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde.”

CHAPTER 2

Berman’s Knightsbridge biology teacher, Dr. Aaron Edelman, termed him “an ardent Schweitzerite, a fully committed reverence-for-lifer.” Edelman said, “It could be said of Gilbert as literally as it could have been said of his hero, Dr. Albert Schweitzer: ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly.’ I remember one time in the lab a cockroach ran across the floor, and a student named Cynthia Gottlieb stepped on it. And Gilbert said to her in that rich voice of his, ‘Cynthia, I can’t tell you how much I wish you hadn’t done that.’”

A possible “extenuating circumstance,” according to the
Globe
: “His father, the prominent Boston orthodontist Dr. Robert Berman, also runner-up two years in a row in the Wianno Pro-Am Tournament on Cape Cod, 1968 and 1969, committed suicide four years ago.”

The denouement? Wanda Lightfoot through her lawyers asked for and received in absentia an uncontested divorce, a flat $1 million settlement, no alimony, no child support, and an order
of protection against her ex-husband. That last was purely symbolic, since she had already left the state with the baby still inside her, and was having her name legally changed so that Berman could never find her. Berman in the year 2000: “That was back when a million was a lot of money. Nowadays you couldn’t buy a cross-eyed shortstop for a season in the basement with the Seattle Mariners for twice that much.”

In the year 1978 a reporter happened to spot Gil Berman at Logan Airport as Berman, in obedience to a court order, was about to leave for Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where a bus from the Caldwell Institute would meet him. He asked Berman what it felt like to give away a million dollars. And Gil Berman said this, appearing terribly weary and humbled, and not acting funny at all, according to the reporter: “
Tabula rasa
, friend. I feel like shit but my slate is clean.”

Dr. Robert Berman, DDS, committed suicide in the autumn of 1977 at the age of forty-two, his son Gilbert’s age there onstage at the Calvin Theater in the year 2000. Dr. Berman, DDS, did the big trick by means of carbon monoxide while sitting in his BMW convertible, with his seatbelt fastened and the top down in a closed garage on Cape Cod. The garage belonged to Mrs. Arnold Kirschenberg, a young and recent widow, a former girlfriend from Barnstable High School who, like Dr. Berman, had married a lot of money. She lived next door to the waterfront estate of the Kennedys in Hyannis Port, where the murdered brothers John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Robert Francis Kennedy had learned to swim and sail.

His son, Gilbert, was then nineteen, a freshman at Columbia.
He had a daughter he didn’t even know he had, not that she could have made any difference, telling him how much she loved him, begging him not to do it and so on, that sort of thing. She was only three years old then. And she wouldn’t find out her biological father was a long-dead Boston orthodontist until, at the age of twenty-five, she tracked down her still unmarried biological mother, Mary Kathleen McCarthy, who worked as a receptionist for a veterinarian in Fresno, California, and who told her about him. So there was no biological father to whom she might introduce herself with all possible modesty. She did find out, at least, whence came her red hair. Mary Kathleen McCarthy’s hair was brown. The name of the daughter, who was put up for adoption at the age of three months, was Kimberley Berlin.

Here’s the story: Mary Kathleen McCarthy, an orphan, a Roman Catholic, had worked as a receptionist for Bob Berman in Boston for three years. She knew he was married and was devoted to his wife, although she did nothing but play the piano and make scrapbooks of items in the
Boston Globe
, and made no sense when she was talking, and they had a son who was at the top of his class in high school. But she could not help herself: She fell in love with him. He was indeed lovable, “a paragon of manly schmaltz,” as his son would call him: good looking and sexy, but overwhelmingly considerate, and sentimental about the human race in general, quick to reward, forgive or comfort, or boost a loser’s self-esteem. He was a people person if there ever was one.

Even after Gil Berman’s dad fucked Mary Kathleen McCarthy on her desk after hours, in a moment of passion,
her
passion, with
the telephone ringing and ringing, and knocked her up when she was twenty-four, she was still able to say to the redheaded Kimberley Berlin in Fresno: “Your father was a people person if there ever was one. He never took his eye off the sparrow. If you couldn’t get along with Dr. Berman, you couldn’t get along with anyone. And he could be so funny. Laugh, I thought I’d die.”

And Mary Kathleen was surely not the first woman in history to find a man so lovable that she would have died for him, if that would help. More common, and more in practical harmony with the apparent intentions of evolution, one would think, have been women who died for children, children as children, not necessarily their own. The sacrifice Mary Kathleen performed for Bob Berman was a near-death experience for her, since she would never see him again. But it required only that she not tell him she was carrying his child, and that she quit her job and head for the other seacoast, where she would have that child and put her up for adoption.

When Gil Berman said celibacy was like not lighting a cigarette, he had no idea that this might have some bearing on his father’s life. But it might be said that it was Mary Kathleen’s match that lit the cigarette of Dr. Berman. And she knew that. She took full blame for what became Kimberley Berlin. She made the time-honored blunder of deciding a man should know how much he was loved, even though they both knew there was nothing either one of them could do about it: sort of like in an opera. What such women seldom realize, if they’ve never done it before, is that such an operatic confession in real life will cause their own bodies and souls to insist on copulation. She confessed, then cried.
He put his arms around her and said, “There, there,” and off they went to the races.

Gil Berman was asked by a psychiatric social-worker during his first stay at Caldwell why, in his opinion, his father killed himself, although his father was in good physical health and was only forty-two. His father left no note, unless fastening his seatbelt first was some sort of note. He had given no indication to his hostess that, as soon as she was asleep, he was going to kill himself. And Berman said this: “I dunno. Don’t ask. I hardly knew him. He came home to Knightsbridge less and less, and I don’t blame him. When he did come home, he had to look at Mother’s latest scrapbooks and say how much he liked them. And then she would play and play the piano, and I would sit on the bench next to her, so he would have to yell if he had anything to say to me.

“The fault was mine, not his. I’m afraid I treated him as an invader, an intruder. I told him I hated golf, and my teeth were coming in nice and straight. I was very close to my mother because I was so sorry for her. Now see the corner you’ve backed me into? What do I say next? That my father killed himself because his own son could not like him? Thanks a bunch. This much I know: I never heard him mention the Holocaust.”

Yes, and on the CD
Who’s Sorry Now?
Berman posits this conundrum: “Who’s kidding whom? We’re having a War on Drugs? The biggest American industry in dollar volume, number of employees, and persons and even nations directly or indirectly affected by it, is the thwarting or bankrolling, manufacture, shipping, and sales, wholesale and retail, of mind-bending, mood-enhancing, or blackout chemicals, including alcohol. Half the
banks and brokerages in California and Florida would go bust if it weren’t for invested profits from the drug trade. But don’t worry: The War on Drugs might as well be a war on glaciers, with the soldiers armed with ice picks and smoking joints.”

And then he intoned: “Let us pray: ‘Our Father which art in heaven, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Amen.’”

And then he called the President of the United States “a corksocker.”

And then he said, “Nobody wants to admit it, for obvious reasons, I guess, but the swastika wasn’t a pagan symbol. The Germans weren’t pagans. They were Christians, and the swastika was just one more version of a Christian cross, like the Maltese Cross, the Celtic Cross, the Cross of Lorraine, the Red Cross Cross, Saint Andrew’s Cross. Hitler’s party was the National Socialist Party, and the swastika was a working man’s cross made of tools, of axes. Only kidding, folks.”

A male kid in the audience there at Northampton shouted this to Berman in the year 2000: “Hey Gilbert, who’s gonna win the War on Drugs?” It was a keen and jagged question, for everyone there knew Berman was now a recovering abuser of or experimenter with a veritable
smorgasbord
of shit, except for booze, by no means all of it illegal. Quite a bit of it had actually been prescribed for him.

Berman’s reply would make it onto TV and in the papers the
next day. There were reporters but not TV cameras there. “The War on Drugs,” he said, “is one hell of a lot better than no drugs at all.” Irony! His message, missed by the papers and TV, because one had to be in the theater to hear how he said it: He sure missed drugs, and he was now terrified, as he should have been all along, by their puissance and ubiquity.

The line wasn’t original with Berman, either, which, again, he would have admitted, if timing had not been of the essence. He had come across it in a book about the “Roaring Twenties,” the Prohibition Era, when thousands upon thousands of heavily armed law-enforcement people, at least half of them half in the bag, were mobilized in order to make people stop drinking alcohol, not even wine or beer. Can you
believe
it? This really happened! And according to the book, a humorist named Kin Hubbard said in print back then: “Prohibition is sure a lot better than no liquor at all.”