Sins of Paradise
Bill Graves
Excerpt from Sins of Paradise by Bill Graves, an unpublished novel based on his experiences in the Sullivanian Group. Bill was a professor of literature, painter, novelist, and medical doctor. He was chronically ill and disabled during the last eighteen years of his life. He lived from 1943 to 2020; between 1971 and 1984, he was a Sullivanian.
Spring, 1979—Paradise
My psychologist accused me of fighting change and growth. She was tired of hearing the same old memories, the dreams that were all variations of the primordial themes I had revealed to her in my first months of therapy.
“A new memory that you haven’t bored me with and have never told to anyone. Type it out, two copies, and we’ll go over it next session.” She yawned so loud then that I knew I had better dig deep into my mind. With a great deal of effort, I returned life to a memory of long ago, allowed myself to be as I had been, hoping with this offering to rekindle her interest in my troubled psyche.
I knew by now I had made a big mistake in giving up Dr. Peter Richmond, my Paradisen therapist for so many years that, in the end, I was his last patient in the Group. Last summer, my latest love, Fatima, had “discovered” me, seen all my brilliance and talents, and realized that I was ready for a real psychological growth explosion. She explained to me that Dr. Peter Richmond had long ago stopped growing himself. I needed Dr. Linda Saunders, a pretty, hip, prestigious psychologist with a reputation for pushing her patients out of their ruts and back on the highways that led to human fulfillment.
Unfortunately, I had learned too late that while Peter seemed to be a real therapist, Linda wasn’t much more than a booster for Paradise. The practical effect on my sessions was that, while I had told Peter what I really thought, with Linda I knew I had to even censor my dreams to protect myself from her frowning judgment.
To satisfy Linda’s latest assignment, I spent an hour hypnotically returning myself to the time when I was six or seven years old. I tried to force my body to rise up from my backyard through the clouds until I reached heaven. If faith could move mountains, I figured as an innocent child, it could take me up to heaven, the jungles and fruit trees and berry patches and all the happy people who did nothing except keep thinking up new wishes for God to satisfy. I imagined Him as like the genie, except he didn’t give you only three wishes, but thousands upon millions.
I could taste and smell my memory. I could feel the air, the warmth of the sun, the child’s trance where only his world has any reality, any real presence. Since it was about getting away from the reality of my young life, it would offer Linda the opportunity to talk about my unhappy childhood, one of her favorite ways to pass the fifty minutes I spent with her each week trying to be a good cooperative patient struggling to figure out how to give up the old world and embrace the new.
But she took my pages and slipped them into the back of her notebook without even glancing at them and told me she would get to them some other time. She had more pressing things to talk about today, new thoughts about my mother and something else that she would save for the end.
After the forty minutes of discussing how I remembered my mother as a ghost, someone who was so lost herself she barely acknowledged the existence of her two children, Linda asked if I was following the mess at Three Mile Island.
“The nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania,” I said, “is about to have a meltdown, right?”
“Do you know what a meltdown would mean?”
“The reactor gets so hot, the plutonium turns liquid, and then the whole plant boils. Finally, the radioactive gases spread over the farms, and the people and cows of Pennsylvania join my mother in hell.”
“Buy a paper when you leave here. Look at a map. We’re two hundred miles away.”
“And therefore safe.”
“With a little wind, the Eastern seaboard becomes a graveyard. Don’t say this word to anyone, but I want you to think ‘evacuation.’”
Linda was always bothering me this way, suggesting things I should write down and then putting all my hard work into the black hole of her notebook. We would never get to talk about heaven. I comforted myself with the realization that at least I knew the meaning of the story and how it explained my endless quest for a better place than this shithole we call Earth. Also, and maybe this was more important to me, I could see that she was still energized enough about my life to keep the session full of perky wisdom—that my place in Paradise was safe.
And in any case, I wasn’t worried about the news stories. I had been with the Paradisens for so many years that I knew a little radiation wasn’t going to put us out of business. The famous Inside New York exposé said we were a cult—hundreds, maybe thousands, of middle-class malcontents suckered into political therapeutic gibberish, the Paradisen Institute for Marxist Psychoanalysis, forced to live in communes with the sexes segregated, brainwashed into hating our families, taught that marriage was the root of all evil, loyal only to each other, and filled with scorn and hatred for the rest of the world.
That article, which had come out just two weeks before, was a scandal—and we loved it. The author, who used a pseudonym to protect him/herself from our wrath, appeared to have been a member who came to recognize the madness we lived. We weren’t allowed to have babies without our leader’s permission, the eighty-year-old patriarch Isaiah Kruger. We couldn’t have boyfriends and girlfriends, no romances that might lead us into alliances against the group. We were forced to sleep with any member who wanted cheap thrills. The patients had to sleep with at least six others at any given time. The therapists screwed their patients and charged for double sessions.
The article concluded with a series of vignettes, the true stories of crippled minds led astray by those who were morally as well as psychologically sick. I read the last paragraphs carefully, secretly hoping I had gained a spotlight, but the anecdotes neglected my own sad tale. Instead, the author told of six fellow Paradisens, their lives ruined by robotville. The first three were friends of mine, but the final trio was something more, my three great loves, Gina Corelli, Margaret Snow, and Fatima.
“The renegade had an explanation: The Paradisen therapists are expert at exploiting their patients’ psychological problems.”
Poor Gina came straight to the big city from Queens, age seventeen. Fleeing her high school lover’s pleas for marriage, Gina takes up with a musician she meets in the Village. He impresses her with his psychological acumen, convinces her she is fucked beyond belief, and she visits his shrink. Five years later, she is still scrounging tips at Vinnie’s Cafe to pay her therapy bill. A quarter of her life in Paradise, and she has nothing, no family, no kids, no schooling, only the conviction that her mother hated her. The article left out the part describing how her father molested her from puberty to the day she made her escape. When she had the strength to write her mother a letter detailing those ugly years, her mother had two thoughts: first, that Gina was nuts and making the whole story up, and second, that Gina had herself to blame because no man would do such things to his daughter unless the girl first tempted him. The article also left out the fact that Gina was a few months away from graduating college, the first in her family to go beyond the walls of elementary school.
“You’re not smart enough for college,” her mother had counseled a few years back. “Work on your typing.”
Margaret Snow comes through as a spoiled little rich girl. Raised on the Upper East Side, summering in South Hampton, attends Vassar, becomes a nymphomaniac. When she can’t decide between her Harvard and Columbia boyfriends, she begins her first therapy with a psychiatrist who pleads with the old lady to let him do a regimen of electric shock; she sees a second shrink who tells her she needs lithium for her manic depression; she finally chucks it all to go to graduate school. She lives with the Urambu Indians in Peru, writes the definitive work for her doctorate, and, worldfamous, still can’t leave the boys alone. She is ready prey for the Paradisens, who tell her that she’s been right all along. Monogamy is the curse.
Fatima was my present angel (along with Gina, of course, whom I’d been with from the beginning and who was under Linda’s daily assault as my “girlfriend”). I was worried what the author had to say about Fatima. A bright girl, always top of the class, devoted daughter to her Albanian parents, on scholarship at art school, a successful painter only two years after finishing her master’s. None of these things mattered to her parents because Fatima had been born for only one reason—to marry a member of her tribe and to produce for her father the dozen grandchildren that he felt were his birthright. But the real dirt came next. It was painful to read the words proclaiming Fatima no longer suitable for marriage to any decent Albanian boy: I knew Fatima enough to realize these words would bring an almost earth-shattering shame and dishonor to Fatima’s entire family.
She was lonely in New York, the story continued, had trouble with boyfriends, thought she was sexually dysfunctional—easy pickings for her Paradisen therapist. Two months later, in the middle of the night, Fatima moves out from her aunt’s apartment in one of the big buildings her father owned in the Bronx. In the safety of her new surroundings, she calls up her parents and screams in the native tongue that she wishes them dead and buried beneath the ancient hills in Kosovo. Her father has a heart attack, languishes in Jacobi Hospital’s intensive care unit. Mother calls, “Please, my daughter, see him one last time!”
Fatima wants to go, but her new roommates say she is falling for the oldest trick in parents’ How to Torture Your Kids book: the dying parent and the child’s last chance to visit before a lifetime of guilt and shame.
“If he’s dying, it’s because he’s got so much rage,” one of her new roommates explains for all. Her shrink threatens to boot her out of Paradise if she mentions the dying man again. Dr. Hans Geiser, on behalf of Isaiah himself, calls her up and demands to know whether she loves her friends or her sadistic old man.
Fatima refused to give in to her parents. Later, she showed me the scars up and down her back and told me she could still feel the agony from the horsewhip he brought with him from the old country. Fatima is still with us and her father is still on his way to becoming Slumlord King of the Bronx. His daughter, meanwhile, has come to hate him both as her father and as a capitalist pig, notorious for letting his own mother freeze all winter long with the rest of his tenants.
“What I want to know,” Fatima said to me now, “is the article’s explanation of why, if everything is so horrible in Paradise, not only do we stick around, but our numbers are growing.” The renegade had an explanation: The Paradisen therapists are expert at exploiting their patients’ psychological problems. They offer a sympathetic audience to sufferings, real or imagined, and quickly indoctrinate the theory that parents hate their children. The patient now has an explanation, simple, complete, and immensely satisfying to the mind that craves a quick fix. Once a member of the cult, the patient finds it almost impossible to leave. His or her entire world is now circumscribed by Paradisen mores. She or he is not allowed friends outside the Group. Gogol’s lost souls may not keep their own apartments. If ordered to leave a job or even a profession, the ghost of a person will do so. In an incredibly short span of time, the lost ones can no longer see the real world. They have become so isolated that outside of Paradise, they can only see a terrible loneliness.
“The truth,” Fatima said scornfully about the magazine, “is that Inside New York decided to do a hatchet job now because we‘ve just opened the Fifth Circle Theater Company. With one of the biggest theaters in the East Village, we are public in your face.”
I told Fatima what Dr. Saunders said: “The CIA or the FBI is behind the article. Whoever wrote it joined us as an agent.”
Just the mention of the CIA and the FBI made us both pause. Five hundred of us had been on political tours to Cuba. We broke up in groups of forty to draw less attention to ourselves, but someone in the government must have been watching.
“‘In a revolutionary society,’ Roberto interrupted, ‘psychoanalysis has no place. By its very nature, it is elitist and cannot provide for the needs of the masses.’”
Something else that might have lit up spying eyes. Of course, there were no Cuba-United States government relations, but Cuba was part of the United Nations. Fatima’s best friend Jane, in some way I didn’t quite understand, became friends with a member of the Cuban delegation, a man about my age who was an architect by profession. Fatima and I and Jane and Roberto sat around the women’s kitchen table several nights a week, sipping the very special twenty-five-year-old Havana Club Rum. Jane and Fatima showed him around the apartment and explained the origins and goals of Paradise.
“In the late fifties there was a lot of ferment in American psychiatry with probably a dozen competing and arguing institutes of psychoanalysis. The William Alanson White Institute was probably the most radical for a while, but about two dozen of its members, led by Isaiah Kruger, left to form a new and far more radical program, The Paradisen Institute of Marxist Psychoanalysis.”
“In a revolutionary society,” Roberto interrupted, “psychoanalysis has no place. By its very nature, it is elitist and cannot provide for the needs of the masses.”
We were back in the kitchen and all of us poured tall glasses of rum. I figured we were in for a long, hard night. It was important to us that Roberto, as the representative of the Cuban Revolution, understood that we were not dilettantes, that we were ourselves revolutionaries. Roberto refused Jane’s offer of ice, saying it would be a sacrilege to dilute the purity of Cuba’s finest rum.
Roberto told us we were all too serious, that he was going to have to bring two bottles of rum with him each night. “Politics, psychiatry, everything is too much for my tiny brain. I work all day. At night I want to have my fun.”
Jane and Fatima had given him a copy of Life Without Fear, Isaiah’s theoretical treatise. The book described his theories of the stages of the human personality, infancy, childhood, the juvenile level, preadolescence, adolescence, young adulthood, etc. Each stage had many subdivisions. Certain conditions were necessary to progress to full adulthood. There were many potential blocks keeping an individual from full development. Most people, whatever their chronological ages, were still stuck in the earlier stages of development. From the beginning, for example, parents, having had their own growth stifled by society, inflicted limits on their children. The children’s innate drive to grow could only infuriate these parents, who ultimately came to hate their own offspring. The only hope for change was to bring up children in a more open environment, preparing them to be the new people of the revolution. Isaiah considered his work to represent the supreme convergence of Marxist and psychiatric thought.
“You can’t postpone the revolution until you have subjected everyone to your new therapy,” Roberto protested.
Fatima explained that Isaiah, borrowing from Chairman Mao’s concept of the barefoot doctors, had established a lay therapist program. Even a high school dropout could learn to do therapy, and therapy was now available to the masses.
Roberto was still dubious, but he understood our point. He understood we were stuck in America trying our best to figure out how to change things. And we weren’t like those crazy bourgeois Weatherpeople. We weren’t dreary ideologues like the members of the American Communist Party. We believed in having fun.
We were only a year from Jonestown, but we were different. The Rev. Jones preached heaven and postponed gratification. We believed in the instant pleasures—not just sex, but companionship, nice apartments, good food and drink, and parties. The Reverend Jones counted a thousand holy rollers, but we were stuffed with PhDs, MDs, famous painters with works at the Met and the Modern, New York Times best-selling writers, and stadium-filling rock stars, as well as chamber music groups that played at Carnegie Hall. We had sixties political backgrounds and could smell the stench of fascist leaders long before they could get us to drink any poisoned punch.
There were plenty of famous names associated with Isaiah. His second in command, Dr. Geiser, seeing through the bourgeois idea of analytical confidentiality, proudly described the ’50s origin that led to our present Paradise. Everyone knew that Jackson Pollock, the most famous of the abstract expressionist painters, had been his patient. Nobody blamed Dr. Geiser for the artist’s fatal drunken car crash out in the Hamptons. Instead, lots of us wondered how much greater an artist he might have been today if only he had listened to Dr. Geiser. There were other big name abstract expressionists. I saw plenty of paintings around the Group with museum-sized price tags, but rumors were that really big-name gifts of paintings to Isaiah were hidden away for security. The painters took up with Isaiah and Dr. Geiser in the fifties, after The Paradisen Institute started but before the time of Isaiah’s present-day cadre. How did Peggy Guggenheim know to discover Pollock? She knew because there were Paradisens on the inside.
By the time I was around, gossip was that there were plenty of big-name contemporaries who still went to the Institute for therapy. Superstar female folk singers and half of the television rock band that discovered recycling ’50s songs paid a lot more than doing anything else with a Columbia University degree. There were already successful writers, too, who penned the book reviews that sent their younger Paradisen protégés to the top of the bestseller lists and, from there, to more fame and fortune writing screenplays in Hollywood.
Of course, in the great circles of rumors that surrounded us, we heard names we were never to repeat—not just the painters and musicians and writers, but university presidents, Congressmen, two senators, even our own counteragent in the CIA. When we felt we had gotten ourselves into a crazy mess in Paradise, we urged one another to know that all these names showed we were so much grander than one of our parties—where we danced in circles, drunk and drugged and half-naked, our lovely sweating bodies scenting the air with musk—might make it appear. And just the fact that all these other creative and intelligent and powerful people believed in Isaiah made you think that maybe the whole world was going to change and that we would be the new center that kept everything from falling out into chaos.
It was also kind of fun thinking of ourselves as Manhattan’s underground revolutionaries. Walking down Broadway in the ’70s and ’80s, we looked like all the other young people who had come to New York to escape America’s barren hinterlands. At jobs, gallery openings, and publication parties, we went our separate ways and chatted up strangers. But we were comrades, and comrades helped each other. We hired each other as college professors, made sure our comrades’ books and articles reached the right editors with the right recommendations. We didn’t try to talk galleries into taking on ugly paintings, but we let the gallery owners know of our discoveries.
Knowing that we were different, at the very vanguard of our society, we knew we were not a cult. In fact, we held a special contempt for the cults, all these crazies that were the natural product of the excesses and the fear in the air at the coming collapse of capitalism— the Moonies, the Scientologists, all the Maharajahs and their followers, the Hare Krishnas, and what we thought of as the really big-time cults, the ones that had gone on to be successful: the Mormons, the Hasidim (in fact, all the religions in the world, including my old Roman Catholicism). We were atheists. We were Marxists, people of the future. We imagined ourselves as like the urban cells that infiltrated Havana as they waited for the final victory, the time at last when they could reveal themselves and, with their comrades from the mountains, execute Batista’s torturers, distribute the stockpiles of food hoarded by the speculators, and tell the people that they would at last have the freedom from misery long ago promised by José Martí.
Capitalist America might think us nuts, but Roberto expressed his admiration that hundreds of us lived in communal cells right inside the belly of the beast.
I liked Roberto very much but often wondered if the FBI followed him on his trips to Fatima’s apartment. I wondered, too, if the exposé article was really an attack on our revolutionary politics. Lately, Roberto had introduced us to a Nicaraguan member of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. Fatima, Jane, myself, and a few others were already starting a North American propaganda support group, Casa de Nicaragua, to help the rebellion against the American-sponsored Somoza dictatorship.
Many people, including my own brother, had spent some hours in Paradise before returning to the old world, but I couldn’t figure out who was the author that betrayed friends and revolution for money. Still, I knew he was right about one thing. If you stayed around Paradise long enough, leaving was about as easy as breaking out of a concrete box. When you became a true Paradisen, you were a new person. You felt as if you belonged to another culture. You didn’t understand anymore how the rest of the world could live as it did. No matter how much trouble you had living the Paradisen way, you knew there was no alternative. I told myself I was like a citizen of Albania, and that I didn’t have to flee my life and friends and culture—my fellow Albanians—just because of some crazy totalitarian dictatorship.
The article’s author made life in Paradise seem very simple, but to me it was immensely complicated. I stuck with therapy because there was nowhere else to go. I prayed that the assurances that we alone saw the light would prove themselves to be true.
Still, I was not a very happy man. My mother had been dead for some fifteen years, but Linda said she lived within me like a cancer, even though she had actually died of some kind of liver disease that attacks innocent women and holds them up to the world as alcoholics dying because of their own moral decrepitude. I had done everything you were supposed to since joining Paradise, but I couldn’t rid myself of my feelings of sorrow at all she suffered.
I had long given up on explaining to Linda or any of my friends that my mother wasn’t really a demon. I was still furious at the way she had died. When she started turning yellow and her liver swelled and her belly filled with fluid, the doctors were unanimous in their diagnoses of alcoholic liver disease. My father, in general not a very nice man, nonetheless loved my mother madly through her decay, even as the rest of her family and all the “good” friends of so many years shunned her with the same horror and disgust with which the still healthy ostracized the unfortunates dying of the medieval plague.
I had left my wife, joined a Group apartment with other men, told my father to fuck off, attended countless hours of men’s groups, slept with over a hundred women, paid thousands of dollars each year for therapy and The Fifth Circle dues, written up a ream of dreams, gone crazy, hallucinated Nazis trying to murder me, slit my wrists, changed my literature classes at NYU into communication sessions so I could inform my students of the wonders of Paradise, tried group sex, given up dope, taken up the bottle, and, just this last week, at Dr. Saunders’ command, told my first girlfriend in Paradise, Gina Corelli, that I would never see her again, except in social groups. And Gina, I knew in my quiet heart, was the only woman I loved.
I left Dr. Saunders’ office that afternoon not thinking about Three Mile Island, but obsessed with how I was ever going to get back on the Paradisen track. After all, our whole purpose was to be happy and to figure out what we wanted and then how to get it. If Linda knew that I still harbored hopes of another secret of my past, my week in medical school and my unending craving to be doctoring, she’d say I was grandiose, so another subject to stay away from in therapy.
By this time in my life, I had a terribly clear view of the years ahead. Unless the world itself blew up, I couldn’t imagine much else that would happen, except I would grow duller and older and then die, leaving the earth as unchanged as if I had never lived a single moment.
I had no way of knowing, but the reactor was about to change my life. In a weird way, I actually have this reactor to thank for returning to medical school and sacrificing all my fears so that I could finally trust another person enough to love again. An awful lot happened, though, before life offered me a second chance for a happy ending. Or maybe, I sometimes think, it was Paradise with all its contradictions that changed me so much that I was able to bring about my own resurrection.