The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 433
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
CHRONOLOGY 63: Cartoonist 5
Mon., June 15, 2015
… And what happened then?
This 2nd wife stabbed me and my friends in the back in a diabolical way. She destroyed our dream of having our own recording studio and recording our own music. We had the music to record, songs that Greg and I had written. We had the talent to record them. Edward had become a good bass player; Greg had developed his unique style of guitar. I was ready to add keyboards, which would have made a great difference since that was always my strength, rather than rhythm guitar. And Geoff had become an excellent guitarist ready to add anything that Greg couldn’t do. We were poised to make some very good records.
And?
That 2nd wife, the one I had devoted my life to because only by doing that and believing it in could I justify my own betrayal of Paula - she found a way to destroy it all. It was ingenious in its simplicity, diabolical in its long ranging impact. It destroyed the band. It destroyed the recording studio. It destroyed our dream of recording our own music. It destroyed our family. It destroyed the thing that had made teaching for the DOE tolerable to me. Ultimately it destroyed me. It changed me so dramatically that I was no longer the same person I had been from 1952 until 1996 when the cult began to chip away at that old person and from 1996 until 2007 when all of the abuse and maltreatment had continued to eat away at that person. Finally that betrayal destroyed the person that I was completely. Now, here I am.
But you’re good.
Yes, amazingly, I’m good. Here I am. I survived 14 years of teaching in a job that was nothing but stress and frustration and early morning train rides to the ghetto that took up most of my waking hours. Looking back it’s a miracle that I was able to come up with all of the music that I wrote, demoed in some cases and recorded in other cases while doing that job. It’s maybe not quite so amazing that I came up with the cartoon because that was nothing if not pure survival.
What do you mean by that?
I mean that when you’re depressed and ready to give up on life, you need something positive to keep you going. I no longer had the music to keep me going. There was no travel other than the depressing train ride at 6 o’clock every morning into the Bronx ghettos. I was ready to cash it all in.
Suicidal?
Yes. But in 2009 Therapy Dog showed up and saved my life.
A cartoon character saved your life?
Literally. I got such joy from the idea of writing scenarios for Therapy Dog that I decided that summer to start working out. I started jogging and exercising that same summer that Therapy Dog appeared and there is no doubt in my mind that the two are related and that if they had not come long, I would be dead now. Therapy Dog literally saved my life.
It gave you a reason to keep going?
That’s right. I knew I had to keep teaching because it would really have been meaningless if I had quit then before I got even a small pension out of it. I set my sights on writing cartoons and surviving until I turned 62 and finding Zawadi Noel really helped me in that . When he brought TD to life, it was a great motivator for me to keep going. So here I am today.
Just having taught your last DOE class.
That’s right. Today it came to an end but now there is the possibility of something good coming for this long, seemingly at times endless nightmare. Now I’m talking to Paula again ….
Your first wife?
That’s right. Incredibly she is talking to me. We have made some tentative plans for our future - a real future with the possibility of something good finally happening for me. Nothing good has happened for me since the day I met that woman in Managua. Now that I’m finally getting free of her, there is a chance that it will all pay off - not for me but for Paula, who is still there and still interested in my well being and future.
That’s an incredible story.
She’s incredible. There is nothing more to say than that.
6:38 p.m. Rathskeller. G. #3.
Well, there it is. I didn’t intend to write anything like that. I was thinking of completing today’s ATR log for the last period of teaching of the last day of my last year of teaching in the DOE. I haven’t done that but it was fun writing that little interview with myself. I’m getting some t.v. news here at the Rathskeller that I never get and there are some interesting stories going on right now. Jeb Bush declaring for the presidency isn’t one of them. I won’t vote again. I’ll vote only when they get rid of lobbying and make political advertising on t.v., which is purely behavioral modification, illegal. That won’t happen, of course, so I will never vote again so it won’t matter to me if another awful CIA Bush takes office. If not him, then another more or less the same. I don’t consider Hilary Clinton to be any better.
7:22 p.m. Rathskeller. G. #4.
I just talked to Mandy on the phone. I sent her a text about things in general and then went to Facebook and commented on a couple of her posts and she got back with a text suggesting that she needed a “friend’s ear.” So I called immediately and she seems fine but also talked about how Ryan seems to be taking her for granted, getting upset over small things, overreacting, etc. - the sorts of things that all marriages run into. I couldn’t really tell how serious things are because overall she sounded like her usual very positive self.
8:07 p.m. Rathskeller. G. #5.
I just spoke to Mandy again. She got interrupted by union issues during that first 11 minute call so I called her back and talked to her for another 19 minutes. She talked mostly about how Ryan is taking her for granted, treating her in a sexist way as if she is some sort of 50s housewife rather than the artist that she is, and that he doesn’t seem to be able to recognize that she is far more supportive of him than he is of her. I couldn’t tell from the first call how bad things were and don’t really know now after the 2nd but she went so far as to say that she had gotten the name of a counsellor just today when I suggested that maybe that was something they should try before just giving up altogether. She has her son Harper to think of. She said she doesn’t want him to grow up thinking that a man can treat his wife the way Ryan has been treating her - as though he is the primary member of the family and the woman is secondary.
She talked about how good we were together and I reminded her that we were more like Jimi Hendrix than the Rolling Stones. What we had burned bright but for a short time. It was a really beautiful collaboration that we had at a time when both of us were going through very traumatic changes in our lives. She was breaking up with her first husband and I had just been stabbed in the back by both my wife and my son although during that summer of 2008 I didn’t realize just how complicit Geoff was in the betrayal. It didn’t occur to me that she might be suggesting to me that there might be more between us as we talked but it suggests itself now as I write about it but there is nothing like that in my mind at all. I love Mandy for the beautiful, creative person that she is - a singer, a writer, a teacher, a mother and friend. I love her for that and don’t think that she could really think of me in any other way, especially now, almost 8 years after we were whatever we were to each other.
8:52 p.m. Rathskeller. G. #6.
Of course, that’s only #5 as far as the Rathskeller is concerned since I’m counting as #1 the pint I bought at Penn Station. But I’m chatting with Paula now about Mandy and other things and the food here is the equal of the Cranford Hotel - grilled chicken Caesar and fries. It is just as good for sure. If I’d found this place 10 years ago, I’d truly be a regular. Right now there are 10 men at the bar, which would hold another 5 or so and 2 more watching the big screen just behind me - and me. That’s great because I can walk outside with my phone to talk to Mandy without worrying about leaving my computer here or I can go to the bathroom and not worry about anything disappearing. I wouldn’t do that at TGIF or any other big chain joint so TGIF may now be a thing of the past - especially since they know to keep feeding me pints of Guinness without my asking.
9:29 p.m. Rathskeller.
Time to get out of here. That was the last of the beer for tonight. I’ve got a little back at Dewitt but I’ll go back there and just fall asleep at this point. The bartender just left me a conventional check. Sometimes they bring the European charge machine around and take care of it at the table. Not tonight, I guess.