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About Us
The power of love works miracles
When I was seventeen, my father threw me out of the Brooklyn
apartment I had grown up in, right next to beautiful Prospect Park. We
had been sharing it for a couple of years, just the two of us, and I
thought things were going great. However, our bond suffered as my
presence in the house became more and more like bondage for "Bubsie,"
the nickname my father earned from his fellow NYPD cops for his
devil-may-care, Lothario personality. Fathering a teenage son is hard
enough, but living with one when the father was single, making up for
lost time after a horrible marriage to my mentally ill and frequently hospitalized in the psyche ward mother and, most importantly, hadn't
stopped being a teenager himself, well it turned out to be catastrophic.
The reason I was thrown out of my house was that I didn't come visit
my father in the hospital when he was admitted after fainting in a
subway car. The doctors discovered that my father was suffering from
tachycardia arrhythmia, an irregular heartbeat, which I believe was
brought on by all the stress of his life that he never let show.
When he called from his sickbed to tell me where he was, he had made
a point of saying, "Don't come visit me. This place is in a bad
neighborhood and I'll be home on Tuesday." So, obedient and, thanks to my mother's in-patient bouts, hospital-shy
child that I was, I didn't visit.
When Tuesday rolled around and he didn't come home, I called to find
out where he was. It was as if it was his turn to start doing time in a
mental hospital. "Why didn't you come see me?" he roared into the
phone. "They thought I was going to die! They took my shield and my gun!
I want you out of there before I come home." And then he hung up. In a
daze, I took what I could carry and became homeless. For a while I
really called Prospect Park my home, sleeping on benches I had played on
as a child.
Getting thrown out of my house at seventeen years old for such a
stupid reason was so embarrassing that I lied to my pseudo-hippy friends, saying
that my father had done it because he had found lots of drugs in my
room. They knew I was lying because, though I was a budding musician, I
had very pointedly and very loudly never done drugs before and had, in
fact, threatened in all seriousness to kill any of them who followed
through on their threat to get me high by surreptitiously slipping LSD
into my soda, which they never did, I'm glad to say.
After I got really tired of living in the park - it was summer - I was
taken in for a few weeks by my friend, a great guitarist who was eating
macrobiotically so he could get higher when he injected heroin into his
pure veins. As anyone who lived through the sixties can tell you, this
kind of health regimen was no crazier than those times. His Jamaican
roommate, apparently a drug dealer, was murdered in the house a week
after I moved out. It was a message lost on the both of us. I began to
smoke marijuana and did so for quite some time. My lack of a place in my
life to call my own and my drug use wreaked havoc with every aspect of my life and my
decision-making ability.
My homeless period was a long, arduous rite of passage into manhood.
At first, I was devastated and frightened to the point of a strange
numbness. As I was forced to depend totally on myself for everything, I
learned how to go to the sacred space within myself for advice and
solace and the power to go on, no matter what life dealt me. I have also
learned that the wonderful conditions of my daily life are an outward
manifestation of the rich inner life I continue to consciously co-create
every day.
The power of love works miracles, and one of them is that I put
those crazy times behind me. Eventually, thanks to my own efforts and
the loving support of Amy and her mother, Jessie, I learned who I was
and who I was meant to be. Having the secure, sacred space of both our
home and our relationship revealed the many ways my youth was still
affecting me, such as my tendency to get very nervous and, according to
Amy, irritated when things don't make sense to me or when I think people
are acting crazy. I suppose it feels too much like my childhood.
(c) Monte Farber 2010
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