Surfing the boardwalk, my thumbs slapped the shimmering reflection of my iPhone. Scrolling, searching for a song to captivate Ocean City, New Jersey on a sun-scattered, Sunday afternoon. Winds ricocheted against my black Nirvana t-shirt, hoodie around my waste, as I maneuvered through pockets of pedestrians embracing the unusually sunny, March day. The rays peered behind transparent clouds, illuminating a once barren boardwalk — elderly couples, families, dates, children, and surfers alike.
You may be familiar with this situation, scrolling through song after song, only to realize you’re stuck recycling the same playlists, the same artists, the same tracks: the most recently played. You’ll know when it happens, and if you’re like me, it’ll make you slightly uncomfortable.
“The world of music at my fingertips and I’m listening to the same Grateful Dead tape (Dick’s Pick 33: Oakland Coliseum October 9th -10th, 1976, highly recommend).”
The walk, an attempt to induce sleepiness and hunger, was grasping effect.
My stomach churned against the scent of boardwalk fries, oven baked pizza, melted mozzarella, and the brutal lines for ice cream.
“Maybe its time to head back?” I thought to myself, “I hardly have any cash to spend. Boardwalk’s expensive.”
True enough, I was dependent on my parents, something difficult to communicate or confess. Especially if you know my past, the lengths I exceeded to maintain financial independence from Mark and Betsy. Eventually landing in legal troubles, which unfortunately resorted in even more financial dependance.
I spent over three years grinding the restaurant industry during peak COVID: delivery driver, dishwasher, busser, runner, bartender, server, food prep.
During my time at Anthony’s, I was prepping ingredients, bartending, taking tables, running food, bussing, and cleaning the guest’s dishes, all in one shift. Essentially a one man show alongside a manager and general manager. Despite the hard work, I encountered a theme of narcissism and codependency that prevented any upward mobility, eventually being forced from job to job at high turnover restaurants. Does this have anything to do with my psychoanalytic education, anything to do with the fact I’m educated in why these managers and owners are burning down their restaurants in self-destruction?
Do they notice?
Am I perceived as a threat?
I asked my last manager during a heated argument and he never said no.
This is subject for an entire essay, so I’ll return shortly to discuss narcissism and codependency in the workplace.
Trouble with work and various life situations occurred, I was jumped on my birthday after an altercation, receiving a concussion and broken hand. A drunk driver totaled both cars while returning from Dead and Company, slamming my head multiple times against the roof and headrest, a confrontation between my prescription-pill-popping brother, his wife, and my parents where police and courts were summoned to clear the dust, and climaxing with a cockroach contaminated apartment.
I negotiate enough money to stay off the streets, feed myself, and continue working on my art — my chosen career field. I could’ve lived out of my car during the winter months, but actually found it more difficult and more worthwhile to negotiate support and avoid burning bridges.
A lesson I’ve been learning: How much are we able to accomplish with the help of our fellow man, how much easier would COVID have been if people and corporations actually assisted each other instead of accumulating profits?
However its a tense situation. I recently find myself in Ocean City due to lack of affordable housing near French Creek and the Poconos, my determined final resting place due to scenery and lack of people.
I have specific housing needs. My search for housing is a character arc itself extending from the age of five years old dealing with health issues, visiting countless primary care physicians, psychologist, psychiatrists, specialists, surgeries, inpatient, outpatient hospitalization. This is an incredibly personal journey, and I have to know what works best for me. I’ve already been forced to move from the last two locations in my life. So I’m sorry if I look like a rich kid on vacation right now, I have to know my self worth with the resources available. Like any businessman.
I will be returning to discuss abuse at the hands of the medical establishment, and resentment toward an upper-middle class upbringing. They are connected.
Walking for over an hour, my legs drudged over wooden planks, muscles tightening to my hips. Time to head back. I trudged along the boardwalk, allowing the salty breeze to clear my recently infected sinus’s — spying surfers in the distance.
They ambushed the pressing tides, whipping around storm drains and gulleys, washing up on sand-stained shores, crowds spectating in admiration.
In the corner of my eye, a bench protruded from the edge of the boardwalk, vacant, beckoning to melting thighs and aching feet. I placed myself against the wooden frame, enlisting the help of Alice In Chains to set the mood, MTV Live’s Unplugged. As Lane Staley’s hoarse, angst-embraced vocals soothed my ear drums, I heard a muffled vibration — a figure caught the corner of my eye.
“Whersav-Sdfaf—fd!”
“Huh?” I said, removing the earbud from submersion.
A bulky gentleman, five o’clock shadow, black sweatshirt over black sweatpants, worn tennis shoes, clutching a Dollar Tree plastic lunch-bag approached the boardwalk bench.
“You got the best seat in the house, I was here earlier. Bathroom.” he said hovering over the bench.
“Would you like me to move?”
“Nah man…It’s all good, best bench on the boardwalk. Five-O-One, Fifth Avenue, first bench — surfer’s bench,” he said taking a seat, “You know how to surf?”
“Can’t say that I do.”
“Usually we surf on the other side, but recently a lot of guys come here. I’m a big boy though, hardly fit into a wet suit anymore, gotta lose a couple pounds. Old man. Won’t catch me surfing near rocks and storm drains like these guys either. Young man’s game — didn’t mean to interrupt you. You can listen to your music.”
Half tempted to replace the ear bud, I sat frozen, aware of the possibility of conversation. A theme: encounters with strangers who shed light on specific ideas I’ve been ruminating in Modern Psychoanalysis. The crashing waves embraced a moment of silence, as the gentleman eyeballed Nirvana’s “In Utero” on my black t-shirt.
“I love the sixties, seventies, and eighties music man. The stuff that really rocks. The music they played at Woodstock; Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, The Who, Crosby, Still, Nash, and Young; guys like The Eagles, The Cars, ZZ Top, Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Dire Straits…even Ravi Shankar… I saw his daughter play the sitar once — music where they actually care, ya know?”
Recently visiting Woodstock this summer, I jumped eagerly into the conversation.
“Favorite band?” I asked.
“Too many. Depends on the day, the mood. Anything with real intentions, where they care about the rock n roll. Something pure. I’ll go as far back as Earl Scruggs and some bluegrass, to Chuck Berry, early Rolling Stones — better than the newer stuff, maybe some Jethro Tull. Have you ever listened to their first album? Better.”
“Incredible, bluesy with the harmonica,” I said.
“Yeah man, and the flute— ‘My Sunday Feeling’. People don’t listen to that stuff, always the radio songs. What’s you name?”
“Nick, you?”
“Ronny…Ronny Longboard Shwartz.”
We shook hands.
“No ninety’s music?”
“Nirvana is too weird for me, but I like Alice in Chains.”
We discussed music for almost an hour. Favorite musicians, Woodstock, discographies, blues, bluegrass, the invention of the synthesizer, the history of Bruce Springsteen and Atlantic City surfer culture, racist banjo tunes of the twenties. After a lengthy conversation, my stomached roared. I was preparing to leave when Ronny divulged about growing up in Atlantic City, moving to Ocean City, promising never to return to casino stacked skies, escort muddled streets, cracked out corners.
“A small town with big city problems,” he said, “all thanks to those damn casinos. I remember when they first opened. We were there. At the ribbon cutting. How much good those did…” Ronny explained how casino culture killed his hometown, increased alcohol consumption, gambling addiction, drugs, crime. “I’ve lived a hard life. Everyone grew up with a skateboard, surfboard, and an instrument in their hands. First they traded it for a bottle of liquor, then a needle of heroin. Peer pressure, always. I never met my dad. Called a Vegas gambling missionary and found him there, never met him. I don’t need that in my life right now.”
“You sure know a hell of a lot about music, did you get into a music career?”
“Nahh…Not exactly. Just day by,” said Ronny.
“Certainly know quite a bit. Who got you into music?”
“Myself. I was the lead singer of a band too.”
“Play any gigs?”
“Ha! Hardly, garage band. Just some local guys having a good time.”
Ronny focused on the surfers floating against the tide as a bicyclist slammed his breaks, eyeing Ronny from the throne of his bicycle — Tour de France bike suit and all.
“Yo Ronny, what’s good my man?”
“Yo, buddy. How are we today?”
“Good man,” said the bicyclist, “Haven’t seen you at ACME in a bit. You still over there?”
“Nahhh, I got fired.”
“Anyway you can get your job back? I’m sure they’re looking for every dick they can find!”
“Yeah,” Ronny said, Yeah.”
The bicyclist departed after a brief intrusion, as Ronny sat perched against the wooden bench, accompanied by his Dollar Tree lunch bag. The seagulls chirped overhead, casting shadows that whipped the wooden planks. Ronny continued.
“I don’t believe in religion,” he began, “religion is nonsense, controlling.” Ronny shifted toward me, hesitating. “You wanna hear something crazy?” Peering over each shoulder, Ronny paused. “ I guess I’ll just say it…. Fuck it, Despite everything I know there’s something up here,” Ronny circled the left side of his head with a finger, pointing to the empty space joining his ear. “I don’t know what it is…I was walking beneath the spot where my friend’s brother died, killed by lightning, leader of the local Neo Nazi’s, electrician. I don’t go back there often, but when I do, sometimes I feel him.”
Ronny hesitated for a moment, discovered I was still listening and continued.
“My friends are dead. I survived and I owe it to whatever this is,” Ronny pointed toward the empty space next to his head, signaling towards the other. “A hand grabbing my neck, telling me to go over there, stay away from that, ignore that, no, over here, idiot…. Sometimes it feels like my dead friends, my mother who recently passed, sometimes it feels like this one woman…”
“What woman,” I asked confused.
Ronny paused before removing a black brick from his hoodie pocket, a relic from the past, a flip phone. “Don’t mind me. I’m high energy, low tech.” He searched through his phone, returning the screen with a black and white, Marilyn Monroe-esque, photograph of a woman posing, faded, circa 1960’s?
“I don’t even use streaming services for music, just YouTube on my broken laptop, but here she is… I saw her photograph one day and decided to call her, let her know how much I appreciated her early work… before it got smutty and risqué. Not a fan of the slutty pictures. She wasn’t really there when I called her… dementia… I mean the photograph was thirty-forty years prior but I let her know. I’d call her from time to time, found her number online. When she passed away, I could feel her along with the others.”
Ronny pointed to his ear once more.
When Ronny mentioned the smutty picture and his preference toward purity, he provided a perfect example for the Madonna Whore Complex — the inability to view a woman as BOTH a caring, compassionate wife and sexual partner. Did you know a great portion of men are unable to perform sexually after they marry their wives? This is known as the Madonna-Whore Complex, stemming from the infant’s attempt at preserving the innocence of the primary caregiver. Melanie Klein, prominent psychoanalyst discovered that during breast feeding, a child would bite, tear, and punish only one breast; while finding great comfort and admiration in the second breast.
A ‘good breast’ and a ‘bad breast’ resemble the infant’s attempt to split the identity of the caregiver into two polarizing identities, bad and good instead of a multidimensional human, somebody who isn’t perfect. This occurs when the child’s emotional and physical needs are unmet and the child becomes overwhelmed with negative emotion. Instead of blaming the caregiver, the child splits the caregiver into two separate identities to preserve the child’s identity of the caregiver.
This phenomena translates to incredible problems in society. For example, one of my major inspirations in life, Ken Kesey, suffered from a Madonna Whore Complex. How? Maybe it had something to do with Mountain Girl, the young teenager who slept with Kesey during the Electric Kool Aid Acid years, who conceived his child while Kesey had a wife and family at home. In Tom Wolfe’s book, Faye Kesey is continuously projected as this Mary Magdalen, do-no-wrong, woman duty-fulfilling, child rearing housewife. However, Kesey seems unsatisfied, searching for an emotional outlet in teenagers. Mountain Girl and Kesey eventually split, leaving Kesey’s child to be raised by Jerry Garcia. While Kesey is pushing consciousness, spirituality, and a higher plane of existence, he’s simultaneously caught inside a childhood repetition which endangers the family model. Behavior that encourages the repetition of the Oedipal Complex, as Kesey’s children are witness.
The Oedipal Complex foreshadows difficulties with gender identification, the feminization of men, infantilization of children, preference of narcissistic love objects, and overall is a nuisance to developing society.
If you’re like me, you accidentally made a whore a housewife — Women who constantly look for sexual escape, incapable of unconditional love, bouncing from love interest to love interest, narcissistic. Were these girlfriend’s capable of providing real, unconditional love and support? In one example, the cheating, ghosting, and abandonment of our six year relationships should be the indicator. However, unconsciously this is what I was looking for: unloving women to debase and dominate as a sexual object, an oedipal revenge against a mother figure from childhood. The act of physically controlling a woman for a moment and casting her aside to prevent any vulnerabilities. Many times after having sex with a girlfriend or any woman, I’d feel a compulsion to drive her home, tell her to leave, go to sleep, even break up with her.
I also had trouble masturbating while thinking about certain women, as if I were “degrading them” or making them “unworthy”. One woman for sex, another for the home.
However, most relationships, I’d find myself sleeping with a woman only to run away until it was time for sex. Tinder and dating apps were incredibly enabling. It’s not proud behavior, but its a defense mechanism against my sociopathic mother — a subconscious recognition that women are possibly dangerous and must be treated as such.
My grandfather, when acting out during his marriage with my sociopathic grandmother (history repeats), brought his affairs to the dinner table. Literally.
In an act of self-destruction, my grandfather would actually bring his mistresses home and introduce them to the family. This is a revenge act against women in general, using them as objects, but especially my sociopathic grandmother — along with a cry for help. I grew up hearing about how my grandfather was a narcissistic asshole, a piece of shit who cared more about sex and himself than anything else, but after psychoanalysis, I believe my grandfather had a Madonna-Whore Complex — married to somebody with absolutely no ability for love or compassion — trapped with a sadist, looking for a way out.
It’s important to identify how narcissists and codependents share similar behaviors when self-destructing. The analysis of the self, family history, individual personalities, and individual behaviors allows access to the full picture. Without a properly trained analyst, somebody skilled in understanding resistances and unconscious motives, history may be lost.
Ronny also mentioned his skinhead friend who died from lightning (what are the odds). This provides evidence for the root of scapegoating, tribalism, and prejudice within the “the good” and “the bad” breasts. An infant will exemplify the same splitting behavior, not just within women, but races, religions, anything. Even how Ronny kept explaining every artist’s first releases were “better than the rest”.
Ronny’s automatically classifying a specific release as better than “the other” releases, solely based on order of releases. While I won’t disagree, AC/DC’s ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’ is a great album, is it better than Back in Black?
Jethro Tull’s ‘This Was’, more inspirational than ‘Aqualung’?
Suppose there’s no right answer, music is subjective, right?
Do you see the “This vs. That” mentality, at least?
How about the voices in his head?
It could’ve been easy to laugh at Ronny when discussing the orb of voices encircling his skull providing him with proper guidance, the deceased friends and family, the woman from the photograph, Raquel. However, Ronny didn’t explain the situation with a psychotic gibber jabber, he didn’t break from reality, he didn’t form word salad. You may be familiar with these phenomena if you’ve ever encountered a psychotic episode. Ronny carefully explained his perspective of intuition, listening to the inner voice, staying alive, and why he’s the sole survivor from his friend group, a burden he carried like the plastic Dollar Tree lunch bag.
It became more apparent when I tried to leave, and every time I said goodbye he rang me into the conversation. A man who’s lived a difficult life, few family, dead friends; freshly fired from his ACME day job, living vicariously through a group of young surfers in a body too big for a surf board. But a shimmer of light sparked from the corner of his eye, a relaxation when speaking, and a smile that hugged his prickly, oval face. A stranger, but no stranger to strangers.
“I’ve really gotta go.” I said, stomach twisting, eyelids cement.
“No worries, about time I hit the bathroom again. Been a couple hours. Just stay up, man. Don’t let anything or anybody get you down. You wanna learn how to surf, I’ll be here. Five-oh-one, baby.” He jumped from the bench, standing tall against the Atlantic City skyline lingering in the distance.
“One last thing,” I asked Ronny, “ Shwartz, what is that?”
“Hundred percent German baby!”
“Sounds like something out of Space Balls.”
Ronny sighed, “Never was a movie guy… more into music… Especially a movie where the yudin are tryna make a few bucks off a guy like me.”
A laugh struck me by surprise.
We shook hands under the flocking seagulls, amongst the first crowds of the beach season, basking in a beautiful spring afternoon.
“I’ll catch you later man!” I said, “thanks for the music suggestions!”
Amongst the crowds Ronny punched two fingers into the sea breeze, the sign of horns and bellowed,
“Keep rocking and rolling, Remember Ronny….Ronny Longboard Shwartz!”
THE BADBOOB 