I do try to avoid social media, colossal waste of precious time that it is, but every once in a while, something leaks into my asylum and I get sucked in. I saw a post this morning that Glen Roberts was soon going to celebrate his 99th birthday.
Glen Roberts is one of my very few surviving bosses. A tall, gentle man, with a boyish demeanor, he was not only the clinical director at a non-profit mental health center where I worked in the 1980’s, but was also a consummate standup bass player, and the leader of an eponymous big band. He was one of those rare men who was loved by all, although occasionally his passivity irritated some who appreciated a more authoritarian, less laid-back, musician-like leader.
Glen was so beloved and respected that when the clinic finally raised enough capital to construct a new building, the board decided to name it after him, an honor rarely bestowed on a living and not-yet retired individual. Years later, in a travesty of justice, the Glen Roberts Child Study Center was renamed after the agency crumbled under strokes of mismanagement that caused it to be absorbed by the mega non-profit named after social worker and philanthropist Didi Hirsch.
As my boss and supervisor, Glen and I talked often about my clients, one of whom I have likely written about before. Patrick (not his real name) was a strapping, sweet, charming and kind-hearted man in his early twenties, another of those rare men who people tended to love almost instantly. Patrick had likely killed many people in his young life, though the exact number was not clear, because, in Patrick’s words, “I never hung around long enough to see if they died.”
Patrick lived with a bullet lodged in his spine that was put there by his father when Patrick stepped in front of his mother to protect her from his father’s drunken rage. The story made the news, especially because the dad got off scot-free on some technicalities. He disappeared soon after, and Patrick was determined to find him and kill him, although he struggled mightily to resist the urge. To let off some of that pent-up rage, he would go from bar to bar and challenge random men to a fight, take them out to the parking lot and beat them until they were unconscious in pools of blood.
Yet, Patrick’s typical waking demeanor was such that once, when he was arrested for beating the crap out of a fellow co-worker, the Burbank police showed up at my office in Burbank with Patrick in tow. The police noticed how despondent Patrick was in the back seat and had the perspicacity to ask Patrick if he felt like killing himself. When Patrick answered affirmatively, they asked him if had a therapist, and Patrick directed them to my office, where they let me talk to him while the two cops sat in the waiting room.
Afterwards, the police said that the guy who Patrick beat up at work was at the hospital, and the victim’s mother asked that they release Patrick because her son “deserved it.” Patrick, who was mixed race, was being repeatedly taunted by this guy and had enough.
I loved Patrick, as did nearly everyone else, but I was afraid of him. I believed what they taught me in school, that the way psychotherapy worked was that the client “transfers” his or her unresolved conflicts onto the person of the therapist, and the therapist then provides the “corrective emotional experience” in which those past emotional wounds come to be healed.
The implication of such a scenario was clear to me, and that I, especially as a male father figure, would likely become the target of Patrick’s rage. When I told Glen that I was afraid that Patrick would come after me in one of his vengeful rages, Glen just sighed softly and said, “Maybe he won’t.”
Those three words have stuck with me ever since, and have comforted me in so many instances in which the odds felt stacked against me. After the cancer diagnosis, the voices inside and around me kept telling me that there’s a good chance this cancer is going to kill me. Somewhere in the recesses of consciousness, Glen’s reassuring voice responded, “maybe it won’t.” So many other times, too personal to mention in this context, in which panicked voices crescendo in the face of one sort of loss or another, Glen’s words respond. “Maybe he won’t… Maybe she won’t… Maybe it won’t.”
When attempting to teach me to swim in the Atlantic Ocean as an 8-year-old, my grandmother Rhea told me to “Never turn your back on a wave.” I don’t know if at the time she spoke it she understood it as the profound metaphorical injunction it came to be for me, although I expect she did. But I took it to heart, and I do my best to remain vigilant in this truly dangerous world. But it’s Glen’s voice that enters as ballast for the terror that manages to reside like Castaneda’s raven just over my shoulder. That may just be the wave that does me in, but on the other hand, maybe it won’t.
Happy 99th birthday Glen, and thanks for being a guiding light for so many of us who were fortunate to be graced by your presence.
