Jazz Pianist Jessica Williams

An Appreciation of Jessica Williams

Everyone grew up with a unique soundtrack. These are the songs, the music that sustained our adolescent years, the songs that saw us through our high school sufferings and our frazzled romances. This is the music that walked at our sides as we met and married our spouses. And, perhaps, the music that dirged when the marriage ended.

None of us forgets the sound track of our youth, with its slow-dance makeout songs and funky booty-bouncers. It remains the sound track of our lives. There may be additions, new music always comes forth, but the basic rhythm carries our days and soothes our nights. We will always love the music we loved when we were young.

Our world is a motley of generations, and each generation has its youthful soundtrack. My father is still imprinted with Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey. They evoke his time in history. Armies were storming the beaches of Normandy, hopes and heartaches were thrown into the fires of war. Spirits were kept buoyant in the face of dread. The music was lively, sentimental and sophisticated. Only real pros could play it, virtuosi of reeds, brass and rhythm. It was vital and inventive and it isn’t going anywhere. New generations simply rediscover it.

We know our sound track,whatever it is: Metallica, Paul Anka, Tupac, The Carpenters, Michael Jackson, The Eagles, Little Richard….it’s ours and ours alone.

It is permanently tattooed into our nervous systems.

The soundtrack of my youth was a little strange. In 1961 there weren’t many kids of fourteen listening to John Coltrane . How many of my peers had a closet full of albums by Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderly, Roland Kirk? How many owned a copy of Charles Mingus’masterwork, “The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady”?

I loved jazz so passionately that there’s no adult counterpart that I can identify. I love my wife that much. It’s no innocent passion, it’s tempered with the woes of life. It’s deep and real but it isn’t the insatiable breathless devotion I knew as a teenager. I was a kid who had musical crushes. My first Art Blakey album tipped me over!

Jazz was everything for me, at fifteen, sixteen. It was the Path of Paths.
I wanted to be a jazz musician, and my ear tuned to this musical elevation. When Ornette Coleman came along in 1965, I was graduating high school, and I didn’t hesitate, I jumped. I left home, ran off to New York with a dream of joining The Ornette Coleman Quartet. I met the man. He was wonderfully generous but I was too young and not good enough to be a member of his band. I didn’t get it, socially, didn’t understand the drugs, racism, the harshness of the jazz life. It was all a romance for me. If I failed, I could go home and attend college. There was no such safety net for Ornette Coleman. He had to grab the world and make it listen!
The sound track of my youth: Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, Jackie Mclean, Tony Williams, Ornette Coleman. I didn’t have many friends. People thought I was crazy.
Along the way I developed a passion for piano music. I loved pianists. I seized upon Bill Evans with a grip like epoxy and listened for hours and hours. The way McCoy Tyner soloed with Coltrane gave me goose bumps. I’d stop the record, go back to the start of the piano solo and play it again and again.
I liked the peaceful manner of Bill Evans. He was never harsh, he played like a very gentle man, and so it was, I understand. I was gravitating towards a more reflective kind of music.

I love pianists. I love the great classical pianists. Glenn Gould, Vladmir Ashkenazy. Chopin transported me. I loved the interpretations of a relative unknown , Abbey Simon. I hated the the narcisissm of the so-called “greats”. How could different pianists play the same music, the same Chopin, with such disparate results? Some sounded musical and tender, towering and strong, while others merely sounded brittle.


About ten years ago, a friend gave me a Jessica Williams album. I loved the music. The CD was “Live at Maybeck”, an outdoor concert in which Jessica played solo. I loved the playing. I wanted more. I played the Maybeck CD again, and yet again.
What happens when an artist’s work enters a person’s life? What intimate process evolves when a relationship is established between artist and participant? There are a few artists whose visions have become like an alternate home for my soul. I’ve listened to John Coltrane for fifty years. I bought my first Coltrane album, “Blue Train” in 1960.

It began an awesome collection of Coltrane recordings. I wore out copies, I gave away copies. I often entreated some shrinking acquaintance who was dodging the copy of “Meditations” I was thrusting into his reluctant hands. “Here, listen to this, you HAVE to listen to this! It will change your life! Just take it!” He wanted to go back to his apartment, smoke dope and listen to Moody Blues and Led Zeppelin. By my logic, if I loved Coltrane, everyone should love Coltrane. If I was at a party, I’d load a recording like “Ascension” onto the turntable and people would run from the room as if a disease had arrived. Now and then someone would hit me, take the album from the turntable and break it or sail it out the window.

I carried Trane’s records with me across the country. I took them everywhere an aspiring musician could go. They lived with me in Cleveland, Detroit, New York, St. Louis and San Francisco. I listened to them stoned, straight, on acid. I absorbed them, I ate them whole, chewing so much vinyl that my lips turned purple..

Later, the same thing happened as I began to acquire Jessica Williams’ CDs. Jessica has a CD called “Tribute to John Coltrane”. I ordered it from Jessica’s direct-sales website. She even signed it! That CD, with my favorite Coltrane song, “Lonnie’s Lament”, became my everyday soundtrack.

As I began listening to Jessica Williams I began to perceive the details of her genius. Her technique is so abundant, I can only laugh. Such speed, such “touch”, such command of the entire keyboard’s sonority. There aren’t many pianists to compete with the absurd affluence of her chops. Some performers with technical gifts get stuck there, with the technique. They remain performers. They never take the next step towards artistry.

Jessica Williams’ technique is so huge that she’s surpassed that mysterious threshold where a musician becomes able to tell jokes. Wit requires a special ability in music. A witty musician needs virtuosity. How can a player tell the joke without the timing? How can there be humor without first acquiring a universe of knowledge with which to assemble the fable, the short quip, the pun, the turning upside down backwards and forwards of a well known piece of music so that it sweetly mocks itself? It takes years of practice to afford the risk of timing, the risk of flirting with a line or a pun in an odd place, framed in an odd way. It requires confidence and audacity to take a chance, to make a wide leap of musical faith. Only the masters have that much audacity. Only the masters are geniuses of timing. Jessica’s aptitude for surprise keeps us listening intently. Some of her witticisms pass in a second. Whoops, quote from “Grand Canyon Suite” in the midst of a tender ballad. Gone! Two bars. She might play a gorgeous arpeggio from a great old standard. At the end, as the ringing tones of the florid scales vanish into the air, she throws off a little two tone discord, dink! and it fits perfectly, makes a comment on the preceding music as if to say, “so there you are! Ha!”

It’s impossible to write about Jessica Williams without a discussion of Thelonious Monk. Jessica has made no secret of Monk’s influence on her work. It’s an odd juxtaposition. Jessica said during an interview with Terry Gross that the first time she heard Monk, she thought he was wearing boxing gloves.
Monk plays a hammer-handed style that owes little to classical training. It’s a fusion of conventional and purely invented techniques, devised by Thelonious Monk to serve his peculiar childlike madness.

My guess is that a major link between Monk and Jessica Williams is humor. Jessica, with her fleet fingers full of finesse, has so much technique that the piano becomes a complex toy, an object with which to play, as a child plays, building worlds in the imagination.

Monk’s music often sounds like something played by a brilliant and very strong six year old. The melodies are deceptively simple, yet full of tricks and quirks. Some Monk tunes evoke the sensation of almost stumbling over a crack in the sidewalk, then recovering without falling on your face. Monk is devious. He writes to test other musicians, to see if they can cut it, to separate the gold from the lead. The compositions are not so much difficult as subtle. It’s easy to hum a Monk tune, easy to let one of his lines slip into the rhythm of driving or shopping. His songs are like nursery rhymes made up by a man who is both autistic savant and cosmic seer. Monk seemed to live in several worlds simultaneously. The only location where all the worlds converged was in the piano . Monk’s music was so unconventional as to require use of elbows, forearms, crazed crushes of fingers. His right leg flopped like a hooked sturgeon when he played. He was famous for getting up and dancing a little jig while his sidemen solved the labyrinth of his chords. Were it not for the staggering originality of Monk’s ideas, he would never have been recognized, never acquired fans. He was barely functional and spent time in mental wards. Without his wife Nellie’s patient devotion, no one would know the name Thelonious Monk. It would be “What-lonius who?”

Monk could be hilarious with a single chord. Just one! Using ten fingers. There might be fourteen or fifteen notes played by those ten fingers but all of them belonged in the comic smash of tones that was Monk’s sly quip. How could a musician as funny as Jessica Williams not fall in love with Monk? Both are clowns of the piano. They approach the piano from opposite ends, but Monk has given Jessica an entire vocabulary from which she can absorb crazy funny quirky and exotic musical remarks. No one can imitate Monk. An astute pianist can be liberated by Monk. He invented a uniquely sonorous dissonance. Monk used his imagination to turn wrong notes into right notes. There were no wrong notes. There were just Monk-Notes and Not-Monk-Notes. Musicians who played too many Not-Monk-Notes soon found themselves playing elsewhere.

Jessica’s palette is larger than the conventional palette of modern jazz. Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Billy Taylor, are modern jazz pianists. I know Jessica will be called a “postmodern” pianist but I refuse to plop a decal on her. Trained in classical music at the Peabody Institute, she encompasses the whole of piano literature and borrows from sources in every corner, from John Cage to the pulse of flamenco and the staccato plonks of the Balkan santur.

The length of Jessica’s lines is unusual. They can be so long they seem endless yet always resolve perfectly, after wandering and stretching through a DNA-like weave of notes where each fragment of the entire line is a single chromosome and miraculously the chromosomes fit together by the time Jessica has reached the conclusion of her idea and is moving to the next. Then, another line of equally operatic length may follow. Jessica pulls this length off without ever getting boring.
Her lines are like action films where we wait with our hearts beating quickly until the good guy wins or the odds are overcome. The conclusions are celebrations. The effect is visceral: UH! Rock me in my seat, let my arms and legs twitch with happiness when the mystery is solved!

This isn’t music I listen to. This is music I ingest. This is music that mingles with my bloodstream.

“When I'm playing, I think of NOTHING. The Buddha is EMPTY. I seek TRUTH through emptiness, through honesty without a veil or blinders.”. Jessica Williams


I have twelve CDs by Jessica Williams. That’s not a large number. I’d love to have all of them. I listen to them constantly. I listen to them as I write and work at home. I listen to them in the car. I hardly listen to anything else. Jessica’s music is so rich it’s like a rain forest of exquisite musical plants. It brings me joy, stimulation, awe, relaxation, information and escape to a world ruled by The Queen Of Beauty. What is she doing, I wonder, as she reaches to the very upper keys on the piano and spends sixty four bars tinkling almost beyond the range of human hearing.? The sounds are like bells coming from the clouds of a supernatural realm. Meanwhile, her other hand is playing some ironic or unlikely counterpoint that is so dextrous as to be stunning, impossible, yet there it is, pure musical fact. I can imagine a Hindu deity-poster of Jessica possessing eight arms. In each hand is a piano. A keyboard elephant’s trunk of ivory and ebony tapers gracefully from where her nose should be.

Jessica is both lofty and funky. She is elegant and rooty, the rasp and twist of blues is never far from the surface.

When John Coltrane said, with such stunning simplicity, “I want to be a force for good,” he was expressing the deepest will of anyone attuned to spiritual purpose. I seldom use the word “God”. It’s too vague. “God” becomes an excuse, a crutch, a fantasy, a fleeing from pain, a selfishness.

“Being a force for good” is a more accurate expression of putting my life in the service of a greater power than myself. If I want to be a force for good, if I hold that desire at the center of my heart, I have made a commitment to walking a path of ethics, generosity and compassion. Integrity demands that I make an effort to repair the damage of the lies that I have told, or believed.

There are people who make themselves into living treasures by embracing this desire. Jessica Williams is one of those people. It is our good fortune that she is an individual who devoted countless hours to the practice and study of music. This has enabled her to be the treasure, play the treasure, inspire the treasure in all of us.

Jessica is a force for good.

I have let her become one of the cornerstones of the sound track of my life.

Why Do We Pick On Ourselves?

Why Do We Pick On Ourselves?
Copyright Art Rosch
Jan 3, 2010



Americans pick on themselves. We do it constantly, relentlessly, awake, asleep, we pick on ourselves about everything. It’s as if a perfectionist mother –in-law sits inside our heads on a platform at the very center of our thoughts and points here and there, hectoring us with criticisms.


“You could lose a few pounds, you know. You’re getting heavy. What’s wrong with your face? Is that a zit? How could you have a zit at your age? Your pores are kind of large, too. Speaking of age, wow, you’re getting’ over the hill, and it shows, it shows! I see wrinkles at the sides of your mouth and eyes. And that big one in the middle of your forehad, wow. Who could love a mess like you? Who buys your clothes?!! A retarded pygmy? Where did you get those awful shoes? Who does your hair, a baboon? Get another stylist before it’s too late. The damage that’s being done, what a shame. Your hair is thinning out day by day. You’re getting a pot belly, by the way. Ever think of wearing something, a brace, maybe? Your skin’s losing its elasticity, there’s a cream that I can recommend. Your teeth are a little funny. Has anyone ever suggested cosmetic dentistry?”


Pick pick pick, pick pick pick. Am I wrong? Have I overstated the case?
She never stops, this critical demon of the shadows. She is a product of decades of indoctrination.


“I should remind you to get your cholesterol checked. Wouldn’t want you suddenly keeling over. It can happen; any second it can happen, bam! You’re dead! I’ll bet you haven’t provided for your family if something happens. Do you have a good lawyer? My brother in law knows one. Are you seeing a doctor? Have you checked your prostate lately? I hear there’s a new medication for that. There’s a pill for everything these days, just watch Sixty Minutes. I mean the commercials, not the show. There’s a pill that’ll help you stop smoking if you survive the side effects. I love the medications where one of the side effects is “diminished semen”. What does that mean? What kind of pill can have “diminished semen” as a side effect? Isn’t that the scariest thing a man can hear, short of “penis may wither and fall off?” Loss of semen really means having crappy sex, doesn’t it? So why don’t they say, “may have brief weak orgasms due to lack of sperm?”


This yapping harridan, this carping abusive inner voice, how did it get inside our heads? Let’s make it simple. First there’s television. There are a lot of good things about television, it’s not the monolithic purveyor of propaganda it might be in some other countries. Still, it hauls a freight train of psychological toxins every second of every day, no matter if the sound is on, whether or not Tivo has blocked the commercials. It doesn’t matter. The marketers behind television are so sophisticated that we don’t have to turn on the device to be contaminated. In our society, television has become a self-referential culture, the subject of billions of conversations. It has moved into our thoughts and taken residence, permanently.
After TV there’s movies, the internet, magazines, newspapers, radio, you can’t escape marketing anywhere, not even in an airport restroom.


We barely live real lives any more. We talk about fictional characters whose lives are infinitely more exciting than ours and whose dangers are far beyond anything we would ever permit ourselves to face.


It would be interesting to snatch someone from the past and have this person witness our marketing techniques. Show a Viagra or Cialis commercial. What if we brought someone from the Victorian era, from around 1895, and showed him or her commercials for keeping your thing hard, every ten minutes another commercial showing a man of about forty five with a woman of about thirty eight, snuggling together, holding hands, watching the sun set. We would have to explain the nature of this product to the viewer. Without the warning “see a doctor if erection lasts more then four hours” there is nothing to indicate what this product does, what’s it’s for. When we explain it to our time traveler, what will this person think about our culture? How embarrassed would he or she be, how shocked at the impropriety?


Well, sure, they were prudes. Their repression caused them vast inner conflicts, but I would speculate it added an extra thrilling dimension to sex. It seems that when we started discussing our President’s blow jobs on the public airwaves, some line was crossed, some basic decency and sense of proportion was jettisoned off the side of our big ocean liner of a culture. Sex also got a little bit more ordinary, a bit more like costume jewelry.


I digress, I was talking about how we pick on ourselves. It’s stupidly obvious. It’s about getting us to spend money. The entire purpose of marketing is to manipulate our desires. The basic technique is to infect us with feelings of inadequacy. Then we are bombarded with glittering images of things we’re led to believe will make us feel better. If we feel bad enough we’ll go out and buy some ridiculous cream, or pill, or car, or hair weave, or something that makes no sense at all, we’ll just go buy anything, walk into Walmart with our credit cards and shop, as an anesthetic. We’ll be perfect consumers, depressed, dazed automatons piling up debt. Glassy eyed, we walk the aisles of the stores, pace the infinite mallways without destination until we find ourselves back home with bags full of junk. How did all this crap appear in our houses? I don’t remember buying an eighty eight inch Super High Definition TV set with a quadruple-woofer ten speaker sound system with Dolby nine point two noise reduction software.


We’ve been had. We’re nuts. We pick on ourselves because all our role models are distortions that are dissonant with real life. We don’t see authentic people in the movies or on TV. We see heroes who can kill a dozen trained hyenas by throwing wooden chopsticks from fifty feet. We are not encouraged to admire people who aren’t particularly beautiful, rich or talented. We aren’t given strength of character as a yardstick of true heroism. It isn’t enough to be an ordinary person anymore, we have to be some carefully crafted mannequin, with no missing teeth, no bad habits. We’re going to live to a hundred and fifty in perfect health, glowing and radiant, with a beautiful partner by our side. There won’t be any old age, slow decay, debility, nothing like that because the inner witch-voice won’t allow us to relax and be human, be ordinary and obey the laws of nature even when they take our youth and beauty.


Isn’t that the primary mechanism of marketing? To raise dissatisfaction to a level where we’ll do anything to “better” ourselves in the form of consuming whatever’s consumable to get a buzz for a few minutes or hours?


Pick pick pick, we’ve learned to pick on ourselves without mercy. Go ahead, take a look at yourself in the mirror! Do you like what you see? Have you been taught to accept yourself with all your flawed genes and pathological behaviors?

Can you accept and love yourself as the unique creation that you are?
Of course not. There’s no money in love.


Not yet.

Begging Is the Hardest Job In The World

A few days ago I was getting into my car in a large parking lot. I was approached by a well dressed woman. “Excuse, me, sir,” she asked with apparent reluctance. “I’ve had a bit of trouble and I…”


My hand went up to stop the rest of her pitch. She was begging. I could see that every word was costing her great effort.


“Sure, no problem," I responded. "I have a couple bucks worth of change. I’ve been through hard times myself.”


She relaxed, her shoulders came down from around her ears. She wasn’t a funky street person holding a sign at a busy intersection. She looked like a soccer mom with two kids. This was my first encounter with a more upscale type of beggar.


Some traffic- light panhandlers have a dog. Some sit in wheelchairs. They’ve always been a fixture at certain busy intersections. They hold cardboard signs written in Magic Marker that say variations of the same message: “Anything will help.” “Please. Will work for food.” I hold no animus towards them. To feel contempt would be....contemptible. They stand for hours in a noisy place clogged with car fumes and endure a thousand humiliations.

I could tell that the well dressed woman in her early thirties was not used to panhandling. The look on her face was shattering. She was humiliated but she tried to appear as if this was just a momentary blip, like she had left her wallet at home and had run out of gas. She was going to beg just this once, it wasn’t a thing she would do tomorrow and the day after that. I saw her move on to the next person and the next. They recoiled, they refused. She kept on, walking softly up to people. “Excuse me, sir, I’m in a bit of trouble…Excuse me ma’am”.

I could see the immense effort it cost ; her body was wrapped around itself as if she was very cold. I know the feeling. I’ve begged and panhandled. I sank to the bottom tier of society. The work of begging is very difficult.


Yesterday I was in another parking lot, just coming from Raley’s with two plastic bags of food. It was five-ish, getting dark. A woman approached me wearing a white down jacket and slacks. Her hair was well kept, her makeup was in place.
“Excuse me, sir” she began and again I held up my hand. “No problem,”
I said, “I have a couple bucks worth of change.”


As I dug through my bag, I asked her a question.

“How many hours a day do you do this?”

“All day. I’ve been here since eight this morning. My feet are killing me. I’m done in an hour. Eight to six,” she laughed bitterly, “it’s a full time job.”


“So..what are people like?” I wondered. “Do they help you?”

She leaned back against a car, taking the weight off her feet. The bright blue light of the mercury vapor lamps made it easy to see her face. She didn’t look like an addict. I'm not an expert on what an addict looks like, but, having been one, I can feel that particular hunger, I know the signs. She looked like a thirty five year old woman trapped in circumstances beyond her control. Maybe she’s divorced. Her ex-husband’s vanished, not paying child support. She’s three months behind on the rent. She was laid off from her job after twelve years of loyal service to the firm. Unemployment benefits are running out. Can’t find a job anywhere. She’s desperate and she wants her kids to continue having the things they’ve always had. Karate lessons. A music teacher. Little by little she’s losing the ability to provide, and pride leads her to some difficult choices.

So…panhandling in supermarket parking lots becomes an option, a desperate option that she takes with greatest reluctance.

“About one person in ten is nice.” she replied. “You can’t believe the abuse I get out here. ‘What’s the matter with you?’” she imitated a shrill pitiless voice, “‘Go get a job like a decent person. Shame on you!’ Women are the worst, especially the ones of a certain age, over forty five, fifty. I don’t bother with the twenty-somethings. They’re just overgrown high school kids, they tell me to go fuck myself. Excuse my language. And you know what? I stand up for myself. I tell them they don’t know what’s going on in my life, they’re not qualified to judge me.”

Her eyes shifted. A woman was loading groceries into a car just down the row. She needed to get back to work.

“Thank you,” she said with sincerity. “I have to make every minute count.”

“Go on,” I said, “Go back to work.”

She had to push herself away from the car. She was bone tired. She didn’t know whether her next approach would end in kindness or invective. Her eyes thanked me for treating her like a human being. She was half an inch from breaking into tears but she pulled herself together.

With each passing week I expect to see more of these parking lot beggars.

Begging is one of the hardest jobs in the world.

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Update on the Big Bang Theory

November 30, 2009

Scientists at the Space Science Institute have issued a revolutionary update of the Big Bang Theory. The explosion of the universe from an infinitely dense singularity and its subsequent expansion have now been drastically re-examined, following measurements of the velocity and distribution of so called Dark Matter. It has been experimentally proven that this matter, and other forms of matter such as Baryons, Gluons, Muons, and Schmoo-ons are actually being recycled, and that the known universe is a Big Bag, being filled by Bag Ladies from the Eleventh Dimension. These beings live in time and size scales incomprehensible to normal human thought. It is speculated that they use promordial galaxies and quasars as cast-off brassieres, bunny slippers and hair nets. These Bag Lady Beings have been referred to in Hindu Cosmology, somewhat romantically, as Devas, and in Christian theology as Archangels. But, in fact, the yiddish terms, Schlepper, or Shmatta, might in fact be more accurate.

A Vision of Yanni

Last night I channel surfed past a PBS station in time to catch the entertainer Yanni playing with a sixty eight piece orchestra in some awesome place like the Pass of Thermopylae or The Gramd Canyon. He was standing between phalanxes of keyboards, four on his right, four on his left, and as the orchestra pumped out vigorous but empty musical calories, Yanni stretched his arms straight out to either side and played the keyboards. He threw his hair back, arched his body in a spasm of ersatz passion. He wore an all white costume with puffy sleeves; the shirt was unbottoned to show his hairy chest. He was gallantly crucifying himself, ascending in resurrected bliss on a cascade of idiot dramatic crap New Age muzak fit only for hair salons and supermarkets. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not jealous of this man’s success. (Oh no.) He undoubtedly works very hard. But the insult of indulging in such silly and obvious showmanship only diminishes his besotted audience. Showmanship is a wonderful thing. Especially when it is connected to genuine talent or profound ideas. I recently saw a vintage film of the Count Basie Band. The drummer, Sonny Payne, twirled and juggled his sticks while executing a wildly complex solo. I watched him pass the sticks under his legs and around his back. He threw them into the air so they landed on the snare drum in perfect time and bounced back into his hands, and all the while he held and stomped on the beat until he cued the band back into a great bellowing riff that lead to the tune's head. THAT is showmanship. In Hell, Yanni will be a toothless bald man gesticulating wildly in front of a three piece band of Borscht Belt hacks who can barely wheeze in tune, let alone play music. He will repeat the same phrase over and over again, “Aren’t I wonderful?” and a thin, bored applause will leak up from a cigarette strewn linoleum dance floor that stretches to infinity.

/b>

The Suicide Hotline Boogie

Several years ago I got involved with suicide hotline counseling. I took a two month training course, and spent four hours a week answering a phone, knowing that utter despair might be on the other end of the line.
The training was terrifying. Two thirds of the initial class dropped out in the first month. I wasn’t dropping out of anything. I was training my character about the concept of commitment. All the volunteers had the same fear: what if we said the wrong thing and were RESPONSIBLE for a suicide?
The latter parts of our training were about role playing. We’d gather as a group and the trainer would ask someone to go first. I always offered to be first. I preferred to get my terror over with rather than sit and anticipate. The trainer and I would pretend to be on opposite ends of a phone conversation. The trainer would say “Ring Ring” and I would answer, “Suicide Hotline.” Then the trainer would act out a scenario and it was my job to respond to the situation as if it were real.
My heart started pounding, my throat went dry. The trainer would play an adolescent in crisis, or an elderly person sick, alone and without hope for the future. The trainer could be anyone at all. We didn’t know until we answered the “phone”.
In this way we got past certain inhibitions. It’s not only okay to ask if someone is thinking of doing harm to themselves. It’s mandatory.
“Are you thinking about committing suicide?”
Yes, we ask the question!
“Do you have a plan? Do you have the means to do it?”
“Have you attempted suicide before?”
If the answer to all of these questions is yes, if the caller has a history of attempts, and is holding a gun, a bottle of sleeping pills or a pack of razors, then it’s time to go into action. We try to find out the location of the caller. If the caller won’t give up this information, we have the ability to trace the call. We have a reverse phone book, addresses that yield phone numbers. We can call friends, relatives. We can call the police. We’re not helpless.
By sheer wonderful luck, this is the hotline associated with the Golden Gate Bridge. There are call boxes at regular intervals where would-be jumpers can get a direct line to a counselor. I never got a jumper. I got a lot of other things.
When the training was complete, I went as an intern to the switchboard. An experienced counselor was on hand to help out. We worked in teams. For a few sessions, the supervisor could listen on an extension to my calls. I got some calls, but they were mostly sad people wanting to hear another human voice. No serious threats.
On my third shift, it was time to go solo. There was another counselor there, but I was now officially on my own.
I was terrified when my first call came in. I picked up the phone and said the requisite, “Suicide Hotline” in a calm neutral tone. Then I waited, listening to hard breathing on the other end. After about fifteen seconds, a woman with a thick southern accent said the following:
“I have a loaded gun pointed at my head, and my finger is on the trigger.”
This is my first solo call! Okay, okay, be calm, work from the training.
“If you really wanted to die, you wouldn’t have called me.’
“Maybe I don’t want to die and maybe I do,” the caller responded. “Maybe I called to see if you could come up with a single good reason for me to keep living.”
“I can’t talk to you until you put the gun down. And I can’t give you reasons to live, you’ll have to do that for yourself.”
My supervisor had heard all this. She came and stood behind me. She took a pen and bent over to write on a piece of paper on my desk: “did you say gun?”
I shook my head yes.
The woman on the phone spoke in an acidly sarcastic manner. “You mean you’re not going to give me Jesus or Buddha or some crap like that?”
“I’m not here to promote religion,” I responded. “I’m here to listen to you.”
“Oh bullshit!” Now she was angry. “I’m going to pull the trigger!”
I braced myself for a blast. It didn’t come. There was just the sound of labored breathing from the telephone.
“Hello?” I spoke to the breath. After some seconds, the voice responded, with the same angry sarcasm.
“Yesss. What!”
“You didn’t pull the trigger.”
Then I heard a click click click.
“That’s the gun,” said the woman. “It’s not loaded. But I can load it, in a second.”
“You don’t want to do that.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you would have. I think you want to live, whether or not I give you a reason.” I was beginning to feel a little angry. I felt a sudden intense dislike of this person. I felt that she was bullshitting, that she had called just to mess wth my mind.
Again, the sound of three clicks. Mocking. I had a cigarette lighter in my pocket. I took it out, held it to the receiver and clicked it three times. My supervisor had been standing behind me. I saw her arm come over my shoulder with the pen. She wrote, “what the f…?”
I shrugged, then wrote, “B.S.”
I saw Leslie, my supervisor, nodding.
The woman with the southern accent said, “What’ve you got there, a thirty eight?”
“No,” I responded, “A Bic.”
She laughed in a witchy sounding cackle. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”
“I know I’m smart, but that has nothing to do with what’s happening right now. Are you intending to hurt yourself, or anyone else?”
“I’m not gonna tell you, now. You’ll just have to live with not knowing.”
Click. She hung up. I sat there, half terrified and half enraged.
I pivoted my chair so that I could talk to Leslie.
“Doe she sound like this?” Leslie did a perfect imitation.
“That’s it.”
“Okay, well you just met Lynn Brogan. She calls four or five times a week, and if she gets a newbie, she does the gun routine.”
As I was letting the air out of my lungs, as my shoulders settled, the phone rang again and I nearly levitated from the chair.
“Suicide Hotline”, I said.
“You know, I have a pretty important job.” Same southern accent. It was Lynn Brogan.
I had to restrain my anger, restrain my urge to answer with sarcasm. After all, if this was how she spent her time, she was pretty unhappy. She was in a lot of pain.
“That’s good,” I said in a neutral tone. “What do you do?”
“I’m head of Research and Development.”
“With what company?”
“I can’t tell you that. It’s a VERY big company. Very important to the government. You’ll just have to take my word. I have thirty four hundred people working for me.”
The other phone line rang. Leslie moved into the next cubicle and took the call.
“Suicide Hotline,” she said.
Thus began my acquaintance with a list of characters who used the hotlilne as their primary social focus. They were hotline addicts. Kendra S. called fifty times a day until we cut her to a maximum of five. She started calling all the other Bay Area hotlines. San Francisco thirty times. Berkeley twenty five. Oakland fifteen. Each day. Her hoarse voice assaulted hapless volunteers with anger and self pity. She could not live without calling hotlines. As she got thrown off one, she migrated to another until she was calling hotlines in Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles.
One of our clients, named Gwen, had multiple chemical sensitivity and would go into a psychological meltdown if she thought she was exposed to a carpet that wasn’t detoxified or a whiff of someone else’s perfume. When she weakened and ate a piece of chocolate she entered a state of panic in which she believed her toxicity would be fatal. It wasn’t.
Bob R. had flown B-17’s during the war and couldn’t stop re-living his experiences, fifty years later.
Working the hotline was like that truism regarding war: hours of tedium punctuated by minutes of sheer panic.
Most of the time, my method worked. I kept at bay all the things with which I might lose my sense of equality with these people. Compassion can only operate on a field of equality. If I lost sight of the fact that I could BE one of these people with the tiniest slip of fate, then I was in trouble.
At one time I WAS one of these people. I could never forget that. I always felt a vulnerability, always felt as if the despair were as close as my skin. After five years, I reached the burnout point. The despair penetrated and I began to become my callers. That’s when I started leaking anger and judgment, impatience and contempt. It began to come out through the holes in my skin, through the membrane of invulnerability that I had worn in order to do this kind of work. The membrane was leaking pretty badly.
When I said to Kendra S., “For god’s sake Kendra there might be someone in real trouble trying to get through here….”
That’s when it was over.