West Side Stories: A piece of advice that changed a life

There was a person who was in my life for only two hours when I was 10-years-old, who planted seeds of faith and confidence in me. Much needed seeds of faith and confidence. They took hold and they emerged just when I needed them when I was 16-years-old.

When I was 16, I decided to take my life into my own hands, and quit high school. And because I did quit high school, I kind of meandered my way from there to here, and when people say ‘What do you do?’ I tell them that I’ve had lots of careers and so many jobs I’ve forgotten most of them. So, here are some of the jobs I’ve had in roughly reverse chronological order.

My last job was with a nonprofit Jewish funeral home and cemetery.

I was a green building consultant.

I delivered mail on dirt roads in New Hampshire. I ran a graveyard shift at a bookbindery. I managed the facilities for a financial software company nationwide. I worked for a company that fabricated museum exhibits. I worked for Smith & Hawken, an upscale garden supply company. I managed arts supply stores in San Francisco and Oakland. I ran a pipe and tobacco shop.

We’re back to about 1970 when I “tabbed acid.” That is, I took the LSD in crystal form and made it into tablets.

[Voice from back of the room calls out “Thank You!” to which Roberts replies “You’re Welcome!”]

I have bussed tables, worked in health food stores, read books for the blind, taken tickets in a porno theater, made custom-made leather clothes, etcetera, etcetera. You kind of get the picture.

But back when I was 16, I delivered the San Francisco Progress newspaper. It was published twice a week. Trudging up and down those hills kept me in really good shape, and it gave me five days off a week for my hippie lifestyle. So that’s taking me back to 16.

Now I’m going to take you up to 16, with some of the not-so-good events in my life.

When I was three, I broke my leg on the same day my dad was put in jail for conspiracy to overthrow the government. He was a pacifist. He was convicted. He was let out on bail, but for six years, until the case was thrown out of court, my family lived under the specter of his going to jail for a long, long time.

Things got worse for me personally when I was six. My right hip was crushed in a car accident. And when I was nine or 10 I was brutally raped in the park near our house in Philadelphia. And when I ran away from that rapist, he yelled at me, “Don’t you tell anybody, because I will find you.” So I closed off, went inside myself, closed the door on top of me, and I didn’t talk to anybody. My parents knew something was wrong, and they sent me to a psychiatrist for one two-hour session.

He gave me the normal intelligence tests, and emotional tests, the Rorschach test. You know, those ink blots? I knew what he wanted me to see in the Rorschach test. I saw genitalia, and I saw breasts and other body parts. And when I ran out of those I saw baseballs and baseball gloves, because I was really into baseball.

I know he didn’t get inside my pain.

But he said something before my mom took me out. He looked me in the eyes and he said, “You’ll be able to do anything you want to do in your life, anything you choose.”

He gave me faith. And confidence.

I didn’t understand it then. And it stayed “sub rosa” for a while, but it came out when I needed it, when events brought it out. Those events were, when I was fifteen, my mom and dad split up, and my mom dragged me out to South Pasadena, to live with the guy she broke up with my dad over. I hated living there, with them. I hated South Pasadena. And I really hated South Pasadena High School.

I knew things weren’t going to get any better for me.

So after I got out of 11th grade, the next day I got a ride up to San Francisco, where I started delivering those newspapers. At the end of that summer, my dad flew out from Philadelphia, and my mom drove up from South Pasadena, to talk to me. And they said, “You have to come home. You have to finish high school.”

Inside I thought, “Home?”

My mom and dad never owned a home. My father was living with friends in Philadelphia. My mom was still with the same guy in South Pasadena. There wasn’t any going backwards. I said, “San Francisco’s my home. I’m staying here.”

Then they said, “What are you going to do? You have to finish high school. You can’t deliver newspapers for the rest of your life.”

I said, “Don’t worry. I’m going to be okay.” And inside, I was saying, “I can do anything that I want in this life, if I choose to.”

And I did.

I’m retired now, but I still have work to do. I have two young grandchildren. I figure that if that shrink can make so much difference in my life, in just those two hours, just imagine what I can do for my grandchildren.