We Are Still Married (5 page)

Yes, we did climb into the fountain in Rice Park across from the St. Paul Public Library, just as in the legend, but it was not intended to be a legend at the time, it was only something we did. Patty said, “There will never be another night exactly like this one, so let's do something we've never done before,” and the fountain was there and we got in—first Patty and then Cheryl and me, and finally Ed, who thought it was “dumb.” (We were not arrested, as Ed says now, nor did he take off his clothes. We removed only our shoes and stockings. Nor did he recite Baudelaire. None of us recited anything or made any reference to a pre-existent work of art; we said what we were thinking and feeling
at the moment.)

I don't mind that every year during Momentarily Week thousands of people jump into that same fountain, but I wish they would do it for their own reasons and not to celebrate something that happened one evening twenty years ago. If ever a movement resisted celebration, it was us Momentists. That was why I went back to St. Paul—to repeat the message that the world has misunderstood: Not Us but Yourself, Not That but This, Not Then but Now, The Answer Is Not on My Face. The moment is gone, now is the moment. We are gone, we will come back in a moment.

But I didn't have the heart to tell them. The crowds I saw milling on Maple were happy to think that the cheap imitation of Momentism they were buying was the genuine article, that a twelve-dollar T-shirt (“I Spent A Moment In St. Paul”) made them members of a secret society of finer, more sensitive people, and that, strolling along this street, drinking burnt coffee in a room with burlap-covered walls and fishnet suspended from the ceiling, they were having an “experience” of a sort not so different from ours. I remembered what Patty said once after we had gone swimming at midnight and then sat around on the riverbank eating doughnuts. She said, “Don't tell anybody. Don't say anything, period. Don't ruin it.”

She was right. It was Ed who ruined Momentism. First he insisted on writing “We Were Here” on walls and sidewalks with a piece of chalk, then he started taking hands off clocks. He wrote “Now” on his forehead. He talked to reporters. He wore strange clothes. He developed himself into a celebrity, a walking personal appearance, an event. Younger people started following him around; they shopped all over town for khaki pants, striped short-sleeved pullovers, white Keds, black horn-rimmed glasses exactly like his.

He looked so old when I saw him, there in St. Paul. I was disgusted. So sallow, flabby,
listless
. He sat in uniform at “the table” and allowed the patrons to stare at him. He was accustomed to being watched, I could see, and it had destroyed him. The Ed I knew was gone, his Edness all used up. I couldn't stand to look at him.

Thank goodness we true Momentists got out intact, leaving no work behind to be gawked at and eventually become dated and embarrassing and dull. Everything we created was in our heads and among us three, and only we know what it was, and so it exists outside of time and form and will be forever pure being just as it was at that moment. I walked away from the former Swedlund's and caught a cab to the airport, wishing I had never made the trip. And then something happened! In the airport! A woman in black was sitting at the shoeshine stand—the slap of cloth—a dime dropped!—a plane rose! It was such a brief thing, actually only a glimpse of something distant, fleeting, and so graceful that when it was gone I carried the image with me to the Coast, and it was worth going to Minnesota to see.

R
EMORSE IS A FAIRLY NEW AREA in social work so it's no wonder we get the short end when it comes to budget and staffing. Take me, for example. For three years, I was the
only professional remorse officer
in a Department of Human Services serving a city of
more than 1.5 million,
and not so long ago my supervisor Mitch (a man with no remorse background at all) told me I was “expendable” and that he would “shed no tears” if remorse was eliminated from the Department entirely. I had no office, only a desk across from the elevators, and I shared a phone with the director of the Nephew Program in Family Counseling. And it's not only me! Around the country, morale in remorse has never been lower.

We in remorse are a radical minority within the social-work community. We believe that not every wrong in our society is the result of complex factors such as poor early-learning environment and re-sultative dissocialized communication. Some wrong is the result of
badness.
We believe that some people act like jerks, and that when dealing with jerks one doesn't waste too much time on sympathy. They're jerks. They do bad things. They should feel sorry for what they did and stop doing it. Of course, I'm oversimplifying here, trying to state things in layman's terms, and I should add that we are professionals, after all, who are trained in behavioral methodology
including
remorse, but also a lot more—if you're interested, read “Principles of Deductive Repentance,” by Morse and Frain, or Professor Frain's excellent “Failure and Fault: Assignment and Acceptance. ”

I did my training under Frain and graduated in 1976, just as remorse was coming to the forefront. People in the helping professions had begun to notice a dramatic increase in the number of clients who did terrible things and didn't feel one bit sorry. It was an utterly common phenomenon for a man who had been apprehended after months of senseless carnage to look at a social worker or psychologist with an expression of mild dismay and say, “Hey, I know what you're thinking, but that wasn't
me
out there, it wasn't
like
me at all. I'm a caring type of guy. Anyway, it's over now, it's done, and I got to get on with my own life, you know,” as if he had only been unkind or unsupportive of his victims and not dismembered them and stuffed them into mailboxes. This was not the “cold-blooded” or “hardened” criminal but, rather, a cheerful, self-accepting one, who looked on his crime as “something that happened” and had a theory to explain it.

“I'm thinking it was a nutritional thing,” one mass murderer remarked to me in 1978. “I was feeling down that day. I'd been doing a lot of deep-fried foods, and I was going to get a multi-vitamin out of the medicine chest when I noticed all those old ladies in the park and—well, one thing just led to another. I've completely changed my food intake since then. I really feel good now. I know I'm never going to let myself get in that type of situation again!”

It wasn't only vicious criminals who didn't feel sorry, though. It was a regretless time all around. Your own best friend might spill a glass of red wine on your new white sofa and immediately
explain
it—no spontaneous shame and embarrassment, just “Oh, I've always had poor motor skills,” or “You distracted me with your comment about Bolivia.” People walked in and stole your shoes, they trashed your lawn and bullied your children and blasted the neighborhood with powerful tape machines at 4:00 A.M. and got stone drunk and cruised through red lights, smashing your car and ruining your life for the next six months, and if you confronted them about these actions they told you about a particularly upsetting life-experience they'd gone through recently, such as condemnation, that caused them to do it.

In 1976, a major Protestant denomination narrowly defeated an attempt to destigmatize the Prayer of Confession by removing from it all guilt or guilt-oriented references: “Lord, we approach Thy Throne of Grace, having committed acts which, we do heartily acknowledge, must be very difficult for Thee to understand. Nevertheless, we do beseech Thee to postpone judgment and to give Thy faithful servants the benefit of the doubt until such time as we are able to answer all Thy questions fully and clear our reputations in Heaven.”

It was lack of remorse among criminals, though, that aroused public outrage, and suddenly we few professionals in the field were under terrible pressure to have full-fledged remorse programs in place in weeks, even days. City Hall was on the phone, demanding to see miscreants slumped in courtrooms, weeping, shielding their faces while led off to jail.

Fine, I said. Give me full funding to hire a staff and I'll give you a remorse program you can be proud of. Mitch sneered. “Ha!” he said. He said, “Get this straight, showboat, 'cause I'll only say it once. You work for me, and I say remorse is Number Last on the list around here. Cosmetics! That's all City Hall wants and that's what we give them. A few tears. You can twist arms, step on toes, or use raw onions, but forget about funding.”

His insensitivity shocked me. Remorselessness is a fundamental flaw, a crack in the social contract, and repair requires a major commitment. One man simply couldn't keep up with the caseload.

I spent two months on the president of AmTox, who was sent to me after his conviction for dumping tons of deadly wastes into a scenic gorge and killing thousands of trout and who took a Who—me? attitude toward the deed until finally I elicited a small amount of shame by requiring him to spend Saturdays panhandling in the bus depot, wearing a sign that said “Help Me, I'm Not Too Bright.” But meanwhile hundreds of others got off scot-free. I'd put the screws to the guy who enjoyed touching pedestrians with his front fender, but meanwhile the guys who bilked hundreds of elderly women of their life savings walked out the door saying, “Hey, what's the big deal? So we exaggerated a little. No need to get huffy about it.”

It depressed the hell out of me. Here I was, swimming in paperwork with my hands tied, and out on the street were jerks on parade: unassuming, pleasant, perfectly normal people except that they had an extra bone in their head and less moral sense than God gave badgers. And the ones I did put through remorse didn't improve a lot. Six months ago, thirty-seven former clients of mine filed a classaction suit against the state demanding millions in restitution for the ethically handicapped and arguing neglect on the state's part in failing to provide remorse counseling earlier. “We have suffered terrible remorse,” the brief said, “as we begin to recognize the enormity of our sins, including but not limited to: pure selfishness, vicious cruelty, utter dishonesty, blind insensitivity, gross neglect, overweening pride, etc. And that's fine. But where was this program ten years ago? Nowhere to be found! That was the Me Decade! Is that our fault? Therefore, in consideration of the vast black abyss of guilt to which we have been suddenly subjected, we demand that the court order ...” My heart sank as I read it. They had even quoted my speech to the Council on Penitential Reform in 1981:

The state, they said further, had failed to exercise due care in neglecting to warn them earlier and to inform them of the urgent necessity of changing their ways.

Three days later, the order came down that I was reassigned. By offering remorse assistance, it said, I had needlessly raised people's expectations of inner peace.

“That means you, lamebrain,” Mitch cackled, leaning across his desk and poking an index finger into my rib cage. “Let's see how you like it in the basement. ” He assigned me to “assist in the assembly and assessment” of ancient and dusty ascertainment files in a dim, airless room deep in the bowels of Human Services—useless and demeaning work that left me weak and dispirited after only a day, but I held on and did the work and didn't complain. He plugged the ventilator, reduced light-bulb wattage, denied me a radio. I spent three weeks in that hellhole, reading lengthy case histories of clients long since deceased and sorting them into meaningless piles and attaching gummed labels that tasted like dead socks.

Suddenly, one afternoon, he appeared in the doorway, his face drawn, his eyes filled with tears. “I read Frain last night,” he said. “All night. Why—I—You should have told me. Oh God, oh God! What have I done to you? How can I make it up? You want my job? Take it.”

“No, thanks. That's all right. No problem,” I said. “I'm quitting.”

He begged me to stay. “I can't live with my conscience if you won't let me do something for you. Let me at least take you to lunch. There's a terrific little seafood place a block from here that I've been keeping to myself—”

“Don't bother,” I said. “Come five o'clock you'll never see me again.”

I was true to my word. I'm a vice-president of Yakamoto now, where I've designed a remorse program for assembly-line workers to build stronger emotional responses to poor workmanship, tardiness, false sick days, and excessive lunch breaks. The job is challenging, the people pleasant, the fringe benefits outstanding, and the salary is three hundred and ninety-five thou a year. The Japanese place a high premium on shame. You don't see them treating other people like dirt. They even feel contrition for things that someone standing next to them did! They treat me like a prince. I'm a lucky man. I'm extremely happy here.

Q:
JIM , I'D LIKE YOU TO LOOK at this magazine article entitled “The Twenty Best Hash Browns in Town” and tell me if you wrote it.

A: Yes, I did.

Q: How about this? “Fifteen Great Ideas for Putting New Life in Those Dingy Stair Treads.” Was that the second “list” article you wrote for a magazine?