I Was at Low Ebb in My Twenties

If I had to pick the worst decade of my life, I would have to pick my twenties, between 1966 and 1975. I had miraculously survived brain surgery in September 1966. For my entire adolescence, I did not have a functioning pituitary gland: Instead, I had a benign tumor that not only destroyed my pituitary, but was staging an incursion on my optic nerve. Oh, and by the way, due to the malfunction of my pituitary, I had, for all intents and purposes, no adrenaline, thyroid, sex hormones, or human growth hormone. At the age of twenty-one, I looked like a high school freshman. When I bought alcoholic beverages, I was always being carded by store employees who did not believe my true age.

As I have described my condition before, I felt like a Martian mixed among human beings. I had fallen in love with a young woman, but it was not reciprocated. Several times, I awoke in the middle of the night, walked several blocks to Zucky’s Deli and had breakfast, then walked a few more blocks to the beach at Santa Monica. In the pre-dawn hours, I stared at the waves wondering if I had the courage to take a walk to Japan.

In time, I weathered my depression. I signed up for group therapy, where I discovered that my problems were all part of the human condition, namely, that we were all Martians.

In his book of interviews with Osvaldo Ferrari, Jorge Luis Borges found an interesting way of describing my condition:

Yes, I am sure I am happier now than when I was young. When I was young, I sought to be unhappy for aesthetic and dramatic reasons. I wanted to be Prince Hamlet or Raskolnikov or Byron or Poe or Beaudelaire, but not now. Today, I am resigned to being who I am. And to summarize: I do not know if I have attained happiness—no one does—but I have sometimes attained a kind of serenity and that’s a lot. Also, seeking serenity seems to me to be a more reasonable ambition than seeking happiness. Perhaps serenity is a kind of happiness.

For Borges, that’s saying a lot, as he had lost the sight of his eyes some thirty years before the interview. After my surgery, I was sterile—which is, as I see it now, a highly survivable condition.