Back From the Edge and Eager for Life

Traffic on East 8th Street in New York seemed to stop that day two years ago as Eric Wunderman told me how the dream he had only hinted at in the workshop where I had met him was actually coming true.

Eric, who several years earlier had been drugged and institutionalized for five months because he posed a violent threat to himself and others, had not just come back from the living dead. At age 45, he was going to Yale Law School, the oldest member of the class of ’97.

Only slowly did the street traffic seem to start up again. I had met Eric just across the street half a dozen years earlier at a self-help workshop. At the time, I was teaching screenwriting part time, the rest of my life seemingly stuck.

The reporting job and life I really wanted seemed as distant as the farthest galaxy. Instead, I was gaining weight and losing confidence. So, after class, I would often head over to the free workshop.

The group met three times a week, talking about our lives, creating a home among ourselves, a kind of extended family bonded not by blood but by truth.

There was Kenny, a former hustler and sometimes user who wanted to put his previous life aside and become a drug counselor. There was Caroline, a secretary who wanted to go to law school. And there was Eric, his movements stiff, the anger in his eyes seemingly constant.

The longer Eric came to the meetings, the more the eyes lost their intensity, and behind the anger I glimpsed an extraordinary intelligence and acceptance of others and veracity about his own life. And so I grew to trust him, sharing my story with him and the group and listening to theirs.

Mostly we talked about our fears, where they had started and how they still played out in our lives. In time, many came to see those fears not as something to be ashamed of, but as old patterns lingering in our paths, patterns we were learning to circumvent.

Eric spoke of how he had been so rebellious that he’d been kicked out of three high schools before graduating from a fourth, some of whose rooms included indoor bars across the windows.

He’d flown to California, where he’d hung around the Venice boardwalk and taken various drugs for eight years. Amid the haze, he became acquainted with a man named Charles who was distributing free bread. One day, Eric and the man almost came to fisticuffs when Eric rejected the bread as too sweet, and Charles Manson, who was already using the bread to acquire a following, wanted to know if Eric thought he was too good for him and his “family.”

But he also met a woman there named Linda Newton, who saw the man trapped deep inside the craziness, and spoke only to him.

It was the first time he sensed he had a choice between sanity and perpetual anger. Still, sensing the choice and acting on it were two different things.

*

Returning to New York, Eric was still so angry that he threatened a girlfriend seriously enough to get forcibly committed to a psychiatric ward. Here he was drugged, and soon realized that he was never going to get out if he didn’t come from that sane center he’d discovered in Venice.

And so, he became a model patient. Soon, he was off Haldol, then lithium, finally entirely drug-free. I met him just as he started coming to our group and enrolled at Hunter College. There, he met Kathy Geier, a depressed would-be writer, and not only did he pull a 4.0 in his own classes, but he also encouraged her to express herself on paper. They both went on to win prizes for excellent writing. But Eric had always wanted to be an advocate for the poor.

Eric took a series of part-time jobs, and when six years ago I wrestled with whether to give up my teaching job and move to Los Angeles, it was Eric who helped talk me through the fear.

Still and all, as my life here started to come together, I spoke with Eric less and less, until I visited the city and met with him for lunch, across the street from our former workshop. And when he told me about Yale, I knew that the thing I had seen in him had also manifested in the world, and that he was no longer dealing with if onlys and things gone wrong but with the core of life itself.

A life that perhaps was late coming to bloom, but a life savored even more because of that.