The scene is a Stu and Lew Jewish singles dance in the mid-90s. Hundreds of young Jews at the Century Club in Century City are eager to connect, to make Jewish babies, to never forget the Holocaust. Every generation the goyim rise up to annihilate us but we’re still here, thanks be to God. From the destruction of the two temples to the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Chelmitzki pogroms and the Shoah, oy, how we’ve suffered, but the Chosen Ones are eternal. We will never be destroyed.
So I spot this woman standing by herself and she seems available.
I just get a feeling about certain girls, that they’re in my league, that I can sleep with them. I’m rarely wrong. As for girls out of my league, I lose all hope at the outset. If they’re too pretty, too popular, too successful, I figure they won’t want me and I don’t really try. When I have tried, it’s never worked out. And as for girls below my league, they don’t interest me unless I’m horny.
Sara is a 6.5. I’m an 8. Just telling the truth. I cannot lie. That would be a sin.
Don’t give me crap that beauty is only in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is objective and scientific. It’s symmetry and hip to waist ratio and perceived fertility.
My scale is generous, folks. Women I think of as sixes, other guys call fours.
I’ve slept with a lot of homely women and my friends make fun of me for it. Even ex-Gfs get mad at me when I date someone homely because it reflects badly on them.
I do have a heart. I find that a woman’s attractiveness changes when I get to know her. Someone who’s a five objectively, she can become a ten in my heart, but I don’t fool myself that objectively she’s a supermodel simply because I love her.
I’ve got a big heart. I can fall in love with fours. Most of my male friends can’t.
It’s important to be honest about these things. You need to know how you stack up. If you’re constantly getting dumped, it means you’re dating out of your league. If you’re the one who’s consistently doing the dumping, that means you’re dating beneath you.
So know where you stand with your looks, your personality, and your life position. Read the book, The Rating Game. It’s written by a woman, Reba Toney.
What’s my confidence level? Generally speaking, it’s low. At my core, I have all the fundamental beliefs of the addict (that’s why I never touch drugs or alcohol or gambling, I know they would destroy me). I know that I’m a rotten person, that regular life is rarely satisfying, but I also know that there are ways to escape from my misery through sex and success and love and God and religion. And I know that there are people out there who can rescue me because I’ve experienced wholeness before through human connection, romantic and platonic, and life became rich and colorful and vibrant. Eventually, however, with everyone I’ve known, the unconditional positive regard has fallen away and my sense of self has dissolved with it.
Do I feel ashamed about living out of my car? Well, frankly, I have so much shame, what’s a bit more? My sense of self, my sense of shame, they’re all situational. In certain contexts, I feel strong. In other contexts, I feel ashamed. It all depends on the outlook of the people around me. If they feel I’m pathetic, I feel pathetic. If they think I’m an adventurer, I feel like an adventurer. I have no core. I rely on other people to tell me who I am. A psychiatrist would say that I’m constantly seeking mirroring and that this exhausts people. I’m so needy for attention that others have to set limits with me and I never take this well.
Do I feel like I’m a catch? Well, I know there are women out there who will go crazy for me. I just have to talk to a hundred girls to find that one. My Australian accent doesn’t hurt me in the search. Once I make a girl laugh, the odds are good she’ll sleep with me.
Clubs and bars don’t work for me because it’s usually too loud to talk much. Shuls, Shabbat dinners, those are my happy hunting grounds.
So what’s my confidence level? It’s strong in the sense that I know that there are people out there who will find me fascinating if we can just have a conversation and that they will want to help me to achieve a good life. I’ve met thousands of people in my life and at least one percent of them have adored me. I’ve known human connection. I’ve known success. I’ve known friends. I’ve known community.
The Jewish theologian Dennis Prager once wrote a friend of mine in 1993, “Anyone who’s a friend of Luke’s is a friend of mine.” I’ve been stamped kosher by Dennis Prager!
So what’s my confidence level? It’s strong in the sense that I know there are certain things I can do well. I love to talk and to listen to people who read books. I know I’m a good writer and a good speaker. I know I can achieve anything if I can just have normal health, which I don’t. I know I can still achieve substantial things, even as weak as I am, if I can just be nudged into the right niche. I just need a helping hand. I just need guidance. I just need adopting. I just need regular sex and baths and home-cooked meals and a few extra dollars a month.
So in the mid-90s, I am about 27. I have a model’s looks. I have personality. And I am living free with a friend, a UCLA professor who soon kicks me out for my messy inconsiderate ways and I have to make do with living out of my car. After six years of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I’ve made a two-thirds recovery and moved to Los Angeles and am trying to pick up the pieces of my life. I don’t have a college degree. I don’t have a job. I could work something prosaic and get an apartment, but I prefer to live free, to embrace the adventure, it will be great for my writing one day, down and out in Beverly Hills, and to spend my time away from drudgery reaching for greatness. Everyone has told me that I will be great one day. I believe them.
I spent my 20s sick. You probably spent your 20s getting laid. Now I want to catch up. I am new in the big city, I’m a legend in my own mind, and I want to get some. I want to connect. I want to launch myself. I don’t want to work an ordinary job. I want an extraordinary job as an actor or writer or model or escort.
So I go up to this girl at this secular dance and I come in under the radar with the spiritual approach. The first thing I say is, “Hi there, where do you go to temple?”
She smiles. She says she has no regular temple but is going to a beginner’s course in Judaism one night a week at the University of Judaism.
“I’m a convert to Judaism,” I say. “I go to a lot of different synagogues from Stephen S. Wise to Aish HaTorah, usually both each Shabbos. I love being in a city with so many Jews and Torah classes.”
Sara: “What got you interested in Judaism?”
Luke: “Listening to Dennis Prager on the radio. I’ve gotten to know him a little bit. He said that if I moved to LA, he might have work for me.”
I tell her I have an agent (Debbie Durkin) who sends me out for auditions for modeling and acting work and I might return to UCLA in the fall to finish my Economics degree.
She gives me her phone number and I call her the next day and she swings by to take me to the beach.
Sara* is about 35 and never married.
We lie on our towels in the Santa Monica sand and rub each other with sunblock. Then she gratuitously lets her long fingernails glide over my back.
It’s heaven. I’ve never had a girl do this to me before. She just grazes up and down my back and I daren’t turn over or my excitement will show. She’s in no rush. Up and down. I bet she could really work my digit.
I think she really likes me.
I’m lying in the sun on the beach in the company of an attractive woman who shares my values, shares my religion, and shares my love of pleasure.
A few days later, I tell her about this reality show I am thinking of going out for, but it is for couples. Is she interested in coming with me?
She is not.
I am a fool for asking her. I’m not living in reality. I’m oblivious. I’m just thinking about myself. I have delusions about others. Typical! Sara is a private person. She has no need to perform. She has a responsible job in healthcare. This is never going to be her thing. I’ve taken a bridge too far.
Our conversation turns serious. You can’t joke about marriage and children and relationships with girls, those topics are sacred. Once civilizations started joking about adultery, it meant that adultery wasn’t so bad. When I joke about marriage and kids, it just shows I don’t take such responsibilities seriously.
Sara says she can’t see us having a relationship.
I feel like a dick. I thought she was really into me. I have been way too flip in asking her to be my girl on TV before she is my girl in real life and now she’s knocked me down.
Something inside me dies when a girl does that. If she’s not going to take me seriously, if she’s not going to consider me for the long-term, well, I’m not going to take her seriously either. She’s no longer precious to me. She’s no treasure. She’s not somebody I will invest in. She’s not somebody I will commit to. She might be useful, she might be fun, she might be smart and interesting, but she’s never going to be mine. We’re just ships passing in the night.
Have I ever been in love? Yes, of course, but it takes two to tango. I’ve never been in love with girls who’ve declared to me that we have no future. That we’re not having a relationship. That we’re not going anywhere. There’s nothing like such declarations to turn off my feelings. There’s nothing like such declarations to turn off my honorable side. Such girls are no longer precious. When I can already see the end of us, my blood runs cold.
And you know what? All the women I’ve known who I told I could not see us building a future together, they changed immediately from warm to cold towards me. If women can’t see a future together, they get no joy from the present. They’re not like men who are happy to get some today without thought for the morrow. At least I’m open to the present! Carpe diem!
A few days later, Sara invites me over to her place Beverly Hills adjacent for dinner.
Afterward, we sit on the couch. I rub her back. One hundred percent of the girls I’ve known for the past six months who’ve let me rub their backs have also let me have sex with them.
I’ve been with about ten girls at this point in my life, nine in the last year.
Sara starts sighing. Then she says, “Let’s go into the bedroom.”
We make out for the first time and then we keep going. I’ve got my hooks into her now. I’m gonna trap her with the great sex and then just let this thing play out. I’ll have someone on my side. I’ll have a place to stay. I’ll have rescue.
I stay the night and then drive her to the airport in the morning. She’s going away for the weekend and she says I can stay at her pad.
I pick her up Sunday night. I bring her home. We make out. And then she asks me, “What do you want to do?”
“Can we go to Disneyland*?” I ask.
“OK,” she says.
I’ve never done this before but I’ve seen it in movies. It looks so cool.
I only tried it with one previous girlfriend. When she told her mom that Luke wanted to go to Disneyland but she was scared, her mom said she was a wimp. And when we tried it, she was really tense and it didn’t work.
Now I have someone who says yes as easily as if I had asked her to pass the peas.
So my first trip to Disneyland. I have some trouble with the route. I don’t feel comfortable asking directions so we go around a bit, take a few false turns until I finally bear down and get us there. It isn’t pretty but it works and its worth the wait for me. It’s wonderful. It’s one great ride. I feel like a million bucks. I’m ready to fuck my way to freedom.
I’m not just a good little Australian schoolboy anymore. I’m not just Dr. Ford’s son. I’m not just an ethical monotheist. I’m a bloke who walks the mean streets and knows how to ride a girl. I can drive a stick, I can become a Jew, and I can find Disneyland. I know what to do with my tools. I can be a manual laborer. I’m not just an effete writer. Give me a hammer, give me a nail. Let me create something magnificent.
Here I am with a girl who does not consider me worthy to be her boyfriend, who does not want a relationship with me, and now she’s doing everything I want. This is better than Space Mountain, this is better than Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. This is freakin’ Pirates of the Caribbean action. I’m getting the booty. I’m going where no man has gone before and I’m making her scream my name.
Why was this such a big deal to me? Because it was fun, exciting, pleasurable, taboo. I couldn’t do this with an ordinary girl. I couldn’t do this in a sweet loving relationship. I needed rage and a desire to inflict pain to pull this off. It’s easy to tap into rage when a girl lets you know you’re not good enough for her.
Sara didn’t want a relationship with me. She’d cut me off at the knees. Now I’d cut her off at the knees. It was justice. I was God’s servant, delivering divine karma.
With some girls, I only love her with my good side. With Sara, I could love her with my desire to do good and with my desire to do bad. She was the first girl to accept all of me. I hid nothing from her and she withheld nothing from me. I had a willing adventurous partner. I had a sport, a good sport, a champ. She took it like a champ.
She offered up on the altar the most precious part of her and let me do with it what I would. She didn’t do that for just anyone. I was special. I was privileged. I was chosen. She held nothing back. When we got together, she wasn’t coasting on her laurels. She wasn’t lying on her back allowing me to feed her grapes. Now she’s changed positions. When she met me, she was a tight end. Now she’s a wide receiver.
During July, we end up getting together twice a week.
Some mornings I get up early and go to prayers and Talmud class. I’m hitting for the cycle — God, Torah, Israel, Disneyland.
LA is a great place. Anything is possible. You can recreate yourself. I ask Sara if she’s ever considered upgrading her B-cups. “No,” she says, “I’m happy with them. They’re proportionate to my body.”
I agree. I was just kidding.
Sara is a health professional and sometimes when we go to Disneyland, she makes me wear protection. Other times, when we’re swept away, we go bareback.
Our repeated trips to Disneyland become progressively less exciting for me and wreak a toll on her.
One evening, we go to a Jewish singles event. “Let’s mix,” I say, “and then we’ll come back together at the next of the night.”
Late that evening when we finally visit Disneyland, we both notice the trip is taking longer than usual and finally she says for the first time, “It’s hurting me.”
The news of her discomfort makes me grow an inch.
“Just one more minute,” I plead. “I’m almost there.”
“OK,” she says.
And a minute later, I’m very happy.
That she was willing to give me everything, that she was willing to open herself up to me, that she was willing to endure pain for the sake of my pleasure, it moves me. I was willing to be uncomfortable for her, to keep seeing her even after she rejected me. So it was only just that this girl would endure some discomfort for me.
I adore Sara. She salves the pain of my neglected childhood, the pain of growing up a socially awkward preacher’s kid who never got any, the pain of all those girls who rejected me, wouldn’t experiment with me, wouldn’t open themselves up to me… I adore Sara as much as you can adore someone who doesn’t want you in her life for long.
I’m a boy-toy. I get it. It hurts.
As we lie in bed one night, I say, “I’m going to New York for three weeks.”
“Who will you stay with?” she says.
“A friend.”
“Is your friend female?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re going to be having sex with her.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re going to be having sex with her,” she says, and starts crying softly.
She lets me leave a suitcase with my clothes under her bed.
On the day of my trip, she’s particularly tender. She takes me to breakfast on Beverly Blvd.
I fly to New York. Rachel* picks me up.
About nine months previous, Rachel placed a singles ad for a friend in this Jewish newspaper. She gives all of the responses to her friend but mine.
I start talking to Rachel (about 35) on the phone (she pays!). I send her cassette tapes with my musings.
It’s all very polite and spiritual until one evening, she talks about her difficulty falling asleep. “I’ve found that sex has a marvelously soporific effect,” I say.
She agrees and our connection takes a more intense turn.
I finally meet her when she flies to Los Angeles for Memorial Day weekend. We have a lot of sex. We go to Shabbat dinner. We go to shul. We take baths together.
She wanted to know what I was doing about work. I said Dennis Prager might hire me. I was just waiting for the word. For two months now.
So, unbeknownst to me, Rachel gets on the phone with Dennis Prager’s office and the next day, I get a letter saying they regret they don’t have work for me.
I guess I’ll have to make it as a model.
Rachel and I talk regularly on the phone during that summer. We love Judaism and sex. She knows I’m broke so she pays for my plane ticket to New York. I don’t think things will work out between us, but I’ll give it a try.
Rachel’s an heiress. She can afford it. She was born Jewish. She was born in the money. She has multiple graduate degrees from Yeshiva University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. She’s a five.
It makes me feel good when she gives me money. It makes me feel nurtured, cared for. Throughout my life, I’ve always paid for dates. Now due to circumstances out of my control, things have turned. I don’t have money. It makes sense to me that people who do have money and care about me, will help me out.
When I’ve had, I’ve given away. I come from a tight-knit religious community where we were generous with each other. Now I’ve joined a new religious community and it makes sense to me that we help each other out. With the little I have, I give.
I’m a youngest child. I don’t mind living off people. I’m used to getting things just by being grateful and adorable.
I remember in the mid’80s, I heard this story on All Things Considered about a guy who’s told he’ll spend his life living off women. That struck me hard. That’s me.
My ex-girlfriend Holly Randall was interviewed on the radio a few years ago. She said that she usually dated broke guys but most of them were bothered when she paid for stuff. “For some reason,” she said, “that never bothered Luke.”
It doesn’t bother me when other people pay my way. I’m Luke Ford. It just seems natural to me. I have so many gifts that I give to the world freely, abundantly, generously, through my witty conversation, my writing, my personality, my smile, that it only makes sense that the world would want to repay me with free trips to Disneyland.
I stay with Rachel for three weeks at her apartment on 78th and Broadway on the Upper West Side.
Just before I arrive, she has her maid do a thorough clean. Each day after that, however, her place progressively falls apart. She’s not the domestic type.
On my first full day in New York, Rachel starts telling me a little too strongly what to do with my life. I retreat inside. I realize she is not for me. Boom, that’s it. That possibility has closed. I will no longer invest in this woman. We’re just ships passing in the night.
Her bossiness causes me to shut her out for the rest of my visit but I try to make the best of things. We have a vanilla milkshake every night but there are no trips to Disneyland. She gives me $15 a day spending money and shows me around the Big Apple. We visit the Lincoln Square Synagogue, the Jewish Center, Stern College (an Orthodox school for girls), Crown Heights, the Yeshiva of Flatbush, Bnai Jeshurun, and several Broadway plays.
I place a singles ad in the Village Voice and say I’m a bicoastal actor-model. I feel no obligations to Rachel. I tried and she’s just not somebody I can live with. I don’t say this aloud because I’m dependent on her for a place to stay for three weeks.
With two days left on my trip, Rachel reads my ad and calls in to hear my voice. Things get a bit tense between us after that.
I borrow $500 from Rachel to buy two hours of the time of an acting manager. I need guidance with my new career. I tell him about my conversion to Judaism. I tell him about my role in a new movie whose details are listed in the Hollywood Reporter. I tell him I’m thinking about escorting for women! He says that’s probably a good idea.
He places some calls and tells me this new movie in which I have a lead role is a scam. It will never shoot.
He’s right.
On my last night in New York, Rachel and I visit a video store. She rents Sleepless in Seattle. I rent the porn film I Like To Watch.
Rachel pays for both.
We go back to her place. I put on the porno. I sit on the couch and Rachel rides me while I watch my movie.
Then I fly back to LA, forgetting my wallet at Rachel’s. She goes through it and finds the address of a woman I met at the Conservative synagogue Bnai Jeshurun.
She finally sends my wallet back but in our final phone call, she says her therapist thinks I’m using her and that’s it.
I still refer at times to the tiny siddur (Jewish prayer book) she gave me in happier times where she writes in the front in Hebrew and in English: “Wishing you peace of mind and joy to your heart, Love always…”
So I’m back in LA and Sara reluctantly agrees to meet up with me.
We go to a Shabbat dinner hosted by this weird woman. It’s awkward. Then we go back to Sara’s place.
I’m dying to know if we’ll ever have sex again. I’ve missed Sara. I want our old connection. I figure a three-week break will make our trip to Disneyland as exciting as the first time.
We walk through the kitchen to her bedroom and we’re off to Disneyland and the moment I break through, her moan is as loud as mine. She’s missed me as much as I’ve missed her. We’re tight. She grips me like a glove. She loves me. She wants me. She forgives me.
I was so frightened that we were done. That I’d let go of a good thing. That I’d blown it. That our good times were over. Other women didn’t let me do the things that Sara let me do. Sara was a champ. A gold-medal girl. I’d never known anyone like her and I never would.
A girl can talk and talk about how much she loves you, but until she gives you her body it doesn’t mean anything. Words are cheap. Romance is cheap. If there’s no sex, there’s no love between an adult man and an adult woman.
I knew we didn’t have a future together. I could never see myself marrying anyone older than me. I was willing to sleep with the older women, to live with them, to live off them, but I wasn’t going to marry one. It was an older woman, eleven years older, who took me to her shrink in 1993. He prescribed the MAO inhibitor Nardil and from the first day I took it, I was on the path to partial recovery from CFS.
“I have nothing to lose,” I tell myself. “This is healing. This is therapeutic. This is reparations for her contempt, for all I’ve missed out on in life. This is good times. This is an education. This is preparation. This is practice. This is knowledge. With every woman, I get wiser. I make new connections. It’s good for my career. It’s good for my writing.”
“I’m in LA. This is where they make music videos, movies, TV, porn. This is the sex capitol of the world. Everything I’m doing is consensual. In LA, life is sweet and easy. Sex is easy. This is what I deserve. I’m hot stuff. I’ve got a great story. I’m gonna be great.
“All of my life, I’ve had older women bossing me around. Teachers, substitute mothers, caretakers, the works. They’ve been telling me what to do, running my life, squashing me, beating me, harassing me. Now I’m getting some. I’m out on my own at last. Life has restarted at age 27. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to make my way in this world. When will my disease return and turn out the lights? I’m going to stuff as much as I can into each day. What I want more than anything in the world right now, aside from God, is sex. Rough sex. Deviant sex. Dirty sex.
“Yeah, I like to inflict a little pain. A little discomfort. No blood! No injury! No bruises! Just minor discomfort to a consenting adult partner. You’re going to judge me for that? What I do is nothing compared to what women have done to me. It’s nothing compared to being knocked around the house as a little boy by a rageaholic. Multiple women did that to me. This time the bitch is getting hers.”
I wanted someone to rescue me. To show me the way. To give me a place to sleep. It ain’t easy picking yourself off the sickbed after six years and trying to make your way in a big city at two-thirds strength, no money, and a car-home that keeps breaking down. In exchange, I will give you the ultimate ride. There’s no one like me. I’m destiny’s child. My mother used to say when she was carrying me in her womb, “This one will do something special for God.” I’ve always known I was going to be great. I’m the greatest writer of my generation. My insights into life are so keen that other people resent me for it. No matter, that’s the price of being an artist. I don’t complain and I don’t explain. All geniuses are misunderstood.
Life is good. I move in with Sara for a couple of weeks. One evening, she takes me to her parent’s home. I’m dying to see this videotape of my work at a recent acting workshop, and so that’s how I spent most of the visit.
I don’t make a good impression.
A week later, Sara asks me to move out. She says her parents don’t think much of me. She says her friends don’t think much of me. She says her therapist doesn’t think much of me.
I’m in a bind because I’m broke and my home, my 1977 Datsun station wagon, is in the shop.
I borrow $500 from Sara to get it repaired.
In my last scheduled night at her place, she comes home late and finds a tiny drop of my seed on the toilet seat. Sheesh, I thought I’d caught it all! She marches into the bedroom and demands I clean it up.
Then we go to sleep like brother and sister.
While my Datsun is in the shop, I’m supposed to stay with a friend from acting class.
It’s Saturday night. I know Sara has a date. I sit on my friend’s porch and wait.
His name is Alexander Denk and he will hit the news more than a decade later as the putative father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby.
When Alex doesn’t come home by 11 pm, I try to sleep in the bushes beside the Beverly Hills High School. After a few minutes, I give up.
I walk over to Sara’s place. I wait until the lights go out in her apartment. Then I ring the buzzer, hoping her date has gone.
She answers. I explain my situation. She’s not happy but she lets me stay the night on the couch.
And that’s it.
Over the next three months, I cry every day over my loss of Sara. I’ve never done anything like this before or since. The intensity of what we shared shakes me up and losing her is like losing an addiction. I am now walking the tightrope of my life without a net. Nobody will catch me if I fall. I have no one to distract me from the hole in my soul. I have no one to distract me from my lack of normal human connection. I have no one to distract me from my lack of friends, my lack of work, my lack of home.
Fear of abandonment is my deepest fear.
To find such rescue again will take a lot of luck and a lot of work. I am back to zero. I am in withdrawal. I have no distractions.
To have tasted connection, to have tasted living from the inside, and then to be thrust back out in to the cold, it makes the pain worse. It reminds me of everything I’ve missed out on in life. For a little while, I had connection and now it’s gone.
I am a scared, frightened, sick, homeless boy trying to make his way in the big city. Again and again I turn to sex to get by — for solace, for affirmation, for comfort, for connection, for the sheer joy of doing what I do best. The only reason I never formally sell my services? I get no takers for the two months of escorting for women ads I place in Los Angeles magazine at $90 a pop.
I feel bereft without Sara. Lost. With her, I have solace and satiety. I have someone in my corner. I have everything I need. I have my basics taken care of — sex, shelter, connection — and with those bases covered, I can look around to do better. And now my security blanket has been ripped away. It would’ve been one thing if I had done the breaking up, if I had someone better to move on to, but I don’t. I’ve been fired from one job without having another one ready to go. That’s not like me. Normally, I’ve scouted out for where to land when the current relationship crashes.
All those thrill rides came to a crashing halt and I am back at the starting line. My life isn’t the unfolding upward progression I’d dreamed.
One Saturday morning at temple, I sit next to Sara. When it comes time to call out the name of somebody who needs healing, I ask Sara — as a joke — to call out my name.
“I think it would be better if you asked someone else,” she said.
My laughter dies. I feel small. I feel insignificant. I feel rejected. I feel like my mommy has died.
That’s about our last conversation. I avoid her after that.
A few weeks later, I sit in the YULA beit midrash and write Sara a valedictory letter telling her about how much our time together meant to me. I send her a $500 check and I send Rachel a $500 check. I’m a bloke who always pays his debts.
Sara replies with equal warmth. She says that while I was in New York, she met a guy she fell for hard. One night he came to her place. He asked her about the suitcase under her bed. When she told him the truth, he left her and never came back.
One Friday night a few weeks later, I meet a new friend, Bobby*. He listens to my tale of woe about Sara. He confides that he’s really well endowed. And that he did Sara on their first date a couple of years previous.
But she never took him to Disneyland!
About five years later, I run into Sara at temple. She is married and living in the Valley.
Mama, put my guns in the ground
I can’t shoot them anymore.
That long black cloud is comin’ down
I feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door.
Here’s the coda. I found my niche in 1997 blogging about the porn industry. In June 1999, I published my first book — A History of X: 100 Years of Sex in Film. For my intrepid reporting, Hustler magazine in its Christmas issue 1999, named me its Asshole of the Month.
It was an honor just to be nominated.
In 2000, my family is so worried about me that they give me a free trip back to Australia to see the doctors of their choice. One of them is a psychiatrist. I spent three hours with her.
Afterward, Dr. Redden gives this evaluation to my sister: Applying the DSMIV, Luke has a personality disorder of the histrionic/narcissistic type.
Luke is very dependent upon other people for his identity as a person.
He has poor identity integration and poor self esteem. Accordingly, Luke is always looking for mirroring – it’s called “narcissistic supply.” That is to say that Luke is always looking for external validation of himself as a person (i.e., he needs other people to tell him who he is). However, because it is not possible for people to mirror him all the time, he gets disappointed and this can turn to envy. Luke may not be conscious of the fact that he is very envious of his family as they seem to have things he would like to have but does not have. This leads to him fluctuating between, on the one hand, devaluing people such as the family (putting them down) and on the other, idealisation of people – such as Dennis Prager.
Luke tends to make unreasonable demands of people who are eventually driven to setting limits on him. Luke takes this very badly.
Luke needs five to ten years of insight orientation psychotherapy. It was the falling out with Dennis Prager which caused him to go to therapy. While Luke has a lot of therapy ‘speak’, he may not really understand the concepts involved.
Luke will continue to do what he is doing to satisfy his needs until such times as the rewards (reinforcement) are outweighed by the negative effects of same (punishment). Then he may do something about getting his life on track and getting therapy or going back to finish his degree (which would give him some self-esteem).
The negative effects of his current behavior are that no one will have a long term relationship with him as no matter how sane they are, people cannot live without getting something back – and Luke is always taking in without giving anything back. Second, any decent woman who looked at his website would be immediately repulsed.
Luke has a complicated personality. He has mood instability – perhaps mild cyclothymia.
Luke become very focused on one thing then, when he is not getting the desired rewards, he drops it and moves on.
Luke may have had some post viral illness but then the illness took on a life of its own. It is common for people to retreat into the sick role because it is a way of failing in a face-saving way. Luke was failing because of the lack of significant relationships in his life.
Luke in his current state would not be successful in employment.
He wants immediate results and if he does not get them, then he does not want a bar of it.
As with most adolescent boys, Luke was obsessed with sex.
As with most super egos – it is not well integrated. His rules are situational and he justifies things.
Luke is capable of being exploitive.
Luke is reacting to the values of his family unit.
We [Luke’s family] have to have a firm boundary of where we go in his life. We should stay off his website – what we don’t know won’t hurt us. We should set limits on his unreasonable behavior. We must treat him as an adult that he is and stop babying him.
Luke has tunnel vision and difficulty seeing things as others see it. He is only looking for mirroring.
Luke has a poor sense of identity – he is not well integrated – he has no sense of self – therefore he is very changeable in different circumstances.
