Intro to Cosmology

Peter's Memoir: Introduction to Cosmology

By Peter Neuendorffer

I was very excited about my new course as a freshman on the meaning of the universe, “Introduction to Cosmology.”

We were standing on the busy steps outside a landing door entitled “Do Not Enter.” My professor, Mr. Briosi, was a thin man, not bad-looking, in his early twenties, with orange-blond hair and a button nose. He was wearing a green plaid shirt and black pants with sneakers. As he talked I realized I had lost my manila folder, and felt very naked because of that.

Mr. Briosi had an evil grin, almost like Santa Clause sideways. He had just told me that I was not going to be continuing in his introductory cosmology course, which I had been so enthusiastic about. I had been like the student answering questions with a frantic wave: “Me, Me! Call on me, Mr. Briosi!”

So I told him that if he said I wasn’t going to be in the course, why hadn’t he told me so before? And he replied that wasn’t so, which confused me, I must say. He said that I just wouldn’t be in this coming class, so I asked how I would know what class I would be in.

He said he didn’t have his number. (The number of the other professor, that is.) I fumbled in my wallet for my business card – which I had designed myself – only to come up empty. I had forgotten to get more. Very embarrassing. I realized I was taking up a lot of his time. After all, this was an Ivy League school.

As students streamed by on the stairway, I knew now that I was doomed. No professor, no course title, not even a phone number for my prospective professor.

So what was the meaning of life, I wondered?

When I took a remedial course on the History of Science at Harvard Summer School, we read a book originally recommended by my first psychiatrist, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by T. S. Kuhn.

The author’s idea was that all changes in scientific theory came about as a result of radical changes

in observations, so they did not match up with existing theory. For example, it became clear that the epicycle loop de loops would no longer adequately describe the motion of the planets around the earth.

Therefore, all the planets including earth must revolve around the sun. My psychiatrist said I suffered from dissociative reactive syndrome which meant that I was not in touch with myself. That was funny, because I touched myself a lot, so to speak.

So there I was, talking with a professor that did not want me in his course, which of course upset me very much. I called the college psychiatrist for help, but he said they were only dealing with suicides.

Not four years later, I made a suicide attempt, putting my head in the oven without the pilot light being lit. I rationalized that this was not a real attempt because my roommate was coming home from work. But what if he didn't come? I soon landed up at a famous private mental hospital – it was recommended by my psychiatrist who sold me on it by saying a very famous musician had been there. The place was on a hill near Happyville Square in Happyville. At one point, we had three musical bands at the hospital, and I did the arrangements for one entitled Bobsie and the Happyville Squares for flute, cello, voice, violin, piano and not-so-great drums.

We made a four-track tape. I would give my eye teeth to get a copy of the tape, that is if I had any eye teeth left, but I think the tape was lost forever. A famous columnist for the Boston Globe newspaper wrote about us in a book about the hospital. As the columnist said, the only medications at the time were something called phenothiazines: thorazine and stelazine, which were euphemistically called “chemical restraints.” If you want to know what the hospital was like, you need not look any further than the Terry Gilliam film Twelve Monkeys, starring Brad Pitt as the overzealous patient. By making a big scene, he enabled the main character’s escape.

Ten years after that, after numerous stays at state mental health clinics, one admitting doctor told me I wouldn’t be getting any valium. I didn't know what valium was at the time. Another admitting doctor asked, do you know what is stamped on the front page of your record from the private hospital (the record was six inches thick)? “No,” I replied. “It says chronic alcoholic.” I was mortified.

So after the state hospital, I was waiting in line outside in the freezing rain to get a bed at the Pine Street shelter in Boston’s Chinatown. Supper was chunks of hot dogs in pea soup. There were very very crazy people there. One drunk pointed at me and said to his friend “He doesn't even drink.” I started attending recovery meetings.

But the way I got out of the shelter was not through the meetings, but by the labor pool. I packed vegetables in packing plants at the Chelsea produce market. I stood up on several crates and hand-picked icy spinach onto the conveyor belt. The machine noise was relentless. I also worked in a squash packing plant as a “line man” two-wheeling rinds of squash.

The people at the squash place were very nice to me, and one man gave me a winter coat. I got drunk with a couple of younger men and got into an argument with one. He picked me up over his head and threatened to drop me. Very scary stuff. Somehow I thought that packing vegetables was not the meaning of life.

At the end of each work day I was paid thirteen dollars cash which I took up Beacon Hill and paid for a night at the Beacon Chambers Hotel. This left me six dollars to buy a sub sandwich and a pack of smokes. Once when I was going to the hotel I tried to buy some marihuana. I was mugged and they stole my cash. Off the ruffians ran laughing at me and waving my empty wallet. The hotel was nice enough to advance me one night’s lodging.

The maids there changed my linen, which impressed me. I had stayed on cots in the shelter. In the shelter, one friend – much older than me – had a heart episode. I went with him to the hospital. When I went to bed that night, the aide on duty gave me an extra pillow, which was a sign of thanks.

When I didn’t go to the labor pool, we went over to Haley House in the South End where we could have free coffee served by the brothers and nuns, and engage in conversation all morning. We could also shave there and they had muffins.

In the recovery meetings I didn’t get it that it was for me as well. I just thought they let us drunks have free coffee and donuts and listen in as long as we didn’t bother anyone. It was four years until I got sober, and I haven’t had a drink or a street drug now for thirty years!

One woman said her bottom was falling out of her husband’s limousine and being laughed at by her husband’s business partners. My bottom was the peep shows. Another man’s bottom he said was staying at the YMCA. Staying at the YMCA was a step up for me.

Now as I sit eating my bagel and drinking black coffee on the second floor of a cafeteria overlooking historic Trinity Church the muzak is playing “One More Day, Just One More Day.” I have just gone to CVS to buy denture tablets, envelopes and ball point pens, using a ten-dollar gift card that my house gave me for Christmas.

I live in a sedate if drafty old rest home in Boston's Back Bay. It is three short blocks from the shopping area where I am sitting. At home I have a gazillion cable TV stations, my Netflix movies and streaming movies, high speed Internet and my unlimited long distance phone service.

Back in the seventies, I lived in various rooming houses. I moved so frequently that it was difficult for me to get my Social Security disability checks. They were always being sent to a previous address. I would eat in cafeterias that I couldn’t afford and ended up either being booted out of my room or they would lock the door so I couldn’t get in. The ladies at the front desk were friendly, but one man was a real grouch and when the house burned to the ground he said “You can't come back.” I had recurring nightmares about that, and about being thrown out of Harvard.

One day I went to the local liquor store. I picked out a two-dollar-and-ten-cents bottle of wine and asked the man behind the counter “Is this a good wine?” He looked at me like I had three heads.

I was walking up Beacon Hill when a short man in the regulation Jack Klugman raincoat hailed me: “How are you doing, Peter?”

Well, I replied, my rooming house just burned down, I have been diagnosed with cancer, I am flat broke. Otherwise everything is fine.

“Well,” he replied, “I have had enough trouble with booze and I am going to a meeting, do you want to come along?” Well, I didn’t see what that had to do with anything, but it had been a long while since anybody had asked me to go anywhere so I said sure.

Then after a couple of years I met Little Steve, who was five feet tall. He and I made coffee and set up chairs for recovery meetings. We were inseparable, and he asked me to move in with him. The phone was always ringing with people wanting to know where he was, and most of the time I didn’t know. We had cable TV and I borrowed a small Commodore 64 computer which I started programming immediately. I wrote a program to play a tune, and I wrote a drunkard’s walk.

A couple of years later when the IBM PC came out, I programmed the Citgo sign for the small screen. I started writing databases from the ground up. I wrote software to give directions on the Boston transit which I posted on my Web site. I wrote artificial intelligence software to simulate a conversation.

My mentor joked “We don't want artificial intelligence, we want real intelligence.” As I got each generation of computer, arriving via FedEx, I would prop my legs up on the box and savor the moment. Surely those moments now held the meaning of life.

One day I was going up Palmer Street in Harvard Square. An old friend of mine called up to me “Peter you’ve got to see this. You pay five dollars, and you can get up on stage and sing two songs.” I was hooked on the open mikes from that day on. Occasionally I get to do a half-hour feature at one.

I neglected to say that I play the piano. I studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, and in my twenties I played many times on WBUR-FM radio.

My friend John and I demonstrated the artificial intelligence conversation software at a storefront open mike in Natick. We had a microphone hooked up to a computer which was hooked up to a speaker. Unfortunately, the program was so enamored with itself that I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I remember my friend saying after a particularly long introduction to a song involving pages of information about the labor unions “Just play the fu**ing song.”

The same funny guy had a great shepherd collie that loved to play fetch. You would throw the ball, and the collie would bring it back, then you would say “Give me the ball, give me the ball” and he would play tug of war with you and the ball. But as soon as you said “drop it” he would dutifully deposit the ball at your feet, all ready to be thrown once again.

Unfortunately, dogs were eventually banned from the performance space. The space moved into the refurbished Natick firehouse but everyone agreed that the golden age of the Natick open mike was over. After a couple of years, it spun off into a concert space in the neighboring town Framingham, at the firehouse there.

No longer a computer programmer, I use Go Daddy to design my Web site, Google to do my Internet searching, Netflix and my new digital video recorder to watch movies. I have made music CDs. I call the open mikes “recovery without the alcohol.”

Last Sunday I played piano during church, which was broadcast on FM and the Internet. Although there weren’t many people there – it was just after Christmas and there was a big snowstorm brewing – my playing went over big. This Thursday I am playing a half-hour set at the Amazing Things Arts Center in Framingham. But not to sound too much like an advertisement, I should return to my story.

I used to “collect” pianos, asking to play them, from the bandstand at Niagara Falls to a piano in Exeter MA to an upright piano in Rockport and pianos in San Francisco – including one at a smooth bar called the Candy Store where slinking skinny women played pool as I played piano, with a portly matron at my side giving me encouragement.

At the Committee Theater we took acting and improvisation workshops. When I was sixteen I spent a summer at the Arundel Opera Theater, an old-style summer stock theater where we put on a new show every week. Sometimes I would be playing piano in the pit, and sometimes I would be an extra on stage. I got so tired that when I was playing rehearsals I used to see people in the wooden floor.

Many years later, riding in the back of Bob’s pickup truck, a bunch of us from our recovery group would go off to speaking engagements. Sometimes the South Shore, sometimes the North Shore. I remember once in the North Shore we were speaking in a church with a fancy pulpit.

Tom ascended to speak and started off: “F**k God. F**k God.” Needless to say that didn’t go over very well with the locals. This reminds me of the time I was working day labor at the Jello plant only to discover it was a union shop. We barely made it out of there alive. The man driving us bought us ice cream cones from Friendly’s as a consolation prize.

When I was growing up we had a cocker spaniel named Misty, who was very high-strung. She was black with tan eyebrows and paws. She would have been the pride of the litter, except she had buck teeth. She learned how to shake hands, roll over, sit, and lie down, in that order. So any time she wanted a table scrap she would go into her routine.

Misty was deathly afraid of thunder and lightning, as were my mother and I. During a thunderstorm, she (Misty) would hide under the bed. But towards the end of her life she became deaf and didn’t mind the thunder. Eventually she also went blind, and it was decided to put her down.

We lived in a sedate split-level development in a house built just for us. Out back were pine tree woods.

We built a deck, with a tree through the middle. Squirrels would dart up and down the tree, much to the chagrin of Misty who could never catch them. As if adding injury to insult, they would drop chestnuts down on her head. Mowing the lawn and raking leaves were endless tasks. My dad built a tree house for my sister using bark he got from a local saw mill.

We had a boat. It was a double-ended wooden sloop that we called “Tip Two” after another of our dogs “Tippy.” It was not made of plastic like the boats we called “Clorox bottles.” It was thirty-three feet long and drew six feet below the water line. It slept four somewhat comfortably and used to be a fishing boat. It was once owned by the governor of Maine.

Launch privileges were always extended to us, except by the snobs in Nantucket. In Maine we anchored at sunset in a beautiful little harbor called Pulpit Rock. We put into Cape Porpoise in a thunderstorm. The lightning struck the clock tower – exactly as in the film Back to the Future. We were rowing ashore at the time. It was the loudest sound I ever heard.

Every year we had the boat out of water and we had to scrape it free of barnacles, paint the hull, and fiberglass the deck. This took up most of our weekends and it was finally decided to sell the boat “for the children's sake.” But I didn’t mind. We would walk up to this great restaurant called the Blue Roof to get fried clams. It had a drive-in window and served beer.

An overnight sail was to Rockport, which is a harbor out of a post card. The Motif #1 is the most painted structure in New England. Except for our boat, that is. Sometimes we would drive around the shore route, where there were numerous mansions that had seen the ravages of fire in years gone by.

In downtown Gloucester there was this great statue – all green bronze now – “Down to the Sea in Ships.” Also downtown once a year was the fishing fleet festival with carnival rides, cotton candy, and festive lights. I remember one year I went, but I got very ill and had to go back to the boat before I threw up.

Where we tied our boat, a marina standing on wooden pylons, the fishing trawlers would come in for the winter, ship out in the Spring. I remember looking straight up to the fishermen who seemed impossibly tall to me.

Now I’m listening to Bob Dylan singing “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall” with glorious remastered sound.

But it is now past my bedtime and tomorrow is another day. Did Bob Dylan know the meaning of life?

In Maine, out of sight of land, a school of porpoises followed our sailboat’s wake – considered to be a sign of very good luck indeed.