Magic Joe and other shrinks in Chelsea

By Mary Reinholz

A few days before Christmas, my well-heeled internist suffered something of a mini-meltdown when I, your basic struggling writer with anger issues, requested through his receptionist that he please take $5 off the $15 co-pay on my medical insurance and return it to the previous $10 level. It didn’t seem like a big deal, but the great man was so disturbed by my modest proposal that he came barreling into the waiting room and said in an overwrought tone: “No can do.”

Why? Because, he said, his costs were “going up.” He seemed horrified—as if I had asked him to demolish the front porch on his house in the Hamptons. When I reminded him that he didn’t have time to see me for an emergency visit the day before Thanksgiving, forcing me to see a specialist whose co-pay was $25, he shouted, “I cannot be available 24 hours a day!”

Well, I always knew he wasn’t Santa Claus. In fairness though, perhaps I don’t deserve the services of this hard-working but manifestly crazy doc who once wanted to be a psychiatrist and gets very little money for treating patients from managed care. But I’m spoiled. Over the years, I have been lucky enough to know several dear and glorious physicians, including high-priced shrinks, who have waived co-pays when I’ve been down and out after job losses, and others who took me on credit when I was uninsured like millions of other Americans.

Which brings me to a counter culture psychiatrist I shall call Magic Joe, an energetic blue-eyed bachelor with a talent for one-liners who, when I told him I was nervous because I didn’t have any money, replied: “You don’t have any money because you’re nervous.” He has a beatific smile that first reminded me of Harpo Marx’s. We met in the early 1970s, when I was a recent California transplant living at the bohemian Hotel Chelsea and was broke from writing blocks while on freelance assignments.

At the time, Joe was the unofficial house shrink for the hotel, helping various avant-garde artists deal with their private demons, including several of Andy Warhol’s so-called superstars, the beatnik poet Gregory Corso and experimental filmmaker Harry Smith. One of these creative geniuses gave me Joe’s name and address on the Upper East Side, observing that he was like a Woody Allen character, “overextended” and so absentminded that some of his more brazen patients would steal his prescription pads under his nose to get drugs, and another had ripped off his bottle of opiates, treating an entire floor at the hotel to a 24-hour party.

Joe was certainly burdened with a big case load and was hard to reach on the telephone, but he was exceedingly generous—maybe to a fault. Not only did he forgo immediate payment for his counsel until I got on my feet (”I have a weakness for waifs,” he said), but he also lent me money over the years. I will never forget his speeding downtown to pass me a wad of greenbacks at an intersection when I didn’t have enough chump change to buy food after a swinish-type editor gave me the boot at a community paper on the same day I had two front-page stories. (Joe recommended suing the SOB.)

He offered the same kind of support for other patients, acting as a patron of the arts and a friend. We would sometimes meet for “sessions” in a coffee shop on Madison Avenue or talk while he drove his van with the Vermont plates to visit a patient in the West Village. I tagged along with him as kind of Girl Friday for an irascible Frenchman named Jacques, a disabled member of an illustrious banking family who was afflicted with a heroin addiction and working on a screenplay based on William Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novel “Junkie” at his room at the Hotel Chelsea.

The two men gabbled in French, and I understood some of it, having been a French major for two terms in college and long an admirer of both Céline and Simone De Beauvoir, whom Jacques, now deceased, pronounced as a “much better writer” than Jean Paul Sartre, her companion. Joe once gave me a paperback copy of De Beauvoir’s classic feminist manifesto, “The Second Sex,” perhaps remembering that I had landed a regular gig with the Daily News magazine writing a column called “The Liberated Woman” on alternating Sundays with another freelancer. The assignment lasted four years.

Just for the record, Magic Joe helped me get that job when my head felt like it was going to explode before a try-out that pitted me against eight other applicants. We were all asked to submit three sample columns focusing on issues arising from second-wave feminism, and at one point in wrestling with the material, I had Freudian-type fantasies of a cop clobbering me with a billy club.

“I’m just guessing,” said Joe as we sat in his office, which he shared with a Cuban psychologist, “but maybe you think you’re going to be punished.” When I told him I was confused about how to write a column covering feminist psychologist and author Phyllis Chesler, who had just came out with a provocative book called “Women and Madness,” he said, “Why don’t just write about it as a reporter covering a debate: Show one side and then the other, and take yourself out of it? Try not to get into the ideology or the crimes of history.” His cool and precise comments helped ease the pressure in my head, and clarity emerged. He prescribed tranquilizers a month or so later but eventually said I didn’t need them.

While Joe was something of a mystic who also believed in the theories of Wilhelm Reich, his recommendations for my “treatment” were largely pragmatic, as he flipped through his Rolodex and ran book and magazine ideas by me. One day, he gave me the telephone number of the renowned photojournalist Bob Adelman, who had been his classmate at Stuyvesant High School for gifted students. Joe described him as “sinfully successful” and loaded with contacts that might be helpful to my career.

Adelman, who then worked at a studio on 19th Street and Fifth Avenue, had covered the early Civil Rights struggle, the focus of his most recent picture book, “Mine Eyes Have Seen,” but at that time he was about to publish an investigative tome about a year in the life of a dapper pimp, “Gentleman of Leisure,” which made him a fortune. He referred me to several editors, provided excellent advice and has been a friend since 1972.

Joe also introduced me to Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg and the aforementioned Willliam Burroughs when the latter was teaching a writing class at Hunter. So, I learned early on that he was an important resource for writers and was himself a rare bird among the therapists I had checked out while shrink-shopping in my Chelsea days, a dangerous pursuit because of the mind games some therapists play. The burning question often emerged: Who is the true nut job in the psychodrama?

While I was disappointed by Joe steadfastly resisting my rather aggressive advances and numerous marriage proposals, he was an antidote to several outrageously sexist male shrinks I had seen a couple of times before him. One was a bald psychologist named Wally who had a practice on West 23rd Street and told me I might “feel better” if I sat on his lap. Another neighborhood therapist, whose name I mercifully have forgotten, turned out to be a self-serving advocate of the so-called “love cure” of the era, claiming that he had “saved a patient’s life” by having sex with her. When he said I was actually a “little chubby” for his taste, I suspected he was engaging in an ugly seduction ploy with reverse psychology and swiftly exited his snake pit. It never occurred to me in those days to complain.

These days, I suspect that shrinks are a lot more circumspect because colleagues have been slapped with sexual-harassment lawsuits and criminal charges. And many don’t even accept patients in managed care. One female therapist, said to be a specialist on writing blocks, sneered when I identified my insurance, and I found myself shouting, “Power to the people!” and later ranting about the need for free universal health care in a health club Jacuzzi on West 13th Street. Other therapists I encountered were on serious power trips and even more egocentric that my tightly wound internist, who sometimes reminds me of the royal Brit played by Peter O’Toole in “The Ruling Class,” a fellow who thinks himself Jesus Christ and then shifts to the role of Jack The Ripper.

Joe could blow up like him while under pressure but is basically a soothing presence—chicken soup for the tormented soul. He once told me he considered himself not much different than a bartender who listens to people’s stories and offers an insight or two. I remember his mentioning that he originally wanted to be a nuclear physicist but had been influenced by the beatnik literary movement, in particular Ginsberg’s slim volume “Howl,” in which the now departed bard wrote: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”

It’s plain to me now that Magic Joe was driven by an ideal and not just the prospect of big bucks when he got into a profession consisting largely of smoke and mirrors. He is now in his 70s and is still hyperactive, traveling to Bejing on mysterious errands and working part-time in an Upstate hospital emergency room. He believes people are sane if they can tell the difference between true and false. I can do that on good days. And I can also embrace a notion that more rational folk might dismiss as sheer lunacy: Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and there are also angels in America.