I Never Had A Single Beer In My Life
My old friend Dan Levitin is an author. He totally lucked out with his first book, This Is Your Brain On Music. It was meant to be an academic tome but turned into an international #1 best-seller that has sold more than a million copies. Now he gets 6 figure advances for his books and he’s written 5. He’s just finishing his sixth and he included a paragraph about about a run-in I once had with prostate cancer in it. We happen to be separated by several time zones this week so he woke me at 2 am to ask me if he should use a pseudonym to respect my privacy (Jake) or call me by my actual name. As Roland always complains, there’s no privacy in my life so I’ll be Howie when it’s published.
But Dan and I remembered some of the details— this happened two decades ago— differently. My memories are more foggy than sharp— more like a Claude Monet painting than an Alyssa Monks painting— and he said he had contemporaneous notes. The doctor who treated me, Timothy Brantley, included me in The Cure, a book he wrote a few years after I was cleared, and I suggested Dan take a look at it. He found it in a second (photo up top) and presumably used it as a source, although even Brantley had an error. He mentioned that I “had hardly ever drunk beer.” Actually, I never had a single beer in my life. I hated the smell of it on my parents’ breath and avoided it and skipped right to heroin when I was just a kid. Dr. Brantley thought the hard drugs contributed to the onset of cancer.
Anyway, this was another example of the problem any mémorialiste has in trying to keep the memories more factual and less impressionalist. Dan— a professor of cognitive psychology and neuroscience— needs to be factual. As you may have noticed, in this little adventure, I’m fine with impressionism. Dan’s memories of this and my own (and Dr. Brantley’s) aren’t that far apart anyway. Nothing like mine and Martha’s. I recent sent her a photo of us at a marriage celebration in Morocco. She certainly remembered the images of us, but not the celebration or even that it was taken (in 1969) in Morocco. Just so you don’t get the wrong impression, Martha is a brilliant herpetologist at Columbia University and discoverer of a new species of clawed frog (Xenopus) on the Itombwe Massif in the Congo.
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