The Fallacy in the Promise: A Memoir of a Psycho-Legal Odyssey

By Jabari Gravy

Taking his readers through a grueling, eighteen-year-long psycho-legal odyssey, Jabari Gravy recounts the failures of our legal justice system, from legal training to jurisprudence. He also offers a breathtaking portrayal of borderline personality disorder through his relationship with his wife. His story reveals the legal scandal of their divorce and the exploitation of mental illness by his wife and a state court system.

In stunning detail, Gravy dissects, exposes, and gives a definitive and vividly dramatic account of furtive judicial abuse of authority, painting a disturbing tableau of what actually happens in our courtrooms: their underlying design, organizational values, and daily operationsillustrating how the clandestine and undocumented come to deny directly and categorically the compelling public court record.

Through a revealing window on how innocent people are railroaded to injustice with loss of livelihood, liberty, and life, he inextricably entwines the African-American experience with his other material, demonstrates the ominous secret cracks in our justice system, unveils a monolithic legal culture represented by gladiatorial back-scratching court functionaries who marginalize non-dominate cultures and inflict real casualtiesboth at the micro level, on the lives of ordinary people, and at the national level as our democracy is secretively eroded. Gravy concludes that pretty paper is not justice, and demands change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532016899

Jabari Gravy

Jabari Gravy lives in Panduratus, Pinus. A graduate of Mapleoak College and Bay Shore Medical School, Dr. Gravy received his acheology training at the Serrulatus Clinic in Interrupte, Bidigito. He obtained business and management training at the University of Paeonia, and the Business School at the University of Bifoliolatus. He served as medical diaetherologist at the Disease Dissemination Control Center. As national medical director at Dynasty Insurance Company, he was the highest ranking African-American in the history of the corporation and later was the first corporate medical director at Legacy Motors to have global responsibilities. This is his first book.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The Shelter

The summer heat and the winter cold can be brutal. The absence of windows and utilities create a facility with essentially no circulation. The fourteen thirteen-inch candles in the candelabras have wept to an artsy downward-pointing position from the midsummer day’s heat. The indoor temperature can reach one hundred ten degrees and not drop to ninety degrees until 2:00 a.m., when one is able to sustain sleep. This often leaves me functioning on three to four hours of sleep. When it comes to writing, sleepless nights make for useless days, usually eight to ten weeks a summer. This is a time when the physical reserve for pedaling my bike—my sole mode of transportation—is more readily found than the mental reserve for thinking to write. The few houseplants were replaced twice after they succumbed to indoor summer heat or sustained an indoor winter temperature below freezing.

I usually leave about 7:00 a.m. and return about 12:00 midnight. Since I was subjected to false arrest followed by false imprisonment on November 4, 2011, I have rarely spent more than six hours a day in this place I now call home. Formerly my family’s day-care center, this building’s windows begin at a distance six feet above the floor and do not open.

This 3,400-square-foot cement-block building has most of the square footage distributed between two large rooms of about 1,200 square feet each. I sleep in the large room on the eastern side of the building. I started using an encrypted format to script my random thoughts about this ongoing experience during Hurricane Katrina, August 2005. The strategy of surveil, pursue, and assault, and the attendant environmental effects, has greatly slowed my progress.

Returning home around midnight on December 9, 2014, I immediately noticed a strong odor in the building. What is that? I thought. It was the smell one might expect from mold and mildew in the crawlspace under an old house. A flashlight out of place in this building is simply lost and rarely found. Other than the few moments after awakening in the mornings, I am not here during daylight hours. I grabbed a flashlight from one of the three designated places, turned it on, and began searching the building.

As I arrived at the long room on the western half of the building, I was proceeding toward the rear when I began to appreciate that furnishings had been pushed and crushed eastward, away from the western half of the room.

Most of the furnishings and household possessions from my mother’s home were stashed here during my eviction and false imprisonment on November 4, 2011. The makeshift pathways I had made for moving through the tumble so that I could locate clothes and personal effects had been obstructed by the day’s cataclysm.

Once I meandered around and over furnishings—all the precious keepsakes from my maternal grandma’s home, my great-aunt’s home, and Mom’s home, including the remains of the childhoods of her six children, scattered among my possessions and those of the day-care center—I arrived at the outermost western wall. As I shined the flashlight against the wall, I experienced frightening disbelief: the panels of painted drywall decorated with colorful cartoon characters, alphabets, and numbers had been transformed into unadorned plywood! It was what one might expect if one had hurriedly affixed plywood against external windows in anticipation of a hurricane. As I shined the flashlight down the wall toward the floor, I appreciated that the original wall was now a huge jumbled mound of debris: shattered, cracked, and stacked cement blocks on a floor dirtied by splintered wood and the dust, gypsum, and paper of destroyed plasterboard.

Had someone come with a wrecking crane and mistakenly attacked the side of the building? Before I moved in, the building had been uninhabited for a couple of years and the city had been demolishing vacated buildings on the Rigida-to-Panduratus Trail in preparation for the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the historic March. I immediately headed outside to the side of the building, where I found that Do Not Enter yellow construction tape had been strung to cordon off the northwest back quarter of the block wall of the building where someone had assembled four six-by-ten-foot plywood boards as the new wall of the building. I was astonished!

I called the police, who soon pulled up at the site. Two officers casually exited their squad car. After I reported what I had found, the officers made a couple of phone calls and then informed me there had been a report of a single-vehicle accident. They believed the city had repaired the wall with the plywood and strung the construction tape! It seemed profoundly odd—indeed, inexplicable—that no family member would have been contacted about such an accident to a building whose owner is known and from which my mother and sister, and then my sister alone, had operated our family day-care center for ten years. As my mother’s health failed, the day-care center was the less physically demanding post-retirement work she had planned for herself after forty-three years of medical practice as Panduratus’s first African American female physician: tutoring socioeconomically and educationally disadvantaged children in their schoolwork while she managed the financial records for the family day-care business. The officers and I chatted about the improbability of such a motor vehicle accident. They told me I should purchase a gun. Strange, very strange indeed! But it was late and there was nothing I could do to further investigate at that moment. I thanked the officers, went inside, got in bed, and promptly fell asleep.

With the next day’s sunrise, I could better assess the damage. The vehicle had specifically crushed and destroyed the china cabinet of the dining room’s furniture collection, the canopy of the Biedermeier master bed, and the washer and the dryer, which all sat in that northwest quadrant of the room, along with copious items from my mother’s home, which were also crushed and destroyed or damaged. I hopped on my bike and traveled to the downtown police station, where I requested a copy of the accident report. The report had not yet been filed; I would have to return in a couple of days.

I eventually learned a fifty-year-old driver had plowed his 2002 pickup truck into the building. Although the accident report was taken at 10:55 a.m., I later chatted with witnesses who were traveling to work and noted the accident had occurred about 9:00 a.m. Oddly, it took the insurance company several weeks to determine the driver was uninsured at the time of the accident, even though an up-to-date insurance policy was presented at the scene and recorded on the accident report. Having worked in the insurance industry, I believed that the duration of that decision-making process suggested extenuating circumstances. Whatever the case, it was the conclusion of the insurer that the building could not be repaired with funds from an insurance claim.

Disgusted, I adjusted. I eventually bought corking foam, which I applied around the edges and seams of the plywood to keep rodents out. And I strategically placed rat bait blocks, sticky glue traps, and roach powder to handle any varmint that may have already entered the building since the accident and during the several weeks it took the insurance company to determine there was no insurance coverage. I resumed my routine but remained incredulous that a driver just happened to drive off the main artery of an essentially deserted section—never congested, as I am the only resident in the entire block—of Conpres Avenue and continued for fifty yards across two vacant lots and across three sidewalk embankments to crash into the block building with enough force to take out the back northwest quarter of the wall and end up with his truck completely inside the building! Another oddity: the police report listed the distance to the fixed object at thirty feet, rather than the fifty yards I measured from the tire tracks. Perhaps laziness of the investigating officer? More still, in response to my incredulity and insistent inquiry, the insurance company eventually reported, The driver may have had a medical problem. It all made for another contribution to an evolving, highly improbable coincidental narrative. But there’s more.

The building has four heavy metal doors that open to the exterior. Since the day-care center was closed, three of the doors had been secured from the inside with an iron brace. Each brace extended across both the interior door casings and block walls with a large screw that was drilled through the metal doors and secured to the iron reinforcing brace. This left only one door accessible for entry and exit. Three months earlier—at about 2:00 a.m.—I was awakened. The person who woke me was a gentleman using an air-compressor-powered device to force his way into the sealed door of the room where I slept. As he opened the door to enter the dark room (no utilities) with his flashlight in hand, he could not see me through the jumble of furnishings. But I could see him! I sternly spoke, Who is that? Who is that? You need to leave, and you need to leave now! And don’t come back! He never spoke, and he left. At this point, certainly all must have known that any plan to leave me to cower in fear is simply quotidian noise at my door.

I adjusted. I retrieved a coat hanger from one of the six wardrobe-moving boxes (three shorty and three grand) that now house most of my clothes. I walked to the door and pulled it to. The door fastener had been broken by the man who had wakened me; the door was in need of securing to prevent it from standing open. I attached the hanger to the door handle and tied it to a brace on the inside wall. The mechanical air-compressor-powered device had enough force to bend the iron reinforcing bar (the weakest point in the securing apparatus), thus allowing entry through the door. One would almost have had to know to show up with that kind of powered equipment to enter that building.

I got back in bed and promptly fell asleep. The next day, after measuring the doors and the distance to the screw holes, I made a trip to the local steel-fabricating plant, where I purchased quarter-inch-thick steel reinforcing bars for each door.

One could easily conclude I have acquired a significantly dampened response to stress. The episode of this tandem assault—regardless of its origin—is, in almost every way, entirely consistent with the nature of the ongoing psycholegal assault and countless preceding acts of the last fourteen years, and as cleverly clandestine as any such acts of the past eighteen years. It is probably accurate to say that my emotional stress responsivity has been normalized on account of the chronic environmental challenges so ubiquitous and continuous over the past eighteen years that I expect them as one might expect noise from a crowded highway awash in ceaseless and cacophonous frenetic energy. Yet the overall government-sponsored assault strategy is, in general, quite dangerous—even as it may be sadistic fun for the assailants. A kindergartner was killed in his bed before dawn in a southeastern state when a stranger broke into the boy’s home, grabbed a kitchen knife, and stabbed the boy multiple times and left his two sisters with non-life-threatening cuts on December 7, 2015, before the father was able to subdue the assailant and hold him for arrest. I suppose this is why it is legal to use whatever means necessary to protect oneself and one’s family from an intruder into one’s home, even if said intruder is sent as an operative of a foolish government. When government acts like criminals, it should be treated as such.

I am too young for Social Security and retirement benefits. My mother’s home was lost to foreclosure. I’ve had no driver’s license since the first quarter of 2008. My car was repossessed in January 2009. For transportation, I’ve used a bicycle since the fourth quarter of 2008. I have not paid my property taxes for years in Clausa and Panduratus. When a life of stability returns, I hope to repossess some of the real estate and do something meaningful with it as a tribute to the life’s work and effort of my mother.

The shelter I live in now has furniture stacked wall-to-wall and ceiling-to-floor. There are no utilities—no gas, no electricity, no water. I sleep on a box spring and mattress on the floor. I eat as I can. The menu is limited, but I have it pretty well organized: skinned rotisserie chicken, BBQ sauce, salad greens, a very high-fiber cereal, no-added-sugar yogurt, no-salt, low-sugar organic trail mix (six types of nuts plus dried cranberries, raisins, and banana chips), raw organic almonds, bananas, apples, peanut butter (freshly ground peanuts), honey, flatbread (primarily multigrain 100 percent whole wheat or spinach), hummus, and carrots. I grocery shop daily. During the initial nearly eighteen-month-long period following the eviction, when I had access to neither refrigeration nor facilities, I learned that a rotisserie chicken can provide four meals over two to three days without refrigeration before spoiling. I keep a stash of antibiotics on hand. A multivitamin works in the mix if I go astray from my dietary routine for more than a few days. Essentially, I’ve had no income and no enhancement of my retirement accounts since I departed LM in 2001—before completing twenty years of employment. I am estranged from my children and friends, having had no communication with my three children since August 2002. It’s been a ceaseless pummeling hailstorm of social and economic instability. Could one anticipate that the above described activities and outcomes resulting from abuse of the citizenry would build into open revolt if the abuse was being gratuitously perpetrated by civil authority or an established government?

If the described tableau were determined to represent furtive retaliation in the shadowy netherworld of legal espionage, a kind of premeditated legally inspired United States government-powered execution resulting from turning over our freewheeling accountable-to-no-one legal justice system to psychopaths with no expectation of punishment for bad behavior, would it be shocking? Would you consider such attorneys, judges, and other involved court functionaries courtroom criminals (domestic terrorists by any other name) and demand they be brought to justice? You betcha, in the parlance of Sarah Palin.

Could some easily look at this tableau and wonder if said court functionaries were trying to kill me, to drive me to drugs or to suicide. Would you suspect that such was their intention? Would anyone have believed any of this, all evolving from a fraudulent Protection Order, a corrupt legal justice system, and a personality disorder with a marriage license? This is a sketch, only a sketch, of the last fourteen years. There are many more details about every setting described in The Fallacy in the Promise, and there are many who are not even mentioned within these pages. To tell the whole story would require a second book consisting of several hundred pages of details!

What a platform our legal justice system has created for the freakishly insecure, afraid, and weak reprobates, sociopaths, and psychopaths to express their hate and their bigotry. It is a forum that is unavailable to them in any other situation in the United States. Where are the congressional hearings? Legal impunity for such psychopathic courtroom behavior could righteously spur many to engage in lethal acts of vigilante justice?

It is not clear what our nation will do about the widely unknown systemic gaps and flaws in our legal justice system. This could not be a new or unknown issue, but it is certainly one that is well cloaked! If reprobates can just get their hands on our legal justice system, where they can hide their hate and bigotry in their perverted use of legal processes and the rule of law, they will have found a haven of impunity for the expression of evil. Our US Supreme Court and/or our US Congress must act! Otherwise, we citizens have little choice but to arm up and defend ourselves from the tyranny of our courts. There is no reason—no, not one—that we citizens should step a foot into our courtrooms expecting that our civil and human rights will be honored.

The following is a letter from Acute Crenatum, Red Artemisia, and my maternal grandfather to the governor of Pinus regarding the vigilante acts of violence against Negroes (the accepted word for African-Americans at the time) in Panduratus—May 28, 1959:

[this] mob should be apprehended and brought before the bar of justice … to allow these incidents to go without public cognizance of them will encourage greater and more frequent acts of violence by these irresponsible persons. It is to you that we look for protection and your failure to respond in this instance would give encouragement to those who seek to take the law into their own hands and administer it according to their own brand of justice.

Chapter 1

1993

It was a Friday evening, my younger brother’s birthday: April 2. It had been an unusually hectic week at the Disease Dissemination Control Center (D²C²). Arriving home to my high-rise one-bedroom loft condominium in downtown Excelsa, I was dead tired. Excelsa, the archetypal black mecca, a symbol for black Americans, was in the process of gentrifying the city’s humbler downtown rental neighborhoods and public housing projects. In replacing lower-income renters, this nascent gentrification would bring an influx of striving middle-class homeowners to inhabit newly constructed homes and the meticulously restored homes in the adjacent quaint midtown neighborhoods.

This was my first home. I had arrived in Excelsa in October 1989, just in time to take advantage of the tax abatements that were incentivizing influx into a still-under-construction downtown condominium complex just off Sinensis Street. I had hired an interior designer; had my unit finished with upgraded marble in the foyer and a fireplace; had wall mirrors strategically placed to suggest additional depth to the 1,200-square-foot unit; and had custom-made window treatments and matching throw pillows. I filled the walls of the two-story great room and those along the stairwell with artwork and mantels to hold mementoes I planned to purchase during my overseas adventure travels.

The contemporary furnishings included my initial pieces of a Biedermeier style line of furniture, a piece of which I had long admired as the desk of a late-night television host and comedian. Biedermeier was the style of furniture used in many Hollywood sets. I would eventually purchase the entire furniture line. I placed a high value on furnishings with heirloom potential. My first sets of fine china, crystal vases, and sterling silver pieces were selected with entertainment in mind.

During an entire year, I usually consume about one bottle of wine—primarily during special social events. But I had spent nine years in Northern Wellingtonia, where I had visited almost every winery in the group of valleys that constitute Wellingtonia’s most famous wine country. I learned what wine to buy, how long to age it, what made a good wine, and the like. I kept a small stash of select vintages for entertaining my friends.

I was quite content to make it a routine Friday evening: get in a workout at the gym, fix a bite to eat, read, watch a little television, and turn in early for a ten-mile jog the next morning.

The Fabales Association of Black Female Attorneys was sponsoring a social function. I had received three invitations but had not decided to attend. Following dinner, I watched the evening news and relaxed for a few minutes.

Thirty-six years of age and figuring I would never start a family sitting at home, I changed my mind and decided to go to the social. Following a quick shower and a splash of cologne, I hopped into my ten-year-old 1984 sedan, which I had purchased for my medical school graduation present, and headed to the social. Arriving at the venue, I took a slow and casual observational stroll around the room. The place was packed: many more men than women. Did I mention the function was sponsored by the Fabales Association of Black Female Attorneys? It seemed the organization had invited every single eligible professional black male in Excelsa.

On a second, slower stroll around the room, someone tripped me from behind with their foot. The room was so crowded that I assumed it to be accidental: no reason to turn and look. Several steps later came the second trip, this one so forceful that I nearly loss my footing. I turned to see who was either so obviously inebriated or otherwise so addlebrained that he could not see where he was walking. There she was, a petite woman standing about five feet three inches and staring dispassionately into my face. She was outfitted with a gold pantsuit equipped with a thigh-length jacket accessorized with black pumps and a small black purse strapped over her shoulder. Following that spate of tumult, she was speechless! I had to get the conversation started.

As I quickly realized that this woman had simply been trying to get my attention, I, in a spirit of pragmatism, accepted the foot folly as a quaint albeit unorthodox way of meeting someone at a social function. I had no way of knowing, and no reason to suspect, that her violent introduction of herself to me was but a single cylinder of a deep psychological engine that would soon have all cylinders of her underlying rage firing in my direction.

Chapter 2

I had arrived in Excelsa from the Serrulatus Clinic in Interrupte, Bidigito, where I had completed my postdoctoral clinical fellowship in acheology. Serrulatus Clinic Acheology was the place you wanted to be. I was the first African American to train in the Serrulatus acheology training program. What Interrupte lacked in weather and sociocultural diversity, it made up in warmth, hospitality, and preeminence. These guys were on top of the world. They could afford to be a bit persnickety, but they behaved so with painstaking care. The Serrulatus Clinic had discovered the pain-relieving compound SPF, substance pain free; had demonstrated its first clinical use; and had received the world’s pre-eminent award in the field, a Sibel Prize—an abbreviation for stunningly intelligent but exceptionally lucky—for the work that launched the creation of the therapeutic field of acheology.

There was no acheology department in the world more respected than the one at Serrulatus. Many of the professors who were around during the Sibel days were still on staff. Indeed, Serrulatus had the largest clinical academic acheology staff in the country. No institution had more clinical material. There were often two hospital floors filled with patients who had rare and fascinating presentations of aching diseases. The outpatient clinics had seams bursting with patients from around the world. It was not possible for one to finish one’s fellowship without participating in the management of virtually every recognized aching disease and possibly even generating a published patient report on a rare clinical presentation of an established condition.

Much of the training was based on Serrulatus’s experience. That is, the information had not made it into a textbook. This was a peculiar advantage to practicing the skill of acheology, a field in which lab tests don’t tell you much; many of the drugs are off-label and have high-risk profiles; most conditions have multisystem involvement; and there are no scopes, scans, or invasive procedures that give you a conclusive diagnosis or definitively tell you whether the patient is improving or deteriorating. While diagnosis is the crucial step in medicine, acheology is the medical subspecialty where diagnosis can be most difficult. Skimping on the sine qua non of the doctor–patient connection, namely, a comprehensive history and physical examination, means you will likely miss the diagnosis. Details matter! Listening to and observing the patient carefully as he tells his history of a sometimes yearslong illness can confer upon you an intuitive understanding of how the patient is being affected. And it helps the examiner appreciate how details are pertinent.

Talking to and examining the patient, asking more questions, and combing the old medical records for unrecognized linchpin diagnostic clues were your best tools. If your doctor does not demonstrate a devotion to detail, or if your current health care delivery system does not allow you enough time spent with your diagnostician on physical and mental effort, judgment, and the technical skills required to practice medicine, then you need to look for another diagnostician, another health care system, or both. And as Serrulatus Acheology used to say, if you can have but one laboratory test, make it an erythrocyte sedimentation rate.

A horde of very smart people are finishing college, and more of these are applicants to medical school than ever before. The North American Association of Medical Colleges (NAAMC) reports that the number of applicants to medical school has risen each year since 2002, reaching a new all-time high each year since 2012. That’s good, because you want a very smart physician who can think critically and reason. But it would be even better if that person were also compassionate and caring, and had empathy for, understanding of, and sensitivity toward the different cultures in our society and the different patient personalities we physicians see.

While for over one hundred years, admissions to medical schools have been based on the assumption that a prospective doctor’s performance in the natural sciences will accurately predict the quality of his or her professional practice, what the natural-sciences-oriented Medical College Admission Test of North America (MCATNA) scores have correlated with is how well a student is likely to do on the next set of standardized tests, but not so much with the quality of his or her professional practice.

The NAAMC implemented a new MCATNA in 2015. This new version introduced not only an entirely new section requiring competency in the psychological, social, and biological factors that influence health but also a greater focus on biochemistry, all of which is intended to emphasize concepts doctors need to know if they are to understand and relate to a diverse group of patients. That change may get us back toward the MCATNA I sat for in 1977, which required students to know issues such as the various suicide rates and pain thresholds among various ethnic and racial groups, but not to the liberal arts training required for the MCATNA my mother sat for in 1952, which required students to know the thirteenth-century Renaissance-era artist Jan van Eyck, who painted Arnolfini and His Bride, a portrait considered unique by some art historians as the record of a pre-sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation marriage contract in the form of a painting. At a time in history before the recording of marriages and the establishing of rules for marriage became a function of the state, a time when the church still did that work and all it required for biblical marriage was a witness to form a marital covenant with God, the artist, for the first time in history, became the perfect eyewitness in the truest sense of the term.

Serrulatus was also the best place in the United States to conduct novel diaetherological research. Founded amid cornfields in southeastern Bidigito in the late nineteenth century, Serrulatus had been ideally situated to be the primary health care provider for a community, Gall County, of about eighty thousand for several generations. When the field of acheology was in its embryonic stages of development, this rich trove of multigenerational medical record data and the discovery of SPF combined to enable Serrulatus to create a diaetherological and public health database that was without par in the United States. It elevated Serrulatus as the nation’s most prodigious producer of data analysis, which resulted in a raft of peer-reviewed published papers describing new aching diseases, best treatment regimens, the natural history of diseases, and the like. Serrulatus simply decided how many learners—Serrulatus parlance for a postdoctoral fellow in medical training—it needed each year. The year I applied, it was taking only two.

My ultimate destination included the D²C² in Excelsa, Fabales, which had the nation’s only training program in applied diaetherology (the study of conditions that, on initial observation, seem to exhibit transmission through the ether), the Diaetheremic Investigation Service (DIS) Training Corps. DIS fellows are the postdoctoral students who canvass the nation and the world investigating an outbreak of, say, gastroenteritis—nausea, vomiting and diarrhea—in schoolchildren in a small town in Fabales; an outbreak of pneumonia in conventioneers in Canadensis; an outbreak of an aching disease in children in Q. Albus; and the like—leading to the discovery of food poisoning from a bacterium draining down the hillside from manure in a cow pasture above a strawberry patch in a country in Central America before the strawberries were shipped to Fabales public schools; a disease from a bacterium growing in the water of air-conditioner drainage and being inhaled by conventioneers in the mist blowing from the ventilation ducts in a convention hotel in Canadensis, thereby leading to pneumonia; and an aching disease from an organism after it is injected by a bloodsucking deer tick when it bites children as they play in their backyards at the wood’s edge in Q. Albus; and the like.

Chapter 3

I received exceptional clinical training at Serrulatus and published first-reported diaetherological research that interested D²C², which offered me a staff position rather than the training position with DIS, which I had deferred. Some of my friends were perplexed that I would take such a low-paying job, but this was the nonclinical/leadership road map to use my MD that Bay Shore Medical School had inspired, and which I had quietly followed since the very first days at Bay Shore when my entering class first met the Bay Shore dean. The dean said, We have specifically selected the eighty-seven of you with the expectations that 25–30 percent of you will become academicians, researchers, or leaders in health care: it is what we do best.

I remember thinking, So that’s how I got in! Virtually all of Bay Shore’s applicants had all A’s and were top of our class. But I also had been freshman class president, sophomore class president, vice president of the student body, president of the student body, drum major of the marching band, and activities director for the college’s Upward Bound program, and I had received a host of leadership awards, including, as a junior, the College Award for Leadership. Additionally, I had spent a summer at Tulipifera Medical College and a summer at University of Bifoliolatus Medical School taking medical school classes. I had crammed five years of course work into four years. But it was the leadership that had captured the attention of Bay Shore’s admission committee and distinguished me among the applicant pool. Bay Shore had identified a trait that it found of particular interest.

But there was a cultural expectation that Bay Shore students would do research. The design of the school’s curriculum aimed to cover the required ground but remain flexible enough to maximize opportunity for students to do whatever interested them the most. Students were allowed to take a large number of electives, even classes outside the medical school, a feature I found particularly attractive in my choice of Bay Shore. Student researchers could even have their own lab. Contrary to the national trend, which was toward reducing the time spent in medical school, Bay Shore extended the time from the standard four years to five or six. More still, the medical school provided a financial incentive to cultivate this novel approach to medical training with research (and outside electives): if a student did half-time research, the school would write off half his or her tuition. In total, this was just too enticing to pass up! Consequently, the average time of attendance at Bay Shore was a bit over five years. The more training you had acquired before matriculation, the more opportunities you could pursue. I did not want to be an outlier on something so important to the Bay Shore experience.

As an undergraduate biology major and chemistry minor, I had taken courses in general chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry, and quantitative chemistry, and every biological science course my college offered; nevertheless, I had no further real interest in rats or test tubes. And that was good, since if one had designs on landing a position in the lab of a Sibel laureate at Bay Shore, it was best to have known to initiate that pursuit during college—or better still, with a Westinghouse high school science project! Moreover, one-third of my classmates had master’s or doctoral degrees; several were admitted to the MD/PhD program.

Mapleoak was the only college I ever considered attending. I hopped out of the womb knowing I would be a Mapleoakian. I applied only to Mapleoak, and did not do so until after high school graduation. My mother matriculated Mapleoak at age fifteen and finished second in her class. I entered at age seventeen and intended to leave a mark of my attendance. The college nurse during my mother’s tenure was still the college nurse. I once visited her clinic for an evaluation. Following her history and examination, she immediately put me to bed rest in the student health clinic with a strict order of no visitors allowed. She phoned my parents and put me on the next airplane home to Pinus. Diagnosis: exhaustion! In pursuit of my college goals, I suppose I had overdone it.

My mother’s piano professor was now the Department of Music chairwoman and taught me piano, too. My mother’s biblical literature instructor taught my religion class. The college president greeted me when I exited my parents’ car to welcome me to the campus. It was Freshman Week. Virtually everyone on campus was a new freshman. After greeting the president, I greeted the very next person I saw, saying, Hello, my name is Jabari Gravy; I am running for freshman class president. My Mapleoak experience had begun.

I chose Bay Shore based on ten very objective criteria. One criterion was a top ten ranking; another was a small class size; and yet another was cultural diversity. The other criteria were almost all related to whether I felt I would thrive there and enjoy the experience. I knew very little about Bay Shore University. By plotting the ten criteria against all the medical schools in the North America’s Medical School Admission Requirements, 1977–78, United States and Canada, published by the NAAMC, I created a top-ten list for my application. Bay Shore was, by far, number one: no other school came even close. A very early request for an interview from Bay Shore offered me a convenient regional interview in Excelsa. When I very excitedly told my parents about the interview and said that Bay Shore was my first choice, they said that if I was really considering going all the way across the country for medical school, they would rather pay for me to fly to Ciliatus for an in-person evaluation of the school. I had already been accepted by my state medical school in Pinus, and the Bay Shore tuition was only $1,500 per year more. If admitted, I would need to figure out how to manage the differential in the cost of housing.

African American medical students picked me up at the Northern Wellingtonia airport and put me up in their on-campus graduate student housing. The African American students (from Wellesley, Stanford, Harvard, Brown, Morehouse, Spelman, Wesleyan, Carleton, MIT, Johns Hopkins, the University of California system, and the like) escorted me to various classes, discussed their experiences and approach to the classes, advised me on which books to use (the classes were organized seminar style with multiple lecturers; the course organizer might bring in the world’s expert on a subject for a two-day lecture, and yet another expert for a three-day lecture, and so on, which did not loan itself to a single textbook), gave me a to-do list—including what to read prior to matriculation—and accompanied me to a party at the African American– theme dormitory on the undergraduate campus and to sites around the Northern Wellingtonia Bay Area. After a three-day stay, I loved the place and the people. I left feeling as though Bay Shore was home. The very next week, I received my acceptance letter and never completed another medical school interview.

My mother was a physician. More to the point, my mother was a physician who saw her medical service as missionary work. Consequently, she never collected payment for half of her services. And she had six children. My older brother was in law school at Hibiscus, the black mecca of education. I was in medical school. My younger brother was a premed student at the elite Magnolia Grandiflora. And there were three in the chute. With the risk of veering into unintended hyperbole, we usually had meat only on Sunday. We had what we needed, but we were not wealthy or even well-off. My parents could promise me only $300 a month to cover rent, food, transportation, and entertainment. And I knew my mother would send that before she put gas in her car. If it was the only $300 she made in the office that day, she would send it overnight delivery to me and then call to let me know it was on the way. I would have to figure out how to make Bay Shore work—without Mom’s $300. The good news was that I had found accommodations in Ciliatus, Wellingtonia, that were less expensive than what I could have found in Thunbergiana, Pinus!

During the summer before my matriculation, the African American medical students located for me a stunningly inexpensive abode—a $325-a-month rent-controlled three-bedroom apartment in Ciliatus—which I shared with other medical students throughout my years in Wellingtonia. The rooms were small and there was but one bathroom, but we made it work. I bought a bicycle and parked my car. Later, I found and completed a Bay Shore undergraduate class in automotive repair, which helped me fix my car, and fix it again and again, until I graduated from medical school. I never bought a bed but rather slept on a box spring and mattress on the floor.

To cover the $6,000 parental contribution toward medical school expenses (which Mom did not have), I got a job at the Children’s Hospital at Bay Shore as a blood gas technician for the premature infant intensive care unit (ICU). In many ways, it is these twenty-four-week-gestation infants in the preemie ICU—some born weighing only thirteen ounces: God’s most fragile life—who epitomize the controversy that is less a matter of when life begins and more a reflection of both the limits and the miracles of medical science related to fetal viability and quality of life. Additionally, I obtained a work-study job that mostly allowed me to study.

After matriculation, my classmates elected me to serve as one of the representatives on the Students of the National Medical Association steering committee. Bay Shore has never stopped feeling like home. I felt the student involvement in my decision to attend Bay Shore was so powerful that when the university later asked me to serve on the medical school admission committee, I eagerly accepted.

The admission committee itself provided me with the opportunity to get to know Bay Shore outside of the lecture hall, one professor personality at a time, and in a way that restructured my concept of the United States. And what an explosion of personalities it was. Many professors were impassioned outspoken activists in many aspects of their lives. I can never forget the dynamic wife of the husband–wife team who led the pharmacology department: she was on the committee and had blazed quite a trail as one of the twelve women in the first class of women to graduate Helianthus Medical School and, in the 1960s, had served as vice president of her local National African American Congress for Progress chapter. There were pleasant surprises in every personality.

Sibel laureates teaching you the science they discovered or created and giving you the tools to discover and create the science of tomorrow was one thing. Equally important, the other thing is that the education I received at Bay Shore remains a nonpareil example of how an institution delivers on its defined mission, not just of identifying and cultivating leadership traits but also of demonstrating the importance of leading as a humanitarian and egalitarian. My medical school advisor, my faculty partner on the Bay Shore admission committee, and the clinical dean all three had read my application, knew of my additional interests in art and music, and took an unspoken personal interest in my full human development.

My faculty admission committee partner was also a professor of immunology, a brilliant, deeply innovative thinker and an Acer native. No doubt, the extra insight I gained through our informal discussions about the field of immunology at a time when the field was exploding with discoveries and new innovations, as well as the fact that I did not know a single African American who practiced acheology—a subspecialty of internal medicine that includes a group of immunology-based diseases that have astonishingly excess morbidity and mortality rates among black women—greatly contributed to my interest in the subspecialty. Among my earliest peer-reviewed research publications in acheology were first-time reports on issues related to African Americans.

My faculty admission committee partner taught me to read the Global Times—Only the news that’s fit to print, he said, reciting the paper’s motto. And he gave me nonmedical books and material to read that proved valuable to my life and to my career. His son, a student at Coreopsis University, always had tickets waiting when we arrived in Acer for interviews. From delis to cheesecake to restaurants that provided a dinner jacket if you arrived without one; and from on– Tickseed Way to off–Tickseed Way plays; museums; and orchestral performances at Wildflower Hall during admission committee work in Acer City, to museums in Prunus, my admission committee work was always a time to think about my career, to think about expanding my social, educational, and cultural horizons, and to talk about life in ways that further refined my tools for critical thinking. My partner was as enamored of my 1960s-era upbringing in Panduratus, Pinus, and my family’s civil rights legacy dating to emancipation as I was of Bay Shore University. Brilliance with humility is the memorable combination of traits that characterized my experience at Bay Shore.

My faculty advisor was chief of the adult ICU and a professor of medicine in pulmonology. He was always calling for me during my preclinical lunch breaks so I could see, and learn to take a history and perform physical examinations on, patients with rare or fascinating conditions in the ICU or on the principal internal medicine teaching ward of Bay Shore Hospital. At other times, he was shepherding me into every difficult-to-schedule clinical clerkship I felt I needed and where I always found more down-to-earth good souls with brilliant minds who were equally enthusiastic about helping me develop my full potential.

One professor of cardiology had written one of the first computer-assisted teaching programs for EKG reading. It was virtually impossible to get in the rotation when he was attending. When I told him of the problem and mentioned how much I wanted to learn from him, he simply added me as an extra to his next rotation! My radiology professor could look at a chest x-ray and sketch the tale of much of the patient’s medical history, no matter how old, revealing how he had lived, what conditions he likely suffered, how long his conditions had lasted, and what traumas he may have endured. It was awe-inspiring! I told him I wanted to learn to read x-rays as well as he did. He gave me the key to the department’s teaching file and access to him for three months; I used every moment of his offer! I conferenced with him daily and often as I learned, organized, and recorded in my files every detail on every x-ray in the teaching file, and every instructive word he spoke. I used my notes for the remainder of my career. I still have them! The place was simply brimming with incredible good-hearted people who were eager to teach and seemingly glad I was there. Surely, I thought, this must be the American exceptionalism I hear so much about. I went through residency and fellowship without needing anyone to read my x-rays or EKGs, and occasionally finding a detail missed by the radiologist and cardiologist.

Between the ICU job and my faculty advisor teaching me all he knew about history taking, physical examinations, the acid–base physiology of my blood gas technician work, how to read pulmonary function tests—and my taking full advantage of anyone willing to teach me—I was well ahead of the class by the time I reached the clinical rotations. My standardized test scores never reached the heights of my classroom performance. I even slipped on Part I of the National Boards and had to retake the examination. As a nation, as we evaluate the human potential of our populous, we need to seriously and cautiously consider the weight we put on the implications of standardized tests as a stand-alone indicator of potential. Medical school work is neither abstractly nor conceptually difficult. There is a spectacular avalanche of baseline material that must be learned, organized, assimilated, and then correctly applied in the context of an infinite array of subtle but crucial variables, namely, the patients. Many ninety-ninth-percentile test takers who are at the top of their college class fail in the application requirement during clinical rotations and often end up in limited-patient-contact fields such as pathology. There is no substitute for learning the material! And patients presenting their unusual situations enabling the physician to learn material in different ways never ceases. Extending medical school for more than four years will increase the cost of tuition and student borrowing at some medical schools, and it may dent income and retirement savings for all, but in the long run, these disadvantages may be less significant for medical school graduates who almost all finish medical training in their thirties and enter a high-income profession. Whatever the case, some students may require longer than four years for the baseline material and may not be ninety-ninth-percentile test takers; nevertheless, they may make compassionate, exceptional medical doctors.

Every student at Bay Shore was assigned a faculty advisor; however, not all took full advantage of that resource. As I have chatted since graduation with some of my friends who did not capitalize on the advisor and the other supportive resources available at Bay Shore, we realized it was the most important determinant in our very different Bay Shore experiences. I worked very hard at Bay Shore and was pushed to new levels of achievement, which immensely expanded my sociocultural exposure and launched my voyage toward becoming a citizen of the world. I understood the paramount role of humanitarianism and egalitarianism in my life; developed a new direction for a career; and had the time of my life. And the academic dean sent me on my way with an excellent to outstanding letter of recommendation.

It was difficult leaving Ciliatus and Northern Wellingtonia. I decided to ease the transition by visiting parts of the United States I had not yet explored. Keeping my backpack, tent, and sleeping bag handy, I packed my things and took about a two-week drive to explore the Rocky Mountain region and South Dakota. While in Yellowstone National Park, on June 17, 1987, I wrote my Pinus family a note on a wood postcard from Yellowstone. As I sorted through my mother’s life’s possessions following her death, I found the postcard, which reads as follows:

Dear Family,

Spent a full day in Idaho hiking through Mammoth Caves, ice caves (23 degree F, lantern required) and other remains of extinct volcanic eruptions. Have been camping out all the way. I’m presently in my second day at Yellowstone. This place is absolutely incredible, and at 2.2 million acres (3,472 square miles) it is the largest national park in the 48 contiguous states. I think I’ll need another day to really do it justice. Leaving Wellingtonia, my home for the past 9 years, is the hardest thing on me since grandmother’s death. Will let you know when I’m settled in Interrupte, Bidigito.

As I completed my studies at Serrulatus Acheology in the fall of 1989, the faculty nominated me for the Serrulatus Research Award (Bay Shore’s medical school dean would have been proud). As the only fellow who had completed and published original research, I was ruled by the chairman of the Research Committee to be technically a clinical fellow and therefore ineligible for the award, which no one received that year. Several members of the faculty immediately howled foul, even privately apologized to me, and then sent me on my way to Excelsa with an effusive letter of recommendation, one of which reads as follows:

I have been on the staff here since 1968. For 8.5 years of that time, I was the training program director for the acheology training program. During most of that time, we had 10–12 learners in acheology at any one time. I rate Dr. Gravy as one of the four best learners that we had in our program.

Excelsa seemed like the best place to launch my career journey, as there were myriad options for extended progressive advancement in public health, clinical medicine, and administrative medicine. Six of my African American Bay Shore classmates eventually settled in Excelsa.

Serrulatus had a legacy of Serrulatus-trained acheologists running the Excelsa Acheology Center or serving as medical director of the Excelsa-based US Acheology Foundation, or both. Serrulatus was hoping I would continue that legacy and introduced me to the Center through a letter. In an October 4, 1989, letter from the director of Excelsa Hospital’s Acheology Center to the Division of Acheology at Serrulatus, the Acheology Center replied as follows:

Thanks for your letter about Jabari Gravy. He came over to see me shortly after he arrived in Excelsa and indeed he is a very impressive person—a clinically oriented J. S., so to speak. He was very much taken by our setup here—the finest clinical center for acheology in the U.S., if I say so myself. He is interested in arranging for some time to see patients here. I would be glad to accommodate him if it can be worked out. If so, I would try to recruit him to run the center when my contract runs out in 1993.

With a clear path for career advancement, I settled in Excelsa.

Chapter 4

Following the foot folly at the Fabales Association of Black Female Attorneys social, I walked the woman I had met there, whose name was Carissa, to her car. She invited me to a musical performance scheduled for the following week at her church, saying she was playing violin in the church orchestra. I arrived at the church: it was large with an all-white congregation. Acute Crenatum, an Excelsa hometown hero, once said, It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning. So it may ordinarily seem unusual that Carissa would have lived in Excelsa—the black mecca—for the past five years and had membership in an all-white church. But Carissa was born and reared on the Eastern Isle of the Gulag Archipelago, where her family was one of only two black families in a small southern town, Amygdalina, and later, twenty-five miles away, in a small northern town, Hippocrateoides. Neither town had a black church; consequently, she had grown up in the historically all-white denomination of the Perfoliatus church, a church of relative obscurity in the black community. I realized interfaith couples can occasionally present challenges, particularly if both parties are active in their religious community and one member tends to pull the other from the bonds of tradition of orthodoxy of his or her lifelong membership. I did not know anything about the church of Carissa’s youth other than it was a mainstream religion, and so I did not give it much further thought.

Following the orchestral performance, Carissa and I shared four hours over coffee and cheesecake at a spunky café on Sinensis Street, where we learned more about one another. We had several things in common. We both appreciated and enjoyed classical music and were both all-state musicians: she on violin, I on clarinet. We were both serious students, valued education, had finished at the top of our college classes, and had earned terminal degrees. We both professed Christianity and desired children. And then there were other important issues.

Having recently learned she would not make partner after five years as a litigation associate with one of Excelsa’s largest law firms, the Law Firm, she was planning to relocate back to the Gulag Archipelago, her home state, in six weeks. She was recently divorced after a ten-year marriage. Her first husband was abusive. He had battered her throughout the marriage; used to beat her with a wet towel when she was naked; and battered her until she bled. He was an adulterer and a drug user. He had been unfaithful to her. He had abandoned her three years ago, leaving her to file for divorce through legal newspapers (aka by petition, which, she explained, served the purpose of notifying the absent spouse of the impending divorce) since her husband could not be found. The sensationalism of her narrative fueled a personal life of lurid headlines, a pathetic story that would explain why she was, as anyone would have been led to assume by sight, obviously situationally depressed. Wow!

Only later, and over time, would I learn that almost every piece of the pathetic tableau was untrue. Carissa has a way of inserting a single photo of truth among a collage of graphic Photoshopped images; it seems to help her give credence to the entire falsehood.

I departed for home about 2:00 a.m. thinking she was a lovely but depressed and accomplished young woman who had gotten married way too soon (during her second year of college) to the wrong guy, and probably needed help to get back on her feet and back on the road to success. At this point in my life, I did not waste much time dating for the sake of dating. To me, every date was a potential spouse.

But I had unspoken concerns: had she been to therapy for her mental health issues (depression); had she been cleared, psychologically, for a new relationship (emotional); and had she had a comprehensive physical examination (to better understand the health risks of partnership)? Later, she would respond affirmatively, but untruthfully, to all three.

We dated nearly daily for the entire six weeks of her remaining time in Excelsa. It was a courtship of intense romancing: roses in vases of Waterford crystal, trips to the mainland coast, picnic lunches with perfume surprises, a weeklong trip to Northern Wellingtonia, and the like. This was a period when Carissa should have felt most loved, supported, and secure, yet there was rarely a display of sheer joy. She almost never laughed out loud or ever seemed effusively happy with her existence. I would characterize her as being quiet most of the time. She was rarely warm or affectionate but through comments such as Why are you so good to me? she suggested she was appreciative of the attention, affection, and security I provided.

Why are you so good to me? I had no reason to suspect such a question reflected her perception that I might not stay with her—a fear of her being controlled by me, of her becoming dependent on me. And there was no premise for me to suspect that these concerns caused her to feel hostility toward me.

There was no way for me to know her fear of being controlled, and hence her perception of being abused, slighted, or exploited in some way by me would later prompt her active attempts to gain preemptive control over me, such as through the legal system or a therapist, or prompt her to hold clandestine planning meetings with her friend whom she would choose as our marriage therapist, or to attempt to orchestrate therapy sessions prior to my arrival and, if that failed, simply refuse medicine or therapy, particularly if it was from a therapist whom I had chosen.

And there was no way for me to know that her unfounded fear, real or imagined, of my leaving her would prompt in her progressive, aggressive, and often hostile and intense, unrelenting violent physical assaults on me—initiatives to extract from me what she wanted and felt she needed from me more fully. And this what was illusory, and hence indefinable. I could not have suspected that her sustained mental conflict would always be: Should I want more from you, or should I be angry at you because you will leave, because you don’t love me and because you never wanted to be married?

I had no basis for concluding that her being quiet, being rarely garrulous, and always eschewing nonrequired social events was a learned behavior that was reasonably effective at avoiding attracting attention to potentially untoward public responses from her. I had no basis for concluding that at home, when she was morbidly angry, she would go days without speaking to me. And there was nothing set forth beforehand that would have allowed me to know that sometimes—sometimes—quiet would be good, as it would mean peace! But that quiet could also be quite disarming, as it belied a vortex of fermenting anger, hostility, resentment, and planning for the next assault.

And there was no way for me to have suspected that once we were married, her demandingness and sense of entitlement—ownership of me—would lead her to require of my secretary an ongoing daily itinerary of my every movement at work, even calling me several times during my twenty-minute drive between home and the office seemingly to confirm my presence, while refusing to share with me anything about her University of Gulag Law College work: My work is confidential, becoming her constant refrain.

I would learn only later that much of Carissa’s persona and her behaviors toward me were the consequences of her ongoing interaction with a person in her head: a delusion. And the what that she felt she wanted and needed more fully from me was an abstraction, a consequence of that delusion: never definable, and hence never fulfilled. Consequentially, it was responsible for all of her pain.

Carissa reciprocated my romancing with a weekend trip to a very nice bed-and-breakfast on the mainland coast. It was during this six-week courtship that she volunteered her only reflection on her failure to make law partner at the Law Firm: They did not like my writing. I could not write the way they required. I thought I could do it; I thought I could do it.

It was also during this period that she volunteered that her older sister had not spoken to her mother in two years. Her mother had misrepresented the adoption of Carissa and her sister, telling them that the three children were all biological products of her current husband. Only in their thirties had Carissa and her sister learned this was not true. The man of the house was the biological father of the youngest child, a boy, but neither Carissa nor her older sister knew their fathers. Carissa told me the man of the house had later adopted the two girls. When Carissa’s mental health issues arose and there was evidence of a familiar pattern, I asked her