TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 179

[Tobie Shapiro]

March 14, 200000000000000000007


Dearest dears,

	So at the last minute, Meyshe and Feyna 
put together a dinner party.  I cancelled my 
appointment with my shrink (that one's gonna cost 
me some money for late cancellation) and I ran 
around shopping for the ingredients for matzoball 
soup for eight, apples and squash for eight, beet 
and egg salad for eight and Challah for eight. 
Then I picked up the cakes.  The cakes were for 
16.  I ordered two, because up until the last 
moments I didn't know how many were coming.  It 
turned out to be nine.

	The dinner was a blazing success.  The 
soup pot was reduced to enough for someone's 
lunch.  There are plenty of matzoballs left, 
however.  The refrigerator is groaning.  And my 
fingernails are still stained red from working 
with the beets.  That colour!  Beets are divine.

	In other news, on Monday, after an 
exhaustive three and a half hour session, we 
finally got a divorce settlement.  I found out 
things about villainman that made me sick to my 
stomach.  I can't force myself to write out his 
name after the Shapiro, then hyphen.  So when I 
wrote checks to the kids for their birthday, I 
addressed them to Meyshe B. Shapiro, and Feyna 
Alina Shapiro.  I know they'll be able to deposit 
them.  I will tell you tomorrow about the 
settlement conference.  I don't have the energy 
right now.




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The Court of Last Resort

	Handwriting analysis got me into a lot of 
interesting situations that I would never 
otherwise have gotten into.  With the help of 
Bonnie Weiss, my publicist, my name began to be 
known at least around the bay area.  I did 
interviews on the radio, was the talk show guest 
for call in programs.  This is over the airwaves:

	"What does it mean if I make my Gs like this?"

	"Well, just a G doesn't mean any one 
thing.  It's in combination with a list of other 
factors that it may mean something."

	"You mean I can't tell just by looking at 
a G that has a big loop on the top what's going 
to happen to me next week?"

	"Handwriting analysis doesn't predict the 
future.  It's for personality portraiture and 
compatibility studies, for fitting people to the 
right job with the right employer, for advising 
how to treat the prospective employee.  I can't 
tell your age, your race, your gender, your 
sexual preference, your religion, or whether 
you're right or left handed."

	They were always disappointed.  They 
wanted prognostication, diving rods, magic 
tricks.  They wanted the great unknown beyond to 
come sweeping into their lives and give them an 
answer, maybe even THE answer.  And then I got 
all practical and scientific.  What a drag.

	The majority of people who actually made 
appointments to come and see me for an in depth 
analysis were at a tender juncture in their 
lives.  They were re-evaluating themselves, 
assessing the past, wondering about the future, 
or in a difficult situation, a precarious balance 
of will, luck and circumstance.  They came to me 
to have their ideas verified, or to give them a 
shove in some direction.  So I had to be delicate 
with them.  Often, I felt like an impostor, 
because what I was doing had so much psychology 
involved in it, and I'd had no formal training in 
psychology.

	What amazed everyone, including me, was 
how accurate I was, uncannily accurate.  I would 
draw out of their handwriting a three dimensional 
portrait of my client, in enough detail to create 
the juice for an hour and a half of a 
consultation.  They left convinced that 
graphology worked and that I worked.  I parted 
with them feeling exhausted, spent, wrung out, as 
if I'd been dragged inside someone else's skin 
for a couple of hours, had felt what they were 
going through at this turning point in their 
lives.  It took me hours to recover myself.  And 
I'd swear I'd never do it again.  I can't say how 
I survived these sessions time after time.  I 
just did because I had the appointments made and 
someone was counting on me.  I would start out 
cheerful and energetic, full of communication, 
animation and enthusiasm.  And over the hour or 
so, I would become drained and all my energies 
would transfer to my client, so that when we 
parted, the client was full of energy and I was 
on the verge of collapse.  I can't account for 
this phenomenon.  It makes no sense in any 
scientific way.  But, there it was.

	This was the early 1980s.  My sister, at 
that time, had met her second husband, Bruce. 
They had met at a Mensa gathering.  Mensa, the 
organization of people with their high I.Q.s in 
common, and maybe nothing else.  One of the 
people in the bay area chapter of Mensa was the 
director of The Court of Last Resort.  What the 
Court of Last Resort did was search around the 
country for people who were wrongfully 
incarcerated.  They would try to bring up their 
cases again in court and set them free: dispense 
justice.  Do good deeds.  This man approached me 
because my sister had recommended he do so after 
I'd taken a look at Bruce's handwriting and 
impressed them both.  I told her he should see a 
doctor about his stomach.  Evidently, he'd been 
mis-diagnosed for a while, and finally the 
doctors had zeroed in on the real culprit which 
was his stomach.  He'd recently had surgery to 
fix it.  Luck, skill, or magic?  You be the judge.

	The Court of Last Resort wanted to employ 
me (for free).  I was to take a look at a tall 
stack of the handwriting of prisoners who all 
claimed to be innocent of what they'd been 
convicted.  They had all been tried and found 
guilty of murder in the first degree.  The 
problem, as the director put it, was that every 
convict claimed to be innocent and of course that 
couldn't be the case.  They needed to winnow out 
who were the ones into whom they would put their 
time and energies.  I was to peruse the 
handwriting samples and tell the director which 
of them was likely to be innocent.  Which of 
these convicts was more or less incapable of 
performing first degree murder?  Who were the sad 
sacks who were in the wrong place at the wrong 
time and were just hapless enough to get fingered 
for something they didn't do?

	I decided to agree to take this task on, 
because it might be less exhausting, since I 
would be remote from the writers, and the whole 
thing would be more objective.  I couldn't have 
been more wrong.  The pile of writing I was 
handed was filled with the most blood curdling 
writing I'd ever seen.  Here were examples of 
traits I'd only read about in books, but never 
actually observed first hand.  There was 
brutality, coarseness, violence, hysteria, 
vengefulness, psychosis, perversions of every 
kind.  There were elements of the handwriting 
that seemed impossible for someone to make: huge 
blotches and smears made with a ball point pen; 
words that ran off the page; heavy clod-like 
writing that tore through the paper.  It took the 
breath out of me.

	There was one sample, however, that 
scared me, sent my nerves rattling and my teeth 
chattering.  I could hardly look at it.  It was 
not the handwriting of a thug.  It was the 
handwriting of a sociopath.  Here was someone who 
could talk your socks off with your shoes still 
on.  I told the director of the Court of Last 
Resort to take that handwriting away from me, to 
dispose of it in some thorough way, to bury it 
under a cubic yard of soil, set it on fire and 
disperse the ashes.  Wipe all trace of it off the 
face of the earth.  I described the writer as a 
liar, a clever actor and a man with no moral 
anchor, a complete utilitarian, and someone with 
no conscience at all.  This was someone who could 
kill his mother without a hint of remorse, would 
slit a throat to get at the head of the line, 
someone who could design the deaths of numerous 
innocent people because it furthered his casual 
plans and pleased him to do so.  He was capable 
of lying with such art that he could talk a sane 
person into trusting him.  Whatever it was they 
said he did that he claimed not to have done, he 
did.  And probably more.

	The handwriting itself was ornate and 
orderly, little loops and flourishes attached to 
many of the letters that gave it the look of some 
Spencerian script.  It was practised and 
contrived.  It was calculating.  It gave me the 
heebie jeebies.

	The director asked me if I wanted to hear 
the guy's story.  I said yes.  This is what I was 
told.  He was initially convicted of a multiple 
murder to which he confessed.  Yes, he'd done it. 
In the penitentiary, he was the model prisoner, 
one everyone's best dressed list.  After being 
incarcerated for a while, he escaped from prison 
by convincing a guard to let  him out, and then 
convincing the same guard that he needed his gun. 
He fled to a trailer home and sweet talked his 
way into the good graces of the family residing 
therein.  The guard was found tied to a chair and 
beaten senseless.  The family of five in the 
trailer home were found splattered all over the 
walls.  This one, he said he didn't do.

	 I had been working on the heap of 
handwriting in a cafe when I came across this 
man's letter.  My eyes were bugging out, my soul 
withering, when a patron walked past me and 
caught sight of the writing.

	"Oh, what beautiful writing.  Did you do that?"



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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net