“You Ask, “Where Is Terry Coming From?”

So why go out on an edge of a cliff like that and risk everything? To understand that question, we need to go back.

Liberals say every bad guy comes from a bad family environment. Unfortunately, my family environment is excellent. My father is as kind and stout as they come. My mother is as full of love as they also come. My wife is also as dedicated to me as they come. And money was never really short.

My problem is that I am schizoid.

And so I am coming at you as a mentally defected person. But that defect was hidden most of my life but it came out of the closet so of speak, when my father offered me a job at his resort, Holiday Park, at the Big Mountain. My father, by the way, is an ophthalmologist, or eye surgeon, who was the first Thai who made it to the American Medical Board. My mother is an American who comes from an independent middle class Detroit family. My grand father would go off into an isolated island at the Great Lakes, in Michigan, and build a big house from scratch, for example.

Being wealthy, my father sent me to the states during Thai schools summer break to soak up American values and way of life. So if there was truly someone who was not only of mixed blood, but also mixed culture, it was me.

In that movie, “Revolutionary Road” the character played by Leonardo DeCaprio told his wife, when they decided to leave the middle class life of America to pursue their dream life in Paris, that all he was when he was young was a “stupid guy with a big mouth.” Well that was what I was like at Holiday Park - adding of course the mental problem.

My time at Holiday Park, back then, is worthy of a story in its own right, but to put it shortly and simply, I went totally crazy.

I had just come out of Bangkok Post, with lots of readers and recognition - meaning the ego was very big. But like that Leonardo character in Revolutionary Road, I was real stupid and full of it. There was a great deal of pressure at Holiday Park - to which I still maintain today is more like a political and management school than a resort - meaning any manager must go through some serious trials.

Then a highly respected lecturer on management, called me “shit” in front of about a hundred seminar goers, after I blasted away a lecturer at his seminar as being wrong on economic theory. Well, that seminar might have been a setup to shoot me down to size since all the lecturers were bringing up my writings at the Bangkok Post and commenting negatively on them.

He said people had intellectual capacities, but they also needed emotional maturity. I became the butt of a joke about being smart but without maturity. The first time I cracked was when my father asked how I felt - after being called “shit” and not mature, in front of a lot of people. My face turned sour and I let out a cry - to which my father showed a very disappointed face, and then turned his back on me.

I failed at Holiday Park. And so I went crazy. But I blamed it all on Holiday Park, not realizing I was a lunatic there, and indeed, the lecturer was right in that I was emotionally just a baby.

I ended up incarcerated in a mental asylum for about a week, and it shocked me to realize that my medical charts said schizoid on it.

What convince my dad and one of the best psychologists in Thailand that I needed time in the mental asylum is a long story. But to cut it short, I dated a girl from Peace Corps and when I met Pookie, my wife, I dumped her. She had warned me before to stay away from a friend of hers, but after the dumping, that friend of hers caught up with me and he tells me he is an investment banker from New York and in the conversation, he was going after me like I was a rubic cube.

What I remember of the experience was that it is a place where illegal drugs like heroine were passed from one inmate to another and that a heavy heroine addict can be a really fat person, because my only friend there was a heavy heroine addict and he was a fat guy. Oh, and there were a few cute nurses in tight uniforms, who we kept an eye on because we were sneaking in cigarettes.

Once out, I had no money and my wife Pookie was expecting a child. The low point came when I had to visit a friend to ask for money for the delivery and he threw a bunch out of his window to me and it landed on the street - to which I had no choice but to bend down, pick it up, and shouted thanks to an empty window of my friend’s apartment. And he was the best friend I had.

That fat friend, heavy heroine addict with very frequent visits from a disappointed father, “shined so brightly,” even in that dim and grim environment of the insane asylum - like a real life Jack Nicholson in “One Flew Over a Cookoos Nest” or a John Belushi in that crazy comedy late night “Saturday Night Live.” And I learned that even when there was no hope at all in life, there was still “comedy.”

I ended up living in a very small room with my wife and child. At times I would get real drunk and swore and curse at the world to which my wife would give me medication shots to the butt to calm me down, and that was my life for a long time. I could not keep any job and even driving gave me a fright of being in a small confined space. If not for this, I would have resembled Mel Gibson in that movie about a schizoid taxi driver.

I have turned everyone into an enemy! Even my billionaire father turned his back on me. He was probably sick and sore as hell at me for the things I did to him at Holiday Park, like telling him what a bad manager he was.

I had to beg for powdered milk for Tammy, my daughter, from my doctor aunt. My American Uncle, Jon, wired me US$10,000 and it helped keep the best of milk going to Tammy and enough for us to buy a television and a small refrigerator. It was pure hell back then.

What kept me going back then literally was walking through the slum - not to feel how lucky I was to have that little room and what little money I had, but to see how vibrant and happy life could still be for people who really had less going for them. Pookie denied my request to move to the slum, but I needed it and I glowed and basked in the happiness of the people of that slum, located by a stinking polluted canal.

Somehow, in that slum, I found what Carl Jung, the famous Austrian psychologist had meant when he said the bottom is reached when you let yourself fall as long as you can go. Jung said he let himself fall, on purpose, way to the bottom of his psyche; he finally landed in a wet warm thing. To me, that slum was my wet warm thing.

All of that was about 10-15 years ago, when I started on a long journey of who knows what, that now ends in self discovery.