When I read about the arrest of Gabriel Olds, the actor, I
remembered him playing a rapist on Grey’s
Anatomy—pushed in a wheelchair, he’s somehow threatening the person pushing
him.
I’m not sure this memory is accurate, since I can’t find the scene on
YouTube, but he’s done a lot of television. I, however, have often thought of
him as the son of one of my favorite poets, Sharon Olds, and of the
psychoanalyst husband who left her. Did
the husband push an inhibited wife into psychoanalysis and then not like it
when she got cured and wrote vivid, graphic, uninhibited poems? That was always
my theory. He loved his privacy? Didn’t realize the poems were more about the human condition than about him?
I loved her poems about her children. In one, “The
Clasp,” her daughter, four, about two
years older than her son, is always pushing him over, face-first. The exhausted
mother and narrator—they’re all home with colds—clasps the daughter’s wrist
hard for a moment, and reflects on that moment. Oh, the moment when a mom loses
her temper on no sleep! I know that moment well.
In another poem she observes her five-year-old boy accidentally
breaking things. Filled with energy, he looks with amazement at a sieve he’s
just busted and pees on the lawn. The poems ends with a humorous jab, the house
collapsing behind the kid. Oh, I know that feeling too. There are more poems
about her son, one in which as a seven-year-old he plays tough
guy at his birthday party, and another about him becoming a
man.
Could this well-observed child, son of two Upper West Side
professionals, really be a rapist who lures women in with his charm and
violently assaults them? It doesn’t sound likely. Unless the kid sustained a serious head injury or is on drugs.
He has pleaded not guilty. I
hope he really is not guilty. His mug shot shows shock, horror; he can’t believe his situation.
