Election Headquarters

 

 

“Ten o’ clock.  By the bank…”  Autumn, 1980.

That was our common meeting spot on weekends.  Me and my friend Dave.

I had just turned thirteen. He was there a few months already.  We’d known each other for about a year.  We met up just shortly after starting at the same Junior High school together.  Neither one of us blended easily in a crowd, and each of us needed a friend in our own right.  For that reason, we’d been good for one another. But boys don’t bond quite the same way that girls do, and even girls can have their share of problems in friendships.  Dave and I, despite plenty of appreciation for each other had ours, and after months of relying on each other’s daily company had a rather inexplicable split for a while.  It was he who instigated it at one point, not really myself.  And it came simply by way of a confrontation we had one day with some menacing classmates.  While I was just as resigned as always about it, he was fed up once and for all about being victimized, and blamed me and my attitude about the whole thing.  The result was an unavoidable split that lasted a good few months.  I doubted we’d return to one another, until fall and eighth grade arrived, when he simply grabbed me in the hallway and said, “listen, you’re coming with us next Tuesday, over to Carl’s place…”  Wow….Who was “us”, anyway…?  Who was Carl, and where was his place…?

Next Tuesday was Election Day.  There’d be no school, and nothing for us kids to do.  But this Tuesday, we’d have something to do.  I was certainly up for it.

A day or two later, Dave phoned me. He said we’d meet on Tuesday at ten, on the corner where the bank was.  It would soon become our weekend meet-up site.  He was not necessarily the old, one-liner dependable comic creature I remembered.  He was now a little taller, a little more athletic, in better physical shape and just a little more aggressive. Everything I wasn’t and everything he was now trying to inspire me to be.  It wasn’t going to work.  But the important thing was, he was still funny.  He never dropped the Don Rickles thing, and clearly, despite all his pubescent revisions, he knew better than to lose his best style.  He obviously didn’t want to lose his most patient friend either.  I was just as glad to be reuniting with mine.  I needed a laugh, regularly.

But now, Dave had more of an agenda.  On the day he summoned me, we’d be spending time with some kids we knew. One was a former classmate, the other was some kid from the neighborhood, Carl, whose folks were live-in custodians at an old luxury apartment building in town, one of those sixty-year-old Tudor places that old money lived in.  The front lobby looked like somewhere that Hurstwood would have romanced Sister Carrie. 

We weren’t allowed in the lobby.  Just as well.  We’d meet up around the side, behind the service entrance, in a little storage room that had just one little window up top.   Big empty room, nice for the four of us.

Zak was this tall, lanky kid we’d known from school.  I didn’t see Zak around much at school these days, and Carl attended a different school entirely. Neither one of these guys were the laugh riot Dave was, and neither one of them laughed at his one-liners as much as I did.  All these thirteen-year-olds wanted to do was get stoned.   And that they did.

For many kids, especially boys, reaching pre-adolescence means reaching for something out of bounds, something long restricted to them, something dangerous, branding them beyond the gates of innocence.  I never really had that calling, but others did. Like Dave.  Even if he knew better than to part with his humorous side in return for exemplary danger, he still needed to break those boundaries.  My desire not to didn’t turn me against him or these friends of his.  But it didn’t bore me any less.

When we entered our “club house”, first order of business was Carl whipping out his little Sucrets box, packed with rolled joints.  He and Zak would light up.  The stench and the whole hashish den thing was not something I really appreciated.  The all-new Dave of course thought it was cool, and partook, but I just kind of sat back from it all.  I had no taste for any of it.  I was really aboard for the laughs.  I could still depend on Dave to be killer hilarious, which he was.  Though for a room of stoners, I seemed to be the only one steeped in hysterics.

On the way over, we got ourselves a pizza.  Each one of us grabbed a slice or two.  I of course wanted to know if there was a plate, or at least a napkin I could lay my slice on.  There was none.  Dave said, “I’ve got no problem with that…”, and laid his slice atop his mullet head.  He did this obviously for comic effect. I was dead with laughter.  No one else was.  Were these guys that humorless..??

Humor actually did nothing to keep Zak and Carl from getting into some kind of a dispute all of a sudden.  Something about money owed for joints provided.  Dave couldn’t really keep the two at peace and before long, things got physical.  That’s when I ducked out of the room and into the alley.  From the window above I heard the shouts and the shoving, bodies slamming against walls like a staged Hollywood fight scene.  I had every intention of remaining outside ‘til this died down.  It was a nice day.  Before long, through the window above I heard the click of beer bottles opening.  Peace prevailed.  It was safe to enter.

Later, Dave’s mom showed up.  She’d meet up with him after school nearby and whenever he ventured out of their neighborhood.  Then they’d return home together, a couple towns away on the bus.  No one seemed to have a problem with her prancing on in, and she had uniquely no problem with her boy and his friends drinking and stoning. She ascribed to the school of “as long as I know where he is…”.  Vera was a fairly young woman, younger than my mom.  But somehow, she seemed a good deal older.  She wore some very outdated polyester outfitting from a time years prior, and it appeared not to have been laundered since.  Her complexion looked extremely haggard, and she bore a personality very semi-comic, to match her teen son’s.  She was a genuine, very grumpy Sandra Bernhard.  The boys seemed to accept her just fine, and when she pulled herself out a cigarette, Zak lit hers along with his own, for which she politely thanked him.  It was all very, very strange to me.  And yet, for the portrait at hand, it all kind of worked.

Around four p.m, we all dispersed.  I went back home to my mom.  She’d already been out and voted.  I sprawled out on my bed and went out like a light for an hour or two.  Later that night was the election.  My mom wasn’t much for any of it.  Everyone knew it would be Reagan Country, and either you were rich and thrilled, or poor and fearsome, my mom among the latter.   She and her long-time friend Mildred, from the neighborhood, groused together about the loom of a Republican America.   Mildred was married and she and her husband were fairly well-off, despite their politics. Liberal Wealth.  My long-single mom was more on the one-percent end of liberal struggle.  That was the dividing line that balanced their friendship.  Playing Scrabble and talking books kept them together.

But no one I knew seemed interested in election returns that night.  As a kid in school, teachers always try to encourage watching the election with your folks and educating yourself about the Electoral Process.   The way I learned it at home, it was much more simple:  The rich win, the poor lose.  That’s why the election returns didn’t play in our living room.  My mom was watching the Channel 9 Special Presentation of The Deer Hunter instead, dejected about our economic fate. 

The next day, my mom said to me, “Mildred called me……she’s in mourning about the election.  She’s in mourning….Can you believe that…?!?”

I didn’t know about her, but I certainly could.

 

Noah F.

 

 

 

 

Inertia With My Mother

 

 

“You’re not gonna have your own room…”

Somehow, as despairing as that sounded, it actually made sense.

I was nine years old, finally making a few actual friends in grammar school, which amounted to knowing at least a few kids who’s daily agenda wasn’t predicated upon disparaging or threatening me.  Then the bomb dropped.  After years of kittenhood spent in residence with my uncle and aunt in their suburban sprawl, long vacated by their coop-flown baby boomers, my single mom was hell bent on reclaiming her independence with her child once and for all.  She was in her mid-forties and had lived plenty. Dated, partied, married, divorced, flinged and at some point in 1967, got pregnant.  Single, alone with a two-year old and scared shitless, her angry older brother summoned her to move us in.  From that day forward, she’d seethe in her vow to move us out of there.  As she’d announced it to me one spring evening seven years later, “I can’t wait any longer……”

So, out we went into sparer quarters, all she could afford:  A wood-floored one-room flat in a vintage little apartment building, a few neighborhoods away.  We shared a very quaint, large space together., unpartitioned.  My private life was no longer, and when you’re nine, what private life do you have, anyway..?

Fact was, a major part of this whole life transition was going to be a vast shift in dynamics.  Back in 1974, Martin Scorsese introduced this sort of thing in a period drama called Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, a tale of a pre-adolescent boy and his suddenly widowed mom, the two nowhere ready to introduce themselves to one-another after a lifetime separated under the same roof.  On only certain levels, that was my mom and I.  Until then, we’d lived only within the divided dynamics of my aunt and uncle.  They were the grownups, who occupied the latter portions of the castle, the living room, kitchen, etc.  I spent plenty of time in those communal parts of the home, but my self time saw me often in pensive, creative solitude, in my bedroom, with the radio, perhaps the portable black-n-white TV, but most often, the music I’d listen to on my stereo or cassette player. For a kid of eight or nine years, I sure knew about music and the artists I liked.  The folks could have their evenings with McCloud and Kojak out front.

My mom was actually miserable there. Much as it all provided me the life she couldn’t, she really felt like a prisoner of war.  She and her brother did not share the most respectful relationship, and while her sister-in-law was more compassionate, my mom only resented her for her surroundings. Finally, at age forty-six, not entirely able to get back to work after a heart attack put her on the DL indefinitely, she decided handicap or not, she had to get her son and herself out of there, lest she lose a parental relationship with him for life.

So I went from time spent with neighborhood friends, music listening, weekend breakfasts with my uncle at the local diners, to being with my mother all the time, basically every minute. Separation meant one of us was in the kitchen or the bathroom.  Or asleep.  I think this is what someone once categorized as “marriage”.

Marriage indeed.  It was my first marriage, to be certain, a crash course in concentrated emotional codependency.  At age nine.  To this day, I’m exponentially grateful for it.  How many grammar schoolers my age get to learn life through the lens of a John Cassavettes-Gena Rowlands drama..? In black and white…?

One of the reasons my mom was so hell bent on all of this happening was that she had so much going on intellectually inside her that she wanted to share and impart on her impressionable boy.  She wanted me coming of age in her image.  She never attended college, but spent her life determined to learn everything they had in a way that unaffordable hours inside ivy-covered walls with pretentious tweeds could not properly teach. Instead, she raided the college bookstores for twenty years and read up voraciously for decades on all the political science manifestos and Humanities essays from Ancient Greek and beyond that she could absorb.  And those quiet Saturday diner breakfasts with my sedate uncle and a funky Seeburg wallbox were now suddenly bacon and eggs in a somber coffee shop, the silence broken only by my mother’s accompanying lecture on Plato, Socrates and Aristotle.  This fifth grader certainly would not be learning this lesson on Monday.

Even if all of it wasn’t necessarily my idea of a good time, I knew somehow that it was actually good for me.  Even the things that were taken from me that I wouldn’t have minded having back.  Like watching TV in peace.

If on-line surfing today is a “passive” medium, it had its sociological origins in television, which to this day would not be the Fifth Estate that it is if not for that successful neurological effect.  As a child, I often watched TV in solitude, many times in my bedroom alone, or in a living room, to the disinterest of adults buried in over-my-head crosstalk.  That was over.  Now I had another soul in the room with an attention span to occupy.  So whatever I was looking at became what she was looking at. Commentary to follow.

My mother came of age at the dawn of the heady 1950s.  At a time when “mindless suburbia” was the Disco to Urben Intellectual “Rock”, almost never did the two social orders fully embrace one another respectfully.  My mom hung with the East Village intellectualites  Her friends were all name-taggers to the authors, playwrights, theater critics, independent movie directors and authors that defined that pretentious time, when, as my jaded mom would intone, “people read books…”  Even in the Queens of the 1970s, there were a smattering of chain bookstores about, but in my mother’s view, not nearly enough.  At the same time though, she knew how to appreciate TV and the visual arts for what they could best offer, in comedy, music, drama, and not always just on PBS.  In those days the major networks were still serving up some heightened culture from time to time.  That and a good Laurence Olivier movie and some Mary Tyler Moore re-runs made the TV our biggest household staple.

As cited, TV for this kid was no longer a solo experience.  I now had a color analyst at my side.  And with the right entertainment, it was a great supplement.  On the halftime break in a sitcom, my mom would explain why that first fifteen minutes of The Odd Couple was so powerful in character and plot development, in writing and direction.  Then we’d see how the closer was constructed, and I’d get the lecture on all that moments later.  I don’t think too many kids got such home schooling on Friday nights at 11PM.

The lecture series didn’t end there, however.  It was a very free-associative environment.  The only time lectures did not commence was when the instructor was fast asleep on the couch, which also was plenty.  Truthfully though, not every TV image was worth a pile of intellectual analysis.  That didn’t silence the professor.

Notably, many professors are given to a certain insilenceability. This unaccredited one certainly was.  I was her round-the-clock pupil.  Whether it was while sitting in a pizzeria munching a slice while she pontificated on the irony of William James and brother Henry, or raging about the latent antisemitism of Philip Roth while waiting in an apocryphal heat wave for the Q60, the class was always in session.

Even in front of the TV.  No longer could I simply watch a Bugs Bunny cartoon without my mom’s spirited laughter at some of those ancient Mel Blanc rejoinders, and an elaborate talk about the Golden Days of Radio and Hollywood, from her kid years in the Depression.  A dumb re-run of an old Gilligan’s Island and a shot of luscious Tina Louise on the screen would start her into a collective journey down her fashion-model wannabe past, when she was the cute hottie in the literary pub, the belle of all the fellow luminaries passing through the White Horse Tavern.  “Did you know I once dated Steve McQueen..?  He was an actor in the Village…”

The only logistic problem is that every time Gilligan’s Island emerged on the TV, I ended up hearing the Steve McQueen story once more.  I don’t know why my mother, who was so hyperperceptive to things, didn’t recognize quite how characteristically her diatribes could go into reruns, but she seemed to need to reprise them cathartically each time.  This is why the TV stayed ultimately off before 11am on Sundays.  Initially, I used to like catching a few of those quiet little ecumenical dramas like Insight, or This Is The Life when rising early.  Or a least a couple of rounds of Davey and Goliath.  With my partner in the room, all it meant was an intolerant rebuttal to the vast ills of organized religion put to the Idiot Box, and how Christianity has long shafted Judaism in American society. After a couple of those encounters in a row, I just let her keep the radio on until Abbott & Costello showed up.

Ironically, for subject matter too delicate or dear to her heart, my mom held the artistic belief that critique or analysis bears no place in the encounter of fine art.  The greatest film, play or portrait cannot be defiled by analytical deconstruction, she believed, and often pronounced.  I kept that philosophy too, and it turned me off any such thing as a classic movie DVD release containing a “commentary track”.  Do you really need someone talking throughout a movie you’re trying to watch..?

Like any good marriage though, confrontation would ultimately at some point ensue.  But the union becomes better for it.  Upon the twentieth time that episode of The Twilight Zone with that actor she once went on a date with in the Village in 1956 came onto the screen, launching her into the word-for-word story once again, quite predictably, I uttered, somewhat annoyed..”I think I’ve heard this story…”  The stunning response was not worth my plea.  This composed woman lost herself and nearly collapsed in tears, yelling, “You’re not supposed to say that to a person..!!!”, sending her into a traumatic childhood recollection of the time her older sister reacted to one of her mother’s stories with “You told me that already..!!”, and her mother’s hurt retreat.  Never again would I interrupt the professor. It just wasn’t worth it.

Even that, I would come to realize, is part of what made the whole educational experience what it was.  If nothing else, it taught me something about the best-spoken words.  Sometimes, more than often, they are best left unwritten, unthought, and at the very least, unsaid.  It’s a policy I’m still to this day working against my learned behavior in striving to achieve. And yet, somehow, I’m still all the gladder for never quite having mastered it.

 

Noah F.

 

 

 

 

Tomorrow, the Trinitron...

In the last hundred years perhaps, one of the most revered and celebrated forms of home and personal décor has been that of repurposed print literature and media, of all and any sorts. Ecumenical, literary, news……….and let’s not forget advertisements..!

Much as Columbus will forever be known to history-lesson pupils as the founder of America, the late, great artist Andy Warhol will be immortal as the creature who discovered art in the design of the Campbell’s Soup label. Conclusively, the folks at Campbell’s who first designed that very label were evidently just a bunch of soup makers with clearly little or no innate sense of artisanship.  Apparently, it took a mod, irreverent creator decades later to bring its aesthetic force to fruition.

After that, the latter 20^th century U.S. population caught on madly.  In the late 1970s, as a child of eleven visiting my first Wendy’s franchise eatery, I was captivated by the interior’s theme, tabletops laminated with the images of nineteenth century newspaper household product ad pages, wallpaper of the very same.  I was fascinated.  It was my first genuine encounter with the tidal wave of “pop art”.  The movement as such in the interiors of Wendy’s didn’t even last that long.  But on the nouveau design front, the trend had arrived.

It wasn’t just for Soho galleries and Village sophisticates anymore. Over time, sophistication could be recognized on contact in anyone donned in a black T-shirt proudly displaying a front reproduction of a headline page of the Daily Mail, or a significant cover of a LIFE magazine. To simply carve out a page or two of a 1920s edition of Variety or some entertainment trade rag, as my mom or my aunt did at one time, framed and hung in the living room or kitchen with great care, brought instant elite to one’s otherwise common quarters.  I wonder what people did back in the 1920s for that sort of effect when those pages were nothing but trashable newsstand fodder.

What was dismissable in one era would become reverential in the next.  Much in the way an ancient artifact is honored among a culture that truthfully cares little about the item’s genuine origin or its founding purpose, the subject matter or continuity within the text of those 1890s Times pages handsomely framed in the foyer is absolutely foreign to the young homeowners who mounted them.  It simply enhances the era of the actual hallway’s vintage.

In other words, employing the concept put forth quite incomprehensively to a mass culture in the 1960s by the erudite Marshall McLuhan, the medium is quite effectively the message.  In this latter-day case, the product of the medium in question now serves a secondary purpose.  A 1977 episode of All In The Family tossed its critical grenade at the pretentious garbage-as-art Soho gallerists, when Archie’s beloved old living room chair was inadvertently adopted and “re-created” as an art statement in a downtown exhibition.  But despite the reflexive live-and-let-live laugh, it was only the late acknowledgement of a tidal wave after the storm.

The most advanced evidence of the storm back then came in those displays one might have seen downtown, window displays with old, refurbished portable television sets piled up together, flickering familiar snow, in some statement representative of our postvideomanic culture.  To be anthropologically certain, that would cite the generation best known as “X”.

We were the “TV Generation”. For the most part now, there is none anymore.  It’s a world of download and devices, devoid of any sense of collective viewer unity.  I don’t know anyone currently who each watched the same prime-time comedy in their home on a TV set at 8:30 last night.  If they did, they were calling each other on rotary phones.

In my formidable kittenhood, my immediate elders were not young.  They were the mature end of the Depression-Era generation, some pre-Roosevelt.  The popular culture they related to best went out when running boards on automobiles did.  Their most content solace came with recollections of an era brought to life only when a Paul Muni crime drama fired up on Channel 5 on a Sunday afternoon.  My quiet grandmother was known to pop to life when Greta Garbo stepped out suddenly on The Late Show after midnight.  These moments were the anti-inflammatory remedies these people relied upon to restore their inner dopamine in an alienating biosphere of oxidative stress.  They couldn’t do it with music or outfits.  They didn’t spend their time buried in the periodicals of their youth, even if an old, cherished mag or box of photos remained buried on some closet shelf.  But that which was made readily available to them went a long way.

The X Generation has at long last, in the real time of its own inevitable alienation, found its cherished remedy.  The benevolence of some committed video archivists and uploaders out there have devoted their efforts to restoring the structures of our nation’s televisual past.  On YouTube, you are likely to find more and more long-form offerings of recordings noted “Complete”, which indeed are broadcast “airchecks” of television network or local presentation of decades past, uninterrupted, commercials, continuity and all.  It’s a futuristic art form that to this day still remains fairly ahead of its time.  A good many might swing past it, perplexed by why anyone would care to deal with a broadcast full of what disruptively annoyed them break-wise twenty years ago.

But how about forty years ago..?

I had plenty of TV in my life as wallpaper as a child, but I’ve never really followed sports.  It’s what’s made me the nerd that I am.  But there was sure some TV sports in my wallpapered life back then. My disinterested uncle would have ABCs day-long Wide World of Sports serenading the living room on Saturdays.  Visits to the cousins on Sunday afternoons meant the sounds and images of CBS NFL Sunday before the dinner with an aroma that had our tummies growling.

All I have to do now at 3PM on a quiet afternoon is fire up an exquisitely reconstructed three -hour serving of a CBS 1978 Cowboys-Steelers game, commercials, 60 Minutes and All In The Family promos, AC Delco, Radio Shack ads and all, and my pre-teen stomach and I are primed for my wife’s precious homemade vegetable soup just like a Sunday in the Disco Era.  I’m at some inexplicable peace in a prior, innocent, inculpable time, when things had some greater identifiable shape.  Even if books remain on shelves, keys still remain in pockets and water runs from faucets, there’s plenty now that doesn’t exist as it once did.  Such a cultural placeholder can sometimes return a comforting equilibrium to one’s immediate existence.

While a restored NFL broadcast as such probably holds even greater value for the NFL enthusiast, in the venue of “repurposing”, the value is just a great or maybe even greater for the adjacent appreciator, one who absorbs the element for restorative effect.  It’s no different than the result upon those ailed elderly who, in an experiment long ago, broke their dementia suddenly when introduced to a re-created surrounding of their childhood past, a mock soundstage-like construction of a vintage 1930s candy shop and corner, newsstand and all.  Their healthy and long-depressed senses, ignited by precious nostalgia, sparked immediately to life.  We can’t all bear the personal funds needed for a month-long retreat at some luxury ranch for such.  But with some internet, maybe some wi-fi, access to YouTube, maybe an effective vintage reproduction-style speaker recalling the bass-heavy sound barkers of your uncle’s old ’65 monochrome Zenith, some regular self-restoration in this high-functioning, battle-scarred world can at once be ours. 

The repurposing of video past is thus in fact not re-purposing at all.  In fact, it’s a restoration of its purpose genuine. The same experience was driven home to me preciously as I strolled past the park a few days ago, as two senior fellows sat with each other, one’s smart phone proudly blaring the 1967 hit “Soul Man” by Sam & Dave, in the quiet afternoon.  What I experienced was the sound of a transistor radio chiming the sounds of its indigenous era. Amidst my badly pre-occupied mind, now transcended to a prior time, I made eye contact with those fellows from afar and gave them the thumbs-up to their selection.  They knowingly smiled.

Ultimately, it’s all art for art’s sake.  To any soul, there is no greater purpose.

-Noah F.

 

 

Vicaria Hurrah

 

It’s a turn-off to “live in the past”.  It’s a cultural demon, established as far back as the 1950s, in those compelling Shirley Booth characterizations in Come Back Little Sheba, and Hot Spell,  For a positive and healthy existence, we’re not supposed to languish in our childhood recollections and selective memories, but rather accelerate forward at jet speed, fixated upon our future’s advancement, be it our childrens’ achievements, our own, our professional or material gains, and our ever-empowering self-image as a product of it all.  No lifestyle article on any web service homepage will ever espouse anything to the contrary.

What they will alternately offer is some eight-box article on how to relieve the immediate stress and anxiety of today’s world that plagues each and every one of us in some way, and a reminder on how to breathe, how to stop cold and think before even thinking further, step out for a walk, hum a tune, or do most harmlessly whatever the hell you can to break the dark torpedoes veering down suddenly on your brain.

It's sure nice to see those little features, which if nothing else remind us just how plagued we all really are anxiety-wise today. It’s easy to forget.  All I know is, when I was a boy of seven, a half-century ago, there really weren’t articles like this jumping out at you all over the place.  Lifestyle magazines, bought and read strictly by housewives would roll out a column now and then.  Men had no emotions, and there was no internet or moving screens in your face as you crossed the boulevard.  There was also no 9-11 or COVID shutdown to recover from. 

In 1974 however, there were the remains of the Vietnam War, city crime, pollution, and a deadly inflation that no one was willing to admit was just as bad as what their parents dealt with in 1934.  Denial went a long way back then, and things like “family groups”, where folks unite to talk openly about their emotional struggles were a much more covert operation in the pre-Self Help days, before it became a full-on cottage industry.

The common consensus now, after a world of misguided quarantines, market crashes, unprecedented anxiety over “retirement” amongst a generation mostly convinced that their elderhood will consist of paycheck employment until the hereafter, is that anything you can add to your daily life to relieve that tension, if it’s safe, harmless and risk-free, is healthy and worth it.

I’m not the only one to have landed upon his or her Utopia.

More and more, the artifacts of a distant past are surfacing.  Our vital cyber-friend YouTube is hills alive with the work of a population of history-dedicated uploaders, benevolent with their time and effort, to restore the television and radio obscurities in full-form to our availability.  Only in recent years has this harvest come to fruition, and for some of us, it’s just the wallpaper our inner sanctums call for.  An anti-inflammatory treatment for the alienation of an indifferent, colorless, flavorless world a Generation X-er can’t quite taste.

Any world is an acquired taste.  I had just about zero tastes for the worlds I lived in during the 1970s and 80s.  I was busy being a scorned, alienated fat kid with no friends, angry teachers, and really couldn’t drudge up too much respect for the likes of Shaun Cassidy and Olivia-Newton John at the time.  I laughed smugly at the 1980s when I lived in them adolescently.  It was my only recourse.

Where does one look back to for solace in the 2020s..?  Likely to a world that finally few any younger can respect.  Having lived in those times myself, I certainly can’t blame them.  That doesn’t stop my vicarious crusade.

It’s a crusade only I or someone with a compass similar to mine will understand, and I make no effort to defend or explain.  But an hour or so each day (if I’m lucky enough to have the time) with a full-length radio or TV-news program aircheck, sound siphoned through the “aux” of my exquisitely placed twin Crosley “Ranchero” reproductions in a classic mid-century flat, suddenly rendering my abode into a virtual “holodeck”, chiming the beautiful FM sounds of waiting rooms in 1974, complete with aspirin commercials, is a stunning relief to any current day emotional inflammation.

What’s the charm to this..?  Perhaps the desire to step aboard a virtual Circle Line cruise to a time when my elders were my age, much less healthier, and much more accomplished, and stronger, for all their ailments, puts me in that brief experience of being the grownup in a world that weathered much tougher times.  Amongst the people who saw hurt, tragedy, loss, family drama, divorce, addiction and the requisite car wreck.  I won’t be as strong or courageous as they were.  I won’t be commanding all that they once farmed.  But I can visit that world, and remind myself of the terrain these people once crossed when I was too young to know better.

Part of the catharsis of such indulgement comes from knowing how it all turned out.  Bad times, good times……you’re still here.  You’ve made it.  Your higher power saw you through to this safe place now.  It’s a somewhat guilty pleasure to revel in one’s survival success by taking the time to appreciate those moments in past history that you never properly could.  Maybe, good or bad to come, you’ll make it through the next frontier.  Just the way our predecessors who never got to see the millennium did.   It’s kind of a learning component.  A step ladder that gets us to the next shelf in this world just a little more safely.

The young are thankfully too absorbed with the world in front of them, the way us X’ers were.  Those beyond my years have no taste for that elusive past.  But as I define it, it’s merely a tool to see one comfortably through these ambivalent and sometimes frightening days.  I recently watched a 1975 Johnny Carson show, where guest Rex Reed notes that the best thing you can do in this world is to survive it.

At midnight, that’s exactly what I was very gratefully doing.

 

Noah F.

Fahrvergnügen

 

When I was twenty-one years old, I acquired something I’d never yet possessed: 

Vindication.

It was sort of an ascension, a sense of personal power.  While I was in fact far less than powerless in every way, I could not, for the first time, be convinced of that.  That’s all that mattered.

Finally, after a two-year journey, I’d visibly shed a fortune of weight. In that chronic fear and anxiety of first-year collegiate ambivalence, everything you hear cited in those personal obesity-transformation challenge profiles on TV nowadays kind of applied to my odyssey, if maybe on a lesser scale. Unnecessary drama, emotional act-outs, codependency, everything predictable that goes on with a family under a roof. That plus midterms in a batch of courses I’d been nodding off during, and had yet to finish a third page in any of the seventy-five-dollar hardcover textbooks we were summoned to buy and read.

The weight may have been off, but the drama was still very much on. My mother and I had been roommates since I was nine. Fun times, with an overriding theme, which was, we were poor.

I certainly don’t mean to convey “poor” in its conventional definition, a depiction of people interviewed outside an urban housing project by an L.L. Bean-clad Bill Moyers, on his way to journalism award-recipienthood.  That wasn’t quite us.

By the time I hit nine, my mother was sick of living in her angry older brother’s little suburban cottage in Bayside, a souvenir of the tiki-lamp-backyard parties of the 1950s, now somber and ivy-covered in the 1970s, and drunk-off-her-ass or not, this alcoholic single mom was going to have to get her shit together and move herself and her kid out once and for all.  She’d only been telling me about this glorious plan for the prior five years during her common drunken departures, each one a brilliant audition for Martha in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf.  When she was dry, the proverbial theater was dark and silent.  So was she.

Years of office jobs and efforts to improve the lives around those she thought she loved had her in the debt corner in her forties. So did the heart attack that sidelined her a couple years before.  So now it was all up to disability, child support from the well-off ex that she still adored, and any other denominations anyone who really cared about this child of hers were willing to drop into the collection plate.

Meantime, she found a great little pad for us half a borough away in an upscale neighborhood.  At the far end of Forest Hills we settled in a little mid-century studio apartment, blocks away from the all-new public-housing multiplex that almost got Mayor Lindsey assassinated by the furious, liberal-slanted Not-In-My-Backyard townspeople.  Migration into that little villa was actually the long-term game plan, but it looked as though Mom and I didn’t quite meet their criteria for destitution.  That had to stand for something.

Our little nest was one I could really like. No carpeting, of course.  No big living room console TV, but rather mom’s flickery old ’59 RCA portable.  Not even a room of my own.  But as I sized up the situation I fast realized there was no full cast anymore.  Just the two of us nurturing our own very codependent relationship.  Me and an unpredictably predictable alcoholic.  As Charlie Brown once said…”Just what I needed….a handful of chicken pox…”

We made it, though.  A tough, but lasting marriage, me and my mom.  I’ll bet you never hear the word marriage to define a young man’s life-long relationship with his mother.  Well, you should, because that’s exactly what it is if they’re living together in an inseparable codependency for so long. Two people, one young, one old, having no lives except for their obsessions with themselves and each other as the moment sees fit.  Those are some of our society’s most popular types of relationships, and many of them have long been held by the successfully-published experts who think they’re going to make a career out of fronting seminars to coliseum audiences on how to break out of them.  It’s like that Norman Lear movie Cold Turkey about the cigarette company that tried to bolster their image by fronting a non-smoking campaign.

We would weave in and out of a couple of cute little such apartments in the area throughout my adolescence. One even afforded us a teenage room of my own and someone’s former shag carpeting. With mom’s flair for design, we had a pretty trendy looking little 1980s nest, plants, lithograph prints and all.  Over time I’d get to know this incredibly well-read, sophisticated, impatient and unsuccessful woman and how academic fulfillment really did have a role in a life that nourished her with Liberal Arts, and left her gaunt and frail.

At age sixteen, in-between cram sessions for math tests and history exams, a good part of Sunday mornings were given over to sharing living room time together, over Charles Kuralt, the Sunday Times, and conversations about the Greek Philosophers and the writings of Michael Harrington.  Such would be the basis of the Liberal Arts framework of the CUNY curriculum to which PELL and TAP would entitle me.

Four years later, in a dusty, wood-floored, vintage flat in Brooklyn, blocks from the college to which I flocked for their glorious TV and Radio program that would presumably promise to catapult me to Network Executivehood in four years, the marriage was on the rocks.

We moved there when our Queens pad turned condo and exiled us for a pile of money.  Not quite enough though to fulfill the promise of rent on the little museum piece we moved into.  Think Polanski’s The Tenant.  If you like gothic settings, this was your kinda digs. The landlady caretaker was a four foot-ten inch ninety-year old woman, and the porter was a young Greek man who sneered and spoke no English.  Our neighbor was, small world, a tall, stout fellow in his thirties who also lived with his ailing mother. We’d have bonded if he were friendlier, and less sociopathic.  He slid threatening, scrawled notes under our door and ultimately tried to set the building ablaze.  He was then apprehended and sent away for a little vacation.  He didn’t look too well rested when I ran into him in the elevator two years later.

But we had bigger problems. I say “we” as if I was fronting any portion of this crusade and hardly was that in any way the case. At nineteen, I knew and embraced my role: Frightened child, constantly bound for parental-approval glory. It wasn’t my train wreck. I was just a stowaway in the sleeper car. It was all just more stuff to avoid, along with my proverbial wife’s return to periodic drunkenness once more.  But I wasn’t a frightened little kid with it anymore.  Now I was a powerless, frightened young adult.  Big difference.

But a couple years into this, in-between housing court dates, something phenomenal happened.  After serving as a part-time neighborhood cashier in the nearby supermarket, in a role that stood me as a well-groomed, conservative-looking outcast in a valley of late 1980s teenage punks, suddenly I was offered a little part-time job in “the business”.

Even if my opaque aspirations from pre-adolescence were to become the Next David Letterman, complete with roaring audience and super-cool-sounding house rock band in a New York studio every night, or maybe some top creative network television decision maker, in a suit and tie on the sixth floor of 30 Rock by day and around a café table at Hurley’s with the bigwigs by evening, none of that mattered.  Here was the beginning. Answering a school-posted ad for a Production Assistant at a New York radio station, I showed up in my neatest Wall Street threads, got handsomely grilled by a couple of impressively menacing young staff directors of sorts, and a couple days later got a phone call for the job I didn’t originally apply for.

I’d been told the Friday afternoon thing was gone, but here’s this Saturday morning gig, and you’ll have to be here each Saturday before 5am.  In 1988 Dinkins-era New York City, a trip in from Brooklyn on the subway at 3am meant by any legal definition, suicide.  I said yes.  Remarkably, my mom showed no dissent, putting her son’s life goals before her own deadly fears.  In too many ways I somehow knew that a life-threatening Friday night on the subway to somewhere ostensibly enticing instead of a Friday night trapped in a wooden room with a fierce drunk was still a better option.

The radio station into which I was welcomed was a long-standing talk venue of the city and surrounding states, and played to a significantly affluent consumership.  It catered to suburbanites in upscale cul-de-sacs, and social-climbing children of the Park Avenue dowagers.  Some of it would now be presented on Saturday morning in part by a poor twenty-year-old kid risking his life in a dash through heroin-infested Times Square at 3AM.  The dichotomy was never lost on me.

Even if the station and its heritage descended from a long-gone storybook time of "Manhattan Tower" and Cocktails at The Algonquin, the cast and crew hailed from a much more contemporary time.  Even still, no one top to bottom could unhinge this museum from its image legacy.  In other words, if you wanted Howard Stern, or his audience, turn the dial. This place was sticking with the old money.  So long as those rent-controlled leases held out.

So just how connective were the 1980s youngsters in “the wings” with their stars and subject matter..?  Reliance on smug humor said it all.  Most of them were very dedicated and professionally-minded Broadcast Engineers. It was a solid-steel Union Shop, and I looked up to these handsome, successful and impressive craftsmen. 

These young men were the up-and-coming former apprentices to the elder set of hall-of famers, the far seniors whose careers dated back to the Bing Crosby remotes of the 1930s.  The trade was a tradition.  And so were the well-established, impressive Union wage scales.   Decades of periodic strikes defined that.  This however, I would come to learn, was the end of that period in history.

A lot of over-my-head business drama was once and for all dismantling the place, as a new parent company took hold and proceeded to make the place run at cost.  It meant divorce from full union shophood, and that plus similar changes in the local industry were the buzzkill to the party I stepped in on every weekend.  The “boys” were no longer sharing a collective laugh in Master Control about how Business Editor Karen Woodhouse characteristically mis-cued her engineer last Wednesday at 5:15 pm with the wrong phrase.  There weren’t more than a couple of “boys” around at one time anymore.

Yet, true to the place itself, some of the glaze still stuck to the pan.  To work there now meant an attitude devoted to every sound you created or helped to.  It wasn’t about “what you were paid”.  Somehow, artists don’t ascribe to price tags.

That made sense, because minimum wage or maybe a dollar or two more back then was not something negligible.  But to identify myself within those broadcast confines, instead of in a raging supermarket, still set me apart with some connection to my future shape. 

Soon, I adopted the in-house mentality of that appreciated team smugness, one that was literally worthless currency outside the building.  And I didn’t care.  Even if I did choose at times to freely drop name references and punchlines to thoroughly inside jokes in outside settings, yielding a polite smile or a hollow stare, WTF? I was entertained.  Far as I cared, I was hipper than the room.  No one ever understood Frank Zappa in his cameo shots on The Monkees, either.

It was all good, until I had to occasionally explain who I was or what I did amongst curious civilians.  When it came to family, fortunately they were well-off enough to know something about it.  If a schoolmate in some media-course college setting wanted to know, I’d drop names and titles, and got the obligatory “Whoa, that’s so awesome..!” Beyond that, I was a Romulan.  If I said I worked In Radio, four out of five, the first question was “Do you know Howard Stern..???”

Something about me was oddly at home in this antique shop, something I knew I’d never be able to articulate or share with others.  With me, it was always like that.  Thrift shops full of white elephants and trunks full of vintage TV Guide issues were my utopia. Now I worked inside the elephant. It was one hell of a trunk.

That professional alter-ego was just what I needed at the time.  Here I was, almost flunking in my last batch of college courses, nursing a codependent relationship with my occasionally-employed but too-often flatlined mother, and giving up sleep on Fridays to spend the night traveling on a city death-ride to set up for a job I didn’t always know just how critical for which my participation really was.

I took my tasks pretty seriously though.  I had to set up that stack of commercials for the engineers, those acrylic cartridges that resembled 8-track tapes. Had to make sure every one was exactly in place.  I had to prepare the stack of printed commercial copy and feature show sheets for the program hosts, so that it would be right there in front of them when air time arrived.  I did all this regularly on Saturday mornings, just to frequently find, as hosts and the engineers, trusted young men a few years beyond me, would confirm all the details with each other directly, ignoring me entirely, as I sat alongside in the control room.

Curious as it was, I would hold onto that little job like David Janssen, dragged along by a fender on a speeding car on Harry-O.  That meant never a day-off request.  This new identity was who I was.  What was I gonna do, ditch this for a barbeque..?

Only once, after I was introduced to a few other weekly shift positions, finally asked after nearly a year to work relief for a vacationer, did I inquire as to whether I could get a replacement for the dawn Saturday shift, since I’d work late Friday.   I was politely told, “No”.  I suggested other staff workers I knew as candidates.  None would be available.  That meant that none would be willing to travel into Times Square at 3AM for a little weekend presentation that wasn’t as important as what they visibly did during the week. I quickly got it.  Even this was a fortifying revelation.

Meanwhile, my undefined stature was really the ultimate compliment to my newly treasured, slender physique.  I was no Adonis, and was in no way athletic.  But to drop over seventy-five ugly pounds in eighteen months and fit into a size thirty-two at age twenty-one for the first time made me Gene Kelly on the M-G-M soundstage. I walked on clouds.  Clouds are what you can walk on when you have no life.

And it was no loss, believe me.  I was making a friend or two, but I was no social butterfly.  My little job was my recreation.  Home was this place I had to live in.  School was something irrelevant, to be survived.  And I had a part-time identity.  I was an Industry Professional.  You just couldn’t ask me what that meant.

That spring, I got a little invitation in the mail.  I touched base a year or two earlier with Lenore, a figure from my past, an old high-school flame.  We’d not been in touch for a long time, and there were reasons for that.  Our so-called undefined “relationship” was fraught with ambiguity.  It’s the very reason I don’t think teens ought to “go steady” and get “official” about their relationships.  Ours from the outset was like a divorced couple before the marriage even happened.  Phone calls went long into the night, and only decades later would I realize how necessary those encounters were to the both of us.

But, here again was Lenore, announcing her recent engagement and invitation to a celebratory dinner at a local bistro.  Right in my old Queens neighborhood.  And what better me to attend, than the slender, sleek-suited fellow with the buzz cut and shined Kinneys..?  It was pretty well-timed. Two years earlier, I’d have no choice but to excusably sick out of the whole thing.  But with a top hand-me-down wardrobe, a new self-identity and a body to match, I couldn’t afford to pass this up.

There’s more than one reason Lenore and I weren’t exactly Brooke Shields and Martin Hewitt in Endless Love. For one, there were no resemblances on anyone’s part. At age sixteen, I was a cherubic Justin Bieber when looking like Steven Tyler was sexy.  Lenore was not unsimilar in design, but was afflicted with an overweight condition.  In other words, she looked like a heavy-set, innocent sixteen year old girl.  And had the personality of such. 

That would have been great, except that living in the tight hamster cage of my life at the time, my obsession was a fantasy relationship with Carolyn, the blond girl in my English class, who sat one row across from me.  She was a tall, slender creation straight out of the Ingmar Bergman casting office.  Never did she show up in class looking like anything less than the Polo ad on page four of the Sunday New York Times Magazine.  I’d steal a sunlit glance at her Burberry skirt, her Nordic blond hair and turtle-shell frames, and enjoy a pretty nice few-second dream about a hand-held walk in the country. Preferably to a vintage antique shop loaded with ancient TV Guide magazines.  Then I’d get called on suddenly to answer “what was Mark Twain’s simile in that phrase..?” and get nailed for drifting.  Carolyn’s attentive laugh and eye contact was worth it.

No Carolyn for this cherub.  She was somehow polite enough in one of our friendly encounters to allude to the fact that she had a serious boyfriend.  The guy was older, taller, out of school and handsomer than the actor who would play him in the movie.  He was quite friendly too.  They could have each other.

My fate was with the girl who voluntarily pursued me, and that was Lenore. She was overweight, unpopular with the cliques, spent most of her time at home with her parents, loved to laugh, and was miserable most of the time.  If there’s one thing I just didn’t crave at the time, it was a carbon copy of myself.  They say you attract who and what you are.  So, here I was, predictably staring myself in the face.  This isn’t to say that in four years of high school I didn’t ultimately pursue one or two other girls and relationships.  But when I did, I’d invariably end up with someone too frightened, depressed or distracted to walk me up that self-image pedestal.  I just couldn’t get out of the district. Lenore it was.

In the time of our pre-collegiate years, we were hardly Romeo and Juliet. More like Stan and Dorothy in an episode of The Golden Girls, her tearing me a new one about my latest escort.  It was fun, until high school ended, and so did my self-confidence among others.

Four years later, I’d have my chance to live every divorcee’s dream. Why the hell not..?  Put it to you this way: My mother wasn’t about to let me pass this night up for the world. She even went out to Woolworth’s and got me a new tie clip.

 

I ventured out, back to my old Forest Hills neighborhood that cold April night.  I was certainly tired from my all-night, all-morning grind and had to be back tomorrow afternoon, but this adventure had me charged.  I was ready to go on stage at the Westbury Music Fair.  

I approached the side-street bistro and checked in.  Lots of handshakes with strangers, including the gentleman fiance, a tall, handsome enough young chap. Conventional stuff, until Lenore emerged through the crowd.  Let’s just say after four years her size hadn’t diminished.  More of an extensive advance.  To be delicate, she required no walking support.  That was encouraging.  And she was furnished in a beautiful white gown. She cried when she saw me and we embraced.  I was glad to be on my side of the encounter.  It was just as much my evening.  Maybe even more.

I was seated next to a old acquaintance of Lenore’s, some lovely young woman who’d joined her at a teenage weight-loss camp in the old days.  This lady seemed to bear no trace of her prior afflictions, and we enjoyed a nice handshake and observant flirtation with each other.  In a dark party setting with a deafening house dance mix, that’s all you can do, if you’re not leaving.

I was no dancer, but you’re supposed to hit the floor at these things, so up I went. Within one number, I was approached by a very tall, slender, mature looking young woman with a broad smile. She happily knew me, though I was a deer in the headlights.

“Oh…”, she laughed, “I’m Ariyka…!”  Erika with an “A”.  As if I could ever forget.

I couldn’t.  At age fifteen, when I would walk Lenore home from school each day, there was her nine-year-old sister’s classmate, the uproarious Ariyka.  From the time we met, she positioned herself Dennis the Menace to my Mr. Wilson.  Annoying as she was, her cliché Hollywood-sitcom-bratness redeemed her somehow.  The prototype for Kimmy Gibbler.

No brat now.  Here was a sleek, cropped blonde in gold frames and a red-satin dress, who looked less like a party guest and more like a promotions rep on her way to an executive presentation.  She was inches taller than me, and between my second-hand gray Armani suit and her Park Avenue looks, we were the dance floor stars of that TV commercial.  And this guy couldn’t even dance.

But the lovely young woman would not say no to another good stomp together, so we did, and we shared a few kind niceties between the din of the house.  That’s when her mother approached me from behind, almost maternally, touched my shoulder and spoke kindly into my ear…..”She’s fourteen”.

I kind of knew that, but I guess a polite reminder was in order. It certainly was, to look at the young lady.  Here I was, a year ago the object of attraction to no one much less myself, and now the sleek, Wall Street-Charlie Sheen-suited dasher.  I was the big-screen Judd Nelson I long disparaged, in the 80’s Hollywood movie I long trashed.  As a friend of mine would say, ”Ice cream and comic books couldn’t improve on this…”

The evening ended early for me, as I made my charming farewell to Ariyka and all, and as I stepped out, my ears thawing from the deafening house-mix interior, the Executive Rep in the Red Dress gazed at me as I met her eyes once more, on my march down that childhood block.

There’s only one thing you can do after such a pleasant first-time encounter at a function like that.  I’d seen enough romantic movies to know how this works.  You have to make contact, like with a small card, perhaps.  Knowing her full name, and the fact that she shared a building address with the guest of honor, I could easily oblige. I wrote a nice card saying how enchanting it was, etc, etc, and maybe we’ll meet up again.  I had no idea what that would hold, but somehow, it wasn’t even important.  The thing I kept uncomfortably reminding myself was, this is a fourteen-year-old.  What possible business does a man of twenty-one have associating with a girl of fourteen..??  On any perceivable level it was creepy.  The only thing that justified it was celluloid-theatrical.  It was two young people, separate in age, employing range in their roles.  I was forever the 20 who looked fourteen, and she was the fourteen who looked and sounded twenty-six.  We were both, in reality, a couple of innocent young children.

Meanwhile, in fact, I never would get around to seeing much of Ariyka again, if at all, as it turned out.  But we did actually maintain an immediate correspondence, in a few lighthearted letters and phone conversations.  Nothing too deep or personal, but rather a charming kind of precocious Regis Philbin talk-show visit, to lift our spirits on occasion.  What could be better..?  Ariyka told her mom about me, and the delightful lady was just as eager to share a lengthy chat.  In truth, they were both a riot.  But given the distance of our respective lives, geographically as well, our contact was sporadic.

But I did have memory of that one great evening. The one where I shined. And to no one was I cooler and hipper than to myself.  What a beautiful evening Lenore gave me.  Weeks later, I’m on the job one weekend, and in the control room, where all our foolish, eclectic, harmless inside jokes held forth, at one point I literally stepped out of character.  I confidently confided to our amiable engineer Marty, “so….I went up to this girl at a party the other night….she was talking about some dispute she had with her mom….so I said, ‘come tell me all about it here on the Doctor Susan Show’, that being an inside reference which no one but us who worked at times with midday radio feature host Doctor Susan, PhD. would pick up on. And maybe a few astute listeners.  Marty chuckled.  I was a proudly confirmed industry insider.

As one of the creative tape-and-control-room types (even if I bore no exorbitant salary or union membership granting me the rights to be one..), it would be remiss, I thought, if I didn’t regale Ariyka with my artistic side, and whip together a clever little mix-tape of songs I thought she’d appreciate, in light of our conversations.  I had a whole retro sixties theme in mind.  I’d start off with “Young Girl” by the Union Gap, then “Eight Miles High” by the Byrds, “Can You Dig It” by the Monkees, “Just Like A Woman” by Bob Dylan…..the ultimate in entertainment and artistic affection..! Made possible by my impressive new Sony dual-deck boom box. 

I mailed it off to her, and she thanked me in our next phone encounter, laughing predictably at some of the selections. Maybe I was introducing her to a few for the first time.  In some way, I felt as though I was scoring with an attractive young girl, the way the sixteen-year old supercool punks did with the fourteen year-old girls around me in my fat little junior-high days.  Only here I was, older, sophisticated, and professionally established and successful.  I was Max Von Sydow to her Barbara Hershey.  Hell, it was my movie, we could be whoever the hell I wanted.  All by way of a mix-tape.

I must have had some curiosity value. Ariyka soon invited me with great anticipation to a play her uptown school was presenting, some originally-created musical with staged parodies, backed with sing-and-dance-along-to-the-record numbers.  As strange as I felt about being a twenty-one-year-old professional visiting a company of pre-teen girls at a parochial school for an auditorium evening, I figured it was all innocence.  My mom certainly looked upon it as such.  She helped determine which shirt I’d wear to look the most attractively commanding. My weight was starting to gain on me once more, but that was no excuse to wear the comfortable pants. I’d have to wear the tweed chokers.

I was embraced like a theater critic that evening amongst a throng of adorable fourteen and fifteen-year olds. One charming young lady kept my attention during the intermissions, as we chatted about the days of musical theater, Jerome Kern, Leonard Bernstein, and anything else heady and frostingly pretentious we could think of.  I shared a greeting moment with Ariyka shortly after the performance, but she was then off with her clan, as I floated home for the evening.  I don’t know what I was in love with, but it must have been me leading myself on.  I was quite a Lothario.

 Somehow, it didn’t matter that I was in no regular contact with Ariyka. She was an occasional acquaintance, with whom my association meant more to me than the relationship.  She was certainly no celebrity. But she made me feel like one.  Whenever I reminded myself that this was all pretend on any level, it somehow made more sense.  Ariyka was not someone with whom I ever could or would share my semi-adolescent nightmare domestic and personal problems and fears with.  We were not intimate friends of that sort.  Nor was I inclined to divulge any of that life-poisoning crap with anyone for that matter.  My hell was my own.  Ariyka was my charming few-minute getaway from myself.  I know I enjoyed our brief encounters way more than she could have.  But she certainly seemed to enjoy phoning me for a few. That was all the prize I needed.

Sometimes that prize veered me away from my worst times.  Codependency in a relationship with an addict, perhaps a drunk, or as treatment professionals prefer, “functional alcoholic”, is head prison, akin to cult membership.  You’ll have to have one of those relationships half your life to understand, but I can’t decode it here.  For those who know the code, I can tell you about the evening my mother returned home from the office job she’d finally landed, in a last-ditch Hail Mary to keep us from apartment eviction a year earlier.  She was sober, depressed and suicidal, and insisted I join in and chase her.  For the first time ever, I refused. Ordinarily, I’d dive into a chase scene, but not today.  About an hour to her arrival, Ariyka suddenly phoned me, and we burst into one of our charming little riotous talk-show segments.  None of my haunts meant anything when I was “on stage”.  It’s known that when Johnny Carson was at his most commandingly, riotously, attractive best, it was when he’d return from his off-air life of legal threats, enemies and clinical depression.  That grind he constantly threatened to walk from saved his life.  This unscheduled little departure sure healed mine.  I wasn’t letting the fiend lure me into a chase this evening.  What the hell did I have to lose…? Let her fry.  She’d be fine in the morning.  Next day, she apologetically was.   I couldn’t rely on Ariyka to be there for me all the time, but she awoke me to something better: my ability to be there for me. I don’t know if I ever thanked her for that.   Or if I needed to.

I was on the job one late night, as one of the engineers was mastering one of the newly arrived agency commercials on tape.  It was a new national spot launch for Volkswagen, with a catchy campaign called “Fahrvergnügen” or in it’s native tongue, “Driving Pleasure”.  It was a chorus of Nordic girl singers harmonizing the word, and I somehow had this image of the European-drawn Ariyka crooning with them. The spot was all over the place like radio wallpaper, and it turned Ariyka into some kind of mind-screen-saver. I didn’t think it entirely appropriate, since this wasn’t someone I knew that well or even had any intentions toward.  We had almost nothing in common as any kind of friends, and apart from a charming little “talk-show” encounter here or there, no business with one another at all.  We’d forged a minor pen-pal-hood for a brief time, but I fast realized I had little to say or share with a kid who had better stuff occupying her. And yet despite it all, thinking about my contact with her every time that spot played made me feel good about me.

It was two years later, much of our destitution realized, our apartment gone, mom and I residing with my aunt in her 3-roomer, me out of school and still bare-pocketed with my lunch-money part-time job, that I would make contact with Ariyka again. I got up the nerve to phone her and say hello, and I was back residing in town once again. She was pleased to hear from me, and agreed to make time for a coffee date in the donut shop nearby.  It may not have been the encounter I’d have preferred.  Ariyka politely showed up.  She was pleasant, but seemingly preoccupied.  She was now seventeen, and on her way to college, discussing her military-school boyfriend’s background.  We weren’t trading witticisms as we once did, and I had nothing enticingly clever to offer. I did compose one more mix-tape for her, with some rare Beatles stuff that was first getting unleashed on compact disc from the U.K.  She said kindly, “That’s okay….I still have the other one….”  I don’t think we ever spoke again.

Once my part time pittance became full-time, in my efforts to present an economizing solution to a dismantled task force, my close and ailing elders soon gone, I was left alone, in my blissful solitude to care and fear about no one but myself. I acquired a room of my own, the kind for which Virginia Woolf once pined, and thought not much about anything except the next day’s demands.  It was peaceful, if not an evasive and often unhealthy life.  I never smoked, drank or got arrested. No tags got detached from any mattresses.  Ten years later, I almost died.

I would have, had I the courage to do so.  But my intentions were circumvented by a good friend or two, as well as my better mind.  I began to seek out the road to better health, and it was a grateful ride that was many times a mudslide.  Homeopathy became my primary healer, and when solitary confinement did me no longer any good, the relationship I’d find with a beautiful young alternative practitioner led to what I cite as my “next marriage”.  It’s the best one yet.

It’s strange and beautiful, residing now more properly and respectfully in a handsome, vintage mid-century building, in the borough of my youth, returning full circle in many ways in mid-life to the place that once nurtured me in my impressionable mind.  But it was even stranger a few years ago, when some staff reconfigurations at work would force me back into pre-dawn patrol on weekends.  I had to re-learn how to return home late and up and out early once again on some regular basis.  People with rent or mortgages to pay aren’t afraid to do these things.  I’m too grateful to find any fault with it.  It happens to be an incredible souvenir, a genuine throwback, to a time in some ways alienating and horrifying.  And at the same time, one commandingly victorious.  It may be debilitating to acknowledge that after three decades, I’m reduced to marching down a barren crosswalk in the dusk of pre-dawn on a spring Sunday, onto an eternal subway platform vigil, to a job that gets thanked by corporate greeting in note form once every year or so.  But it’s a precious ascension.  An ascension beyond the constrictions of age, of time, of chances lost, and the life I never thought I’d see, and one I can’t promise I’ll well navigate.

The only thing missing down that crosswalk on a spring dawn is that Volkswagen commercial. I heard it on-line somewhere recently, and it sent me back to an awful, younger, powerless time.  It was that magnificent time, when I genuinely adored myself. 

The job and profession to which I introduced and affixed myself back then has not proved to be one of phenomenal prestige, award, or lucrativity.  Once a Grand Hotel before my time, it’s now a corner bus stop for many. Few will find permanent comfort on one of those shell-covered benches, as buses stop and go by. You have to be okay with a shell-covered bench that transports you nowhere, but shelters you, and has you seeing and helping so many on their way, as well as welcoming those who’ve needed to return.  For one thing, you never know who’ll meet, waiting and arriving.  Sometimes it’s nice to have the bench to yourself.  The good news is, the bus stop remains. The buses still come and go, and the bench is a founded one.

About a year ago, a long-time industry colleague of mine introduced me to her visiting daughter, a charming woman of twenty-one, on the fast track of graduation from M.B.A.-hood to a business role in some international tech outfit. This vibrant young lady in the DKNY threads, upon introduction beamed when she saw me, and clutched my hand in a passionate handshake, expressing a thankful captivation for who I was and what I did for her mom and others in the place.  I knew her mom long appreciated me and told her girl about me.  But this was quite a reception.  It made my day.

A day like such today, much like all those years ago, is all I’m really entitled to, all I can afford, and all I really need.  That young woman went out of her prestigious way to provide me with one.  It gave me something I can’t remember having since I was her age:  Driving pleasure.

 

N.F