We Have To Stop For Today....

 

A long-time dear friend of mine, with whom I’ve drifted in and out of contact since teenhood and blessedly reunited with recently, has at mid-life handsomely achieved professional status in her life’s true calling, as a psychotherapist.  Or Analyst.  Or Life Counselor.  I have to apologize, as I don’t really know her accurate and correctly referenced classification.  But in reality, chances are a good many of her ensuing clients, or patients, as it were, will reference her as The Shrink.

This whole therapy thing is no small box of Cracker Jacks.  It’s the Las Vegas of self-help, and in a world of diminishing health care coverage, the industry shows no sign of slowing down, on any professional level.  It has been the target of humor good and bad, sophisticated and banal since the double-digit Greek and Roman years, and that’s been an industry just as lasting. Mainly because it’s a science equally inexact and respected enough to never, ever be thoroughly dismissed.

Dismissable to this day only by those who cannot tolerate it, financially, mentally or emotionally.  Those would be pretty good reasons.  I’d cop to the financial one, basically, though even though I’ve never really considered myself averse to traditional office-visit tradition, I’ve just never really believed myself in a ready state to confront the subconscious of my brain and soul in a way that’ll really make those high-priced visits pay off from day one. Once you sign up for a commitment like that, generally the instinctive desire is to make this work from the outset, like an academic course, or chiropractic treatment.  Get the pain and gain underway with purpose immediately, and make the whole expenditure a valuable one.  You’re not gonna sink half your life savings in co-pays ostensibly, unless you know exactly how each and every trip to the minibar is gonna go down.

The unfortunate inability to establish this very application is what truncated my one or two very dedicated efforts in the distant past.  It all came to a head one day when the licensed clinical professional seated directly before me at her desk during one of my afternoon diatribes fell fitfully asleep.  I very, very silently rose, stepped out, issued my co-pay cheerfully to the young concierge and chose not to return.  I would have returned the lady’s apologetic voicemail that arrived late that night, but some relationships are just better off ended.

While my long-time crony, couched at last in her rightful theraputic-analytic righteousness, was demanding to know why I’ve long refused to delve back into therapy, as any particular individual bearing any early-life trauma or hardship of any sort should, in order to maintain a successful, cured existence on Earth, I very honestly explained why, beyond reiterating my economic constraints:

I’ve long maintained a therapist of my own. 

The fellow, of voice only, has lived in my frontal cortex for pretty much most of my life.  He has no actual name, but I guess he’s what Disney’s Jiminy Cricket would have referred to as my Conscience.  That’s the built-in guide that little song from Pinocchio says you’re supposed to be equipped with.  Mine most blessedly has.

MC (my conscience) may not have always won out over the course.  Like during my early life as a fat pre-adolescent reaching for the second devil’s food donut in the Entenmann’s box, alone in the kitchen with it.  But even back in those years, conversations with MC both short and long, over walks to school, car rides, strolls through the downstairs courtyard beneath our apartment, strolls up and down our block in our earliest suburban times, not one of those aimless childhood moments alone was without the critical companionship and time spent with the therapist no price could acquire.

I guess my mother, for all her sophistication, my aunt and uncle, for all their pragmatic intolerance, kind of set me up right where the internal head gear device was concerned. I knew how to talk to myself, how to address my thoughts, how to intellectualize my fears and disturbances.

Usually, it came down to a puzzling chess match.  My mom, in my earliest acquaintance with her, was an alcoholic, classified as the “functional” kind.  That means that she’s capable of being the office-working, ever-present superhero everyone knows and relies upon each day.  But she’ll also find the down time she needs to get pounded off her ass, stumble home stinkers and f@#k up everyone’s night.  If my formative life amounted to an uncountable battery of sporadic f@#kd-up nights, that didn’t even really infringe on my bedtime, how bad could my life have been..?

Fact is, it could have all been much worse if I’d not had in-residence the honorable MC, or acting Analyst I’d installed at an age too young to chart.

I may have been four or five when these comforting one-on-one silent conversations in my mind first commenced.  I don’t know where I’d have been without them.  And the fact is, that’s one fear I never had to maintain.  “MC” was always there.

At age four, for example, as the day wound down in Class K-2 at P.S. 203 in Springfield Gardens, while Mrs. Sachs, our matronly teacher implored us to begin putting all our toys and crayons away, I was, while doing so, as others rapped with their classmates, in a strategy session with my mental health professional over how I’d best respond later this evening, when my mother would predictably arrive home from work an hour later than usual, falling over herself, reeking of scotch and ready to strike out at my aunt.  I had to steel myself on keeping cool inside. “Remember…..it’s just gonna be a night…Be solid and get through it.  Hold your breath when she embraces you if you can’t stand the smell…”  Good tip. 

As a conscience, MC worked pretty damn hard every day, and so did I, as a patient.  In most ways, it was everything effective therapy is supposed to be.  If I flunked a math test for example, and left school that day in the fifth grade suicidal, over the slow journey home, I asked myself in-session, “So why did you really flunk this test..?  Is it because you can’t learn..? Is it because you don’t want to learn..?? Why can’t you do what every other kid in that classroom can..?  You belong there….so why can’t you..??”

Ultimately, we took it to the painful acknowledgement that my mother, in all my math hangups, took the low road of “walking me through”, by originally trying to demonstrate problem-solving with homework assistance, and then simply completing the workbook assignments for me, without as much as my verbal request.  It was just easier.  Even if I knew better.

Easier while knowing better is what the excruciating awareness of one’s crime is made of.  It’s what Watergate was in fact made of. It’s what white-collar sentences are made of.  While at age ten I wasn’t really putting all that together, I did know I was in some, at least partial way at fault in not counteracting any of this.  My only recourse were those afternoon sessions, the ones that uprighted the upside-down Wonderland I was living in.

As I recall, that Wonderland Alice was trapped in was pretty functional.  In fact, she was kind of the weirdo that didn’t belong.  As I grew up, the injustices and wrongs I either dealt with or ended up committing against myself rendered me to myself a weirdo, an outcast a lot of kids around me didn’t understand.  Usually, a kid with little patience will respond only one way to a kid he doesn’t understand: aggressively. 

So, naturally this worried grammar-school fat kid was also the beat-up, threatened persecuted kid, for all the wrong reasons.  MC didn’t cut me any slack for that either.  He reminded me that this is just something you have to live through in order to get to the next chapter in life, the one where I’d be a fun-loving, girl-dating, tall, skinny, hot-looking Shaun Cassidy in high school, all hair and denim, chilling out on Camaro hoods. 

Ten years out of fifth grade, I was a wretched, skinny little alienated nebbitz of a disenchanted college kid, with no prospects, roaming home from my part-time supermarket job to yet our third, spare little apartment, once again deep in strategy over how I’d deal with my life-long roommate of more than ten years, my mother.  Things were of course different now.  She didn’t return home from work drunk all that much.  After a sober seven years, she was a little more tempered after time spent on the wagon.  She waited ‘til she got home to get slammed.  But if all those same structures were in place, so was my life-long therapist, the reliable MC.  What the hell would he have cost me by now if he were a human being..??

And we weren’t limited to life’s larger confrontations, either.  Sometimes I just needed a reminder not to spend that extra five dollars when I could wait and get whatever it was for three.  Or maybe an alert to mind the light at the corner when the cars are speeding by.  It may have been a reminder that the VCR it looked like we were finally going to scrounge up the $400 for was just not going to happen this time around, and that there’s still too much to be grateful for.  Maybe it was a reminder at age eleven that while I was really looking forward to going to the new Woody Allen movie on Sunday, and then my mom asks me if we could sit this one out today because she’s just not feeling too well, I need to just let it go and appreciate all that I have anyway.   MC never really steered me wrong.

In fact, he only steered my wrong when I slammed the door in his face and avoided him. Sure enough, it happened, somewhere in my thirties.  That was around the time I was too neglectful to accept my self-neglect.  That’s around the time the panic attacks and autoimmune problems moved in.  I would, in demonically possessed fashion find myself dashing up the block, ducking into phone booths (there were still a good many around) not to make a phone call, as I had few if anyone I could open up to about this kind of emotional emergency, but just to quietly cry a good five minutes of tears.  I hadn’t cried since I was ten. How could I articulate this crisis to anyone..? I couldn’t relate it to myself…

Before all the imbalances set me off, I was starting to recognize a frightening detachment from family members I loved and respected.  People I’d not regularly visited since teenhood. I’d kept no friends other than some long-timers who were emerging after years to appear self-dangerously disturbed.  It all led to an isolation I could no longer bear to sort out.  MC and I parted ways.

But alas, we would re-unite just a few years later or less.  I had to re-learn how to hear and acknowledge him, and embrace what was now more uncomfortable than ever.  MC has talked me through repairing my body, my self-courage, and changes in my life that just kind of had to happen, like dealing with job transition, courtship and marriage, re-locating to a new flat.  Not necessarily life’s most stunning accomplishments, but they were certainly mine.

The most challenging times in our professional relationship are probably those I face today.  Middle age is a frightening tightrope.  It is in too many ways a jaywalked crossing of a near-fatal traffic intersection at rush hour, with no lights. MC has no need nor any room to cut me any slack now more than ever.  And yet, he remains the wiser of us.

In my most fearsome pockets, he will be there not to excoriate, but to calm me, to remind me that in a world of what appears a population alienating, an economy threatening, and a human odometer doomed to disrepair and incapacity one day despite every advanced health awareness set in place, nutrition, exercise, constant flossing and the like, I am well and stronger beyond my greatest fears. 

And when we ascend from the subway and I make it to work, as I approach the entrance, as the case has been since childhood, I never hear MC utter the phrase, “we have to stop for today’.  I’m usually the one to call an end to the session.  I’m the one with other appointments.  He’s earned himself a rightful nap.

 

Noah F.

 

 

 

 

When The Family Moved In....

 

It was 1979.  I was all of eleven and just about ready to give up on prime-time TV after the long decay and departure of one of my most relied-upon weekly tube visits:  All In The Family.  The show basically signed itself off that spring, allegedly to return as Archie Bunker’s Place, the focus on Archie’s new identity as tavern owner, and the adventures within.  TV viewers one and all by this time well knew the ills of “shark-jumping”, as demonstrated by Garry Marshall’s Happy Days two seasons earlier.  Far as I was concerned, All In The Family went much further off the cliff in its final two seasons.

You wouldn’t be able to tell the late, great creator Norman Lear that.  To his insistence, the attempted rape on Edith Bunker, the cruel, tragic street death of her friend the cross-dressing Beverly LaSalle, Archie’s face-to-face encounter with lesbianism, the departure of Mike & Gloria and their subsequently failed marriage, the arrival and residence of Edith’s ten-year old niece Stephanie, and Archie’s struggle in realizing his dream as saloon owner were all no less than relevant and necessary life structures completely germane to the existence of our extended family.   Somehow, at my formidable and media-advanced age of eleven, I was more inclined to perceive it as a corporate television network desperation strategy.  The point is, Carroll O’Connor, who spent the duration of the show’s run in publicly reported walkoff-threat stalemate, was by 1979 prepared to continue when every other original cast member was in split mode.

I had no misconceptions about the fact that the pending Sunday night watered-down all-new Archie recipe would not replace the Saturday night uproar that welded my characteristically warring family for thirty minutes each week around the ’62 black-n-white Zenith for a solid few years at least.  But something much more important was about to happen, anyway.

It was announced that fall that all episodes of All In The Family were about to roll out in nightly strip syndication, meaning Channel 5, six nights a week at 7:30pm, and for good measure 11pm Sunday nights, right before The David Susskind Show.  I couldn’t believe it,  But I wasn’t exactly stunned.

I long knew about the gift of strip syndication.  It was the stuff of my earliest TV awareness.  The Lucy Show, The Andy Griffith Show, Petticoat Junction, My Three Sons…..Basically every show my kitten eyes glimpsed in network departure at first were now ubiquitous décor.  A little ABC show I’d been introduced to called The Odd Couple was now this hot 11PM weeknight thing on Channel 11.  It’s like the sandwich meat you always liked for occasional lunch now becoming a frequent condiment spread for other meals.  Every day of the week.

And now that dinner treat was All In The Family.  I was quite elated. This was around the time that I had little or nothing to look forward to sitcom-wise in prime time. 8PM meant lots of time for homework after dinner, if none of my favorite movies were on. The only TV I really kind of leaned on was anything prior to 8PM, which were those independent-channel prior-network sitcom reruns. Nothing bad about The Honeymooners, The Odd Couple or The Dick Van Dyke Show, even if I could recite half the episodes (or all of them) like favorite songs.  But that’s kind of the idea behind strip syndication, believe it or not.  It’s a reunion with the iconic TV treats you remember best…..kind of like favorite songs on the radio.  Music stations have “play lists”, that strategically program songs they know their listeners cherish most and know best.  TV stations did this with sitcom reruns. 

Trouble was, those Andy Griffith, My Three Sons and The Brady Bunch episodes were getting a little too monotonous, to the point where you wanted to play an obnoxious round of Mystery Science Theater 2000 with them to break the excruciating boredom.  When you have the urge to begin vandalizing the greats, that’s bad news.

Life breathed its way in the door when All In The Family arrived.  While in fact the show’s long run was being re-lived each weekday on CBS for the past four years, it was not at such a highly accessible viewing hour.  This new implant would, certainly in the New York-New Jersey region, if not nationwide, transplant this already-renown TV icon into the infinite lexicon.

It probably started out that way.  Anyone with any enjoyable familiarity with the show would be reuniting fondly on a nightly basis.  In my home, we certainly did.  For the first time ever I could have dinner along with the best act of the evening, and properly attack the homework before bedtime.  Much of the tri-state must have agreed, because the 7:30 time slot held for at least a good three years or more.

By year three however, the best act in the house kind of lost something.  With that kind of rigid repetition, it sort of makes sense.  Not too many comedies of limited run can withstand that kind of ubiquity.  The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy, known for their rooted Commedia-Del-Arte composition, packages like The Three Stooges or Laurel & Hardy will likely play that way through the next millennium or more.  All In The Family, as a sitcom of a more modern age, is a different story.

The show began it’s run in 1971.  The characterizations were still very pre-formed, and the composite on the screen was just that:  A trial run with promise.  That weird experiment of a show, a four-piece band that hadn’t quite found their sound or synergy yet, was in it’s first ten episodes little more than an odd comic depiction of a foregone sociopolitically heated period.  While Norman Lear was intent upon getting this hot commentary on the air in its time, no network would take a chance until CBS saw the promise in its domestic humor, just a few years after the holocaust of the 1960s, and agreed to put this now-comic cartoon strip of a period depiction on the air.

In the early seventies, this had its place. It was more or less in context.  Now, flashing onto TV screens every full-series go-round (off-network rerun cycles in those days mostly ran chronologically..), in a world full of dinner hour The Muppet Show, Family Feud, Entertainment Tonight, and anything else uber-80s, we had these grainy-orange, color-faded tape remnants of a foolish era, when youth resignation ruled.  It was the equivalent of playing your folks’ old early Donovan or Joan Baez worn-out LPs on your little portable suitcase-styled phonograph each night, those acoustic little whispers beneath the snap-crackle-and-pop of scratched vinyl.

Those historic artifacts of 1971, appreciable in their own right as such, were now, to no one’s fault, badly out of place.  A modern art exhibit probably wouldn’t fare all that well to an arts crowd in the concourse of a shopping mall.  Yet this was what the delicate history of one of television’s most pivotal contributions to our modern culture was now reduced to.  If you saw your favorite ballad on the roster of a jukebox inside a raucous barroom with a TV and video games blaring deafeningly, would you drop a quarter and play your song..? Probably not, if you had any interest in listening to it.  The same kind of justice was now being robbed of one of TV history’s great early foundations.

The gift in the strip syndication of All In The Family nonetheless however, was the blessed installment of some of those brilliant and perennial verbal exchanges and misguided insights of ironic brilliance into our daily and nightly lives, almost something ecumenical, a spiritual offering.  And every so often, my folks and I would in fact find ourselves wrapped around the TV together when one of those old flickers were before us, and we’d roar together like never before.  The lesson just might have been that life itself, the one we have to live, is bigger and more consuming than a brilliant little sitcom we look forward to once a week.  But we can instead find time throughout our struggled week to recall that wit, and mine that laughter.

Even the ancient aspect of those obtuse early episodes trapped in historic time end up maintaining kind of a Warhol-exhibit quality that one can appreciate from some Lichtenstein-esque standpoint.  I long certainly have.  It’s kind of like the TV commercials and preserved station continuity captures randomly uploaded on YouTube.  I’ll visit those precious historic treasures often.  And I’ve been predictably asked by some, just what is the allure in all that old junk, anyway…?

I’ll never be able to answer that one, and won’t, for one very simple reason.  You can’t explain art.  But when it plays in the middle of a shopping mall concourse, I’m pretty sure that’s where I’ll be.

Noah F.

 

 

 

Infomerzak

          📺

Much like any generation, there’s one amongst us today that pines for the particular décor of an identifiable past, the garish well taken for granted for so long, so long ago.  Then, one day, up comes a still image or a preserved video capture on YouTube or Facebook of that inescapable icon we’ve managed to erase from our memory for the last forty-five years, and *bang..!*……we’re back in senior year, or maybe middle school…..perhaps we’re square into that eve of the math test in the fifth grade……all provoked by a the long forgotten sound or image we’d never forget.   And there’s that moment…..the one that teaches or reminds us of the gratitude of time and perseverance….how far we’ve come from that foolish little anguished night…….or how blessed we are to suddenly feel as empowered as were on senior week in high school…..or the day after we got through that Regents Exam in the eleventh grade.

And perhaps we owe it all to a television commercial.

Or maybe some captured, unabridged spot break off the local TV station you watched that very week, that very day, that someone miraculously, astoundingly preserved and benevolently shared on YouTube for all to admire.

But wherefore art the admiration in this once-denounced video litter..?  Even as young teens, in real time as it were, we knew this ubiquitous flicker on our bedroom black-n-whites to be disparageable trash.  And there was no getting away from it.  Every day, every weekend, every same interval, there it was, the same damn Odd Couple rerun promo with the same damn clip we all knew by heart, the same damn trade school promo filmed in 1969 and running for the past fifteen years daily, the same damn spot for Automobile Club of America with that actor screaming “Did ya’ have to be that good…?!?!?”

Those sights and sounds were the crushing classmate in our lives, the one that cheerily trailed us every single day, the one we tossed off disinterested, with almost embarrassed disrespect. 

Forty or more years hence, for a good many of us, it’s now our crush.

It’s the Professor Higgins syndrome, pure and simple.  We’ve become accustomed to that face.  The one that hounded our awareness every day, reminded us it was time for school, time for homework, Friday night at last, suppertime…

And the fact is, it could be any historic fixture sprouted on that world-wide-web-scouring-tablet.  The one that only we know the way we know it. A thirty second advertisement, a little local station promo from our hometown…

Maybe even an infomercial…

Why not..?? Those are TV shows, too..!  On radio, now more than ever.  As industrial as their design and intention might be from the outset, the standard ubiquity of those consuming presentations have by now rendered themselves just as recall-and-appreciation-worthy of some of our favorite old sitcom reruns.  They do in fact have channels devoted strictly to exclusive product informercials just about all day and night.  They’re not about to break format for anything.  If heaven forbid a national crisis or incident were to summon all news channels to attention, The Kitchen Squasher infomercial will be playing on and acting natural, for all the glued viewers indulging in their news blackouts.

Infomercials, as the title was coined somewhere in the late 1980s and cemented in the 90’s, compose a genre that broke ground over forty years ago, in the pioneer days of public-access cable television. When product sales and consumer response began to skyrocket, television stations, network flagships in top markets accepted the fact that programming old movies and even any leased first-run syndie fare would never turn around as much revenue as an infomercial time-buyer laying down some good hard green for an acre of air time in the middle of the night.  Farewell to Kirk Douglas at 3AM on Channel 2 once and for all.  Hello to the “Kernel Cooker” for an hour….followed by “The Best of The Hollywood Palace” for thirty minutes…..then maybe the “Cap Crusher” demonstration show, with that guy that drops the bottle every time……..that’s because it’s the same damn half hour show every single night…!  But last night it was at 1:30.  Tonight it’s at 3:30.   Tomorrow it might be on at 2.  Who’s to say..?  Is anyone actually directing the programming of these things..?  Whatever happened to “audience flow”..??

That went the same direction veered by newsprint.  Over-the-air television has succumbed to overnight flea-markethood. It is today one huge video airbnb. 

Disparage it some of us will, lament the absence of that huge, overnight mall of obnoxious record-offer-spot-break-disrupted movies we shall.  We’ll also become fixated in the absence of anything else, and then…?

They become nostalgia.  Our nostalgia. 

Did I ever, as a young bachelor of twenty-four in the early 1990s, indulging in the solitude of my new little flat, arriving home after work past midnight, with no VCR, but simply my treasured five-inch-screen black-&-white, with no recourse before me but the least-objectionable presentation of the Super Sweeper half hour ever imagine that I’d now face a nostalgic yearning to see it again..?   What’s worse….I’m ready to go onto YouTube and look for it.

The radio side of things bears it’s own history with these program formats.  I was just a rookie on the control room scene when these slick little broadcast pageants began to seed, replacing in many cases the extensive public-affairs presentations the small stations couldn’t really afford to front, and the airtime traditional Tabernacles and Ministries couldn’t afford on Sunday mornings anymore.  Back then, this sort of thing was pretty new stuff, and a welcome cache of business clients.  To me back then, it was all in a day’s work………the sound of being on the job.

A few of those single, recognizable moderator-and-expert spokesperson half hours or more must have done well for the presenters, because those very half-hour shows, or “blocks’ as they’re respectfully termed would soon sprout in more locations on the broadcast schedule. Sometimes a few in one day.  It’s just another form of spot advertising, and it’s likely an extremely effective one.

Is it possible that some late-night listener, wracked with insomnia, with nothing but a pitch black bedroom, a glowing digital clock flickering away the sleepless night, and a spirited discussion between two nondescript voices about some amazing health-restoring product can be a gateway for purchase persuasion..?  Much like TV, whether those discussionists are celebs or not, they become the viewer’s trusted companions.  Not like the angry Judge Judy or judgmental Dr. Phil, but rather the familiar friends whose immensely predictable conversations we can relax and find solace in each night. Almost like a favorite movie with that unforgettable scene we can always watch…..or a hit song that’s found it’s comfort in the couch of our mind.  No political fights, no scary weather reports.  Just a trip to that faraway holodeck known as………The Informercial.

And back then..? It must have been good.  Especially if some of us can be quite that secretly nostalgic for those thirty-plus-year-old little presentations now.  But unless you literally rolled tape on that obscure little TV or radio half hour and kept it forever, good luck reuniting.  Of course, I’m not necessarily unable to implement my best recall, the kind that blocks my memory of where I left my phone an hour ago, to recall note-for-note the industrial production music that opened that little show I’d hear at work each Sunday night around nine-thirty when I was young, free, and without care of where I’d be at middle age. And a fine and cherished memory it is.

Only an elder acquaintance of mine who long ago minded the front end of an urban supermarket day after volatile day in her cash-strapped youth might understand. With empowered excitement, she one day notified me, albeit buried in her daily professional crises, that she stumbled upon that song……that very piece, the obscure Muzak arrangement that played regularly over the store P.A. during her shift in the mid 1980’s.  She found it suddenly on YouTube one day and her “whole world stopped”. According to her report, she was (and I’m paraphrasing..) reborn.

Resigned over the reality of so much these days, the one wish I don’t naively hold is that of locating the audio of those long-gone infomercials of my upward-gazed youth. No matter what’s on today, nothing’s quite like the vintage stuff.  In comparative truth, they’re probably indiscernable, and for all I know that vintage is still playing somewhere, and wallpapering the ears of some young impressionable lad such as I.  I don’t know him, but if that’s the case, it’s a bond well shared.

Indeed, there’s hope for all of us.

 

Noah F.

My Friend Bea

 

Ask me what a friend is, and I can’t promise the answer you’ll want.  To me, a friend is someone that will tolerate you when they absolutely can’t or shouldn’t. and insist at 3AM that it’s no problem at all.  I’ve been that friend to some once or twice, and I had to spend some time afterwards wondering why I was.

Is it some kind of sub-level codependency of some sort…? Or is it something greater..? Is it the need to play martyr to escape our own callings..?  In any event, in a lot of cases, it’s not necesssarily all bad.  In fact, we just might find ourselves paying honor to those friends in need who in-turn by nature of themselves become friends in our need.  It’s just possible that The Man Upstairs designed it just that way.  It’s not perfect, of course.  But the 12-step Codependency Family and Recovery Group industry wouldn’t be the factory that it and its book sales and lecture circuits and retreats are today.  It’s the fuel of our ecosystem.

Sometimes though, the primitive ecosystem is the creature itself.  As a child, like so many of us, I lived in that very ecosystem.  And it was fascinating.

I didn’t have “young” elders.  Mine were all middle age or more and grew up in that wonderful old nightmare called The Great Depression, followed by The War, followed by the angry 1950s, etc, etc..  They saw it all.   My mother was for much of her life a desperate, functioning alcoholic forced in motherhood to straighten out once and for all.  When I hit thirteen, it looked like it was actually happening.  She’d been dry nearly a year, after a few years of heavy AA participation. 

My ailing uncle and aunt, my mom’s sister-in-law of some decades, now lived in Florida.  Not the swiftest move on their part, since all their kids and family lived in Queens, near us. 

My aunt didn’t really have that many close friends, but plenty of acquaintances.  Most of them were long-time ones as neighboring couples in fifties Queens suburbia during the Ike Era.  Now they were all rich retirees in sprawling palms, just an hour’s drive from one another.  My uncle was ill with worsening PSP at the time, unable to engage with others.  But there’d still be polite visitors.  It was only right.  For awhile.

One of these folks was a lady I’d heard about for years, since early childhood, but never got around to meeting.  Her name was Bea.  I thought it was “Bee” like from Mayberry R.F.D., but no, more like Beatrice.  The long-time story about Bea was that she drank heavily.  My mom had a bender now and then, but hers were more sporadic.  Bea was well older, rich with no responsibilities, and wasted most of the time.  It wasn’t really something I spent time thinking about, though when I finally met her and her husband of thirty years, it did get me wondering.

On a visit to Florida, to my aunt and uncle’s new expansive condo (it looked like the set of an Aaron Spelling nighttime drama, literally), we rode from Snapper Village to Miami Springs for dinner at Bea and Gary’s home.  Their home was an honest-to-God movie set out of the late 1950s.  I thought I was walking into a museum.  Where were the velvet admission ropes…??

The living room was too immaculate to enter.  We all sat in the equally as exquisite Florida Room.  You can’t have a house in Florida without a Florida Room.

That living room was a piece, alright.  Shame this was long before digital smart phone photos.  All that room was missing was Donna Reed.  In 1979.  On the couch sat a tiny, hand-woven pillow with the inscription, “To Have A Friend, You Must Be One”.

Bea was predictably Judy Garland to her mansion.  A five-foot waif, with a jet black coif bigger than herself, tilting around incomprehensively and precariously, with a huge splashing goblet that never went empty.   She was relatively tame, gracious, talkative as far as muttering and mumbling went, and for the condition she was in, she held it together pretty well. I was betting she’d collapse before evening’s end.  My mom and her niece weren’t exactly known for holding it down so well.  Bea on the other hand was a visible pro.

Bea and Gary were an object of troubling curiosity.  What was their thing, anyway…?  What did they do..?  Here was this quiet, soft spoken retired pilot, and his afflicted wife.  They must have had extensive and lucratively paid staff.  Our dinner was what White House visits were made of.  Was Gary a former pilot or a U.S. Senator..??  Gold silverware..!

It was later on of course, through my mother’s inquiries to my aunt, that I’d learn of some of the behind-closed-doors-history of Bea and Gary.  Some domestic physical response from time to time was not out of the question, and at one time explained Bea’s bandaged eye. 

It may be no surprise that folks existing as such did not seek emotional or supportive refuge in others, and as a result didn’t engage too much in the social carnival of mah-jongg and shuffleboard retirees.  Gary looked oddly good for his age, if stout, with a 1959 slick as black as his wife’s.  I don’t think he touched a drop.

But an alcoholic in-progress needs a sounding board, someone to be heard by, as in a bar, on a train, plane, ball game, etc.   Those trapped at home, like Bea, made use of the phone. And she had one reliable, captive ear:  My aunt.

Those phone calls from hour-away neighbor Bea rang nightly around midnight, muttering jibberishly about some movie that was on Channel 4 and are-you-watching..?  Maybe about some cars driving loudly down the road, or perhaps wondering if my aunt got home alright, my aunt unavoidably countering with “Bea….we weren’t out tonight”…

But Bea muttered about anything and everything for at least an hour, and it’s a good thing my aunt didn’t have to be up early.  She also didn’t know what to do about this.  Good thing my mother in recovery was around to respond to her dilemma.

“She’s an alcoholic..!  What are you expecting from her..?!?  If he doesn’t ger her into treatment, she’ll be dead…”

Meanwhile the phone visits went on quite regularly.  

In a discussion with my mom about something else entirely, my aunt offered a point that was made in a conversation with Bea one late night….something about bug season, and my aunt said “Oh that’s right……..my friend Bea was telling me…”

My mother found that validation of a crippled alcoholic absolutely outrageous, and she told her sister, the aunt on my mom’s side, all about it.  Her sister was the first line of gossip defense against the U.K.-born sister-in-law they’d had reservations about since they were all teenagers during the war when I wasn’t even born.   I just knew them as old gossip hens. Buck buck.

“Do you believe her…?!? My Friend Bea…!” My mother roared her trademark smug laugh into the phone.  A day later, her sister-in-law would be getting the smug laugh about some insulting thing her sister said to her.  These family triangles were pretty isosceles.

A few years later, when my uncle became immobile with his illness, and he and my aunt moved back to an apartment near us, in a comparatively swanky Queens condo, word was Bea was coming to stay for about a week.  I was about fifteen and really had little thought about the matter, but got to hear my mom’s nightly analysis on what a deadly disaster this could be.

“She’s in their apartment and drunk constantly……she’ll fall over and drop dead..! And then what…?!?!”  She tried to explain that danger to my aunt.  My uncle, eldest brother and greatest life-long enemy to my mother, in his incoherent, decaying growl uttered to her one afternoon….”It’s none o’ ya’ business…!

I was treated to a three hour one-woman performance at home that night, depicting how this bastard had continuously to this day ruined her life. Hour three was just as good as hour one.  No repeats.  I’d rather have caught Letterman that night, but…

Even if some kind of semi-cathartic time was had by all over the years in some way, a year or two later we learned that Bea had passed.  There was little or no discussion of her and their association with her afterward.  My mom upon hearing the news, intoned to me, “not a surprise..”   My mother would lose her own battle of recovery four years later.

It was in that brief several-year time though, that Bea was a name we never really stopped hearing.  Kind of like Koch or Brezhnev in newscasts, only it was Bea in our lives.  She was this figure of reference that served as a default cast member, a comic relief, a buffer, a non-sequitur, something historic, a piece of furniture perhaps.  And in all that, she did in fact offer something everyone in my family needed.  And probably got what she sought in return.  I don’t know where that tiny pillow went, the one that read “To Have A Friend, You Must Be One”.  But when that living room gets enshrined at the Smithsonian, that pillow damn well better be there.  If it’s not, no one will know whose living room it was.  

Noah F.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Take Two Sacraments and Call Me In The Morning...

 

Everyone has their favorite Christmas or holiday episode of some old TV series.  Almost every domestic situation comedy in the last sixty years has churned out one or more.  Like All In The Family.

Probably one of their best, most thought provoking episodes involved the violent crime death of Edith’s transvestite friend Beverly LaSalle. Beverly was introduced as a social force against the compromising Archie, and was such a hit with the audience, the character would recur occasionally.  When ratings wars got dire by 1977, Norman Lear and the AITF team did what they had to do.  Rationalize it any way you’d like, as in Movement Toward Social Awareness, but prime-time commercial television series episodes involving direct encounters with rapists, lesbians, and street murders of professional cross-dressers can only stem from one network programming office mandate: Get Ratings or Get Cancelled.

Even then, like no other, All In The Family handled these fragile matters with the utmost exquisitry in writing. If it’s intelligent, it’s acceptable, as it was in this 1977 holiday episode. After a delightful return visit, on a walk to the subway, Beverly is killed in a street mugging. The two-parter concerns Edith’s inability to regain her faith in God upon the merciless and pointless death of a friend for whom she’d developed a wonderful affection.  No one knew how to restore the faith of this once-devout woman who now openly denounced prayer.  It was only her notably agnostic son-in-law Michael, who could command her attention long enough to explain that her faith was responsible for the faith and belief held by the entire family.  Well in character, he did not advocate for the Power of God as healer, protector and Almighty.  Actor Barnard Hughes was not dispatched as the recurring, consulting Father Majesky for this one.

The takeaway message was of course about the mortal value and purpose of prayer. Few will bother to decompose the whole thing enough intellectually at any time, though you certainly can.  If that became a trend though, it might threaten the Global Religious Industrial Complex, and let’s just say that no one’s been too down on the health deficits of Coca Cola over the years to put it out of business

I myself was raised in a semi-agnostic home.  Jewish intellectual graduates of the Depression Era.  My uncle was the devout templegoer.  My mother was some years younger, a youth of the early 1950s who doubted and questioned everything from Nixon to cake ingredients.  Read every political science book on the shelf and saw things for what they were. 

 Her faith veered toward the sort I laid out in an essay awhile back called “We Only Pray In The Car”.  Much like a friend or relative that’s proven by their presence when really needed, so is God.  Beyond that, her take on religion was professedly Marxian.

It all kind of fit in with our shortage of personal funds in my childhood.  My mother’s bank account wasn’t big enough to subscribe us to a local synagogue.  So the whole formalized high-holy-day thing kind of left us somewhat disqualified. We could still make and eat latkes.  There was no membership charge for that.

My own relationship with prayer and religion was not really a conscious one until middle age rolled around.  Certainly, a semi-agnostic upbringing in a Zionist-supportive household can leave a growing child confused.  But much like a praying motorist desperate for a parking space ten minutes to an appointment, I knew the critical aspects of theology.

That said, I haven’t prayed for anything in years.  I’ve been mindful never to do so. My frequent daily prayers are strictly ones of thanks and gratitude, for the peace, comfort and safety with which I’ve been blessed on even my most stressed-out day.  A late, great older friend of mine used to thank the Lord “for my aches and pains”, stating her gratitude for being able to know she was still whole. Now there was a valuable friend.

Since my arrival at the fifty-yard line, my purpose in prayer has been almost exclusively the same.  I don’t pray for miracles.  I can’t say that reflexive flight-or-fight reaction won’t force me into a state of sudden desperate plea to God when my mobile phone lapses into momentary shutdown, or I’m running late and can’t be sure if the Metrocard vendor is working.  But those are temporary emotionally reflexive actions.  Miracles are not attainable upon request.

If they are, they’d better be pretty monumental Hallmark Movie-worthy ones.  I have never believed in changing a force of nature by divine request.  The fierce sinus headache I endured four weeks ago was tempered by a good strong pain reliever, meditation, and yes, prayer. Prayers of gratitude for the strength with which I’ve been endowed.

The platform here is that any prayer of request had better be important. One of the reasons behind this again comes from a semi-agnostic intellectual argument background.  Even Edith Bunker had to come to terms with the fact that prayer is just the exercise of sitting in a pew in an age-old structure, wishing in blindered futility. The kind that makes you feel good when you’re powerless and it’s all out of control.

It was that very awareness that ushered me home just the other night, as I struggled to “say a prayer” for a stranger.  On a dark, late-night walk home down the boulevard, a tall, older-looking (but admittedly nowadays probably well younger than I) man approached me on a barren sidewalk and asked me if I spoke English.  Thinking this guy might be delusional or dangerous, I stepped more than a few feet away from him and faced him, saying yes.  He began to explain that he was a veteran, and how he was destitute and politely, eloquently made what sounded almost like a corporate pitch for some money.  Having more than once in my lifetime been a target of street crime, I was too concentrated on my surroundings, scoping for any other attack figures in zone, and politely declined to help, as the fellow sadly marched away.

Walking home, naturally, I chided myself for my bourgeois response, which in fact only appeared as such for reasons of personal safety.  Which may have qualified as the same thing.

Trapped in such a moment, it’s too complex to question. So I figured I’d bandage my injured conscience with a prayer for the fellow.  Such noble charity of soul did not help either one of us.

It forced me into that difficult question that only happens not when I’m peering down to the busy expressway from the overpass, saying a prayer for some random, unknown kid in a yellow cab heading home with his mom, as I might have been four decades ago, fearful of my exams tomorrow, my permanent record, my mom’s emotional state, and the like, but rather when I decide to repair my decline from a poor one’s direct plea with a prayer for their rehabilitation.  

Perhaps a venture into greater theological reading and study will see me through this brief labyrinth, or better yet, the next immediate domestic matter, crisis at work, the next missed train or malfunctioning Metrocard.  Maybe my phone will pop back to life after an unexplained few-minute outage, proving that indeed God forgives me.

That’s a much easier and more convenient approach in this age of instant, electronic gratification and artificial intelligence.  There is ultimately no explaining the greater mysteries of our existence, like why some are doomed to writh, some mercifully relieved of earthly burden and some taken out suddenly with no rational explanation whatsoever.  But those of faith will always be on firm ground with the weights and measures of sacred theology.

Or to quote the immortal Redd Foxx, “…you’d be a damn fool to die of nothin…”

 

-Noah F.