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
