Infomerzak

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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.

 

 

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.