My sophomore year gave me little to complain about. New high school, new friends, new image, less scorn, fewer arbitrary enemies, maybe just a little more common respect. I was taking to civilized human-beinghood pretty well. I even had a birthday coming up.
I wasn't necessarily in need of any kind of advanced celebratory day in my life around that time. I had no genuine craving for anything even fairly unattainable, and would have been equally as content had my fifteenth not been sailing along that fall. I lived with my mother at the time in a charming three-room flat, the master bedroom of which was my adopted chamber. She relegated herself to a small day bed in the outer living room, and that was our comfortable life. The place was subject to her vast knowledge of economy-chic charm, hung art, library of bookcases, vintage furniture acquired in the 1950s. I was a disciple of "retro" long before that prefix was coined out of it's prior, somewhat disrespected term, "old".
My mother, a pronounced scholar of all things literary and history, educated strictly by the self, and not by the academic foundations themselves, was once again between sources of employed income. Her situation had been a chronic puzzle for many years. A heart attack in her mid-forties landed her on the DL and on disability insurance indefinitely. What it meant was that in order to accept any kind of work going forward, regular channels wouldn't cut it. The prospective employer would have to enter into an agreement to pay "off-the-books" in some way. Remarkably, it wasn't always impossible. She did at one time, along with a contemporary of hers, land a paired office-assistant gig in a trendy ad outfit back in the early 1980s. While certain figures within prevented it from being cited a "dream job"", it was equipped with some young and intriguing fellows that made it a fulfilling, sophisticated ride.
That was until the unit changed and she and her pal got canned. After nearly a year, she'd not worked since. Her health condition was no prize, either. She lived on several heart medications, and short of the sorts of anxiety meds that composed the industrial buffet we'd all be charmed by in the nineties, the all-purpose Valium was also on her prescription list. The comic-strip-style joke I darkly coined at the time recognized that her re-fill trips to the pharmacy also included several packs of Marlboro 100's.
She also was not without that pesky near-one-hundred-pounds or more to lose. Her Rosanne-esque physical profile set the template for her self-effasive, depression-inspired humor. Most people view O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night as simply self-indulgently depressing. Our home looked upon it as Sophoclean Tragedy. Harold Pinter would have made a great next-door neighbor.
Despite all our rustic-charmed Sunday Times Book Review elegance, we had little or nothing in the bank, or shall I say my mother did. Each month on the month, we'd make the trepedacious pilgrimage to the ATM at the local bank, a few bus stops away, to affirm her disability payment's arrival into her account, just over a grand. If the emerging computer readout was a thumbs up, we breathed a sigh of relief and looked forward to a coffee-shop breakfast next door. If not, I'd be Dean Stockwell to her Kate Hepburn for a day. Either way, the forecast was predictable.
Usually, in the rare event of a non-existent payment, it was the matter of some beaurecratic several-or-less-day delay. It just wasn't a welcome sub-plot, that's all. And on the Saturday of my fifteenth birthday, that sub-plot set the tone.
We dirged our way back home, my co-star upstaging it with all the overwrought drama she could passionately emote. I had no lines. You don't need a lot of dialogue for solid drama. Just a situation. Here was a fine one, no thanks to me. All I did was get born.
She walked a flat ground as if she were trying to scale a mountain. At one point she wrenched, in a deep sulk, "I'm sorry, it's just that being destitute and penniless on your birthday is more than I can bear....", after turning to me and displaying the irony of showing me a pained attempt at a smile. I had no intent on trying to persuade her to smile, lighten up, or break her masochistic catharsis. Even I knew how good misery on the eve of a train-wreck midterm felt. I wasn't that discompassionate.
We returned home on Crisis Day, and I retired to my bedroom, on my cherished Saturday afternoon off, to indulge in what gave me some regularized solace. I did not maintain a cast of active social friends in my teen life. One older friend I'd been known to hang with was long off into his relations with some older boys on some more militant and provocative adventures at the time, and I was just as content not to be a constant part of that. I was genuinely content in my afternoon solitude, with some creative endeavors. I long maintained a growing set of Fisher-Price action-adventure figurines and accessories at the time, vehicles, scenery and the like. It provided me with the sets and cast I needed to compose, block and portray various dramas and comedies I'd cooked up all the time. Today I'd get back to that, with some WNEW-FM on the clock radio across the room.
But adjourning to that today wouldn't be quite as approachable. Unlike the mandate of exam-cramming or homework completion, I had an emotional mother in the next room. I couldn't exactly pre-empt the day's drama from my mind with the House Crisis upon us. At the same time though, there wasn't anything I'd be able to say or offer to her in consolation, other than the assurance that I was having a fine old birthday Saturday, and there was no need to maintain any sense of despondence over the whole applied juxtaposition. Of course, even that bore no affect on the matter. So, I did what I did most effectively and dutifully. I retired to my chamber and worried.
My mother was characterized, at least to me, by her mood swings. She could really be the life of the party on a lot of occasions, for a lot of people. But on any given day, I could arrive home to find her mentally and emotionally flatlined. Never so much so that she couldn't adequately express her misery with advanced quotes from the works of James, Bronte or Wharton. It didn't even mean that she wouldn't end up talking through her misery with a friend or relative later that day and relying on some riotous punch line from Neil Simon or Mel Brooks and howling at self-propelled reflexive laughter with it. But none of this would serve to disrespect the order of the day.
It remains to be seen if my mother indeed, a decade or more later, would have been a candidate for the certified clinical depressionhood that authorized the kind of indulgence known to the likes of the late Elizabeth Wurtzel, and her many era disciples. In sorting it all out decades later, to this day I still genuinely doubt it. I never forgot that exchange from the film adaptation of The Odd Couple:
Felix: "I hate me.....O boy, do I hate me...."
Oscar: "You..?! You love you..! You think no one has any problems but you....!"
If it wasn't articulated in our outdoor pilgrimages on weekend mornings, it was certainly the design of my weekly thought balloon.
The birthday at hand was not without my mother's reluctant resolve to compose what was at the time my favorite cuisine for supper that night. A rare creation of sweet-n-sour chicken, made with jarred preserves. Impeccable. I'd ultimately grab a nap in my quarters, awaking later on to immediate family and a few friends arriving for a collective dinner. That really touched things up, and got my mom kind of brightened up. The flea-marketing friends of ours procured for me a fabulous relic for my room: a working saloon Rheingold-logo wall clock, complete with a colored overhead lamp. We pounded in a nail and mounted it. Gorgeous. In my darkened room that night, it glowed mightily, while I gazed on my G.E. portable at the CBS presentation of a theatrical drama I dug years earlier, My Bodyguard, while our company caroused in the drawing room. For a fifteenth ring-in, it was one solid time.
And that was more than I could have asked for on any given birthday. To be sure, I have been the honored guest over my time for many a solemn commemoration, dinners and such, at the behest of many precious friends. I've long come to know my participation and acceptance of such less as an indulgence to myself and much more as a reflexive offering to them, as an extension of a much more valuable appreciation of mine for their presence in my life, one which I've never taken for granted within my capability. The day, throughout my life has never, in spite of any matter at hand, been lacking in some level of acknowlegded honor, and it keeps me the most blessed soul I know.
But for just that reason and all the more, my favorite birthday remains the one spent solemnly, without too much pomp and circumstance if at all, simply in a state of gratitude often hard to surpass the one I maintain every day. A time-out with my beloved perhaps, a new ancient book off a dusty thrift-shop shelf, and a good, well-lit seat on a long subway ride home with an undemanding bladder is a gift only a man of my vintage will treasure. Too much at once.
N.F
