That first breeze of late August was a reminder of something I was for the first time in my life genuinely anticipating: The new school year. In 1979, I'd be entering Junior High School, and based on a tour my sixth-grade class was treated to months before, I was more than ready for this. It looked like the academic proscenium was finally stepping up to my sophisticated standards. In a post-war-era-founded schoolhouse a block away from the grammar one of the same vintage, genuine interiors that would render no Norman Rockwell portrait all that impressive, I saw the image of upperclassman maturity. Hallway lockers, individual desks, a front lobby with a pay phone and men's and women's restrooms. Not "girls" and "boys", mind you. This place meant business. It was my kind of scene. For a kid of eleven, I was just as much an alien from Ork amongst my peers. I wanted to hang with the grownups. Those people knew how to have a good conversation.
Good conversation was the most significant, and maybe the healthiest part of my diet when I was growing up. I was surrounded by it constantly and at times encouraged to engage in it. My mother always had an opinion and the need to express it. And she wasn't afraid to secretly share with her son her acerbic disdain for interpersonal environments unconducive. If the family was getting together at her niece's place or my aunt's on a Sunday afternoon, she'd try and toss out a thought about some article she just read in the Times magazine. It would fall flat in a room of resigned visitors, met only with the roar of the NFL crowd on the Trinitron. She would look at me with that sinister glow and whisper to me....."they don't read books..."
Those were family Sundays. The other kind were ones spent with her friends, far away from the Great Neck suburbs. The Village. Mercer Street. In some ways, the geographic was all you needed to know.
It was in a fantasically expensive one-bedroom that my mom's ex-husband lived. I never knew this man during their marriage, which existed and expired well before my arrival on Earth. I was the product of something less lasting, a relationship my mom shared with a younger man around the time of her separation. The mid-1960s was no time for this kind of personal liberation. Popular media would not sympathetically endorse that kind of departure beyond a potboiler like Kazan's The Arrangment, which meant that if you're going to have that kind of relationship acceptably, it had better contain Mia Farrow. During a borough traffic jam, I was almost born in the cab on the way home from the divorce.
Needless to say, the stranger and I never met. I'd grow up hearing affectionate things about him, but he was little more than something akin to Alan Ladd in Shane.. He and my mom, reportedly on very tacit terms parted ways. He was never heard from or sought by my mother again.
In stark contrast, her most prized compatriots remained the people to whom she gravitated and, for better or worse, spent her life around in her late twenties and early thirties. They were the comics, the fellow entertainers of the New York club circuits, those who would pave the way for the age of Catch A Rising Star and Dangerfield's. She married one and hung with the rest, their friends, their brethren, and stayed on 'til their show-biz pipe-dream sleigh rides fast faded.
Rather than waiting around for her husband to free-fall, she commandeered him into an adult education curriculum, a G.E.D, a teaching degree, and a job in the public school system. She worked and ghost-wrote his assignments. He went on years later to score one of the highest-paying gigs the Board would allow. He'd ultimately reside in a mod-furnished suite off Eighth Street. My mom and I would visit frequently from our one-roomer in Rego Park. While she subsided off heart-attack disability and the child support he'd long and respectfully agreed to pay, she never stopped hating him for their marriage. She loved the guy.
A relationship design such as this is not, as many will reflect in hindsight, unique. My mother remained hurt most by no one other than herself, but was not in the process averse to cultivating a grudge that would distance her from the one man with whom she was only really compatible. Ditto for him. They had a conventional marriage wrecked by impotence on his part and alcoholism on hers. Where the marriage failed, their intellectual relationship flourished, and was the strongest co-dependency on record.
There was a lot of intellectualism in the air all over the place in the 1970s, to be accurate about it. Throughout the latter part of the decade, I grew up in the din of all this brain traffic. I may have been way too young at ten or eleven to grasp the subject matter of all the academic stuff these two, and for that matter much of the well-educated world was going on about at the time, but it might explain why, at an age slightly past theirs back then, I now mull through the used bookstores like a stray animal, voracious for vintage publications, those luscious treats of almost any sociopolitical subject matter that say home to me. For some reason, in an indifferent world such as ours, nothing seems to feel better than some hardcover David Halberstam or Kenneth Tynan from 1977 on the E train at day's end.
To be in the presence of my mom and her ex- over the course of a weekend spent at their flat was one of fascinating Rennaisance. Those two would start the conversation when we arrived, and on they went practically all night. Discourse was their intercourse, and no one left undersexed. Towards evening, it would take on the form of argument. They'd raise their voices. I'd be tucked in bed in the master bedroom at some point, listening like a visitor to a David Susskind panel. The two kept in fine form, raging their distinct viewpoints. At some point, they'd unfold the couch, go to their respective sides and peacefully crash 'til well into daylight. Ultimately, we'd all be up, break our fast with some bagels and cream cheese from the high-price deli on the corner ("the gonniff", he'd growl..), and amidst a later stroll down Eighth and a tour through Brentanoes, the talk-a-thon continued. Y'know, for some people, it's skiing, for some, it's stock car races. For me..? This was my kind of weekend. They decorated my late 1970s. Skip the symposiums and events. The best discourse was the kind you knew how to make at home.
Where does a dog go when his master dies..? How does his heart and mind deal with the whole thing..? Does he get angry, the way people do..? Does he growl outward and turn it inward..? When this middle-aged ex of hers turned ill and died, my mother was the stray dog.
It might not have been so starkly alienating, beyond what became a challenged question over the beneficiary in the man's will. He had a brief subsequent marriage after the divorce. This led to significant will-based plot twists, and suddenly the long friendship between my mother and her ex's sibling immediately turned to war. It was an all-Jewish version of The Little Foxes. While I knew it all for just what it was, it wasn't really about the legalities. It was about the betrayal.
Not only did I hold no active animosity toward the offenders. I honestly never expected anything from them. Of course I was eleven, I was never married, and I never lived with the social or legal expectation of the rewards of enduring such prior wreckage. But very truthfully.? This particular bomb that exploded at the reading of the will, nearing the finally incoherent, fatally ill man's passing, somehow stunned me none.
The greatest wound my mother bore was not in fact the absence of posthumous bounty, promised or not. It was the stark disappearance of that intimate partner, the one who gave her everything she deeply craved day and night: Shared intellect. For long as she continued to live, I would never see her fitfully matched again with any such human. But it did teach me about the greatest kind of intimacy; The intellectual kind. For all the talk about sex and relationships out there, intellectual eroticism on the full time scale is a jackpot a lonely dweller will spend his or her life wishing for. They don't make medical treatments for that, and when they do, I'll be inclined to run the other way.
The summer of '79 was the time of our Six Day War. It was in that spring that my mother faced the betrayal of "her people", the ones we knew and liked the best and spent time with the most, the man who became more ill and aged by the day, who everyone congregated in imperative concern of, over coffee, talk, dinners, book and movie discussion and the reflexive hard laughter they all needed. Now it was all gone, and replaced with return phone calls from attorneys.
With us in possession of little cash that summer, my aunt and uncle, a man falling ill himself, took us in for a few weeks at their newly leased condo house in Miami. If this place didn't look like the set of an Aaron Spelling nighttime series, nothing did. It was exquisite. The sale of that Bayside house couldn't have gone that badly. It was from that remote end my mom got word over the phone that the case was lost. Our final net result was zero. It didn't even take six days. Fixing her anger upon the sibling opponent, she talked to her eleven-year-old son about the possibility of his residing in Florida with his aunt and uncle permanently, while she tracked him down and committed murder. Somebody, I thought, was watching too many Movies Of The Week.
No one murdered anybody. We came home to our little dusty-floored Queens abode, and spent our days doing laundry, maybe browsing at Queens Center, a good few trips to the Social Security office in Jackson Heights to square a few things that evidently couldn't be squared, amidst the wild-multicolored and coordinated sets of luxury cars and young fellows' suits along the avenues. Not too many guys paraded around in athletic gear and flannel shirts back then. They still dressed to go out. Maroon was the color of one's car and sport jacket. The print shirts glowed like gardens.
It was on no uncertain terms, a vacation. I indulged permissively and affordably in something I just wouldn't be able to do in the school year: The TV I never got to see. Stuff well after midnight. I was basically that cat that only wants to see what's in the hallway closet, while no one understands why he's so fascinated with it. The Marcus Welby M.D. re-runs I'd never care for by day were stuff I got turned onto at 2am, amidst a dial of old movies, nightclub and electronics-store commercials, bad public service announcements and The Joe Franklin Show. It was a carnival of it's own accord. You didn't need cable, or rock videos. There was something commanding about local television very late in the pre-dawn hours. It was somehow more intimate, more humanizing. It spoke to the alienation of the soul.
Somewhere past 2am, at least one or two of the few stations that hadn't yet signed off would offer a serving of News Headlines. Nothing fancy, just some branded logos and that familiar announcer, known for only a few words by day, now intoning the stories of the day. It was interesting to hear these guys speak at length. When the station signed off for the night a short time later, that very announcer would, for half a sentence, get personal with the viewer. He'd say, "on behalf of the entire staff....have a good day..". How about that. A human being.
More than a few times, I'd be gazing at the final moments of whatever was on the Channel 2 Late Show at 5:45 in the morning as the sun met the summer horizon. I'd already caught the rare Channel 5 re-run of The Jack Benny Program and heard Tom Gregory put us all to bed with their newscast and sign-off, complete with that "Feeling Good" public service announcment about physical fitness, scored by that all-too-familiar Chuck Mangione hit. It played underneath a twelve-year old kid reading a teleprompter message about staying in shape. As an overweight adolescent looking forward to his next malted at Carvel, all I could dig was the score.
When life in that Junior High began, all hopes of distingushed collegiate-style life were instantly dashed. I'd be introduced promptly to a life of threats in hallways, locker rooms, cafeteria lines, on school grounds and off, and a self image I never thought could corrode further. If Channel 5 hadn't rolled out that nightly hour of M*A*S*H and All In The Family that fall, I swear I'd have killed myself. You just don't forget a summer that good.
Noah F.
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