“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.
