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.