1986 was a banner year for a lot of nineteen-year
olds. Not this one. I spent much of it
alienated, inside and out. Probably many
shared that experience as well. I had no
concept of “going out with friends and enjoying myself”. I had no actual friends to go out and do that
with. That’s because I cultivated none.
My ability to even appreciate and enjoy music was eroding
as well. It was difficult. My enjoyment
and indulgence in wood-crated used record stores had faded away, mainly because
in the Midwood neighborhood to which my mother and I had just migrated from
Queens, I’d no sense of the landscape, or knowledge of what was where. You certainly couldn’t “Google” something unknown
back then, and phone books made for an arcane hunt.
Somehow, life became a pronounced, uphill struggle. And yet nothing about mine seemed to support
such frame. My mother was out of work,
on disability payment, as she’d been for probably a decade or more. I was attending classes at nearby Brooklyn
College, but had yet to obtain any part-time work in the neighborhood. In one’s teen years, the inclination toward
part-time employment isn’t always just a matter of scraping up a few bucks, but
it’s also in many ways a move toward social engagement, a way of getting to
know your new town, make new friends, connect with your peers. I was a little too disinterested and
encumbered for that. Why and with what I
did not know. That was my problem.
There was an overwhelming fear between my mother and I.
You’d have to be Harold Pinter or Eugene O’Neill to understand probably, but
that’s what was asphyxiating us. For
one, we could not afford to live in our new flat. There was some money saved, but a personal
medical emergency drained it. Now we
were in many ways stranded. My mom at
age fifty-five had intentions of finally getting up off her duff and back to
work in the secretarial pools that she long tolerated and despised. But a fearful depression kept her down. We were in much more trouble than even I
cared to acknowledge. It was good
preparation for life, whether I knew it or not.
It taught me one very basic postulate. If you’re not worrying and miserable, you’re
doing it wrong. If you are, you can’t possibly
be doing it wrong. This was that all-purpose steel compass that never lies. I focused on doing as right as I could. It wasn’t that hard. I had plenty of practice.
In the middle of everything, I’d noticed parenthetically that
music had changed its design. The
melodic sound of what was once known as Rock had given way to the pop-embraced “Rap”,
and now the message adopted by that genre was not altogether a friendly one.
Violent uprisings, ones not known to nightly newscasts
for more than twenty years in the metropolitan area, were starting to sprout
once more. Racial attacks, violence upon authority, distrust and fear of
authority were all in the headlines.
Young people weren’t getting busted for holding pot and having long hair
anymore. They were being hauled in for
accidently killing each other with rough sex outside preppy bars, white boys
with shaved heads chasing down and fatally assaulting young men of color, and
in many cases attacking and using firearms against law enforcers. It was not a peace movement. Our cities lived in a pronounced age of war,
one to rival and perhaps outviolent earlier times of uprisings abroad.
And the popular sound was no deterrent to this. While some rap artists were in fact composing
sonnets of a desperate cry for inner and outer peace, they were drowned out by
the more top-gold-selling sounds of hate and destruction. Anger sells, no two ways about it. But amidst this dangerous tirade was this riotous
little number by these frustrated young fellows about simply wanting to have a
good time in a world where grownups won’t let them:
You gotta fight….for your right……to paaaar-taay..!!
For one thing, I never knew “party” was a verb. I thought it was a gathering with streamers, paper
hats and cake.
Turns out, no. It
means “to celebrate….indulge in enjoyment, have a good time, free of despair or
worry”. Is one beyond early childhood
capable of such a thing…? Not since I
was nine did I maintain that capacity.
A good time for me was not the sort of thing shared with
more than one human at a time. A friend in
my teen years, an entertaining comic sort whose company I relied upon largely for
respite back then would show me a good time, no matter where or when. My mom and I could almost always enjoy a good
late night movie or sitcom together and have some laughs. But hanging out with friends was alien to
me. How did one “hang out”..?
It would be several years of fear and economic struggle,
and perhaps some inner and outer destitution before I’d see some semblance of
stable independence in my mid-twenties. I lived and functioned in many ways
alone, and was quite silently content. I
lived without the choke of family drama and inter-relationship emotional
turbulence, for the most part, at least in my most intimate life, and it was
just the Canyon Ranch retreat I needed.
I embraced music and the Arts once more, perhaps now for the first
time. I learned how to stand and walk
erect. It was a rehabilitation that
would ultimately, after too many years, see some corrosion and healing, but
strength nonetheless. Two decades of unmindful
escape would lead me to awareness, an appreciative relationship for the first
time, and something I never thought possible, matrimony.
It was really all part of a life-restructuring design
that would require me more than a decade to embrace, comprehend and begin to fully
acquiesce to. The blessing is a daily
one, and I’ve no capability to repay such debt.
That, in itself is part of the middle-age struggle.
Then, there’s the other part. The terrestrial part. Financial insecurity, the fear of future, the
unknown. All the things us Gen-Xers
loved to get existential and gloomy about in 1994 are now the white elephants
we cleaned out of our closets at age forty-five for the scary stuff we never
even learned how to worry about for real at age fifty-seven. You would think all that indulged misery back
then would have fortified us for this.
But in fact it didn’t. It was, in
fact, our ‘party’.
Misery was indeed the layer cake. Whether shared amongst friends or alone in
one’s room, it was delectable. That and
a headset full of vintage Neil Young and Ani DeFranco, and you’ve got yourself
a late-night good time. Nearly every night. Thirty years later, I don’t know what a “good
time” is.
Or am I in fact eligible for one..? Maybe it’s not necessary to qualify. No one ever defined these things. Friends tell me it’s now more than ever, in
this fearful day and age, to be as grateful and endearing of every peaceful and
artful interval you can encounter. It’s
those roses you have to stop and smell on your way to a long day at work,
instead of waiting until your day off, when you’re too idle, exhausted and
guilt-ridden over your failures to mindfully get out and do so.
Only now, despite life’s expressway of unknown threats
and demons, of all the challenges of the collective human race that loom ahead,
in contrast to the movie trailer fantasies that entertained our dark-themed
twenty-somethinghoods, am I finding liberty in challenging my insecurities just
enough daily, to find those spare moments to indulge critically in a level of
artful peace, through music, literature, a gym workout, or a quiet walk and
momentary conversation with a forest squirrel, a fellow adult faced with his
own daily struggles. No one tells him
how important it is to find peace every day.
But somehow, in a way us humans can’t, this fellow knows and practices
it every day.
But for us human mammals, the inspirational message is
the one put forth by those once-violent visionaries of a prior century. As a roamed into my nearby gym for my daily
rituals, I arrived during “Eighties Hour”, and blaring above were those familiar,
once-threatening Beastie Boys intoning the need to fight…for your right….to
paaar-taay…!
And forty years later…?
To someone who never needed to pick up that sword..? It’s no longer an option. It’s a fight to be won. Every day.
Praise for those who can win.
Noah F.
