I shouldn’t be
awake, I thought. It can only mean one thing.
My mom overslept.
I was eleven,
plodding along in the sixth grade, more or less. But if this sudden overlay were to become
what I’d hoped, it could, if cards were played correctly, mean a day off. But there was no way yet of knowing. The game was on.
Mom always woke me
up at 7am. I was usually asleep sooner
than midnight, but even if I slept the whole night through, which sometimes I
actually did, you needed car alarms in the house to get me up and out of bed on a weekday.
Our home was a fine
little piece of rustic interior. A wood-floored,
paint-peeling little 1950s studio flat in a unit complex in Forest Hills. You say "Forest Hills" to a person and certainly,
in 1979 anyway, that conjured up images of opulence, perhaps a grand suite in
one of those 1920s residential apartment buildings, complete with a lobby and
doorman straight out of a 1930s Preston Sturges comedy. That was the polar opposite of us.
My mother’s famous
heart attack four years earlier trapped her on disability indefinitely, and any
work she’d try to attain in any office setting would not be attainable unless
some kind and willing employer could pay “off the books’, income
unreportable. Not too common, and
neither was legitimate work. So outside
of the few writing and typing jobs that came her way informally, she was on the
dole. Just her and her boy.
There had been, at
one time, a shred of child support. That
came from The Ex. I actually knew the
guy, his brother, and some of his family and friends. Although my mom and this one-time husband of
hers did enjoy a badly conceived marriage for which both and neither could be
blamed, I was not an official product.
The union ended five years before I began. The divorce was final just 24 hours before I
plopped to Earth at Brooklyn Heights Hospital.
I was actually the culmination of a mostly inebriated affair my mother
had desperately enjoyed, with a suitor I never would in my lifetime meet, or
have the urge to. I’d heard he was a
nice guy. The ex agreed to offer child
support, subsequently. The two always
remained on some sort of deeply affectionate terms. She would hate the guy and love him
forever. Even posthumously.
Only that kind of love
could move a brilliant, alcoholic young woman to spend her every last cent and
work two office jobs just to fund and support her unemployable husband through a
GED, a college diploma and a masters in Education in 1960, just so he could
within ten years become one of New York City’s highest paid English and Drama
teachers at the O’Henry School, and move into some six-figure condo on Mercer
Street in the late 70s. We lived in a
bare flat with horse-size waterbugs in Queens.
I often wondered, despite all these adoring relationships, if my mother
didn’t bear some kind of anger or sense of affront against her ex for all
this. The more she’d imply no, the more
she implied “yes”.
It was now 8:40am. Ordinarily, I’d be off to school, ten blocks away. But I’m in bed, trying not to breathe. Of course, I was breathing, but my constant morning sniffles were acting up and if I didn’t get up and blow my nose, I’d have a pillow full of snot. Looks like currently, that was the only option. No way could I stir and awaken my mom, fast asleep on the couch, ten feet away, her all-night talk-station clock radio quietly jabbering away. The later it got, the better my shot at a day off.
Would showing up to
school late have destroyed me..? School that
particular year hadn’t really been the prison yard it was the year prior. Decent classmates, a fine teacher, school work
wasn’t exactly a brick wall. So what..? Maybe it was just the grind. Or maybe I had become accustomed to skipping
out.
When The Ex took ill
months earlier, everyone worried. He became more and more debilitated. My mom had us spending more and more time at
his place in the Village. Before long,
she and his brother and friends decided he needed to visit the Mayo Clinic up in
Minnesota for experimental treatments.
Doing so meant a month-long pilgrimage, and my mom didn’t really have
any willing or able parties near home with whom I could bunk and go to school daily. So I tagged along. My mom explained the hiatus to my
schoolteacher, who complied.
But once we
returned, we still kept vigil with the ailing Ex at his apartment. Late Sunday nights meant there was no way to get
me to school in Rego Park in the morning. My mother was in no condition to
accompany me there on the subway. It
meant more arbitrary days off.
Before long, or
shortly before term’s end, a very disturbing official notice arrived in our
mailbox at home, threatening my inability to graduate to Grade Seven, the result
of overt inattendance. That shocking letter
was just one month away. I sure had no inclination
to expect it.
This morning was
like any other, among the growingly common, of pre-emptive situations. But at 9:10am, I would absolutely not move or
breath a muscle. It’s as if I were
playing a corpse on live television in the 1950s. I loved all those stories about TV in the
early 50s, and wished I could see more of that stuff. If you couldn’t make it to the Museum Of Broadcasting
on 53rd street in those days, you could just forget it. But there were plenty of books about it
getting published, and I think I read them all.
This play I was in at the moment was getting pretty climactic.
My mother awoke and
cough-hacked herself awake. She looked
at the clock.
“Shit, it’s almost
nine thirty. Are you up..?!?”
I did my best wake-up
impression. “What…??”
“We overslept…..I don’t think you can go to school today…”
“No..?” No
challenge out of me…
“What would your
late excuse be..? You’d only get in more trouble. You can go in tomorrow and I can say you were
sick…”
“Well, okay…”
I won.
“I have to blow my
nose..” I jauntily darted off to the
bathroom. In a victorious mood, I lightly
offered, “My nose feels like a bowl of oatmeal…”
My mom didn’t
respond. She was having her morning
bedside cigarette.
Clearly, there’d of
course be nothing to celebrate about this sudden vacation day. In some ways, it would inarguably function as
kind of a semi-legal “Yom Kippur”, or day of atonement of some sort. Or at the very least, a forced inception of
guilt observance.
I was not supposed
to be at home today. There would be no
margin for what might be deemed enjoyment, at least not by my incitement.
“I’m gonna make coffee…”,
my mother groaned on the way to the kitchen.
I’d fix myself a king-size chocolate milk to get the day started. Mom made us some toast.
Back in the
everything room, the radio was still on, mumbling away. My mom seated herself at the table, gazing
out the window, the typical creative writer’s post. She’d long sought to become a writer of many
sorts, fiction, non-fiction, commentary, screenwriting, television writing. But
despite any efforts, her quest for ultimate sobriety seemed in the last five
years to be her most overwhelming challenge, freezing all others. It does not however, stop a writer from
writing, or processing thoughts or words like one. I grew up in an environment of half-filled
notebooks and collegiate lectures on the lives and writings of Joyce, Bronte,
James, O’Neill and Woody Allen. Had I
never climbed higher than Grade Five, I’d be smarter than a kid attending it.
I joined her at the
table, and knew that some pensive, poetic filibuster was on the way. In her guilt-covered mental state, I knew we would
not be sharing an intellectual Cavett-style discussion about the comic genius
of Mel Brooks, like the one we had last Saturday night.
“It’s too
depressing in here………..Why don’t you put on the stereo…?”
She’s cold sober
and saying this…?? Hell, okay, I’ll go
along with it. It certainly wasn’t the
design I was used to. Music was
something reserved for enjoyable occasions.
It was something I couldn’t really listen to while doing something else.
For me, music was serious stuff. Even If I knew the song, I had to listen
to it. But, she wanted background score,
so….roll with it..
“What should I put
on..?”, as I clicked off the radio.
“I don’t know……Put
on some Beatles…”
I opted for the
most inobtrusive Beatles I could find:
The UA A Hard Day’s Night Original Soundtrack Album.
While the Fab Four draped
the room like a muffled bar-corner Seeburg, Mom drifted into her inspired
soliloquy…
“There’s a great
deal to know about survival in this world………..and a tremendous part of it is
showing up, and doing the work…… ..Doing the work and applying yourself is what
gets you places in this world…..It gets you noticed…….I always did the
work. You know that..?? I was always the
one doing the work…..in the office………..in my marriage…….If I was one minute
late on the clock for Heitz and Rosenblatz in the Flatiron Building…..they
would have fired me..! And I was the one secretary they couldn’t live without….”
No matter how many
times I’d hear that stirring replay of her life in 1954, I knew this one would
never be the last. Today, it’s biblical
application lent itself to a reminder of my errant truancy. Kind of a “Sermonette”. But longer than the one you’d get on Channel
4 at 4am. And with a Beatles album
behind it.
Not entirely
though. This album had plenty of instrumental
orchestral jazz score, lots of jaunty early 60s black-n-white Room At The Top-era
stuff, conducted by George Martin.
Perfect for imposed self-drama.
With little indication of the scene to come, I nailed the score.
My mom was deep
into the climax of her impassioned diatribe.
“You’re gonna have to do the work…….you’re gonna have to take school
seriously, and you’re gonna have to do the work….”, she cadenced as Martin’s
jazz arrangement of “A Hard Day’s Night” hit it’s final bars. The scene couldn’t have hit better if it were
mixed in a Panavision film lab on Tenth Avenue.
“Why don’t you put
on side two…?”, she said, breaking her gaze.
“I did….that was
side two..”
“Oh………then put on
something else…..that didn’t even sound like the Beatles”
I went over and
found the White Album. This was going to
be a precarious day. If mom didn’t have
it in her to bravely sneak us out to the movies in an hour, then we’d have to
be house prisoners until after 3PM. I’d
likely be with my TV reference books, Mad Magazines and Archie Comics
until we could amble out to 108th Street together. I might mess around with my Fisher-Price Adventure
figures, create a new little action drama or sitcom. While mom slept off her anxiety.
I came and sat back
down as “Back In The U.S.S.R” exploded on the house jukebox…
“Now this…”, mom said, “sounds more like the Beatles….”
-Noah F.
