Love's Austere, and Lonely Offices

My grandfather’s sudden death left a 61 year old woman alone in a big house in a once safe neighborhood. My parent’s divorce a year later left a 9-5 mother with a two young children to care for. As if she’d ever really “shared” that responsibility. I was maybe two at this juncture.

In many ways my grandmother predated everything. She was always there.

My earliest cognitive memory, the oldest image I can conjure (without the aid of hypnotic suggestion) is of her.

It's blurred and choppy, like a dusty old film aging in storage:

Early morning and dark outside. Tangled in the sheets of my crib, I am wet, and crying. She lifts me out, and we walk hand in hand down our dimly lit hallway to the bathroom. I think I’m naked. The upstairs bathroom light is intense in the early morning darkness.

There is nothing before this.

One in a series of faded, photo album snapshots, I know some day it will be gone entirely.

.........

You couldn’t take me anywhere. My rages became hallowed things of legend, experienced by family and friends alike. Terrible didn’t just describe age 2 for me, but just about every stop thereafter. In my early childhood I’d gotten us “politely” evicted from restaurants, grocery and department stores, concerts and school recitals. Babysitting me for a day came only after lengthy negotiations and a lofty sum were agreed upon.

While my sister tries on shoes, and my mother looks for something I won’t outgrow in a month, I am made to wait with my grandmother. I am bored. I want to leave. Right now!

“Behave,” she warns.

I stamp my feet and curl my bottom lip to show I am not to be trifled with.

“You better behave…”

“Shut up!” I yell, and make a break for it. What began as steady whining has given way to a category three temper tantrum.

Down isles and behind display mannequins, I attack the men’s section by ripping off tags and tipping over racks of jeans. Before I can bring my assault to intimates and turn Bob’s Stores into a tinker tape parade of streaming pantyhose, my grandmother takes decisive action.

She takes hold of me, and before I can struggle free again, pins me to the floor.

From under her foot, I lay there, thrashing and wailing. Many would have stooped to bribery: Candy. A stop at Toys R Us. A video rental. More candy. But, appeasement be damned, she just stands with her hands on her hips as other shoppers walk past and stare.

The time for negotiating a behavioral truce had come to an end.

..........

At five years old I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen with a pack of the original Lifesavers. In an ill-advised move, I clamp down on the tube and with my front teeth slide half the role past my lips. I swish them around in my mouth, hoping for a fruit-punch effect of cherry, lime, orange and whatever the clear one was supposed to be.

Time slows down as I begin to choke. I can’t hear very well, but other senses become very acute. The pattern in the kitchen tile. The smell of old coffee lingering in the pot.

I know she is downstairs in her recliner watching her shows. I Panic. Falling to one knee I call out, hoping my guttural cries carry downstairs and over her television.

Harnessing the last bit of youth left in her body, she takes off in a sprint from her recliner and up those stairs, one long stride after the other.

Once behind me, she wraps one arm around my waist and pulls me to her, while driving the opposite palm down the center of my back.

In one powerful lurch, the bright candies accosting my air ways come up—with just about everything else I’d eaten that morning. Wet with spit and brown bile, they glisten in a wide, curdled puddle like Christmas lights strewn across muddy snow—one of countless messes of mine she’d had to clean up over the years.

I blame the clear mystery flavor.

Far back as I can remember I have never seen her bend her arthritic knees more than a few degrees, much less did I ever think her capable of movement that lithe. I would never see it again.

...........

What she may lack in kitchen prowess, my grandmother at least makes up for with a consistent menu of items: dried out chicken breast, a pasta sauce that tasted like tomato soup, shoe-leather pork cutlets, and a roast that came out of the oven so woefully overcooked it resembled a football helmet from 1926, to name a few.

Pair it up with a list of delectable sides that include soggy spinach, mostly-mashed potatoes, or an over-boiled rice and vermicelli combo all the salad dressing in the world can not save.

We liked to blame it on our electric oven, after all she had learned on gas. And maybe that her homemaking heyday came in the times before culinary globalization, and the discovery of such exotic spices as pepper and Old Bay. It was a time, my mother reminds me, when a type of potted meat scraped across toast could constitute dinner, or perhaps some kind of lower middle-class appetizer. Lucky for them, the first McDonald's in New England opened not far from their house sometime in the late 50’s.

She couldn’t boast to have served billions of people daily, but I am quite sure that I alone had happily consumed several hundred of my grandmother’s pan-fried ‘briquette burgers’ over the years.

..........

Christmas time. Her gift sits unmistakably atop a tower of brightly wrapped presents in that same bag with the same Rockwell print on it depicting a boy in pajamas SHOCKED to find Santa’s beard and red jacket in his parent’s dresser.

Like any kid wide-awake since 4:30 I attack my gift pile like a hungry piranha. After the frenzy she sifts through the war-zone of plastic, paper and bent cardboard and rescues the bag before the cats have their way with it. With a cup of coffee in her other hand, she seamlessly folds and tucks it away for Next Christmas.

Over the years that bag held a myriad of things: action figures; Nintendo and Sega Genesis games; Some CD’s; a gold chain for a cross; a bottle of expensive, tersely named cologne. When I started asking for simple cash, she’d tuck it inside a thick, ornate card and bury it in the bag under several layers of green tissue paper, I think, to grant it the illusion of substance.

That bag is now a decorative mainstay at the holidays, retired next to the stockings and wreaths, and above the porcelain Santa Clauses, angels, and scented candles. The same tag still hangs from the red-rope handle.

To: Adam

From:
Love, Grandma Marge
...........


Whatever provokes an eleven year old to call his grandmother a “candy-ass” I am not quite sure. Probably something terribly unreasonable on her part, like “no, it’s too late for you to go to his house now’, or ‘you can’t eat that, dinner is almost ready.’ Whatever the reason, in hindsight it was the wrong thing to do, not so much because it was rude or disrespectful, but because it couldn’t have been FARTHER from the truth.

Standing toe to toe on my back porch, I look her in the eye and utter those ill-begotten words. What transpires then shakes the air like a clap of thunder, louder than the gunshots that claimed Bambi’s mom and Old Yeller combined with twice the ballistic force. Writhing on my back, I clutch a section of my chest where there is now a giant red hand print.

Nearly three houses down, my friends are scratching their heads about now wondering where I am, but mostly what that loud crack was, and the girly yelp that followed it.


............

Mid summer on a Friday evening. Mother is at work, while sister is out doing what older sisters do. Whatever a sixteen year old male’s equivalent is, I have no clue.

I sit, legs resting limply like prostheses on the coffee table while the rest of me piled onto the couch like a scoop of something instant slapped onto a cafeteria tray. I stare, listless and unblinking at the television.

Strike-two.
Ball-one.
Foul tip.

If I have nothing else, I can at least bank on my favorite baseball team winning every six nights out of ten. It’s like a (for now) $175 million insurance policy. This then, must be that seventh or eighth night.

Pitch out.
Advertisement.

She slowly makes her way up the stairs. These days her body knows no other speed. She sits in the uncomfortable pink Victorian chair next to the couch and fixes her eyes on the TV with a weird smile.

This is absurd. I know she cares little for baseball. HER television works just fine, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t she rather sit in HER chair?

She turns to me between pitches with that smile still on her face.

“That colored ballplayer you like sure is doing good, isn’t he?”

The colored ball-player. Like the colored friend that would come by looking for me as a kid. I could explain Bernie Williams’s Puerto Rican heritage to her, but lack the drive.

“Yeah.”

The infuriating part is that she is right. He has been leading the league in batting average for the past month.

“Ya hungry, Ad?”

“Hmm?”

“Want me to make you something?”

By now fixing us our meals has become, like cleaning, one in a long line of thankless tasks she is very vocal about reminding us of, and as such has tapered back considerably.

“No. I’m good.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m not hungry.”

I am starving. She knows. It’s impossible to hide anything from her.

The game plays on and she continues her pointed observations. O’Neil’s temper, the rise in Jeter’s errors this year, Torre’s ever-present scowl and the often reprised “They sure are playing like crap tonight, aren’t they?”

“Mhmm.”

She continues to glance over at me with that feigned smile. Maybe it’s some dumbass, skewed adolescent concept of impeded privacy that stirs my Ire.

“What?” I snap

“What?” She retorts.

“You keep doing…that.”

“Doing what?”

“Nothing…Nothing.”

I slouch lower in my seat.

“Ok…” She says, and turns back to the television.

“Sure you don’t want anything to”—

“No,” I say, my voice tired and disdainful, “I’m fine.”

“All-right”, she says, gets up and slowly makes her way back downstairs, and closes the door.

Alone in the living room with nothing but the light of the television and the ground crew spreading the tarp over Yankee Stadium, my stomach begins to quake, and not from hunger.

I stare at the line of light from under her door, and yet all I can do is sit.

A few minutes later, it goes dark.

...........

Winters in Connecticut made things hard enough. Waking daily to the reminder I am a severely depressed and anguishing teenager wont graduate high school and will probably end up in a mental institution lest he dresses and soldiers through another day at the place that consistently beats him does little to lift my spirits.

Typically after my mother has given up trying, I wrap myself in the oblivion of sleep until about eleven or twelve.

Arthritic knees and hips made one flight of stairs a daily burden for my grandmother, but two some kind of corporeal penance. Nevertheless, she climbs the second tier.

As my mother curses at herself down the hall, my grandmother quietly stands just inside my doorway. She looks at me.

“Adam. Get up…”, she whispers.

I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling.

She moves to my bedside.

“Adam. Get up”, she repeats.

“Grandma, I don’t…feel good.”

“But, you have to get up”

“But… I hate every day…”

“I know, I know. But…you—you just have to get up.”

There is something strange there in her face and her voice, some fear I have never witnessed before.

She is no longer the same disciplinarian, but then again I am not the same defiant, energetic child.

She came to this house for my sister and me, for US. That was the unspoken trade-off: Keep yet another home, help raise two MORE children, and be spared isolation in a big empty house, the indignity of assisted living complexes, and the loneliness of aging.

At least for this one morning my shame outweighs my depression.

I crawl out of bed and throw on a pair of jeans.

She rubs my shoulder, as if trying to conduct some kind of heat through me.

“Alright. I’ll go get your lunch money. Ok?”

............

Eighteen years old. Home from school, I am greeted with shouting. From the doorway I can see my mother and sister standing over my grandmother, trying desperately to get her attention. She is slouched in her recliner, her face expressionless, eyes wide and sometimes blinking.

Their calls to her become louder and slower. The tension builds in my mother’s voice and it begins to crack. My sister calls an ambulance.

I can only stand there.

What they describe in the hospital is an incident stemming from a loss of oxygen and slow wear and tear of clusters of blood vessels in the brain.

I.E., A massive stroke.

After a priest reads her last rights my grandmother holds out for an additional week, I suspect out of spite for trying to usher her along so quickly. Like everything else, she would go on her own time.

On the afternoon of December 16th, 2003 the machines show faint signs of life in her, but she had, we know, long since given up the ghost.

In accordance with her will, my mother and uncle instruct emergency room doctors to stop the respirators and pull the feeding tubes.

Like everything else, she would go on her own terms.

The service is held just a few days before Christmas. She is laid next to my grandfather.

............

My grandmother used to sit at our kitchen table staring out the sliding glass door sometimes for an hour or more, transfixed on the backyard as if waiting for something to move. To come to life.

An occasional Squirrel would dart across the lawn and up a tree trunk, while birds glided between the high, bare branches from time to time, but that was the extent of it.

It was usually mid-afternoon, after lunch and Regis, after household stuff was done, cats fed, dishes put away counter tops wiped down, and before the news on TV or the school-buses rumbled down the street.

There was this certain shade of light that would pour in that time of day. Bright, not the yellowy gold of sunlight, but more the white of a lightening bolt screened through a cloud. It would cast everything in the room its iridescent bleach and freeze it into a Vesuvius-like diorama. It always felt cold, a repressed world without sound.

In certain countries across the Atlantic many people choose to sleep this time away. Housewives opt for that second glass of wine, or cut a lime for another gin and tonic.

My grandmother wasn’t a drinker.

To see her sitting there was a profoundly lonely sight. She’d sit, hands folded, an expression not quite sad, or angry, but “pious” in a way, a look and a posture that, to me results after sadness calcifies, and you are given the choice to either tear into the scar tissue, bleeding the bruised blood of whatever life handed or took away, or take an occasional standing (or sitting) eight-count, remember what there is, and soldier on.

I wonder if she knew I was watching all those times.

I Am Superman--And I...Can't do ANYTHING...

I’ve discussed before the importance of finding our cue to enter the “production” going on around us. But what if you found yourself in the same role every time?

George Reeves, the first actor to portray Superman, was doomed to wear the tights and cape for the entirety of his career.

He saw the role of the fictitious superhero as a jumping point into bigger and better things, hoping to endear himself one day to the hearts of movie goers worldwide as an A-Lister with great range and talent. Superman was a way to get their attention- a gimmick, sure, but a positive one- you’d welcome the Cryptonian into your home, Wouldn’t you?

Audiences appreciated Reeves’s Superman portrayal the way a crowd appreciates a court jester, mime or juggling clown- entertained, but not illuminated- acknowledged but not taken seriously.

Irrevocably type-cast, he couldn’t escape the identity, and what was just an icebreaker became his sole dimension. He tried to act in a few serious roles but…people just…REFUSED to see him in any other light.

His story ends quite tragically. I’ll spare revisiting that bit of Hollywood history. (For a sub-par film that kind-of explains it, watch Hollywood Land. I'm not going to force it. Understand however that you wont get those two hours back.)

I have a certain quirky way about me. Not eccentric, just a few miles both north and south of the beaten. My sense of humor shines through brighter than most traits; it’s my way of breaking the ice. I joke a lot.

I have this odd memory. I can’t remember where I put down my drink, or where I take my glasses off most days, yet I can rattle off some obscure actor’s name from a twenty-year old cult favorite, or other piece of popular culture.

(Kevin Costner’s Indian name in Dances With Wolves was Shumani Tutanka Opachi. Look it up. I didn’t have to. But I’m sure you will…)

I can impersonate. Pretty well too; there’s not a Family Guy character (outside of Meg, and honestly, who gives a rat’s ass?) whose voice I can’t nail. People love it.

I like making people laugh. I can do it fairly well.

I smile, or try to, and keep a light heart.

I show people respect; I never laud my own knowledge or opinions over theirs, no matter how much more valid and informed mine may be. I don't very much care for competing with people, and other pissing ground nonsense.

Somewhere in there, they become USED to this person, I think. Used to this patronizing comic relief.

In this way, I feel I fall into being ‘typecast’ by many people. No matter how I try and show them the other dimensions of my character, they don’t want to believe it exists.

Am I a one-liner? A novelty? A clown juggling on a unicycle? You laugh at a clown. You enjoy its presence. But you don’t take it seriously. You don’t place stock in his opinions or his own experiences. You don’t go out for drinks with him, or to parties. The myth about big feet in decline, you certainly don’t sleep with, or date him either. Instead of seeing the leading man, I fear people see only a stock character

This is an irritating, if not interesting phenomenon to me, because I’ve seen it work both ways, for the good and the bad.

Reeves was a good looking man with decent range as an actor, yet despite repeated attempts to show this, he was only allowed to be what the audience would let him be. What they PERCEIVED him to be.

There are those in Hollywood nowadays pulling the wool over our eyes with a good performance or two before disappointing in several others. Soon, they resort to any role offered to them. But they seem to set themselves in stone as talented actors and actresses because of those first few performances. People STILL put credence in them and their careers, studios STILL offer them roles, and the public flocks to theaters.

I’ve known people whom, despite their penchant for making complete asses of themselves, are secured atop a tier of coolness from which they can never fall. Why? Because all it took was a Fonze-like performance in some early social context and every stumbling drunk, word slurring, cock-blocking, disrespectful and tactless machismo exit thereafter is proceeded by a curtain call.

What if, despite the red cape, blue tights and giant red S emblazoned on his chest, the city of Metropolis perpetually referred to the Man of Steel as The Green Lantern?:

“But, look at my S…”-

“GREEN LANTERN.”

“But, I just stopped an asteroid from hitting the…”-

“Nah. Green Lantern.”

“Watch me leap over this TALL BUILDING”-

“Nope. Green Lantern. You’re not fooling me.”

“I have a deathly severe allergy to this green, glowing crystalline substance. Watch…”-

*Goes comatose from Kryptonite poisoning*

“Hm. I sure will miss that Green Arrow guy.”

Imagine the Man of Steel interrupted by some novice bodybuilder as he gives advice to someone about heavy lifting:

“Whenever I pull runaway BULLET TRAINS from the edges of cliffs, I push off with my legs. Yessir, it’s all in the”—

“YEAH, WHATEVER E.T.! Listen to ME kid—you just need to get HUGE AS FUCK, that’s all!”

I feel we all get the point by now. It’s maddening. I deal with this or some variant of it all the time. People get not me, but this projected IDEA of me custom fit to their mind’s eye, and from there, it’s almost impossible to alter.

I write. A lot. That goes without saying (or reading…). I fancy mine a creative mind--abstract, yet rooted in reality.

My tastes are eclectic.

Neil Gaiman is one of the best writers in ANY genre—Cormac McCarthy writes dialogue better than anyone I’ve ever read, and for an English Grad, that list is admittedly small—Michael Mann is fantastic, but missed the mark with Public Enemies—I can sway to indie, rock out to alternative, bang my head to metal, and get me on the right night, dance (albeit poorly) to anything else.

I’m a Zen Buddhist at heart with a bad habit of wandering from now to then to way back when—I believe in many paths to the truth, whatever candle lights the darkness for you, but no matter how far you’ve gone down the wrong path, TURN AROUND—I believe in being a newer, better, slightly different, more evolved version of you today than you were yesterday—I don’t believe in time frames; WE are in the frame and it’s reshaped and moved every day.

I’m a regular gym goer, and a martial arts enthusiast. I recently took up Yoga, and, if I can figure out how to restring my guitars without breaking them, will start teaching myself to play again.

I walk. Everywhere, especially at night. I’m perpetually on the lookout for something. Anything. That stuff we commonly shuffle right past; something opaque that clears up only when the moon is right.

I’ve been known to cook from time to time, menu not limited to tuna sandwiches, though with a bit of dill, black pepper, chopped celery and shredded cheese I don’t think you’d turn one of mine away. When we talk food, I will eat anything, and most likely love it.

No matter what you believe yourself to be, and that should always be something great, it becomes a bit moot when your audience and co-stars alike refuse to acknowledge it because of their own misconceptions and biases.

Have I sold ya yet?

NO?

...

I do my best to fill my life with different and meaningful things, and want very much to show them to certain people, to take them on the walk with me. I can only hope the ones that matter will take the time to make it past my opening soliloquy and acknowledge my stage presence and range.

The 'Icari'

If I’m to fall,
Would you be there to applaud?
Or would you hide behind them all…

There's a painting hanging somewhere by an artist whose name I don't remember, but of which W.C. Williams wrote a poem.

"Landscape, With the Fall of Icarus."

Spring time. A perfect blue sky with friendly white clouds, and boats moored in the gulf of a placid, inviting sea. A farmer tends to his greening field, a shepherd to his livestock.

And off in the periphery of that perfect day, barely noticeable on first or second glance breaking the tepid surface of that inviting water is half the body of the mythical Icarus, his legs flailing wildly, desperately.

"insignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning,"

…are the poem's final lines.

I think Williams saw it the same way I do: The death plunge of this hopeful, innovative young man went largely unnoticed, taking a backseat to everything else.

In seeking to break a family curse and escape from the labyrinth on the island of Crete that imprisons both he and his father before him, Icarus, an articulate and wistful young man, constructs large wings from feathers and wax with the intention of soaring through the ceiling.

He is free, or very close to it. High in the sky he tastes the crisp sea air, and soars through the updrafts, hair on end, through clouds. Tasting the exhilaration of those heights for the first time, who wouldn’t yearn to fly higher? His father warns him not to, but Icarus ascends higher and higher, his destination, a place only gods and monsters have clearance: the golden sun…

…and he gets too close. The sun's rays melt the wax holding the feathers together. He endeavors to fly too high and the earth's limitations impose themselves, sending Icarus spiraling down to a watery grave.

I speak in metaphors. A lot. Sometimes I worry what I'm trying to say gets lost in these lofty metaphors, and my audience along with it.

Robert Frost once said of his craft that poets should begin in obscurity and end in some form of wisdom; all winding paths converging on one clear endpoint. I believe this applies to many things. It’s how I express myself. It’s how I like to read and in turn how I myself like to write.

So, with that in mind, if you're still with me, maybe you'll be willing to read a bit further. (If you haven't given up on my entropic blog of late, for that matter...)

One of Buddhism's primary, if not its ONE primary concept is mindfulness, which manifests itself in many forms. Mindfulness of the suffering of others, of their struggles, failures and tragedies is one sublet that is lost on a lot of people. MOST people.

Icarus probably struggled there in the water for twenty minutes while his shoulders and legs cramped up; while his voice grew hoarse from crying out for help, and lungs burned filling slowly with saltwater.

Fishermen probably passed him on occasion. Swimmers waded by until it was no longer possible to ignore the limp, face down body. He was an imposition floating there, undetectable until caught in the gaze of some other artist surveying the hills.

Was Icarus punished for being arrogant--For not understanding his limitations? Who is to say what his limitations really are anyway? Was he wrong for defying everyone, for not adhering to their rules, or BELIEVING in their view of what he was and wasn't?

I guess right now, at this very moment, I'm worried about becoming Icarus, wanting so much to break through this barrier in which I'm interred, arms stretched out towards this light that I'd been chasing only to fall short. To fall hard. To be burned.

I’ve said it before in another post, it’s as though our generational predecessors failed to ensure more than just social security and oil stores, but our dreams, and a proper landscape with which to weave them in.

I think there are many like Icarus out there…A generation of…Icaruses? Or would it be Icari?—trying to blaze a bright trail for themselves- they do it alone, on makeshift wings, and on borrowed time shooting for heights once only imagined, while struggling to keep their heads above difficult things.

Anxiety, depression and other party favors in that grab bag of genetic predispositions, made worse by an increasingly alienating world are weights that overbear our buoyancy. Exhausted, we paddle furiously rather than float--rather than glide just above the earth, we trudge through it.

Some days they're more weighty than others. Some days my wingspan stretches from my upper back, to my shoulder blades, down my arms and across the updrafts. Other days I look and see only feathers hewn together with wax.

There's more I want to say, though I'm not entirely comfortable yet. Maybe I've been repeating myself. I'll explore these things in greater detail in future posts, which should come more frequently, now that I'm not working on anything for a while.

Some days, It's just very hard to fly.