Rebel-Headed Level

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 10, Verse 1

"Happy is the man with a level-headed son;

sad the mother of a rebel."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Take a good, hard look at these two kitty cats:

 

                  Him                                                                             Her

God, how I love them.  

On the left, you have my father.  See the look of befuddlement, consternation, near-anguish on his face.  Note the creased brow, and the bank manager's placement of the fingers on the right hand pressed gently against his lip, beneath his massive, thoughtful Iraqi-Israeli nose.  Note the cell-phone-cum-calculator in his left meat-mit.  This is my father trying to figure out how his son, a man who earns a respectable salary-- the most he's ever made in his life-- can be simultaneously starving to death.  He calls it a problem.  I call it "multitasking."

Now, turn your attention to her.  There is very little that I can or need to say about this picture.  This, friends, is my mother.  This, at her most unguarded, is who she is.  If an ordinary, run-of-the-mill picture is worth a thousand words; this one is worth a tome.  I snapped it tonight at my sister's 37th birthday party.  My father was trying to light a candle that had no wick.  This is the reaction.  I'm so proud of myself for capturing this fleeting, illuminating moment that I now know what National Geographic photographers must feel like when they catch the cheetah the very instant it snaps a floppy gazelle's tender neck with its teeth.

It hasn't been an easy forty years of marriage for these two kooky funsters, but, then again, I suspect it could have been far worse.  After all, my father could have turned into a PTSD-riddled drug abuser, wife-basher, and my mother could have been more afraid of men than she is of her own shadow, my eldest sister could have turned out, um, worse?  My middle sister could have turned out, uh, worse?  And I could have... I don't know... been born without-- lungs or knees, I suppose.  And that wouldn't have been any fun.  How do you take a kid like that to the bank to make a deposit?  I used to love going to the bank with my mother.

 My marriage is seven years old-- we're practically marriage infants when compared with my parents, but we're gaining on them-- slowly, very slowly.  I wouldn't say that marriage is especially hard.  But it's no rainbow-fart either.  I'm at that stage in my life where I know mortality is creeping 'round somewhere, lying in wait to ambush my parents with a stroke or a fall or a clot, and I am also, not coincidentally, at that stage where I want to pump them for information about everything.  I want to know how they paid for college for all three of us.  Were they drug mules or were they smart investors (my money's on the former-- I guess it's good I don't have much money), how do they really feel about each other, when we're all gone and the lights are off and the house is still?  How do they really feel about (gulp) us?  Are we disappointments?  I have no doubt, in many ways, we are.  And that's kind of a hard thing to accept about yourself, but, in another respect, it's easy, because they've always encouraged me to live my life as I see fit.  

"Don't worry about pleasing us," my mother used to say to me, "who the hell are we?  We have our own problems to deal with."

And that they do.  That they do.  I won't bore you with them, even though they're not all that boring.  But, hey, this blog's for my problems, bitches-- and don't you forget it.  

My eldest sister was born in 1967.  Flaxen-hued hair and movie star sunglasses.  My favorite picture of her was snapped when she was maybe four-- stricken with a high fever and her cheeks all splotchy and her hair all stringy like hay, she was clad in a light blue nightshirt and was in the middle of racing across her bed.  A picture snapped at just the right moment-- a crazed look in her boiling eyes.  She looks wild and gentle and fun and haphazard all at once.  

The middle one bounded in like Tigger ten years later.  All curls and piss and vinegar-- a personality far bigger than the house that tried, in vain, to contain it.  She was and is still all over the place.  There's a picture of us on riding toys in my grandparent's driveway.  She's in a gray dress and I'm in a sailor's suit.  She's making me laugh, or maybe it's the other way around.  Either way, our heads are both thrown back in glee.  My grandfather's Chevy Impala is visible in front of us with its reverse lights on.  "Oh, look," I say, on the rare occasions when I'm looking at the photo album with someone from the family, "there's Zayda, about to back over two of his grandchildren."

1980 was my year.  I wore my bowl-cut and my sweatsuits for far too long-- but you knew that.  I wanted to change my name to "Moe."  I wanted to go to Catholic School so I could wear a tie and a v-neck sweater.  I wanted to grow up and marry a Korean girl as I watched the 1988 Seoul Olympics in wide-eyed fascination.  I found the page and the stage and my dick and its tricks and I emulated newscasters and Peter Sellers and I practiced my pratfalls in my room and in Borders Books & Music.  I don't know what my favorite picture of me is-- they all kind of make me sad, for one reason or another.  Maybe one of me onstage-- being somebody else.

Maybe this one, from "Pirates of Penzance."  Maybe because it's the last time I felt like I really had control, command, like I really knew what I was doing.  Maybe because you can see my wife, if you squint, lurking there in the background, backing me up.  Maybe because I really am the very model of a modern Major-General.  Maybe because this is what I was meant to do.

Maybe.      

Partners

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 4, Verse 23

"Above all else, guard your affections."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Mothers and sons have scripts.  They are steady scene partners, and they can read each other's rhythms and faces and pauses like old vaudeville performers.  When Larry Fine was in his seventies and nearing his death, he and Moe Howard were still performing together, even at the nursing home where Larry was recovering, or trying to, from his latest stroke.  The story goes that Moe was running late and Larry had to go on without him.  He was terrified.  It was the first time he had gone out on stage without his beloved friend and comedy partner by his side in over fifty years.    

In middle school, I filmed a few episodes of a mock news program that was set in the late 1700s.  A friend of mine and I were co-anchors of a show called "A Bit of History", and we read phony news dressed in silk stockings (okay, they were very long gym socks) and white perriwigs bought from the local Halloween Adventure store.  My father steadfastly filmed these episodes which were originally done for school projects, and were slated to run on the local cable access channel, but we never could get our act together.  Now, Greg, my comic partner, is a successful alt/folk singersongwriter out west and I'm, well, here.  He and I, fully clothed and submerged in water, pretended my family bathtub was a colonial warship, we tramped through local creeks, frightened neighbors, and destroyed my parents' dining room with huge custard pies that we threw at each other and, you know, missed.  I cajoled other hapless schmucks to join me in comedic misadventures, sometimes for a camera, sometimes for a live audience since then, but Greg was always my favorite comic partner.  

My first comic partner, though, was my mother.  We did scenes together.

Me: Mommy, I love you.

Her: That's very sweet, honey.

Me: Mommy, don't you love me, too?

Her: Of course I do!

Me: Then SAY it!

---

Her: You're my best boy.

Me: Mommy!  But I'm your ONLY boy!

---

This was the first bit of rehearsed dialogue I ever did with anyone.  I thought we were hilarious.  What did I know-- this was before I discovered Moe and Larry on my Bubba's enormous wood-encased television, and long before I discovered Greg in 7th grade formaldehyde biology class.  The lines my mother and I spouted back and forth to each other were always delivered with the same pitch, pace, rhythm and I liked the rehearsals because they differed in no way from the performances.  I enjoyed the predictability of the script, and we never deviated or improv'd.  

She was a good scene partner.

Nowadays our dialogue isn't rehearsed, and it's more spontaneous and more dangerous, and less satisfying and less happy.  While she lives less than half-a-mile from my house, I feel like she's off somewhere very far away.  Our pauses aren't Pinter-esque, they're just heavy, and hard.  And, some days, I feel just as lost and frightened as Larry staring out into the house with no Moe beside him. 

We were very vocal about our love for each other, that family of mine and I.  I will never forget how my father, a hardened sabra who fought in two wars and who has taken the lives of others on this earth, taught me about how to show love.  He didn't always know what to say or do, and he didn't always know how to respond to me, definitely his most eccentric and perhaps his most needy child, but he never ever failed to show his love.  The man let me eat bacon on Shabbat and he let me drink coffee at age 8.  He nurtured every crazy thing I was into-- nevermind if it was antique Volkswagen Beetles or Bach harpsichord concertos, navy blue three-piece suits from Mennonite-run thrift shops, the Civil War or 1970s British comedy.  He even indulged my desire to become a police officer.  

That one didn't come easy, though.  

We went out to dinner as a family-- maybe the last time, actually, now that I think about it-- to a restaurant in New Jersey shortly after I had graduated from college.  All five of us in one car.  We were on Route 73 and a New Jersey State Trooper lit up his overhead lights and pulled over a dark green Mitsubishi with heavily tinted windows.  

"He probably pulled that guy over cuz he's black," my middle sister said authoritatively.

"What the fuck makes you the expert on traffic stops?  You can't even see if he's black-- his windows are tinted so dark you can't see shit."

"Fuck you!  What do you give a shit?" she spat back at me.  What was she, stupid?  I had just written and published a book on cops as an undergraduate in college.  

"I give a shit because you don't know anything about what they go through and you sit back and make fun and criticize and you don't care and that cop could die tonight shot by that asshole in that car and he'd never see it coming and you think it's all a big fucking joke!"

My sister and I fought like animals the whole way home.  Late that night, in the living room, I told my father I was enrolling in the academy.  And he and I sobbed hysterically together on our knees, pressed up against each other so tight I could barely breathe, clutching onto each other's shirts for dear life.  A few weeks later, he was running alongside me on the track of my old high school to help me prepare for the mile-and-a-half run, which I blew the doors off of.

The weight-lifting test... not so much.  And that's the way that one went.  

In the salty heat of our embrace on the living room floor, I felt his love forever-- his terror, too.  My mother and I still have our scripts, we just don't rehearse as often as we should.  She has two grandsons now, and a granddaughter, too.  I'm no longer her only boy, but that's okay.  I know.  I'd have to be a real lamebrain not to.