by Mike Edison
YOU ARE A
COMPLETE
DISAPPOINTMENT
A Triumphant Memoir
of Failed Expectations
Mike Edison
STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
© 2016 by Mike Edison
Photo of author’s bar mitzvah circa 1977 © 2016 by Mike Edison
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ISBN 978-1-4549-1966-7
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For Mom and Dad and all the wounded cats and kittens, with love.
If you are living for tomorrow,
you will always be one day behind.
—BILL HICKS
CONTENTS
1 “You Are a Complete Disappointment”
2 Of Atomic FireBalls® and Talking Cows
3 The Great Meatball Pizza Incident
4 Welcome to the Summer of Suck
5 How to Win Friends and Influence Idiots
6 “You Built a Computer When You Were Eight, and Then… Nothing!!”
7 Papa Joe
8 Requiem
9 Punching Back
10 (Talkin’ ’Bout) My GGGGeneration
11 Brothers and Sisters
12 Mom
13 From Mauler to Mahler
14 I Am Just a Jeepster for Your Love
15 Freedom
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1
“YOU ARE A COMPLETE DISAPPOINTMENT”
My father was having a hard time speaking.
He was on his deathbed, quite literally, in an Arizona hospital room—the best money could buy, with all sorts of tubes exploding out of his arms, monitors beeping and buzzing, nurses bustling in and out to check the connections and interpret the blizzard of numbers that flashed on and off like Christmas lights on a Matterhorn of rack-mounted biotech, a pinball parlor’s worth of LED readouts that could just as easily have been designed to read EXTRA BALL or SPECIAL WHEN LIT. He was breathing erratically through a milky plastic oxygen mask that was growing thick with condensation.
He waved me over to the bed.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he began. “There is something I want to tell you.”
I sidled up close to hear what he had to say.
There was a soft sucking sound from inside the mask, and the low whistle and shhhhhhhhh of an air valve doing its thing. His eyes were clear, lucid blue.
“You,” he said, “are a complete disappointment.”
He sucked another lungful of oxygen out of the mask, and his eyes opened up like saucers. He was just getting started.
“You are a failure,” he leveled, gaining strength. “You think you are a hotshot in New York writing books, but you’re not. No one wants to read your shit. It’s obvious you don’t even like yourself,” he added, before turning to my younger brother, the Wall Street macher who was standing next to me, wearing a dirty T-shirt from a recent Who reunion concert, cargo shorts, and those trendy, Fruity Pebbles®–colored plastic clogs. “It’s been a pleasure to watch you grow up,” he said to him.
My father’s breathing had become a Greek chorus of pulmonary angst, like Darth Vader, if Darth Vader were an old Jewish man who lay dying in a hospital bed. After another air-valve intermezzo—hhoooooaaaawhhhk—he turned his attention back to me. “You are broken,” he said, “and need to be fixed.”
Never mind his immediate challenges—the mask, the tubes, the electrodes, the IV drip, the demoralizing, disposable pale-green hospital gown—the old man delivered his message right over the plate.
“You aren’t as smart as you think you are,” he hacked. “And,” he added, after taking a moment to catch his breath, an increasingly rare commodity, and marshaling every bit of strength he could, leaning forward like the carved wooden mast on a pirate ship and spitting into his oxygen mask, “you are the only person in this family who is fat.”
If his vitriol were a baseball, they would have said it had some mustard on it. I was speechless, and I watched it sail by without swinging, as stoic as Kaw-Liga, the famous cigar-store Indian. There wasn’t much else I could do. Not to set the bar of what it means to be a mensch too low, but there was no way I was going to fight with a breathless, dying man.
The truth is that my father never liked me very much. For years he railed at me, with no attempt to reserve his anger: “I resent you because you are having more fun than I did at your age. I didn’t begin to have fun until I was fifty-five.”
I had heard variations of this tune my whole life, recurring themes of jealousy and contempt. When I was nineteen and my band was beginning to see some moderate success, being booked for tours of Europe, he hissed: “I hate that you get to live your dreams before I get to live mine.”
Twenty years later, when I began shopping my first book—a memoir largely about my dubious double-helix of a career as musician and magazine editor—he opened fire: “No one wants to read your shit. No one cares about you.” When I told him I thought I had some serious interest from a legit publisher, he assured me, “It’s not going to happen.” When I told him, no, everything is looking good, that I was pretty sure I was going to get a good offer, he demanded, “Oh yeah? How much do you want to bet?”
I called him back a few weeks later and apologized to him for getting heated, never mind that he had put his money on my failure. If I didn’t make that call, we could have gone forever without speaking again, and I wasn’t quite ready for that. So I decided to suck it up and be “big,” as they say. But here in the hospital room I was starting to discover that being “big” was totally overrated.
With every new volley, he became more and more agitated. His blood pressure was punching a hole in the sky, and his oxygen level was going south fast—you didn’t need a degree in advanced medical engineering to know that the numbers racing on the readouts weren’t the good news everyone had been hoping for. Then again, seething as he was, he wasn’t really helping his own cause.
A fresh phalanx of nurses came crashing in like a Navy SEAL team to try to calm him. It was fucking scary, and it was fucking weird, although I am still not sure if it was John Waters weird or David Lynch weird. It certainly wasn’t any fun.
And then he dropped the bomb, his last great mortal concern. This is what had turned disgust into ire, and ire into top-fuel rage. He leaned forward, fighting the trauma team so he could spit it out from behind the oxygen mask, which was now opaque with saliva and spew, and he let me have it: “I can’t believe someone as smart as you likes professional wrestling!”
It was the last thing he ever said to me.
WHENEVER I TELL THE STORY, people laugh. And then they apologize for laughing, because they can’t believe someone could be so mean, and they don’t want to seem heartless or unfeeling, and then they laugh some more, because the irony of a poignant deathbed scene turned comically sour outweighs the bizarro-world cruelty of the whole lousy affair. It’s a just lot easier to laugh than to try and parse the brutality of it all. It never fails.
<
br /> “‘A complete disappointment’? You mean like one of those shitty Star Wars prequels? Bwwwahhhhh!”
“‘You are broken and need to be fixed’?? Oh, that’s priceless.”
“‘You don’t even like yourself’??? Oh, you have got to be kidding… Does he even know you? Hahahahaha…”
And then, because my friends are largely a kind lot, they strive to reassure me of my value in this world, but by the time I get to the bit about being too smart to like professional wrestling, what they really want to know is how something so self-consciously silly can tie a guy up in knots so fucking tight that this is what has consumed him during his last moments on Earth. Why is it even part of the conversation? And it’s not like all my friends are wrestling fans—the great majority of them think it is far too dumb for even their slightest consideration, and they mostly just tolerate my enthusiasm, laughing with me occasionally but all fairly certain that I have committed worse crimes.
MY FATHER SUFFERED FROM MORE than a little bit of status anxiety, which was ridiculous, because he came from a lovely Boston home, went to the best schools, and became extremely successful in business. Nevertheless, his main concern always seemed to be how others perceived him.
I always say it takes a little bit of crazy to keep the big crazy away, but he led a life terrified of cutting loose, lest he appear out of control or, God forbid, frivolous. Frivolity was a big, frilly no-no. He was driven by what Paul Fussell once called “anxious gentility.” He made taste decisions based largely on social aspirations, and my querulous love of the lowbrow somehow threatened to turn his world topsy-turvy.
My father reminded me of my favorite cartoon fish, Charlie® the Tuna. People of a certain age are sure to remember the old animated StarKist® Tuna television ads. They went like this: Charlie’s one goal in life was to be accepted by the StarKist Tuna company. This was, for a tuna fish, the ultimate status symbol, never mind that “acceptance” in this case would mean being filleted and canned and stuffed into sandwiches and mediocre casseroles. Charlie strove to get the nod. He wore a pretentious beret and some very smart-looking eyeglasses. In one television advertisement, he was playing a harp—plucking away at one note with the aplomb of a virtuoso. His friend, an octopus jamming on flute, says to him, “Hey Charlie, you’re only playing one note!” Charlie says, “It’s a great note! Mozart used it lots of times! Hey, StarKist, listen to my musical good taste…”
But in every spot he is rebuffed: “Sorry, Charlie. Star-Kist doesn’t want tunas with good taste; they want tunas that taste good!”
Class consciousness informed my father in all things, and to him there was nothing lower than wrestling fans. They were “toothless hicks and hillbillies,” the absolute nadir of the human race, a pop-culture pathology that festered between the pit of his fears and the summit of his disdain. “That’s not who we are,” he chided me, “We are better than that.”
I have no idea why he thought wrestling fans were from the South or were immune from the miracles of modern dentistry, and why he somehow felt entitled to pronounce judgment on everyone around him, but there you have it. He was a bit of a pill.
A few nights ago I was recounting the deathbed story to a friend of mine: “And so I go over to the bed, and I say ‘Yes, Dad?’ And he leans in and says, ‘You are a complete disappointment.’”
“Oh, shit,” my friend says, laughing cautiously. “Wow, I’m so sorry that happened to you. It reminds me of my old man. After I got out of school and had my first big job interview, he told me, ‘They don’t want people like you.’”
Lately I’ve been getting a lot of that. The more I tell the story, the more I realize that there are a lot of fathers out there who somehow along the way were stripped of their kindness and their compassion for their children. Dads who compete with their sons and drive them to acting out are legend. I remember hearing about one guy who started a war in Iraq to impress his old man.
My father harbored a galaxy’s worth of unrealistic expectations and a narcissist’s obsession with perfection. He had never been liberated from the truculence of seeking status through the petty tyranny of taste. Outwardly he was the very picture of affability—a popular guy, a master of small talk. But, having somehow earned a lifetime’s worth of his ire, to me he was a scion of dysfunction.
By the way, I guess it’s worth mentioning that the friend of mine I was just talking about graduated from Columbia University in the same class as Barack Obama.
“So what was your father so upset about?” I asked him.
“I don’t think he liked my taste in music,” he told me.
I PRIDE MYSELF ON MY GOOD TASTE in movies, wine, women, detective novels, eyeglasses, electric guitars, neckties, nightclubs—you name it. I recoil in horror when someone puts cheese on pastrami or, God forbid, mayonnaise on a corned beef sandwich. When I am on a first date and the woman I am with orders a “vodka and soda” without calling a brand of vodka, it is a deal-breaker. Seriously, if you somehow made it to forty years old and are still drinking vodka from the well, it is pretty clear that the fabulous dinner we are about to have is going to be lost on you.
Cheap vodka aside, the true definition of a snob is someone who is so invested in class and status, they actually believe that how much money you make or where you went to school somehow dictates your value as a person. And that ain’t me—I’m just a guy who is passionate about a lot of different stuff. You know, curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back.
I would be disingenuous if I said I don’t ever care about what other people think about my taste. I like to look presentable—dashing, even—on a date, on a gig, or if anyone ever called me again for a job interview. I have a closet full of suits and vintage deco ties, slightly starched white shirts with collars cut like razors, cowboy shirts with ornate embroidery and pearl buttons, fedoras for every season, square-toed mod boots that work for any occasion, socks with clocks on them right out of the Philip Marlowe collection, and a gorilla suit that gets a lot more play than you would ever imagine. Everyone loves a man in a gorilla suit.
Someday I would very much like to wear a black turtle-neck because I think it is a good look for a middle-aged beatnik. But I don’t, because I am also self-conscious enough to know that wearing a turtleneck sweater makes me look like an actual turtle. It sucks having a fat neck and a round head. But I never really cared what anyone thought about my fetish for old blues singers, which made me kind of an odd duck to the girls I knew in high school, and I clearly don’t care what anyone thinks about my enthusiasm for men-in-tights, whether they’re caterwauling in the Ring cycle or just a smelly old ring. A little bit of benign connoisseurship never hurt anyone. At any rate, it would give us something to talk about if we ever got stuck together in an airport bar, or on a first date.
My father’s brand of snobbery was particularly nasty. He pretended to be folksy and unpretentious when nothing could be farther than the truth. And he could be vicious. Just as much as he cozied up to those whom he thought might help elevate his social status, he punched down at those he deemed below him. He ridiculed my mother for being a “brand whore” because she carried a Gucci® bag. It was, to him, ostentatious—he considered designer clothes and accessories an overreach by people who had no class in the first place. But when it came to badging oneself with name brands, he was just as bad, except he chose marks that promoted a patina of affluent, post-preppy perfection, never really appreciating that the bespoke humility of Brooks Brothers® purred just as loudly as the bourgeois status bump of the Gucci bag.
High on the no-fly list, along with Louis Vuitton® luggage, Liberace, and a litany of my childish pleasures (amusement parks, horror movies, and comic books among them), were the great American trilogy of motorcycles, guns, and tattoos. Which begs the question: Why the hell did he decide to retire to Arizona, where every other person has at least one of those things? Going to the supermarket must have been intolerable.
Someone I know who
lives in Arizona and had been to my dad’s house laughed at the scenario: “The people like your dad who live in these gated golf-course communities, they want to tie their identity with the spirit of the Old West. And it makes them feel precious to live in the Southwest among all of this beauty so they can brag to their friends back east, but they want no part of the reality of who and what actually lives and thrives here. Where they live, all the natural fauna has been removed. There are no thorns anywhere. It’s kind of an ecological crime. It’s the only place in the desert where there is Kentucky bluegrass.”
In wrestling parlance, this is called “kayfabe”—holding up the illusion that everything you see is real. It’s maintaining the gimmick at all times, meaning the sadistic Marine Drill Sergeant you see on television battling the Russian Heathen is actually a sadistic Marine Drill Sergeant in real life, and the Russian is without equivocation our biggest threat to losing the Cold War. And, after they are done working, they do not go to parent-teacher conferences or mow the lawn, and they especially do not have drinks together at the hotel bar. They are 100 percent legit enemies, the bona-fide bone-snapping Marine and the unrepentant Commie Thug.
In the old days, when a large part of the wrestling audience still thought that what they were watching was “real,” it was considered taboo to “break kayfabe.” Everyone stayed in character, always, to protect the business, and no one told tales out of school. No out-of-character interviews or public behavior, ever. It is what we call a “work.” The opposite of this is called a “shoot”—which just means “straight-shooting.” A lot of wresting slang comes from old carnival put-ons, like the gallery games that were stocked with rifles fixed so “the mark” could never hit the target and win the big prize. Straight-shooting meant the guns weren’t gimmicked; they were true. Ready, aim, fire.
Losing control in the hospital room was my father’s true self betraying his gimmick of genteel perfection. It was the sedition of his glands. But at least it was real—a pure shoot. With his last breath, this was the message he was most compelled to deliver: “You are a complete disappointment.” And he threw it for a strike.