by Mike Edison
It had gotten to the point where I felt like it was my fault if I left any of the above in the Hot Zone—namely, on top of the kitchen table—even for a moment. He’d jump on the table, look me straight in the eyes, and shwoop! There went the phone. Shwoop! Sunglasses under the couch. I can’t tell you how much time I spent looking for my keys thanks to his kittenish pranksterism, even when I wasn’t stoned.
Speaking of making eye contact, it was a big part of his charm. He always made you feel like you were the most important one in the relationship. He was often compared to Bill Clinton that way. He could slay anyone.
In his final days, he withered but was still the life of the party. A somewhat cantankerous but lovable old man, he’d punch me in the nose playfully every morning, demanding the early seating for breakfast. He was eighteen years old, and when he went, he went quickly, bravely letting me know it was time.
How lucky am I to have been his best buddy and caretaker? While it broke my heart into pieces, I feel strong that my final act for him was the greatest act of love and compassion I could possibly do for my friend, The World’s Strongest Cat.
Soon after Fortuna spun her wheel downward, my brother called to say, “I heard you lost your job, sorry about that,” adding after a long beat, “I’m sorry about your cat, too.” Another beat. “But not as much as your job.” My mother was sad to hear about my job, too. No word on the cat or the girlfriend. Regarding my father, she told me to “get over it.” These were not sentimental people, but they had their priorities.
And that was the basic architecture of the Summer of Suck.
GENERALLY, I AM EXPERT at keeping my life in a reasonably stress-free zone. Mostly it’s pretty easy: I don’t worry when worrying doesn’t help. I don’t panic at deadlines, I work toward them. I don’t get caught up in juvenile gossip and bullshit. I try to bend in the wind, not snap. I laugh out loud every day. But weeks after he died, my father’s words hung in the air like a particularly smug version of the Ghost of Christmas Past—“disappointment,” “failure,” “broken.” What the fuck was wrong with me? My stock had bottomed out: Edison Preferred was in the toilet with no takers. I was a middle-aged, unemployed, single guy living alone with his cat.
And then the cat up and died. It was truly pathetic.
That the cat had been my most successful long-term relationship was itself a sad statement, but after almost twenty years together, his death punched a black-hole-like singularity in the landscape—I had enjoyed many more conversations with him than I had with either of my parents, after all. Whether the devastating series of events spoke to my shortcomings as a human or was just an unfortunate run of luck, it didn’t seem to matter because, you know, “loser,” “failure,” “broken”… In his last moments, Dad had done some real damage, putting the final, needling touches on a lifetime of hurt. It was his masterpiece: a symphony of pain.
I KNEW RIGHT AWAY that I was experiencing what is commonly known as an “anxiety attack”—what Thomas McGuane once described as “a sudden loss of cabin pressure.” I woke up gasping, feeling like I had been body-slammed by a behemoth. Sometimes I dream about professional wrestling, but this wasn’t that. Even though I had never actually experienced a full-fledged anxiety attack, I knew all the symptoms. It felt like my soul was being flushed down the toilet. It was the logical extension of living in post-modern America.
Maybe the old man was right. Maybe I was a zero, as evidenced by my empty bed and my dwindling bank account. No matter how good I was at helping aging rock stars find the mot juste in their memoirs, or taking my girl out on a sexy dinner date, I was obdurate and just plain stupid when it came to seeing the oncoming storm. Sunshine turned to rain, and there I was: the chump without an umbrella. My once swank bachelor pad had turned into a killing field where bad choices went to die. Within a few weeks I was on a therapist’s couch—the last Jewish guy in New York City to have turned that trick.
I tried to imagine what seeing a shrink was going to be like, and all I could think of were movie and television psychiatrists. The whole thing seemed fairly ridiculous: Dr. Bob Hartley on The Bob Newhart Show; Dr. Bellows, the thorn in Major Nelson’s paw on I Dream of Jeannie; Dr. Frasier Crane (and his insufferable but funnier brother); the A-Team of uptight psychoanalysts in Spellbound; and my favorite comic-strip Freudian, Lucy van Pelt, with her five-cent solutions.
As it turned out, the therapist I began seeing was more like Dr. Melfi, Tony Soprano’s leggy psychiatrist in The Sopranos. She was just a couple of years older than me, very smart, and also very warm. As luck would have it, Dr. Headshrinker (as I have come to affectionately call her, with her permission, of course) was also a lapsed wrestling fan, meaning that she’d watched it on TV with her brothers when she was a kid and even harbored some lingering affection for the Junkyard Dog. She made me feel comfortable enough to cry in our first hour together.
I’ll confess to having been a little bit nervous. I think that I was afraid I would come out of her office more nuts than I went in. Maybe I’d turn into a neurotic jerk—the punk rock version of Woody Allen, whose entire career seemed predicated on seeing a psychiatrist. He hadn’t been funny in years—a fate far worse than death.
The only advice I got when it came to seeing a shrink was to be completely honest. Be yourself, don’t hold back—otherwise, it won’t work (or, as one Jewish friend put it, you won’t get your money’s worth). Seeing as being myself was pretty much what got me there in the first place, it didn’t seem like too much to ask.
I told her the story of my dad’s last homily, that I was feeling overwhelmed by life, and that, for the first time that I could remember, I was having trouble coping. I felt like my integrity (if nothing else) was still intact, but at middle age I thought I would be a lot further ahead in my life and career. I was starting to think that my father was right to suggest that there was something seriously wrong with me.
“You are who you want to be, not who he told you to be,” she reassured me. “And let me tell you, this story could have ended a lot differently. Men come in here every day and tell me about fathers who bullied them, who told them all their lives that they were stupid. Women, too. Really great, smart individuals grew up thinking they were stupid and worthless because that’s what their fathers told them their whole lives. They wind up failing in college and in their marriages, drowning in self-doubt. Then, when they are forty or fifty, they realize that they were pretty bright after all. Like you, they are overwhelmed with conflicting emotions: They wanted to love their fathers but never got the chance because their fathers were bullies. The story doesn’t always end so well—there are a lot of guys who don’t make it as far as my office.
“Listen,” she told me, practically leveling me, “he sabotaged you. When he bought you broken drums and then yelled at you for not playing them, he set you up for failure and then blamed you for it. Every time you showed some talent that he didn’t have—taking pictures, whatever—he tried to suppress it. He had to be in control. Even when he was dying, he had to remind you that he was somehow still in control. He had to win. It’s the classic sign of a narcissistic father.”
“Well, yeah,” I conceded. “But it’s not like he beat me up or anything…”
“What are you talking about? That’s exactly what he did.”
“A poor little middle-class Jewish boy singing the blues seems pretty fucking weak. ‘My Daddy didn’t love me enough,’ and here I am whining about it. I think I should be over it.”
I apologized for cussing, but she told me not to worry about it; she did it all the time. I was starting to like Dr. Headshrinker.
“But how did the old man become such a pill?” I asked her, because every monster needs its origin story. I’d settle for a benign creation myth. I felt like an explanation would go a long way to helping me find some peace.
“Well, you’re the writer. Maybe you can figure it out, why he was like he was. Did his parents show him love and support?”
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�They were cold. His father was browbeaten by his mother, who always thought that she had married down. Her father came from Russia with some money—he had won the Irish lottery, come to America, and started a successful paper business selling boxes, industrial cardboard, paper towels, and whatnot. My dad’s mom had six sisters, and the legend was that they came from Russian royalty, but that was complete bullshit. Nonetheless, that was the story they told. So my dad’s family was kayfabing for at least two generations. Maybe that’s where he got it—I have no idea. Anyway, they had enough family money to buy this terrific house and send the kids to shmancy private schools and everything else. My dad’s father got a job in his father-in-law’s business, selling toilet paper or something awful, but they were pretty well set.”
“That goes a long way to explaining why your father wouldn’t want to be like his dad. But it doesn’t give him license to be mean to his children. Nothing does. How did he treat your brothers? The same as you?”
“Not at all. I think he was still fairly emotionally remote, but he was certainly more present in their lives, encouraging their decisions. But they took the straight and narrow, you know: One became a lawyer; the other one is a very successful financial guy. Their experience was much different. Me, I couldn’t do anything right.”
“And how do they treat their kids?”
“Incredibly well. They love their kids. If anything, they spoil them. Beats the alternative, right? I guess being a dick to your kids skips a generation, or something…”
“It’s different when you are the firstborn. Also, they were conformists, and you weren’t. They provided a narrative he could understand.”
“He used to tell me, really angry, ‘You chose a tough road to go down, pal. It could have been a lot different.’”
“He actually called you ‘pal’?”
“Yeah, I hated that. I never knew what to make of it… but the point here is that my life could have been a lot easier if I had just been, I don’t know, someone else?”
“The point is that he could have made your life better. He was in control and could have taken care of you, if you did exactly what he said. That was the price.”
“Well, that wasn’t going to happen. But the big question is: Don’t you think by this point in my life I shouldn’t be hung up on my father? It’s pretty fucked up. I am starting to think that it’s entirely possible that he was right: I’m failing at life because I have been making a series of bad decisions. On the other hand, maybe I’m a loser because ‘failure’ has been so ingrained in me that it’s what I’ve become. He told me my whole life that I would never make it, and after a few modest successes, maybe now I am just regressing to the mean, as they say.”
“What failure? If you had listened to him you never would have played the drums, traveled, written a book—anything. You’ve had this amazing life.”
She had a point, of course. But months after that scene in the hospital room, I still heard his voice everywhere I went. Looking in the mirror, shaving: “You are broken and need to be fixed.” Sitting at the kitchen table, writing: “No one wants to read your shit.” Walking down the street, on the way to see Dr. Headshrinker: “You are a complete disappointment.” The anxiety attack had sealed it: The guy had really gotten under my skin.
“Basically,” I told her, considering my career right up until that point, including my last anemic royalty statement, my current employment status, and the precarious mystery of how I was going to pay for this session, “I have a bright future behind me.”
She laughed, because she is very kind, adding, “It’s a good thing you came to see me.”
5
HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE IDIOTS
You would have liked my father if you had met him. He was, as we say in the wresting business, “a good worker,” meaning he knew how to “work the crowd.” He knew how to put himself “over.” Perhaps I’m being cynical, not to mention pretty damn cheeky, using slang from his least favorite industry in the world to describe him. Mon petit vengeance!
But wrestling has always served as a great metaphor for life. It has never failed me—at least not yet.
My father was very successful. He made a lot of money, which he obsessed over and which, of course, was his yardstick for others’ success as well. He was by all accounts a great businessman, tops in his field, developing a thriving office and retail space in northern New Jersey.
I was in awe of his acumen, and I had a ton of respect for anyone who made it like he did, through hard work and a fair degree of vision. He began as a commercial real estate salesman and was so good at it that they gave him a piece of the company. He was an admired executive, popular with his colleagues and peers, and much lauded in the local business press. Such was his reputation that by the time I was just getting out of high school, he was named CEO of a major development. The guy was a titan in his industry. The buildings he worked on are still there—a testament to his drive. It’s his legacy, like a pyramid, except that people go there to work in cubicles and get their nails done and gossip by the watercooler.
Dad was a student of the Dale Carnegie school, literally sleeping with his copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People. It was ever-present, tucked into a headboard-cum-bookcase, the kind of modern-esque 1970s bedroom design that was intended to elevate the boudoir into something pragmatic and ergonomic. Looking back, it was actually a lot like the veneered build-it-yourself furniture you can get for less than two hundred dollars at Ikea® these days, but back then it was a custom job—“custom” being the prime shibboleth for good taste in suburban shelving back then, sort of like how track lighting was once considered très sophisticated.
On his side of the bed were his books, including the Dale Carnegie Baedeker. Next to that was Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, a treatise on information overload and rapidly advancing technology that was also very popular at the time. I read it cover to cover—it seems quaint now, but Toffler was definitely on to something. I was as much attracted by the title (which sounded like a cool science-fiction movie) as I was by the idea that reading one of my dad’s favorite books would bring us closer together.
It did not.
I understood it probably as well as any twelve-year-old ever would. I particularly liked the parts about mass production and disposable goods, since that jibed pretty well with my own fear of a future dominated by landfills in New Jersey and Staten Island and it pretty much validated my bar mitzvah speech, which I don’t think he was too keen on, either. But in terms of fostering a conversation with the old man, it was all worth bupkus.
Incongruously, next to Future Shock was his well-worn copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which, if you recall, was a treacly, spiritual-cum-self-help novella whose incredible popularity at the time was a perfect example of hypocritical middle-class squares adopting a soft-pedaled hippie homily to help convince themselves that they were somehow enlightened, despite being on the wrong side of everything in the 1960s. It was genuinely among the dumbest, most banal things I had ever read (if “reading” is even an accurate description of how one absorbed this sort of gobbledygook)—just completely lame in every possible way—and it left me wondering how I could possibly be the progeny of the kind of people who kept this sort of brainless crud next to their beds. This was what passed for wisdom among hapless squares?
Meanwhile, on my mother’s side of the bed were the hotted-up, best-selling bodice rippers of the day: Jackie Collins, Harold Robbins, and the like. Jacqueline Susann would have been a bit too hip, although Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying had somehow found its way in there. I have no idea if any of its implicit messages of second-wave feminism and sexual freedom resonated with her. I am guessing not.
In between Mom and Dad, in a cubbyhole that also held a box of tissues and a squeeze bottle of store-brand hand cream, were popular self-help titles—I’m OK, You’re OK (some hooey about “transactional analysis” that my otherwise precocious brain could not possibly parse) and Gail Sheehy�
�s Passages (about the “predictable crises of adult life,” which promised to be a tour de force of the arc of human existence). I found Passages not so much incomprehensible as just boring, but then again, I was only twelve years old and an entire lifetime away from the “Forlorn 40s—Dangerous years when the dreams of youth demand reassessment, men and women switch characteristics, sexual panic is common, but the greatest opportunity for self-discovery awaits.” What the fuck did I know? The adults who owned the copy were in the midst of the shaken illusions of the “Catch 30s”—in 1976 Mom was thirty-six and Dad was thirty-nine—and presumably able to glom something from it, even if the “self-discovery” promised after the “sexual panic” came in the form of a grueling, hopelessly bitter divorce.
As for the men and women switching characteristics, not a chance. As things got worse between them, they only became more trenchant, with their own worst characteristics amplified logarithmically. It was amazing to consider that they had ever been able to have a civil conversation, let alone procreate. They each quickly remarried with a minimum of fanfare or romance, somehow finding people remarkably suited to themselves: My mom married a milquetoast accountant who held precious few skills when it came to conversation but could swing a golf club, and perhaps as important held no opinion of her taste for animal-print wallpaper and designer handbags. My dad’s new wife simply adopted his gimmick of studied preppy perfection and self-consciously humble affluence. Sometimes it seemed as if they were all part of some sociological experiment in middle-aged coupling where husband and wife eventually begin to resemble each other physically.
Not improbably, my father didn’t invite his children to his second wedding, preferring to let us know at his first convenience after the fact (“we got married on Cape Cod a few weeks ago”), while my mom invited only her children and took pictures of us in her driveway, like a low-rent senior prom.