You Are a Complete Disappointment

by Mike Edison

  To be fair, Dad introduced himself first and said, “Hi, we live next door…” But it didn’t matter. The couple looked positively mortified, even as they forced smiles and introduced themselves and said, “Uh, hi. We’re staying here, in this house…”

  Satisfied that everything was in order, Dad turned on his charm.

  “Is this your first wife or your second?” he teased the fellow.

  My girlfriend was livid. I tried unsuccessfully to use a Jedi mind trick to vanish into the ether. Meanwhile, the poor guy forced a smile and said, “First wife. Thirty years.”

  Dad said something like “nice to meet you and have a nice evening” and continued down the street. Driving away, I mentioned that maybe that wasn’t too cool and that if he found himself in need of a cup of flour, maybe I wouldn’t go knocking on their door—that bird had flown.

  “You are wrong,” he told me very flatly, almost aggressively, which kind of made me think he knew that he fucked up, but he wasn’t backing off. “You don’t know what you are talking about. We were just having fun.”

  That night, the girlfriend told me she wanted to go back home. “I was so embarrassed,” she fumed. “He seemed like he was giving them the once-over, like he was the neighborhood watch. And that joke about second wives? Is that what rich Jewish people on Cape Cod think is funny? Because my parents are old-school Catholic and don’t believe in divorce and if they had heard that shit they would have been like, morally, righteously offended. Who the fuck does he think he is that he can just say anything that pops into his head to anyone?”

  Later she told me that if we broke up, I should never, ever introduce him to future girlfriends; he was a liability. We broke up—horribly—and I kept her advice. But even after all of that, I still thought that maybe, just maybe, it was me who had the problem.

  6

  “YOU BUILT A COMPUTER WHEN YOU WERE EIGHT, AND THEN… NOTHING!!”

  Mike, why are you still blaming yourself? His expectations were impossible to meet, and when you didn’t meet them—and there was no way that you ever could—he marginalized you. He belittled you every chance he got. It’s like a laundry list for the narcissistic father. He was competitive with you. He pitted you against your mom. He denied you your individuality. You have a strong sense of values—you believe very strongly in what is right and what is wrong—and he mocked you for it. He had no empathy for you. What did he say when you told him you broke up with your first girlfriend?”

  “He said, ‘So what? Your mother broke up with me.’”

  “How old were you?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “What an asshole.”

  “Are mental health professionals supposed to say things like that?”

  “If it helps. Did he ever say to call him if you needed him? Even when you were a kid, when your parents first got divorced?”

  “No.”

  “So when he wasn’t being mean, he was being indifferent. He gaslit you into thinking you were a failure. What more do you need to know? You came in here practically drowning in self-doubt, even though by any standard you are successful.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. I’m not even close to where I think I should be in my career. And I still don’t speak French.”

  “Mike, you figured out a way to make a living doing what you love to do. Your father did everything in his power to stop you. What did you write in your book about why you dropped out of college?”

  “I wrote that I flagged out because I was ‘neither hard working nor humble enough.’ Which was very honest.”

  “It may well have been, but that isn’t the entire story. Why were you trying to protect him? He tried to sabotage you. You are actually extremely motivated. He’s the one that fucked up, not you. And then he scapegoated you for his failure.”

  It’s true. He always told me that I needed to grow the hell up and stop blaming him for my failure at college. And when I wrote my first memoir I thought maybe—just maybe—he would read it. Never mind the tawdry topics of punk rock, pro wrestling, and sex on Spanish beaches—some of his least favorite things, although I don’t know how anyone could dislike the latter—he would see that I owned my successes and my failures and that I could take responsibility for my own destiny. Hopefully he would see that this writing thing had some legs after all. I was forty years old and still desperate for him to like me, even though I was still very angry and wounded. Forty years of browbeating was one thing, but he was so confident in my inability to succeed that he wanted to wager on it? That really stuck with me. The urge to impress him and prove that I was not a failure was very powerful.

  But it didn’t really work out that way. He claimed to have read my book. “I’m amazed that someone who dropped out of college even knows how to write,” he said. I asked him about the part where I talk about leaving college the first time, that whole “hard work and humility” thing. “I must have missed that,” he spat.

  Oh well, one tries.

  * * *

  WHEN I WAS ACCEPTED into New York University’s film school and they sent me a package with information and applications for all the related scholarship programs and work-study jobs that I may have been eligible for, he threw them all out with an angry swoop. “I told you, if you got in, I would take care of it!” he snapped. I’m not quite sure where the anger came from, but I knew how ridiculously fortunate I was to have that opportunity in the first place. I have many flaws, but one of them, I like to think, is not any misplaced sense of entitlement. Usually I have to fight for whatever I want. Nothing ever comes easy.

  I arrived at NYU with a safety pin holding my glasses together, and trust me: This wasn’t any sort of punk rock statement or some advanced nerd chic—I just needed new glasses.

  It had been a rough summer, what with Dad’s constant braying, “It’s a waste of time, you’ll never make it,” and Mom’s slightly more benign “I wish you would go to school for something you could use!” When I needed anything for school, like glasses that weren’t broken, she’d say, “Tell your father, he doesn’t give me any money.” And then Dad would say, “Bullshit, ask your mother. She is supposed to take care of you.” They had unwittingly become co-conspirators in a perfect storm of anger, repudiation, and willful neglect.

  When September finally arrived, he dropped me off at the dorm with all of my stuff—and I mean literally all of my stuff, because I knew I was never going back home. I had my drums (somewhere along the line I had found some sticks and was still at it); my entire record collection; my big-ass hi-fi cobbled together from cheap, mostly used components (Pioneer® receiver, Realistic® tape deck, BIC® turntable, and giant Advent® speakers, all bought with money earned at after-school jobs); and a duffel bag of old clothes (back-to-school sales hadn’t been on the agenda). The other freshmen looked at me as if the circus wagon had just rolled up.

  Everyone was very fresh and crisp. It was a big day. Parents beamed as they unloaded their Volvos®. Even the punk rockers were polished up nice and bright—new Converse® Chucks or spiffy Dr. Martens®, sharp haircuts, Ramones or Exploited T-shirts torn expertly to varying degrees of urban suave, depending on one’s commitment to the cause. And everyone had smart-looking mini boom boxes to play cassettes, or small stereos with automatic turntables and foldout speakers (such was the technology in 1982), all brand-new.

  Most folks could carry their entire record collections under their arms, which they did very self-consciously so everyone could see where they staked themselves on the continuum of good taste. There was a lot of Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel among the jocks, and a lot of new wave and dance music flashed by pretty girls and gay boys who, like me, seemed thrilled to have somehow escaped their suburban nightmare. The Psychedelic Furs were popular that year. I had three crates of records, including lots of punk rock, old blues, a shit ton of jazz, and hard rock—but no classical back then. And definitely no Billy Joel.

  The next day I realized that I needed to buy books. I didn�
�t have a credit card or any real cash—I think I only had about fifty bucks left over from my summer job. Classes started that week, and so I called my father to let him know what I would need. Dad told me flatly, “I’m done paying for you. I’ve had enough.” Some parents might be thrilled if their son got into what was probably the East Coast’s most prestigious film school. He acted as if I had joined a motorcycle gang.

  So I got a job right away to make some money to buy some books, but I was losing traction from the very first day. It was at least a week until I was able to buy any, and by then I was already way behind and off balance. I had a very hard time getting my footing and catching up. When I called Dad to tell him the cafeteria would be closed for a week around Christmas and I needed some money to eat, he told me it wasn’t his problem—he had already paid enough—and then he promptly fucked off for Cape Cod with his wife. I was not invited. My mother told me it wasn’t her problem—he didn’t give her any money—and it was his responsibility per the terms of their divorce to feed me. Call him, she told me; she didn’t want to hear about it. And then she fucked off to Florida with my younger brothers to stay with her snowbird parents. And no, I was not invited.

  That Christmas was miserable. The dorm was largely empty, as mostly everyone had gone home to see their folks or taken off on vacation. I spent a lot of time wandering around downtown Manhattan, trying to make my daily excursion to Mamoun’s 75-Cent Falafel on MacDougal Street take as long as possible.

  The next year I took the leap and cut the cord, unceremoniously dropping out. I was, finally, truly on my own—a nineteen-year-old scrambling to make it and getting by with crappy jobs, while hustling for writing gigs, back when such a thing was possible.

  Of course there were plenty of times in years to come when I was surviving on rice and beans and three-for-a-buck ramen noodles, and wondering how I was going to keep the lights on, but that was usually poverty of my own doing. At least now I was driving the car. Never again was I going to let the old man sandbag me. It was a tough lesson, but I caught on pretty quickly.

  WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL and was first accepted into the program, I was determined to become the best first-year film student ever. I had so many ideas. I was reading and writing all the time, plotting the films I was going to make and staying up to impossible hours to watch every old noir that came on The Late, Late Show, sneaking off to Greenwich Village art houses to see Pink Flamingos and Polanski’s horror stuff, and even getting 16mm reels and one of those noisy old projectors from my local library to study up on Buñuel and Eisenstein and D. W. Griffith, not to mention Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. You have to remember this was the dark ages—before anyone even had VHS video players—and if you lived in suburbia and wanted to see anything that wasn’t playing at the multiplex or the drive-in, you had to make a pretty big effort.

  But when I finally landed at NYU, I let the situation suck the wind out of my sails. Truthfully, I did not really understand what it really took to make it back then. I was eighteen years old. I was just a puppy. College was supposed to be my ticket off the dismal planet my parents ruled, and now I was looking for an escape from this Promised Land that I had strived for so arduously. I started acting out. I was drinking too much, and smoking way more pot than I needed. I was behaving like an idiot, talking when I should have been listening.

  But if the idea of college was to make friends and connections for the future, I was a booming success. I fell into an astonishing, wide net of musicians and artists, many of whom paved the way for adventure and love and heartbreak and hard-learned wisdom. Thirty years down the road, I’m still cavorting with many of them. But just as important, making friends who didn’t come from my own air-conditioned slice of northeastern suburbia opened my eyes and showed me that there were plenty of people from fucked-up families crawling around lower Manhattan the same as I was, trying to find themselves. Maybe they weren’t subjected to a never-ending cavalcade of verbal and emotional abuse, but I was definitely not alone.

  We played in our punk rock and garage bands with battered equipment and drank beer on stoops in the East Village. We got drunk and listened to country music in dive bars. We crashed gallery openings to soak up the free wine. A big date was a tandoori special on East Sixth Street, with a bill of thirteen dollars, plus a forty-ouncer of cheap beer. After making a cheap record, my band somehow landed a record label and booking agent who sent us plane tickets to Berlin and Amsterdam and London. It was glorious.

  A few years later, when I took another stab at finishing the four-year degree and went uptown to Columbia University, I was working full-time as the editor of a glossy professional wrestling magazine, Main Event. It was my first real job after leaving NYU. By then I was wearing some very smart-looking horn-rimmed glasses that I bought at Cohen’s Fashion Optical® on Fourteenth Street, mostly because they were cheap and hard to break. A few years later they would become the apogee of hipster vogue, but at the time they were kind of stuck fashion-wise between “beatnik hangover” and “unrepentant nerd.” Such is the way of the world.

  When I applied to Columbia, the old man had assured me that “no way in hell are they going to let you into the Ivy League if you work for a wrestling magazine.” He himself went to Brown and later MIT, and so spoke from a place of presumed and potent sagacity—but the brain trust at Columbia didn’t it see it that way. Main Event may not have been Vanity Fair, but they obviously thought that a twenty-three-year-old running a high-circulation glossy newsstand magazine showed some sort of motivation and competence (I somehow forgot to mention my micro-career as porn novelist). Not only did they let me in, but they gave me a pass from their required “Columbia Method of Expository Writing” course. And I still got A’s on all my papers. Go figure.

  One semester later, despite having made the dean’s list—at which point my mother demanded that I get her a Columbia bumper sticker for her car (I wisely demurred, since they are very difficult to remove, and of course Dad considered bumper stickers about as classy as vaginal warts)—I decided that I was not going to stick around to finish the degree. When I called to tell Dad, he told me good luck, and that if I needed anything, to be sure not to call him.

  Decades later, he was still pissed off.

  “You still blame me for your failure, don’t you? You still think it was my fault that you dropped out of NYU,” he railed. “You need to grow up already,” he fumed.

  Anytime in the last twenty or so years would have been a good time to discuss this, but he had never asked me why I decided to leave, or encouraged me to stay. And then of course I had the temerity to get accepted to a better school, only to drop out again.

  Understandably, cutting short my tenure at Columbia was not a popular decision with either of my parents, but it was one that was actually measured and thoughtful, and one that I have never, not for a second, ever regretted. I actually really liked going to Columbia, but another two and a half years seemed like a long time to dally in undergraduate school, and I had other wienies to roast. I went back to Europe with my band, and when I came back to New York, I got a better-paying magazine gig. Of course, it didn’t matter.

  “I can’t believe they let you into Columbia… and then you dropped out!” he sputtered from behind the oxygen mask. I thought he might die on the spot. “You think you are smarter than the Ivy League?”

  I must not be that smart, because even now I have no idea what that means. When I was a little kid, before the disappointment had set in, I heard a lot about how bright I was—an opinion largely based on my ability to fill in the little ovals on the old-school standardized tests with a fair amount of accuracy. I was always a little bit of a science geek, too—the space program made everyone nuts for slide rules and lab coats back then—and somehow this convinced him that I was going to grow up and become some sort of moneyed Superbrain.

  Why not? When I was about eight, I built a computer. Actually it was just a kit from Edmund Scientifics®, this entirely awesome educat
ional supply company that sold everything from Van de Graaff generators to ant farms to helium tanks—you name it. I bought a shiny, forty-foot weather balloon for only a few dollars, with aspirations to float it over by the high school and foment a suburban UFO scare. That dream is still alive.

  The computer was plastic and had about five hundred separate parts. It was basically a very advanced adding machine that, when cobbled together, looked like a cross between a Frank Lloyd Wright ranch house and a lasagna, a fragile mess of sliding red and white plastic components and wire hinges. The readout was just three ones and zeros on cheap little plastic tumblers, but it taught some important lesson about Boolean logic and fundamental binary systems. A lot of the guys my age who built this thing when they were kids became wizards in the nascent programming industry. Obviously I did not.

  One of the old man’s favorite refrains was “You built a computer when you were eight, and then… nothing!”

  Good grief, maybe they should just write that on my tombstone:

  FORTY YEARS OF NOTHING.

  Recently, I actually found one of those Edmund Scientifics kits online, selling for $100 (the original cost was $8.99), and decided to try and build it again. I thought maybe it would give me some insight into who I was back then.

  My father was right about one thing: I was very smart when I was eight.

  7

  PAPA JOE

  In the hospital room in Arizona, while my father was simultaneously dying and dressing me down for being such an utter disappointment, I was thinking about a night when I was a freshman in college and he took me to dinner in Greenwich Village. After we ordered drinks he told me unceremoniously, “I wanted you to know that we buried your grandfather a few weeks ago.” Then he called the waitress over and, after some small talk, ordered the veal.