You Are a Complete Disappointment

by Mike Edison

  When I started writing this part of the story, I felt sick to my gut. The memory was so visceral and so dizzyingly ugly that it made me queasy, as if I were actually being punched in the stomach all over again. Telling the world about it, though, has finally put me in the position of power. Finding compassion and forgiveness for this ape meant I had the potency to grant long-distance clemency—like I was the governor of some far-off, touchy-feely utopia, where feelings were the coin of the realm. It didn’t suck. As it turns out, it was the best way to show some mercy on myself.

  After I sent Dr. Headshrinker the story I wrote about being bullied and confessed that I still feel haunted by the entire experience, she asked me, “Mike, why do you keep punishing yourself for something someone did to you when you were a kid? Holding on to this is just a way of beating yourself up. Forgiveness is about accepting that you no longer want to hold on to anger, that you are ready to let go, that you no longer want to live clouded by pain. Forgiveness is how you separate yourself from all of this hurt and resentment. Wasn’t it bad enough the first time?”

  As always, she has a nice way of being sympathetic while also cutting through the bullshit. And so, there it is—Et ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis… poof!—and like magic, I feel a whole lot better. I’ve moved on. I may have been the victim of a bully, but I’m not defined by it. I know it’s hackneyed, but we don’t measure ourselves by how often we get knocked down; we measure ourselves by how quickly we get up.

  But absolution for a boy who was mean to another boy is far easier to accept and deliver than the same indulgence for my father—an adult who was mean to a child. Perhaps there are some things that are just not forgivable? Still, as Dr. Headshrinker astutely pointed out, the pardon is not intended for my father—after all, he’s gone—but as a gift of compassion that I give to myself. I just wish it were that easy. It took me thirty-five years to be able to confront one shitty afternoon in junior high school, so maybe I’m not quite the champ I like to think I am.

  10

  (TALKIN’ ’BOUT) MY GGGGENERATION

  The day before I was born—August 2, 1964—Jack Warner shut down the Warner Bros.® cartoon division, sending Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, and Daffy Duck off to find a new home. A few days later, two American warships were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin, leading to the eponymous resolution and the official beginning of the Vietnam War.

  Earlier that year, the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. My parents watched it, but it didn’t mean anything to them. None of it did. The Vietnam War didn’t even get a reaction from them: Years later, my mom told me they never discussed it, which I find odd if not palpably distressing.

  When I was born, Dad was twenty-seven. Mom was twenty-four. They were part of a wave known as the Silent Generation, largely thanks to a 1951 Time magazine cover story that asked the question, “Is it possible to paint a portrait of an entire generation?” And then it did, more or less, exactly that, describing “a remarkably clear area of agreement on the state of the nation’s youth.”

  If you were to believe everything in the story, people born between 1925 and 1942—namely, my folks—did not question authority. They believed in order and the status quo. They were not a generation strong on leadership, and eventually they became famous as the only generation never to produce an American president. Their worldview seemed to be mostly concerned with their own well-being, “working fairly hard and saying almost nothing. The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence… today’s younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not issue manifestoes, make speeches or carry posters.” Incidentally, they were also the last generation to grow up without television.

  My father graduated from high school in 1955 and shipped off to the Ivy League, believing that the nascent rock ’n’ roll music was teeny-bopper nonsense and well beneath him. My mom graduated in 1957 and danced to Chuck Berry and Fats Domino at her prom. They were both just a little bit too old, but definitely too square and too neurotic, to have enjoyed any of the classically transcendent 1960s experiences. Unlike my dad, however, my mom got to discover at least for a few moments that it was okay to be a teenager. The year she graduated high school was pretty much the first time in America when it was actually cooler to be young than old. She kept a little bit of that spirit intact until it was drummed out of her by my old man. It would become his goal to cure us all of our youth.

  Dad graduated Brown University in 1959 and was sprung from grad school, the very prestigious MIT Sloan School of Management, in 1961. Mom graduated college the same year from Lesley University, a smallish school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where MIT was also located.

  I once asked my mom about what drew her to my dad. Surely she must have been in love with him at some point? They got married and had three kids, after all. She had no good answer except that “he came from Boston and went to Brown, and his mother dressed him in Brooks Brothers. He seemed very nice.” He also played tennis, which she loved, and he took her to see the Boston Pops, which had impressed her. It was the ultimate middlebrow reach for upper-class sophistication—the Gucci bag of dating. During the years they went to see the orchestra, the program hardly changed: It was all Gershwin, all the time—the perfectly modern soundtrack for kayfabe romance.

  My parents were married in a hurry, sailing straightaway into the greatest uninterrupted period of economic expansion in American history. Their timing was great: If you graduated college in the late 1950s or early 1960s, you could make some real coin—unemployment was at 1 percent. Inflation was practically unheard of. Houses were affordable. Cities bustled with jobs, and the great suburban dream was alive.

  This was the stage on which my father chose to create his perfect life. He would prosper in real estate. Mom would learn her station in life as an elementary school teacher. It was all she ever wanted—suburban bliss wrapped in the idyll of Formica® prosperity and wall-to-wall carpet. Bouncing babies who would grow up to be nice Jewish boys or girls and give her plenty of nice Jewish grandchildren. She would have lots of friends who talked a lot about nothing. Her world was a small one.

  For him, though, it was hardly enough. Or maybe too damn much. He once told me that he would have been very happy not having any kids. Of course, he dialed that back the very second he said it—he didn’t regret having children—but the message was clear. He had little room for anyone or anything that didn’t serve his ego.

  My father grew up in a gorgeous New England home, surrounded by a stone wall that was probably built by Robert Frost, but he was determined to move my mom into a house well below their means. By contrast, Mom had grown up in relative poverty. Her parents were the children of poor immigrants who spoke Yiddish in the home, and when they went to the synagogue, they usually called it going to shul, a term that my father disdained. “We don’t go to shul. We go to temple,” he corrected me, and with far more anger in his voice than should ever have been indicated. It took me years to figure out why that was, exactly—didn’t suburban Jews have enough problems without having to kayfabe where they went to worship? But shul was old-school Yiddish, and Yiddish was low. It was ethnic, and not the kind of monkey-talk that hyper-assimilated society Jews in Boston liked to bandy about.

  When my parents were ready to buy the house in which they would raise their family (we lived in a tiny apartment until I was four, when my twin brothers were born), my mother lobbied hard for a home that she absolutely loved, just across the town line in a terrific school district, with lots of trees and nice families. She was shut down by my father who insisted they buy an innocuous split-level in a cookie-cutter, post-Levittown development just a few blocks away.

  The difference in prices of the two houses was nominal—two thousand dollars, Mom told me years later. She adored the home she had chosen, and knew it would be better for the kids. But as was his wont, he used his checkbook to oppress her and stay in control. He always seemed be trying to teach her some sort of tough-love lesson, but usually it just
came across as mean.

  “That,” she later told me, “is when I first realized that we weren’t in this together. We weren’t friends, and I couldn’t be in love with someone who wasn’t even my friend. And I just had twins. We had three kids—there was no way I could leave. In those days you didn’t really have a choice. I was stuck.”

  MY GENERAL SENSE IS THAT it is a little too breezy to paint entire generations with one broad stroke. The so-called Silent Generation that produced my parents also produced Gloria Steinem, Andy Warhol, Little Richard, Martin Luther King Jr., Abbie Hoffman, and Bob Dylan, to name but a few, but those people became my heroes, not theirs.

  According to the kind of pop sociology that loves to put everything in boxes, twenty years or so make up a generational era: The Baby Boomers (1946 to 1964 or so) followed the Silent Generation, which was followed by the so-called Generation X (roughly 1964 to the early 1980s, depending on who you ask), who grew into an era sadly characterized by Wall Street greed, the dismantling of the middle class, and a return to Eisenhower-era anti-intellectualism, largely stewarded by Ronald Reagan and his dingbat “Just-Say-No” wife, Nancy.

  “There are times…” Hunter Thompson mused, “when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It’s a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.”

  Right now we’re looking at a bumper crop of Millennials (early 1980s to the early 2000s) coming of age in a culture moving so fast that it seems nearly impossible to gain purchase on anything, what with life whipping by on tiny screens, a free fall of highly disposable ones and zeros. Presumably this generation or their spawn are the ones that are going to inherit the Earth. I guess we’ll just have to see what’s left for them in another forty years.

  By the loosest definition, I am sitting in the very last row on the Baby Boomer bus, but I wholeheartedly reject being any part of that group. Bill Clinton, the very epitome of the Baby Boomer, was born in 1946, and clearly I am not from his generation. But neither am I part of the next broadly defined group, Generation X.

  People born in 1964 or so share a unique historical catbird seat. We’ve benefited directly from the counterculture and music of the 1960s, and a heavy dose of the jaded cynicism and awesome bombast of the 1970s, but we’re still young enough to have embraced first-wave punk rock, become self-aware through the Reagan years, and grown into the Internet without being formed by it. I was old enough to see Jethro Tull when they were still a hot ticket. I remember where I was when Elvis died and the first time I heard Grandmaster Flash, Run-DMC, and Public Enemy.

  When Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols came out in 1977, I was thirteen years old, and the TV news was screaming about this fresh threat to youth: Punk Rock: Violence, Anarchy, and Chaos! Film at 11! I happened into a record store where a couple of stoned hippies had a copy up by the cash register. I immediately wanted to buy it, and the first one told me, “Just take it. Play it for your friends,” and the second one chortled, “And then you won’t have any friends!” They may have high-fived each other. They were ridiculously pleased with themselves.

  I brought it home and played it for my pal Eric, and it totally blew us away. It was just so big and angry—the logical extension of Bob Dylan’s rage against the machine distilled into pure, astringent snarl. How does it feeeeeeeeel??? Pretty vaaaaaaaaaaaaacaant. Ironically, there was more genuine anarchy in Dylan’s lyrics than in the Sex Pistols’. He had taught us—contrary to what our parents believed—that not everything had to make sense. But that was an old revolution; this one was ours. Our personal Ubu Roi.

  We sat in my bedroom and quite literally watched the record go around and around on the record player, amazed at the new sound of rebellion unlocking itself from the spinning plastic disk and pumping ferociously out of my old speakers with the tidal force of Noah’s flood. The impact was inescapable: Ten years later, I was in my own punk rock band, touring England and opening up for the Ramones.

  My parents were never interested in making waves. They were very much those people buttonholed in the Time magazine story. “There is also the feeling,” the article went on, “that it is neither desirable nor practical to do things that are different from what the next fellow is doing.”

  Let’s face it: It’s a square world. America, a country built on rugged individualism, still puts a high premium on “fitting in.” Growing up, I was told that there were rules that had to be followed and that I must always obey my parents, teachers, and future employers—all adults, really. That’s what they had been taught, and now they were carrying the freight. But there was a palpable sense that my parents, and everyone of their generation—at least the ones who seemed to be in charge—were completely full of shit.

  When I was a little kid, the Vietnam War was on television every night. It was on the front page of the paper, which I looked at every day (mostly just to read Peanuts), but there it was—a big ugly war, and inevitably a photo of our dour, unctuous president, Richard Nixon, lying about one thing or another. Thousands of young men died, and for some reason we never knew any of them. It didn’t touch our lives directly, and so it was as if it weren’t even happening. It was surreal. And when I asked questions about it, I got no good answers. Not that I needed a treatise on the Gulf of Tonkin or My Lai or the invasion of Cambodia, but no one had the patience to talk to me about any of it, and it just made me trust adults less and less. I never got a decent explanation for anything. Everything just was.

  I remember lining up for gas during the so-called Energy Crisis in 1973. You could only buy gasoline on certain days, depending on your license plate number. Later, of course, I found out that it was all bullshit, there was no real oil shortage—it was just some giant reindeer game being played by a bunch of dudes who looked like they should have been the heels on Florida Championship Wrestling. Perhaps indicative of nothing, 1973 was also the year the designated hitter was introduced in baseball—a signal shift of nuance to power in the national pastime.

  The next year I watched the president of the United States resign on live television for crimes far too complex for a ten-year-old to ever fathom, only to be given a “Get Out of Jail Free” card by the guy that replaced him. You didn’t have to be a poli-sci major (let alone an adult) to know that there was something seriously stinky about the way the world was being run.

  Remember how nuclear power and the metric system were going to save us? And then in 1979, Three Mile Island happened. It was the worst nuclear accident in American history. They made a film about it called The China Syndrome, referring to the fanciful idea that if Three Mile Island had been a full nuclear meltdown, the core would have burned completely through the Earth, from Pennsylvania straight down to Shanghai. That didn’t quite happen, but you had to know you were fucked pretty goddam good when they got a couple of lefties like Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon to star in a movie about the failure of your industry.

  Soon after that I went to see the No Nukes concert movie, which you probably don’t remember. It was a nice moment—the last optimistic gasp of a superannuated protest movement—but a year later, no one seemed to care. Jimmy Carter put up solar panels on the White House in 1976, and Ronald Reagan tore them down in 1980. Reagan’s swagger was a clear sign that the jocks had made a comeback after America had lost its way in the 1960s and ’70s. It was time to vanquish the hippie scourge once and for all.

  ACTUALLY, WHEN REAGAN CAME IN, the new and very real scare wasn’t nuclear power, but rather nuclear arms. The Cold War had been rebooted: USA vs. Russia! Good vs. Evil! It was just like wrestling, except it was real. And yet no adult that I knew growing up ever seemed to worry about nuclear power or the arms race. Maybe they found Reagan’s
foreign policy shift from the old doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” to the rosier vision of “a winnable nuclear war” to be some sort of balm. I have no idea, because all my parents and teachers ever seemed to worry about was drugs.

  How many completely insane drug scare stories did I have to weather before I was certain that they were either lying and/or had zero clue as to what they were talking about? Either way, with every idiotic story that was meant to “scare me straight,” all they did was prove that nothing that came out of their mouths could be trusted.

  “Did you hear about the babysitter who was on drugs? When the parents called home to see how their child was, she said, ‘The baby? He’s almost done!’ Thankfully the parents raced home to save their child—the babysitter was so stoned she thought the infant was a turkey, and tried to roast him in the oven! That’s what drugs do to you.”

  I heard that story so many times, usually introduced with the old chestnut, “This happened to someone a friend of mine knew in California”—the signature riff of the urban myth. Did they really believe this crap? I still think about it: Just what kind of fabulous drugs does one have to take to mistake an infant for a turkey? And even if you are that stoned, is your reaction really going to be to ignore a baby’s protests as you baste it with butter and paprika?

  It remains one of my favorite jewels of the entire drug-scare-story genre, although honorable mention must be given to the pantheon of cautions involving people who smoked pot and then leapt enthusiastically to their deaths off of tall buildings, believing they could fly. To listen to my parents and teachers, kids were just sailing off rooftops. It was as if you could hardly walk down the street without the risk of being flattened by a plummeting pot smoker.