You Are a Complete Disappointment

by Mike Edison

  This is what I said:

  “For the first three years of my life, me and my mom got along great.”

  That got a few nervous laughs, mostly from my brothers, who had the same look that comes when the plane you are on hits a scary patch of turbulence. The only thing you can do is look around and see if the flight attendants are scared. I shot a glance at the rent-a-rabbi, and she was cool, so I moved on. “After that…” I trailed off and shrugged, guiltily. It is a good skill to have, shrugging guiltily. The whys and wherefores are often better left unsaid.

  “But in the end, despite it all, we shared the greatest blessing imaginable—shpilkes were out, kvelling was in!”

  BIG points for throwing down the Yiddish. I was, as we say in the wrestling biz, over. The old Jews were eating it up. For a change, I was working babyface.

  “My mom and I were finally able to find joy in each other’s lives and share a great happiness. What she wanted, simply, was the best for me, as she did for my brothers—who by the way, were the direct beneficiaries of my teenage prevarications. What was bad for the goose turned out to be pretty good for the gander. After my shenanigans, they could have robbed a bank and still come out looking like cupcakes.”

  Thumbs up and tears from siblings. Laughter from her country-club pals.

  “My mom was very good at what she did. She was a fantastic elementary school teacher,” I beamed, “and her kids loved her as she loved them. She won awards. Once she dressed up as the letter A on Halloween, which was the silliest thing I have ever seen her do, but she did it because it was her job to teach kids how to read—the single most important job in the world.

  “And, as everyone who knew her knew well, she was a ferocious tennis player, a true champion, and a fantastic and dedicated golfer. She hit an astonishing seven holes in one. But she took it in stride, because the most important thing in her life was never personal achievement or awards; it was just the joy she took in her kids and her grandkids.

  “Of course, like any good Jewish mom, it often came out as worrying. But this was the way she expressed her love, and in the end all we had was love, because truly, love is who we are. And that’s who my mom was.”

  After that speech about a hundred old ladies, my mom’s mah-jongg partners and golf pals and extended circle of yentas, all made it a point to tell me how happy I had made her. And then a few days after the funeral, I got a letter from her. She had written one for each of her children, to be mailed upon her death.

  It was cast on an old page of three-ringed notebook paper that she must have been saving for fifteen years, since she last worked as a schoolteacher. Niceties like fancy stationery were a waste of money to her. I can’t remember how many times I got yelled at for buying cards for her (another thing she had in common with the old man), never mind presents, because she didn’t want me spending my money. Flowers were a big no-no. “It’s a waste,” she always said, “because they die.” She was always a bit of a scold, but I found her unwillingness to accept gifts from her children as particularly selfish. I think in her mind it somehow weakened the position she had staked out as a victim in life, but it also took joy away from those who wanted to do something nice for her.

  The letter arrived while I was packing up my apartment, getting ready to move—the new girlfriend and I were going to play house, and I was keeping with the program and meditating on how happy it would have made my mom to see us in our new place together. Of course I had never purposely tried to make either of my parents unhappy, but given their rigid expectations, it was a pretty safe bet that’s exactly what was going to happen, just like when a monkey goes into a bakery, you can be pretty sure it is not going to end well. This was definitely better. Premeditated disappointment had served no one.

  I was just about to take a walk to the local pub to get a cold beer—I had been choking on fifteen years of dust and cat dander and needed a break—and I took her missive with me. Ever the romantic, I thought that sitting alone over a glass of something strong (the moment the envelope arrived, I upgraded from beer to whiskey) while reading an honest-to-goodness letter was the way to go. When’s the last time anyone sent you a letter, never mind one from beyond the grave? It was downright gothic. What pearls of wisdom would she impart? This was her legacy on blue-lined paper!

  Well, it wasn’t quite like that.

  “You were my first born, and I loved you with all my heart,” it began. “But somehow you got off the beaten path. You really strayed. The hardest day of my life was when you dropped out of school.”

  Really, Mom? Worse than getting divorced? Worse than watching your parents die? Worse than the day they told you that you had lung cancer?? Good Lord, if I had known my folks were going to take that to the grave with them as my single most noteworthy accomplishment, I might have re-enrolled and dropped out a few more times.

  The letter concluded, “I think you are finally on the right course.” But of course she couldn’t leave it there, adding, “It took you fifty years, but it was worth it.” You have to hand it to her for setting the bar pretty freaking high in the Jewish guilt department—whipping that out after you’re already dead is some real heavyweight shit.

  “Both of your parents,” Dr. Headshrinker told me, “were looking for you to fulfill their needs, not the other way around, which is what should happen in a healthy parent-child relationship—certainly at least until you are an adult. They were both selfish like that… They had a very specific narrative that they expected you to fill, and when you didn’t, they blamed you for the deficits in their own lives. Your father wanted you to be just like him, but probably not quite as successful, so he could still feel superior. Your mother wasn’t so insidious—she just wanted a storybook. Either way, you, being who you are, were destined to fail in their eyes, no matter how successful at life you actually were.”

  I looked at the date on the letter and it was written a few weeks before Mom met the new girlfriend and we had our shared epiphany, so I gave her a pass and clung to our newfound mother-son bliss and her love for me, which had always been there but had been twisted completely out of shape, what with the travails of a strain of suburban strife for which she was in no way prepared.

  Anyway, how can you fault someone who is dying? I mean if they don’t use their last breath to bury you? I felt like crying, but I kept a lid on it because I was in a bar after all, and didn’t want to be that weird Jewish guy weeping in the corner.

  The truly strange thing is that I miss her all the time now. I never thought I would, but now every time I am overeating, or spend too much money on a shirt, I think about how she would be clicking her tongue in disapproval, like an African tribesman, if only she could see me.

  13

  FROM MAULER TO MAHLER

  One of my aging relatives told me that if there were one person I absolutely needed to talk to while writing about my father, it was, in fact, my father, and she knew someone who could put me in touch with him, no problem. I politely told her, “No thank you.” For the time being, at least, I was going to stick to traditional reporting methods.

  But she pressed ahead, and left me numerous messages—she had been in touch with him via a psychic, and he had a message for me.

  The idea of using a medium to get in touch with dead people seems, to use my favorite word, icky. Who’s to say if they have a DO NOT DISTURB sign up on their doors? Do they have voice mail in the afterlife?

  It was particularly upsetting when it came to my father. On Earth he was a closeted unhappy person. Maybe now he was free to be unhappy all the time, which would make me terribly sad, because I truly hope that he is in a better place. But either way, why should I go chasing his ghost? I saw nothing good coming from reaching across the vale of tears, such as it was, to talk to my father. There was a good chance he wasn’t done yelling at me.

  I made a thousand excuses not to return the calls, but at some point I had to call her back, because not to would have been rude. And, apparently, he had
a message for me. “He can see more clearly now what you are trying to do,” she told me.

  That was it? No apology? He didn’t want to finally say, Gee, son, I’m proud of you?

  And now, goddammit, look at me, all in a twist because a psychic whom I do not believe in, and did not want to hear from in the first place, delivers me a message from my dead father—and I am disappointed in the content?

  Good grief.

  She added that she was frequently in touch with her mother—they spoke all the time—and that this new cross-dimensional relationship had really been helpful to both of them, and that I should really make an effort to talk to my father across the abyss. I thanked her again but declined to take the number of her psychic.

  I suppose if there really were spirits who felt like visiting, the sleeping brain would be a fertile field for them to make landfall, kind of like a bar where everyone knows your name. Maybe the dream state is like the Internet for dead people—a good place to cruise for family and friends. It’s probably much easier to drift into a dream than to start rattling chains or writing messages on foggy mirrors or dusty walls. For a dead person, that is probably a giant pain in the ass.

  One dead friend of mine showed up in a dream recently. He was one of my best friends and died when I was about thirty. I knew him since we were eighteen. It was a suicide. His death broke my heart, and I dedicated my first book to him. I still keep a picture of him hanging in my living room: a black-and-white photograph I took of him playing in his punk rock band in a Bedford-Stuyvesant loft in about 1983. I printed it myself in the NYU dark room.

  He looked pretty good in the dream—more or less the same as I remembered him—and he thanked me for thinking about him. I asked him what it’s like where he was. “It’s okay,” he said. “The people here are nice.” It was comforting to hear, and the whole dream was so entirely not weird, and pleasant, that it would be easy enough to believe.

  When I dream about my father, he’s also just as I remember him in better days. He criticizes me, and we get into petty fights right away. I search for approval, and then I feel crappy when I don’t get it. Not much has changed. In the most recent dream I asked him to read something, and he said, “No, I’m not interested.” And then I told him don’t worry, it’s not something I wrote, I’m just trying to share something nice I saw in the paper. And then he showed slightly more interest.

  It was an obituary of a friend of mine who had recently died, a really lovely write-up of a woman I knew—a journalist who had broken through the old-school boys club of the newspaper racket and was something of a local legend—and he said, “Why would I believe a word of it? I am sure it is all about the writer. These things always are.” I woke up thinking that wherever he is, he is not going to be very happy about this book of mine.

  In another dream, he told me that he was going to write a book. I told him jokingly (the same way I rib a lot of people who get the idea that they want to write a book), “Don’t do it! It always seems like a good idea, but it’s such a schlep. It’s like having homework every day for a year.” (After half a dozen books, I can testify this is true enough.) He told me, “You never were any good at doing your homework. That’s probably why your books aren’t very good.”

  * * *

  WHEN I WAS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD, I owned exactly one “classical” music record, Glenn Gould’s 1955 version of Bach’s The Goldberg Variations, which I bought because a Canadian girl I was keen on told me I needed to listen to it. When it came to the classical music thing, I was right off the turnip truck. Glenn Gould, apparently, was like the Wayne Gretzky of the piano.

  I played the Gould occasionally and enjoyed it, but I never got any action from the girl, and the record faded into the rest of my collection. Who knows: If she had slept with me, I’d probably be playing the Brandenburg Concertos on a harpsichord by now instead of continuing to hammer away at Bo Diddley on an electric guitar.

  About fifteen years after that, I went to see the first Jackass movie, which, if you recall, was hardly a movie at all, but more like a series of slapstick vignettes, each more perverse and violent than what came before it, and generally loathed by what one would call “people of taste.” The Jackass guys loved to fire bottle rockets out of their butts, zap one another with stun guns, ride their skateboards at high speeds into brick walls (because somehow that is hilarious), cover themselves in steaks and fight off hungry Dobermans, play demolition derby in golf carts, etc. It was impressive how much pain these guys were willing to withstand for a cheap laugh.

  The first scene of the first Jackass movie (such was the popularity of stoners electrocuting one another for a few yuks that these movies actually became a successful franchise) featured the entire cast of wounded misfits hurtling down the side of a mountain in a giant shopping cart while bombs exploded around them. Eventually they went sailing off a cliff, Wile E. Coyote–style.

  Adding to the laughs was the soundtrack: a bombastic choral symphony blasted at rock-concert volume. Clearly someone’s idea of irony, it helped transform the willful idiocy of these morons into a demented ballet of sorts—and right then I decided that I should spend more time listening to bombastic symphonies, putting Beethoven at the top of my “To Do” list.

  As I like to say, sometimes you just have to take it where you find it—and if the most reviled comic troupe of no-brain masochists in the world was going to be my entry point into classical music, so be it. I hear it, I like it, I look for more. Like I’ve said before: Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back. Now tell me, how many more lives do I have left?

  It was just like being a teenager all over again, getting up and out to discover all of this wonder for myself. I really had no idea what I was doing—that Beethoven cat made a lot of records! So I started out with what I thought, based on reputation, were going to be the biggest and baddest: Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies; Brahms’s Symphony No. 4; and Mozart’s Symphonies Nos. 40 and 41, and of course there were like fifty versions of each one, by various orchestras and conductors, and who the hell knew what the difference was; and also Carl Orff’s opus, Carmina Burana, which is what I had unearthed as the choral swarm wailing on the Jackass soundtrack. You would recognize it from luxury car commercials, or possibly a satanic possession film, if you went in for that sort of thing.

  I also picked up a disk of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, because I figured they would have a lot of what I came to call “the Bugs Bunny Quotient,” defined casually as the kind of thing that would cause wild gesticulating if played or conducted by a cartoon rabbit wearing a top hat and tails. Never mind the BBQ—which it delivered in spades, the “Moonlight” and the “Waldstein” especially—what I didn’t expect was to be frozen by the abject beauty of Beethoven’s solo piano work. Each composition seemed to tell an epic story. About what? I have no fucking idea. There was no real narrative here, not in the “poor boy from Illinois grows up to be president and frees the slaves” kind of way, but those sonatas sure took you for a ride. As you might stick your nose in a glass of wine and get notes of plums or a bit of leather, I listened to these and got stormy seas and rough sex. There was nearly unbearable tension and release, preternatural calm, divine mystery, and explosive joy, all expressed in music so expansive that mere words wilt in its presence. Is that too earnest? Fuck it: I was floored.

  The recording of piano sonatas I picked up was by Maurizio Pollini on the Deutsche Grammophon® label, for no other reason than it was the first one in the bin, and I understood that DG was something like the Stiff Records of the classical world, a name you could trust. I played it over and over and over again. Nothing had really captivated me like this since the first time I heard Chuck Berry play “Johnny B. Goode” on the American Graffiti soundtrack (which also came out during the annus mirabilis of ’73). Pretty soon I was sitting on a pretty big pile of classical records, which you could still buy stacks of at the Salvation Army® for a quarter a pop. And when Pollini came to town
, I was lucky to get quite literally the very last ticket available in Carnegie Hall—in the very top row in the balcony, in the most remote corner of the entire venue—to see him.

  It was a beautiful spring Sunday afternoon, and I gaily ran uptown to get there early enough to smoke half a joint in Central Park on top of my favorite rock. After getting a drink in the lounge just off the lobby, I found my seat at precisely two p.m., since unlike impudent jazzers and rockers, I had a feeling these classical cats liked to start right on time.

  Two o’clock came and went. Two twenty, two twenty-five…

  “He must be getting a cut of the bar,” I said to the fellow sitting next to me, who was tapping his watch impatiently. But he didn’t laugh. And this is where I learned that you are not supposed to make jokes at these things—which is kind of a drag. Why do classical music fans have to be so goddam serious? No wonder the median age at Carnegie Hall was about a thousand.

  It was a few weeks after having my brain zorched by Pollini’s turn at the Appassionata that the editors of one of the local arts weeklies approached me. They had really liked my first book, which had recently come out, and wanted to know if I would consider writing for them. I agreed, on one condition: I was only willing to write about professional wrestling and classical music. Okay, so two conditions. But for some reason, they agreed.

  I had an idea to work an angle with the classical music. I could never approach the subject with the authority of say, the New York Times classical music guys, and would only make an ass of myself if I tried. So I came at it with an unhinged sort of enthusiasm, with the idea to write about classical music in rock ’n’ roll terms, for the folks who didn’t go out to classical concerts because they figured it was going to be performed by codgers in powdered wigs.

  I advocated that the hipster nation get good and stoned and sit front and center for Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 in G minor—what I like to call “the Sonic Reducer Symphony,” because the opening riff of the symphony (the first music heard in the movie Amadeus) sounds a hell of a lot like the Dead Boys’ minor punk rock masterpiece. Have a go at them both, and tell me I am wrong.