Chapter 5,9r?999

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“A camel is a horse created by a committee.”

-Stanislaw Lec

If Joan of Arc and Dylan Thomas had produced a child, it would have been my mother. She was a flying rebel and a bleeding poet. When she walked into a room she owned it, challenging the masses, drink in hand, Irish jaw thrust out, daring the world to fuck with her. She used her rapier wit, her beauty and her muscular arrogance to frighten the enemy, meaning almost everyone, into retreat or worship. At a cocktail party, underneath her laughter, you could smell the fuse burning, hear the sizzle, see the flames in her eyes. You would wait, clutching your canape, in awe, for the explosion. She had succeeded from the weak, sad and robotic human race and carried the invention of herself like a battle flag. She crouched like a leopard in the jungle of mediocrity, ready to spring and rip the guts out of a colorless world. At the same time, ironically, you couldn’t jack hammer your way through the walls that surrounded her to protect her from the danger of you. I was plagued with x-ray vision when it came to my mother, and there were times I could see through her armor. There was a deep well of sadness in there. And there was wind. There was a field of fear, desperate loneliness and anger. And I saw a fat manuscript crackling and curling up in a bonfire as she walked into the sea.

She should never have locked herself up in a house in the Midwest. She should never have had children. She should have been on the road with a big band. She should have hung out with Henry Miller and Anais Ninn in Paris. She should have had a seat at the round table at The Algonquin in New York City. She wrote, about being a mother and a housewife: “For this I gave up a cold-water flat in Greenwich Village? I must have been drunk.” And, in a letter to a friend-

“Have to go now and make like one of those esoteric creatures slathered with cold cream who dusts and bakes and answers the doorbell for the Fuller Brush man and like that. Quelle drag. The editor of Good Housekeeping is a sadist whose mother was probably a suffragette. I’m like a secret drinker…I sneak an unfinished lyric into my apron pocket when no one is looking and scribble a line or two while the toaster heats up…a nip here and a nip there…”

Why she chose the lifestyle she did, I’ll never really know. Maybe she was drunk. What I do know is she poured her unfulfilled passions and dreams over and into us kids like mad syrup. And we devoured it, swam in it. We worked our little asses off to be the quickest, the most well read, the cleverest and most unique, the shining stars kicking ‘round the status quo. She unveiled our heroes and our competition to us through repeated lessons in art, literature, poetry and music. We had to be the absolute, smartassiest best. Because we could pull it off. Because we wanted, because we needed her love.

Being the oldest, I was the prototype. I was the first project. Because I could walk and talk and read and paint and play music first. I was constructed out of acrylics and oils, hard cover books, steel strings and wood. I was put together piece by piece, nails pounded into my young frame at all hours by my mother, my dad lugging the tool box up the back stairs and into the smoky den. They were assembling The Golden Boy. My dad set up the tape machines and did the recording, named my bands and paid for professional promo photos. He bought us matching stage clothes. He drove me to a guitar shop and when I couldn’t decide whether to buy a six string or a twelve string, whipped out his credit card and bought them both. My mother was my coach and teacher, especially when it came to writing lyrics, and would sit across from me at the breakfast table dissecting the words I had put down in a loose leaf notebook, (she once accused me of treating the English language as if it were a mortal enemy and I was beating it to death with a shovel), explaining how internal rhymes worked and how I could give the song more style and power with a change here and there. She would suggest bringing in the chorus earlier or how adding a bridge would give the song more body. She insisted I stay away from what she called “oblong words”, words like “emotion” and “sympathetic” and, instead, describe those feelings using hookier and more quirkily descriptive words, and to use words that describe the things you see around you to tell the story of what’s going on inside of you. (Any outward display of our feelings was frowned upon, but expressing those feelings in prose, poetry or lyrics was applauded.) I would run upstairs to my room and rework the tune and when I had it to the point where I thought it might be acceptable, I would play it again for her, waiting for her nod of approval. She kept herself at a distance from us, but when we were working or performing she was right there, head held high, judge and jury, gauging our progress, our retention of what she had taught us and the results, seeing what we added to it that was our own, and if it worked. I wrote prose as well and she decided that I needed a pen name. And so she gave me one-Styptic Fantod. In a letter to her mother she wrote about my early writing skills:

“This is so sophisticated that it scares the hell out of me! What will he be doing at age eighteen? (There is a certain winsome disregard for continuity in subject matter in his stuff, but this is not so important at the beginning, I think, as a good sound knowledge of form, so I am not badgering him too much about it. When he knows how to say it, then he can decide what to say. After all, at his age, he’s liable to be a little shorter on writable subjects than an older person with more experience. Let him learn HOW and then when he has something he wants to say, he can plunge right in…I remember John Ciardi telling his class; ‘Show me a man who has some great message for mankind, and I will show you a dabbler…but show me a man who cannot resist fooling around with words, and I will show you a writer.’’’

At some point, after auditioning a new song for her that I had written, she decided I had graduated from her school, and said to me: “You know all this stuff I’ve been teaching you? Well. Forget it. Go do what you want to do.” I was devastated. I had worked so hard to get it right and now she was telling me to throw it all out the window. I understand now that this was part of her teaching, the culmination of my time spent with her laboring over every word and phrase. It was an almost Zen-like approach. She thought I had learned what I needed to learn from her and now it was her job, her duty, to set me free. To construct myself, to build my own story, on the foundation she had constructed with me.

Sarah says, standing in the kitchen: “There was no possible way you could have become the son/artist/writer/musician/friend mom demanded you become, no matter how accomplished or talented you were.”

We only wrote one song together. It was a talking blues about travelling through different time zones. We haphazardly constructed it in Billings, Montana and called it “A Lucid Incandescent Blinding Revelation on the Transitory Ephemeral Nature of Time and Space”, or “Better Late Than February”.

She joined The Polar Bear Club, put on her bikini and jumped into Lake Michigan in a blizzard on New Year’s Day.

Danny reacted to her lessons, her expectations and her grandeur in his own way. He refused to read the literature she laid on him-he read books about music and musicians. Magazines. Creem and Rolling Stone. The songs he wrote were disjointed and wandering, he couldn’t write words really, and had no interest in poetry. He was a musician, plain and simple, and that’s all it says under his name on his headstone: “Musician.” Because I was the first to get up on stage and rock it, because Danny saw me win my mother’s attention and admiration, because I got the girls, the drugs and the applause, he spent his time in the basement with her working himself stupid learning the drums. Basic twos and fours at first. Rudiments. Paradiddles. Fills and shuffles. My mother played jazz and swing, and after lessons in those genres, he dismissed her and dove into the rock ‘n’ roll he loved. Hour after hour after hour, day after day after day, in bell-bottoms, flowered shirts, beaded necklaces and turquoise rings, hair down to his shoulders, he lived in that basement with his headphones on, playing along with records of rock bands, working out like an athlete, bound and determined to get what I had, and then, as I did, make it his own. And he did it. And he was good. He was better than good. And, eventually, he would turn into one the most amazing drummers I’ve ever known. He would turn out to be the best actual musician of all of us, the one who would spend the most time on the road, the one who did the heaviest drugs, and the one who couldn’t handle it.

Sarah was a whole different story. She studied every book my mother gave her, laboring through the Irish literature and the poems until she knew the stuff inside out. But she hated being on stage. She wasn’t that into rock ‘n’ roll (a kind of rebellion in itself, I think) and, although the only time I remember our parents listening to classical music was on the odd Sunday when my dad, feeling morose and hungover, would sit in the den on his own reading the paper and listening to a Gustav Mahler record, she was a classical whiz kid. She was fast and furious when it came to reading music (Danny and I didn’t read) and could play anything you put in front of her. But she never jammed, never played a sleazy twelve bar at three am, never was in a band. Odd, considering the way the music in our house swung. Her approach was much more intellectual than the way Danny and I did it-like throwing paint. She was a big Beethoven fan. She would write concertos, but she also wrote songs-you kind of had to in that house-and some of them were beautiful. Lilting, melodic, haunting pieces with lyrics more like poetry, songs that were reminiscent of no one. Her style was truly her own, influenced by her knowledge of classical, popular and Irish music, and words that were crafted from her time spent under my mother’s tutelage. She was in a class all by herself. She was all by herself in many ways. As a small child she would hide in the basement laundry chute for hours. At one point-declaring she was an astronaut-she moved into her spaceship under the basement stairs for three days and nights. Mission control was my dad communicating with her through toy walkie-talkies. My mother had the job of emptying the bucket she used to relieve herself. Later, she moved herself into the attic and spent her time making dozens of miniature instruments-cellos, violins, pianos-out of cardboard and thread. The deal with Sarah was this: she felt invisible in our mad family. She was the youngest, and watching Danny, myself and my mother strut our stuff, and regardless of her boundless talent, she convinced herself that she could never be creative enough or famous enough. She felt alone. She felt that she couldn’t live up to the “Shmitt Mystique”, as she called it. And I also think she was misunderstood. She went away to camp one summer and returned to find her cherished stuffed animals (she had given them all names and personalities) gone and her room redecorated by my mother in a gaudy ridiculous fairy princess motif. The house on Farwell Avenue was a scary place for her. So she hid. And so she’s an egghead. She has four degrees from two of the best universities on the East Coast. She graduated Magna Cum Laude. She lives in Maine now. Alone. And the Steinway just sits there looking at her, like an old car on blocks, taking up space in her tiny green house.

She asks from a chair in the corner: “Why was it so terrible to show any emotion aside from drunken hilarity or awe in the face of beauty?”

She hated and feared Danny, and had little sympathy for him when he started to hit the skids. But she loved rabbits, and wrote:

“I’ve had a bit of trouble, all my own to wonder at,

I’ve seen my lover raped.

I watched my brother go mad.

And one night, drunk, I tried to throw myself into a winter river.

I had a bout with bloody evenings locked into my room

With a flock of Falcons; it was Falcons who tore my flesh, not me.

I remember wandering by the lake, sleeping in a tree, afraid to go home.

Afraid, all the time, of my mad brother.

Of my lover.

I would have killed.

I’ve had my own bit of trouble to wonder at.

But also I had a great Dutch Red

With grand silk ears, long,

And a quick red tail

And a passion for Kool-Aid.

Some mornings I’d wake to her asleep under my chin

And she’d open her round brown eyes

And kiss my ears.

We are, least of all, rabbits.”

Sarah drinks way too much scotch, runs through the snow in the back yard and falls flat on her face. She doesn’t move. I think she is dead.

The idea that my mother was simply cheerleading the underdog, as some people thought, isn’t really accurate. It went deeper than that. She truly believed in the causes she chose to champion. But I understand how people came to that conclusion. She was a Freedom Rider, integrating buses and swimming pools, she was engaged to a black man called Harry before she married my dad-a Jew. She told us stories about how this country fucked over the Native Americans and swore we were part Blackfoot. And she turned us on to the Irish rebel songs, making sure we understood the politics and, yes, the romance of that tragic and bloody clash, with such fervor, I would wonder if she was secretly running guns for the IRA. As a result, I would come home from teaching art to kids at a school in “The Inner Core” to the song “The Patriot Game” by Liam Clancy playing at full volume. And one night I came back late from a party and found her, drunk and passed out on the floor, Paul Robeson’s version of the spiritual “Deep River” booming out of the enormous speakers. I turned off the stereo, got my arms under hers, lifted her up and guided her, pushing and pulling, up the stairs to her bed.

My mother was one of the most powerful, talented and unique individuals I have ever met. And although she was not one to hold and rock a child in her arms at any length, although she lived in her own world, I could never imagine trading her in for a warm, simple and cuddly PTA mom in a flowery apron, smelling like cake.

She would one day write this for me:

“Night after night and after

I listen

To what you sing and bleed and build

And (quite aside from academic awe

At what is beautifully, now, you)

I weep

for all the Others (kind, blind dr. susans,

good, sweet dim and simple sons

and daughters) who have

Never lived and died.

Pain o yes buys twice its weight (like diamonds

the only safe investment) in joy

And whoever

Never

Hits bottom never slices sky

My

god

How you have eagled free beyond my highest dreams

Where I can barely see what I will always love

Enough

to burst the world.”

Once, at a public beach, instead of a sand castle, she sculpted a life sized, belly up, anatomically correct sandman. The lifeguards kicked it to bits.

She loved us. Deeply: from her lighthouse on the rocky shore, writing it down to prove it.

You can hear two of her songs I have recorded: “Cool It, Baby” on the “Nothing Is Real” album and “A Grief Ago” on “Dog Steal The Moon”.