summer of '75

The gaps between my posts have increased. It's hard to get into a consistent rhythm with this thing. Real life takes over, leaving the life of the mind behind. Real life gets in the way of living. I spend so much time compelled to do things I don’t really want to do. I guess this is what adulthood is all about. ...I delayed being an adult for about eight years but eventually fell in line. Lots of people from my generation and demographic background seem to have deferred adulthood indefinitely. They dress like they’re still teenagers, what with their ripped jeans, 'ironic' t-shirts, baseball caps, sneakers. Deferring adulthood means, in part, maintaining a juvenile casualness in all areas of life, but especially in the way one physically presents themselves. There’s no propriety anymore. Do I sound like an old crank? I feel like one these days. I feel like one, for example, when I see young moms at the grocery store, sporting dreadlocks, covered in tattoos, and – quel surprise! - unable to impose any discipline on their kids as they go wilding through the aisles and throw tantrums if mommy doesn’t buy them their Lucky fucking Charms. ...I know quite a few people who’ve put off the serious business of growing up. I smile at them and make them think I respect their precious bohemian alternativeness, but their way of life disgusts me. They lead itinerant, rudderless lives. Two years in L.A., three years in Seattle, two years in Frisco, four years in New York, four years in Amsterdam...

I’m glad I was able to avoid this trap, however narrowly. My life history has played out in such a way as to imbue me with a very well-developed Reality Principle. I gravitate to safety, to predictability...to adulthood. But being an adult in this sense means I never have moments of pure bliss. I fuck with two condoms on in case one of ‘em breaks. I haven't had an extended period of pure bliss since that magical summer, 35 years ago. I've had moments of happiness in the time between then and now, of course, but never another similarly uninterrupted stretch of days and weeks and months, cemented together by contentment and freedom from the fear of something unspeakably horrible happening to me. This is the trouble with me and my reality principle. Reality for me invariably equals the worst possible scenario, the most awful outcome. So maybe it’s not reality at all. Maybe its paranoid delusion. I think it comes from being abandoned. I don't mean this in the sense of a 12-year-old mom in the South Bronx dropping her baby down the garbage shoot. It's not that kind of abandonment. The kind of abandonment I’m talking about is much more subtle, not nearly as raw, but powerful nevertheless. ...My folks weren't around much. They were so immersed in themselves and their careers. And my biological father had already left the scene before I was even two. He couldn't deal with the dissolution of his marriage to my mom, so he just ran away from it all, fleeing for a bottomless bottle of Chivas and a dank apartment on east 66th street. I only discovered years after the fact that the guy died of liver disease. Poor fucker drank himself to death. After he was out of the picture, almost all traces of him were swept under the rug in my family. He wasn't talked about at all. There were no photographs of him anywhere. It was as if he had never happened. But if he never happened, then in some ways I never happened either. It's weird when you're a young kid and there's already all this denial about your origins. It's another kind of abandonment, the kind that leaves you with all sorts of unanswered questions about who you are and where you come from. You get to thinking that there's something wrong with you, and you expect that the world is out to hurt you because of it. You do what you can to protect yourself. You put your guard up. You don't let people in because you know that in the end they'll leave. You avoid risks. You remain closed off.

Helene, the grandmotherly woman from Belgium who raised me while my mom and dad were out conquering the universe, eventually left me as well, but that was two years after the glorious summer of my untouched happiness. ...My parents had a groovy country house in the town of Wingdale, New York, a little two-story place made of stone, very dark and cool inside, at the end of a long twisty-turny driveway that cut a path through a thick cover of trees and greenery. I spent that summer up at that house with Helene and my sister, who was three, while my parents were working in the city. In the mornings, a young hippie mom and her two daughters would arrive in a tan VW Bug - the cool kind with the engine in the back - and the four of us would drive to Green Knoll Day Camp, the radio blasting AM Gold. Dancin' in the moonlight... The new Mother Nature's takin' over... Ride, ride, ride, gotta let it ride...

I loved those drives to the camp, clapping and singing and snapping in the back seat of the Bug, no worries, nothing to make me scared or sad, no bills to pay, no buttons to push. Pure freedom, with a great soundtrack. ...At Green Knoll I'd play baseball, trade baseball cards with my friends, swim in the lake, eat ice cream, and listen to some hippy dude play Cat Stevens and Jim Croce songs on his guitar. Rollin' me down the highway... Nowadays when I see some hippy dude playing a guitar on a lawn or park bench somewhere, I'm automatically consumed with an urge to rip the guitar from his faggoty little hands and give it the full Pete Townshend treatment against the concrete. I don't know what happened to make me such a tortured and angry guy. Then again, maybe I do know, and maybe that's the problem...

...So there was a counselor at Green Knoll named Sharon. The memories are blurry, but Sharon was probably 15- or 16-years-old, and she was beautiful with long red hair and freckles. When you’re a seven-year-old boy and there’s a girl like Sharon taking care of you, paying attention to you, and giving you validation, it’s inevitable that you’ll fall in love with her. But the thing about Sharon was that she seemed to fall in love with me, too. I was a cute kid with wild blonde hair and brown eyes. She gave me much more face time than she gave to the other kids, or maybe this is just the way I choose to remember things. She’d hug me and kiss me and put me on her shoulders. The minute we pulled up in the tan Bug, she’d take me from the car, throw me in the air, and give me love and love and love and the love that loves to love. When I got a hit in baseball, she’d clap and cheer. When I swam well, she’d grab me and hold me against her fleshy bathing suited body and tell me how adorable I was. And I loved it. And I loved her. I wanted marry her, to be with her all the time...

But then one day another counselor, some guy I don’t remember much at all, took note of the love affair between Sharon and me. He thought it was funny, or cute, or both. “You really love Sharon, don’t you, Max?” he said. For some reason, when it was expressed so nakedly like this, the feelings I had for her filled me with instant terror, shame, embarrassment, and maybe even some anger. Who the hell was this voyeur, peering in at our amorous dance? “No I don't!” I answered. And that’s all I said. One small sentence. It came out instinctively. I didn’t want other people to know. I didn't want to own up to what was so obvious...

Sharon walked away. I guess she felt hurt or betrayed because she wasn’t waiting for me the next day when we pulled up in the tan Bug, and she was cold and distant when I found her and tapped her on the shoulder. She looked at me like I was a stranger. She wouldn’t swim with me, wouldn’t cheer for me in baseball. She found some other kid to love and adore and hug and kiss. I don’t remember whether I cried, but I do remember feeling empty and sad. Sometimes you don’t get a second chance. Sometimes you wound the people you love just by virtue of being who you are, or you do or say something irretrievably bad in one fleeting and isolated moment, and then that’s it. You’re done. There’s no way to get back what you once had. You’re just left with yourself, and you don’t even know where to go or who you can turn to for comfort. I wonder what ever happened to Sharon. Beautiful, unforgiving Sharon...

In spite of the trauma and heartbreak with Sharon, I still like to think of that summer as an unblemished time for me. When I wasn't at the camp, I hung out at home with Helene and my sister. One of the funny things about Helene is that, even though she was rather prim and formal when my parents were around, she would let me do almost anything I wanted, within reason, when they weren't around. She let me have TV Dinners, which were way too down-market for my mother to ever let me have when she was around. My favorite was always the friend chicken with mashed potatoes and apple pie. Helene would also let me stay up late watching Met games and The Courtship of Eddie's Father. My favorite players on the Mets that summer were Tom Seaver, Del Unser and Mike Vail. Vail was called up from the minors in mid-season and proceeded to go on a 23-game hit streak, which was a record at the time for a rookie. There was all kinds of talk that Mike Vail wuld be the next big thing, but he injured himself and never lived up to the hype. Baseball can be such a cruel game, which is probably the reason it affects me in such a deeply emotional way, ...One game the Mets played that summer against the Cardinals in St. Louis is still especially memorable for me because it went 15 innings and didn't end until after midnight, but Helene let me watch the whole thing. I must've explained the concept of extra innings to her in my broken French, and somehow it must've made sense to her. The Cards ended up winning the game when the the lightning-fast Bake McBride walked to lead off the bottom of the ninth, stole second, stole third, and then scored on a passed ball by John Stearns. The Mets lost a lot of games like this that summer... Bake McBride's name stayed with me forever. It's one of the great baseball names, along with Dick Pole, Sixto Lezcano, Amos Otis, Otis Nixon...

The other thing about the house in Wingdale was that it had a bedroom in one of its back corners, which my dad turned into a den, where he kept a fairly sizable record collection. He's mostly a Sinatra, swing jazz, Sondheim, WNEW AM kinda guy, but he had some great rock records, too. It was back in that den where I discovered Sgt. Pepper, and After the Gold Rush, and Tapestry, and The Band, and Beggar's Banquet, and...

Another thing I can say about Helene is that she let me be by myself. I can't really figure out whether she somehow knew that I liked solitude or whether her leaving me be alone, along with my parents being away, trained me to be self entertaining, but so many of the memories I have from that summer are of me being alone. I was alone a lot in the den, listening to my dad's records. And even when I was in the tan Bug with the hippie and her daughters, I mostly peered out the window, enjoying the music, and lived in my own internalized world. At least this is how I remember it. ...I used to play baseball by myself on the front lawn of the house in Wingdale. I'd watch a Met game and then go out there with a ball, a bat, and a glove, and I'd reenact the game. The only change I'd make in the script is that the Mets would win. Stearns would gun down Bake McBride trying to steal second. Skip Lockwood would retire the side. Dave Kingman would win the game with a home run in the top of the 16th. And maybe Sharon would even take me back...