Oedipal complex? What Oedipal complex? I won hands down.
What little boy doesn’t cower after divorce? Hurt by the departure of the big man, the mean man, the drinking and yelling man. And in the hurricane of hurt that follows, money worries, sex worries, death worries, what small boy doesn’t go looking for a companion, a shelter, a new inspiration? Mom.
It’s common. Mama’s boys are created daily. We find life a bit harder than normal boys. Our baseball playing suffers from the lack of tossing partner. Basketball was ridiculous. We had the hoop in the back driveway of the glass castle, but my dad never spent a second playing horse with me or any of his four children. He was busy with his drinking and his success. Massive massive success. So much success it is hard to talk about, really. And, to be fair, Mom never worked a day in her life before or after he left. Okay, one shift in New York City for FAO Swartz during the holiday seasonal rush. One day. It was all she needed. Work was not for her. She’d already suffered under an asshole telling her what to do all the time. She was a painter.
In her late years, long after the motherfucker was dead, she would say, “My painting is hard work.”
I was talking to her on a bright and cheery Saturday morning. “It must be nice to get your painting studio back,” I said, being cheerful. Mom liked cheerfulness, though she herself was often sour and a bit mad.
“It’s not play for fun for me,” she went on. “When I get in there, it’s hard. I struggle. I fight. I try to hear what God is telling me.”
It really did seem to be difficult for her. That was probably due to the weight she’d gained over the last twenty years of being depressed and sedentary. She says she used to “play tennis three times a week, and walk a mile a day.” I never saw it. She did hit tennis balls with me. My dad didn’t like to play with anyone who couldn’t return his cracking serve. So, he never played with me. He did provide the country club on the lake, however, so that was nice. It is where my mom would drop me off in the summers, around 10 am, by boat. “See you later,” she said, speeding off.
My two kids early memories might have some of the same abstract details. I was certainly going off during the day. Jobs that provided for the white picket fence in the nice neighborhood with the nice school took a lot of money. And my wife didn’t really want to work. She volunteered at the school. It was like more adult playtime. Supervising her tot and a bunch of other tots and then being able to leave after a few hours. Back to her chores, or her rhuminations. I’m not quite sure what she did with all that free time. I guess she worked on a drawing or poem or short story. But she didn’t share much. Didn’t have much to show. She did get a story in an anthology published by someone else, so that was more than I could say.
I publish all my own books.
I’ve got no one to blame but myself. For the typos. Meanderings. Lost metaphors. Abstract constructions of language that attempt to obscure the real meaning I’m trying to express. It’s modern literature, for sure.
Like this, for example: David Byrne is ten years older than me, like my sister, both creative geniuses. He did not jump off a bridge in his thirties. He’s got more to show for himself. I have paintings and drawings and short stories of my sister. David has literally done it all. He even introduced me to the second piece of French I ever learned, though my pronunciation is still a joke. C’est ce que c’est (https://howtosayguide.com/how-to-say-it-is-what-it-is-in-french/). It was in the first hit by David and his band The Talking Heads, Psycho Killer.
It was the same year, 1977, that my sister arrived at my prep school in New Hampshire with her boyfriend, Win, and began warping my little open mind with ideas of comparative religion. Imagine if all the religions were right about God? Like the Muslims, the Jews, and all…
I am not kidding about this.
A week ago, The Pope said mankind could worship God in any form they liked. “God is God.” That was from the current Pope, God’s human messenger. So, we’re evolving in our ideas down here on Earth.
And so on I go.
This day will be much like yesterday. I don’t think I will get to play tennis today. I won’t work to hard either. I’m kind of in this state of retirement. Not that I wanted to be retired from my last job, it was pretty cush. I worked from home. Took naps between meetings. And got a few performance awards along the way. I had time to plan my rock opera. My manager, however, didn’t like that I was able to play tennis during my lunch break M-W-F. He made plans to get rid of me. First by being an asshole, which came naturally. He was one of those angry dads with an arm full of tattoos. A skater boy in man form. The way he went after me is probably much the same for his children. I don’t envy any of them. Anyway, I’m waiting for my massive legal judgment. It might never come, says the law firm.
I apply for at least three jobs a day, during the weekdays. It’s Tuesday morning. The sun has finally begun to light up my front garden. This is how I know my mom is still around five years after she completed her Earthly cycle. I’m a gardener. I did not used to be. I now have conversations with frogs and spiders. I water plants and imported trees in a familiar circuit. The water starts hot from being in the long-ass hose. Then it runs cold. By the time I make it back to the beginning and put the hose down at the base of the Red Ornamental Plum, the water is neither warm nor cold, just normal temperature.
As I am slightly bored with myself, I’m going to pause here and go water the garden.
+++
As of today, I am as modern as it gets. Things continue from here.
My new neighbor is a slightly disappointing. I know I have not done the Welcome Wagon thing, but I did walk over and say hello on a Sunday and complain about the liquor stores being closed because I wanted to toast their arrival with a shot or two of Casa Migos, George Clooney’s two-billion-dollar tequila company. We laughed. The tall man introduced me to his wife.
“I hear you are a musician too,” I said. It was a greeting, not a challenge. “Yeah,” he said. I don’t remember either of their names. This morning I was curious about a new yard sign they had put up. I was thinking it approximated my yard sign indicating my preference for the first female president of the United States. The sign, however, was way up the hill of their long driveway and placed behind the child-proof fencing put in by the Jewish couple with the Korgi and two kids.
The sign said, “Athlete of the Week.”
I want to tell them, the parents, to put the sign down near the culdesac so all of us could revel in their daughter’s success. Maybe even learn *her* name. I have seen her shuttled around a few times in the back seat of one of their two cars. That’s it. That’s all I know. Now, at least, I know she’s an athlete. I can’t tell you what sport, the sign is too far away to read without being creepy. I don’t want to be the creepy old guy neighbor who fancies he’s a David Burne protege.
There was one Felipe hopping around this morning. The wolf spider, Pepe, however, has made his retreat after two weeks of holding my recycle bin hostage with a beautiful web. All that single-use plastic. It was one of the greatest marketing lies of all time. While there are islands of the stuff floating in the ocean, we were given little recycle symbols with numbers to reassure us that all was well. Turns out the recycle symbol on plastics is bullshit. Doesn’t mean anything. They don’t even try to recycle it. There’s just too much. I still buy cases of Italian Sparkling Mineral Water from Whole Foods. Why do I care if the water is Italian? Dumb. Shipping all that water over from Italy. Does it taste better? Is it the ancient Roman minerals? WTF?
It’s all a cluster. I’ve gotten myself into a bit of a sweet spot, however. I can’t complain. My weight is coming down. My optimism is high. And I’m giving flights of fancy to this writer’s gambit. Will someone read it? Will no one ever discover my genius? So what! As Rilke said, “You write because you can’t not write.” I don’t think that’s it exactly. Besides, he wrote in German.
C’est ce que c’est.
If Goethe is the author of the masterpiece of literature so massive they can’t even decide on the correct name for it, then I can also blather on and on about memories and images and snippets of songs. I haven’t been able to crack it. I tried the first one, Swan’s Way, in some translations, but no go. Nonsense. Baby talk. Impressions of his pre-biographical memory. Again, I haven’t read more than a few excerpts, because every attempt bogs me down in some misunderstanding. I don’t aspire to write books that take college classes to decipher them like Joyce. Good lord.
It was while I was watering the garden and looking for Filipe that I recalled something that many people are angry about: generational wealth.
I’m here to explain it to you. My dad and mom came from two different well-to-do families. They came together and my father made us even more well-to-do. There’s nothing bad about that. But, it’s imagined that my dad’s early upbringing with and around money gave him an advantage in life. Not just about the money. About the thinking. See, my dad believed he could conquer the world. And in many ways, he did. It was just that little issue with alcohol that queered his progress.
At the height of his success, he began to stop his boat on the way home at his mom’s house for a drink. They drank together. I understand. What I would give to have my mom say, “Wanna split a beer with me?” over a plate of enchiladas and bowl of queso. It was like we were being bad. She would need a nap after I dropped her off and walked her safely into her house. I’d like to share a beer with my mom right now. Instead, I share my garden with her. She’s everywhere. She’s still singing me into being.
At some point her dead genius daughter was like a siren calling her into the rocks and death. My mom wanted to go to Heaven and be with her favorite daughter. “I’m ready,” she would say at Christmas dinner. We all understood her. She was tired. Fat. And depressed about it all.
Except she still never had a job. Kind of like my son. He’s struggling a bit because of this lack of adulting. He’s about to be twenty-four years old. I’m about to be sixty-two. My daughter will be twenty-two in six weeks. We’re all going odd.
Last I checked things were working out okay for me. If I can remember that God is watching out for me, I can relax a little bit into the temporary retirement. I can’t not work forever. My son can’t not work any longer. He’s required to have a job for his sober living residence. I kicked him out of my music room. It’s still just as he left it. Dirty clothes around. A bulky desktop computer. Other random left-behinds. He only had a few hours to clear out.
Coming back into my calm and empty house I smile at God and my mom. “A pretty damn good life,” I say out loud. I measure my time in Nag Champa incense. My house smells like an ashram or a teenage hippie’s bedroom. It’s probably my sister’s influence. The one who flew. Or didn’t fly, as the case may be. Tried to fly. Perhaps it worked. She’s up there now, with my mom, my dad, my brother, and a ton of cats. I’d like to see the cats.
As I look into the yaw of the day I contemplate various trajectories and contemplate the uselessness of many commas in the writing above. Take that!
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