I Say Goodbye

Okay.  I really wanted to like the final Colbert show.  I had expectations. And to be truthful, I answered the phone a couple of times... took my eyes and ears off the TV. Also I was buoyant and a little emotionally intoxicated from the second Knicks win over the Cavaliers.  Factually, I never loved the show in the first place. I sympathize, he tries... but it's a little like being on a date with that charming handsome intelligent man who cracks jokes over dinner and pours your wine correctly... but you can't wait to get home to that hot crazy guitar player who makes you laugh.

I grew up craning my ears to hear the Jack Paar and then Johnny Carson show from my parents' room.  It was like forbidden fruit. Some nights I'd lie on the floor and listen outside their door.   I loved the way the audience  laughed. When I had my own place and a tiny b/w TV I got to watch from a bed on the floor with my guitar player live-in boyfriend.  It was special. 

When Letterman took over it was perfect. Everything about the show-- his guests, his cynicism, his lists, his skits and bits... was perfect. I loved the band.  Hiram Bullock was to become one of my favorite musicians and friends.  He was smart and cool and brilliant.  

In the last years there is too much competition for late night.  You see the same guests on all networks... no loyalty or feuds or even political differences.  Everyone hates Trump with similar ferocity. Who to pick?  Musical guests no longer compel me; they occupy a very short segment. Hosts take up half the show with their monologues. The audience doesn't count as much. 

Colbert is nice.  He's become something of a hero-- a TV martyr. His cancellation is an eerie foreshadowing of the compromised future of media platforms. What is happening here, etc.? I read today about his grief episode... where he shared with Anderson Cooper that his father and two brothers were killed in a plane crash when he was a boy.  Touched me. But he had a mother and many other siblings. Some of them were in the audience tonight and they all seemed wholesome and happy and normal.

Memorial Day is almost upon us.  My father died shortly before his ninety-seventh Memorial Day.  I remembered how I wished he would die in a plane crash.  Not a car accident-- one of his brothers went that way and it was a scandal because he'd disowned his own family. But a plane crash seemed instant and sort of poetic, especially for a former paratrooper who was at home in the sky. It's a terrible guilt but I wanted my mother to have a husband who deserved her kindness and I wanted a 'real' father-- the kind of father maybe Steven Colbert is. 

But the show-- ?  Well, for those of who were hoping for the Pope, we got Paul McCartney.  His facework is marvelously done and he's charming and maybe a NYC legend at the moment... he lives ten blocks away from me.  He once stopped into a club where I was playing on the upper east side... well, he started to, until he was swarmed.  And the Ed Sullivan theatre connection-- the history.  I always actually thought Ed was creepy-- ditto Lawrence Welk, and the children's show hosts-- Soupy Sales, Captain Kangaroo, Ringmaster Claude, even Mr. Rogers (apologies).  But the guests were superb.  No contest.  Immediately recognizable.  Iconic. Variety.  

Maybe there was a  message in the McCartney appearance.  He's eighty-something and promoting his new album.  I wonder if he would have done the show had he no product.  But he reinvents himself.  He goes on. No matter that each reincarnation is that much less stellar than the one before. It's been fifty-six years since the Beatles broke up. Admittedly, Paul played great bass tonight on Hello/Goodbye. Really good.  But for many of us who always preferred Stones to Beatles, our favorite was George.  He was a rebel. Sir Paul is metamorphic and has rounded corners.  You could tell Colbert was thrilled and that was nice.  It made me forget about Jon Batiste whose success baffles me. Everyone wants to be a rockstar--talent or not. Like instant rice-- just stick a bowl and some water in an instagram oven and you have it.

But Colbert will go on. Cancellation is the new black.  It's like death; suddenly people who never cared become your supporters. I actually watched the show tonight-- or some of it.  Isn't that the point of television anyway-- the viewers, the money? I wonder what McCartney was paid and who paid it. Literally a ha'penny in the billion pound bucket of his wealth and continued royalties. Like Bruce they can't stop.  I wonder if the Pope had been on Late Night whether he'd have given the godly finger to the management at CBS... a Fatherly scolding. I'd like to shake the whole damn country. But we're complacent-- we worship mediocrity and elect morons. And we wave goodbye. It's wrong.

Memorial weekend I'll say a prayer for my unhappy misunderstood father. I'll remember all those great guests on the Ed Sullivan show-- Elvis, Little Richard, the 'original' Paul.  The more things multiply the further we are from the originals.  Scroll through the thousands of faces onscreen at any given moment... it's underwhelming. Goodnight, Steven... we'll surely be seeing you. 

Driving Mr. Madden

Throughout my life, my father was something of a mystery to me.  He had very rare moments of joy or lightness, but mostly he brooded-- he paced, he fretted, he lay awake at night.  Of course in the 21st century one would have recognized the classic symptoms of post-war PTSD, but in the 1950's, retired soldiers were expected to re-acclimate to civilian life-- to have families and jobs and be 'normal'.

Whether or not he was CIA, as some of my curious boyfriends were convinced, he'd had a challenging military enlistment punctuated by wounds and acts of great heroism. As many soldiers will attest, the accolades and medals do little to assuage the deep psychological trauma that went mostly unaddressed in those 'happy' days of the 1950's.  Many self-medicated with alcohol or prescriptions, but they were mostly on their own.

At some point in my adulthood, my mother tried to soften the emotional walls I'd created to shield myself from the effects of his moods and disapproval. I was referred to as 'the one who works in bars' with a kind of built-in question as though not even that description was apt. Anyway, during one of his more difficult depressive episodes, she related a story to open my heart  a little. As his enabler and life partner, it was rare that she divulged anything, especially to a daughter whose natural inclinations toward the arts and free speech made her suspect and outside the realm of trust.

During his European service, my father as Captain of the 101st Airborne had a driver. Besides his military field heroics he also participated in some dangerous undercover intelligence missions.  His driver was a black man from Kentucky. They became close. The driver made him promise if he was ever killed in action, my father would go to his family in person and deliver the news.  He did not want his poor mother who could not even read to have one of those terrible telegrams she feared.  So they made a pact.  One day during a risky maneuver, they were attacked and a grenade blew up the jeep.  My father was wounded but not critically; his driver, attempting to shield my father, took the brunt and was instantly killed.

After 9/11 my father was given a hero's license plate which allowed him to park anywhere in the city.  For some reason he seemed a little lightened by this recognition.  While he still experienced periodic deep depressive episodes, he began to attend weekly Old Guard meetings. Being too macho to submit to psychiatric treatment, these meetings were therapeutic.  I guess he was able to pull this story from his memory...  one of the terrible guilts from which he suffered. Most of them were unavoidable-- the consequences of following military orders.  But this was a personal debt he'd left unpaid and it ate at him, decades later.

Why he never attempted to contact the family is a complicated mystery, like most of my father's narrative. For me who goes to great lengths to fulfill even the silliest of promises, this is baffling. But recently it occurred to me that among the landmarks of my life that most irked my father, I married a black man. Perhaps he saw this as a painful reminder and criticism of his personal failure. I don't know; he so rarely gave me a kind look or an embrace; I both feared and hated him.

Last week I read the Count of Monte Cristo... a classic I had written off long ago as a 'boys' book.  It was in my son's teenage library, untouched. And it was fantastically entertaining. Adventure, intrigue, conspiracy, murder, romance... everything one would want.  But most of all it was a story of not just revenge but the resolution of deep irreparable damage from the miscarriage of justice, the way one envious man can turn against another. The unlikely resolution of one man's trauma results in further damage. 

Today as a kind of personal dare I have begun the daunting Divine Comedy. Dante, like Dantès in the Dumas, had been wrongly accused, and the writing of this was a kind of retribution. Whatever the motive, I surely read it in school-- the Longfellow translation which is maybe not the best but I learned today how HWL faced this project just after his beloved wife was killed in a house fire. He, too, was wounded in the inferno. A double dare.  

As we age, the issues of guilt and anxiety weigh on us.  We look back and try to re-interpret our past as though there is a moral there. Sometimes we find understanding-- forgiveness. I tried hard to forgive my father, and have done so, to the extent that I have forgiven myself where he has not. We don't have an enlightened guide like Virgil to guide us through the layers of narrative, to shed light on the good and evil of our present which seems, like worlds past, to have confused the system of punishment and reward.  The life which seemed so easy and simple in the 1950's has become cluttered and confused. One wants to write a guidebook to take us through these times where there are literally millions of digital answers to whatever question we pose. A definitive contemporary Divine Comedy.

In the end, we are each of us responsible for not just ourself, but someone else-- maybe one other person-- fulfilling the promise we made, or explaining, or listening to the man on the bus who looks ill... or the lady on the park bench who stares, day after day, who leaves her lunch untouched on the seat. I am sure that my father, to someone else, was a hero-- was perhaps kind, and understanding. And I hope somehow that driver's mother-- now long dead, certainly, was able to find peace.  After all-- no one's presence could really have relieved the pain of losing her son.  Maybe my father knew that. He was a believer, I think. Maybe at the end, he finally forgave himself.