Neither Nor'easter

My father, after a 1960's weekend-long winter Nor'easter, checked himself into a psych facility for a considerable stay. Coming from a family who only disclosed good news, I never quite knew whether it was alcohol, classic depression or business issues with some military PTSD in the mix. I remember he was essentially glued to the sofa in our windowed porch room with the snow piling on the jalousie glass slats insulating like soft white feathers. Football on the black-and-white set, an ice bucket and a bottle of Johnny Walker on the end-table, financial newspapers spread like a blanket... 'In my White room with black curtains... goodbye windows, tired starlings...' lyrics swarm my head when I think of that long weekend.  

Two-plus days of relentless rain in late September New York revived a little cancel culture. It was enough to saturate the glue which holds together the fragile pieces of my generation's aging psyche, and cause a bit of brain-melt, a bit of panic for some.  'You up?' I saw several times in my messaging app... but I didn't dare reply lest the sound of my own voice betray my isolation-- the echo of solitude.

The social media of my peers is a little sad. It ranges from 'those who do protest too much' i.e. happy photos of family events and excursions and food...  to lengthy detailed descriptions of medical nightmares with selfies from hospital beds and requests for aid.  Then there are the chronic daily historians who post memorials to the ever-growing population of the talented deceased. Old photos and files that grow heavier each year because the anniversaries continue to cycle like an unbroken record on continuous play. We look at our newsfeed to discover which of our former bandmates and acquaintances have passed away-- some in real time but altogether too many who somehow slipped away unremarked months ago.  We failed to notice they stopped liking our posts--  stopped wishing us well on our birthday... and we learn they may have died in their apartment or home undiscovered for days, having retired from jobs, their presence not missed by anyone in particular until their voicemail is full, their email has reached a storage limit...

Some post brave photos which do not hide their wrinkles and sagging faces.  So beautiful, people comment.  I mean-- this is life and we age as biology dictates.  I remember Gloria Steinem, my idol as a teenager, telling America 'this is what 60 looks like' as she bravely flaunted her un-altered great looks for a camera.  But soon afterward, she succumbed to the temptation of plastic surgery.

I'm moderately horrified to see photos from gigs... I do not check mirrors and do not 'see'' myself as others do.  I bravely ignore cosmetic realities and play my bass with pretty much the same drive as before. But I see some women on the stage with their faces pulled and pinched and pumped jumping around like old rabbits and I feel sad.  It might be hard to look me in the eye, with my slightly melted face, but unless one has a small fortune and can afford constant attention and consistent maintenance, the altered results of procedures just project a weird sort of insecurity to me.  Like one of those arthritis drug commercials. I don't find this version of Madonna pretty... it's desperate.  But what other version is there? 

I remember when witnessing a friend turn 30 aroused deep pity.  By 40's I was womanly and in love with life.  Joys and challenges of motherhood eclipsed my personal middle-age ambitions but I managed to produce and perform on a level I found satisfying.  Now in my 70's there's another benchmark altogether.  Tonight I watched a Bergman film I'd seen in the 1970's... thinking these characters are so much older and now I could be their mother. Many actors are dead. I've taken their place in line... the ranks move up and up, and eventually we'll fall off into the sea.

What terrified me this weekend was the idea that the glue will disappear before the substance... so that we'll become as a pile of threads which formerly made a stunning dress.  My mother was this-- threads of clarity and intelligence floating in a world without gravity as though she'd lost her footing altogether. What will become of us, we who thought we were so clever and strutted our little accomplishments across a smallish stage for years? What next? 

While the expression 'moving forward' is omni-present in our social and other lives, many of my peers are not moving forward, but looking backward as though their past accomplishments reassure their current version that they had or have value. One wastes the present rediscovering the past which will fail us in the end because the more we disturb it, the less intact it becomes.  And I learned with the death of Alan Merrill that the future is tenuous as well, because the best-laid plans can disintegrate with the death of a critical bandmate... and there is no residual trace of something that never happened. My own father, while he recovered from his episodes, never seemed to really grasp the concept of 'forward' but languished with sobriety and a bit of misery into old age with God-knows-what haunted thoughts and dreams.  Old soldier that he was, he seemed ready to take his place in the front line at nearly 97 years.

So here we are with the tapering rain and the wind in a kind of extended weather denouement and somehow the assurance that a brighter day will dawn. Floodwaters will recede and evaporate leaving damage and scars, but the world will go on.  Not so much our own lives... they are becoming less and less resilient and one day one of these events will be ours and we will be no more. Who will find me? Who will remember my small sorrows and regrets, who will know these lavender-flowered patches in my bedquilt belonged once to a hand-me-down dress I wore on my first day of first grade?

I spent a good part of Saturday night browsing my library shelves-- wondering whether to go back to Dostoyevsky, could I ever read Boswell's Life of Johnson in its entirety, Gibbon's Decline and Fall... ? I finally chose the last Saramago novel I'd been saving... I remember going to hear him read some years ago... he was an old man, and spoke no English-- rarely traveled.  The astonishing thing about Saramago is that he met and recognized his soulmate at 66-- left his partner and directly married this woman and ensured a passionate and creative future.  Meanwhile, I was utterly thrilled, waited on a huge slow-snaking line to have him sign a ratty copy of The Rise According to Jesus Christ. He patted my hand, knowing it was my heart he was signing, not a crisp first edition for lucrative resale. Priceless. It occurs tonight that, God willing, I will soon be the age he was when we met. There will be no more Saramago to read... but at least I will not have left these pages unturned.  

Sex in the City

Lately I've been feeling not exactly discouraged but 'slackened'-- maybe I'm coming off the cruel backlash of April, but the spirit of May has felt more like a nagging hangover than a renaissance.  The indignities of our political climate are being swallowed down like the shitty mediocre coffee we've all come to accept here... one tweet from some useless celebrity talking head, and the crowd sway seems to drown out all protest.  The spring art auctions used to cheer me up-- but now it's all a huge manipulated hedge fund... who needs the tax burdens and massive maintenance issues of real estate when they can buy and sell for millions per square inch?  Much more practical... and you get your name out there not just in the tabloids, but the mainstream media.

So many of my beloved old venues have shut down, having given up trying to keep their heads above encroaching debt-water.  I have fewer gigs, and can ill-afford going much anywhere with a door.  Restaurants don't appreciate food stamps.  My overnight inspiration feels sorely moot and underappreciated.  I stray--- like a sad old lamb.   I readily confess to binging on familiar television noir films, but when those run out-- I admit I have recently discovered Sex in the City.  Yes-- me, who shunned Seinfeld, Friends--  every other sitcom in their time... I've found something addicting in viewing the version of 'ruined' New York I snubbed in the 90's.  Compared to what we get now-- it looks decent.  Obviously others have discovered this, too, apparently, because it seems to be on 24/7 in endless loops.

Of course, each generation had its own version of urban life--- the 'ripe' adult phase-- your girlfriends and roommates-- the inappropriate affairs... the intoxicating hurricane cultures and fads.... bars and restaurants, clubs-- infinite entertainments of menus, club music, art galleries.  Things were being invented nightly... men were plentiful and you could go uptown or downtown-- upscale or slummy/grungy... there was nothing like being on your own, with safety in numbers... and people were wide-eyed and alive-- not buried in their phones and texting.  We danced and yelled and sang and ate and ran around streets which still felt historic and important and yet new.

What I've discovered, twenty-something years later, is the 'vintage-lite' appeal of this show-- well, the girl-gang thing, a non-familial and more intelligent form of Kardashianism-- but also a certain marketing of New York to the rest of the world who peered in with fascination and voyeurism.  How many girls spent their salaries on shoe collections and longed for a West Village studio and a newspaper column?  Or the old-school Park Avenue husband?  The jogs and horseback rides in Central Park, cafes and bookstores, club openings, new restaurants... billboards on buses, New York Times reviews...these things have changed.  The internet has changed most everything.  And New York-- well, the local celebrities and eccentrics have all but disappeared in the whitewash of social media.

I sound like an old person now, and I am.  Maybe I failed to 'get' what everyone else got, immersed as I had been in my Proust and Jean Genet and David Foster Wallace... but I guess what I'm saying is I would gladly take this SITC version of New York over what we have now.  The early episodes still feature landlines and answering machines... cigarettes in bars,  couples actually looking at one another over dinner-- taxis-- labels and not brands-- video rental stores and Tower Records...coffee shops... it's 'new' nostalgia but it beats what we're getting today.

In the 90's I had many visitors from Scandinavia who obsessed over the 60's and the roots of American rock and roll.  They wandered around Greenwich village looking for Bob Dylan's footprints and Jimi Hendrix's old apartments.  They photographed places where Allen Ginsberg had drank and read, visited CBGB's and bought Patti Smith books. I tolerated their hero worship with my 'been there, done that' attitude... after all-- I'd been at Newport in the 60's and met John Lennon several times... I am/was a true New Yorker.

Earlier this week a young couple from Norway visited.  One of them had never been to America.  He is a renowned but not rich guitarist and she is an artist.  In order to afford the lowest fare level and a one-star hotel for 3 nights, he worked painting houses and gardening.  They arrived during the worst spring weather I've seen in years-- a stubborn nor'easter pattern which spread a 3-day pall of cold rain and cloud-cover over the city like a punishment.  It was funereal and depressing.  For a tourist budget which allows for little more than self-directed walking tours and street food, it was a wash.  There were rats in their dark room and the communal bathrooms smelled of sewage.  Visibility was low on the bridges; the Empire State building seemed to evaporate in the fog.  I can't remember a drearier Mother's Day; I wore a fleece coat and watched basketball playoffs with my son in a local bar; everyone seemed muted and cold.

The Norwegians showed up at my Monday night gig, where we old rockers were doing our best to keep up an electric tradition.  I can't even buy anyone a drink these days; at least there was no cover... but I had to resist the urge to apologize on behalf of my city.  The presidential American shame is bad enough--- but here we all were--- downtown on the Lower East Side... and I was hard pressed to muster a little rock-and-roll joy and to keep myself from talking about the good old days.  It is what it is, my guitar player says, as we headed west toward the ailing nighttime trains, past the stores and spaces of what used to be... thinking about the concept of future shock and the reality that every three months Downtown morphs and sheds another skin.  I used to guide people through architecture and galleries, down streets; even the Metropolitan Museum is now wearing a Play It Loud banner like an old seer dressed in young man's clothing.  I no longer belong anywhere except my own apartment.  I wondered how this couple processed the city-- the dream they'd had-- the streets of gold vinyl and talent-- the art and the poetry and the grit now a slick modified vision of pseudo-luxury and bling... the unwholesome smell of over-taxed sewers and wet garbage and the omnipresent homeless-- soaken and broken and swollen.

So I failed in my usual role of tour-guide and old-cultural liaison.  They looked cold and hungry and bewildered from their miserable trek in what seemed like winter rain.  They came looking for paradise-- a souvenir honeymoon to remember for all time from the Scandinavian countryside, and found a shrouded, subdued island in the midst of an urban identity crisis.  Was it the nor'easter that spoiled the dream or was this just a meteorologic excuse for something that has long evaporated except for in late-night television re-runs?   I wanted to cry and only hoped, from my cold but dry bed last night, they had enough love between them to have a little sex in the city.