No Hard Feelings/excerpt
And yet, the finality of the inner drought, this dreadful blend of acuity in the matters of detail and indifference has created a generation wherein people have an air about them that seem to matter more than any specific achievement. Perhaps they have a particular genius for passing as a genius. This is dilettantism and if the intellectual life of the American speaking world rests largely on dilettantism, for this is a talent found in every degree up to the level of those who really are highly gifted, in whom it usually seems, to all appearances, to be missing; then Man’s monstrous abandonment in a desert of illusions, his restlessness, malice, unsurpassed callousness, money-grubbing coldness and violence, all fully characteristic of our times, (same as it’s ever been, only our version), and by these accounts solely the consequence of damage done to the soul by keen, brilliant logical propaganda masked seductively at pretty amphetamine-colored speeds, Delicious Apple-like isexed up madness of marketeering devilment and dirty rat, Orwelian advertisement. Simply put: There’s a lot of people hurting out there and they don’t know how come and that really scares me.
*****
…..ONCE upon a time over warm bagels, smoked salmon and fresh fruit; in the picture home fashioned after a schooner; on the peaceful, strange Sound, I shared the warm, yellow wooden family breakfast nook with my mother. It must have been a weekend with my father reading his papers alone just outside our conversation.
“She doesn’t love me,“ I told my mother. “I think my heart is actually broken,. I’m telling you, ma, it’s really broken., I can feel the break!”
My mother sipped her coffee and said nothing She flipped her platinum blond hair with dainty brown highlights off her face with a theatrical shake of her head.
“How can you not believe me?” I asked. “I can tell you think this is adolescent psychodrama!”
“She loves you, “ said my mom., most matter of fact “I see you two together every day. She’s a lovely person and you better believe it, kiddo, I know good love when I see it.”
“You’re wrong, ma.! I feel the loss coming for me, even right now just sitting here…I’m about to be ditched and when you see this before your very eyes, you just might cry for me. Don’t say I didn’t warn you”
“Sunny, I don’t believe you,” she said and giggled because what I said to her often tickled her, “In fact,” she went on, “you’re full of shit,” My mother then took a sumptuous bite out of a red Delicious apple. This was not her usual language, but it was curiously exciting being a part of it with her.
I took a quick pause to catch a sudden and fearful, breath and lamely told her, back –“You’re full of shit,” and no matter what, it felt immediately all wrong. Instinctively, I shifted backwards just as my father came bashing through the yellow swinging door, pencil mustache shimmering with sudden sweat.
”Don’t you ever!” he was right up in my face as I stood to match him and looked down at his hamfist and saw it at the ready. This was another first.
Feeling knotty and confused and a strange yet not totally unfamiliar helplessness of a rubbery pawn as if being positioned for something I was utterly unprepared for. Thoroughly uncertain about knuckling-up, before responding to my dad, I glanced to my mother who sat regally placid and unmoved, still working her lipstick red mouth over the Delicious. I’m sure I expected a helping hand but none came. No paliative words of love from her, not this time. No peacemaking No protective caresses to my head. No, “Don’t worry, baby, everything will work out all right.” No, “Walter, how many times!–” Instead, something utterly other.
As my father stood his ground, nervously inching into me, leading with the width of his meaty pelvis, I was stricken by the expression of otherworldly reverie on my mother’s pretty blond face, lips slightly parted like a Madonna; a completely foreign mix of sound and vision — quivers. Was she really delicately daubing drops of apple juice off her breasts with her pinky? Matched in affect only by the tiny, quick pink wavery silk movements of the nightgowned, airy excitations skimming the sudden blush of her substantial décolletage.
Certainly, I’d never seen such a thing ever – Oh, God, not so up close.
I split the scene, avoiding my father’s beefy shoulder as I skipped past them, bizarrely fixed on the motto of the 101st Airborne, Screaming Eagles, Vet Nam, 1966 – “Death From Above.”
Out of the house and didn’t slow until I’d hit The Sound where I sat at water’s edge with the swans, the ducks, the lights across the water, sat in late sunshine and in shadow feeling dead, as dead as I could have been. Wishing all my dreams to be warm and sweet and from thereon in imagining how if my love failed to tell me that she loves me, I’d simply sleep in peace until she comes to me. I stared down the willowy weirdness before me; Nevermind that which had just been left behind. Well, I promise you, being capped at half-past almost grown makes for awful strange fruit when all else, has more or less fully ripened. And all this set down years before my current circumstances became my identity.