Now Beacon, Now Sea: A Son's Memoir by Christopher Sorrentino

Author:Christopher Sorrentino [Sorrentino, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary Figures, Family & Relationships, Death; Grief; Bereavement, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781646220434
Google: YMIXEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2021-09-07T23:35:24.227441+00:00

When would I get a job? Would I enroll in the local JC? Apply to a four-year college? Would I stop moping around? Why couldn’t I just get it together? My parents’ attitude was perhaps understandable. I was an adult living in their house who, from their point of view, refused either to work or to go to school. That the very idea of facing people drove me back under the covers in the morning was something they attributed solely to laziness.

One afternoon they went to the Stanford Shopping Center and when they returned my mother had a gift for me: two neckties. It was a marvelously pointed gift, subtle and unsubtle at the same time. Unsubtly, it announced, “Get off your ass.” But on another level, it said, “You think you need so much to actually function as an adult. You’re telling me that you can’t manage it, that you’re not equipped. But here’s all the equipment you need: men knot them around their necks each morning and are deemed presentable. Shave your face, put one of these on, and see if it doesn’t make the difference. See if it matters at all to anyone how you feel, what you think you’re capable or incapable of coping with, whether you want to cry or hide or wander aimlessly around the grounds of a great institution. This is part of the costume people wear to hide the fact that they’re falling apart inside. That’s what normal people, competent people, do: fall apart inside while taking care of business. Get hit with a skillet, sing. See all your personal possessions auctioned away, clap. Give away your cat, whistle. Bury your father, dance. Put on the tie or you’ll be like Dianne and Larry, falling apart on the outside, standing in a phone booth on the corner in frigid January weather to make your calls or running an extension cord from the outlet in the hallway outside the apartment to power your TV. You’ll be the one working harder to con your landlord into letting the rent slide for another month than you would to actually earn the money to pay it. People with a whingeing, wheedling, grasping reality. You’re surprised they fucked you? Of course they fucked you. That’s how people like that get by. They fuck other people to make up the difference between their inadequacy and what’s normally required of adult human beings, and then they tell themselves that it’s just what they were owed.”

That was the lesson of the neckties, at least as I understand it now. It was my mother speaking to me loud and clear. In a weird way, it was her at her best. She was actually giving me the lesson of her experience as well as she could. Of course no one wants to be like Dianne and Larry. Larry committed suicide years ago; he was maybe forty. F’s father died young too. Dianne still lives in that apartment, and F lives with her.

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