THE S CLUB
Chapter 18

1968

Creative Writing 21-A

Conscious Dream

Father had gone “up the club” to golf, so Mother and I assumed he was now dead like most of his fellow golfers as well as most of their families on Long Island’s North Shore. Everyone was incinerated in the searing white radioactive conflagration that the Russians had just dropped. All our friends, relatives, and realities were now dead. Everyone was dead except my mother and me.

“I am so glad I made the old man build this thing,” said mother with a Philip Morris multi-filter in one hand and a cocktail in another. ‘This thing’ Mother referred to was the fallout shelter that refurbished the basement five years ago. Mother looked at the gray concrete blocks with a sad realization that-that wall was the extent of her world for ‘God knows how long.’

She sipped her scotch. “Goddamn Soviets,” she sighed. All it took was two books: “On The Beach,” and “Fail Safe.” Plus that alarming Security Council incident when Khrushev hammered his shoe on the tabletop and predicted that he was going to bury us convinced Mother to persuade Father to build this ‘thing.’

This ‘thing’ had the essentials. Oxygen. A freezer full of food. Plenty of Liquor. A stereo phonograph with Mother’s favorite recordings: from Van Cliburn to West Side Story.

Father made sure to include a billiard and ping pong table.

“So it looks like we are set for eternity, Edmund,” she said.

I was a sullen sophomore in college hoping to return to Lush Forest in the fall. Now with this, I knew that would never happen. No one knew what was going to happen.

All I knew was that I probably would never get high or laid again.

Mother wanted to get better reception from the transistor. This, I thought, was insane because Father had already tuned to the CD band. Apocalypse or not, Mother still persisted in fucking things up just for the sake of it.

“Mother, let me do it!” I said grabbing the radio away from her.

“Really,” she said in an underlying tone that conveyed my life-long incompetence.

“It was fine where it was,” I barked.

“Not for my ears, dearie,” she retorted.

The radio’s sibilant frequency relaxed and held a vowel-an electronic howl-until words puttered forth through the transistor’s tin holes.

“New York City, Albany, Baltimore, Boston and Washington DC have experienced massive damage.”

“I just hope we have enough batteries for this,” Mother said thinking of the transistor.

The broadcast repeated that people should stay where they are. Perhaps for nine months. President Johnson had retaliated by destroying Moscow, Stalingrad and Minsk.

No doubt, it seemed like 1968 was some fucked up year.

When six thirty rolled around Mother was at a loss. There would be no Huntley and Brinkley telecast. Because for all we knew, Huntley and Brinkley were buried under the radioactive debris somewhere in Midtown Manhattan.

The CD radio band was repeating the same announcements over and over again. “What a crashing bore,” she said.

She gazed at the beige Formica floor contemplating, a prelude before ’making a statement. “As God awful as all this is,” she began,” not all Russians are bad. There was Stravinsky, Tolstoy, and, best of all, Boris Pasternak.”

It really hadn’t occurred to her that Dad was dead. We were still shocked that we were here in our Oyster Bay Cove fallout shelter.

She looked up at me, her eyes Irish and her skin Ballek,” Edmund, are you up for a few hands of Gin Rummy?”

I wasn’t even listening to her. I was thinking of other things. Perhaps the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Buffalo Springfield were dead. I was silent grieving that I would never hear,” She Said, She Said,” ever again.

Three scotches combined with Beethoven’s Piano Sonata 14, especially the third movement is the lethal combination that manifests the alchemy of my mother’s anger. It is the soundtrack of her despair.

“Oh Mother, must you?” I said like a droll Hitchock Homo. She slid the record out of its sleeve, the London label flashed across the room as she then placed the record on the revolving turntable. The needle rode the wax and the dreariness of life soon became manifest.

“Unbelievable!” she said as the pianist’s fingers hustled up the scale and toppled over themselves with frenzied and agitated notes, only to gallop up the tonal gamut again. “Unbelievable that I have outlived your father,” she said really not believing it still. “I am alive and your father is dead. I am the one who smokes! God, did he give me grief!” She shook her head and lit her cigarette. “Surgeon General this, Surgeon General that! Goddamn. Day in and day out! And you know what I would say!” she said with the blue smoke accompanying her. “Tough!” her lower lip curled like a West End Kid. “Tough!”

She let it sit there for a moment in the air. The record moving on to Sonata No.14 with lingering sad notes tickling slowly down spiral. The generator whining. The oxygen pumping. Quiet but not quite quiet in this fallout shelter that is neither day nor night.

“I smoke. I inhale, it actually clears out my lungs actually!”

“Really,” I say in imitation of her.

“Well, it does when I have a touch of asthma. When the inhaler fails me, I have one of these goddamn things!” she says holding up the burning cigarette. “I inhale and my bronchial tubes widen, I breathe easier just before I cough.” Mother then bent over and coughed. She grinned and then laughed phlegm into her cocktail napkin clenched fist.

“Excuse me, that’s disgusting!”

“It’s okay, Katherine” I said softly. “Don’t apologize it’s all over now-anyway.” What is the sense of propriety? I figured now that we will either live or die in this desolate and clicking Geiger-counting atmosphere.

“Well, here we are we,” Katherine said in much the same way, she would say “Upidity-Upidity” on school mornings. “So now what do we do?” she said in a lost and somber tone. Looking to where she left her last opened pack, she muttered, “Make dinner, drink, wash the dishes, play cards, sleep and maybe die.”

“I’d die to get high,” I spewed in a “Revolution or else!” explosion,” this sucks!”

“If you want a drink-have a drink,” she said, ”you’re over eighteen for chrissake!”

“Betrayal,” said Mother in a statement-making tone is the crux of it all. She hadn’t touched her dinner of spaghetti and frozen meatballs and sauce. “Everything and everybody betrays you. Your body wrinkles up and betrays you. The truths of your youth betray you. Your dreams, friends, husbands, and the help betray you. Most of all you betray yourself.” She pushed her cigarette’s glowing end into the ashtray to a blue smolder.

Vladimir Ashenazy continued to play.

I get up and she looks at me: that’s not all.

“Life, ideas and things seem to start stumbling looking for a home.” She lit another cigarette, inhaled, smoked and spoke. “Things are said mean and true. At first, you are shocked at such eloquent cruelty and then they begin to hurt and there is really nothing you can do about it except accept.”

She paused.

“Accept your new hanging chin, your laugh ravines, your marbleized varicose calf, your ever fragile arthritis, your growing liver.”

Her eyebrows inflected: oh well.

“Youth’s fervent and unreal optimism,” she said, “is something real adults, real mature grown ups...” Her gaze was leveled at my Bacchanal Beatle forelocks, “grow out of by the time they are in their second year of college.”

“What second year of college,” I said. “There is no more college, it is no doubt wiped away like everything. So what you say doesn’t matter.”

Mother left the arm up on the turntable so that the record would continue and repeat Beethoven’s Sonata No.14. The famous first movement-Moonlight-Adagio sostenuto; coaxed and massaged my mother’s maudlin front lobe. It serenaded one’s despair like a doctor’s bedside manner. The notes seemed so inward bound. An introspective quagmire of dispossessed realizations.

The second part-Allegretto-skips along in gray dirge. Happy rhythms in megalomania of melancholia.

“As if life wasn’t depressing enough those goddamn Russians had to make everything worse.” She stopped. “I wasn’t born to die like this,” she declared cigarette burning and ice melting in the empty glass. She inhaled on her multi-filter as if the puff would give her a better perspective.

The needle arrived at the third movement-Presto agiato. This movement piqued something bitter and vindictive within the pith of mother. The dueling hands make for a dizzying contrapuntal accompaniment leading the listener to a hysterical conclusion of an unfulfilled life. The drama of the ivories: hard vs. soft vs. mean vs. paradise vs. inferno, the notes gallop to some dreary epiphany in the sub-basement of dolor. At their most hurried, I am reminded of the gurgling bubbles at the office water cooler trying to strive up a pointless dark vortex.

“Do you have any idea,” the music had rallied her, ”to think I thought you were going to be a priest and not a pothead that you have become.”

I said nothing. It was better that way. I was taking my cue from Mohammed Ali: The Rope-a-dope. I was just going to lean back on the ropes, do nothing, and let her swing wildly until she got tired. And then I would cowardly try and change the subject.

She shook her head: why did everything in the world go wrong inside and out. Society’s corrosion. Father’s extramarital affair, the Profumo affair, Oh! Calcutta, SDS, Zip Codes, The War, The Peace, The Pill, The Live-In Love-Ins, young girls not wearing bras, boys not wearing BDV’s.

“God damn Beatles,” she said,” you need a haircut,”

“Not that it makes a difference now,” I spat back thinking so much for the Rope-a-dope tactic.

“Well it makes a difference to me.”

“Tough,” I said in imitation of her. My lower lip curling like a West End Kid. I went to the bar to make myself a drink.

“Don’t patronize me,” she said. “I really don’t like it.”

“Either do I!” I said just like her. In her key and everything. I might even have held an imaginary cigarette.

“I said...” she said.

“But mother, I was born to patronize you,” I retorted, “Isn’t that really why people have children?”

“Everything is just so goddamn disappointing,” she said with justified disdain. “There is always so much pain.”

“I think pain wakes us up to who we really are,” I said. See, I thought, I did learn something in philosophy.

Mother’s spine straightened. “To whom we really are,” she corrected.

I look at the bright-saturated colored balls on the green felt playing field of the pool table. If she doesn’t change the record I will pelt her with one.

All she has to say is get a haircut one more time and I will run outside and breathe in the deadly sepia atmosphere. I imagine it will prick and burn my lungs, I will fall to my knees and the ground will be hot like a hot plate. I then will keel over die in the red ragged shrubbery.

She is on the couch looking and wondering somewhere in her youth. She smiles. “Honey what would you like me to boil for dinner tonight?”