I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 (13 page)

I was also told I was going to win an Academy Award. Presumably this would happen before our departure, as it would not only be a tough commute to return from our intergalactic journey for the ceremony, but finding a stylist and having fittings for a dress would be difficult transplanetarily.

I was two years into college when my parents suffered a major
financial setback and I dropped out of school. I had just returned from a semester abroad when I got the news. I went from studying art and architecture in London to punching a time clock and handing out flyers on the street for Arby’s dressed as a clown. Actually, the clown getup turned out to be a total bonus as I was working in my own neighborhood and was grateful for the anonymity the makeup afforded. Alone and on my own in the city, this confluence of events caused me to rely even more on my new family for emotional support.
*

Why Van Zandt felt such a great affection for me is a mystery I will never solve. He had absolutely nothing to gain from me, but his love was unconditional and unbounded. Outside of his role as a medium, Van Zandt was very down-to-earth. The kind of guy who reveled in a great find at a thrift store, loved his cheeseburger and fries after our sessions and enjoyed amyl nitrite and anal sex, though we never got into deep discussions about either of the latter. He was quite simply the best gay dad a girl could ever hope for.

I never asked critical questions, like why our artsy band was chosen to usher in the new age and not the legions of religious adherents who have dedicated their entire lives to achieving enlightenment. On the face of it, there wasn’t much to recommend me, in particular, as a representative of our planet. I didn’t have any scientific knowledge that could be useful on a long journey across the universe. In fact, I had enrolled in an astronomy
class at NYU so I could gain more understanding of my future voyage but never made it to more than a handful of the classes. The seminars had a narcoleptic effect on me—these were the dark ages before really good coffee could be found on every corner of the city, and I attended these lectures on nothing more potent than watery coffee-shop drip. Neither was I particularly athletic, an attribute that might indicate my physical readiness to undertake an intergalactic jaunt, but I didn’t spend a great deal of time questioning the improbability of it all. After all, I was the reincarnation of the daughter of Akhenaten. Favorite daughter, I might add.

And yet I had no problem deeming other mediums I encountered as inauthentic. On one occasion, a few of us trekked to Brooklyn to see a woman channel tree fairies for a fee of twenty-five dollars per head. “What a total phony,” I remember saying on our way out. “
Tree fairies
, have you ever heard of anything so silly?”

I neglected to discuss this part of my life with professional colleagues even though my confidence and fragile self-esteem were dependent on the assurances of success that I’d received from this adoptive father mostly while he was in a trance.

It was at this time that AIDS was beginning to cut a swath across the gay community. Several men in our group died swiftly, as was common in the early years. Then Van Zandt was diagnosed. The members of our group rallied and we took turns spending the night with him, placing cold compresses on his forehead, helping him to perform the basic functions of life. As the youngest in our group, I was only asked to carry out a small share of the
caretaking; all the while, Van Zandt kept urging me to move to California. I didn’t want to leave him, but he simply wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was already in the last months of his life, encamped at Saint Vincent’s Hospital, when I packed up my bags and left New York. I landed in Los Angeles the same day an industry-wide strike was called, but I’d already given up my apartment so there was no turning back. I got a job hostessing at a nightclub frequented by Russian mobsters who tipped me in cocaine and black-market blue jeans, but I stuck it out and kept tabs on Van Zandt. A few months later, while on location with the first acting job I’d booked in California, an unmemorable movie of the week titled
Where the
Hell’s That Gold?!!?
with Willie Nelson in Alamosa, Colorado, I learned of his passing.
*

His death was devastating for me. The group disbanded and I lost contact with everyone. I didn’t actually know many of them as anything but the affectionate nicknames Van Zandt had given them: Rabbit, Angel, Feather or Miss Thing.

When the aliens didn’t arrive on the appointed date, I reasoned it could have been a scheduling error. You’re traveling across the universe back to the world you seeded, but you have to stop to refuel or seed a civilization on another planet, or maybe their concept of time is simply different from ours. So what if they were running a few hundred or even several thousand years late—what’s the difference in the bigger scheme of things? Maybe those computers buried under the poles needed to be
recalibrated. My cell phone needs to be reset for time zones, and those babies were placed under the ice millions of years ago and were sorely in need of tech support. They had to have a supremely advanced society, but wasn’t it possible their economy had tightened and that the 1995 scheduled voyage to planet earth had been put on the back burner in the same way NASA projects get redlined? To date, the Academy Award prediction has not come to pass, either, at least not in this or any currently known dimension.

It was around that time that I had one of my first celebrity sightings in Los Angeles, the actress Rebecca De Mornay reading
CoDependent No More
at the Sunset Car Wash. I took that as a sign, the last sign I would ever look for, to put down my wand and take up a hammer. I worked on my craft and religiously avoided anything that smacked of magical thinking or mysticism. Except for patchouli and sandalwood incense. I still love the smell of a séance.

By the time I started my own family, my relationship with nonmagical realism was firmly established. If you’ve ever tried to find a preschool in an urban area, you know that it’s more all consuming than fulfilling a destiny, even one that spans thousands of years. But this period in my life is an endless source of churning remorse at four a.m., when the middle-of-the-night hormone dip jolts me awake. It’s at the top of an inventory I call Regrets: The Short List.

Time Spent with People in Trances

If I was looking for a new family, why didn’t I just join a sorority? Why didn’t I take classes in directing instead of spending
time trying to have an out-of-body experience? I should have learned how to play more than the three chords I know on the guitar instead of comparing my facial features to those of three-thousand-year-old stone carvings. I should have worked as a stripper. Having worked in the sex trade would be less embarrassing than having spent seven years of my life communing with the spirit world. Thank goodness Instagram wasn’t around, or I’d be spending the next few lifetimes deleting photographs in which I am costumed as the princess Meritaten. If only I had befriended a psychic who’d seen a medical degree in my future, I’d have a much larger 401(k) today.

The Ones That Got Away

Real estate is a most seductive regret. I’ve worn deep grooves in my brain mulling over lost opportunities. The $800-a-month loft in Tribeca that was over two thousand square feet, which shared a kitchen wall with Robert De Niro’s place, I recently saw listed for $15 million. There was that spacious two-bedroom with floor-to-ceiling windows in Chelsea—$70,000 in 1984. I didn’t have enough money to even be looking at places to buy, but I should have found it somehow, even if it meant calling Phil Rizzuto. It would be worth over a million today. That midcentury house my husband and I didn’t buy on top of a hill, where you can’t hear freeway traffic. It had one more bathroom, was priced less than ours and would be worth over a million today. The words “worth a million today” replay over and over, until I move on to the next set of regrets.

The Ones That Didn’t Get Away

Why did I feel so compelled to date Giancarlo, John Travolta’s feet, and David Renaldi? Giancarlo was probably a lovely person, but sadly, my Italian is so limited, I never understood a word he said. “I was John Travolta’s feet stand-in in
Saturday Night Fever
,” was a line that successfully got my pants off in my twenties. To his credit, Gary claimed ownership of the infamous strutting feet in the electrifying opening sequence of that film. David Renaldi was a starving artist who lived in a tenement building with a bathtub in the kitchen and no bathroom. There was a water closet in the hallway, a tiny room with carpeting and a rotting door that didn’t close entirely. It had no lock and was shared with the tenants from several apartments. I developed a urinary tract infection from those long waits. Then again, through a recent Google search, I’ve learned Mr. Renaldi appears to have a thriving law practice focused on constitutional law, something I find endlessly fascinating, so maybe the regret is why didn’t I date him longer. I imagine he’s got unfettered access to modern plumbing. One-night-stand guy whose last name I never knew and first name I can’t remember but who’d recently been discharged from the Navy, where he’d discovered he was bisexual—let’s add him to the list, too.

The Lost Tears

I spent the winter of 1992 weeping over the loss of my bedroom drapes to my ex-husband. It wasn’t worth it; window treatments can be replaced, but I can never get back three months in my early thirties.

It occurred to me one morning at four a.m. that everyone else might have been a part of Van Zandt’s group for shits and giggles, as the saying goes, except me. I hung on every word, rarely dating anyone, moving to a new apartment or making a business decision without consulting him first. Everyone else was just living in the eighties. I might have been the only one actually in a cult.

Then again, maybe not.

Almost twenty years after his death, an email arrived with Van Zandt’s name in the subject line. I recognized the name of the sender immediately as someone from our group, even though I hadn’t thought of her in almost as many years. Let’s call her Q. The email was addressed to Members of the Council. Q was writing to let us know that she had devoted much of the last twenty years combining over one hundred and thirteen cassette tapes, and four reel-to-reel recordings into CD compilations of our sessions. Maybe I wasn’t the only one in the cult. She had inserted his name into her surname. Possibly legally? She wanted to know if we would like to receive copies of the CDs she’d made.

This might be my chance to rewrite the past. My chance at closure or to reconnect. I considered the responses I might compose.

Dear Q,

Did you ever and do you still believe that we were fated to travel to other worlds? Why do you suppose the landing didn’t happen?

Or: Where’s my Academy Award?

Or: Do you feel lost without our friend, or are you still in contact with him? Are there messages you’ve received intended for me?

Or: Have you ever considered availing yourself of talk or drug therapies?

Before I wrote anything, I asked myself what would my most evolved fifty-year-old self do? Then I realized how shortsighted I’d been. I’d been so focused on turning fifty, I hadn’t thought about what happens the day after I turn fifty. I’ll be
in
my fifties. I’m becoming Area Fifty-One. I’d cultivated an air of mystery, but it turns out I’m far more ordinary than I ever expected and that’s okay, even something of a relief. I am my own family. I don’t need a celestial lineage or the answers to any of my questions anymore. I can’t afford to spend one more minute of my ever-shortening life punishing myself for the choices I made in my twenties, because I will be leaving the planet. I will have a close encounter with Death, who will remove me from the planet swifter than an extraterrestrial airlift. Thank you, fifty.

So what I wrote was this:

Dear Council Member,

I would love to have copies of the CDs. Thank you.

The CD set arrived. I put it in my desk, where I expect it will remain unopened.

“Mom, I can’t see the lights anymore, but I know what I saw.” My son’s voice snaps me back to reality.

“Okay, let’s go home,” I say, breathing the longest sigh in my entire forty-nine years.

As we get into the car, I ask my husband if he would have married me if I’d told him I had once believed I was going to leave the planet in the company of friendly alien life-forms. “No,” he said without hesitation and a quizzical look. I can’t blame him. If he’d ever said anything like that before we’d tied the knot, I’d have insisted that he undergo a psychiatric evaluation and sign a blood oath declaring he had no intention of departing the planet anytime in the foreseeable future.

“We can check the Internet and see if anyone else saw anything,” I say as we pull up to our home. But we don’t. Once inside, we breeze past the artifacts that decorate the walls of our dining room: a handwoven Tibetan tapestry, two antique wooden Chinese window lattices and a small fragment of an Indian fabric, intricately laced with gold and silver thread. All inherited from my dear friend Van Zandt. We head into the kitchen. We’ve got dinner to heat up. Dishes to wash, showers to take and our favorite Sunday night TV to watch together. Just an ordinary night on earth with my family.

I’m seated at a birthday party next to a woman who is singing the praises of Vedic Meditation. She’s in her sixties and is making that decade look effortlessly appealing. She’s the heir to a banking fortune, with homes in Nantucket and Los Angeles, so one might reasonably conclude that financial woes are not about to give her frown lines anytime soon, but still, people have been unhappy with more, so hers seems like a compelling endorsement.

She tells me there’s a free introductory lecture this very week with her teacher, who has flown in from Australia, so what do I have to lose? I announced my intention to attend somewhere between the salad and the entrée and before the coffee was served
I’d gotten the address, time and date. As it turned out, because I was writing without my reading glasses, I got a few minor details wrong. I arrive at the yoga studio and find I’m an hour early and a day late for the freebie.

“If you’re up for it, you can start meditating with us tonight. A beginner’s course starts in an hour. It’s five hundred dollars and it’s a four-day-long commitment. You can come at either nine a.m. or six p.m. for two hours each day,” Bradley, the instructor’s impossibly good-looking assistant, tells me.

“Sign me up.”

I didn’t sign up because, as Bradley suggests, “It was meant to be,” no, I enrolled in the course because it had taken twenty or thirty texts and emails, and as many phone calls, to coordinate our carpool so I could leave the house on a school night. I was just too embarrassed to go home and face my family, and it was too early in the day to start drinking.

I am not looking to start a meditation practice for fun. No one takes up a rigorous practice of any kind at forty-nine for fun. That would be like suggesting I’d just given up sugar for fun and not because I’d just been diagnosed as prediabetic after a routine blood draw. No, I know I need to start meditating because middle age is turning me into a raving maniac.

It might start like this. A simple meeting with our investment guy. He tells me there’s good news and good news, and which do I want first? Either one? My retirement plan is recovering some value. I wasn’t wiped out during the recent financial downturn because the majority of the money in my account was in cash.

“I went to cash against your advice, right?”

“Yes, and now your IRA is worth almost as much as it was back in 2001.”

“What’s the other good news?”

“I’m moving to a new firm, and that’s good news for you, because at the new place, I won’t have to recommend their investment products. I can recommend just the ones I think are the best for you.”

“So, what you’re saying is that for the last ten years you’ve been recommending things that aren’t in my best interest, but now you’ll be able to?”

“Yes!”

“This is the best you’ve got?”
*
I can almost hear my brain cells exploding.

The churning rage might continue when my husband takes to singing “I am woman, hear me cough” around the house because my nightly glass of red wine is giving me a persistent dry cough that I thought was allergies but my husband has correctly recognized as acid reflux. I am downing Tagamet by the fistful. Caffeine, chocolate and red wine, the anchors of my food pyramid, turn out to make acid reflux worse, making me even angrier. Anger, it turns out, is bad for acid reflux, and that is making me furious.

Giving up sugar makes me positively blow a gasket. It’s not like I appear overweight, so to be denied sugar because of the results of blood work seems like a sneaky ploy on behalf of my body to
remind me that not looking old doesn’t have anything to do with being old. Cutting sugar out of my diet, it turns out, does not increase my energy level in any measurable way. I’m down to one good hour a day. An hour I would prefer to enjoy hopped up on a sugar high.

Internet passwords have the power to reduce me to a state of sheer madness. There’s just no way I can remember them all. This means I have to change my passwords on a regular basis. However, some of the sites I visit won’t accept the same password more than ten times, and if I pick something that isn’t a repeat of one I’ve already used, then I can’t remember the new one. Sometimes, I can’t remember my user name, so I have to create new email accounts just to access those sites, and if I forget the passwords to those new email addresses, I’ll never get back into them, if I can even remember what these new email addresses are in the first place. Recently, I was forced to resort to calling my cell phone provider when I couldn’t remember how to access my online account. When the operator asks why I don’t know my user name, I give what will no doubt become my new go-to excuse: “I’m fifty.” She tells me she can’t accept my payment unless I produce the information I entered on their website, something I can’t even remember doing in the first place.

“Are you saying that random people call and want to pay phone bills that aren’t their own?”

“Yes,” she replies, just to piss me off further.

“Really,” I say. “How do I get someone to do that? Because that sounds fantastic. Until then, will you please, please, please take my fucking money!”

I keep trying to remind myself to write down all the sites and the codes, and I can’t remember to do that, either. I’ve also gone paperless with my bank and investment accounts, so if my memory diminishes even further, no one, including me or my family, who has no idea where I even do my banking, will ever gain access to these accounts. This might be the point of all the rules and regulations surrounding gaining access to your own accounts—it might be a vast conspiracy by the banking industry. How many abandoned accounts of mine might already be languishing in cyberspace?

And why? Why? Why, if I am one of your most treasured women friends, are you sending me emails that require me to foist unwanted emails on ten friends within thirty minutes? What kind of invitation demands a response that is divisible by two? Can’t we meet up so I can “sit at your table” in person? I’ll bring a bottle of rosé or white—no red wine, since you might have reflux as well. Emails that threaten retribution from one deity or another should I break the chain might one day make me go postal.
*
What kind of God is so micromanaging that he/she/it would count the number of times I forwarded something before granting me any kind of luck or blessing? What if I send said email to ten people but one of the addresses is outdated or it lands in someone’s spam folder? Do I still get the good karma I am due for my effort? Is this Internet God the same deity called upon to stop genocides and famine, or is there a subcontractor supreme
being whose purview is solely cyberspace? Does the same God monitor the innumerable variety of email providers? Lord, that’s an expansive kingdom to rule over. I just lost an entire cluster of brain cells on that one.

That’s why I’m writing out a check for five hundred dollars that I can’t afford. Bradley mentions that the five hundred dollars really doesn’t begin to cover our teacher’s expenses, and besides, “Maybe you can’t afford
not
to take this course,” adds Bradley. I mentally add his name to my things-that-make-me-enraged list.

The first thing I learn is that I have neglected to bring the offering of flowers that are traditional in the presence of a Vedic yoga teacher. Luckily, our teacher, Thom, doesn’t blanche when I place a few daisies in front of him that I’ve rescued from the lobby trash can. Five hundred dollars
and
flowers? He’s not a cheap date.

He informs us that the practice we are about to learn is an ancient form that TM, Transcendental Meditation, is based on. Uh-oh. TM, don’t they advertise yogic flying? Red alert, red alert! Stay away from things that promote levitating. It also seems like yogic flying is like something you’d have to dress for, and I’m in my now-standard everyday wear—a wrap dress—so even flapping could prove embarrassing.

He promises that we’ll be able to reverse the aging process. I feel dubious about this claim until he adds that Mick Jagger practices this form of meditation. I only hope Mick Jagger paid more than the five hundred dollars I paid, as I’d hate to be subsidizing our teacher’s travel bill to and from Mick’s pad in London.

Our teacher tells us that meditating will help us stay in the
present moment. The sign of not being in the present, he goes on, is when you find yourself rehearsing the future and reviewing the past. His voice interrupts my strategizing how I will tell my husband that our son’s braces aren’t covered by our new dental plan and a wave of remorse over a job I turned down more than a decade ago. Teach’s got me on that account.

He further explains that when we’re not able to access our brain’s full capacity our reactions become ingrained and we’re no longer innocent to experience. Uh-oh, this is a problem, because it’s not my first time at this dance. I’ve torn through yoga practices like others sample tapas. Is this endeavor destined to become just another one of my failed attempts? But when Thom says this form is purely a practical technique and we don’t need any special spirituality, that we need to “just do it,” I decide I’ll give it a shot. Twenty minutes a day, twice a day. I hunker down.

We close our eyes and I instantly know I’m great at this. I might be the best meditator in the world. Exactly three and one-half minutes have passed.

I close my eyes again, and the remaining seventeen minutes pass quickly. Thom congratulates us on having completed the first meditation of the rest of our lives; only 14,600 minutes of sitting to go this year.

The next day, after a brief distraction about how silly it is to spell “Tom” with an “h,” I complete my first sitting and I feel, if not the bliss that Thom promised, an immense amount of joy. I receive a group email asking me to join in an intercessory prayer circle and though the addresses are not even bcc’ed, I lightheartedly chuckle and delete it. After my second meditation that day,
another email arrives informing me that one of the recipients of that very missive has enlisted her horses into prayer and do any of us realize just how powerful those horses are at helping manifest healing, and the meditation must be working, because I simply hit reply all, with the response “Neigh-be not, but keep it up!”

Mistakes were made. I try meditating in a variety of locales, even in the subways of NYC, until I run into a YouTube video of a rat crawling up the face of a sleeping man on the train.

Our teacher tells us our children will be so happy to see us so relaxed. Not my son.

“Are you going to kill me in my sleep, Mom?”

“No, I’m going to do it while you’re awake. Why would you ask me that?”

“It’s like you had a psychotic break. You’re so weird.”

“It’s called calm.”

“Well, you seem stoned!”

One month into the practice, I become convinced I have been given a bad mantra. Why didn’t I get a good one? If I were younger and cuter, Thom would have given me a better mantra. Why is mine so boring? He said there are a number of mantras, and he’s chosen the one that is best for each of us, but maybe there is just one and that’s why the gurus always insist you keep it a secret.

I keep at it, because with meditation when I am handed a flyer by a person in flip-flops and a T-shirt that reads
I SEE DUMB PEOPLE
outside a natural-foods store, I say, “Thanks.” I look down and see that it says “Hi, I’m David. I’d love to tell you about Herbalife supplements.” I politely return it.

“You’re missing an opportunity to learn something.”

“I know.” I smile and keep walking.

Without meditation, I’d find it irresistible not to answer,
Really? Really, you want to teach me something? You, who are a grown man who leaves the house in flip-flops and derivative T-shirts, want to tell me about becoming an Herbalife dealer? I’m in Bill Ackman’s camp, mister!
*
I’m not going to end up with bottles of pseudo-supplements rotting in my garage and knowingly enlist my friends in a scam just so I can earn a commission. No, thank you, I would rather be filleted than take your flyer!
I still think this, but I don’t say it out loud. See why I need to sit every day?

Since then I’ve meditated while trapped in a car during a blizzard, in planes, in bathrooms, in a photo booth in a mall, and while having dental surgery. Closing my eyes and repeating my dreary mantra turns out to be as reliable an antidote to a Parent- Teacher Association treasurer’s report as I’ve yet to find. As it turns out, I am not the best meditator in the world; in fact, I suck at it. I don’t expect to ever get better at it, but I’m doing it anyway. Sucking is one of the unexpected gifts aging has given me. As a younger person I was a perfectionist. I was an inveterate cheater at anything that required patience, like board games, math and monogamy. There’s something wonderfully satisfying about acknowledging your mediocrity and still persevering, except in sudoku. I don’t understand sudoku. I never have, I never will, I can’t even look at it without getting a headache, and the fact that
it’s been shown to ward off Alzheimer’s fills me with a fury that even meditation can’t cure.

Here is the inner monologue of the mediocre meditator:

Pablo Escobar. What ever happened to him, and what’s the name of that Latino actor who plays both drug lords and cops?

What time is it?

I can’t believe I bought a house that you can hear the freeway from even though it’s over a mile away. Damn it. Never buy a house without checking it out at night when the neighborhood is quiet.

Foot falling asleep. Again. What percentage of people meditating have a foot that falls asleep? A lot. A lot percent.

Neck is thrusting forward. Need to work on posture. I’ve got to hang on to every bit of my five foot four and three-quarters as long as I can. My grandmother Frances shrank to the size of a ladybug.

Buy calcium supplements. With magnesium for better absorption.

I wonder how many students at five hundred dollars a head Teach needs to rope in for him to relax during his meditation?

I love the weight of the cat sleeping on me. I miss my son sleeping on me. Scratching a cat’s head has been shown to produce alpha waves. I loved scratching my son’s head. I hope I didn’t cause his bald spot with my enthusiastic cradle cap-picking.