Europa '87

To ask either of my parents to spend money on their own pleasure would have been like asking them to walk fly-like upside down on the ceiling, inconceivable. Having retired, my dad seemed intent on dying of boredom. He enjoyed pottery, but refused to get himself a potter’s wheel. His huge-hearted son vaguely conspired to get him one, but Mama of course had a whole litany of reasons why I should not, just as, during my childhood, she’d eloquently argued against my having a dog, or the family having a Christmas tree. (Her objection wasn’t based on our being zealously non-observant Jews, but on the likelihood of the tree losing some of its needles, in so doing compromising our happy home’s fascistic tidiness.)

I gave up on the pottery idea, and urged them implacably to go see a bit of the world. Because Pop was sure to have a medical emergency in a country whose principal language she didn’t speak, Mama would consider a trip to Europe only if I came along. My marriage had just disintegrated, I loathed my job (word processing at a huge, ultraconservative San Francisco law firm), and the only reservation I had was that I wouldn’t see my three-year-old daughter for 10 days. I went.

I had a complicated relationship with my folks. That they both loved me hadn’t been in question for a millisecond, but there were some major things about them I couldn’t stand. Mama, having not been valued in her own girlhood, and frantically insecure as a result, had been telling me since I began to understand speech that Pop wasn’t very interested in me, and he’d given me scant reason to doubt her. I hated how she made no secret of her contempt for him, as I hated his abiding it. Mama was always delighted by my expressions of love for her, but similar expressions discombobulated and embarrassed Pop, he of a generation of men who thought it unmanly to express themselves emotionally.

(We swing briefly onto a side road here, as we think about my dad’s discomfort with expressions of affection. My sister’s first two marriages took place at my parents’ house. At the second one, that at which she married a Lebanese mama’s-boy in a fashionably baggy suit, I went downstairs into the garage for some reason, and found my dad weeping, I guess because he and my sister had been much closer than he and I had ever been, and she would live with her new husband on Long Island. A better man that I would have taken Dad in his arms, and comforted him. The man that I was was embarrassed and disapproving. 

A side road off the side road. That wasn’t the first time I impersonated the sort of taciturn hardass I loathe. In the spring of 1964, my uncle’s second suicide attempt proved more successful than its antecedent. (Maybe my flippancy is born of the shame I feel for not having been nearly as good a friend to him as he’d been to me.) My sister, then seven, greeted me at the front door as I arrived home from school. “Marty died,” she said. “Yeah?” her 16-year-old tough guy brother replied. “So?”) 

But back to 1986, and the Mendels(s)ohn”s European tour. My parents drove up from Los Angeles to pick me up at the huge, ultraconservative San Francisco law firm at the end of a workday during which I’d been advised that our flight had been put forward 24 hours, so we had to head for the airport as soon as I’d dashed into Ross Dress for Less and bought a change of underwear and a toothbrush. 

Inexperienced — no, novice! — travellers as they were, they’d prepared for our trip as compulsively as13-year-olds preparing for their first day of middle school. They’d put all their documents in special plastic folios they’d bought for the occasion, and apparently checked  a thousand times to ensure that they had everything they needed. When I asked if they had their passports, they both eagerly reached for their folios, and produced ‘em. They were adorably proud of themselves, like a pair of little kids, and I nearly burst into tears of love. But no, we couldn’t have that, so I hid my adoration behind a mask of snideness and condescension that I didn’t take off the whole trip. 

In London, I’d managed to book us into a bed-’n’-breakfast that provided a stack of gay porn mags with stuck-together pages in every room. They didn’t give me a hard time about it, bless them. When I bought myself a pair of (engagingly) ludicrous Stop-Making-Sense suits in lurid colours in Oxford Street, they pretended not to be aghast, and in fact professed amused delight. In Jersey, which a neighbour had encouraged them to visit, we had an alfresco lunch at a place that Mama just loved. It wasn’t like her to (dare to) express great enthusiasm. I found her joyfulness disorienting and snarled softly at her. Shame on me. It turned out that I’d screwed up our hotel reservation in Barcelona (I made all the reservations), and my parents (who didn’t once let me reach for my waller) were charged for a night we weren’t there. Shame on me. I apologised effusively, but they, who had agonised over every dime spent since I’d met them, told me — superhumanly lovingly —not to give it a second thought. And the sweeter they were to me, the surlier and more snide I became. Arriving in new places, I would point them in one direction, and hurry off in the opposite one. 

Shame on me. 

I intended throughout to stop being a complete fucking asshole at some point, and to tell them how much I loved them, and how much I appreciated their taking me to Europe. That I never quite got around to it will still pain me as I take my last breath.