Whenever I’m with my parents…I tend to regress. Does this happen to you?
And the longer I’m there, the worse it gets.
At first, it feels kinda pleasant. The cab is speeding along the expressway, and I’m looking at all the parts of chicago whizzing by, and thinking the same thoughts I had as a teenager. What pretty skyscrapers! What ugly neighborhoods! I cannot wait to make a decent living so I can GET OUT OF THIS COLD.
By the time I clomp through the lobby and up to my parents’ swanky pad, I’m around sixteen, give or take. I no longer feel competent to vote, for example.
“Have you eaten?” they ask, and I brace myself for the options. Since 1986 my mother and father have cheerfully lived on a slurry of broccoli, fish and tree nuts, washed down with lashings of Pellegrino. And this has worked for them. Boy has it ever. My mother can probably deadlift more than I can, and hugging my dad, he’s as lean as a bird of prey.
So, just like when I was 16, I gamely try to eat what’s on offer; but that never works out. this trip I took two gulps of Pellegrino and started having heart palpitations.
Is this a thing? Tell me I’m just going through Reverse Puberty.
So we end up eating out a lot, which is nice because my parents have good taste in restaurants. Unfortunately by the time we go to one, I’m only eating chocolate bars and chicken fingers. (I can still drink without a straw, but I don’t prefer it.) Needless to say, I am totally unable to carry on an adult conversation, and allow praise for David Brooks to go unpunished, something the adult me finds laughable, intolerable. Instead of explaining WHY the NYT Op-Ed page is systematically moving the Overton Window rightwards, to the detriment of not only this country but the world, I am having to concentrate very hard to NOT put a French fry up my nose.
“How’s work, Mike?”
Caught in the act, I place the fry under one nostril, thoughtfully, as if this is a pose adults strike.
It does not work. My dad opens his mouth to ask why—to distract, I say rather more loudly than is appropriate, “Hey look at that!”
Mom and dad swivel to look at the tv above the bar. It is playing an ad for aluminum siding.
“I don’t get it,” Dad says.
Mom says nothing, assuming it’s a Sports Thing. “What would you like to have?” she asks kindly. “I think they have a burger. Here, you dropped your baseball cap,” My mother hooks it over my chair arm. “I don’t want you to lose it.”
The thing is—the thing is, people—I never lose stuff. I keep hats and gloves for decades. But around my parents, it’s even money I’ll walk out of the house with socks on my ears.
There is—and I know this is an inelegant term but I am getting over the visit—a Dumbness Ray that hits me whenever I’m around my folks, and it sucks. Sorry I can’t be more articulate, but we just took off. By 6pm I should be able to form complex sentences.
That restaurant we went to? It’s just my kind of place, a woody hotel bar filled with people who have made either very good, or very poor, life choices. In other words: my people. If I were in Santa Monica, I would most definitely be a regular. This womb-like deep-carpeted real-horseradish joint would be my sanctum. I would be my usual friendly ADULT self and all the waitstaff would know my name and what I drank and ate, and if they didn’t actually call out my name, Cheers-style, when I walked in the door, they would want to, because I would be a competent, beloved, fully operational mature human being, instead of…this. This man who can just barely order clam chowder without help, and even then worries it might be “too gluey.” Who doesn’t put the oyster crackers in because “what if I don’t like them?”
Jesus Christ!
It’s all very painful to me, the talking about my business and my friends and my opinions like a precocious eight-year-old. I’m sure it’s no picnic for my parents either, but man! I can just barely—barely—tolerate existence as a fully functioning adult. A couple of days with my folks and I start losing object permanence. If you gave me a little wire monkey with a scrap of blanket, I’ll cling to it, and get scared if you take it away.
Thank god some Bystander writers and cartoonists took me to dinner and lunch. After half a cider, I started to feel a bit like myself again, strategizing our upcoming coverage of the conventions—whereas fifteen minutes before, I had real concerns that I’d used the toilet paper wrong in my parents bathroom. (This was the GUEST bathroom; as a good five year old, I never would’ve dared use their private bathroom. That’s just asking to get yelled at.) I stayed out late, demanding we go to a second bar, wanting the night to last—because only grown ups stay up, and SEE I AM A GROWN UP.
I drop a quick thirty years once I walk in the door, and probably bleed off maturity and lifeskills at a steady rate of one year every five hours. Last night, my last night with them, I couldn’t figure out the tv so I sat there and watched it silently for an hour. Then my mom—a wonderful, intuitive, intelligent woman but not exactly Robert Oppenheimer—walked in, asked me why I didn’t have the sound on.
I sheepishly said, “I was afraid I would break it.” And I WAS.
All this is manageable—i mean, i fucking HATE IT, but I don’t have to go anywhere or operate heavy machinery—except when I have to make a business phone call. “But Gary, I don’t WANNA pay $4000 to create a California-based LLC! My brother doesn’t have to!”
“Your brother? What are you saying?”
“I’m saying ITS NOT FAIRRRRR!”
I got away in the nick of time; this morning when I woke up, I looked in the bathroom mirror and thought, “I am a zygote.”
Then another cold realization took hold of my lumbar spine: I HAD to get out of there, before I went minus.
At the airport, mom put me in a little envelope and handed it to a smiling southwest employee. “He’s going to Philly,” Mom said. Then she slipped him a $20, which I appreciated.
When the fellow deposited me at the gate, I whispered in his direction. Luckily he heard me.
“Are you saying something?” The redcap opened the flap and I yelled as loud as my little zygote lungs could.
“Bourbon!” I croaked. “A floozy! And a cigar!”
The people at southwest were very nice. They made up a little dish of brown liquor on Seat 28D, and put the envelope in it. As the booze soaked in, I glanced to my left and a pretty woman smiled back at me. By the time they turned on the fasten seatbelt sign for our descent, I had regained my potty training (mostly).
I’m very happy to report that we’re landing in Philly in ten minutes, and I’m almost back to normal.
Except…
…I still want the under-12 discount on legal fees.
