J’s ex-wife gave him the funniest birthday present ever, a beautifully illustrated children’s book for adults, which I am told is now the top bestseller at Amazon: Adam Mansbach’s Go the F*** to Sleep.”
We opened it after coming home from his parents, where we had a very yummy custom chocolate cake, with J’s favorite things inanimate and non-human objects in life: his angelic yellow labrador, Emma, his first Nikon, and his red electric guitar. His ex-wife, of whom I am quite fond, gave him a book from Chaucer’s (our great independent bookstore in Loreto Plaza, with both a tremendous children’s section, and a serious and large literary criticism/philosophy selection as well as a ton of history). Chaucer’s is one of the relatively rare, quite frankly, cultural gems of this sleepy , affluent retirement and college town.
While the Earthling died some years ago, RIP, Chaucer’s is still alive and kicking and I met Anti-Defamation League president, Abe Foxman, at the store in March, for the signing of his excellent book, Jews and Money, about the ancient, insidious and pervasive anti-semitic myths about the unethical business practices of Jews, which have intensified in the wake of Goldman Sachs horrors as well as the Bernie Madoff tragedy. (Dad’s position, as a former jurist, is that he’s not only a major asshole, but that in this one instance, due process ought to have been suspended, and Madoff put in front of a firing range.)
We opened it after his son, seven and a half, went to bed and absolutely died laughing. It’s very short–you read it in about 3 to 4 minutes out loud–and each picture (two pages) has a four line paragraph, not a real poem, but quite poetic, about the trials and tribulations of getting a child to sleep. My favorite:
The eagles who soar through the sky are at rest
And the creatures who crawl, run, and creep.
I know you’re not thirsty. That’s bullshit. Stop lying.
Lie the fuck down, my darling, and sleep.
A close second:
The cubs and the lions are snoring,
Wrapped in a big snuggly heap.
How come you can do all this other great shit
But you can’t lie the fuck down and sleep?
I posted the link on FB and reflected on my experience of bedtime as a child. There was no experience, per se. By about kindergarten, I went to sleep when I pleased. And I wrote that my father’s theory of parenting was essentially this: I do not wish to be inconvenienced or hassled in any way; you are free basically to do as you please (no horses, no motorcycles, no bright–and absolutely under no circumstances–red nail polish) and I trust you to make rational and sensible decisions.
I adore my father but he has never been an easy man, and was particularly not easy during my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. He’s a big pussycat with a heart of gold, or to select another member of the animal kingdom by way of metaphor, his bark is a lot worse than his bite. But there was just no goddamned way my father was going to have what in Rescue Me is often referred to as “emotional bullshit” over something so trivial and insignificant as bedtime.
As I wrote in my Tiger Mom piece, which new readers of Victorian Chick might enjoy (earlier followers seemed to like it), my parents were extraordinarily permissive in external matters. As I said, I had three rules. The “no horses” rule came about when I was 9 or 10 and got thrown by a horse at Tumbleweeds Day Camp in Brentwood, up Kenter Canyon. My brother at the time was at St. John’s for major brain surgery (benign and congenital tumor, not cancer, but still very serious) and I am sure part of what freaked him out when he saw his little baby girl all banged up was his terror about my brother’s illness.
Of course my sister, 18 years older, who had an absolutely stunning Morgan named Woody, whom she boarded in Topanga, just ignored him as I did, and we rode together not often, but more than occasionally. Riding Woody with my big sister is one of my greatest childhood memories. I am sad I cannot ride her present horse, Indiana, because he is very spirited and has a form of horse ADD. She will not put me on him, nor will she put my nieces, young teenagers, on him because she feels I am a novice after 15 years of no riding (quite true) and worries for my safety.
The other rule–no motorcycles–is fairly straightforward and this did not present a problem. I had no desire to ride one and knew no boys or men who owned or rode them. I rode my first motorcycle at 37. I did not lie to them; I merely did not share this information. I hated every second of it (first of all, I don’t know how to ride a bike, so it was particularly frightening) and will never get on a motorcycle again.
The last rule–no red nail polish–is extremely odd. Dad hates nail polish, well, any nail polish he can see. Baby pink or clear is okay. But red or hot pink deeply offends him and back in my teen years, black, blue, green, purple did not exist. Such colors lie beyond the realm of my father’s reality and comprehension or they did until quite recently. My mom takes my nieces for manicures when they visit and over Memorial Day, the 11-yr-old chose turquoise green, while the 14-yr-old chose a deep, bright burgundy. My dad, now 86.5, has mellowed considerably and it was all very funny when they came home and he demanded to see their hands, which instantly precipitate mock groans of agony. “Terrible!” he said. When he learned that Mom had nail polish remover in the house, he suggested using it. And even, as I recall, asked how much money each would require to remove the offending lacquer.
One day, in 8th grade, my friend Karin (brilliant girl who is now an associate in Paris at Davis and Polk, fluent in French and German which her family spoke in the home almost to the exclusion of English) loved nail polish. She bought a subtle, muted lavender once at the Brentwood Country Mart, about a block from her home on 26th Street, where we would often go for what were in the ’80s, the best fries in LA. She never spent a lot on clothes, but she loved nail polish and shoes and usually bought Lancome or Borghese.
I put this beautiful subtle color on my nails and remember going home after the overnight and Dad took one look and
said: “What’s on the end of your fingers?” I said, “It’s a very light and muted nail polish Karin got at the Brentwood Country Mart and let me try.” “Hmph. It looks like squirrel vomit.” Now, we do have a lot of squirrels in the Palisades up by the park near their house where my father has always worked out (he used to run but now can only walk 20 minutes due to his knee). But I am not at all sure my father had intimate knowledge of or experience with squirrel vomit. Nevertheless, this was his verdict as a judge and from then on, that nail polish which barely passed the test, became known as squirrel vomit.
There were more serious “rules,” relative to emotional needs and autonomy/personal identity, the kind of thing you discuss with an analyst. But as far as rules for behavior, there were almost none. I did not lose my virginity till the summer after high school at nearly 18.5 years of age. I did not date in high school and only had three or so kisses in all my years of high school at Westlake School for Girls. But the first night I spent the night at a guy’s house–not really a boyfriend, a very dumb and dyslexic drummer, I told him. (Of course, dumb and dyslexic are two very different things and many smart dyslexics exist including the brilliant, talented, gorgeous Patrick Dempsey, who plays Derek Shephard on Grey’s Anatomy).
David was a stud with long hair. I hate long hair, always have, would have been very unhappy to have come of age in the ’70s, but he was truly beautiful and the star aerobics teacher at Main Street Dance and Exercise Studio where I taught body sculpting (then, “stretch and tone”). He had many groupies, but found me amusing because I was a study geek soon to be at Yale but had, from years of jazz, the body of a dancer.
I remember I had to get my wisdom teeth out and for some reason, he decided to stay home from work rather than put me in a cab. And I just sort of casually mentioned I had stayed the night with David. I didn’t go into great detail about it. And in fact, I did not really have sex. I won’t go into the gory details, but a virgin really needs a moderately endowed person for her first time, and David was not in this way “moderate.” So it was not technically sex. However, it was certainly in the realm of sex, but in fact, not Bill Clinton sex, because as readers of Victorian Chick and Facebook know, I was “sexually assaulted”–not raped–at 15 while hitch-hiking on Sunset and Capri down the hill from Ronald Reagan’s estate. As a result, that particular Monica Lewinsky activity repulsed me utterly until my late 30s.
It’s not some horribly traumatic experience for me, but I have blogged about it–wanting to offer a PSA of sorts for parents of teen girls to the effect that hitch-hiking is NEVER okay for a girl–but I have no question my total revulsion at the sight of the male sex organ, and refusal through my 20s and much of my 30s to engage in certain activities to which the organ is central–dates back to 1987 when that man with a mustache (which I’ve always despised) in the beat-up cream Chevy sedan picked me up, exposed himself, began to masturbate (I had never seen a cock before, not even in a movie or TV show), pulled me over to the driver’s side (no bucket seats) and hurt my arm when I resisted.
Then the driver/pervert sped up and refused to let me out until I began to scream bloody murder (I had some great teachers in my family) and snapped into state championship tournament debate mode: “If you don’t let me out of this car right now, I’m going to jump out and then a car on Sunset is going to run me over and kill me and I will be dead. You will have on your conscience the murder of a teen girl. Are you prepared to deal with that consequence?”
I didn’t even swear at him and I have always spoken like a GI, due to my father, brother, sister and love of film, including R-rated films, since abount 11 years of age. I screamed but in a very focused manner and I think it just so freaked him out that a 15-yr-old girl would adopt this strategy of persuasion, albeit in a very high-pitched, worked-up tone that he did slow the car down. He didn’t stop, but he was going 2 or 3 miles an hour when I got the door open (no power locks, but it was such a piece of shit that the door did not open easily) and tumbled out.
By that point we were not far from where my parents lived, about half a mile, and then half a mile up the hill. It was a Saturday afternoon and I limped up to the house, always empty on the weekends, as my parents stayed at the boat in Marina Del Rey from about that point on without me. Now that I remember it, I was not on the way to dance. This was a major pain in the ass–to get from Pacific Palisades to Venice or even Lincoln in Santa Monica–requiring two to three transfers and taking one hour and fifteen minutes to travel what in a car would be only 15 or 20. From 9th grade on, I lived alone in the Palisades from Friday night to Sunday night and always had dinner with them–took the bus to meet them in Santa Monica usually–and then we would come home. I realize this is peculiar arrangement, but that is a story for another day. (I have lots of stories for other days!)
So I gimped up the hill and called my friend, Karin, owner of the “squirrel vomit” nail polish by Lancome. I was pretty distressed but not hysterical. She told me to tell my parents and I told her she was out of her fucking mind. They would have killed me, at least Dad would have, and my tremendously calm, mellow mother would not have been pleased to know that I was hitch-hiking.
In my own defense: I usually only took rides from women in luxury cars. I figured a lady in Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, or Santa Monica (north of Montana of course, haha) in a Mercedes, BMW, Audi, or Porsche could not possibly harm me. Only in very extreme instances, when I was late for dance and assisting, would I hitch a ride from a man and only a man driving a luxury car. “Assisting” has nothing to do with teaching. It just means you stand up in front of the class so others can follow your lead and get a free class, but it’s a huge honor and was pretty much the most important thing to me in life, other than school.
I have no idea why I took the ride that fateful Saturday, fateful, again, not because it scarred me for life, but because for 20 years, it ruled out what most people consider fairly normal sexual activity–a central topic of conversations in Rescue Me which taught me about how important Monica Lewinky sexual activity is to a man, though I guess I already knew this from Bill Clinton’s moronic, indecorous conduct, for about 20 years. If I was at Karin’s on a Saturday afternoon, it had to have been after Saturday class and obviously at fifteen, I did not have any pressing engagement that Saturday evening. I do remember just collapsing into bed, not even wanting to take a shower to cleanse myself of this unpleasant experience, and sleeping pretty much till the next morning, skipping dinner altogether. I didn’t drink anything to calm down, though I was definitely exposed to drugs and alcohol by 15. I didn’t even want to drink. I just wanted to escape into sleep and forget about the whole incident.
Needless to say, for the remaining 9 months of my fifteenth year, I didn’t hitch rides. On February 17, 1988, Mom took a couple hours off of work–about as common as a lunar eclipse–and drove me to the DMV in Santa Monica at 8 AM. That night I drove the 1988 Toyota Tercel from Grandma to Katnap in Venice, where Hama taught jazz. (Hama was a protege of Luigi in NYC, where I was supposed to dance this July for 2 weeks, six hours a day, but had to cancel due to my sprained ankle.)
The Tercel was a little put-put with a pathetic horn . Dad drove a Cadillac with a symphonic horn and made mercilless fun of my diminutive “beep beep”) and I remember, driving just before I turned 16 with Dad, to Mike Miller Toyota in Culver City, where the little charcoal gray two-door coupe awaited me, bought and paid for by Grandma. We laughed so hard when I had to honk at some asshole who came very close to hitting us on the drive back to the Palisades. Dad said, “That’s not a horn! That’s an disease!”
I cannot imagine living in NY today, with a driving age of 17 or 18. Not driving till college would have ruined my life, impaired my freedom and independence, and quite possibly killed me because there would have been no goddamned way I was waiting till 18 to get to dance or debate in a more efficient manner than the Big Blue Bus or RTD, which are just fine if you live near Wilshire, Santa Monica or another West Los Angeles boulevard, but not in more peripheral and suburban areas. Even if you live near Sunset or San Vicente in Brentwood, or God forbid, Malibu, there is just no way a person can have a normal life in LA and take buses all the time.
A final note on this hilarious book–Go the F*** to Sleep!”: I told Gregg Hilton about this on FB. His wall is open to all and you only need to be friends with him on FB to “like” or comment. He is an impressive beltway Republican in DC, with a teachcing position at Georgetown in the school for national security studies. He loves Bush and Cheney (I know, I know, I love him anyway) and also has a great sense of humor and handle on American popular culture, though he does post about the Kardashians, something for which I often take him to task! He’s not an ideologue. He is a pragmatist whose goal in life is to elect Republicans to Congress and put a Republican in the White House. To this end, he is on a mission to discredit the nutty Ron Paul and about 15% to 20% (though I’ve not done a formal count) of his posts are anti-Ron Paul essays.
As I wrote in my inaugural post for The Random Review, my short-lived blog before Victorian CHick, Gregg Hilton changed my life when he posted, as a joke of course, that I be nominated as Obama’s new social secretary. He seems to have, Obama that is, all kinds of trouble with the appointees for to this office. He said that I was a rare Ivy liberal, affable and pleasant, as well as a master diplomat who gets along with conservatives. (This is quite true as about 75% of my FB friends are as my friend Hans puts it, “starboard leaning.”) He said that my father was a bomber pilot in the war (WWII) and that my mother was a prominent force in the law (true). Of course, the picture he selected to plug me was not a conservative photo. It was a picture of me on a white couch in a Cosabella negligee to the knee–not technically lingerie but certainly provocative–and the shitstorm his post kicked up was absolutely beyond belief.
In the wake of this hilarious post, I have made on the order of 80 friends on FB (I only have 293 total), some of whom have become dear phone friends as well as real-life friends and dinner companions. Some of my most loved friends have come to me via the most unlikely source in the world, given my background, family, education: a GOP blogger and Bush/Cheney lover!
And in my third comment on the Wall Post, I wrote that my father subscribed to the Adam Smith theory of parenting–laissez faire–at least on the external behavior front, that is, rules or do’s and dont’s. I joked that I would call Dad up today (I call him daily when I am not in LA with him) and give him shit: “You are a closet Republican, Dad!” I joked that I hoped he would not hang up. But I was just kidding. I might get a “bite your tongue” (not entirely in jest), but Dad has never been a hanger-upper.
That was Grandma (his mother), the Jewish one, youngest of ten, extremely poor in her childhood and adolescence and not well-to-do until her forties or so. If Grandma didn’t like the direction a conversation was heading, she would just hang up. Sometimes this abrupt strategy of termination was preceded by yelling, other times not. Usually it was because, as she was wont to do, Grandma was telling you how to live your life (which of course she was qualified to do and would do ever so much better than you ever cold) and you were not, in her view, paying sufficient deference to her superior wisdom. She would decide she had had enough of that conversation, and just terminate it.
