My mother turned 50 in 1967. Although she was close to 40 when I was born, she had retained her good looks. She definitely did not appreciate the idea of being half a century old. The number seemed to portend something ominous for her. I remember vividly how miserable she was during that “Summer of Love”. I was 13, naive, energetic, playing in bands, listening to as much music as I could cram into my ears, discovering that there actually was an opposite sex. Every day was a potential universe of delights and dangers for me. What does anybody know when they’re 13? Ignorance is bliss, especially when even 18 seems light years away.
My mother and I often clashed. We were both extremely stubborn and each of us knew she was right. My mother especially hated the idea of my consorting with “the enemy” -- boys. Because I was becoming increasingly involved in music, I was always meeting guys. Some of them -- the more alluring ones -- were in their 20’s. They had long hair, moustaches, arrogant hipster mannerisms...smoking cigarettes (and worse), wearing tight jeans, reading subversive literature. I was fascinated. For awhile I worked occasionally at a head shop in Hermosa Beach, and I soon gravitated to a couple of the guys who hung around there. We’d play records on the store stereo, jam, talk about deep, existentialist things. It was all pretty innocent, at least at that point.
My mother, always trying to be hip herself, dropped in to visit me a couple of times when I was working. The second time she walked in unannounced and found me sitting in the lap of Spider John, a long, tall biker with flowing, taffy-colored hair and a cute little goatee. In vain did I protest that we were just reading Head Comix together. She ordered me home immediately. That was the end of that.
My mother’s hysteria was somewhat understandable. I was only 13, after all, and so far my purity was intact, but if I kept hanging out with Spider John and his ilk I would be damaged goods in no time. At least that was my mother’s thinking. So, after the head shop incident, my civil rights became nonexistent. I had to come straight home after school. I could not be alone, unsupervised, with any male person. I could not be out any later than 9 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights, even with a girlfriend. On school nights I couldn’t go out at all. This put a huge crimp in my musical activities, but I soon became adept at slipping out onto the deck and making my way down to the street via the sloping roof with a little help from the drainpipe, when I had to play a gig at night. I’d leave a guitar at one of the other band member’s houses so I wouldn’t have to drag it with me. My parents were none the wiser, since I made sure to sneak back in and be in bed by midnight or 1 a.m. at the latest.
I soon had it all down to a science, and gradually I began to lead two lives. By day I was a high school freshman, whose life was defined by classes, homework, marching band, a capella choir, etc.; but when the sun went down I abruptly morphed into a guitar-slinging, wisecracking, degenerate wannabe. Then, by the time the moon was beginning to set, I was once again transformed into a suburban teenager again, back in bed in my pajamas.
I think my mother was a bit jealous. She was bored, with little to hold her interest besides her endless junk collecting, reading, and watching TV. She had always been drop-dead gorgeous, and as her 40’s came to a close she began to worry that she was losing her looks, although she wasn’t. For me to be suddenly attractive to boys was something of a blow to her ego. In those days, the watchword was “never trust anybody over 30.” To people in their teens and 20’s, a 50-year-old was considered to have “one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.” My mother, I see now, was beginning to feel like an old hag.
That summer I had a very full schedule. I was playing in three different more or less full-time bands, teaching myself to play the drums, spending as much time as I could writing songs with my friend Dave Benoit, who also went to my high school, and doing odd jobs for my dad at his furniture company to earn money for guitar strings and new LP’s. In July my mother began suffering from severe toothaches. She went to the family dentist, who told her that she needed dentures. So over the course of several appointments, she had all her teeth pulled and dentures made. This made her feel older than ever, although the new dentures looked quite natural and her looks weren’t affected by them. She became sullen and withdrawn, sulking in her room most of the day with the TV on and not talking to me or my dad when he came home from work.
The last straw came about a week after my mother had had all her teeth pulled, on a balmy, moonlit Saturday night. It was the Summer of Love, and that night may have been the high point of the summer. That night it felt to me as if the whole world was one big party. Up and down our block, music was blasting from open windows and doors, crazy laughter was ringing out everywhere, the excited babble of partying seemed to be bouncing off every wall and running down the street like an ocean. You could get drunk just listening.
I was up in my room, pretending to read. Actually I had to decide what to do about two different parties I wanted to attend that night. I would have to leave soon if I wanted to hit both of them and still be home before dawn. The problem was, I knew my parents weren’t going to get much sleep with all that noise going on around them. I would have to be even stealthier than usual if I didn’t want to get caught sneaking out.
Finally I crept out into the upstairs hall, pretending to go to the bathroom. I could see the reflection of my mother’s reading light downstairs, which meant her door was open. I waited a few minutes, then flushed the toilet. Almost immediately my mother’s light went out. Breathing a sigh of relief, I went back to my room, got dressed for the parties, and after a discreet interval opened the sliding glass door onto the deck, sneaked across the roof, and made my careful way down to the ground.
The place where I reached the ground happened to be near my mother’s bedroom window. I always had to be careful because she slept with her window open. I wasn’t the most agile of kids, and slipping out at night required athletic ability I didn’t possess. Sometimes I’d miscalculate a step, or the drainpipe would shift a little, and then there’d be noise, and sometimes trouble (although I never got caught). But that night I made it to the ground relatively safely and quietly. I was about to slip away down the street when I heard a very soft sound coming from my mother’s window. She was crying.
I think I saw my mother cry twice during my childhood, once when she learned that her younger sister (with whom she was extremely close) had died of cancer, and another time, a few years later, when she decided to leave my dad. This time I realized that she didn’t want anyone to know that she was crying. She was stoic by nature, and she didn’t like people to have any glimpse into her emotions. Somehow she felt that if her feelings were made public, she would lose her authority.
I stood there for a few minutes, listening to her cry. She didn’t make much noise when she cried. I could visualize her lying there in the dark, in her single bed, around which she had designed (and my dad had built) a sort of plywood frame, like a cocoon. Beside her on her nightstand, no doubt, her new teeth were grinning heartlessly back at her from a water glass.
God only knows what she was thinking as she lay in bed listening to everybody else in the world seemingly having the time of their lives. No one in the neighborhood had invited my parents to their parties. My mother didn’t like any of the neighbors, and she made no bones about it. She was also still experiencing quite a bit of pain from all the dental work she’d undergone. She was completely alone at that moment, a stranger for whom the ticking of the clock must have sounded very loud and frightening. Her looks were still intact, but she was, after all, fifty...in an increasingly youthful world that had no use for her at all. How long did she have left?
From the blissfully oblivious vantage point of 13-going-on-14, I listened to her crying, then shrugged and went sneaking off to my good-time rendezvous. Adults were always having problems I didn’t understand. It was a shame she had to let things get to her, but that was the way she was, I guessed.
Today, it’s with mixed emotions that I say that her 50 isn’t mine. For better or worse, I’m far from a grownup even at 49. But now I think I can understand a little more why my mother was crying to herself in the dark on that moonlit night in the Summer of Love when she faced the depths of her own mortality and loneliness.
