I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (22 page)

Obviously I realize that having a kid who doesn’t end up changing your lightbulb one time and therefore not preventing your untimely death doesn’t
necessarily
mean your life was wasted. But she could have just skipped the whole “raising Donny” thing and been a swinging-single flapper,
swilling gin at speakeasies. Sure, she still might have died on the kitchen floor, but it could have been because she was being taken by a handsome gentleman with a jaunty fedora and due to the strong gin, she tilted backward in ecstasy, hitting her head and falling to her death on the floor in the throes of passion—her last words of “Oh, God!” left up to interpretation.

WE ALL KNOW we’re going
to die, right? That’s why a lot of us either
find
religion or
fear
religion. Knowing we’re going to die is why some of us take medication or self-medicate. Knowing that you’re going to die might make you indulge in eating comfort foods or want instant gratification or combine the two as you sit in the car and open a pint of Ben & Jerry’s you just bought at the grocery store, holding it in front
of the dashboard’s heat vent until the AmeriCone Dream is no longer totally frozen, and then taking a bite out of the top without a spoon. “Who cares that I’m eating ice cream with my bare hands? I’m going to die alone,” you say to yourself as you drive with one hand, holding the pint between your teeth and wiping your sticky fingers on the passenger seat.

Knowing I’m going to die someday has
never filled me with the desire to make another human being, whom I have to spend the “good years” of my life looking after in hopes that someday he or she might return the favor. What if you died during childbirth? Then you’ve screwed yourself out of a life
and
you’ll have created a person who will have no elderly mother to take care of someday.

In the song “Beautiful Boy,” which he wrote for
his son Sean Lennon, John Lennon sang, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” And I say, “While you’re busy making other plans, hoping that one day your teenagers will grow up to be adults who sponge-bathe you, they’re hiding behind the local 7-Eleven doing whip-its.”

Have a baby: Just add water and boom! Instant caretaker! Guaranteed to bring you your high blood
pressure medication and administer your insulin shots! But what if your kid grows up to be completely inept? These are a handful of possible outcomes for your child’s life that could hinder his or her ability to be your emergency contact, let alone care for you in your old age:

• Your daughter is busy trying to make a living as a reality TV star and most of her days are spent in undisclosed locations
so that the rose ceremony results remain confidential.

• Your son is a commercial pilot with a drinking problem and bad depth perception who flies exclusively in the Rocky Mountains.

• Your son is a scientist—only because he secretly wants access to Bunsen burners so that he can continue with his after-work meth-making hobby.

• Your daughter is a stand-up comedian.

• Your kid ends up being
the teenage boy who waited on me at a Best Buy in Las Vegas. His name tag said
BREN
—is that a name? Creative naming is a blueprint for making either an angry outcast or an entitled hipster—and both of those types of guys end up being completely unfuckable in their early twenties, wearing their short-sleeved plaid shirts and Malcolm X–style black-rimmed glasses.

Anyway, I’d gone into the Las Vegas
Strip–adjacent Best Buy during my friend’s destination birthday party weekend, scrambling last minute to buy what would hopefully be the best birthday gift I could
give her—the
Golden Girls
DVD boxed set. Young Bren appeared to be sleeping standing up when I approached him at the counter. He literally looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders—as if gravity and the mere effort
it took to stand up against it were too much for this kid to handle as he worked his Saturday-afternoon shift in the DVD section. Or maybe it was just the weight of those weird plug earrings that were stretching his lobes to the size of a dilated-and-about-to-give-birth vagina.

I wasn’t sure how to approach a teenager who was dozed off in the upright position. I knew from dealing with my sister’s
horse that any sudden touch or loud noise could cause him to buck and kick me under the chin with his dirty Converse low-tops. I kept a safe distance of a few feet and said deliberately, “Excuse me, Bren?” (I tried not to say “Bren” judgmentally.)

He snorted, grunted, grumbled, wiped his nose and eyes, and said, “Oh, uh, yeah? Hey.” I felt like I was his mom.
Bren, wake up! It’s time for school!
I thought back to when I was a cashier at Roche Bros. grocery store in Needham and how I got in trouble with the store manager after a customer complained that when she approached me, I had my hair in my face as I bundled the one-dollar bills in the cash register. No manager was anywhere in sight at the Best Buy. Bren was a lone scarecrow overseeing the crops of DVDs spread out before us. Our
conversation was as follows:

Me: “Hi. I’m looking for a DVD boxed set. Do you have
The Golden Girls
?”

Bren: “You mean
Gilmore Girls
?”

Me: “No. I don’t mean
Gilmore Girls.
I mean
The Golden Girls.
”

Bren: “Um, wait, do you mean the Golden Globes?”

(Is there even such a thing? Yeah, I want the Golden Globes DVD boxed set.
All of them
—starting with the first Golden Globes ceremony back in 1944.
Don’t skimp on one part! I want all of it—including every best short black-and-white cartoon that has a hint of racism. I have a U-Haul outside
and a storage space that I’m dying to fill up with over sixty years of awards shows.)

Me: “No. Not the Golden Globes. Not
Gilmore Girls. The Golden Girls.
”

Bren: “Uhhh, what’s that?”

Me: “What’s
The Golden Girls
?”

Bren: “Yeah. I don’t know what that
is.”

“Bren,” I said, “
The Golden Girls.
Starring Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, Betty White, and Estelle Getty. Four middle-age/elderly women living together. Some were divorced, some widowed—but it didn’t matter, they didn’t need men. They had one another. Not to say that they weren’t still sexual—they were. Especially Blanche.
The Golden Girls!
The original
Sex and the City
, if you will. Saturday
nights on NBC!”

Bren dismissed the entire run of the show with a simple, “Pshhhht. Oh. I never heard of it.”

“But it was one of the most popular sitcoms from the 1980s!”

Bren shook his head. “Well, I don’t need to know that. I was born in the nineties.”

Born in the nineties? I can’t even imagine such a thing. How can anyone not have been a teenager in 1991 when Nirvana’s teen anthem album
Nevermind
came out? How does being a teenager not involve driving around in a flannel shirt in your parents’ Oldsmobile, listening to the local college station, just waiting for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to come on the radio? The nineties were meant for being a teenager—if they weren’t, Nirvana would have named their hit anthem “Smells Like Just Being Born,” and that conjures up the smell of regurgitated
stale oatmeal and sour milk. If Kurt Cobain were still alive, he’d kill himself all over again because teenagers these days are so stupid.

I hate the arrogance of “I don’t need to know that.” I’m sure he knows the name of every character in
Star Wars
—does he need to know that? It’s certainly not helping him get laid. By the time I was
a toddler in the late 1970s I knew that although James Dean
was a teen idol for girls in the 1950s, in his real life he took ballet class and was rumored to be bisexual, or, as my mother would say, “a little bit AC/DC.” I knew that Marilyn Monroe had “committed suicide,” but lots of people believed her death was a swift assassination by the Kennedys, because after sleeping with Bobby
and
Jack she simply “knew too much” about their mob ties.

If Bren had
no idea about things that happened before the nineties, he must watch
American Idol
and think,
This old guy Steven Tyler seems to know what he’s talking about. I agree with everything he says even though I have no idea what qualifies this nail polish–wearing man whom I’ve never heard of to judge a singing competition!
Bren must get blown away walking into an Urban Outfitters and seeing a Rubik’s
Cube being ironically sold at the counter and thinking,
Hey, look! It’s a three-dimensional app! Whoa! How do I get that into my iPhone?

When people breathlessly and worriedly ask me, “But . . . but if you don’t have kids, who will take care of you when you’re old?” I think,
Not these dummies!
If I’m in a nursing home, I want someone my own age or close to it administering my meds. I don’t want
some young Bren type to have my life in his hands as he says, “Uh, you want me to give that old lady some penicillin? What is that—some drug that was discovered in 1928? Shit. I don’t need to know about this. I was born in the nineties.”

I disagree somewhat with Eckhart Tolle. I’m not sure I like the concept of “the power of now.” I want to write a new-age book called
The Power of Nostalgia
geared
at teenagers like Bren who think that they don’t need to know about anything that came before them. Would he say, “I don’t need to know that,” in history class when his teacher says that it’s time to learn about evil dictators? Let us not forget that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. I’m not saying that knowing about the episode of
The Golden Girls
where Blanche’s
much younger fitness instructor asks her out will inspire genius in today’s youth, but maybe Mussolini
wouldn’t have been such a power-hungry asshole if he’d had more laughs as a young boy.

MY NANA REFUSED to leave her modest five-room ranch-style home in Methuen, Massachusetts, even well into her nineties. She was mowing her own lawn in her eighties and precariously kneeling on her kitchen counter
to paint her cabinets to relieve boredom. She walked down flights of stairs while she was dizzy from her high blood pressure medication so that she could get to the laundry room in the basement. My mom and my uncle tried to get her to stop—but short of moving in with Nana and sitting on her, they couldn’t wrangle her. It’s easier to get a feral cat into a carrier than it was to get my nana
to move into an assisted-living facility or stop keeping her cash hidden in tinfoil in the bottom drawer of her stove.

After she suffered a rather touch-and-go bout with pneumonia in her midnineties, I really thought Nana would finally acquiesce to a nice assisted-living facility. But she balked at the idea of even going to physical therapy to get her knees working again. “Rehab?” she said. “No.
I’m not going to rehab and sit around with a bunch of druggies.”

Nana eventually allowed a visiting nurse to come check in on her once a day but it ended up exhausting her more than helping, because she spent so much time cleaning her house in preparation for the visit—or, as she referred to it, “this rude woman who barges into my house and wakes me up when I’m sleeping and asks me about my poop.”

Maybe it’s a generational thing. Nana, after living as a widow for over thirty years, took great pride in running her own household. No man was there to tell her what to cook for dinner—or even to cook dinner. She’d given her life to her husband and her children and she wasn’t about to relinquish authority over her own remote control to some caretakers in an assisted-living facility. She was free
to have a dinner of black tea and saltines while listening to her
favorite radio show about aliens and conspiracy theories. Unlike my nana, I would live in an assisted-living facility now if my health insurance would cover it.

I used to tap-dance in nursing homes when I was in middle school—because I was both a humanitarian and a giant loser. Sure, people were drooling and struggling to hold
their own heads up, but they seemed so happy in their oblivion, their only responsibility to clap and make the buck-toothed girl with the too far apart eyes feel good about herself. Or maybe they actually enjoyed my tap interpretation of Elvis Presley’s “Blue Suede Shoes.” I think it must have been the drugs.

I have a nice apartment. It’s spacious and I love my furniture and my framed magazine
covers from the 1960s that adorn my walls, but if someone offered me the opportunity to live in a luxury hotel with an on-call nurse to sponge-bathe me and open my mail, I’d say, “See ya later, dust den.” The thought of living somewhere where I’m brought pills that make me sleepy and I’m seated in front of live entertainment every afternoon at four o’clock makes me all misty because, unless I fake
a nervous breakdown, I’m very far from the age where such accommodations are appropriate. I definitely want to be taken care of when I’m old—by a team of people who hand out heating pads and pudding
for a living.
If I have a kid just for the sake of having a late-life nursemaid and he grows up to be a web designer, what good is he? He doesn’t have a prescription pad or a stable of teenage-but-legal
boys who are willing to “dance” for an old lady.

It’s hard for me to commit to something today just because it might serve me in the future. It’s like exercising now so that my knees feel good when I’m old. Who cares? I’ll want to just sit down when I’m seventy-five anyway. It’s hard for me to even picture my future—besides the future I always picture, which is that I am retired by forty and
living in a “community” in Palm Springs. It’s also somehow magically 1970-something and I’m hosting pool parties at my ranch-style house for the likes of Liza Minnelli and whoever her gay husband is at the time.