Failure Is an Option Read online

  My earliest memories are of my parents cleaning. My father owned an electrical supply store that sold lighting and bulbs and circuit breakers, etc., so as a family, we had access to a lot of cutting-edge electrical equipment. You know how in the fifties, there was a rush to be the first home on the block to purchase a TV set? It was momentous, a real sea change for families. That “moment” came for us in the form of the NuTone Central Vacuum System. Because of my father’s position, we were definitely the first home in our neighborhood to install the vac system, which held the promise of changing everything for home cleaning. It was basically a network of ports in the wall of any room that could connect a vacuum hose to a central unit in the basement. A comprehensive cleaning system, like the 2001: A Space Odyssey of vacuum systems. A real Valhalla for compulsive cleaners.

  And shit, did they use it. In my memory, most of my childhood was spent vacuuming or hearing the sound of vacuuming. Giving my parents this technology was like giving the Union forces the Gatling gun—you can do so much more damage so much more quickly. And with more frequency. The key element to the NuTone vac was that you could increase the sheer amount of “cleaning” opportunities in any given moment. As in, it encouraged rapid-response cleaning. Like, if one piece of lint was on the floor, one could, or dare I say, should, plug in the vac and deal with it like it was a medical emergency.

  With the vacuum in place, our house was on its way to becoming “clear.” As in, a perfectly self-contained cleaning environment. A real biosphere of neuroses. The plaintive wails of the NuTone vac system would wake me in the morning and put me to sleep at night. A giant sucking sound, if you will. And I never knew when and where it was going to come. The threat was always nigh. I would lie awake in bed and long for the simpler times, when vacuums were manual.

  From the eyes of this child, this was just the way things were. Futuristic cleaning all the time and without any foreseeable slackening. The sheer force of constant cleaning was, of course, the veneer of order for a bubbling chaos beneath, and new technologies would only serve to stiffen that veneer. To this day, I can’t clean. And that seems counterintuitive to the bulk of my upbringing, which was consumed with it. Maybe it was rebellion, or maybe I’m still in a state of shock, but to this day, I wipe off a table as if you handed a baby monkey a wet cloth.

  I still get bizarre pleasure in watching people clean, though. One of the first things I did after making some money was hire a cleaning woman to come to my studio apartment in New York City. She was young and cute, but it was less sexual attraction than an attraction to the cleaning. I would sit and marvel at it, which made for an uncomfortable situation. There was always this very present energy coming from her, saying, “Why are you always hanging around here in your small apartment and watching me clean?” My intentions were very easy to misread, and it was a hard distinction to communicate, like, “I’m not gawking at you the way you’re thinking. I just like to watch people clean. Because of my childhood. Seriously I just need to watch!”

  CHAPTER 2

  How I Failed at Pretty Much Everything as a Kid (the Foundations of Failure)

  I meet kids all the time lately who are really good at things, and I keep thinking, I don’t remember being good at anything as a kid. My son, who is fourteen now, has many talented friends, some who play music, others who are savvy at coding; others speak several languages, some are precocious artists, etc. Mainly, as a kid, I just went to Friendly’s. And I had so much time to get good at something, but no . . . nothing. A local pederast did try to get me into archery, but I even faltered at that, which I guess was a good thing: the avoiding pederasty part.

  But why was I so averse to getting good at something? I remember this one kid in my elementary school who was an avid Cub Scout. He recruited me to join his Cub troop that was run by his father. His skill was that he knew how to tie something like five hundred different knots. So many knots. The double loop, the half hitch, the midline loop, the sailor’s hitch, the strangle knot, even the super controversial hangman’s knot. I went to one scout meeting at his house and we sat in a tent for at least two hours tying knots using a diagrammatic guide. He looked so happy. After the meeting, I immediately quit the Cub Scouts.

  I often wonder if that kid finally ever hung himself or others. More likely, he’s just an incredibly successful scout leader. But he was doing something, despite its being only tying knots. He was practicing sophisticated skills, even at nine years old. I recall reading about Ben Franklin, who left school at ten, apprenticed with his brother as a printer, then started writing for a newspaper at age fifteen. Jesus. I mean, c’mon. What a prodigious asshole.

  My unique talents centered more around watching TV while eating SpaghettiOs raw from the can, which made my father rabidly mad, because he had installed in the TV room a white shag rug, that, as a consequence, had recurring and ever-growing concentric SpaghettiO stains. Also, I was proficient at taking a racquetball racket and hitting a tennis ball in my living room against the wide brick chimney for hours. That’s a skill I could have possibly developed into something greater, but on the whole, it was more like what one would do for recreation in a supermax. And don’t get me wrong: everyone’s childhood is “like a prison,” even though that’s a bit “reductio ad custodia.” But, look, starting early being “into something” has its consequences, too. One can carry that burden, heavy, of having tied all those knots.

  For me, I just needed to find my own thing. Anything that would envelop my time beyond procrastination. Something that would set me on a higher path. The thing is, I was very shy and introverted. I didn’t realize that then, but I enjoyed being home alone, despite the accompanying gripping loneliness. One thing I started to do was record myself on a Panasonic cassette player doing interviews. But because I seldom left my house, I would interview me as me or me as other people.

  This turned out to be a relatively successful pet project, most evident in the time I interviewed myself as an astronaut on Voyager 1 and played it for all the kids at school and they went crazy. It, in a nutshell, exemplified the power of lying.

  My hoax was so convincing that one student coaxed me to play it for our teachers. I played it for Mr. Simko, our gym teacher, and he was shocked. He asked me how I got to interview a real astronaut, and I told him that he came to my house because he was friendly with our neighbor who was a scientist.

  Then I played it for my homeroom teacher Mr. Powers, and he immediately pointed out that Voyager 1 was unmanned.

  “Oh . . . yeah, but he was in the space program.”

  “But he described seeing Earth from the spacecraft on Voyager One.”

  “Well, he must have been joking.”

  “But the whole interview was about him being in space.”

  “He must have been talking about a different spaceship.”

  “And as far I know, Jon, there is no astronaut in NASA named Biff Alderman.”

  I really should have stopped with the gym teacher, but that’s the price one pays when one flies too close to the sun, or, in other words, plays a fake interview with an astronaut for a guy who has a completist knowledge of the space program.

  Later, I tried school politics. In sixth grade, I ran for class treasurer. My only real experience with money thus far had been borrowing it from my parents and stealing it from my cousin’s drawer. Both seemed ample qualifiers to run for treasurer. My decision to run was somewhat quixotic, as in I decided to run the day of the elections.

  I was up against a girl named Doreen. She was smart, driven, and self-assured. She was running unopposed and had made signs to “Vote Doreen” and hung them all over the school. I was what is now called a “spoiler candidate.” In the auditorium, in front of the class, Doreen gave her speech. It was well delivered and she spoke eloquently about raising funds to support a class trip to Boston. That was huge.

  Though we were only an hour from Boston, it was like a galaxy away
for most people in Worcester. Personally, I had been only a few times, but most kids talked about Boston like it was Paris. Like, “Have you been to Boston?” “Are you fucking kidding me? No fucking way. I’ve been to Shrewsbury, though.”

  She talked about working with the teachers and the school board to raise money for this trip to go to Paul Revere’s house. She also talked about getting new outdoor equipment for the playground. New balls, new baseball equipment, and new nets for the basketball hoops.

  I thought I had this in the bag. I was counting on the “no-nothing” vote. Nobody wants some loudmouth, proactive girl with a solid agenda, making promises about school trips and better overall conditions. Give them something they really want to hear: a hopeless message, a message that conveys “you get what you get.” Why invest in new balls when we’ve been kicking around that one deflated one for years? Do we really want to sully the memory of all those who came before us who kicked that deflated ball? Do we want some shiny new netting on the hoop when our forefathers played without them? What we needed was some hard-line illiberalism.

  Instead, she completed her speech, and I was called up and I stood before the class, immediately drowning in flop sweat, and said, “What she said.”

  Everybody stared and the room started to melt and no one even uttered a chuckle. Even the heater hissed in disapproval. I received zero votes. Later that year, I looked over at Doreen while we stood in Paul Revere’s dumb bedroom and she gave me a smug look. Whatever.

  * * *

  —

  I tried music. My father played the clarinet. But he had stopped playing by the time I was born, so it was more my dad had a clarinet. My dad also had a gun. He never shot it. I guess it was for protection. He kept it hidden in a box somewhere on a shelf in the back of a hallway closet—a perfect spot for a gun when you need one quickly. In the event of a home invasion, my father would have to exchange pleasantries with the intruders, all the while subtly making his way to a closet at the other side of the house to get the gun. Or maybe his plan all along was to deceive them by telling them that he keeps all his money in a wooden box in a hall closet, then lure them to this closet and then, after using a stepladder to reach up to the shelf for the box, slowly open it, pull out the pistol, and say, “Oh, my mistake, this was the box with this in it,” then BLAM BLAM BLAM, shower them with bullets.

  In any event, the gun and the clarinet basically served the same purpose, at least in my eyes. Just totems of some past life my dad lived that were now nothing more than relics, stuffed in a box, never to be seen or used. That was a pretty awesome imagined past life, though, filled with guns and clarinets. Maybe he was in the illegal woodwind mafia.

  Anyway, he was, in reality, a jazz fan—mainly, from his album collection, “white jazz,” as in big band—Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, etc. (Although, to be fair, there were black musicians in big bands.) He did tell stories of traveling to New York City when he was younger and going to jazz clubs, but the only black artist I remember him listening to was Paul Robeson. There’s nothing better after a quiet dinner with family, heading into the living room and putting on some intensely solemn spirituals to get the mood up. That’s how my family rolled . . . da old chariot along. (That’s a solid Paul Robeson joke, if you like those.)

  Even as a younger kid, I never took to learning an instrument. I took lessons on the recorder (the world’s worst instrument, with the exception of the steam calliope) for several years, then switched to the violin, whereupon I failed miserably at the Suzuki method—a cruel, psyops-style method of forcing children to make music, and after that, finally landed on the guitar. To my chagrin, I had and have painfully short fingers, so even with a children’s guitar, it was hard to play a chord, but thankfully that didn’t matter to my guitar teacher, who would come to my house with his girlfriend, sit me down in front of our stereo, put on an album, and have me strum to it, while he and his girlfriend left the room. I assumed this was how lessons worked, and only later realized he should pay my parents back for both the lessons and for the use of my sister’s room to have sex in.

  After that, it was all downhill with my becoming musical in any way. I could play the drums a bit. In fact, I “played” the drums at our school’s sixth-grade talent show, because the drummer of the band didn’t show and they asked me to fill in. I told them that I had never played on a drum set before, and the lead singer said, just sit there and hold up the sticks and wave them around. So I sat there anxiously holding my sticks in the air, occasionally moving them like a navy signalman, while the band played “Smoke on the Water.”

  After, I asked, “Why did you even bother having me?” He told me, “We set up the drum set, so . . .” Many kids came up to me after and said, “Great job.” Only Alan Leiter asked, “Why didn’t you play?” I plainly stated, “I can’t,” and he shrugged and said, “Oh, cool.” Maybe this was the template that set me on the road to relishing the role of “proudly unaccomplished.”

  * * *

  —

  So, higher path. How do you get on one? One can employ what I call the torpor technique. It’s essentially this: when you discover you’re not good at anything, wait. Wait until you know something changes, and you will feel that change when it happens. You will inevitably get a lot of resistance from those who will try to get you to be good at something, but don’t let this deter you from waiting. I waited. I mean, it took until two years ago till I made an album based on not being able to play piano (titled Well, I Should Have . . . Learned How to Play Piano), and if, per-chance, I had learned as a kid, I would not have been able to do that. I waited forty years, and something came of it.

  And, I will say, the album turned out to be a rather productive experiment of creative fission, or friction, to bring together in one moment, those who can and one who can’t and both make something together. It was a pure example of democracy at work. A professional jazz trio, with me on piano. Recorded for posterity. And it resonated.

  Just recently, I went to my local health food market to buy some avocados, and as I was checking out, the woman behind the register looked up slowly and grimaced ever so slightly and then timidly said, “Can I ask you a question?”

  I said sure.

  Then she said, with a bitterness in her voice, “Why would you make that jazz album if you can’t play jazz?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” I said.

  She sneered.

  See how failure works out sometimes? Even for a kid who couldn’t get good at anything.

  My Failed Children’s Book

  (for kids whose fathers have abandoned them)

  Failed Bands I’ve Been In

  CHAPTER 3

  The Sleepover (and How I Failed to Have One)

  The first kid I remember wanting to switch lives with was my friend James. He was my friend in elementary school. My school was a depressing municipal brick building filled with tough white kids and unhappy teachers. There were no young teachers. They all seemed like relics. Angry, ossified men and women plodding on till retirement. I remember only one teacher who seemed positive and inspired learning, but he had chronic stomach pain, like a perpetual ulcer, so while drinking liquid antacid, most of his class involved him doubled over in anguish. But in the scant moments when he actually taught, he was worthy.

  My friend James had this huge smile. He was always smiling. He seemed happy. I think he was the happiest kid I knew. I assume that’s why I wanted to be him. James and I hung out a lot. James and I shared many firsts. The first candy I stole was with James. The first cigarette I tried to smoke was with James. The first erection I saw was with James. No, it wasn’t his. Or mine. Or the teacher who had ulcers. Let me elaborate.

  Our route walking home took us down a main street. The street had no parking, but once, walking home, we saw a car parked on the side of the road. James ran ahead and looked in the passenger window. I was quick to follow. In the driver�
��s seat, a man sat vigorously masturbating. It felt like we watched for a good thirty seconds. Two little kids with their heads in a car window watching an obscene act like a puppet show. He didn’t stop. He just looked at us, signaling with his eyes down as if to say to us, “Check this out.” We did. And then we ran away quickly.

  I will always remember that guy. If he’s reading this right now . . . Hey. Although I imagine he’s probably passed away. And on his gravestone, it reads: HERE LIES (INSERT NAME), PUBLIC MASTURBATOR.

  The other first with James was a sleepover. James invited me to his house. I had actually never before been to his house. Suffice it to say, I was uneasy about it. My parents were comforting and suggested I take my blanket, whose name was Blanky. That helped. Having Blanky always helped.

  Let me quickly digress. I have always been interested in becoming someone else. I think it’s a common trait. Dysphoria may be the psychological term for it. Or psychosis. When I was really young, I would wander into dysphoric states all the time. Mainly this involved going up to other people, standing near them, and trying to imagine what it would be like if I were them.

  The danger, of course, was of it actually happening. I thought about this a lot. It was like early onset existential dread. Maybe it was because I was essentially an only child (my sister was six years older) and both my parents worked and left me alone a lot. I was pretty much a latchkey kid. My after-school regimen was pouring State Line potato chips into a mixing bowl and then pouring vinegar over them, making a mash, then eating it with a spoon like soup. Potato chip soup. Then, sitting and watching TV with the aforementioned potato chip soup, intermittently hitting a tennis ball against a wall. Sad, but very helpful in developing hand-eye coordination and high blood pressure simultaneously.