The Big Apple

I didn’t write this story, but I’m publishing it for someone who remains “hopelessly out of date and behind the technological times.”

My brother and his buddy Tom Harper used to ask Tom’s mom to do the Big Apple.

They were fifteen-year-old boys, so that ought to be some explanation. According to my brother’s version, he would often start it, because it would have to begin with an innocent question: “Mrs. Harper, will you show us the Big Apple?”

Tom would have to jump right in and back him up: “Yeah, c’mon, Mom. Do the Big Apple. Show us the Big Apple, Mom.”

Of course, I was never there; I never actually saw Mrs. Harper do the Big Apple. Little sisters are not present, but I heard about it afterwards. Mrs. Harper was a short, stocky woman. She wore faded, flowered housedresses, and she often had a scarf holding back her graying hair off her face. She had short arms and was mean with her rolling pin, but if they got her to do the Big Apple, she would slowly close her eyes and hum and then gradually begin to shake. And her rolls of fat would begin to shake. And pretty soon the two boys would dissolve into tears of laughter. And Mrs. Harper would snap a heavy finger at them and call them “bad boys.”

“You saucy boys. See if I cook for you again. See if I drive for you. See if I show you anything again.”

But for some reason, she always forgot and this puzzled me. How could she forget? Why did she forget?

“Mrs. Harper, will you show us the Big Apple?”

“C’mon, Mom. Pleeeeze. Show us the Big Apple.”

I had to smile at the picture the boys painted of gargantuan Mrs. Harper. Her quaking rolls shimmying to the gritty music in her mind, as her eyes slowly closed and she began to do the big Apple. Where did she go? What did she imagine? But I did not question my brother or express my doubts to him; he was my older brother, and therefore, my guide, my personal scout into the future. How could I afford to undermine the few truths he chose to report back to me? He might stop coming back altogether.

At the same time, underneath my smile, I secretly felt sorry for Mrs. Harper. What gave me that key? How did I know? In what obscure way did I identify with Mrs. Harper? I’m sure, at the time, it didn’t occur to me to ask Tom how a young boy could be so mean to his only mother. It didn’t occur to me to invent excuses for him, either, like perhaps Tom’s father had no respect and so the boys had no respect either. After all, Mrs. Harper had twins, then another boy, so her obesity was really on them, their male responsibility, her sacrifice on the behalf of men, both big and small. And this laughter was her thanks?

“C’mon, Mom, do the Big Apple!”

And what did the Big Apple mean to her? When she closed her eyes, and the music played, and her body remembered the Big Apple and itself sixty pounds lighter, before twins, before marriage, when sex was a future, forbidden dare. Was the Big Apple a hotwired, inside, incarnate image of being light and free, and feeling the music and through the music, the hope of a wide open world, and wanting to tear it open and be part of it.

Yeah, the Big Apple. Why Mrs. Harper wouldn’t even have been Mrs. Harper in the days of the Big Apple. Hey, honey, hey, baby, shake that thing! Take hold, baby. Get it on! Maybe it was Shelly or Sheila or Sherry, but not Mrs. Harper; yeah, maybe it was Sherry, Baby, c’mon sweetheart, do the Big Apple!

Now, in Tom’s defense, he wasn’t a simply a bad guy, an ungrateful child, an unfeeling brute in a black hat. In fact, he was rather sweet himself When I ran for student council treasurer, he called me up and told me that Tanya Whittier was going to win and I was going to lose. I was shocked. My brother’s friends never called me on the phone. Why if they wanted to talk to me, which was inconceivable, they could just saunter over any day of the week they were in the house, which was always, opening the refrigerator, eating crackers and cookies, and in between mouthfuls, they could say whatever was on their mind. I mean they were in and out of the house every day, Tom and his twin brother Tim, and John and Ricky and Chaz and all the rest of the gang. As I’m sure my brother was in and out of their houses, too.

But here was this normal voice coming absurdly through the telephone wire and explaining the near future to me as clearly as the gypsy’s image in a crystal ball: “Everybody loves Tanya,” said Tom Harper’s disembodied voice. “She’s in the twelfth grade and the twelfth grader is gonna win. No ninth grader is gonna be an officer on the student council.” And he was right. I lost. It was kind of him to call. Kind of him not to face me with the news. Kind of him to interject winning and losing into my own private fantasy of running for office. I had completely ignored the voting and the losing. In my mind, there were only posters and marketing which was all a grand lark. I had a way even then of failing to think life through to the end.

Years later, my son ran for student council and he lost. And that’s when I found out that his father lost when he ran for student council. And his dad’s cousin just happened to be visiting, and he announced that he had run and lost for student council. So running for student council and losing was in my son’s blood. A genetic predisposition to run — and lose — for student council, on both sides of the family, so the poor boy doesn’t stand a chance. He’s hard-wired to run and lose. Could life really work that way?

Just how does life work, anyway?

Here’s one way: suddenly at age forty-six, I am gripped by the desire to have the latest Tina Turner album — I mean CD. I leave the health club where I have just spent two desperate hours trying to stay fit without any visible sign of success, and I drive to Newbury Comics, the whole time thinking just how embarrassing it is for an old lady like me to walk into a store that sells necklaces that are really dog collars with metal studs. And as accouterments bone-shaped spikes to pierce the tongue, the nose, the eyebrows, whatever your pleasure. My own tongue aches at the sight, never mind the deed. But this is how life works. Suddenly, I’ve got to have it. The al — CD. The one when Tina sings: “I don’t really wanna fight no more. There’s too much talkin’, babe. Let’s sleep on it tonight, I don’t really wanna fight, no more. This is time for letting go.” The album when Tina sings at forty-six: “it’s time for letting go.”

Is it? Letting go of what?

Look. There is no reason why I can’t shop at any store I want to. The red-haired, black-clothed cashier can look down his/her long nose and think I’m buying for my kids, anyhow.

But do they sell Tina Turner? Not bloody likely. But if not them, who? Sam Goody’s? Strawberries? Coconuts? What happened to the shop sandwiched in between Miller’s Ice Cream and The Nook Book Shop run by the Berman brothers, the younger one, Ned who gave me my first job and then yelled at me when I brought back onions on his Miller’s burger?

When I drive up to Newbury Comics, I see a balding man, with that telltale bulge hanging over his belt — must be my age! — walk into the store. What’s he doing here? Where’s his self-respect? Surely, he’s not after Tina Turner. Okay, I think, first, just ask if they sell Tina Turner. If they don’t even carry her, there’s no point walking around the store, gawking at the latest drug paraphernalia and sadomasochistic devices. But on second thought, maybe I should try to look like I know what I’m doing and not ask for any of their help. Why should I give them a chance to ask each other: “Hey, what’d the old bag want???”

After all, I own one other CD — the Bob Dylan collection my son bought me for my birthday when he went to the Bob Dylan-Van Morrison concert. Now, there’s a fact to bend your mind around. My son pays big dollars to go to a Bob Dylan-Van Morrison concert. He’s fifteen; that’s the same age I was when I went to a Bob Dylan concert which wasn’t hooked to a Van Morrison concert which is a good thing because I’ve never liked Van Morrison.

“You could go,” says his father.

“I don’t want to go,” I reply. His father never understands. I don’t want to go to the concert now. I want to understand what happened. How did we get to this now.

So, what happened? What happened is, it was alphabetical order, just like in the old days, when the recordings were slimmer and their package wider and taller, and in the old days, it was shiny black vinyl instead of shimmering, laser-etched plastic. So I find the A’s, B’s, C’s and pause to look at the Dylan CD’s, and then round the comer to the F’s, G’s and H’s. Do I recognize a single name or a single band? Yes, there’s the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane. I pick up a copy of the soundtrack for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and decide to buy it for my son, who just saw the movie, after he read the book.

My son is six feet tall, a good six inches taller than I am and he’s only fifteen, and he has curly blond hair, like his father and his uncle and his grandfathers on both sides of the family, not straight brown hair like his mother and his sister and his grandmothers on both sides of the family. And he especially likes the scene when the Samoan lawyer is in the tub and he takes a gun out and demands that Hunter Thompson throw the radio in the tub when the Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit bites its own head off. Instead Thompson throws a grapefruit at his head. No one dies. Maybe you had to be there. That’s often the case with the scenes that amuse my son the most.

But I was there, I want to shout. In the protest lines against the War. On the third floor of the parking garage smoking. Taking diet pills to fit into junior size nine navy blue pinstriped bell-bottoms. I saw Martin Luther King, Jr. speak at the Washington Monument. On T.V. Yes, but it was only hours after he spoke in real time.

So, it’s possible to request a death radio and have it turn into a grapefruit bouncing off your head.. I’ve got some insight into these moments. It’s all possible. Years later, you can still go up to the counter, and you can say, “I want to buy these alb-CD’s.” And they’ll ring them up, and then you gasp at the total and add it up in your head and say, damn, that’s right, I forgot there’s the tax.

And you pay. With your debit card. What’s a debit card, Dr. King? Bobby Kennedy? Janis Joplin? Jimi Hendrix? When Tina sings “Burn, Baby, Burn” in her disco number, she’s talking about burning with desire, not burning down the ghetto.

But the really important question, the question that really matters, the question that’s gotten me from Mrs. Harper and the Big Apple to Tina Turner, Newbury Comics and her latest CD “What’s Love Got to Do with It”, that question is: Do I remember how to dance?

I can’t play the CD in the car because I’ve only got a tape player. Maybe my son is right. I’m hopelessly out of date and behind the technological times. Maybe we really do need a CD player in the car.

At home, the first thing I do is close the curtains, because I don’t want to alarm my neighbors. For the same reason, I don’t turn up the volume too loud, although the workmen building the six MacMansions behind our house — you know, where the salamanders used to live in those vernal ponds? — their radio is so loud, I can barely hear Tina’s disco: “Burn, baby, burn. Just can’t stop!”

I used to dance just like this. Yes, Mrs. Harper, I used to do the Big Apple. Well, of course, we didn’t call it the Big Apple. It was what it was. It’s recorded there, in the body. Hard-wired. Buried deep. The movements expressing that ferocious energy of hope, that fierce desire to get into the future, to sear it, to mark it, to own it. And just as suddenly, it’s all in the past. And nobody has held onto a single thing. And Tina is sighing: “I could have been the queen. I knew the secret combination.”

Suddenly an absurd little voice pipes up: “Did you used to do the Bump? Did you used to do the Swim? Did you used to do the Monkey? Did you used to dance like this?” It’s my daughter. She’s twelve and she’s got no hips whatsoever, but long, slim legs and long straight hair, and long accusing fingers. Now, she’s got her hands in the air and she’s swinging them up and down and jerking like a mechanical doll. She poised; she’s ready. She wants to laugh at me when I do the Big Apple.

“Please, Mom. Show me. I want to see how you used to dance,” she pleads.

I’ve got to think fast. I need help. I tum to the latest movie and I remember: when Jim Carey invites the movie audience to step out of the Truman movie set and into their own lives, does he know what he’s asking?

No, I holler, don’t go. No, Truman, don’t give up the Truman Show. Outside the fabricated studio cocoon, where we all live, nothing makes sense. In real-time, the live random collision of molecules, there’s no big-breasted brunette waiting to make your future the one you should have had instead. Instead, there’s my long, tall daughter with her finger pointing straight at me with her singular demand: Do the Big Apple. Yet the memories of the Big Apple won’t bring the apple back for another bite. The hairdresser can promise to take care of the gray, but she can’t take care of the gray. She can’t stop the laughter. She can’t prevent the next cycle of laughter, the laughter we won’t be around to hear. The harbinger of that laughter is streaked with gray. And I want to scream at the hairdresser: “It’s just like the atom bomb, you can duck and cover, but you can’t hide!”

But I’m not that crazy and I know she wouldn’t know what I’m talking about.

So I’ve got to pause: would we behave differently if we understood — and believed — that we were next off the stage? Or would we go right on laughing and dancing? And asking our elders to dance so we can laugh?

“Mrs. Harper, will you show us the Big Apple?”

“C’mon, Mom. Pleeeze. Do the Frug. The Monkey. The Swim.”

“Okay, let’s go, Mrs. Harper.”

I’d like to see you just once.

“Let it all hang out, Mrs. Harper.”

It’s time for letting go.

“Please, Mrs. Harper. Let me see you do the Big Apple.”

Here we go.

Just close your eyes and let your backbone slip…