You wake up and after a frantic half minute you realize that you don’t have a Spanish test, or your apartment floor hasn’t been stolen, or the dog belonging to the people upstairs isn’t taking you to court. Anxiety dreams can be like that: their imprint can create a brief interval where the facts have to sort themselves out and then the waking world is ready to get going. I went through something like this, but it was on a bigger scale and it wasn’t scary. As noted elsewhere I just spent two weeks in a coma. I woke with several beliefs; these were detailed but benign, not to say pointless. The beliefs would hang about for days or even a week; in some cases I went along assuming a belief was true and then one day, when it happened to cross my mind, I reflected that probably it wasn’t. In the meantime I inhabited a world set at a distinct but unexciting angle from the world as it is.
Here, in order of realization, is what I discovered post-coma:
My brother, at 13, didn’t catch a ball one-handed while sitting by himself in the stands at Shea. Further, he wasn’t photographed by The New York Times and wasn’t there all by himself while my father and I were at the zoo or something. Above all the ball in question wasn’t a basketball, an idea that on examination makes no sense. After I woke up there was no point to saying, “Hey, one-handed catch,” and no reason for him not to reply as he did, which was to pause and then say, “Yeah. Uh huh.” Further, the photo of him in the stands at Shea didn’t double as the top of a brief but steep road in my hometown that leads from some nice houses down to the Hudson.
There is no sitcom, made now but set in the era of Afros and mustaches, about a pro ballplayer who retires in his 30s and teaches high school. The sitcom hasn’t received appreciative reviews for its sharp writing and its feeling for black American life, and its trademark isn’t the liberal use of bleeps, including when the hero speaks with his class. He isn’t a cut-up and rebel who sometimes sits among the students and talks directly at the camera (again with bleeps). There’s no marketing arrangement with Coca-Cola; there’s no frisky, deftly written episode where the no-nonsense wife implies that she wants cunnilingus and the hero realizes that’s fine by him. At no point during the theme song is there a spoken interlude where a sports announcer pipes up, “Cotton’s really making things happen out there.” Further, I can’t set aside time to watch the show on the hospital television—the hospital has no television and the show doesn’t exist.
Paul Reiser didn’t come out of the closet. In the mid-1990s he didn’t appear on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update to deliver a puckish talk on what it was like to play characters who were attracted to people (women) he couldn’t possibly be attracted to. There was no droll and quietly effective introduction of the public to the idea that an affable favorite of theirs belonged to a different sexual walk of life. In fact, when I thought about it, the last time I’d seen Reiser was in the film Funny People, where he’d been very funny about supposedly having agoraphobia and performing only for the wife and kids. (“Not good stuff. A lot of ‘Hi, where you from.’”)
There’s no short story, a disturbing classic of American realism, about a man who moved to my hometown during the pre-car era to be a writer but then settled into a tepid existence as a milkman, driving a milk cart and nag between my town and the one down the road, back and forth, as the years passed and he became a bent relic wondered at by children and ignored by adults. The New Yorker didn’t publish this story early in the magazine’s existence, and I don’t have to get out my tablet and search for the story in the New Yorker archives. I would’ve done so as part of a resolution to better understand literature and its ties to the dull harshness of life, but I figure all of that has been called off.
30 Rock doesn’t have an episode where Jack sings a song about how he and two other GM honchos—Devin and the Rip Torn character, I guess—are reincarnated as Chinese ducks, with the dual implications that this shows their closeness as fellow executives but also that one of them will remain a duck (Devin, I’m thinking) while the other two somehow go back to being men and eat him in a restaurant. No cold-blooded raffishness is involved, no skepticism of capitalist life must be highlighted to reassure tender acquaintances. Eventually I’ll forget the whole thing and that will be good.
Analysis. Five items, and three have to do with television. This shows a, shall we say, uneventfulness about my interior life. I also have to cover myself regarding the black sitcom. It falls at a J.K. Rowling level of well meant but clumsy stereotyping: not hostile but condescending, with the minority assigned to a narrow and very familiar niche. There’s the hero being named Cotton, there’s his being an ex-athlete, there’s the cursing and sassiness, and there’s the outspoken black woman whose needs must be serviced. The writers would have to work in a scene where she was reading a good book.
Paul Reiser isn’t gay, not even in a relaxed, guy-next-door sort of way. I don’t know why I thought he was. I guess I liked the combination, the old shoe who’s in touch with an unexpected side of human nature. But there’s more. In Diner, Modell struck me as someone who had little to do with the girl frenzy shared by the others. When everyone else is throbbing and vibrating over Carol Heathrow (“She’s death”), Modell goes in for a moment of quiet and disenchanted reflection (“Not a smart girl. You ever talk to her?”). When everyone else is knotted up over a wife, a fiancée, a high school girl, a strong-minded woman friend, or the bets he placed regarding Carol Heathrow and contact with his pecker, Modell sails free and to one side of the agitation. At the start of the movie, he says “Hello, girls” to a couple of kids and that’s it. He asks Eddie about making out to Sinatra versus making out to Mathis, but does say he say with whom? Or maybe I’m sweet on him and still learning about myself.
The short story really surprised me by not existing. At the time I felt sure I knew its title and author, but it never occurred to me to pin them down. The story figured in my head as a forbidding cultural landmark, the kind of work that bookish people all know about but perhaps stay away from. Now, late in life, I looked forward to reading it, though perhaps with some apprehension. I figured it would be a challenge to whatever maturity and emotional wisdom I’ve acquired. Of course these may not be much; you can ask Cotton.
I don’t know what to say about my brother. Dad took my brother to a lot of ballgames, it was their thing. He took me to the zoo once.