My Dinner With Max

Night before last Mommy DiLucchio lavished The Big Luv on her Big Boy. Like all maternal devotion, mine has two components: (a) feeding and (b) nagging. We ate at the Palomar in Santa Cruz, a restaurant I associate with Susie Bright birthday parties and concomitant chatter of clitorises, lubes and Camille Paglia.

(Clitorae?)

Max and I didn't talk about any of those things.

Instead we talked about Stanford which – gasp – does not want to subsidize him indefinitely. He transferred from Deep Springs a year and a half ago; Stanford accepted 90 of his units there as transfer credits but deemed none of them worthy of going towards his major, Human Biology. Max did the freefall thing last year – to be expected. From high desert to academic office park: it's a big adjustment.

This fall he saddled himself with 20 units. Plus he's working, plus he's doing his slam poetry thing, plus he's doing what's amounting to an internship with a behavioral science shop there. Oh yeah – then there's his very active social life.

Twenty units is a lot. Max ended up dropping two of his classes.

He feels kind of ashamed of himself for that.

"You're like your dad," I say, shaking my head. "Sometimes you go out of your way to make things hard for yourself.

"Did your dad ever tell you about his PhD orals? No? Well, you know you get to pick your own orals committee. Most people pick professors who are reasonably well disposed towards them, towards their work. Not your dad though. No-o-o, Bill picked people who actively disliked him and he picked them on purpose! 'I want it to be a challenge!' he told me. Like it wasn't hard enough already."

"I don't see anything wrong with that," sniffed Max. "He wanted to make sure his research stood on its own merits."

"His research would have had to stand on its own merit in either event," I told Max. "It's just in one scenario you surround yourself with people who are rooting for you and in the other you surround yourself with people who are rooting for you to fuck up."

"I don't see anything wrong with it," Max repeated.

I sighed. "Look, Max – I'm not criticizing your dad. I just don't understand why anyone would go out of his way to make things hard when life is so hard already."

"You do it all the time!"

"You're right. And that's why I'm always telling you not to use me as a role model. I'm a cautionary tale – the road not to take!"

"Oh, you're not all that bad, Mom."

"Sure, I am."

Something about the way he smiles at me then almost makes me want to cry.

Over dinner we talk politics.

"So do you think the economy will get better?" Max asks.

I consider my taquitas thoughtfully. "No," I say. "I mean – it's a pyramid scheme. We're eleven trillion dollars in debt and that number is growing every day. I think it's significant that nobody batted an eyelash when Citibank wanted a 300 billion dollar bailout, but when the Big Three auto makers asked for the same amount, there was a lot of pissing and moaning and, 'We want to see your business plan.' Why didn't anyone ask to see Citibank's business plan?"

"Well. Because Citiplan's collapse is tied to the subprime mortgage thing, right?"

"No," I said. "Subprime mortgages was just the name of the latest bubble. See we're tied in somehow to this notion of a constantly expanding economy. Except we're pretty well maxed out in terms of actual frontiers so the only thing we can expand into is wildly speculative ideas about future value. That's bad for a lot of reasons – I mean obviously because there's a lot of uncertainty there. But also because if the thing in the bubble does prove to have worth in the future we've already sucked the value out of it. So it's back to bubble blowing.

"Unless this country gets its collective head around the notions of a sustainable economy, I'm afraid we're heading towards a complete collapse."

"Wanna go for a walk?" I ask when dinner was eaten.

I couldn't remember ever having seen Pacific Avenue quite so deserted before. Store windows glittered like mercantile snow domes, asking, recession, what recession? A dark haired woman sang haltingly for three friends, a tune with sliding notes and sudden desperate plunges into minor keys. It sounded Indian, or maybe she looked Indian; in my mind it was a lament for something that was gone and never coming back, though I suppose it could have been just as easily a neo-Dravidian version of Krishna the Bule-Nosed Cowherd. Across the street a silver-haired gentleman was playing classical guitar. He was standing near one of those wrought iron kiosks that always remind me of the pissoirs in Paris.

What did Max and I talk about? Oh, friends and dancing. The changes that living in the digital age have wrought in the ways we mortals entertain ourselves. A short story I wanted to write – its premise was a new breed of vampires that thrived not on blood but on a certain type of attention. See, the camera really does steal the soul and after you have your picture taken a certain number of times – a thousand? ten thousand? – you have no soul anymore, all that remains is a hunger for that image of yourself that you see dancing in somebody else's eyes when he looks at you.

Somewhere along the way I forgot I was talking to Max. All I remembered was that I was talking to someone I knew very well and loved very much, with whom I shared a strong karmic destiny. Next reincarnation you get to be the parent and I'll be the child, I wanted to tell that person.

But instead I kissed him on the cheek and said, "Are you eating enough? Are you getting enough sleep? Remembering to dental floss? Well then, goodnight."