Robin

[mallorys_camera]

RTT’s ninth birthday yesterday. We’d planned a sleepover with his chosen posse from ISM but this week was an administrative holiday for the school, we didn’t have all the phone numbers we needed so we decided to reschedule the event for after science camp. This year’s best friend, Kodiak, showed up anyway and this morning the boys are thick as thieves together, playing Diablo which Robin scored with the fifty dollars his grandmother sent him for having a dead puppy.

Amusing scene at the Geek store where Robin scored the game: three teenage Chinese punks gathering round while Robin shares his strategy tips. When Robin was six or seven and still into arcade games, I used to leave him at the Gauntlet Legacy machine to do the ghost at Coney Island thing with my camera for fifteen minutes or so. And when I got back, it was always the funniest thing in the world – Robin playing some teenage punks, age differences subsumed by the fantasy world of Gothic magick gawk and stalk. Robin was always the best player.

I have this sense of Robin growing up between the cracks of my own untidy, disorganized life – surely parenting should be a more organized activity. I was too old when I had him, I feel too ambivalent about his father, his emotional makeup – he’s all extrovert, gregarious & charming all of the time – intimidates me. Airlift him down in the middle of nowhere and fifteen minutes later he’ll have an army of new best friends. He’s never had an unconfident moment in his life. It was always very easy to read and manipulate Max at that same age; it is difficult to manipulate Robin. I have to resort to the old parental cliches – "You’ll do it because I said so!"

People tell me he’s a lot like me at that age. Certainly the physical resemblance is strong – I had that same Alfred E. Neuman thing going with my mouth. I grew up to be a beauty and Robin is going to be a very handsome man. But I was a depressed, slinking kind of kid with an overdeveloped sense of emotional radar due to my mother’s borderline psychosis. I had none of Robin’s brightness.

Kodiak’s kind of an interesting kid too. Mother’s American, father’s a Brazilian martial artist of Germanic descent, stricken with some kind of mysterious terminal illness, a virus for which there is no cure which, of course, sounds a lot like AIDS. Kodiak speaks fluent Portugese, and is forever spouting the nine-year-old equivalent of SNL riffs.