At Home, Unexpectedly...

Weeping for your lost youth

I first read Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald when I was 21. I was living with my mom’s friend in Westchester, commuting into NYC every day to work for a couple of small theater companies over the summer. The friend lived in a big house with a lot of random books, and Tender is the Night was one of them. I’d been recommended to read Fitzgerald by one of the guys in the theater company who had been a senior when I was a freshman at Wesleyan.

“Ya gotta read Fitzgerald, man. It’s so sad, but really beautiful.”

I ended up reading it twice, as well as This Side of Paradise, and re-reading The Great Gatsby. But Tender is the Night stuck with me the most. Probably part of it was reading it during the day in that big empty house before I went into the city for work, and while the rest of the family was working or at their summer camps (they had three sons, all around 5-10 years younger than I was.) The luxury of the house coupled with the quiet solitude paired well with the descriptions of sad, sun-drenched vacations in Italy with Dr. Dick Diver and his traumatized wife Nicole.

The first segment of the book takes place when the Divers are in their mid to late thirties, and the last segment takes place when they’re nearly fifty. At 21, of course, those ages seemed basically the same to me, but one part in the last segment made me think differently. A side character, Abe, is murdered and when Dick finds out, he weeps not just for his friend but for ‘his lost youth’. How could youth include your late thirties? I wondered.

I don’t wonder that anymore. I’m in my mid-forties, and fifteen years ago might as well be another lifetime, not the least of which because of the number of people I’ve said good-bye to during that time.

Two years after that summer in Westchester and New York City, I moved to New York City full time, subletting in Harlem for a couple of months before moving in with a stage manager I knew in Park Slope, Brooklyn. That ended up lasting only a few months, though, because she liked taking in feral cats that would scare her domestic ones, causing them to hide in my and our third roommate’s rooms, and then shit in our beds. At the same time, however, when I left a pan to soak in the sink from the morning, I came home to approximately two dozen post its on my door about all it, plus a running list of other infractions. Before I had a real mattress, her friend had lent her an air mattress for me to use. I met the friend at a party a few months later, and she asked how it was.

“I hope it wasn’t terrible, it’s not that great of an air mattress!” she said, laughing.

I made a joke about sinking down in it when I went to bed and we both laughed.

But my roommate had scrawled on one of those post-its that she had felt ‘so mortified and embarrassed about your ingratitude towards my friend who lent you the air mattress!’

An air mattress, for crying out loud. Needless to say, this living situation didn’t last long either.

I moved in with this guy I met through some college friends. It was a three family owned by a very sweet if somewhat inattentive Yemeni family. I’d give my cash to the guy, and he was supposed to give the cash to the landlord. Which he usually did. Well, about half of the time he did it. Soon the landlord started banging on our door, looking for the guy, because he hadn’t actually given the money to them, and before I knew it, the guy split. I didn’t want to leave a cheap living situation, so I had to find roommates.

A young woman in a yellow shirt came to see one of the rooms. She and I talked for an hour, but in the end she decided a) the apartment was too messy and b) she wanted to live closer to her job on the Upper East Side. Still, she let me down easy by asking if I’d like to see a movie sometime. I waited a month to get back to her, but we saw the movie.

Reader: I married her.

But that’s not the point of this story.

The first person to move into one of the two vacant rooms was C, a close friend of my brother’s from college. He was dancing at a club to pay the bills while studying for the LSAT. For the third bedroom, I had to ask around still. I was in a play at the time, that rehearsed and performed in Jersey City. Most of the other actors had all gone to the same small college out west, and one of them knew a playwright, M, who was looking for a place to live. She took a look at the place, we all got a long, so she decided to live with C and me.

At the time I felt dreadfully broke and devastatingly far away from what I considered real artistic living in New York: I wasn’t getting paid to act, after all, so how could I consider myself a real actor? But looking back, I was really living a bohemian lifestyle. Sure, during the day I worked at a boring corporate-style non-profit, but at night I’d go to Jersey City to rehearse this weird little play, then at night go home to my brilliant and eccentric roommates.

One of my best friends at the time, R, was another actor in the Jersey City play. We’d often get drinks after rehearsals, and once the play closed, we produced another one together on the Lower East Side. I don’t know if he was my best friend back then, but he was definitely the friend I spent the most time with, outside of my roommates. When my first band sputtered out, R played drums for my new group for a year, until that one collapsed too. Again, at the time I felt like a total failure for having crashed out of two failed bands. Now, however, it feels like a dream.

The first band (that didn’t work out) had a bassist in it, K. Besides playing music, he liked two things in life: the New York Yankees and the Ramones. He could be pretty acerbic at times, but he was full of love. He and his wife had two diabetic cats and when my friend and her would go away for the weekend, they’d pay me a few bucks to stay in their fancy loft in Union Square and I’d administer the kitty-insulin to George and Martha (those were their names).

The last time I saw K was on Halloween 2019. We were both bringing our kids to a costume party in Prospect Park. It was awesome to be dads together in Brooklyn after those lean years of struggle on Rivington Street. I just assumed he and I would meet for beers soon after, and maybe his kid would babysit my daughter. But COVID happened, and we didn’t see anybody for a long time. And then a couple years later, the guitarist from our old band texted me, “I’m so sad about K!” I hadn’t heard anything about him, didn’t know what she meant, so I looked on Facebook. I found a post on his wife’s account saying that he had passed away from cancer.

The last time I saw R was when I was in film school some time around 2011-13. I’d often ask him to act in the class exercises I had to do. I even made a very short film that he starred in. He was such a fine, subtle and powerful actor, I could dream of a day when I would write and direct more scripts for him to perform. Soon after those class exercises, though, he had to move back to Tennessee to take care of his ill mother. Then one day, while I was traveling through Armenia with my two brothers and our dad, I got a Facebook message that said R had died of pneumonia in Tennessee.

I don’t remember the last time I saw my roommate C, but the last time we chatted online was in March of this year. He had seen The Brutalist and posted about it. I asked if he would recommend it. His reply:

That response encapsulated C so well. He could be grandiloquent and profane in the same sentence. On the one hand, C was a lawyer, but on the other hand his clients were nearly all poor immigrants whose education level paled in comparison to his Ivy League degrees. So on the one hand he would make ribald jokes, suited for drag shows and gay bars, but he could also talk your ear off about capitalism and the politics of gender. My brother, C, and another friend of theirs composed this triumvirate of brilliant gay men and I always liked hanging out with them, as the straight male wallflower.

It was my brother who told me C had died in his apartment on the Lower East Side. I imagined an obituary: ‘Died unexpectedly, at home.’ I’d seen that so many times, and somehow it’s more wrenching than actually saying what really happened. My brother was heartbroken by losing his friend, and I hated that I couldn’t hug him and comfort him.

C, R and K all died past the age of forty. I could imagine a 21 year old today, like me, reading Tender is the Night at 21, thinking, “Eh, that’s not very young to die,” but I will tell them that yes, it is. And yet, like Dick Diver, when these three people passed, something young in me was lost with them. None of these three people were my closest life confidant or friend back then. But for a good ten years after I moved to New York, there wasn’t a lot of time that I spent away from them. They were my youth, really. And so, just Dick Diver cried for his friend and his lost youth, that’s what I mourn now, too.