Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) by Anna Quindlen Page A
Authors: Anna Quindlen
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the Mother’s Day that is not a duty but a real holiday, is about the perfect mother. It is about the mother before she becomes the human being, when she is still the center of our universe, when we are very young.
They are not long, the days of construction paper and gilded rigatoni. That’s why we save those things so relentlessly, why the sisterhood of motherhood, those of us who can instantly make friends with a stranger by discussing colic and orthodonture, have as our coat of arms a sheet of small handprints executed in finger paint.
Each day we move a little closer to the sidelines of their lives, which is where we belong, if we do our job right. Until the day comes when they have to find a florist fast at noon because they had totally forgotten it was anything more than the second Sunday in May. Hassle city.
The little ones do not forget. They cut and paste and sweat over palsied capital letters and things built of Popsicle sticks about which you must never say, “What is this?”
Just for a little while, they believe in the perfect mom—that is, you, whoever and wherever you happen to be. “Everything I am,” they might say, “I owe to my mother.” And they believe they wrote the sentence themselves, even if they have to give you the card a couple of days late. Over the phone you can say, “They don’t make breakfast the way you make it.” And they will believe it. And it will be true.
SUICIDE SOLUTION
September 20, 1990
It was two days before Christmas when Jay Vance blew off the bottom of his face with a shotgun still slippery with his best friend’s blood. He went second. Ray Belknap went first. Ray died and Jay lived, and people said that when you looked at Jay’s face afterward it was hard to tell which of them got the worst of the deal. “He just had no luck,” Ray’s mother would later say of her son to a writer from
Rolling Stone
, which was a considerable understatement.
Jay and Ray are both dead now. They might be only two of an endless number of American teenagers in concert T-shirts who drop out of school and live from album to album and beer to beer, except for two things. The first was that they decided to kill themselves as 1985 drew to a close.
The second is that their parents decided to blame it on rock ‘n’ roll.
When it was first filed in Nevada, the lawsuit brought by the families of Jay Vance and Ray Belknap against the members ofthe English band Judas Priest and their record company was said to be heavy metal on trial. I would love to convict heavy metal of almost anything—I would rather be locked in a room with one hundred accordion players than listen to Metallica—but music has little to do with this litigation. It is a sad attempt by grieving grown-ups to say, in a public forum, what their boys had been saying privately for years: “Someone’s to blame for my failures, but it can’t be me.”
The product liability suit, which sought $6.2 million in damages, contended that the boys were “mesmerized” by subliminal suicide messages on a Judas Priest album. The most famous subliminal before this case came to trial was the section of a Beatles song that fans believed hinted at the death of Paul McCartney. The enormous interest that surrounded this seems terribly silly now, when Paul McCartney, far from being dead, has become the oldest living cute boy in the world.
There is nothing silly about the Judas Priest case—only something infinitely sad. Ray Belknap was eighteen. His parents split up before he was born. His mother has been married four times. Her last husband beat Ray with a belt, and, according to police, once threatened her with a gun while Ray watched. Like Jay Vance, Ray had a police record and had quit high school after two years. Like Jay, he liked guns and beer and used marijuana, hallucinogens, and cocaine.
Jay Vance, who died three years after the suicide attempt, his face a reconstructed Halloween mask, had a comparable coming of age.
They are not long, the days of construction paper and gilded rigatoni. That’s why we save those things so relentlessly, why the sisterhood of motherhood, those of us who can instantly make friends with a stranger by discussing colic and orthodonture, have as our coat of arms a sheet of small handprints executed in finger paint.
Each day we move a little closer to the sidelines of their lives, which is where we belong, if we do our job right. Until the day comes when they have to find a florist fast at noon because they had totally forgotten it was anything more than the second Sunday in May. Hassle city.
The little ones do not forget. They cut and paste and sweat over palsied capital letters and things built of Popsicle sticks about which you must never say, “What is this?”
Just for a little while, they believe in the perfect mom—that is, you, whoever and wherever you happen to be. “Everything I am,” they might say, “I owe to my mother.” And they believe they wrote the sentence themselves, even if they have to give you the card a couple of days late. Over the phone you can say, “They don’t make breakfast the way you make it.” And they will believe it. And it will be true.
SUICIDE SOLUTION
September 20, 1990
It was two days before Christmas when Jay Vance blew off the bottom of his face with a shotgun still slippery with his best friend’s blood. He went second. Ray Belknap went first. Ray died and Jay lived, and people said that when you looked at Jay’s face afterward it was hard to tell which of them got the worst of the deal. “He just had no luck,” Ray’s mother would later say of her son to a writer from
Rolling Stone
, which was a considerable understatement.
Jay and Ray are both dead now. They might be only two of an endless number of American teenagers in concert T-shirts who drop out of school and live from album to album and beer to beer, except for two things. The first was that they decided to kill themselves as 1985 drew to a close.
The second is that their parents decided to blame it on rock ‘n’ roll.
When it was first filed in Nevada, the lawsuit brought by the families of Jay Vance and Ray Belknap against the members ofthe English band Judas Priest and their record company was said to be heavy metal on trial. I would love to convict heavy metal of almost anything—I would rather be locked in a room with one hundred accordion players than listen to Metallica—but music has little to do with this litigation. It is a sad attempt by grieving grown-ups to say, in a public forum, what their boys had been saying privately for years: “Someone’s to blame for my failures, but it can’t be me.”
The product liability suit, which sought $6.2 million in damages, contended that the boys were “mesmerized” by subliminal suicide messages on a Judas Priest album. The most famous subliminal before this case came to trial was the section of a Beatles song that fans believed hinted at the death of Paul McCartney. The enormous interest that surrounded this seems terribly silly now, when Paul McCartney, far from being dead, has become the oldest living cute boy in the world.
There is nothing silly about the Judas Priest case—only something infinitely sad. Ray Belknap was eighteen. His parents split up before he was born. His mother has been married four times. Her last husband beat Ray with a belt, and, according to police, once threatened her with a gun while Ray watched. Like Jay Vance, Ray had a police record and had quit high school after two years. Like Jay, he liked guns and beer and used marijuana, hallucinogens, and cocaine.
Jay Vance, who died three years after the suicide attempt, his face a reconstructed Halloween mask, had a comparable coming of age.
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