13 Is the New 18 (5 page)

I wasn't even sure what The Ivy was. I mean, it sounded vaguely familiar, but why, I didn't know. Then Taz's weekly issue of
Us
magazine arrived. I leafed through it, as I always do, hoping to feel superior when the Fashion Police picked on an outfit that I, too, found hideous on Mary- Kate Olsen. I also enjoyed testing my own judgment against the “Who wore it better?” survey where two celeb chicks wearing the same designer gown are judged by a hundred people surveyed on the
street. (It was always so reassuring to see that the girl with the most cleavage didn't always win the day.)

Then a photo of Julia Roberts caught my eye. The caption said she was eating lunch at The Ivy with her agent! In the following weeks, I noticed that every single issue included a picture of someone famous eating at The Ivy. How did my not- quite- thirteen- year- old son from Brooklyn end up with a yen for a restaurant frequented by Hollywood power brokers? The photos in
Us
were the missing link.

But I am a Big Nobody. How was I going to get a reservation there? How would I ever persuade Elon that we could afford to eat at a place where Julia Roberts was a regular?

Well, it turned out it wasn't that hard. Seriously I've had more trouble ordering pizza deliveries back home than I did getting a table at The Ivy. I just called the place up and reserved a table for four, no problem. (I considered using a phony name like Mrs. T. Cruise, but didn't.)

In the end, we didn't see any celebrities there, just a lot of other tourists like us, taking photos of their pancakes and looking around just in case a famous person happened to skateboard by. (None did.)

But they did treat us so well that we felt like celebrities, and we were even joined at our table by a producer. Well, truth be told, it was only my cousin Ben, who's worked on a couple of movies and, like a lotta folks out there, has some deals in the works. Still, it was cool to be
at a table with someone making cell phone calls to confirm the pitch meeting scheduled for the next day.

And although it was the most expensive brunch I've ever had, it still came to under $200 for the five of us. A small price to pay to achieve nirvana for a twelve- year-old. His heavenly mode continued after The Ivy as we spent the rest of the day with Ben, hanging out at The Grove with beautiful people in sunglasses sipping lattes and window- shopping on Melrose. It felt like some glamorous photo shoot because everyone was so trendy looking, except for us— four schlubby people from Brooklyn, including one adolescent with a beatific look on his face.

Disney was supposed to be our last stop in California, but Elon decided to make a hundred- mile detour to spend thirty minutes at Joshua Tree National Park. Was it worth it? I'll let you guess. We made a similar detour at Elon's behest to see the giant meteor crater in Arizona and the Petrified Forest, which Elon had visited as a child on a road trip with his parents. Isn't it sad how we have to revisit our childhood traumas in order to heal them? Taz thought the Petrified Forest was even less exciting than Sequoia. There weren't even any bears.

But as we took our daily four- hour drive to wherever, I realized I was getting used to the Road Trip Life. It was actually kinda fun. We played Geography, took pictures out the window, and I started to relax about the children's insistence on eating cheddar cheese potato chips for breakfast.

I gave myself foot massages with lotion purloined from hotel bathrooms, and I sang softly to myself, lyrics from the seventies that had popped into my head after an absence of thirty years. “Been to the desert on a horse with no name,” I intoned, followed by, “Standin’ on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.”

One of the biggest changes from the time your kids are little to the time they become adolescents is that they can't bear to hear you sing. I don't have a bad voice— I really don't. And when Taz was little, I sang all the time. I had entire books of children's songs and folk songs that we used to spend hours looking through, singing all the songs. I played them on guitar and on the piano. I taught him to sing harmony to Cat Stevens's “Wild World,” and he knew all the words to “Joe Hill” by the time he was five.

But there is nothing more horrifying to a proto-teenager than to have to hear his mother sing. It must be some hormonal aversion, perhaps because it is a reminder that once he was a tiny little boy in diapers, sitting on my knee, looking at me with big eyes, thinking I was the most marvelous, magical being in all the universe because I could sing twenty- five verses of “Old MacDonald,” with ever- more wondrous animals in every stanza.

Perhaps my effort to channel Don Henley in the car as we drove down Route
66
past the very Winslow, Arizona, corner mentioned in “Take It Easy” was too strong a reminder to my son that the woman whose voice now
repelled him like nails on a blackboard not so long ago was lulling him to sleep. Whatever it was, he couldn't stand it.

“SHUT UP!” he screamed as I got to the part about “a flatbed Ford, slowin’ down to take a look at me.”

“What? What is it? What's the matter?”

“Stop singing,” he said. “I don't want to hear you singing!”

I suppose I should have been insulted, but his tone of voice was— although he is male— positively premenstrual. It was pretty clear that this was not about me, or the song, or my voice. It was about him, and his mood, and his age.

Fortunately, I had bought a small cardboard box of wine at the last 7- Eleven we stopped at. I took it out of the bag, stuck a straw in it, and started sipping. So what if I hadn't had lunch yet? I was on vacation. Time to live a little.

Besides, I needed to fortify myself for the day ahead. Our next stop was the Grand Canyon.

We arrived in late afternoon and jostled with hundreds of Japanese tourists for the best view. But guess what? The view is, um, pretty much the same no matter where you stand. The kids were underwhelmed.

“It's just a big hole in the ground,” Taz complained.

“What?” I said. “You total ingrate! Your father planned this trip for months and we drove thousands of miles across the desert to get here! The least you could do is pretend to be impressed.”

“I just didn't think it would be so boring.”

“Well, don't tell your father. He might throw himself over the edge.”

But Elon was in his own little world by then. In his glory, in fact. Breathing in the deep, clear canyon air. Grinning from ear to ear as he strode around the rim, pointing out the variegated rock and the little ribbon of river at the bottom.

“Isn't it great to be on vacation with our family, seeing things like this?” he said to no one in particular. “Why, I remember visiting the Grand Canyon with my parents when I was a boy! And it's just as glorious now as it was then!”

“When's dinner?” asked Taz. “I'm hungry.”

We had a good meal at one of the park lodges, then turned in early. Elon was planning to wake us for a sunrise hike.

“Won't it be great to see that sun come up over the canyon?” he said just before we fell asleep. “I bet it will be beautiful!”

We were all still sleeping when the alarm went off, piercing the darkness of the night.

It was 5 a.m. but it felt like 2.

“Rise and shine, everybody!” Elon called out with glee. “Time for our sunrise hike!”

I dragged myself out of bed, struggled into my clothes, and attempted to wake my children.

“Why are you waking me up when it's still dark outside?” Taz whined. “I'm trying to sleep!”

At least he eventually got up. Sport simply could not be roused. I finally pulled his pants on him while he was still sleeping and tied his shoes for him, then slung him over my shoulder and carried him out of the hotel. The jostling woke him. It was starting to get a little bit light. At least I didn't have to feel bad that I hadn't brought a miner's headlamp to light my way.

“Are we going home?” Sport asked dreamily.

“No,” I said. “We're just going to relive another of Daddy's childhood traumas.”

Sport nodded sweetly and shook himself awake, then gamely climbed down out of my arms to walk on his own. Elon led the way with me and Sport in the middle, then Taz dragging slowly behind.

“Hurry up,” Elon kept shouting back, the word
up
softly echoing off the canyon walls. “We don't want to miss the sunrise!”

We started climbing down the Bright Angel Trail. It kept getting lighter and lighter out, but, strangely, no matter which direction we looked, the promised sunrise never materialized. There weren't any colored clouds low in the sky, either. Finally, after we'd been walking for forty- five minutes, we realized the day had dawned without our witnessing the promised celestial phenomenon.

Then it hit me.

“Elon,” I said. “I don't know how to break this to you, but you can't see the sunrise from inside the Grand Canyon.”

He looked at me and I could see the logic building in his brain.

The sunrise can only be seen on the horizon.

There is no horizon when you've hiked down the trail into the canyon.

By the time the sun is high enough in the sky to be seen over the top of the canyon walls, it's well into the morning.

There might have been a beautiful sunrise that day but we would have had to be somewhere else to see it.

“Oh,” he said sadly. “I guess you're right.”

“Isn't there going to be a sunrise?” asked Sport. “When are we going to see it?”

Taz actually thought this was pretty funny. He started snickering.

“There is no sunrise!” he said to his brother gleefully. “Mom and Dad are so stupid, they thought we could see the sunrise from inside the Grand Canyon, but that's impossible!”

Just then a caravan of donkeys carrying riders crossed our path. We flattened ourselves against the side of the canyon to let them by. The tourists riding them were smiling. They looked happy and rested. They'd gotten a lot more sleep than we did, and they didn't have to walk down like we did.

And now the worst part: We had to walk back up, making sure all the while that we didn't step in the steaming piles of donkey poop along the trail. We finally
made it back, went and got some breakfast, and packed up our hotel room. The kids were so tired they could barely keep their heads up. I forced them to pose on a little bench with the canyon in the background, but the looks on their faces in that photo said it all: “I'm exhausted, and I hate you.”

They then collapsed in the car. On the way out of the park, as we followed the road around the canyon rim, Elon kept pulling over at one scenic lookout after another.

“Come on, guys! Get out and take a look! It's spectacular!” he enthused at every stop. To tell the truth, I was kind of excited. I liked taking pictures of all the different views. But the children refused to leave the van.

“I'm not getting up until we reach the next hotel,” Taz said.

Eventually, after a number of hours, or days, I can't remember which (and besides, time was starting to flow into some endless psychedelic continuum out there in the desert), we ended up in Utah.

Bryce Canyon, Utah, to be precise, which is known for having one of the darkest night skies in the Lower Forty- eight. We were going to go stargazing in the park that night, as soon as it got dark. I got some take- out food from the restaurant at the hotel and brought it back to the room, and we chowed down. The sun would soon be gone, and then we'd head out for a look at the heavens.

I was really looking forward to this. What a great family outing, especially for two city boys like mine, to get to see the stars in all their awe- inspiring glory. I was sure it would be a wonderful memory for all of us.

“I'm not going.”

Who said that? Did I hear right?

It was Taz.

We'd driven twenty- five hundred miles to this godforsaken place to see the freaking Big Dipper and God knows what else up there in the goddamn night sky and he has the nerve to tell us that he's not going stargazing?

“What?” Elon said. He had that crazed look on his face, the same one he gets when Taz's cell phone bill arrives, a cross between incredulity, as in “I cannot believe this is happening!” and fury, as in “I'm going to kill someone!”

“I'm not going,” Taz said flatly. “I don't want to go stargazing.”

“Why?” I said. Or maybe even screamed.

“I already know what the stars look like. I saw them last summer up in Maine.”

Well, that was true. On our little pond up in Maine, there are no nearby lights, and the night sky is pretty darn dark. In fact, sometimes it's so dark out there that I get totally spooked and run around locking all the doors and windows, checking the phone for a dial tone. (Hey, there's a reason Stephen King sets all his stories in Maine, and I don't want to be the inspiration for his next book.)

“But it's not like there's anything else to do here,” I said, trying to be reasonable. “You might as well just get
in the car and come with us. What are you going to do here by yourself?”

“I'm watching the MTV Video Music Awards,” he said calmly and with determination, reaching for the remote. “I already called the front desk and I know what station they're on, and they start at eight p.m., right when you're going to the park. I don't want to miss them. They're in Miami, and P. Diddy's hosting.”

As he spoke, he picked up the remote, found the channel, and put the show on. The preshow had started, with footage of all the stars arriving by yacht or limo, depending on their preference.

“Taz isn't coming with us?” asked Sport sadly.

“He can't just stay here!” Elon said to me angrily. “You let him get away with murder!”

“You can say no,” I said. “I didn't say it was OK.”

“Yeah, but you didn't say it
wasn't
OK.”

“Oh sure, blame me!” I said.

“Well, why do I always have to be the bad guy? Why can't you say no sometimes?”

I considered this for a moment, but quickly realized why.

“Truthfully,” I said, “I just don't care that much. It's stargazing in Utah. It's not the SATs.”

Besides, after the early morning hike at the Grand Canyon didn't exactly work out, I was starting to wonder if maybe Taz had a sixth sense about whether these things were all they were cracked up to be.