the boomer and the boomerang

Once he’d graduated from Georgetown with a degree in finance, Hayes was offered a six-figure salary in New York City at one of the big banks. I was amazed. In 1978, when I graduated from Brown with a degree in Russian history, I could hardly bring down four figures at the 7-Eleven.

Off he went to Manhattan, but it was no Summer of Love for him there. His girlfriend, the beauteous Queen of Ecuador (she was from an important South American family and looked like Penelope Cruz), dumped him two days after he got there. Meanwhile, the six-week training program at the bank was mind-numbingly dull. And while he had not liked New York when he’d lived there as an intern during the summer of his junior year, this time, he really hated it. Just making his way from his apartment to the subway in the sweaty morning rush-hour crowd was almost more than he could take.

My unflappable son began having what looked like a mini nervous breakdown. There were daily phone calls, there was crying, both unprecedented enough to warrant an impromptu visit. I offered names of therapists, prescriptions for Xanax and Zoloft, a $16 bowl of New York guacamole, and a pitcher of margaritas—I would have tried anything. I knew that Hayes was at an age where some young men develop schizophrenia, bipolarity, or a major depressive disorder. I have a cousin, now sixty, who has been institutionalized on and off since he graduated from Oberlin. So, actually, I was scared to death.

Not counting the death of his father when he was six, Hayes had had a pretty smooth ride to this point. In fact, a beleaguered, trouble-magnet high school friend of his had once joked that the entire Southern School District faculty and administration woke up each morning, scratching their heads and asking themselves, “What can I do for Hayes Winik today?” But now the proud HMS Hayes had sailed into the shallows.

One late summer night before Vince went back to college in New Orleans, he barged into my bedroom at 3:00 a.m., waving his cell phone. “You talk to him,” he said. “He’s a pussy!” Having grown up in the shadow of Mr. Perfect / Ivan the Terrible, he had no idea how to deal with this weepy, crumbling incarnation of his lifelong idol and oppressor.

The next week, Hayes took a leave from the bank, came home to Baltimore, and got not one but two jobs downtown. Apparently people were still wondering what they could do for Hayes Winik. He sublet his room in the Manhattan apartment we had just found, gave notice at work, stuffed his stuff back into my little Yaris, and had taken over my guest room by Labor Day.

I believe it’s supposed to be a bad thing when your children end up back in the house after college, a sign of hard economic times and indulgent child-rearing practices. Well, maybe older couples who have just finished saving for their long-postponed second honeymoon feel this way. Not me. While I was worried about Hayes’s well-being, my nest was far from crowded, and there was no honeymoon activity in sight. Jane and I rejoiced at the return of her big brother.

As the leftovers in my fridge disappeared and my cabinets filled with giant urns of protein powder, as the pundits of ESPN SportsCenter returned to sing their lullaby to the sleeping boy under the afghan on the couch, my heart was glad. Perhaps everything would be fine.

I had not really lived with Hayes since he’d graduated from high school in 2006, and that was hardly an idyllic time. We were in a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania, my marriage to his stepfather was loudly and appallingly falling apart, and as any teenager would, Hayes judged me for the mess I had gotten myself into. He certainly wouldn’t make mistakes like that because he was a much more sensible person than his crazy mother. Just as I had once figured out who I wanted to be by trying to be nothing like my mother, he had formed his identity in opposition to mine. Here is the simple version:

My mother: Golfing, bridge-playing, stock-market-investing Yankees fan.

Me: Bohemian, tattooed, poetry-writing Deadhead.

My son: Golfing, high-school-football-playing, finance-majoring Cowboys fan.

If he looked down on me as an old hippie with weird friends, I had beefs about him as well. Most of them stemmed from what appeared to be his genuine belief that he could be in any number of places at once, and that all routine travel occurred at the speed of light. This is why, for example, he was in Atlantic City with my car when I landed at Baltimore/Washington International Airport, expecting him to pick me up. Ask his friends, ask his ex-girlfriend—we had all suffered. His charm usually got him out of any fixes he got himself into; as I mentioned earlier, even his therapist fell in love with him.

But post-breakup and breakdown, Hayes had apparently decided to be different. In addition to cutting most of the bullshit, he had mysteriously become a voracious reader, and was having me haul piles of nonfiction books and novels home from the library. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Teddy Roosevelt’s autobiography. Zeitoun. He even read Portnoy’s Complaint, my favorite novel. I had never seen such a thing.

More characteristically of young men in his age group, Hayes discovered the Paleolithic diet, which involved living the way the cavemen did, eating only the finest organic grass-fed beef and heirloom vegetables, and engaging in endless, mindless hours of physical exercise. Having finished unloading his wallet at Whole Foods, Paleolithic Man went to the gym, where he was known to dead-lift 400 pounds, after which he indulged in the protein shakes of the Iron Age. Paleolithic Man did not eat pasta, he did not drink lattes, and he was very suspicious of the ingredients his mother put in her supposedly carb-free casserole. Late in the Paleolithic era the discovery of vodka allowed these awesome, disease- and body-fat-free creatures to make vast advances in their ability to hunt and gather women.

I don’t know if it was the diet, the literature, or the healing dose of family living, but Hayes’s spirits were restored in a couple of months.