Date Night

 

In my 9th and 10th grades, I was the last sibling still living at home. My older brother and two sisters had flown the coop, so I was a single child. That was tough duty. I got a reprieve every Friday night though when Mom and dad went out on their “date night” into NYC.  The routine was always the same. Dinner at Pierre Au Tunnel in the theatre district, maybe a show afterward. My routine was set as well. Mom bought me the guilt dinner of my choice, thinking that I was somehow deprived by not being able to go along with them. Poor Hugh, left at home alone. Of course, I was elated, like Snoopy dancing on top of his doghouse, feet a blur.

Friday nights were my time to wallow in late night TV accompanied by my favorite foods. Like a death row inmate ordering his last meal, I got to choose exactly what the meal would be. It was always the same: Stouffer's Lobster Newburg, Stouffer's Spinach Soufflé, Stouffer's Apple Crisp, and a Coke in a glass over ice.

All of those things were normally off limits to me. I ate what mom cooked, wasn’t allowed to watch TV on school nights (too busy “studying” in my room…right) and in our house, only dad was allowed to drink Cokes. He had his stash, which I was forbidden to touch or even acknowledge. Mom didn’t approve of Coke, or junk food in general, but food rules didn’t apply to dad. Apparently, cigarette rules didn’t either, because dad smoked Kents for breakfast and dinner, washed down with Cokes. Smoked all day at his law office in Manhattan too, his nicotine-stained fingers lighting Kents, end to end.

I was always a foodie though, so I especially I loved my date night feasts. Not surprisingly perhaps, but by my junior year things had changed quite a bit for me. By that time, dinner centered more around rolling joints and making myself throw up out of my bedroom window, splashing nightmarish crime scene images onto the new snow below.  Booze that an older friend bought in Staten Island and sold to me for twice the price, did the trick every time.

And, of course, when mom and dad went out, I never, ever, stayed home.

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These days, I think wistfully of that brown paneled TV room, and those Lobster Newburg dinners, now long extinct.

My folks left the building years ago, Pierre died in 1984, and I don’t ever blow chunks out of my bedroom window, or anywhere else for that matter.

But when we go out to dinner? I'll have a Coke in a glass over ice, because I can.