Losing The Sopranos
I've had enough of living through Season Seven.
Secret Service says I have Roid Rage.
I’ve got a nasty cough, and I’ve been prescribed steroids. As a result of taking them, I cough less but am now insane.
It’s been a rough week. I’ve become depressed.
But I place the blame firmly on the head of Tony Soprano.
What I want to write is less of an idea than clouds in the sky, swirling around, trying to gather for a storm. They can’t quite get it together. They drift apart just when I think they’re ready to collect.
It’s annoying, the way they block the sun, go away, then come back. I don’t know what to do.
Is it going to rain or not? Do I leave the sheets to dry on the line, or bring them in?
Indecision is terrible. I live in this nebulous state lately.
It’s time to watch another episode. I’m almost done with the whole business.
The very first show I ever binge-watched was The Sopranos.
I want to say it was a thousand years ago, but fifteen is more accurate. Someone gave us a box set on DVD for Christmas one year.
Now I ask you: isn’t watching DVDs a thousand years ago? It sure seems like it.
Secret Service and I started watching together. We do not stop.
Today it would be called binge-watching. But back then, binging was not a word associated with obsessively streaming episodes of a show, forgoing sleep and good sense because we simply must find out what happens next.
Secret Service has always had the kind of job where he must get up early, and unlike me, he’s very regular in his sleep habits. He goes to bed at 10:00 pm, and at 10:05 he’s out. It’s incredible.
I have put my head on the pillow and fallen asleep approximately three times out of over 21,000 nights. I’ll always stay up late rather than night thinking.
While we were watching The Sopranos one night, not only did he agree to watch another episode at ten; he did the same at eleven. As that one was winding down, I was sad, thinking,
We’re definitely stopping now. No way he’s going to stay up till 1:00 am to watch a TV show.
Around midnight, when the episode finished, he looked at me and said,
“Whaddya think? One more?”
Oh, joy. The Sopranos is a gateway drug, and he’s finally joining me on the dark side. He, too, will learn to stay up late.
The Sopranos is streaming on Max now. I am elated.
I start watching.
Something is wrong. It’s doing nothing for me. Worse, I begin to feel uneasy, dissatisfied.
The show becomes a slot machine. I keep hitting the button, playing another one, and nothing happens. I expect some money to come out, perhaps not a jackpot, but a good payday.
Nada. I feel worse and worse. I go to sleep, with the dialogue playing in the background. I’m not that worried about finding my exact place the next day, because I don’t care about these characters anymore.
I’ve punished myself all week with The Sopranos. It is the most depressing show I’ve ever seen. I hate it.
I can’t imagine why I loved it.
How can two people live in one body? There was me, not so many years ago, and me now. She loved it; I find it loathsome. What happened?
I have a terrible feeling this has something to do with losing poker, as well.
I used to be a good poker player. But I’ve lost my game, and to make matters worse, I no longer care. I just don’t want to play anymore. I can’t make it important.
Ten years ago, I would tell you there was no greater feeling on earth than to sit at a card table and beat a bunch of men at their own game. I’ve left casinos with a purse too small to hold all the money I’ve made off cards. One year, my husband’s late Aunt Natalie bought me a bigger pocketbook for Christmas to hold my winnings.
But lately, I sit at a table and feel nothing but boredom.
I have nothing to prove to these men anymore.
I don’t want to lose poker.
It’s a great skill to have. Playing cards is like being a pickpocket, only instead of getting jail time, you get applause.
Everyone wants to know how to play poker, but I can’t teach what I know. I don’t use game theory. I use intuition. I was born with something called card sense.
I am not the best player, the second-best player, or the thousandth-best player. But I was good enough to play and make money for several years. I had some incredible moments against some of the best players in the world. It was a lot of fun.
I don’t want it to go. I don’t want to lose my path into the underworld. I much prefer it to the regular one.
I’ve got a real problem, now. I no longer belong to that underworld, and I’ve never fit into the bright world, the world of the sun and nine-to-five and car leases and such.
Where do I go?
I get through Season Four and think I just can’t watch anymore.
It’s too terrible. The misogyny is despicable, the racism and racist speech horrendous, the homophobia deadly; battering and beating and gunshots to the head and chopping off heads and hands and digging up bones to grind up and throw in a lake…what did I ever see in this show?
It’s like watching people in hell. I live for the dark side, but this show makes darkness repulsive even to me.
I worked on the show once, in the early days. The scene was at a bar. I sat on one side, a background player, and the late James Gandolfini stood on the other, having a drink.
Between takes, he said to the prop guy standing behind the bar,
“Give me a shot of Hennessey.”
The prop guy laughed nervously. He’s not allowed to touch the real bottles, and he knows it. So does James Gandolfini. Them’s the rules.
“No really, give me a shot,” Gandolfini persisted.
The prop guy’s eyes are pleading with him. Gandolfini doesn’t blink. The poor prop guy reaches for the bottle of Hennessey and pours him a shot, hoping he won’t get fired.
Gandolfini throws it back and puts the empty glass down on the bar with a satisfying smack.
“Ah,” he says, entirely for my benefit. “Liquid acting.”
I wind up on the cutting room floor.
I force myself to watch Season Five.
There are two aspects of the show which still manage to capture my attention. The scenes with Dr. Melfi, his therapist, and Carmela, played by the genius Edie Falco.
Carmela tries so hard. Her nails are done, her hair is blown, her clothes are attractive even on Saturdays. She unloads the dishwasher again and again. She carries tray after tray of ziti to the table. She smiles and smiles. She holds Cliff Notes in one hand as she tries to keep her son AJ from flunking out of school.
She bangs her head against the wall of the patriarchy again and again, and is surprised every time she winds up bruised and bloodied by it.
She knows she’s made a deal with the devil. She likes to be comfortable more than she likes to be good.
Don’t we all? Carmela is all of us.
I start Season Six. It’s better. I wonder if it’s better because it’s better, or it’s better because the end is finally in sight.
I’m a slow learner, so it’s not until I am deep in Season Six when I figure it out.
I hate this show because for the last eight years, America has been making Season Seven:
The Sopranos: The Trump Years.
My poker game may be gone, but a sure bet is that Tony Soprano is a Trump voter. I can see him now, driving his huge SUV around, a big Trump bumper sticker on his back window. I can see him laughing because America is finally being run by a boss. A made guy has made it all the way to the Oval Office.
I talk about it in therapy, and my therapist points out Trump’s charged with racketeering in Georgia.
We are so damned dumb. We’re pretending we’ve never seen this show before.
The bright spot of my week is going to Urgent Care.
Like an angel of truth, the door opens, and my doctor comes in. She is a woman. She is young, Black, beautiful, and whippet thin.
She asks me questions and actively listens to my answers. She listens to my chest and tells me what she hears, and her concerns. She says what I dream of doctors saying,
“Well, you know your body better than I.”
Then she prescribes a course of action which makes perfect sense, given my history and recent bout with pneumonia. She prescribes antibiotics but tells me only to take them if the cough is still present after four days.
She trusts me with them. She understands how hard it would be to make another trip in to see her if I don’t recover, because she lives in the real world. She knows how tough it is to get to the doctor, to get the right help.
I could weep with relief. I dream of a nation run by women like her.
“You’re Cleveland Clinic material,” I told her. “What are you doing here?”
Isn’t that the question.
Tony Soprano is debating Joe Biden tomorrow night for the presidency.
I go to the library today with Secret Service.
I get three books. When I try to check them out, I learn that I’ve had a book out for too long and my card is frozen. I’m shocked, I had no idea I was a delinquent.
I look at Secret Service.
“Oh boy,” he says. “You better not make my card frozen, too.” He checks my books out for me, muttering I’d better return them on time.
“I’ve got two weeks to read them,” I say, “and you’re going to bust my balls before we’ve left the library? Don’t borrow trouble.”
He laughs at “don’t borrow trouble.”
We leave the icy air conditioning and are in the hot parking lot. All of a sudden, I’m a kid again, on a summer day at the library.
It’s the 1970s, when there are only three channels and you have to get up to change them. There’s no internet, no cell phones, no streaming.
The feeling of fresh books under my arm, and no school, and reading whatever I want for as long as I want every day. It’s summer, and I have books to read. I am floating in pure happiness.
I am determined to become a reader again. This Netflix habit is killing my brain.
Only three episodes to go. Then I’m done.
Comparing Trump to a mob boss is an insult to capo di tutti capi.
My favorite childhood memory. Willard library and the books. We had a tree I could climb up in and just read.