The First Words

Jan 23, 2024

*not all moms are created equal. just sayin’ – this is from somewhere’s in the very early 2000s, and is among the pieces I intend, knock wood, to get back to, one day or another…thanks for reading.

Day One.

Every time I start to write a story about myself, or what I imagine will be about myself, a day in the life if me, a memory, a hope, it ends up being about my mother. Such a cliché. She has been dead ten years; I am in my fifties and ran away in my teens to the other side of the continent yet still the color and weight of her life and presence informs my every waking moment, my dreams, and even my imaginings. I stopped writing for twenty years to avoid creating one more piece of her-ness in the world, one more representation of who she was to me and to many others whose lives she touched (they uniformly adored her, a fact that stuns me, still) in order to cease memorializing her or in a failed attempt to change their minds. After all, she must have been good, in some ways, to earn that adoration; I know she was, I just couldn’t, can’t feel it. I want her dead in every sense of the word but fear that would require my death as well, as her only child. There was another, an older brother, but his story is shorter still than hers, and sad. I cannot bear to tell it. I want to let go. I need to try and make a start and this will be that start, maybe. God knows I need a new start.

Day Two.

I have just created a new rule: do not read what was written the previous day as editing and judging, huge amounts of judging, will make day two impossible to achieve. Another rule: no set limit on how many words, high or low, to produce, just get to work getting them out. 

Here goes.

My father died last year and the pain I feel upon his passing is so great and grave, I am only now beginning to grapple with the enormity of the loss. Some of this is the actuality of having no living relative, no parent, no one at all related to me, making my death the end and somehow sooner or more immediate feeling – real – with his passing. If he, my father, is dead, my death is real, and closer; I will, I shall die. He and my mother divorced when I was in grade school and he moved east, away from LA, to, of all places (my mother’s words), upstate NY, where I joined him in my sixteenth year. He was a virtual stranger to me by then, but we became very close. Even now, writing this is hard as I am overcome with tears, which do not help but then, the job is to get something down, not make something pretty, perfect, or tearless. What story, though, am I trying to tell? What ghost (MOTHER) am I trying to lay to rest? (MOTHER) Hm. I wonder. Maybe I am trying to lay them both to rest, or simply give myself rest, my ghosts. They are that, aren’t they?

I think (I thought this last night in my bed) I just want to forgive her and most of all myself and have the life I want to live without this knot of guilt and anxiety and fear in me that is our legacy, hers and mine. All about my mother, indeed. Goddammit, why is this? Understanding why, trying to, has wasted more time and dollars than you can imagine; oh yes, the therapists I have enriched! And I want to be finished with her so that I might write about him, my dad, a man I loved. The much more opaque of the two in many respects, he was quiet whereas she talked about herself, her life, her choices, her pain, her triumphs, her losses – constantly, if superficially in many, many ways. Yet if I could capture him, the detailed funniness of him, the quirks of him, his voice and stare, even the musty dad smell of him (wool, soap, dog, cigarette smoke to start), then he would live on and I would be content. If contentment is possible.

Day Three.   

I had to stop because I was crying. I am a big baby. A new day dawns. Reader’s Digest Condensed version of my brother Stephen. He was three years older and my mother’s clear favorite, although still, to the day of her death, she was in denial about his being gay. He died in 1992 of AIDs and she was not involved with his care, as I was. As was his lover, who also died about a year later, as was my father – our father. I have to let go of this fact, that she distanced herself from him then, to protect herself I guess, whatever. She did the best she could, right? She was in LA, Pasadena, actually, being suburban and fabulous, teaching the finer arts of French cuisine (she claimed her people were Creole, they were not) to her many legions of students, some of them also, later stricken with the disease that killed my brother but that was different, they were different. Don’t ask me to explain it to you, because I can’t. I don’t think she ever said the word AIDs until the late 90s, before that it was just ‘that awful, horrid disease’. Maybe she didn’t have to take their deaths, their sicknesses, personally – or feel much more than sincere and polite, yet always, always, distant, regret? Maybe. 

She used to beat Stephen, and me, with a belt when we disobeyed her, most often though when she had had a little too much to drink, which was often and often, very often in fact. Her first little gourmet shop was hugely successful on the corner of _______ and ___________. You might remember it, if you passed through Pasadena in those years, the 70s. She got a lot of press; some said she looked like Liz Taylor, her petite curvy femininity and thick black hair swept back from a clear high white forehead, her well sculpted, red painted lips. She had flair, they said, for style, for life and definitely for food. She loved being photographed in those (to me) hideous jewel toned caftans she wore for special occasions, as every photo shoot was special, a celebration, with everything matching – the shoes, the earrings, the clunky, chunky bracelets. The business had helped her cope, she was quoted saying, with a tough divorce. It made for good copy in those days, the days of women’s lib (which wave was it?) and a sexual revolution she gave herself over to with more fervor than she would ever dare admit. Truth is I remember her best with her hair tied back and a white apron over a tee shirt of my brothers, his pants too, too long but good, she said, for a kitchen, where things were so often spilled, the excess covering her tennis shoes or open toed sandals. 

And here I meant to tell you all about my brother, not our sainted mama. He was born, 1956. He died, 1992. He was a great dancer and a wonderful graphic artist. He was my only sibling and I loved him. He weighed about 87 pounds at his death. My mother’s mother was still alive when he died (I can’t call her my grandmother, I so disliked the woman) and she said something to me at his wake about God’s forgiveness or something for what he had done, which was be gay, I assumed. I wanted to bite – yes, bite – her face, tear with my teeth at her nose and cheek, at that moment. I got rip roaring drunk instead, vomiting all the way down my mother’s driveway, into her favorite rose bushes, which made me scream with laughter at the time. This was her memorial for my brother, in California, not upstate NY, where he was known, and had friends, and where his ashes were scattered, out beyond my father’s barn, where a studio had been set up to allow him space and central New York’s best light to paint. But she invited me, my father too; I went alone to bear witness. 

What’s more curious is why I went at all? Why did I go to her ‘party’ for the son she had abandoned? Yet I know that I am above all things, perhaps, a rubber necker. I must see – I must witness – the wreckage, experience the worst things face to face, walk across the coals laid down by someone else – it’s some weird kind of bravery, and with this compulsion and pride in facing the ugly, I have hurt myself over and over and over again.    

My brother is dead and I loved him. That is all. My mother is dead, still, after remarrying for the third time (don’t ask), after publishing a cookbook dedicated to my brother, who is pictured there, with the further inscription, ‘1956-1992, whom I loved with all my heart’. Maybe she did. How much do we really know about anyone else? But then, how do you figure out a love that stays in California when the beloved in dying in New York? Of course I have always confused words with action, falling for an entire football team of bad men who simply talked a good line and got their hands on my inner thigh. A different type and style of action, I suppose.  

When I left her at 16, escaping to finish high school with my father in New York, my brother was already back on the east coast, studying art in Pittsburgh, living large. My mother had remarried a man I could not stand, and who could not – it seemed, stand me, although yes, he too liked my inner thighs, which convenient facts gave me the out I needed. I believe she was glad to see me go, though I’ll bet she pretend mourned to her girlfriends, glad to have more freedom, glad to return to the implausible fiction that she was not yet 35. Glad to have me away from my step-papa, and his dislike of and fascination with me, in my bell bottoms and tanks tops and cropped tees.  

Day Four.

My father died of a heart attack, lung failure – that whole COPD thing, after many years of taking unrepentant delight in smoking. He was on oxygen for the last 6 months, and refused to use it whenever it was needed, as the doctor suggested, rather waiting until he was bent over, and gasping for air. We made a bed for him downstairs in his house. We? I. I made a bed for him, moving an old three quarter bed from the guest bedroom upstairs, a piece at a time, sliding the mattress down the stairs to crash into the front door. He sat laughing, at the kitchen table, playing the game of pretending to give a shit while I was there by using his O2. He was the best man I ever knew, and while he lived many years past my brother’s death, and had a girlfriend or two he loved, and did the work he wanted to do – he was never quite the same. I do not have children, and I can’t wholly relate – although putting down the several pups I’ve had as an adult is something I don’t allow myself to think of, much, as the pain is as fresh today as it ever was. But, to lose a child. And they’d been good friends, my father and his son. They were two men who tried in their own way to love my complicated mother and, to love complicated me, two men who appreciated fine whiskey and modern architecture, John McEnroe, and a good steak, two men who had their share of challenges and enjoyed a good laugh more than anything. They were friends. 

My father – and therefore my brother – ended up in New York due to a special exchange-type training course taken one summer during my father’s undergrad years, spent in Syracuse. He’d traveled all around, the Finger Lakes, the Adirondacks and Catskills, the Hudson Valley and Niagara Falls. He made good friends, good enough to help him years later find his way after mother kicked him out. Or did he leave? She said she had done the kicking, he would not comment or contradict, but his body, whenever I had courage enough to ask, told another story.