Anyway, cut to thirty years later. My brother arrives at Kennedy Airport in New York on business and he gets in a taxi to take him into the city. And as they drive along, the cab driver keeps looking in the rearview mirror at my brother.
Finally my brother asks, “Is something wrong?”
And the cab driver says, “Are you Todd Fisher?” and after my brother verifies that he is, the cabbie pulls an old, crumpled, bloody strip of sheet out from the visor over the front passenger side of the car and brandishes it for my brother to see.
“I drove the cab that took you to the hospital that night with your mom back in the ’70s.”
Of course he did.
So the cabbie has my brother sign the rag, brown and stiff with age, and then he drives back out of my brother’s life—presumably forever.
3. A NEARBY ARRANGED ALL AROUND HER
My mother has moved into a house she bought next door from mine. There’s this funny thing she does now, which is to offer my brother and me things that we can have after she’s dead. If my eyes happen to rest on anything in her home, she rushes over and says, “Do you like this? Because I can put a little sticker with your name on it to mark it now. Otherwise I’ll leave it for your brother.” Of all her things, I guess I would want the blue dress with the blue beads and the blue fur. The thing is, I’m pretty sure it disappeared. But I still want it sort of pas sionately. I’ll have to ask her to see if she can find it and if she does, ask her to put a red dot on it.
As a kid, I remember thinking, there is no other mother that even comes close to my mom. Then I became a teenager and thought she was an asshole because let’s face it—it’s a teenager’s job to find her parent annoying and ridiculous—just ask my daughter. Anyway, after I was finished thinking she was this trippy lunatic, I realized that she was pretty fucking amazing. I mean, she’s loyal, she’s reliable, she’s just totally great. Seriously. She’s also really quick, and she can be really, really witty. She also still performs at the age of seventy-six, and she never misses a show—whether she’s tired or her foot hurts; when she’s out there onstage, she’s radiant. This woman is the consummate performer. I’ve watched her for my whole life, and she’s got this insanely strong life force. It pours through her veins and her muscles, and her heart. She’s remarkable.
But here’s the thing—she’s also a little eccentric.
She’s always had a lot of unique ideas. For example: She thought it would be a good idea for me to have a child with her last husband because it would have nice eyes! I should probably explain that my mother could no longer have children after having gone through “the Change,” and Richard didn’t have any children of his own and he had nice eyes!
Plus, my womb was free, and we’re family. Now, my mother didn’t bring this up just once or twice like a normal mother would. She brought it up many times—and mostly while I was driving. And when I finally suggested to her that this might be an odd idea, she said, “Oh, darling, have you read the Enquirer lately? We live in a very strange world.”
Well, when the Enquirer becomes your standard for living, you’re in a lot of trouble!
When I told my grandmother about my mother’s idea, she said, “Well, that’s not right.” The voice of reason.
My grandmother Maxine is from El Paso, Texas. My mother’s entire clan is from Texas. And my father’s clan is from South Philly. So we’re basically white trash. But because of the celebrity factor, I think of us as blue-blooded white trash.
I bring my grandmother up because when my mother was about seven my grandmother locked her in the closet. You know, for not finishing her dinner or her homework. (My grandmother was the one who told this story, by the way.) Anyway, after my mother had been in the closet for about an hour, she asked my grandmother for a glass of water and my grandmother, naturally, said, “Why?” And my mother said, “Because I’ve just spit on all of your dresses and now I’ve run out of spit and I want to spit all over your shoes!”
These are the people I hail from.
When I asked my grandmother later why she thought this form of discipline was appropriate, she said, “Well, we did not have Cosmopolitan magazine in those days so we did not know it was wrong.”
Don’t you think that my family has a really weird relationship with magazines?
Anyway, my mother and I never did go forward with the plan for me to have the baby with Richard, and I think that has turned out to be a good thing. Aside from the obvious—my sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter—my mother ended up hating Richard and for good reason. He took all the money she had made since Harry took the first batch!
So she says to me at this point, “You know, dear, Eddie’s starting to look like the good husband.”
Eddie, The Good Husband by Anton Chekhov.
What could you say about my father?
My father is beyond likeable. I mean you would just love him. My father also smokes four joints a day. Not for medical reasons. So I call him Puff Daddy. But he is just adorable. There’s a reason he got all that high-quality pussy—except for the Miss Louisiana thing, but anyone can make one mistake. So, after he wrote his—well, he called it an autobiography, but I thought of it more as a novel. After he wrote his novel, Been There, Done as I like to call it Been There Done Them That—or as I like to call it, Been There, Done Them because it really was just about the women he’d ever slept with and how the sex was and what their bodies were like (so it is a feel-good read!).
But after I read it, well, for one thing, I wanted to get my DNA fumigated.
But I read it partly out of loyalty and partly because the Enquirer called to ask how I felt about my father alluding to the “fact” that my mother was a lesbian in the book. And not that it matters, but my mother is not a lesbian! She’s just a really, really, bad heterosexual.
4. BOTH HANDS, ONE HEART, TWO MOODS, AND A HEAD
A few years ago my daughter and I visited my father in San Francisco, where he lives because there’s a really big Chinatown there. And the day before, he had just gotten those tiny hearing aids that fit right inside his ears. They’re really, really expensive. Some people say $3,000—others say five—anyway, really expensive. So he’d gotten them the day before, so the night before, he didn’t want to lose them or forget where they were, so he put them in his pill box next to his bed so he’d remember where they were in the morning.
Yes, that’s right, he ate them.
So, whenever he couldn’t hear my daughter or myself, we’d yell into his stomach or his ass. Now he subsequently got those hearing aids again, and I had the opportunity to see them. They were the size of a lima bean—a rubber lima bean with an antenna.
Now look, I adore pills, I’m a huge fan, but these looked like none I’ve ever seen. Now, I don’t know how you are in the morning, I’m not that sharp, but I think I would know if I was eating a rubber lima bean with an antenna! Twice!
Well, if you have a life like mine, then these experiences gradually accumulate until you become known as “a survivor.” This is a term that I loathe. But, the thing is that when you are a survivor, which fine, I reluctantly agree that I am—and who over 40 isn’t?—when you are a survivor, in order to be a really good one, you have to keep getting in trouble to show off your gift.
My mother says, “Well, dear, what are the choices? Not surviving?”
But this is from a woman who when asked for dating advice says, “For what age?”
My mother, who incidentally lives next door to me, she calls me to this day and says, “Hello, dear, this is your mother, Debbie.” (As opposed to my mother Vladimir or Jean-Jacques.)
I have a very loud voice. I used to say that my voice was designed to wrest people from dreams. My mother grew up in Texas, on the border of Mexico, but she learned to speak “properly” with the assistance of Lillian Sydney,
