Oh boy… I’ll try and be patient…
Jeez, too bad you have a job & life that keeps you from posting for us all day & night…
Actually he doesn’t have a job cos he’s just driven up for the interview. I expect he’d have a life if he could see past the piles of stuff in the Mamaleum but as it stands he can’t quite reach one.
Off to drive trains and FULLY expecting the rest of the story when she gets back
I’m just skimming here (it kinda hurts to read it in detail).
I think I’d just have to take my own life rather than dealing with this woman. I mean, I know YOU love her and all, and that’s cool. I’ve thrown your name into the pool of sainthood contenders for 2007. If you don’t win, I swear I’ll demand a recount.
Damn! I’m going nuts waiting to see what happens next!
I do hope he’s OK though. This is just more proof, to me, that the people you love the most are the ones most likely to drive you nuts… :eek:
Oh holy hell, and my friends ask why I spend so much time on the internet? I don’t need to have some drinks to have a jolly good time, I have Sampiro!
Aw man, she came back again and ate him.
:smack: :smack: :smack: :smack:
I’m an idiot.
I didn’t get, until just now, what the red text was all about.
:smack: :smack: :smack: :smack:
Sampiro, would your Mama be interested in an order of flagellating monks? (I already live celibate in a cell, so…)
I’m still clueless, so if you’d like to feel superior and regain your balance, explain it to li’l ol’ me.
It’s Holy Script! The words of The Holy One. Just like Jesus’ words in the bible.
But REAL. (nodnodnodnodnodnod)
Really? I didn’t get that at all.
Seriously. Look at the posts. Every time that he’s quoted anything his mother said, in her words, it’s been in red text. And, except for one typo with a support clause, that’s the only text that’s been in red. The only other instance of that kind of emphasis I’ve ever seen prior to this has been in bibles that use that to make the “true spoken word of Christ” visible to the reader.
The True Spoken Word of Mama.
Yep, makes sense to me.
Oh, I believe you, it just completely went over my head.
The Gospel According to Mama. Hee hee hee.
Holy Crap he *still * hasn’t posted? :eek:
Sampiro I have been down that tunnel and up that tunnel and down that tunnel and up that tunnel and rinse and repeat for nearly seven hours now and you *still * haven’t posted?! Have some pity and just post! I know you are still awake over there.
No more story?
sniff
Heck, Lady, you’re practically in his backyard compared to most of us; go over and knock on the door. See if there are fresh cigarette butts on the porch, or tire marks in the lawn.
Don’t tempt me. I can just see me showing up at his door with a bottle of Jagermeister and a half-dozen cats…
A strange, busy, sweaty day. Yesterday I was LIVID with my sister, today it’s a “who are you and what have you done with my sister… but let me quickly add I’m not asking for her back, I like you better…”. Great news for me, but there’s a lot less anger to drive the narrative. She’s still here so I’ll post later (but relics from the Mamaleum are being wrapped in the sacred cloths and moved as we speak).
It’s no coincidence that this is on Mother’s Day, incidentally. It’s actually why my sister’s here- “To spend one last Mother’s Day in Mama’s house with Mama’s stuff”- but… she’s so civil and reasonable it can only mean one of us is going to die or have a pod-person burst from our abdomen.
More later.
PS- This was the first high-tech war I’ve had with my sister, meaning that for the first time there were email volleys. Among other things I expressed my irritation and depression (not of the “rubbing lipstick on my eyebrows and shit in my hair” type but low-grade over the (to borrown from SUNSET BLVD again) “That’s Norma Desmond/That’s Norma Desmond/THAT’S NORMA DESMOND” aspect of living here. One of the emails I ended up sending her was a CUT/PASTE/SEVERELY EDIT version of an email I’d sent to a friend I was venting to. I figured she would just have a TLDR moment since it’s rambling but instead she said it majorly struck home and was one of the reasons she came up to go through the Temple prior to selling it. It’s a weird email.
Below is the version I sent to a friend. The very edited version I sent to my sister included some things that are a bit too personal to share in mixed company (yes, there really are some things I consider too personal to share). It followed several rounds of “You’re the one who’s more like Mama” “NO YOU ARE” emails (and as I said, the one I sent her was even longer and more personal, but this one gives you the idea).
She could be one of the most petty, irrational, embittered, hateful, miserable, insecure, and thinnest skinned people on the planet. She didn’t just cause pain- I am talking deep emotional injuries- she took pride in her ability to cause pain. That is objective statement of fact- she was proud of how hurtful she could be in an argument, whether it was to my father, my sister, my brother, or me, and if she ever “apologized” for anything you could rest assured that it would be implicit only, no admission of wrongdoing, something to the effect of “my temper gets the better of me sometimes and I say and do things I shouldn’t” (no shit!) or some other unpology. She resented the successes of others, she resented any of us having friends or loves who weren’t her. She held grudges even when the other parties (her husband, her father, her in-laws, and many others) were long dead.
I will never forget the day in 2000 when she came home from work and was telling a story about the storm that badly damaged the group home. While talking about the damage a falling branch caused she pushed the PLAY button on the answering machine and learned, in a recorded message from my aunt, that her brother Carl was dead. Without showing any emotion she resumed telling her story and while she was doing this she opened a cabinet, took out a cut crystal glass she had gotten as a gift many years before, she filled it with ice, all while still telling the story. She opened the very same corner cabinet that Mustang built which is such a contention I have with my sister, she took from it a $100 bottle of whiskey (some type of special premium really aged Jack Daniels) she’d received as a gift years before and had saved for this moment, and poured more than a shot into the crystal tumbler, still telling her story, then she filled the rest with Coke. She finished telling the story- “…and I told them, I am NOT going to go up on that roof for anybody and they can just get over it, so meanwhile there’s a hole in the hallway and over my office-” and when she was finished with the story, she drank a toast. It was not a toast to the memory of her brother, it was a toast to the brain cancer that killed him. She hated the bastard (with reason) and this was her “I outlived you” victory dance. Her only words on the subject of the “loss” were “Brain cancer… that’s not very painful unfortunately. Maybe he at least went blind in his one good eye and shit on himself towards the end though. I’d call and ask [his wife]. Nah, that would be bitchy.”
She was mean, vindictive, unforgiving, trifling, jealous, untrusting, and when she was mad she was downright psychotic, a poisonous and dark force in my life and in all of our lives. I was usually resentful of her, often mad with her, sometimes furious. There were times I did not like her and times when it’s fair and true to say I hated her. There was never a single moment when I did not love her. When I learned (one year ago today in fact) that she had inoperable and terminal metastatic lung cancer there was a part of me that felt relief at her passing, and when she died I was heartbroken but I did not feel the least bit guilty for the sense of relief, because I knew that I could never really live until she was dead. And I miss her every single day more than I can impart.
That may seem completely non-sequitur or contradictory, but it’s not, nor is it borne of guilt (I frankly don’t have any) nor posthumously ennobling her (she was what she was, I have not canonized her). It’s said because I genuinely and always above all loved, respected, and usually liked her, because the darkness was not all she was. It wasn’t even close to all she was.
She could also be one of the kindest and most sensitive and most caring human beings I will ever know, not just when she wasn’t being a total bitch, but concurrent with it.
She loathed her mother-in-law, my grandmother, and Christ himself couldn’t fault her for that one. She also took care of my grandmother, long after my father was dead, made sure she never went without, celebrated her birthday and tended to her needs, even sang her a lullaby when she was calming her after a stroke until the ambulance arrived, went to see her in the nursing home years after they had both left Weokahatchee.
She had no love for poor pitiful crazy Lucy, it was next to impossible to- there wasn’t enough left about Lucy to have love for- but she was so upset that Lucy was going to be returned to Bryce that (for the first time I can say it) she planned to euthanize her rather than let it happen- true story- she was going to risk her own freedom, which was essentially the only thing she had at the time, to avoid letting a lobotomized old woman who probably couldn’t have told you a thing in the world about Blanche other than “she brings me food” go through the one thing on Earth that said old woman was truly horrified of going through (the return to the snakepit where her father committed her for more than 35 years).
When our St. Bernard, BB, had a huge litter of pups and rejected the deformed one- we called her Billie, she had a deformed leg and hairless head and her mother would not let her nurse and tried to crush her- we kept the pup alive on a heating pad on our Duncan Pfyffe dining table and fed her calf-formula with doll bottles for about a week before she died, and my mother tried to give the pup, who fit in her hand, mouth to mouth and compress her chest when she stopped breathing, and when that didn’t work and it was clear that the tiny little deformed thing was dead, it was one of the few times I ever saw Mama break into uncontrollable tears, she wanted it to live so bad.
She cursed all the “welfare dogs” and “welfare cats” who turned up over the years as strays or as dumps but when she had to sell that damned wedding ring I’ve mentioned so many times over the years she used some of the money to buy the biggest cheapest bag of dry dog food to pour out for them because it was cold and she couldn’t bear the thoughts of them being hungry. One of the broke Christmases she bought Carrie, the 95 or 96 or however old she was by that time old woman who moaned and ruined the house with the smell of urine a Cabbage Patch knockoff because it occurred to her “I’ll bet Carrie’s never in her life had a storebought doll- I bet she’ll be absolutely thrilled with this”. Rarely has there been more of a bullseye of a gift, and it was one of the most absurd coalitions you’ll ever see- a woman so old her father remembered slaves and her grandfather died enroute to Gettysburg doting on a doll that was the ultimate Reagan Era fad, but Carrie doted on “Willie” from that day on, dressing him, talking to him, sleeping with him. Mama was able to see things like that cheap knockoff and know “this would bring pleasure” because she was, warts and all, one of the most sensitive and compassionate people on Earth, and again I don’t even say it was the obverse of her “dark side” but interwoven with it. Her vices- the ability to destroy with words or a look or an action- that was borne or the same sensitivity and empathy and compassion because “When you thank about it…”, only caring people can really truly hit bullseyes when they attack with words.
[My best friend’s sister {BFS} the pregnant cokehead] could never destroy or hurt somebody like Mama could in an argument. [BFS] is self consumed, self obsessed, a total narcissist without any feeling or concern for the feeling of others. I seriously doubt she could tell you what her mother’s favorite memories are, what her dreams are or were, what makes her mom truly happy, and when she fights she’ll go for things that she knows her mom’s sensitive about- the baby she gave up for adoption 40 years ago or the fact that her mom feels like a failure because of not financially providing enough for her children- but she could never REEEAAAALLLY drive home a sentence like my mother could have that would with mentioning some fairly minor seemingly inconsequential trait or memory just eviscerate, because BFS is not sensitive enough to know what really makes other’s tick. My mother was, and it’s why she was able to know where somebody was truly vulnerable and attack there, and it’s why she was able to look at a Cabbage Patch knockoff and envision an old woman who was a burden and who was no relation and who was almost a century old bursting into a toothless smile on Christmas morning.
Speaking of BFS, there was a time when my mother hated even the mention of the [my ex boyfriend’s] name, when a foreigner would have thought “goddamned little cocksucking fool” was BF’s official title. During that time BFS, then a teen who hadn’t even begun getting pregnant by her coke addicted male prostitute boyfriend, came to Mgy to and essentially got stranded- her father wouldn’t let her stay with him, she had no money for a bus ticket, BF was driving the Karmann Ghia that might or might not make it to work and he couldn’t rent a car because he had no credit card (this was back when BF was broke and had bad credit because he made stupid career choices of expedience and wouldn’t go to college or listen to the advice of others). I tried to rent a car for him on my card and I didn’t trust my car (the old Escort) to make the trip, my mother actually gave me the keys to her station wagon and said “You take 'em back. She’s gotta get back someway and her mother’s probably worried sick and BF hasn’t seen her and she hasn’t seen him in a long time and God knows I know how miserable it is to not have reliable transportation”. And I took BF, who she officially despised (but probably wouldn’t have been the least surprised to know would one day be a pallbearer) to Panama City to return the skank and see his mom in my mother’s car with my mother’s blessings.
She was never comfortable with my being gay, but she let it be known that she loved me more than she disapproved of my supposed “lifestyle”. She picked up the phone when BF called during the last week I was with her and he’ll verify, she couldn’t have been nicer to him- she didn’t even say anything hateful about him when he got off the phone (and she absolutely craved the dysfunctional stories his wildy dysfunctional family produces- Mama was all about the schadenfreude).
One day when I was leaving for Tuscaloosa before she got sick she said “I put something in your book that I thought you might be interested in” and when I looked at it later it was an article about Montgomery’s upcoming first ever gay pride parade. She would deposit money in my bank account without me knowing it, hide gifts- sometimes a shirt, sometimes something she’d made, a card, a book- in my luggage.
She never missed coming to see me on my birthday. Until this past birthday I didn’t realize how much that meant to me. She praised everything about me to her co-workers and her friends, she never went a day even when she was livid with me for good or bad or silly reason without telling me “I love you” and that’s why on my last birthday it hit me like a ton of bricks when I realized “I am no longer the most important person in anybody’s life…”- self-pitying and I got over it, but it was just an odd epiphany. She cared about everything I did.
And she was such a survivor. One of the things that really made me think of her was of all damned things the extras from the movie 28 DAYS LATER. If you’ve seen the movie you’ll know that-
it ends with Selena (the black woman) and Hannah (the kid) and Jim (Cillian Murphy) all living in a farm where Jim’s recuperating from his gunshots and they’re flagging down a jet that shows there are other survivors. But on the bonus features there’s the original ending which was much darker: Selena and Hannah rush Jim to an abandoned hospital and they try desperately to save his life using the machines and adrenaline and all to the best of their abilities, but he’s just too far gone. He dies on the table and they can’t save him or bring him back. Selena wails and buries her face on his chest and Hannah asks “What do we do now that he’s gone?” and Selena wipes her eyes and clears her nose and calmly says, “We keep moving” and she leads Hannah down the hallway. (Then it’s the same ending as before except it’s just Hannah and Selena hailing the jet.)
That was Mama. Through things no merciful God would have allowed, through things I have never told anybody, through horrors I hope you never see the likes of, she kept moving. She bitched and whined and moaned and occasionally had meltdowns, she never suffered in silence, but she didn’t give up, she spit on her hands and she climbed on the vines and she went from destitute and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and arrests and jailtime in her history and things she worried for years she would be arrested for (she never killed anybody but that’s the most I’ll say) to a woman respected and used as a good example by her co-workers with a house and with a bank account that while tiny by the standards of her oldest two kids would have glowed like a million dollars compared to what we had in 1987. In many ways she won, but even if she hadn’t, she always moved. And even in the last 10 years she moved a lot, she was a far happier and better person in 2006 than she was in 1997 even.
And while I’ll admit that I got to where I loathed the drive between Tuscaloosa & Montgomery ca. 1999-2000, the drive between Albany GA and Montgomery in 2001, the drive between Americus GA & Montgomery 2001-2002, the drive between believe Milledgeville & Montgomery 2002-2004, and the drive between Tuscaloosa & Montgomery 2005-2006, and have rejoiced sincerely at the notion that wherever I go next my weekends are for the first time ever truly mine, it’s also true that most of the times when I called her I did so not as a duty but just to talk. Most of the time I truly enjoyed talking to her. Certainly not always, I’m not going to whitewash her, and God alone knows she could drive me frigging batty- but MOST of the time, I genuinely liked her. I respected her. She was funny, she was interesting, she was a survivor.
She was full of contradictions, but some of them were surprisingly wonderful. She was capable of admitting she was wrong about many things in her life, she told me she was most ashamed of the fact she hadn’t had the guts to stand up against Jim Crow during the Civil Rights movement (that’s not a common confession for an old southern woman)- even as she disapproved of interracial dating, she was capable of laughing at herself more than you would think, she was loving in the extreme, she knew my moods and how to make me feel better about myself with just a few simple words, and we had that time together from the early 1980s to the 1990s when only the two of us knew what it was like to have every hand against you and to live in constant horror that literally the next hour might find you homeless. And we knew what it was like to live through that, and that money was something to be respected but at the same time enjoyed because “money goes, it always goes, at least get some smiles out of it when you can”.
This weekend is Mother’s Day. Last Mother’s Day my gift to her were two porcelain figurines of Chang & Eng Bunker. I bought them on eBay; they’re from Chang & Eng’s first ever tour ca. 1830 when they were teenagers, mass produced in Dresden. I told her that they represented us: Chang and Eng were identical in some ways and totally opposite in others, they didn’t always get along or like each other but they were always going to be together, they were the only two people on Earth who knew what it was like to be Chang and Eng and nobody else, not any of the multitude of children they had or their wives or their siblings, nobody else could really know what it was like because that bond was more than just flesh and blood (and liver). Chang and Eng famously fought, knock-down drag-out fights, but when they were over each hurt from the pain they caused the other. They were united whether they wanted to be or not, and after so many years together, they accepted it, they wanted to be. They were two and they were one and they were, for all their differences and all their disagreements and all their frequent enmity, they were inseparable. And, I told her, that’s how I feel about you. You’re my other half, for ill or naught or good, you’re the closest anybody knows to what it’s like to be me, what we’ve been through, the hell parts and the good parts- what happens to you I feel and what happens to me you feel and we may not always get along but there’s never any doubt that at the end of the day the other one will still be there because they can’t go away if they wanted to, and truth be known after so many years, they don’t want to.
She was moved. She didn’t even speak for a while, she just held them, then asked “Which one are you, Chang or Eng?”
I told her “I’ll be Chang. He was the leftist. You’re a bit more to the right than I am.”
Later that day she picked up one of the figurines again and with her other hand she took mine and said “Promise me something Chang, because it’s what I’ve worried about… more than anything else… for these past few days.”
She was starting to cry a little and her voice was breaking and that was very rare.
“I want you to please promise me… please promise me… that when I die… you’ll cut through that flesh and bone and whatever else is there and you’ll walk away. I need you until then, but when my heart stops beating… I want you to promise me you’ll do that.” It was the first and one of the very few times I ever heard her acknowledge or even imply she was going to die, because for an old woman who could rarely make it through a week in her prime without threatening to top herself she fought hard for her life.
And I told her, “I’ll be a bloody mess and I’ll hurt like hell, but I promise, I’ll hack through it with a butcher knife if I have to”.
“You won’t have to” she said. “Just put some gravy on it and [her obese terrier] Mardi will chew through it.”
And later in the same day we were arguing and bickering and I was thinking “God what a nasty petulant old bitch!”
And I’ll never forget that later in the same day we were arguing and bickering and I was thinking “God what a nasty petulant old bitch!” about something or other she said. I don’t remember what it was but I remember it was hurtful and uncalled for.
And nine months after I held her freezing foot in my hands and told her it was okay for her to die, I understood, I would always love her, I find myself remembering her every day and thinking to myself, with total sincerity of feeling, “God what a nasty petulant old bitch!”
And nine months after I held her freezing foot in my hands and told her it was okay for her to die, I understood, I would always love her, I find myself remembering her every day and thinking to myself, with total sincerity of feeling, “God, I’d give anything I have or ever will have to rest my arm on Eng’s shoulder just one more time, because it doesn’t feel right anywhere else.”
And both feelings share the same blood and the same breath.
She was a twisted old bitch and she was a wonderful person like no other I’ve ever known and they were two and they were one and they were identical and they were opposite, juxtaposed and conjoined.
And I didn’t mean to write but a few sentences. But since I’ve written this I’ll send it, but I won’t reread it because I’m sure I’d think “What the fuck is that about?”
I suppose ultimately what I’m trying to say is, I’m taking those Chang/Eng statuettes with me when I go, which brings me back to the subject of dividing up the maternal burial treasure.
And don’t do drugs.