I think Stuckey’s is some kind of sticky nutroll, or some kind of dessert.
Stuckey’s is known for it’s nut roll candy.
[Miss Coco Peru in Trick: Where was I?.. oh yeah… so I’m lickin’ his balls…[/Miss Coco]
So the ATTACK OF THE PHONES keeps up with my mother making increasingly absurd claims, my sister making increasingly vitriolic attacks on my mother, the entire family history since the Civil War getting dusted off to be used as attacks on one or the other (My Sister: “Goddamn! Why can’t she just get pissed and maybe cry a little and say a bad word or something like most people and then GET THE HELL OVER IT! Aw nooooo… everything’s all or nothing when she’s sick she’s gotta be sicker than anybody else when she’s cold she’s colder than anybody else when she’s mad she’s madder than anybody else and I guess when she by God dies she’ll be fuckin’ DEADER than anybody else! Gotta make that show… SHIT! Reminds me of my 19th birthday. It was on a Friday. I was in college. Some of my friends at college threw me a surprise party. I got a little drunk. Decided not to drive home that weekend. Thought Mama’d understand. Got home the next morning. First thing I saw when I get out of the car is my cake face down in the driveway with ants on it and my presents in a pile on the sidewalk. Shit.”
silence
pause
Me: Actually, that was your twenty-first birthday. Your friends brought you booze because you could legally drink that day.
Her (reflectively, pensively): Was it? Oh yeah, you’re right… my nineteenth birthday was when she called me a whore and tore up all my pictures in the photo albums because I was dating that guy she didn’t like and he took me out to a movie that night…
Me: [singing]“Mem-o-ries are made of this…”
So, I’m actually irritated with my sister and have even told her that I think it was poor planning to invite the others, but as world’s apart as my sister and I are in politics and religion it’s the Ghosts of Disfunctions past that provide an irreparable bond. Nobody else really knows what it was like growing up 15 miles from the nearest town with a mother who might be absolutely wonderful [and I can’t emphasize enough, she really can be- fun, funny, loving, selfless, hard-working, etc.] but can go KA-BOOM! at any moment. (We have a brother but tend not to count him as he left home for college at 16, rarely came back, and has a temper as fiery as my mother’s and was the only one of us who had, to his credit, the guts and fire to tell my mother what to go do with herself (consequently he’s the only one of us who ever got physical abuse from my mother, who also sold her heirloom jewelry to buy him a brand new car for his 17th birthday and gave him her own car when he wrecked his the night before his wedding- they have a complex relationship as well, but he’s out of the picture.)
My father died when I was 15 and my siblings were off at university. It was during a blizzard, in the middle of Nowhere, Alabama (a cattle farm 40 miles north of Montgomery), there was no power or water in the house during the storm, and to keep warm we (my father and I) shared a bed for the very first time and he woke up dead. (Crawling over a dead Orson Welles clone to get out of bed during a blizzard is something too melodramatic by about 90% for me to make up, and the long version is really melodramatic, though I should add with pride that that’s the last time we shared a bed as well.) The reason I mention this is that it was a major turning point: for years things went increasingly to hell on the hillside where I grew up as the house became a haunted (literally, but that’s another story) decaying place filled with me, my mother, my 90-something “I see dead people… and Vanna White!” incontinent aunt, and increasing drama. Poverty is probably too strong a term- we were broke, deeply in debt, and oddly enough living in what had once been one of the nicest homes in the county [though it was falling apart] which we could not sell [nobody wanted to buy a home that far from nothing] and my mother spiraling ever further downward into alcoholism and depression. When I was about 18 I spent all of one night trying to talk my mother out of suicide before finally falling asleep from sheer exhaustion. I woke up to the sound of a pistol shot and knew she’d finally done it. There was no phone (long disconnected for non-payment), no cash, no gas in the car, an ancient woman who hadn’t heard the shot babbling to her dead twin sister, the nearest neighbor was 2 miles away, and I was alone with my mother’s dead body, I thought. I entered the kitchen from where the shot came and there she was cooking eggs and even smiling. When I asked about the shot that woke me up “Well, the bullet was in the chamber, I had to get it out somehow didn’t I? You won’t some bacon drippings for your toast?”
Okay, I mention the above, a teeny extract from the most Southern Gothic part of my childhood, for two reasons (I really don’t have any self pity from the era):
1- this is why a part of me will always be a terrified child/teenager in my mother’s presence
2- at the same time the genteel poverty and the creditors and the haints (long story) and the smell of pee and the depression, etc., (all while my siblings were living comfortable bourgeois lives and could have helped but didn’t) created an unbreakable bond with my mother that in some ways makes me defend and protect and side with her even when I know for absolute-without-a-doubt-certain that she’s in the wrong
Speed ahead to the present (or, actually, about three weeks ago while the ATTACK OF THE PHONES was still going on) when all these memories and the accompanying emotional baggage are swirling and at times I’m totally on my sister’s side (“Yeah, she does do that…”) and at times on my mother’s (“Yeah, I know, she can be totally oblivious…”) and coughing throughout and hearing Sarah Brighton sing “Why can’t the past just die….” and wondering what in hell I’m going to do with those five pounds of cherries I bought now that I won’t be sharing them at the beach but damn if they aren’t delicious and don’t keep me regular.
When I think my mother has gotten a little more lucid at one point on Sunday I recommend “Why don’t we go down there tonight [COUGH], we’ll stay in one of her other houses just for tonight, then tomorrow her condo will be free and we’ll stay there…[COUGH]”
“What! Her condo is on the seventeenth…”
Me: “Fifth.”
“… floor… either way you know I’m afraid of heights and these little dogs would jump off the balcony and die. Do you want to spend your vacation scraping your dead dog off the concrete?”
“Then Becky and Billy can go to the condo…”
“Kathy wouldn’t let ‘em… by now it’s a principal thing…”
“Kathy is willing to do anything.” (Kathy’s at the “I’d piss on a spark plug if I thought it’d do any good” phase, having to deal with this on one end and play the smiling hostess to her other guests without letting them know they’re the reason Mama won’t go down.)
“I don’t even want my dog ah-round that redneck whale Billy! The last time he saw him, that fatass Billy hauled back and kicked my sweet little Marty square in the stomach!”
Pause
Silence
Okay, if there’s one thing every member of my family has in common it’s that we’re dog nuts. We’d probably get the dogs out of the house before the kids in the event of a fire (a kid can call 911, a dog can’t.) If any of us saw anybody “haul back and kick” our dog “squarely in the stomach”, said hauler-backer would next communicate with his or her loved ones either threw hand gestures {as their jaw would be wired shut) or as the unseen party on a Ouija board (odd the associations: I used to fake Ouija board messages to cheer my superstitious mother up, but that’s a whole other long story). There are better odds that by this time tomorrow I will have taken a shower with Debbie Reynolds and an albino chimpanzee than that somebody kicked sweet fat little Marty in the stomach and Mama just didn’t say anything about it until now. (Plus there’s nothing square about Marty’s stomach- when I took him for his most recent round of shots the vet’s assistant had to go get the vet because she couldn’t give them… she couldn’t find any loose skin on him.) Had this happened, in front of witnesses yet (because the only time Billy was around Marty was at Thanksgiving), there’d have at very least been gunfire and probably a crucifixion. I’m thinking, the woman is delusional and I ask for an explanation.
“Well… Marty was being friendly… he was being real friendly… like boy dogs will sometimes do… and that whale Billy the Hutt just took his foot back and ‘WHAM!’ sent Marty flying through the room…”
Even she knows that this one’s exaggerated, though that means she has to insist it happened just like that all the more.
“So… Marty tried to ride Billy’s leg, and Billy used his foot to shake him off…”
“Well… I didn’t really see it… but… he kicked him in the stomach! Marty still acts like his stomach hurts sometimes…”
”Marty has eaten thumbtacks before! He eats more meat in a week than a Cambodian will ever see! Of course he has stomach aches…”
“Take your sister’s side!” Hangs up.
Next call (I’m not even including the coughing spells anymore) is from my Sister:
Kathy: Did Mama tell you that bullshit story about how Billy kicked Marty in the balls so hard he bled from the mouth for two days?
Me: I heard it was in the stomach and he still hemorrhages.
Kathy: “Where the fuck… where does…. GODDAMN IT! “ [through clenched teeth] “That.old.woman.is.crazier.than. a.bag.full.of.squirrels.going.around.in.a.dryer! By this time Tuesday she’ll be swearing Billy ripped out Marty’s colon and nailed it to a Jehovah’s Witness! I’ve sent you some prescription drugs, by the way.
[SORRY FOR THE LENGTH, I HAD NO IDEA IT WAS THIS LONG, BUT IT REALLY IS ALMOST OVER]
Oh, Lordy, another that left me gasping for air!
Nooooo! Please don’t go!
Fuck you, keep it coming!
I honest to god have a cramp from stiffling my laughter at this.
“Crazier than a bag of squirrels going around in a dryer.”
I will be using this before the end of the day.
Oh christ it hurts!
I’m beginning to wish I had a crazy, religious-yet-foul-mouthed, pharmacist sister! This is priceless!
You really have a way of describing the complexity of family relationships. And NPR is what I keep thinking of too, or you should do a documentary or something. It is funny and honest and heartwarming and sad all at the same time. But now I am gushing, so…
I’ll just await the next installment.
On the plus side, I wasn’t eating anything when I read this. On the down side, I do actually have to eat sometime in the next month.
Cue weekly request for pukey smiley.
This is pure gold. I’d read another fifty posts of this. In fact, I’d buy it in a bookstore. Hell, I’d buy five and give some as gifts.
MORE! MORE! MOORRRRRRRRE!!! :: pant pant :: MORRRRRRRRE!
God dammit, I have to leave the computer for 3 hours and actually uh, live life. The suspense is KILLING ME!
On preview: I agree with Velma. NPR all the way, baby. You’ll be the next Sedaris, only better- because you have that southern gentleman thing going and you’re way cuter.
I have no pull or important contacts at all (hell, I write for a University press!), but can I forward this thread to a couple of (very minor!) publishing friends of mine?
Eve, you are my favorite super hero. Smart, witty, a snappy dresser, and oh so generous!
Ok, now I really gotta go. But I’ll be back for more!
Finish this now, Sampiro. I must know how it ends.
p.s. even though I am a 50 year old straight guy, I want to have your babies.
Bartok (from Anastasia): This can only end in tears, sir!
Whoa up, there, my friend!
You don’t get to throw such gems in as
and
and
without further explanation. You’re a big tease, aren’t you? A big, long-winded, hysterical, parenetheses-loving Southern tease.
If I weren’t waiting for the next chapter with anticip--------------------ation I would seriously hate you right now.
Too true. What I really want to know is how we get to those tears. PLEASE, sir, may we have another? Installment.
I see fireworks!
I see the pageant and pomp and parade
I hear the bells ringing out…
I hear the cannons roar…
I see Americans,
ALL Americans
FREE! FOREVERMORE!
but only on the DVD for 1776 because on July 4 the battle is still raging.
Since I can’t convince Mama Direst to budge an inch on anything and I feel like crap (even to the slightly moist and warm part) and I don’t have the slightest desire to go around her at the moment (except to liberate Marty, who always gets nervous when she’s upset- the poor thing used to change owners every second Wednesday for the first year of his life and so even though she’s crazy she’s at least stable and gives him whip cream out of the can) so I’ve begged off the whole journey. My mother has said
“There is no point in you coming down here… I’m miserable, I’d just make you miserable, and you’re already sick… I just want to be alone with myself and my memories of my million failures…”
Which translates roughly as “Come. Come at once. Break every law on the books to get here as soon as you can. Pick me up one of those new 99 cent mini-banana splits at Sonic. The one on the bypass, not the one on Bell Road, their staff looks dirty.”
but I don’t feel well and the fact I can’t sleep for the damned telephones dueling doesn’t help so I take her at her word. I’m going to stay in Tuscaloosa and rest.
CALL
“I don’t want you to come home because you’re sick, but I just wanted you to know I made you a poet’s shirt. It’s blue and has those blowsy sleeves and a twine throat… when you come… are you coming today? Good, because you don’t need to come here today… I’m depressed and I just am not good company… you stay where you are… but when you do come here, bring me some hangers. I will miss seeing Ollie, though. He always picks me up, he’s so hyper and funny and God knows I could use that… but you need to rest.”
Mhmmm.
[CALL]Do you know how much money Mama has in her banking account? Because she’s telling me that she couldn’t have come down here even if she wanted to because she’d have to cook or eat out and she can’t afford to cook for six people or eat in a restaurant because of her medicine and she says she’s going to sell the damned house and look for a cheap one bedroom trailer somewhere. HELL’S BELLS! They don’t even have goddamned one bedroom trailers! And she asked me if I could find somebody to look after Marty cause she cain’t afford his food! Do you know if she’s broke?"
[Actually, I know exactly how much money my mother has in her accounts and while she’s certainly not rich, she’s doing okay- enough money from retirement and Social Security to pay her bills and some money in the bank- not a lot by my sister’s standards but certainly more than I have and enough not to fight feral cats for dead birds, so I tell my sister]
“She’s fine. If you want to give her money to help her buy her medicines that’d be great…”
“Why in hell would I do that? Hell, I told her I would buy her her very own damned beach place if she would just come live in it and be happy and she turned me down! ‘Noooo’ she said, ‘I don’t want your charity…’ I wouldn’t give her the money for one of those damned 99 cent banana splits she said she’d like to have from Sonic but is too depressed to go get! She’s pissed me off. This is the last time. I’m too damned old and too damned rich to put up with this nonsense. You do know that you can still come down here don’t you?”
I appreciate it but I just honestly don’t feel like it.
“Yeah, and you don’t want Mama knowing you’re down here. At least she never put you through this type of crap…”
“WHAT?!”
My siblings have always felt that since I was the favorite child of my mother (which I was- no question about that- she made no secret whatsoever) that I got preferential treatment. I did. I don’t deny it, but… any kid who is the favorite child of a bipolar mother EARNS any preferential treatment. I’ve had to deal with these things while living in the same house with her and when she really was to broke to afford a dog, woman.
I start railing off some examples for my sister and actually have out the words “Hell, she left a fucking suicide note on my best friend’s door when she found out I was…” and the word gay gets changed with a screeching whiplash creating halt to “dating somebody she didn’t like…”
“Are you dating anybody now?”
I tell her honestly, no I’m not.
“Why not? Can’t you meet anybody? What the hell standards do you have that you can’t meet? How bout that girl used to work with you who kept your dog when you went out of town? She seemed sweet…”
“She is… she’s a wonderful person… I just… uh… is it raining down there…”
"I know somebody down here who’d be good for you. She’s really weird and takes… well, I can’t tell you what prescriptions she takes, but let’s just say that they have to work better for her than they do for Mama… " [actually, our mother who art in Montgomery refuses to take antidepressants because ‘they chaaaange people!’, willfully oblivious that that’s the point] “but she’d be perfect for you… she’s even a lib’arian”
CRINGE! My ultimate semantic pet peeve. Outweighs even “irregardless” and “hisself”. I used to work at a library where the country fried secretary invariably and without exception said “lib’ary” and “lib’arian” and it fucking drove me nuts everytime she said it and you’d be amazed how fucking often you have to say it when you work with fucking lib’arians in a fucking lib’ary… but I let it pass.
“down here and I’ve told her about you. I think you’d be a really good husband to the right person and you need to meet somebody before you’re too old to share your life.”
[HONESTLY]“I agree.”[/HONESTLY]
“Well why don’t you go to church or even if you can’t bring yourself to set foot in a church for whatever reason you have go to someplace and meet you a woman and settle down and have some kids. Hell, I’ll tell you flat out that I need an heir and I’d much rather it be your kids than [our brother’s]…”
[LIE]"I’m just… picky… and…[/LIE] ooh, here’s a great out that will change the subject altogether "[LIE? {depends on which psychological theory you subscribe to}]well frankly, after 38 years of Mama, I just don’t know that I want to get married to anybody. I just don’t know that I could ever be happy in a marriage and so I’ve avoided it. [/LIE?]
It works and the rest of the conversation is Mama bashing that is a helluva lot more comfortable. (I’m embarassed to admit that I have gender-flipped with my sister in describing dates- frankly, I don’t want that battle just yet [and she’s a freaking millionaire, which while I’ve never asked for, needed or received her financial support, always might come in handy:cool: ). Besides, I’m saving it for her birthday.
Abortive attempt at sleep. Phone.
Mama: “Hey… you know that big painting of the beach with the seagulls and all that I have in my computer room? Would you like it.”
[Warily]“uh… no thanks… it wouldn’t really match anything I have…*”
“Okay. That’s too bad. Because it’s a nice painting and I hate to see it just thrown away.”
[silence]
[I am not going to take the bait]
[I am not going to play]
[I must not pick up the bottle of urine with my left hand and I must keep my right hand at a 45 degree angle…]
“How about the driftwood and seashells in the downstairs bathroom?”
Anybody who has a hyper little dog knows this feeling. You’re tired, you’re worn out, you just want to chill, sit in a chair and read or even lie down and watch some TV, you have no energy, but for whatever reason that’s the second your dog wants to play. And he’s jumping all around and you’re trying to ignore him and he’s shaking the ball at you and growling and whining because he wants you to throw it soooo bad but you know that if you throw it it’s just gonna set him off even more and
“Or even that bottle of shells from the Sea of Galilee? Or the pictures from the beach when you were kids?”
and the dog is just going to bring the ball back faster and want you to throw it even harder and from then you want be able to read or sleep because the dog’s going to want to play non-stop until he collapses and you just really don’t feel
“Or that big sanddollar in the kitchen or the crucifix bones?”
like tossing the ball to begin with let alone playing with him and playing keepaway, love the dog though you do. And you just want
"Because… I just hate… to think… of it all in the trash… going to the dump… when once it was so dear to me…
pause
silence
paused silence
major sigh
OH GODDAMNIT YOU WIN! ALRIGHT! I’LL THROW THE FUCKING BALL!
“Why would they be in the trash, Mama?”
“BECAUSE I AM THROWING OUT EVERYTHING THAT REMINDS ME OF THE BEACH! I CAN’T EVEN LOOK AT IT ANYMORE! ALL MY LIFE THE ONLY THING I HAVE EVER WANTED WAS TO LIVE WHERE I COULD SEE THE BEACH AND IT NEVER HAPPENED AND NOW I’M OLD AND THE ONLY THING I HAD TO LOOK FORWARD TO WAS GOING TO THE BEACH FOR THE WEEKEND AND SEEING THE FIREWORKS WITH MY CHILDREN ON WHAT WE ALL KNOW WILL PROBABLY BE MY LAST GOOD FOURTH OF JULY AND THAT’S RUINED! AND NOW I CAN’T SEE ANYTHING WITH THE BEACH WITHOUT JUST WANTING TO HURL MYSELF FROM A ROOF!”
'Kathi’s condo is on the fifth floor…"
“I JUST WANT THEM… GONE… FROM THE HOUSE… THEY MOCK ME! THEY TELL ME I’M A FAILURE WITH THEIR DEPICTIONS OF WHAT I WILL NEVER HAVE! ohhhh… i just can’t…”
She’s right on one thing. The Sonic on the Bypass really is cleaner than the one on Bell Road. And Ollie did seem to lighten her mood a little.
Next up: the Hurricane
I doubt they’d be interested (the market for autobiographical gay angst being flooded), but sure… 
A line from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil comes to mind: This place is like Gone With The Wind on mescaline.
Holy crap.
I’m beginning to think we share the same mother, Sampiro, or maybe they were separated at birth. It really would not surprise me. I mean, they’re both in Alabama, they’re both batshit crazy, and they both play passive-aggressive games.
However, I think my mother is taking the SSRIs/Ecstasy/horse tranquilizers/copious shots of bourbon or whatever it is that her doctor prescribes so she won’t spontaneously combust all her drama on everyone around her. There is hope. My mother went from a psychotic violent paranoid loony to a calm if still somewhat underhanded loony. Maybe yours can, too.
Or maybe you and I should just get together and trade crazy mother stories.