Like Cagney, About His Mother

And a grapefruit in the face is too good for youse.

I come from a long line of women. But that’s kind of general. A long line of women who were mothers. But that’s nothing anyone reading this couldn’t also say.

But then there’s this: My maternal forbears both suffered no fools and lived for the possibility (probability?) that you would prove yourself to be one. I’m not saying this is the reason why — a little genetic sleuthing has revealed that we’re pulling from a bloodline with roots in Nigeria, Jamaica and France — but if there’s a global bar fight somewhere you really couldn’t do much better if you’re looking for the win.

“If you ever lay another hand on me, I’ll kill you while you sleep.” My great-aunt whispered those very words into the ear of her first husband as she placed his dinner plate in front of him after his first, and last, handsy episode. They eventually divorced, a turn of events that can’t have been unwelcome by her erstwhile husband who never for a second doubted the soft-spoken, even-tempered, churchgoing professional she was would have done exactly what she had said.

And the family canon is full of stories like this. And beyond that, at odd points, or maybe the same one, if memory serves, both my grandmother and my mother were strapped with .38 service revolvers. My grandmother, who was a seamstress of some note, decided to close her shop and become a cop. She rose through the ranks with a certain weird distinction: all of the mafioso she had busted fell in love with her.

…[S]he has to ask him about the high-speed car chase, replete with car to car gunplay and pounds of the then-illegal weed in the trunk.

“Oh. That was nothing…”

How do I know? I was once having trouble with a long unpaid debt. It was only $700 but on principle, I was chasing it. The debtors were rude. I told them I was just going to send my grandmother in to collect it for me. They laughed and hung up the phone.

She picked up the phone and 20 minutes later walked through their door with one of the mafioso who she had busted who just wanted to “help”. They got the $700 and when they sent it to me, he had also sent along a stereo since he had heard I was in a band and liked music. It had apparently fallen off of a truck.

She died years later at her kitchen table. From complications connected to diabetes. On her kitchen table was a .22 I had just sold her and a picture of my first daughter. Her boyfriend called me after she had died. He was inconsolable and was making little to no sense outside of repeating over and over, “my heart.” She was buying Victoria’s Secret underwear on the regular still so I guess I understood his pique. He’d not find another like her. Not in this lifetime.

But over and above all of these was the woman I knew best: my mother. Who, with a Master’s degree and a long and healthy career in academia and social work, decided one day to also become a cop. To help? Sure. But this too: “I needed the action.”

Talking to a perp who was flirting with her she was enjoying the back and forth but while parrying pick-up lines she’s reading his report until finally she has to ask him about the high-speed car chase, replete with car to car gunplay and pounds of the then-illegal weed in the trunk.

“Oh. That was nothing, beautiful.”

Yeah, definitely stricter terms of release for him.

But she danced at Avery Fisher Hall. She broke her leg disco rollerskating. When it healed she went back to disco rollerskating. She drove like a race car driver and only cooled out after I was born and one of my first words was “goddamnit,” something she had quite comfortably screamed at other drivers as she drove me to the nanny’s.

She divorced my father because, “what? You’re going to marry the most exciting woman in New York and lock her up?” She married my stepfather. They traveled to South America. They hung bohemian. They watched their sculptor friends chop up a telephone with an axe and then call the phone company from a neighbors to replace it because that’s what the company used to do in the old days. When the phone company showed up and asked what happened they all laughed like hell. I guess the unspoken answer was “life.”

“Don’t go anywhere. With anybody…There was a little boy in my neighborhood when I was growing up and he did…and they cut off his pee pee!”

And through it all I got to bed on time. Got my homework done. She taught me how to read. Tip. Tip meets Mitten. Run Tip, run. She made fun of me when I misspelled or mispronounced words. This rankled as a kid but gave me what I currently count as my career I am sure.

“Don’t go anywhere. With anybody,” she warned about the outside world. “There was a little boy in my neighborhood when I was growing up and he did…and they cut off his pee pee!”

Later we were sitting in the doctor’s office. Waiting for our turn. I was a generally well-behaved kid and we were sitting and talking quietly. She said that she never talked to me like people talk to kids. Always like she was talking to a friend. And we were that especially in a lot of ways: pals.

But our chatting was interrupted by some wild ass kid who had just come into the waiting room. He was uncontrolled and uncontrollable and despite his mother trying to gently urge him to be quiet, or calm. He kept it up. I hated him.

And like G-d had read my mind this kid ended up, as a result of doing some sort of wild arabesque, cracking his head on a chair, and falling to the floor in a flood of tears. I looked at my mother. My mother looked at me. Our eyes were … wide…and electrified…and the moment froze. Right up until I burst out in laughter. Loud and unrelenting.

“Now…now…son,” she tried to correct me. Unconvincingly, at least to me. And before long? She was laughing too, and there we were. Mother and son. Laughing at the misfortune of others. Goddamnit. It didn’t get much better than that.

Happy Mother’s Day Mom. I love you.