You Are a Complete Disappointment

by Mike Edison

  Mom was a lot more like my father than she would ever have admitted: He wanted everything to be perfect and turned his back on everything that wasn’t, which was most of the world. Children meant scrapes and bruises and fights and dirt and messes and broken hearts, and he didn’t want to deal with any of it. Neither did Mom. I don’t know where she got the idea that it was all going to be easy, but once she got it in her head that she was a victim of my father’s bullying, she began to take everything personally.

  But my mother was never mean to me, and in her own way, as she got farther and farther away from my father emotionally, she was actually supportive. She had no real understanding of what I did (“Can people really buy your books?”), but she just wanted the best for her kids. “If you ever need anything you can call me,” she would always say, and I think she genuinely thought that I was going to make that call.

  For years she saw my life—no matter what job I had, no matter whom I was dating, no matter where I lived, no matter how happy I was—as a continuous downward slide. Unlike my old man, if I were in jail, she would have bailed me out first and asked questions later. Of course, then I’d have to listen to her click her tongue at me, which is how Jewish mothers signal displeasure to their children. It’s a tribal thing. And then there’s the Sigh of the Martyr (“Why are you doing this to me?”), and thinking about it now, jail would probably be the preferable option. Anyway, I have my lawyer on speed dial in the eventuality that I do get arrested, for whatever (hopefully a good First Amendment case). But anyway, what’s important is that, even with all of the frustration and disappointment, she never once rooted against me.

  She had been coughing a bit, and when she went in to get an X-ray. They found a spot on her lung, so she got on the phone and told her kids, and then everyone she knew. A week later, after a biopsy revealed everyone’s worst fear—Stage IV lung cancer—she was back on the phone, tearfully telling everyone that she was going to beat it.

  In stark contrast with my dad, she started writing mass, open emails to everyone with whom she had ever played tennis or golf, everyone at her country club, detailing her chemotherapy and every detail of her battle. She wanted to make her cancer a group experience.

  At first she fought like a Viking, a real country-club warrior, playing nine holes of golf in the morning and swimming in the afternoon on Monday, eighteen holes on Tuesday, followed by a dinner party, and on and on. It all left her exhausted, but clearly she had something to prove. “I’m so tired,” she would tell me when she called me at night to check in, “but we’re gonna beat this thing.”

  I told her that even for someone in tip-top shape, it would be pretty normal to be exhausted after days like that, especially in the wilting Florida heat. It was an odd strain of martyrdom—not the “being sick” part, but the part where you push yourself to limits any healthy person would find draining and then complain at the end of the day, “I’m so tired.” She had a long history of not being her own best friend.

  It didn’t take terribly long for the eighteen-hole days to stop and the swimming to drop off, with a few long walks being the last refuge for a woman who was once a terrific athlete. She had been a vicious tennis player, often winning club and town championships, and she was a natural, gifted golfer. That was her entire life, aside from her grandchildren, whom she doted on as much as they would tolerate. She didn’t celebrate Elton John or meatball pizza or anything like that. She never, as far as I know, thought about art or God. There was not a lot of caprice or laughter in her life.

  Down in Florida, where as a suburban Jewish-mom-turned-golf-course-grandma it was her genetic imperative to die, she lived in a gated community with a warren of like-minded northern refugees, surrounding a clubhouse that provided a small retreat from the pawnshops, bail bondsmen, closed abortion clinics, and blacked-out windows of what I presumed to be meth labs that dotted the Florida landscape ad infinitum. It was like The Flintstones, where the background kept repeating itself—rock, bigger rock, cactus, rock, bigger rock, cactus, rock, etc.—except in Florida the background was Denny’s®, pawnshop, meth lab… . And once you got inside the gates of “The Oasis West,” or whatever precious name they gave her prefab community, the monotony continued. Everything—the houses, the cars, the people—looked exactly the same. It felt like the set of a movie about a suburb about to be attacked by space aliens. Oddly, it wasn’t all that different from where my father lived in Arizona. His was just the pricier terra-cotta version, carved out of the desert rather than a swamp, and it was called some sort of “Ranch,” which was as perfectly preposterous as my mother’s place being called an “Oasis,” because calling something “something” certainly didn’t make it that thing.

  It’s probably no wonder that for years I visited her only sporadically, even though for most of the year, when she wasn’t wintering in Florida, we lived just a short train ride away from each other—me in Manhattan, she in New Jersey.

  It’s terrible, I know. Taking a thirty-five-minute ride to see my mom seemed like a major schlep, but when I was in high school I never thought twice about getting on that same train in the other direction to go to the city to score a Muddy Waters record. Then again, Muddy Waters never yelled at me. Muddy Waters never called me fat. Muddy Waters never clicked his tongue and talked to me through his teeth.

  When I got older and got over myself, I would visit her as often as she liked, because if there were a chance it would make her happy, who was I to deny her that joy? And it wasn’t really that hard to make the trip, as long as I didn’t have to go to her house, which was basically one giant white sofa that no one could sit on for fear that they might get it dirty and then get yelled at.

  So I’d take the train down to see her, and she’d pick me up at the station and drive us over to the nearest shopping mall and make a grand production of buying me a new shirt, the one activity that we had ever successfully shared that lasted more than a few minutes before one or both of us lost our patience. I mean, you couldn’t eat lunch with her—she was weight-obsessed and always dieting. If you went to the food court in the mall with her, there was one allowable choice: salad. I once made an error on the play by ordering a turkey sandwich, and she made me get rid of the bread. I remember the time I made the mistake of going to her house for Thanksgiving—my brothers were going, and she insisted on seeing us all together. She leaned over my plate and, scolding me like a toddler, put back some of the turkey I had just served myself, pushed the gravy away from me, and with a dirty look told me, “You don’t need any potatoes.” And then she shut down dinner before dessert, because “You certainly don’t need any pie, either.”

  I tried to escape, going out to the backyard with my brothers to drink more and kvetch, but she followed, and after a short round of tongue clicking she started in with, “When are you going to settle down, Michael?” She took it very personally that I wasn’t married and hadn’t spawned any grandchildren for her.

  But you don’t get to be that much of a harpy without some blowback, and so I ribbed her a little bit. “C’mon, Mom, tell me the truth—which would you rather: if I came home with a nice Jewish boy, or a nice black girl?”

  “Don’t start with me, Michael,” she growled, incisors clenched.

  Going shirt shopping with her was a lot more pleasant, a sort of micro-economic jihad. You would have marveled at the way she worked a scattergun’s worth of coupons secreted in her Prada bag to create new discounts for items already on sale, with mathematical combinations and permutations that no one in the history of department stores had ever imagined. Hers was a gorgeous, Jewy, calculus kung fu that conjured images of an ancient Chinese man whipping beads across an abacus with a long, jeweled fingernail. Watching her work, you knew you were in the presence of a master—someone who was clearly the best at what they did, like Michael Jordan or Jimi Hendrix. She was the Garry Kasparov of coupons. Her technique astonished even the wizened old ladies at the cash register who thought they had seen it all, but who
were so dazzled by this blizzard of next-level mall-math that they were practically giving her money for a shirt originally marked sixty-five dollars. Come to think of it, she was probably the one who put Gimbels out of business.

  But without any sort of retail magic to keep us on the straight and narrow, visiting her in Florida became an echo chamber for everything that was wrong about me for the last forty-plus years. Brother No. 1 had the same experience when he went to visit her by himself. Mostly he had to listen to her moan for twenty-four hours as she guilted him for not visiting more with his kids, and when you are in a small house with a cancer patient, and outside it is 110 degrees and 90 percent humidity, you really don’t have much of a choice but to suck it up. Which is okay, because we weren’t there on vacation, we were there to try and cheer up our mom. And we were on our best behavior. But that didn’t mean we had to be miserable, too, did it?

  When he got back home, he called me and we compared notes and decided to do the next visit together, since then at least we’d have each other to talk to. And anyway, my mother always said that she loved it when her children spent time together—it made her feel like we were “more of a family.” And so we coordinated planes from different cities to meet in the West Palm Beach airport and show up bright and shiny and happy, together.

  The night we arrived, my brother and I, as instructed, went to get take-out food for dinner. We took her car and on the way stopped at a liquor store to get some wine that we thought might pair well with the bucket of veal parmigiana and spaghetti that her husband insisted we get at “New York Style Italian Restaurant.”

  No kidding, that was the actual name of the place, “New York Style Italian Restaurant”—and you can be quite sure, anywhere in the world, that the more a restaurant claims to be “New York style,” the less it will be. Some people will never figure out the difference between spaghetti with marinara sauce and egg noodles with ketchup. Just ask Henry Hill.

  On the way back, we realized that if we tried to bring two bottles of wine into the house, we were going to get yelled at. As it was, we got yelled at for the first bottle:

  MOM: How much did you spend on that?

  BROTHER (KAYFABE): Twelve dollars.

  MOM (ANGRY, CLICKING TONGUE): If that’s the way you want to waste your money, go ahead…

  At first we were going to leave the second bottle in the car and retrieve it later, but I saw that quickly backfiring, like some harebrained scheme on The Brady Bunch or I Love Lucy. Either she was going to tell her husband to move the car and he’d find it, or we’d get locked out somehow and have to break in, so we decided to hide the wine in the bushes, which was perfectly ridiculous because never mind my own peregrinations, my brother is the managing director of a large financial institution and not only should he not be getting the stink-eye for buying a bottle of (kayfabe) twelve-dollar wine, neither should he have any business hiding a bottle of Italian red behind the azaleas—especially on a hundred-degree day. But such was the power of my mother’s mojo. Later that night, we sneaked out and drank it on the golf course behind her house, proving once and for all that you can take the boys out of New Jersey, but you can’t take the New Jersey out of the boys.

  The next day we got yelled at for what I’m not sure, but the new mandate was that she would only permit her children to visit her one at a time. “I can’t handle you boys together,” she declared, and we both left feeling like our visit had made everyone involved miserable.

  The next time out, I got smart and took my new girlfriend—and lo and behold, a mitzvah happened.

  The first thing the new girlfriend (also a bombshell of a lawyer with artistic inclinations, you’d think I would have learned my lesson) did was turn off the television in my mom’s room that had been bleating with the acid tumult of Fox News, a cable television station dedicated to fear (Immigrants! Disease! Terrorism!) and the right-wing fetish for people yelling at one another. “You can’t heal with all of this anger in the room,” the new girlfriend told her, and she made the screaming heads on the television disappear with a click of the remote.

  And then she did real magic.

  “I love Michael, and I came here to get your blessing,” she told my mom. “I am going to love him and make him happy.” And then she gave Mom a big squishy hug, and I swear they glowed—I took a picture of them with my phone and you could actually see the halo-like aura. It was a real moment. Beatific, I believe, is the word. And then I gave Mom a hug, and it was quite mushy all around. Everyone was crying by now: me, the new girlfriend, and Mom, who was melting like a Popsicle® right before our eyes.

  IS THERE ANY GREATER BLESSING than to bring another person joy? Especially someone who is dying. This was the greatest gift of all.

  My mother had finally let me make her happy. Never before had I seen her so accepting of love without judgment. I know it was the cancer, and the creeping finality of her situation, but the new girlfriend melted her way through all of that noise with real love and sunshine, and all of a sudden Mom was looking at me a lot differently.

  And beyond finding this new acceptance, she took a radical turn. For a moment, at least, she became both softer and more self-aware than I had ever seen her. It said a boatload when she told the new girlfriend that I got a raw deal growing up, that I was treated much differently than my brothers were, and that she felt bad about it all. “It shouldn’t have been like that,” she said, and she was sorry. Sorry! She didn’t miss the opportunity to ring up the old man for any number of high crimes and misdemeanors (“his father was a cheap asshole”), but to completely let go of her anger would have been a few standard deviations, at least, away from her conditioned behavior of the last thirty-plus years. No one held on to anger like my mom did.

  But this was good. She didn’t say any of it to me—not exactly. She had to work through a third-party broker, namely the new girlfriend, but it cleared the path for us. From there straight through to the end of our earthly relationship, we had love—love without shpilkes! I think she figured I needed someone to take care of me, because obviously I wasn’t capable of it myself, and finally, she didn’t have to worry. The new girlfriend seemed sane. Maybe this was the end of all that playing in bands and writing of books.

  “I’m so glad you are finally settling down,” she wept, holding the new girlfriend’s hand. But what she never got was that there was never going to be any settling, and there was definitely no down.

  ABOUT THAT IRONY, I haven’t forgotten.

  While I was at Mom’s house with the new girlfriend, I called my brothers and left messages saying that against all odds we were having a great visit. A little later Brother No. 2 called Mom and said, “Hey, I heard Michael made your day!” And Mom came back at him with, “MY DAY??? HE MADE MY LIFE!!! I AM SOOOOOOO HAPPY!!!!” I think they heard her in Havana.

  Ten minutes later, Brother No. 1 calls me and says, “What the fuck? Your brother and I finished college, got good jobs, and married Jewish girls… and you show up in the bottom of the ninth, unemployed, with a shiksa girlfriend, and you’re the one she’s happy with?”

  It’s true: No one saw that coming. Sometimes the long shot comes in.

  AFTER THAT VISIT, the new girlfriend and I went on a beach vacation together, and I emailed Mom photos every day. We had fun, glamming up our selfies to look like movie stars, with our sunglasses and Panama hats—but no cocktails, because I knew she wouldn’t approve of that. Mom couldn’t get enough. She responded to every ridiculous photo and my stupid captions with great enthusiasm—“She’s so beautiful, I am so happy for you!”—until she could no longer sit up to type, and the messages stopped.

  Her home health-care aide told us she wasn’t going to open her eyes again. The morphine drip had taken her into a quiet, faraway place. But she was able to listen, so we called her every morning and afternoon to tell her that we loved her, all the while trying to mute our crying, because let me tell you, that is one tough fucking call to make, telling your unconsciou
s mother that you love her through a speakerphone.

  The nurse usually told us, “She heard you, she squeezed my hand.”

  And then that, too, stopped, and she was gone.

  She was so small and frail when she died. The cancer just ate at her. It probably wouldn’t have hurt her to have eaten some of that veal parmigiana, but by then it was too late.

  For a while she had been going to her club to play cards with the ladies wearing a wig, after the chemo knocked the hair off her head, but at some point she just started going out without it. Finally she had found enough brass to say, “Look, this is who I am, and I know it’s not perfect, but if I can deal with it, then so can you.” I told her, “Hey, I lost my hair a long time before you did, and I’m still rocking.” That may have been the first joke of mine she ever laughed at.

  I WROTE MOM’S OBITUARY for her local newspaper and eulogized her with all the might I could muster, in front of what had to be considered a pretty good crowd. I think about two hundred people came to her funeral—more than have come to any of my gigs in a while.

  As I’ve said, I always strive to be a mensch, but I also strive to be honest. And I promise you that giving a speech leaning over the box your dead mother is in is no picnic. Fortunately, somehow, I was reminded of the cocaine penis. I always felt like that was our dirty little secret, unspoken, but something we had shared on another plane of consciousness, and it forced me to remember that no matter her shortcomings, my mom was human, and an adult, and she dealt with all sorts of weird shit, the same as we all do. I know, it’s just awful—my poor mother just died of cancer, and I’ve got this scene of erections and disco dust dancing through my head—but privately it made me laugh and kept me from blubbering through the eulogy. The cocaine penis kept me strong.