mom, out of nowhere

Every so often, a particular word or phrase, something that would not normally bother me, becomes as irritating as a credit card robocall. This week’s winner is that old euphemism for dying, when someone says “I lost my mom this week.”

My mom died in 1984, but I most assuredly didn’t lose her. In fact, I’ve felt her presence a lot lately. It’s not the anniversary of her death, or her birthday, or some other significant time that invites her back. She just seems to show up.

So today, for no particular reason, Mom shows up. I’m at my desk ready to write my next book, and out of nowhere I hear “Turn on a light. You’re gonna ruin your eyes.”

I think it’s funny how moms can make such huge leaps from action to consequence. I can’t count the number of times my mom told me that something I was doing would, inexorably, lead to me breaking my neck. “Don’t walk out there without shoes—you’ll fall and break your neck.” “Stop running in the house—you’re gonna trip and break your neck.” “Get off that fence, you’re gonna break your neck!”

Really, mom? Do broken necks run in the family? Are our neighborhood’s lawns littered with the sprawled, misshapen bodies of kids with broken necks? I’m just saying, there have to have been a few times when a kid ran in the house and nothing bad happened. Another one I never understood was “Put on a shirt—you’re making me cold.” And I would dutifully put on a shirt. And that’s the kinda Bizarro World logic that ALWAYS worked with me! Never once did I say, “That’s impossible, Mom. What I’m wearing doesn’t change the temperature!”

With apologies to my more sensitive readers, my mom was a ‘broad,’ in the best sense of the word. You had to work past quite a few layers of gruff to get to the woman who baked sixty dozen cookies for family and friends every Christmas. I truly believe I inherited my love of New York from her: out of Astoria, Queens, working at the Bulova Watch factory at fifteen to support her family, my mom was the genuine article—a New Yorker.

And tough? Until she quit to devote her time to raising me, she was what is sometimes called a Licensed Vocational Nurse. She explained her job description this way: she did the work the doctors felt they were too important to do, and that the RNs didn’t have time to do. If someone from the psych ward broke his restraints and ran naked out of the hospital, she was the one who would tackle him. Great gig.

She wasn’t wild about the whole showbiz thing. But the only career advice I remember getting from her was “I don’t care if you want to be a ditchdigger, as long as you’re the best damn ditchdigger you can be.” Again with the no-middle-ground thing, mom. Just because I don’t want to be a doctor, doesn’t mean the only other option for me is working next to people in orange jumpsuits fulfilling their community service by the side of the freeway!

It’s not like Mom didn’t think I had talent; in fact, she was the biggest booster of my writing aspirations, starting with my first full-length story, written when I was in fourth grade, “The Adventures of Pat P. Pencil.” But performing? I remember her saying, “I just don’t want you to end up working in the chorus your whole life not making any money.” Sometimes I really hate how smart Mom was.

My mother had a bit of a temper. And we fought a lot. She loved saying ‘dammit!’ between drags of her odd-looking More cigarettes (brown paper, exotically thin and long). Yet I don’t think I ever saw her look as crestfallen as she did the first time she heard me swear back. The only other time I remember really feeling her disappointment was the first time I came home in the wee small hours. And she waited up for me.

I closed the grill at the McDonald’s and decided go with a group of kids to a party after work. Now understand, part of Mom’s reaction was due to the fact that I had never been the kind of teenager that did…anything. My only social life was the marching band, and the only time I had been drunk was at a family wedding when my uncle (her brother) kept pouring me Crown Royal and Coke so I could show I was a man at fourteen. Quick—spot the dysfunctional person in this picture!

So, I get to our house around 4AM, and discovered an important law of physics. The more quietly you attempt to turn a key in a lock, the more noise you will make. I get inside, there’s Mom in a bathrobe, and all she says is, “Good night.” But TO THIS DAY I remember the waves of disappointment hitting me, and me getting sucked into a riptide of let-down.

She wouldn’t have been upset by the fact that I’d been drinking, although she was a tee-totaller. Mom only drank on New Year’s Eve. Three vodka stingers. But in a classic example of mom-think, the first time I asked if I could go to a party, that afternoon, when I came home from school, I saw on the kitchen table three bottles of booze. Mom’s reasoning? If you’re gonna drink tonight, you can have as much as you want…here. With Mom watching. Yeah, that’ll be fun. Needless to say, I didn’t go to the party.

I think my mom missed her calling. She should have been in a position of power, because she could have solved a lot of world problems, just by being herself. The only political comment I remember from her was her take on the crisis in Northern Ireland. To which she suggested: “The Pope should just excommunicate all the Catholics who keep fighting.” And maybe the world needs some of my mom’s approach today.

When my cousin and I fought over an Etch-A-Sketch, my mom’s solution was to take it away from both of us. “Now neither of yous get to play with it.” Imagine my mom as a special envoy to the Middle East. She would say “Alright…you Israelis and Palestinians can’t work out a way to play without fighting? Now none of you get to have Gaza. How does that suit ya?”

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i must make a list

I’ve never been a particularly linear thinker. My mind has never worked that way. And, I probably have ADD. This is a challenge if I’m writing, because when people read something, they usually expect it to be in some sort of order. But frankly, sometimes I just have a whole bunch of randomness. I’ve got ideas coming out of my ass (which, admittedly, is a weird way to write), but stringing them together and having some sort of through line—

So, once a week or so, I end up with a basket full of disconnected thoughts that I want to fling at the screen. While I’d love to become known as the Jackson Pollack of comedy writing, you damned readers seem to want a structure. So I need to do the writer’s work of shaping, and connecting, and focusing. Cool–Hulu is running the first episode of “Fringe.”

Now, I try to avoid lists, for several reasons:

  1. they’re limiting
  2. they’re overdone
  3. they’re too easy
  4. I get bored making lists
  5. I could get confused and accidentally include items from an entirely different list
  6. eggs

Besides, after a certain number of list items readers start to become annoyed and think the writer just doesn’t know how to compose a paragraph so they move on to another piece and even an ironic self-referential run-on sentence won’t get them to stay.

At a time like this, I usually fall back on that old standby, ‘things that irritate me.’ The danger with that is if you only list one or two things that irritate you, readers get to the end and think “Sure seemed like there was gonna be more to that.” And, if you list too many things that irritate you, you turn into the print version of my eighty-year old uncle. Or Andy Rooney. Seriously, how many years has he been bitching at the end of “60 Minutes”? You’d think he’d eventually run out of things that bother him. You know, since I brought it up, there are a couple of things…well, these things don’t bother me as much a they baffle me.

Gadgets Which Combine Things That Were Perfectly Good By Themselves

You’ll find this kind of gadget in your Sharper Image, your Hammacher-Schlemmer, or the Skymall catalog you look at instead of listening to the flight attendant’s safety instructions (if they ever change the protocol for a plane crash, a lot of people are gonna be screwed, because nobody pays attention). For example, it looks like a ballpoint pen, but the ad tells you that if you think of something important, you can click the pen and record a thirty-second voice message to yourself. Or, and I’m thinking way outside the box here, you’re holding a pen—you could write it down! Obviously if you have a pen, you had the intention of writing something, so go the extra step and carry a notepad. These are sometimes advertised as being ‘stealth’ recorders, but really, isn’t jotting a note down on a scrap of paper more stealthy than…talking to your pen

People Who, After I Leave A Voice Message, Call Me Back Without Listening To The Message

“Yeah, Michael—I see that you called? What’s up?” Forget for a moment that I might have wanted to JUST leave you a message and the message didn’t need any conversation (“Don’t forget to bring the fifty bucks for the hookers” is pretty self-explanatory).

There’s also the possibility I left a message saying “Yeah, Matt—listen, some Honduran guerillas are holding me hostage…they’ve got a manifesto…it’s a whole big thing…anyway they’ve got me wired to some explosives which will detonate if my phone rings, so no need to call me back.”

What baffles me is this. Why you would look at your phone, see that I called and that you have a voice mail, and not use the very same phone your holding TO FIND OUT WHAT’S UP? See, voicemail can work like a handy record of why people called you! Otherwise you might as well get rid of your phone, go back to 1985 and get a pager. You can put it in the pocket of your Members Only jacket. Using your phone to just see who called is like getting a laptop just so you can use the calculator on it.

Lest you think these are the ONLY two things I don’t understand in the world, rest assured I also don’t get

  • the success of “Two and a Half Men”
  • football in a domed stadium
  • snuggies
  • pub crawls
  • Snuggie pub crawls
  • drinking games, as opposed to just drinking
  • why Scientology gets tax-exempt status despite the fact that it’s founder actually acknowledged that ‘the best way to make a million dollars is to start a religion”
  • eggplant
  • most of what airs on Cartoon Network after about 1 AM
  • return library books

Well, I feel better now. And I feel productive. I’ll try to write something else tomorrow, or at least I’ll make a list of things I should write.

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9.11.01–a comedian’s take

It was a couple of weeks after my friend Kevin had called me and said “Turn on the TV—we’re under attack.” Now, I’m not a morning person, so my first instinct was to hang up. But then I started to assemble the words into some sort of sense—we’re…under…attack.

I then spent the better part of the day staring at my laptop. I was so overwhelmed, I’m not even sure I felt sad for the first hour or so. There wasn’t any room in my skull for sad. My head was too busy saying “what the fuck” on some sort of endless tape loop for it to admit any other feelings. I watched footage of the second plane (and that was really the one that scared us, because the first one, we all prayed, was just a freak accident)…

I watched that footage hundreds of times on September 11th. I realize now that I kept watching it to numb myself to it. Maybe if I watched it enough, I would be able to process it –react to it—and then put it in a box and on a shelf with other things I just watched on TV. (By the way, at this point, I’m sure you’re wondering, “When does the comedy start? I mean, the guy calls himself ‘Mister Comedy,’ fer chrissake.” )

Listen, I was three when JFK was shot. I was eight when we lost Dr. King. I only vaguely remember shots of balconies and hooded gunmen in Munich in 1972. But this. I knew when the second plane hit that this would be the defining moment of my generation. I think if your country is attacked when you’re twenty…well, you’re invincible when your twenty. But I think when your country’s attacked and you’re forty-one, you have more of a feeling of…ownership of the place.

I realized that from March 30, 1960 through September 10th, 2001, I had not felt patriotism. I had, to be sure, recited the Pledge of Allegiance, sung the National Anthem, and even, in fourth grade, constructed a map of the United States out of salt dough. But until about 9:15 on that morning, I didn’t really feel like I was a part of an ‘us.’

That’s also when I truly fell in love with New York. When I saw news reports of New Yorkers lining up for miles to donate blood, I wanted to move there. I’m from earthquake country, and went through the Northridge quake in ’92, and I don’t remember anything like the sense of community I witnessed from three thousand miles away. (I’m not saying that all Angelenos are selfish, craven, career-driven barnacles on an apocalyptic ship…I’m just sayin’…)

So…I wrote this piece about two weeks after the towers fell, and I think it’s a fair representation of what comedians dealt with in the aftermath of 9/11.

Everyone who works as a comedian (admittedly an oxymoron to begin with) had the same thought on September 11th–“I’m gonna have to get a real job–nothing’s ever going to be funny again!!!”

So here’s the deal. Humor is healing. It is what we do when we can’t wrap our brains around really bad things. It’s a wonderful form of collective denial that’s been around since the first really bad thing happened. Though there are no records of this, I’m pretty sure that there were people doing Pompeii jokes after the volcano hit (“Hey gang–real estate tip–next time you buy property, remember these four words–IS THE VOLCANO ACTIVE?”

It’s like that Star  Trek episode where the scary alien energy presence thingie was eventually defeated because the crew of the Enterprise laughed at it. OK, it’s not a lot like that, but you get my point. Or maybe you don’t.

Anyway, the bottom line is, I don’t know any comic who thinks three thousand dead people is funny. But for those of us still here, we have to joke–because if we tried to understand the level of evil we’re talking about here, our heads would explode.

As much of a lefty as I am, I actually feel sorry for George W. (In my defense, at the time I didn’t realize he would lead us into a misguided war as the puppet of some truly evil motherfuckers–I just thought he was stupid.) I mean, he just got the job–hell, he’s probably still figuring out where all the bathrooms are. “Hey–I wonder where this leads…” “Uh, Mr. President, you have a briefing in an hour…Mr. President? Oh shit–would somebody please find W. and point him toward the press room?”

The most telling video clip is the one where Bush was in a classroom being told about the attack. Rule of thumb: any time a guy in a dark suit whispers to the President of the United States, something bad has happened. And thank God the smirk is gone. W. hasn’t smirked since September 11th. Smirking is, I think, a bad thing for a president to do. Credibility-wise.

Saddam Hussein offered to help the United States–if we asked. OK, guy–let’s assume we, as a nation, forgot about the whole accessory-to-terrorism,  biological-warfare-capable, burning-our-presidents-in-effigy-because-we’re–the-Great-Satan thing. How exactly, could you help us? “Mr. President, Hussein sent that shipment of rocks and sand we need…”(Again–my bad. I was naive and bought into the whole ‘biological-weapons-capable’ deal.)

I’m uncomfortable with the fact that, judging by who I saw on the street that night,  the largest number of American flags seem to have been purchased by a group I call ‘tattoo patriots’–and I’m not sure I feel safe with a front line of rednecks and trailer trash defending me. I mean, I just don’t like it that the most vocal people seem to be the type of guys that think  “Hell, me and a couple of buddies ought to just go over there and kick some ass.” It just doesn’t seem the time for rational dialogue right now…

But once again, the true heroes in this national crisis have been the rock stars who, instead of giving some of their gazillions of dollars to the victims of the attack, chose to–sing. But the thing about September 11th that made it unique amongst the challenges we’ve faced, it that nobody knew how they were supposed to react.

The most unfortunate choice of words in the first two weeks–the announcer for a New York Mets I watched who, after a game-winning home run, said “Shea Stadium has just exploded!”. Imagine some poor working-stiff bastard, just wants to hear a little of the ball game, take his mind off the tragedy, and right when he turns on the radio he hears that.

Actually,  think we should all cut Bush a little slack (in retrospect, I take that line back). I’m serious–we’ve all gotten a new job and then a couple months in realized we’re not quite sure we can handle it–you know, they train you at Starbucks and then all of a sudden they start selling some new kind of coffee, and there’s a huge line, and you’re not sure what button to push on the register, and you panic, and the assistant manager tells you don’t worry, just go clean the tables.

Which is sort of what W. probably went through— “Um…guys…nobody told  me what to do if the bad guys CRASH OUR PLANES INTO OUR BUILDINGS!!!” He’s frantically flipping through The Presidency for Dummies–meanwhile I imagine Cheney being a total jerk– “OK ,Mr. President–you need to call the president of   Pakistan—–and his name would be…?” “C’mon Dick–stop messin’ with me–it’s–I know it starts with an M…”

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