Mom

1.

The first movie I’m reputed to have set eyes upon was Psycho, which my par­ents saw at a drive-in when I was barely one. The first movie I remem­ber see­ing a por­tion of was North by Northwest—the por­tion being the one in which Roger Thornhill almost drunk­enly drives “Laura’s Mercedes” over a cliff—also at a drive-in with my par­ents. Part of an early-60s double bill, I guess. The first movie I remem­ber sit­ting all the way through was The Haunting, which my mom asked me to stay up and watch with her dur­ing its net­work tele­vi­sion première—was it 1966, 1967? this is one fact­oid I have found res­ist­ant to my Googling chops—on an even­ing when my dad was work­ing his second job park­ing cars. We were both plenty scared by it. I don’t remem­ber if my mom held my hand or not. Even then though I found it kind of funny that she was ask­ing a not-even ten-year-old boy to help her not get overly spooked by what she had heard was a pretty effect­ive hor­ror movie (and even with com­mer­cials it was pretty potent).

And that was it: I was hooked on images and their syn­chron­iz­a­tion with sound just as hard as the Beatles had hooked me on music. Looking through old pic­tures this week I came across a shot from Christmas 1970—good grief, did my par­ents actu­ally buy my broth­er a drum kit?—and I’m sit­ting there with my hair hold­ing a record album with the curving let­ters “OCKER” the only vis­ible clue to its title, and it took me a minute before I figured out it was the Joe Cocker Mad Dogs And Englishman double LP. My dad mostly liked Chet Baker (well, he’d tell me that, years after we hadn’t shared the same roof) and my mom’s favor­ite was Tony Bennett so, yes, I must have driv­en them crazy, but they were always indulgent—even got me the pic­ture sleeve single of “The Ballad of John And Yoko” when it came out.

When I was a little kid, por­ing through a lib­rary book or the Arts and Leisure sec­tion of the Times, I asked my mother—with no real clue why I should have any expect­a­tion that she would have a ready answer to the question—“Why do you think Jean-Luc Godard wears sunglasses all the time?” And my moth­er answered, “Maybe it’s an affect­a­tion.” And I asked her what “an affect­a­tion” was, and she told me.

My sis­ter and I recall my par­ents going once again to the drive-in to see David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter with the expect­a­tion that my sis­ter and I would be sleep­ing in the fold-down back seat of the family’s Ford Country Squire sta­tion wag­on. But we did not, and my sis­ter recalls my mom telling her to put her head down dur­ing the forest love scene between Sarah Miles and Christopher Jones. I remem­ber no such thing; I just remem­ber the scene—Miles’ rather self-consciously artily-depicted nud­ity amidst all that green, on a gar­gan­tu­an screen framed by a soft warm New Jersey night, and the sil­hou­ettes of my parent’s heads imme­di­ately in front of me.

Lest I give the impres­sion that my par­ents’ drive-in choices were unfail­ingly dis­crim­in­at­ing, I should add that If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium, and Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell are also reas­on­ably vivid memor­ies from that time.

After my par­ents split up, I watched a lot of movies with my mom. Her favor­ite star was Paul Newman; her second favor­ite was Robert Wagner. But she didn’t rate The Towering Inferno par­tic­u­larly high des­pite the fact that “R.J.” and Newman were both in it. We saw Raging Bull togeth­er some time late in its release—I think it was some­thing like my ninth viewing—and that’s not really a com­fort­able movie to sit through with one’s mom but com­ing out of the theat­er with her I felt a shared tacit acknow­ledge­ment of the film’s painstak­ingly accur­ate and pain­ful depic­tion of the sac­red and pro­fane with­in Italian-American work­ing class milieus—we both looked at each oth­er with what would come to be known as the “well, that happened” expres­sion. For all that, my mom still kept a cru­ci­fix not very much unlike the one seen in Jake La Motta’s famili­al home among her effects. (She was born Amelia Teresa Petrosino, and gradu­ated from St. Joseph’s, a Catholic high school in or around Fort Lee.) One time, for lack of any­thing bet­ter to do, we even went to the loc­al mul­ti­plex for pot luck and ended up see­ing Gotcha!, which eli­cited a “what the hell was that” from me; Mom, want­ing to be optim­ist­ic, shrugged that parts of it were kind of cute.

2.

Long before being a loser who lived in his mother’s base­ment was a thing, I was a loser who lived in his mother’s base­ment. As I put it in “Going Through The Motions,” a piece of my writ­ing that appeared in Black Clock last fall: “After my par­ents were divorced in the early 1980s, my moth­er got an apart­ment in West Paterson. The place was a two-story house and the unit my mom ren­ted encom­passed both the ground floor and the base­ment, and it was determ­ined I could have the base­ment for a fee of $250 a month that I would nev­er pay.” The bit was some­what fun­ni­er when my mom was around to read it. There were all sorts of ways in which I was a hard­ship to my mom—even up until the last days of her life, I tell myself, and then con­cerned and kind friends and fam­ily mem­bers pull me back from that—but I do know that she got some sat­is­fac­tion from the fact that dur­ing the time that I spent dick­ing around “hon­ing my craft” or “try­ing to find a voca­tion” or whatever the hell it was I was doing, she was the only per­son who nev­er said to me, “get a job.” Because she really did believe that someday I would make good as a writer. So I roos­ted there, and the little vic­tor­ies star­ted com­ing my way: a piece I sub­mit­ted on spec see­ing print in Musician magazine, a how-the-hell-did-that-happen monthly music column in a girlie mag, and, finally, after what felt to me like a tor­tured bout of argu­ment­at­ive cor­res­pond­ence, an invit­a­tion from Robert Christgau to write a piece for the Village Voice’s Riffs sec­tion. That was it: I knew then that I had it made. I soon heard from anoth­er “jerk from Jersey” (her phrase) who’d got­ten into the Voice, Rosemary Passantino, and after an ini­tial anti­pathy (I found her as humor­less as I’d expec­ted any English Lit grad stu­dent to be, while she thought the bowl­ing shirt I wore on our first in-person meet­ing to be unfor­giv­ably louche) we got to be thick as thieves. Last week RP wrote to me: “I will always remem­ber your mom, happy to have us and not caring a bit that we were way too old to be lying around for hours pre­ten­tiously com­mis­er­at­ing over com­ic books and French philo­sophy in her base­ment!” In fuck­ing deed.

3. 

I did move out even­tu­ally and my mom moved to west­ern Jersey to man­age one of sev­er­al video rent­al stores my uncle owned. One of her reg­u­lar cus­tom­ers was Keith Jarrett. I loaned him, by proxy, a laser disc of Roger Vadim’s Dangerous Liaisons ’60, which he was keen to see because Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers actu­ally appeared in the film. I got to take my mom to see Jarrett’s trio for her birth­day in December of 2013. It was a great show. I also took her to see Yves Montand at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1982—how the hell I pulled that off I have no idea—and Sinatra at one of his Meadowlands shows, not the really bad one thank God but one where he got suf­fi­ciently bored with his mater­i­al that he sang “Love was just a glance away/a warm pair of panties away” or some such thing. Mom rolled her eyes at that but was oth­er­wise largely delighted with the show. I don’t know that she had ever been a bobby-soxer for real but I could see her in the part.

In 1995 or so my work appeared in book form for I think the first time, or so, in the first and only edi­tion of Leonard Maltin’s Film Encyclopedia, which did not become the fran­chise that Leonard’s Home Video Guide did. Here is what I wrote in the copy I gave my mom:

“4÷16÷95

Mom—This will provide you with many amus­ing hours try­ing to fig­ure out which entries I wrote. Here’s a hint: I’d like to get my hands on the edit­or­i­al assist­ant who intro­duced a griev­ous error into the Godard entry (it was Macha Meril who starred in ‘Une Femme Marieé,’ not Anna Karina). Only in the excit­ing world of book pub­lish­ing can you get it right the first time, only to have some intern get it wrong. But that’s my sole com­plaint. Enjoy…

Love, your son, Glenn”

Pretty insuf­fer­able, yes. But my mom was gra­cious enough to be amused. I think my inscrip­tion of her copy of my De Niro book had a little more humil­ity, and def­in­itely more grat­it­ude. I’m also very glad I ded­ic­ated the book to her and to my dad.

4. 

On March 7, I went to the Museum of Modern Art to see a screen­ing of the five-hour director’s cut of Wim Wenders’ Until The End Of The World, which my friend the screen­writer and essay­ist Larry Gross had kind of insisted I dis­cov­er. That Sunday was kind of my first day “off” in quite some time. In early February, my mom had been admit­ted to the hos­pit­al after a faint­ing spell in the Fort Lee apart­ment build­ing into which she had moved the pri­or August. She hadn’t been her­self in a while, and we had some appoint­ments sched­uled to look into the prob­lem; her faint was just two days before a sched­uled date with a doc­tor. Some scary hours ensued as doc­tors tried to fig­ure out what was wrong with her. It happened that she had a benign men­in­gioma. You have nev­er seen any­one so excited and happy to be dia­gnosed with a tumor, ever. Because, for one thing, it meant that she didn’t have demen­tia. Yes, the oper­a­tion to get rid of the tumor was a real bear, and vari­ous com­plic­a­tions were possible/likely. But. This was a hurdle she could see her way to clear­ing. And yes, Schwarzenegger imper­son­a­tions were proffered, and “It’s not brain surgery…oh, wait, it IS brain sur­gery” was uttered more than once.

And Mom came through the oper­a­tion like a champ, as they say. And sud­denly her friends and fam­ily saw how much of her spir­it and per­son­al­ity had been sub­sumed by her con­di­tion, because her spir­it and per­son­al­ity came roar­ing back. My sis­ter was on the phone with my fath­er one after­noon and gave the phone to my mom to say hello, and mom prac­tic­ally roared “Your first wife is still alive!” with a big grin.

I had not been entirely aware that the con­di­tion had been mak­ing it impossible for my mom to read any­thing much bey­ond a res­taur­ant menu. Now  here I was, bring­ing her a Maigret mys­tery by her beloved Simenon, The Late Monsieur Gallet it was, and she was tear­ing through it. I had gone to vis­it her in the hos­pit­al, and then in her rehab facil­ity, most days of the week, and she was always super-solicitous, wor­ry­ing about the weath­er in which my wife Claire and I would be tak­ing the bus, and so on. And when we’d leave her to take the bus back home, I’d roll my eyes when we pulled into the Port Authority and see she was call­ing, to make sure we’d made it back into the city okay

Anyway, I was par­tic­u­larly moved by the Wenders film, because one of its big plot hooks involved William Hurt’s char­ac­ter gath­er­ing images to present, via a new tech­no­logy, to his blind moth­er, played by Jeanne Moreau. Moreau’s por­tray­al of a frail/strong woman for whom a cer­tain veil of con­scious­ness is lif­ted via tech­no­logy and love res­on­ated strongly for obvi­ous reas­ons. I was ter­ribly excited by the gift my mom had received, and look­ing so for­ward to the ways she’d use it, and how her fam­ily and oth­er loved ones would share it with her.

5.

There are, when you come down to it, two kinds of “you can’t make this up” stor­ies: the kind that are just remark­ably absurd and silly, and then the kind you would not want to make up even if you could. The story of my mom’s death falls into the lat­ter cat­egory, I think.

It was March 10, the day she was sched­uled to come out of rehab. I took the bus out to Jersey, car­ry­ing with me a can­vas bag where I had her new dish drain­er and dish pan. I also had some ten­nis balls that I was gonna cut apart and put on the back legs of her walk­er. (It turns out the walk­er they were giv­ing her was suf­fi­ciently snazzed-out that it wouldn’t have needed the upgrade.) On the bus I got a phone call from my aunt. Seemed that my mom had com­plained of chest pains earli­er in the morn­ing, there was some con­cern among the staff as to what it meant. They were going to take her to the hos­pit­al up the block and have her checked out. She’d have to stay anoth­er night in the rehab, at least. Well, okay. So I wouldn’t be help­ing bring her home today; instead I’d be recon­cil­ing her to stay­ing one more night, and going with her to the hos­pit­al for some tests.

Mom wasn’t into it. “How’s your aunt going to get off work tomor­row?” she asked. Well of course she could get off work tomor­row. Don’t worry about it, Mom. For now you should just relax, because we need to take you up the street and get checked out. I left her room and went to speak to the head of the nurs­ing depart­ment. There were some con­cerns about Mom’s hemo­globin count that needed address­ing. Then I needed to make some calls: to my sis­ter, to my aunt. I went back to my mom’s room and the patient with whom she shared a room was out in the hall, in her wheel­chair: “You bet­ter get in there,” she said. My mom was on the floor, hav­ing tripped and fallen, face first, after hav­ing got­ten up from her bed to go to the bath­room. She was bleed­ing from the nose. She was lif­ted up, and sat down into a chair; her blood pres­sure was taken. It was fine. “How do you feel?” “Awful.” Well, that was to be expec­ted. So now she was going to have to be checked out for a broken nose, too, when we got her to the hos­pit­al. But for now we had to lay her down. Once in bed, she com­plained of not being able to breathe. She was hooked up to a small oxy­gen sup­ply. I sat at the side of her bed and held her hand. “I can’t breathe,” she said.

“It’s gonna be okay, mom. You ARE breath­ing. Breathe through your mouth. There.”

I squeezed her hand. Even though she was breath­ing, she clearly felt that she could not. I said to a nurse, “She says she can’t breathe.”

“That’s why we gave her the oxygen.”

“Something else is hap­pen­ing. Get someone in here.”

And then I kept say­ing “It’s gonna be okay, Mom,” and after a little while she exhaled deeply, shut her eyes, rolled a little to the side, and she was gone. And I knew she was gone. Efforts to resus­cit­ate, in the rehab facil­ity and then the hos­pit­al, went on for an hour after that. I’ve con­sul­ted with her neurosur­geons, who did an amaz­ing job with her and are under­stand­ably kind of angry now, and it would appear that what took her was a pul­mon­ary embolism.

6.

My mom was my first love, and she taught me what it meant to be loved. I may have not treated that gift so care­fully as I ought to have, through many too-long stretches of my life, but I nev­er lost it, and I cling to it now ever more fiercely…or at least I try to, or tell myself that I try to, I don’t know. My mom had a hard life—more than one of her friends has told me that in the past week, and frankly in some cases I haven’t been sure how to take the inform­a­tion, not that it’s news to me or anything—but she also had a life full of event and even­tu­ally adven­ture. And she knew that she was loved, and she took a lot of delight in the people around her who gave her that love. You can see, in the pic­ture above, the genu­ine joy she’s exper­i­en­cing as she holds up that mewl­ing jowly infant who was I at six months (as opposed—I might as well beat any­body else to it—to the mewl­ing jowly infant I am today).

I feel kind of lucky that I’m not more of a Loudon Wainwright III adept than I already am, because if his song “Homeless” had been wired into me back when he first sang it, I’d be more of a wreck now than I already am. “When you were alive, I was nev­er alone,” it opens; “some­where in the world, there was always a home.” It goes on: “And I feel like I faked all that I ever did,” oh dear. “They say in the end, your good friends pull you through/but every­one knows, my best friend was you.” I am more for­tu­nate than Loudon here, because I found anoth­er best friend, Claire, who will have been my wife for nine years this com­ing June. God knows I’ve put her through it, but I do think I’ve been able to make her happy some­times, though not as happy as she’s made me. And while it’s nev­er going to be pos­sible for me to truly accept a world that my mom isn’t in, I guess I will someday be able to recog­nize what so many people have been telling me these past few days, which is that I some­how did make her proud, not just in the end, but always.