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It was about this time that my mother decided she was going to learn how to drive. She was almost 50 by now and had waited long enough. “I want to learn how to drive and I want Jimmy to teach me.” My mom’s brother Jimmy Devlin, was Uncle Jimmy to us…little Jimmy had grown into our giant Uncle Jimmy, my first comic influence and the funniest man in the world. Uncle Jimmy! was built like a beer truck and had an ivory pompadour and pink skin, super white eyelashes and eyebrows, and was just this side of a brawny albino. He had big yoked forearms, that were covered in green navy tats and frosted with fine hair that looked like snow. Uncle Jimmy!...who as a teenager, would take cars up into the canyons above Los Angeles, wedge a cinderblock down on the accelerator and jump out…to collect the insurance. Uncle Jimmy!...who was still driving the Chevy Malibu, the butter-yellow Chevy Malibu that their mother had killed herself in on Christmas morning; Fuck it! What better car to teach my mother how to drive in…not to mention, that Uncle Jimmy was still operating an automobile after being diagnosed with Ataxia, which is a neurological disorder, which caused him to lose his motor skills in more ways than one and experience violent unpredictable muscle tremors…subjecting any passengers in the Chevy Malibu to savage bursts of acceleration, homicidal lane changes and brutal, spasmodic braking. We just thought that’s how our cool and lawless Uncle Jimmy drove, so that’s how Mom learned to drive.
It was no surprise then that Mom, after finally getting her license, borrowed my first car, and immediately totaled it. It was a gold Chevy Vega, with a black racing stripe and an aluminum engine block, so you could argue that she had done me a big favor. Mom had executed a halting and lurching left turn just like Uncle Jimmy had taught her, only unfortunately, it was directly in the path of an oncoming Dial-A-Ride filled with terrified young school children. They T-boned my mother on the corner of La Paz Road and Chrisanta Drive during the Christmas season, spinning her around and depositing her on the sidewalk in front of the charming Santa’s Workshop that was erected every December. Mom came within inches of taking out Kris Kringle’s big red mailbox and blasting the wishes of good little girls and boys all over the busy intersection. She had been coming to pick me up from high school, and after waiting for her a while, my friend pulled up and took me to the corner where the accident was. I found my mother unscathed in the back of a paramedic's truck, with an oxygen mask on, holding an unlit cigarette between her trembling fingers and clutching a lighter in her other hand. As I walked up, she took the oxygen off her face and with a Jersey deadpan said: “Don't kill me.”
My car was totaled, but I still drove it. So what if the passenger side door touched my hip? So what if the plastic that now kept the rain out, made my car sound like I was competing in a regatta? So what? Turn the radio up! So what if totally out of the blue, our dad told us that he was going to be getting married again, to our aunt, to his dead brother's wife, so that my Aunt Helen was now going to be my stepmother and all my cousins were now going to be my step brothers and step sister. So what?
So now suddenly, I had 4 cousin-brothers, and a sister-cousin, and an aunt-mom. And instead of 3 of us kids, there were now 8 of us, and our dad was now their dad too, and now he lived in a house, instead of in his office with a pistol and instead of opening Christmas gifts next to a blueprint machine that left us smelling like ammonia, we actually went to celebrate holidays in his home, a home with multiple hot rods in the driveway, tables laid end to end, groaning under the weight of food and where the phrase “loud enough to wake the dead” was born…Holidays at Dad’s were wall to wall, it was raucous! A decibel level one might be subjected to in a major sports arena, now compressed down into a two-story tract home in Northridge, California. One Thanksgiving, I found my father in the garage, smoldering near the recycling bin. I asked him if he was okay and he answered with: “There are so many people…in my God damned KITCHEN right now!”
The holidays at Dad’s always followed the predictable pattern of a feast that devolved into a dessert orgy that inevitably ended in a death match disguised as the board game Trivial Pursuit, a perverse table top tradition seemingly designed to tear at the very fabric of the American family. One year, the very last question that would lead his team to victory, was asked of my father, who, having never attended Sunday school apparently, had no freaking idea whose image adorns The Shroud of Turin, but in his growing frustration at the increasing volume building in the room as the last grains of sand slipped through the tiny hourglass, muttered under his breath, “Jesus Christ” and he, completely confused as to why, was hoisted up in his chair like a pharaoh.
It was around this time that Sheila went off to college, leaving just me and my mom in the condo next to the crooked ditch on the far edge of town. I remember a few things about this time. Mom was taking a “break” from driving, so I drove her around everywhere in the bombed-out Vega. She sat in the backseat because the passenger seat was now home to a large portion of the ride side of the vehicle. She would peek her head around my shoulder and scream over the thundering of the thrashing plastic “We need to stop and buy cigarettes!” A couple of years passed this way.
I remember watching Monday Night Football together, including the night Howard Cosell announced the death of John Lennon live on the air. I remember going out some nights to be with my friends and she always wanted me to feel just a little bad, or a lot, like “Go ahead, go out with your friends, and I hope when you do, while I’m here, home, alone in our living room…that I’m hit by a fuckin’ truck.” Now, as we all got a little older, Lisa, Sheila and I would sometimes wonder aloud exactly how much it would cost to rent a truck.
I remember one night. I was eighteen years old. My mother woke me up from a dead sleep. I could smell a cigarette and Chanel No. 5 as she was shaking me awake. I could also feel that the heat was on oppressively high and all the windows were open, which is how Mom did winter. “Stephen. Stephen…wake up” she whispered. “There's something on the kitchen floor. I need you to wake up and kill it.” So, I woke up and I staggered down the stairs, stumbling over to where the kitchen was and my mom is hanging back, leaning out over the edge of the stair railing motioning “It's over there, it's on the kitchen floor. Kill it.” I'm barely awake, rubbing my eyes and looking at the bare linoleum and I say “Mom, I don't see anything... I mean, whatever was here, it's gone now” and she said “Find it.” It’s at this point that my eye catches something moving slowly along the carpeting over near the door leading into the garage, and because the carpet was dark, I couldn’t tell exactly what it was, so I got down there a little lower, a little closer, and when I got real close, I was met by two little claws and a barbed tail that whipped over the top of this thing. And I say; “Oh! It's a scorpion?” and I suddenly hear Fooosh! like a Whisssh! coming from where my mom used to be, like I expected to look over and see bobby pins hanging in the air like that witch on Bugs Bunny—because my mom was just gone! And I’m thinking, okay, it's a scorpion that got in from the creek somehow, you know, so I go to the pantry and I’m keeping one eye on the scorpion and I'm looking for an empty mayonnaise jar of some sort with a lid to put on it and I hear my mother is now slowly coming down the stairs, so I look around the corner and she leans way out over the railing and very calmly says “It's okay honey…I called the police.” Which I guess is just what you do when you’re from New Jersey and your son won’t kill a scorpion in your kitchen…you call the cops and let them come and shoot it? So, the police came, and one said: “I’ll be damned, it really is a scorpion” but they didn’t kill it, they took that mayonnaise jar that I had found and one officer took his billy club and sort flicks the scorpion inside, while the other cop was looking me up and down in my pajamas, obviously thinking: “Well done, Man of The House”
When it finally came time for me to move out, there wasn’t a fuckin’ truck big enough that should have come and run over my mother, at least in her mind, but she knew it had to be. Two high school friends, Jay and Michael, using explosives packed with Russian Literature and the band Joy Division, had blown a big hole in the side of the suburbs and as they were escaping, looked back and asked me “You coming?” and we all went away to college up the coast in Santa Barbara. Eventually I moved farther north to San Francisco…which I only knew to be the town where your sister socks you in the mouth if you start crying in a fogged-up phone booth, but I was willing to give it a second chance.
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