700 Sundays (9 page)

“Are you mad at me? Because it was Joe’s father. He was there. Billy, that’s all I said. Joe, there’s your father. I didn’t mean to start nothing.”

I said, “Harvey, I’m not mad at you.” He didn’t seem to hear me.

“Billy, you know, I feel so bad about this. I see you in the movies now and TV. It’s so great to see. I’m really—I’m proud of you, man. You’re really doing it. Every time you’re on TV, my friends are going, ‘Hey, Harvey, Billy’s on. He’s your friend, right?’ I go, ‘No. He’s mad at me.’”

“Harvey, listen to me. I’m not mad at you. I never was. It was my problem.”

“You’re not mad at me?”

“No,” I said.

He looked at me with wonder, a huge sense of relief radiating out of his thirty-seven-year-old face, and then suddenly, he snapped . . .

“Fuck you then! For twenty years I thought you were mad at me and you’re not mad at me? Pick up a goddamn phone! Let me off the fucking hook! And you know what else? You don’t look so fucking Mah-velous! Fuck you!”

After the reunion, everybody came back over to the house, just like the old days. And my mother cooked for everybody, just like the old days. All of these friends, who had come into this house as young kids to listen to
The 2,000 Year Old Man
album or to watch a Yankee game or to listen to a great jazz album, were back, only now they were middle-aged people, showing my mother pictures of their kids. They were just as happy to see her as they were to see me. She even remembered their nicknames.

One of my friends is the head of medicine at a very big hospital in Southern California. He lectures around the world on these breakthroughs that he’s making in oncology. He’s a genius, and a very important man. When my mom heard what he was doing, she said, “Stinky, that’s fantastic.” We all laughed so hard. The living room was alive again.

So many stories in that house . . . so many stories. We grew up there. We measured our heights on the side of the den door in pencil every six months. We ate great food there. We laughed there . . . We made people laugh there. We were the Nairobi Trio there. We watched Sid Caesar there. I saw the Beatles there. We were Yankees there . . . We fell in love there. We brought our own kids there to get Mom’s recipes . . . We mourned there. It was our house . . . So many stories.

CHAPTER 12

T
he last story would start on Halloween night of 2001. Once again, the entire country had the otherness. Our family was still reeling from the loss of Uncle Milt in late July, and Uncle Berns was having a very difficult time. He had fallen ill at Jenny’s wedding the previous September, and Janice and I spent many months in New York, supervising his care. He was having trouble walking, and he had many other serious problems. I wouldn’t let anything happen to him. He became my eighty-seven-year-old son. On September 4, of 2001, exhausted, we finally moved him and my Aunt Deborah into a brand-new assisted-living facility, which was just two blocks from the World Trade Center. Only a high school football field separated them.

A week later, the world changed. We were back in Los Angeles, paralyzed with fear, not only for him, but also for our younger daughter, Lindsay, who was living in New York. We were on the phone with Berns, watching the television coverage as the second tower fell. The phone went dead. I screamed a sound that had never come out of my mouth before. Berns was in a wheelchair, his legs had failed him months before, and I couldn’t help feeling that the towers had fallen on his building.

Lindsay was living in the East Village, and watched the towers fall from the roof of her building. She had the same terrifying thoughts we had: Berns is there!

The only way we could communicate was to instant-message on our computers. She wrote, “I have to get to Uncle Berns,” and the sweet-sounding tone went off, making the whole thing even more surreal . . .

I wrote back, “Stay where you are. We don’t know what this is. There is another plane in the air.”

Lindsay finally got through to the front desk of Berns’s building and found out that the police and firemen had evacuated all the senior residents, and that they were safe.

The events of the day, and the terrible days after, were just overwhelming, emotionally, physically, spiritually. We knew our world would never be the same. A few weeks after that, one of our closest friends, Dick Schaap, the sports journalist, became terminally ill from complications following hip surgery. It was a dark time for us, the shadows were everywhere.

But on this Halloween night, the ghosts and goblins were just kids on the street as I passed them on my way to Game Four of the World Series. That was an odd Series, the Diamondbacks versus the Yankees. It was the only World Series that the country actually wanted the Yankees to win, just so something good would happen to our city after what had happened to us all a month and a half earlier. I was getting onto the West Side Highway just seconds from Ground Zero, near where I live now, and my cell phone went off. It was my brother Joel.

“Billy, listen. We have a big problem. Mom had a stroke.”

“What?”

“I found her in the living room. The doctor said she’s going to make a complete recovery, but it’s bad. She’s really confused. We’re at the Long Beach Hospital Emergency Room so get here as soon as you can. All right? See you here. Bye.”

Stunned by the suddenness and the fear of it all, we drove the hour and a half out to Long Beach. We got there as fast as we could. I met with the doctor. He said, Yes, indeed. She had had a stroke, but if you’re going to have a stroke, this is the one you want to have. What the hell does that mean?

He showed me her X-rays. I saw the villain. He explained, as he pointed to the bleed, that it was in a very safe position in her brain. She would make a full recovery—“great”—but her left arm has been weakened badly but he thought it would come back—“great”—she’s very confused right now, and that she’s over there. He pointed to where she was, a male nurse attending her.

I saw her from the distance. Her left arm had been weakened to the point where it was hanging limply, but she knew that we would be coming. In the first aftermath of the stroke, she started to check out her body to see what this “opponent” had done to her. She saw that the arm was weak. She then took the sheet, and put it in her bad hand and held it as best she could. She evened the sheet off around her waist, so that when we saw her for the first time, we wouldn’t know she had a problem. She was protecting us. When I realized what she was doing I said to myself, God, she’s great.

“Mom . . . Mom, I’m here now. Janice is here. Rip is flying in. Joel’s here. Everything’s going to be great, Mom. I spoke to your doctor, he said you’re going to make a complete recovery. Isn’t that wonderful news?”

She looked at me with very confused eyes. I studied her face. I’d never thought of my mom as old. Even though she was in her eighties, her spirit was always so young. She looked beat up now, worn out, but still so valiant in her struggle to overturn what had just been done to her. She looked like she wanted to sit up and say, “Let’s get the hell out of here.” Instead, she spoke to me as if she was a little girl.

“My head hurts.”

I was shocked, but couldn’t let her see that. “I bet it does. I bet it does. There?”

“Yes,” came the weak reply.

I massaged the back of her head as I held her good hand.

“I will always take care of you, Mom, always.”

“Thank you,” she murmured.

Then she stopped talking. No speech, just staring straight ahead. No speech the rest of that day and well into the next day. I ran to the doctor, anger and fear in my voice . . .

“Did you tell me everything? She’s not speaking.”

“Billy, calm down. Calm down. Your mom can speak if she wants to, but she doesn’t want to right now. Her brain is making new connections, trying to figure out what happened to it. And right now, and it’s a very normal feeling, she’s angry.”

He was right. She was furious that God had insulted her body this way.

“Well, how do I get her to speak?”

“Bill, with all due respect, I heard you tell her that you spoke to me, and that I told you she’s going to make a complete recovery, which I believe she will, but she doesn’t want to hear that now.”

“How can I talk to her?” I asked.

“Just talk about everyday things . . . Try to engage her that way. Just talk about everyday things.”

“Okay. I’m sorry, Doc.”

He nodded sympathetically.

I went back into her room. She was staring at nothing. It was like someone had taken Mom and replaced her with a duplicate. It was her, but not really her . . . I wanted to yell, GIVE ME MY MOTHER BACK . . . I started to talk to her . . .

“Mom, this game last night was unbelievable. The Yankees are losing three to one, ninth inning, two out, O’Neill is on first, Tino’s up, and he hits a home run. Ties it up. The Stadium went nuts! Then later, Jeter hits a home run and they win it.”

And she suddenly said, “Well, it’s about time. Derek hasn’t been doing anything.”

My elation was short-lived. These strokes are nasty characters. They’re mean. It’s a mean illness. A little bit of progress like that, and then many steps back. Some days you’d have a smile on your face, and the stroke would know it, and it would slap your other cheek. It’s a mean, cunning, nasty illness. It was so hard to go to the hospital.

I kept thinking about the first time she had been in this very same hospital. I was nine years old. It was right after we got the car. She had pneumonia, and they took her out the front door with the ambulance waiting in the driveway, the gurney rolling on the cement, all that noise. I stood in the driveway as she passed me wearing the oxygen mask, the weak wave goodbye.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be okay.”

They put her into the ambulance, the sirens wailed, and she was gone. I was terrified. My mom was going to the hospital.

Terrified. Just the way I felt now.

And the day after she checked in, I called her up. It was a stormy day, very windy and pouring rain. I said, “Mom, I’m coming over to see you. I have a new routine, it’s really funny. I want to make you laugh.”

She said, “You can’t come here, you have to be sixteen.”

“So, I’ll do it outside,” I pleaded . . .

“No, it’s pouring. Don’t come.”

I said, “Mom, you can’t stop me.”

I hung up and I ran the seven blocks to Long Beach Hospital. The courtyard of the hospital is a U shape, and in the front was a big garden area. Right in the middle was this young sapling tree, about five and a half feet tall, no branches, very frail. They had just planted it. It was held up by some yarn and some stakes, but in the wind and the rain of the day, it was bending over very easily.

I stood next to it, looking up because I saw Mom in the third-floor window sitting up in a chair, looking out. When she saw me in the wind and the rain, she was not happy. She looked down at me in horror, and mouthed her words, broadly, so I could see what she was saying . . .

“Billy, no. I told you not to come. Go home, Billy. Go home.”

I shook my head, “No.” I came to make her laugh. So I started doing cartwheels and round-offs, back flips . . . all the things I could do back then. And then I got an idea. I took a run and I slid headfirst into the mud like a giant Slip ’N Slide, and I stood up, my face covered with mud, because I wanted to look like James Dean in her favorite movie,
Giant
. Again horror from the third floor.

“No, no. Crazy boy. You’re a crazy boy. Go home. Go Home.” She pointed furiously at me to leave . . .

I shook my head, “No” . . . I came to make her laugh.

Wiping the mud off my face, I remembered she loved Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin was her favorite of all time. I started imitating Chaplin as best I could walking around the tree, leaving Charlie’s footprints in the mud. Then I got another idea. I started talking to the tree as if it were a beautiful girl, because Charlie flirted with everybody. And then I embraced it, and I bent the tree over, and stole a kiss just like Charlie would do.

I looked up. Mom was laughing, a big warm laugh, her shoulders shaking. She held herself, as if we were hugging each other. Then she mouthed . . .

“Go home.”

I got my laugh. She blew me kisses in the rain, and I ran the seven blocks to the house, my Keds never once touching the concrete.

But now I stood by this very same tree, except now this tree was almost fifty years old. Its November branches gnarled and twisted like an old man’s hands reaching up to the heavens as if to say “Why?”

I sat with her, holding her hand.

“Mom, remember when you had pneumonia, and I was outside in the rain? I did Chaplin in the rain. Remember that, Mom? You were so mad. Remember when I did Chaplin in the rain? Do you?”

Her eyes opened wide.

“You’re Billy Crystal! What are you doing here?”

She didn’t know me as her son. These strokes are like bank robbers. They break into your vaults and steal the things that you treasure most, the things that are most valuable to you, your memories. They steal your life.

But then she rallied, like I knew she would. The arm came back. She got off the bed, started walking with a walker first and then a cane, then with nothing at all. And all of us stood there, the whole family rooting her on. She never complained and always had a sense of humor. One day, as she was walking down the hall with the nurse, she turned to us and said, “Don’t just stand there, put up the hurdles.”

I had to leave, just for three days, an event I couldn’t get out of at the last minute. I flew to Seattle, to perform in a comedy concert. The first time for me alone onstage in fifteen years. Next morning after the show, I called her in the hospital. Joel and Rip put her on the phone.

“Hello, darling. How did the show go?” She remembered . . .

“Mom, it went great.”

And she always asks me technical questions. “How many people were in the house, dear?”

“Mom, it was a big joint. You know, it was like Radio City Music Hall. Do you remember Radio City, Mom?”

“Of course. We saw Danny Kaye in
The Court Jester
there.”

“Yes, we did. Yes, we did,” I said, tears of hope filling my eyes.

I went into great detail how the show worked for me, where the laughs had flowed, and she just simply stopped me and said, “Billy, dear, were you happy?”

“Yeah, Mom, I was.”

“Well, darling, isn’t that really all there is?”

She took my breath away . . . Words were difficult to come by . . . “Yeah. Mom, listen. I have one thing I can’t get out of tomorrow, a big meeting in L.A. But I’m going to make the red-eye in. I’ll be there Tuesday, Mom. We’ll have breakfast together. What do you want me to bring you, Mom, you name it. Everything’s going to be great. You’ll see. Everything’s going to—”

She stopped me again and said, “Billy, dear, please. Don’t worry about any of that. Darling . . . I’ll see you when I see you.”

And that’s the last time we spoke. The next day the bank robbers broke in again. This time they stole her.

The funeral was as it should have been. Her grandchildren spoke, Uncle Berns read a letter my dad had written to him during the war, telling him how happy he was to be in love with her. Joel was funny, I was funny, and Rip sang. She rests next to Dad, and even in my sorrow, I found some comfort in the fact that they were together again, in their same bed positions, quiet and peaceful, just like I saw them every morning of those 700 Sundays.