Tasteful Nudes: ...and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation (29 page)

“This is awful!” my mother grimaced as we watched it together one night years ago. “Their language is horrible and they all just seem like really negative, terrible people.”

“I can turn it off if you want.”

“No. I don’t want you to have to get up.”

While my mom might be gone, my dad is thankfully still around, so I find myself determined to make the most of our time together, which, statistically speaking, is probably not going to be all that much longer. Before too long, one of us is going to be dead and—between you and me—the smart money is on him. Lately, we’ve been spending most of our time together at the house, chatting and drinking coffee of various strengths. And when that gets old, we usually grab some food together. And if there’s one nice byproduct of my mother dying, it’s that the idea of cooking or—even worse—heating up some leftovers, is one I can easily defeat with the mere suggestion of pulling the car out of the garage and heading someplace for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or, on a good day, all three.

“What should we get for lunch?” I’ll ask him. “Italian? Mexican? Indian?”

“Yes,” he’ll reply.

“Oh, Davey, that’s extravagant,” my mom would have said were she still here, stopping our plan in its tracks. “Why don’t we just stay home and I’ll boil something?”

On his own, though, my dad is a total pushover. Still, things just aren’t the same. For my entire life, it was a given that when the check came it was definitely my dad’s problem, not mine. But from the time my mother was diagnosed with cancer a couple of years ago, straight up to the day she died and, now, over a year later, when all evidence seems to support the death theory, things have somehow changed.

It all started one night when my dad and I went out to dinner. We had a nice meal, and, when the check came I did my patented reach-for-the-wallet-like-I-might-actually-chip-in (yeah, right!) routine, and for the first time ever my dad didn’t stop me. In fact, I was not only able to remove my wallet from my pocket, but I was able to set it down on the table, and—after a prolonged staring contest—I was actually able to use the money in it to pay for dinner. I figured it was just a fluke. But as we went out for meal after meal after meal, each time the check came my dad would just sit there like some kind of crazy person whose pockets weren’t lined with cash.

“What the hell have you done with my father, mister?” I wanted to yell at him one night. But you just can’t go doing that at P.F. Chang’s. People get freaked out and the next thing you know they won’t even let you pose for a photo with the big cement horses out front.

Naturally, this new pattern with me and my father had me worried. Not only had my father just lost his wife, but now it seemed like he didn’t even have enough money to pay for Chinese food. I called up my brother Bob in a panic.

“Is Dad okay?” I asked him. “Is he having money problems?”

“No way,” Bob said. “He’s set for life. The guy could probably live another fifty years and still not run out of money.”

I was relieved to hear this, but I also wondered what the hell was up. And it eventually occurred to me that the only possible reason my dad might have for letting me pick up the check if he wasn’t broke was to show me respect, to let me know that he knew I was a financially secure and responsible adult who could take himself and his father out to a half-decent restaurant. That’s nice and all, but I just wanted to tell my dad that I really don’t need that kind of respect. I always thought we had a nice thing going with our old arrangement.

“I told you to just cook something at home,” I could hear my mother say as I pondered my rapidly thinning wallet.

With my mother dead and gone and my dad slowly bleeding me dry, it’s hardly a surprise that I became depressed. And to deal with it, I tried every possible method of dragging myself up from the depths—psychotherapy, acupuncture, homeopathy, holistic medicine, alcoholism, jai alai, prescription drugs, and just about everything else they sell at CVS, including that soap with the so-called “moisturizing beads.” Nothing worked. Until I discovered running, that is, an activity I’d been vehemently opposed to my whole life. Even when chased by animals with an overabundance of strength, claws, sharp teeth, and almost no patience to speak of, I don’t recommend it. Despite my disdain for it, though, running is the one thing that’s gotten me to stop pondering the abyss and instead just go out for a sandwich or something.

Shortly after my mom died, I went running back home in Cleveland on an especially frigid day when it occurred to me that I might very well be freezing my dick off. I don’t mean that in the figurative, colloquial sense, either. I was genuinely concerned that my member and I were about to part company for good. After patting my crotch in a panic, I determined that my penis, having shrunken down to little more than a cashewlike nub, was thankfully still where it had always been but was now seemingly fighting for its life, clinging to my barely warm body with all its might. It was like a scene from
Titanic,
all playing out within the confines of my trousers. And I decided the only way my penis—if you could even call it that by then—was going to survive was if I just sort of fluffed myself periodically in hopes that some blood might make its way to my downtown real estate. It occurred to me, however, that I was in public and people could totally see me. So, in order to avoid making the papers, I hastily devised a mathematical equation that told me if I only massaged my privates every hundred yards or so, it would look like I was just adjusting my pants and not actually fondling my goods in public. But, of course, then I remembered there was one person whose gaze never left me—my mother. Embarrassed, I tried to explain to her that desperate times call for desperate measures. Between already losing her and my dad making me pay for dinner all the time, freezing my John Thomas off was an indignity I just didn’t think I could handle.

“Listen, Mom, you need to make a choice right here and now,” I told her. “Would you rather have me run down the street massaging my genitals or lose the ability to ever use the group showers at the gym again with confidence?”

I chose to believe she preferred the former, so I continued down the street, huffing and puffing and vigorously rubbing my crotch area like it would be weird not to. Crisis averted.

Even greater than the fear that my mom’s watching me doing something we both would rather not have her see, I struggled with not having her around. Aside from simply wanting to spend time with my mom, I wanted her to know everything was going to be all right with me, even though there are still moments when I’m not entirely sure of it myself. Despite occasional breakthroughs, I spent most of my life wishing I could know that my mother was proud of me, that she understood me, and that she wasn’t worried that I was going to end up a criminal, a showgirl, or both.

Given my life pursuits—going into comedy, playing in rock bands, writing sometimes long and rambling essays, and other things that don’t guarantee financial or emotional stability—my mother never seemed too crazy about my game plan for survival. Even when successes came, they seemed to confuse her more than anything else. In the last year or two of her life, my mom called to tell me a friend of hers had seen me on HBO.

“She was just clicking through the channels and there you were on HBO,” my mom said, trying to sound impressed. “That’s pretty good, right?”

“I think so,” I answered. “Thanks.”

“Cool, she’s finally getting me and what I do,” I thought. Then she dropped all pretense and asked, “What’s HBO?”

My parents didn’t have cable, so what I should have done to impress them was make the local news on one of my trips back home. To my mom, those people standing and waving behind the local newscaster reporting live from a Christmas tree lighting downtown were the ones with something to brag about. As long as she and her friends could tune in and watch it at six and eleven, it was the real deal. But some cable channel that you had to pay extra for? Not so much.

As hard as I tried to make her understand that I was one in an elite group of only several thousand people in America experiencing minor successes in the field of entertainment, she seemed prouder of my ability to do things like operate the microwave without supervision.

“Where did you learn to cook so well?” my mom would ask as I mixed some impossibly orange powdered cheese into a bowl of macaroni. “You should open your own restaurant! Bob, come here quick—our son’s a gourmet chef!”

Once during my high school years, I decided to try my hand at baking cookies from scratch after everyone else in the family had gone to bed (a necessary prerequisite as my sisters would have attacked the dough like vultures before I would ever have had the chance to get it into the oven. It would have been like trying to grow a crop of marijuana in Snoop Dogg’s backyard). As I sat in the kitchen salivating over two platefuls of slowly cooling chocolate chip cookies, my mom appeared in the doorway. She wasn’t mad that I was messing up her kitchen, she was just looking to get in on the action. In an act of desperation, I offered her as many cookies as she wanted in exchange for not letting anyone else in the house know of their existence. There we sat at the kitchen table, knocking back cookie after cookie as if our lives depended on it while discussing their endless merits—how good they were just out of the oven, how good they were a few hours after they’d been out of the oven, how good they were when they were just barely cooked, and how good they were when they were cooked just a little too much.

“What makes them really good is if you throw in a little extra butter,” my mother said, barely able to get the sentence out between bites. “Now promise me you’ll only let me have a couple more before you get them out of my sight.”

“I could just put them away now,” I told her, crumbs spilling from my mouth.

“You do that and I’ll stab you, David.” She smiled before scooping up another handful, like one of those claw games at the amusement park.

And as we sat there chatting and laughing, a truly disturbing realization dawned on me: the woman sitting across from me was not just my mother, but also my friend. Of course, being a teenager, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that right there and then. Still, deep down inside I knew things would never be the same—we were, and always had been, friends for life. (I know, gross, right?)

In the last few months of my mother’s life, once cancer and the several strokes that followed rendered her unable to stay at the house anymore, I began bringing bags of chocolate chip cookies to her in the hospital and we’d sit there eating them together one after another. The doctors told me not to feed her more than one or two a day, not because they might kill her—the cancer already had that covered—but because apparently even when you’re dying, eating too many cookies is still a bad idea for some reason (science—will we ever really understand it?). Despite the urging of the medical community, though, I still gave my mother as many cookies as she wanted because I knew that—even by the time my mother was so sick she could barely speak—if she could eat cookies she was still my mother, my friend, that lady who was into
Goodfellas
way more than she’d ever admit.

On what turned out to be one of our last nights together, I stayed behind at the hospital after the rest of my family had gone home, and helped my mother eat her dinner. Like most people presented with a tray of steamed garbage, she wasn’t too interested in any of it. Still, the doctors said it would be good if she could get it down, so I stood over her and made her eat every last bite, bribing her with the cookies the whole way. She kept her eye on the prize and eventually cleared her plate, so I broke out the cookies. There we sat together, mostly in silence, going cookie for cookie with each other. My mom was able to put away four cookies that night, which—given the size of the cookies and her current state—was pretty impressive. Even at my best, I’m good for only a couple before I get a stomachache.

As I set the cookies back on the counter in my mom’s hospital room, I saw that she was about ready to conk out for the night. It was in that moment that I realized that none of that stuff I worried about—doing something to make my mom proud of me or have her understand me or know that I wasn’t going to end up New York City’s favorite deep-voiced call girl—really mattered at all.

“Are you sick of me?” I asked, pulling my coat on.

“Yes, I’m sick of you,” she drawled. Then she stared at me for a few seconds and, with perfect comedic timing, said, “I love you.”

I didn’t plan either of these things, but those cookies were the last thing she ever ate and those words were the last she ever said to me. Sometimes even in darkness, a bright light will just come along and blind you.

Needless to say, I miss my mom terribly and even find myself sometimes forgetting she’s gone as I absentmindedly reach for my phone to give her a ring until I think, “Oh … yeah.” My only consolation is that if she were still alive, there’s enough profanity and other bad stuff in this book that I’d be grounded for life.

“It’s just not decent to talk like that, David,” she’d say as she flipped through this book’s pages. “And the title! What were you thinking?”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I’d say. “Do you want me to put the book away?”

“No. I don’t want you to have to get up.”

Epilogue

When my publisher told me I was contractually obligated to hand in between sixty thousand and eighty thousand words for this book, I told them to go fuck themselves. Again. I’m sorry, but it just seemed like a lot—like a word a day for the next two hundred years or something, which is insane given all the other stuff I’ve got going on. Even so, we did it. We really, really did it—we finished the book (I am referring to you and me now). It was a pretty wild ride, wasn’t it? I mean, sure, I did the hard part, what with all the typing and everything, but you’re the one who had to read it
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, which I realize is no easy feat considering the fact that I used a handful of big words that even I had to look up, and I threw in so much profanity that you would have thought I was rehearsing for a community theater production of
Scarface
(I bet that controlling bastard St. Martin is rolling over in his grave by now). Please know that I only added both of those things so my book would seem more sophisticated, which in turn makes for a richer literary experience for you, the reader. However, if you, like me, object to words like “honorificabilitudinitatibus”
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or any of the other sailor talk that wound up in here, I imagine you had to hold on extra tight just to make it here to the end. And for that I commend you. You are a champion and don’t think I’m the only one who’s noticed.