THE S CLUB

1985

I rang the doorbell with apprehension. I wondered what I was going to be doing with my mother this weekend; drink, play cards, dredge up the past, get pleasantly maudlin and then maybe one of us will cry and then we will feel happy (in our unhappiness) for that it seems is what life is all about.

I hadn’t seen my mother in a few months and I inhaled; thinking how it is when you first see her after you haven’t seen her in a while. Immediately, you notice that there is something new in her being old; a manifestation, a malady, a wobble and inevitably some bitter remark about age.

Expecting a pensive, paranoid patter emerging from behind the door, I was surprised to hear three bounding thumps.

The door swung open and there she was, as dazzling (in one way or another) as ever was Boom Boom.

She had changed and she hadn’t changed. It had easily been a decade since I had seen her last. She had sold her house and had moved to a fabulous condo in Coconut Beach.

She had dressed as she always had. Bright colors. Big Buckles. Rattling Jewellery. Huge Geometric Earrings. Chanel Number Five. Her hair was clipped in a Pixie cut but now it sported wispy Dynasty bangs. Her skin hid under the sheen of a suntan. There was the unmistakable reptilian quality flesh assumes (along with senility warts) as it edges into the seventies. Still her body would be considered “dynamite” as if to spite the pronounced folds over her eyes. And yet, the eyes in themselves were brown and sprite-like. She smiled like she was always thinking of sex.

She was scrutinizing me as well. Her lips curved to a new found seriousness. Sad and sentimental. Randolph had died a few years ago.

“Eddie,” she said softly, “you are all grey now.”

“Boom,” I said in awe, “you are still blond.”

“We seem to have a guest,” said mother in the brown and yellow glow of the den’s wood paneling played on her face.

Quickly I kissed my mother on the cheek, made myself a drink and sat down. I asked Boom why she “was up North.”

“Harvey died,” she announced. “I came north because my children need me. I had to be here because...” She stopped. “I need them too because...” She stopped again, it was slowly becoming visible that the maelstrom of emotion was churning. She cleared her throat. “Because continuity is everything. “Like a house of cards; words began to tumble out. “He hated me and he loved me. He loved me after he hated me. I know that by the alimony. He...” she sighed, ”as nasty as it all was, ended up being quite generous and he really didn’t have to be. He did really love the children, there is no denying that and maybe he loved me through them.”

Her eyes were sad and red crushed roses. She sipped her scotch. The wheel of time was rolling through us all. “It is funny,” she said, “that death brings all the children together and not a holiday. I mean finally we are all (sort of) together under one roof.” She mused. “But a holiday, today means to be as far away from your relatives as possible.” She shook her head, death is a motherfucker.

“So I had to get away from it all,” she said, “I decided to come back and see my old neighbors and grab a piece of sauce.”

At there was an impromptu moment silence for Randolph. Death chilled the air. My father called booze,”sauce.’“. The etymology of which I never understood. Mother looked away and I gazed at my topsiders. Father died a few years ago of a coronary. Neither the deceased or the living ever get over death.

“Oh,” said Boom sensing she had a struck a nerve. “I am sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about,” replied mother. She then straightened her spine.

“I am sorry,” said Boom, “that he died.”

“And I am sorry,” Boom continued, ”that I am going on like this now, but I know when I heard about it. I was in Florida and it was too late to send flowers.”

“I honestly hate those flowers anyway, Dorothy,” consoled Mother. “The house looked like we won the Kentucky Derby. Flowers from a florist always depress me.”

“I couldn’t write you,” said Boom almost tearfully. The humidity around her was like she was about to rain. “Because I really can’t write. I don’t know what to say, I felt so sad. And I was too chicken to call.” She then collapsed. Her face contorted to Tragedy’s mask. A slow agonized wail wheezed out of Boom’s fluttering soul. She reached for a cocktail napkin and my mother and I reached for our respective souls in our respective drinks.

This display was endearing and distressing. We hadn’t even gotten through our first drink and she was carrying on like this.

Boom blew her nose and it sounded somewhere between a fart and a trombone. This provided just enough comic relief to marry both comedy and tragedy.

We laughed and she changed the topic, to her favorite subject: vanity.

“You look really great, Katherine,” said Boom, “you really do.”

“I used to look good,” said Mother.” But now I am an old woman and I look old.”

“Well you don’t have to,” said Boom. “Do what I have done; exercise regularly (at that, my mother made a face) eat well, dye your hair, and get a face-lift,” announced Boom with the frantic temerity to the illusion that you are only as good as you think are.

This admission was, of course, no news. The fact of the matter was Boom still looked old with a face-lift. The difference being is that one doesn’t sag, one buckles.

“Well don’t you want to marry again?” asked Boom.

With almost an adolescent’s mimicry, my wonderful and embittered mother rolled her eyes. “Being married for thirty five,” she stopped and almost wanted to say “fucking” but she didn’t, “years is enough in anyone’s lifetime.”

“But don’t you hate being alone? ”

“Of course,” said my mother,” but being with anyone would be much worse.” Her point made. She sipped her scotch and laughed silently in it. And I in my drink laughed just as silently, sense of humor, sense of irony, bond of blood.

“Now Eddie,” said Boom turning to me, “how are things in your office?”

“Stupid,” I replied. I have graduated from French’s Mustard to the McDonald’s account, but I am still an ad man. The Ogden Nash of the billboard. The Corporate Poet. I hyperbolize antiseptic cleaners banks, cats, Cancer, clothes, Cuisinarts, deodorants, liquors, political figures, and refrigerators. I contrive what is current, hot and vapid. Stupid,” I reiterated.

“Stupid,” she said dumbfounded.

“Stupid,” I said again and I have every right to say that. I am in the annals of advertising. I worked on the McDonald’s account which is always a “hot” account. I am the guy who pitched the gimmick of the man pointing to his mouth hung wide open and moaning “aaaaaah!” This was bit of Sign Language was done way before signing became so “in” and close captioning had become mandatory. Then it meant the man wanted a “Big Mac”. The client thought the bit was “Super” because everybody said “super” in the seventies. And if I say so myself, it looked and worked “super” on the tube.

It was when I saw people aping the commercial at a local McDonald’s, did I begin to feel, well, complimented but equally nauseous.

I was as embarrassed for them as I was for myself. I experienced then, a very adult sickness: really knowing yourself. I realized how manipulative, talented and sick I am. It was an entirely new echo to my hollow, self-serving self.

“How can you say it’s so stupid,” pursued Boom.

“Well, Rolaids doesn’t want to spell ‘relief’ any more,” I said.” They want to change their image. They want a MTV sort of thing with a Claymation of Rolaids tablets doing combination belly dance and limbo stick number.”

“Sounds cute,” piped in Boom.

“But it’s stupid. We should keep the same format.”

“But that’s so uncreative,” Boom said all aghast.

“Of course, it’s uncreative,” I said with a rigor and the frustration that seeps into one’s voice whenever you try to explain to something to someone in middle management. ”We have annoyed generations of people with that ‘how do you spell relief?’ crap! Why should we stop now? We give them the proposed commercial and people wont know what the spot is for.”

“Well I would remember,” said Boom in defiance. “I would look at that commercial and say that’s Eddie’s commercial.” She then laughed like champagne fizzling. Her head was back and she wiggled it like a co-ed.

“Oh God,” said Boom sounding suddenly very old in the coda of her laughter, “it is so nice to be here with you two.” She looked at the family photos on the wall. “I love smelling all these familiar homey smells.” The pot roast was in the oven. “I forget how much I miss you.”

“We miss you,” said mother, “but we certainly don’t miss the nineteen sixties.”

At that, we shuddered. Long hair. LSD. Liberals. Lies. We all drank in unison for the comfort and solace of scotch.

I remembered the diaphanous geometric hallucinations swirling around the kitchen table that Easter Saturday night. They weren’t as scary as they were persistent. My teeth grinding and at one point, I think I might have even taken out my contact lenses as a way of avoiding the teasing apparitions. But it was to no avail. Because then I couldn’t even see as I was itching and twitching in a fit of this psychedelic lice.

And then I remembered how I aged her when I told her what the problem was.

“Mother,” I said looking at her across the living room with Boom at my side of the couch. I was letting the scotch hit me in the side of the head. And allowing the boozy remorseful me do the talking because sober I wouldn’t have been otherworldly enough to do so.

“I want to apologize for the pain I caused you in the late Sixties. Your only fault was that you adored your children so much that you wanted them brought up in your own image. But I was Beatle brainwashed and it was one form of Fascism against another. I was hippie which was just an intellectualized drug addict. All under the aegis of a ‘movement’ that only revolutionized car stereos. But that does not excuse the damage I did to you.”

I leaned back on the chair and continued. “We took the War in Vietnam personally as your generation trying to kill my generation. It was a cockeyed and stupid war. And if it were fought today I still wouldn’t want to die in a rice patty for A.T.and T. But we used the war to picnic on Washington; we made the bombing of Cambodia as an excuse to get out of our Spring Term papers and finals. I am sorry for all the things I said to you. All of them too ugly to remember. But I still see them in your face and I ask for your forgiveness.”

“Oh Eddie,” she said, touched.

“But there is no way, I can ever make up for it.”

“It was youth,” she said. And sometimes that is very mean, but I am your mother and loving is what....”

She stopped. She realized another person was in the room. Clearly, this was something we would both have to live with to our deathbeds.

“Well, the God damn Beatles and all those God damn drugs changed my Chris. And he was my favorite child!” She then hesitated because that was terrible thing to say because no good mother should ever admit such a thing as true as it is. She shrugged it off and proceeded with her tirade. “He was a wonderful child and now he is permanently damaged.”

“The last that I heard was that he was living in Aspen and he had a prosperous business in sporting goods,” I said.

“That’s right,” countered Boom. “His business. He did a lot of traveling, had plenty of money and knew absolutely everybody from Prince Albert to David Kennedy.”

“Oh I met someone who knew David Kennedy,” I said.

“Who?” said my mother in a protective yet police like tone that resounded from the times when she could tell me who and who not to associate with.

“A client,” I said. ”An Auchincloss. He said David is or was a nice guy except he was constantly drooling himself and everybody else.”

“Well, Chris says everybody in Aspen hates Ethel. She is constantly stiffing the trades people there. She feels she has the right to; she is a Kennedy, after all. But they all have really fallen apart since Jack got shot.”

“But what happened to Chris?” asked mother.

Boom then took a very big sip.

“I don’t know,” replied Boom non-committal and defensive like John Mitchell stone-walling. “I don’t know,” she reiterated. Obviously, Chris was more than just a freelance drug dealer. Boom was beautiful and altruistic then; protecting her son and protecting us. “I don’t know,” she said a third and final time. Chris probably worked for the Mafia.

“As I said,” she said, “I really don’t know what he did, but what he is now...well that’s real tragedy.” Courageously, she took a long draught from her scotch. “Last April, I got a call in Florida from the hospital in Aspen. Chris was comatose.”

“Comatose,” uttered Mother.

“Holy Fuck,” I exclaimed.

“You’re telling me, “Holy Fuck,” she replied. She tucked in her shirt. She may be Boom Boom but “I am his Mother,” she stated. “I didn’t dare tell his father, he was too sick then. He has been sick for such a long time, as you know. So I packed up and flew off to Aspen and waited three horrible weeks in the hospital. They had no idea what he overdosed on. Oh Katherine, it was just so scary.”

“I believe it,” Mother said.

“Well after three weeks he came out of the coma and came out a different man.”

“How so? ”

“He left the sporting goods business, well whatever that was and now he has really changed his ways. He won’t even take an aspirin. You don’t even feel comfortable having a drink around him. He gives you the creeps.” She was exasperated. “He has discovered Jesus in the worst possible way. That is all he talks about.” She ground out her cigarette. “It is just defiant.”

“Recovered drunks go from definite drunks to definitely sober zealots.”

“Well whatever it is, that is what he is,” she said.

“Dot,” I said, “why don’t you stay for dinner? ”

Having Boom there for a few more hours would be a diversion from mother and I focusing on each other and (worse) ourselves.

“Oh I can’t,” she gasped. “I have to go meet the children down the hill at Rothmanns. We are all going to have dinner together before Neil flies back to Kuwait.”

“Kuwait?”

“Oh yes, he works for Standard Oil,” she paused. “Would you like to come?”

I turned to mother. ”Thank you,” I began, “but....”

“I know the children would love to see you, see both of you,” Boom continued.

“Well, I have a very important bridge game tomorrow,” mother said,” and I really don’t feel “up” to it, (which meant that both Dallas and Miami Vice were going to be on later) however Edmund, you might have some fun.”

“Mother,” I said, “I appreciate the gesture, but I don’t want to leave you alone.”

“Oh come on,” she said in a tone that would settle it once and for all. ”We have the whole rest of the weekend to feel sorry for ourselves.”