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Category:
Memoir
Publisher: Cacoethes Publishing
Type: Non-Fiction
Chronicles how one week after September 11, 2001, while the rest of the nation struggled with the attacks on our country, I realized during a phone conversation that my 63 year old father was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. In the midst of a midlife crisis trying to balance my life as a wife, mother and struggling stand up comedian, that phone call added caregiver of my father and his 89 year old mother, to my already over loaded plate. (The book also contains a history of family abuses, the redemption of a family’s black sheep, porn talk with a parent and the fact that I perfected the art of going nutty-buckets and shaving my head long before Britney made it chic.)
Think "Tuesday's with Maurey" with a twist. My book is a memoir, written in the spirit of Julia Sweeney's "God Said Ha,” Gerlyn Lucas’s "Why I wore Lipstick: To My Mastectomy,” and Margaret Edson’s “Wit” which all use unconventional humor to tell the story of their serious medical issues.
It is the story of the insanity, bureaucratic nightmare, inner, reverse, and stereotypical racism, along with the headaches and heart breaks which became part of my family’s daily lives. The story is told through my shocked, newly opened and sometimes inappropriately twisted eyes. (The word inner is not a typo.)
Excerpt
Tuesday, September 11, 2001. For most people, it started out as an ordinary day. Not so for me. This was the day before my 34th birthday and the climax of what had been evolving into my first mid-life crisis. (The second should probably be my next book entitled, “Dodgeball, Motorcycles, and Other Stupid Stuff I’m Probably Too Old to be Doing.”)
I had recently taken a career hiatus to re-evaluate my seven year long struggle to make it as a stand up comedian. I had been having conflicts with my chosen career and my husband’s schedule, while trying to be a good mother to my two boys, ages eight and three. I was also fraught with self-esteem issues due to drastic negative physical changes brought about by each of my pregnancies. While in contrast, dealing with being told in my comedy endeavor that I was, “too cute to be a comic.” The latter has never made any sense to me. I have never understood why people expect that if you happen to be female and funny, you need to have a hump, a third eye, or some other deformity which makes it permissible to make people laugh.
I had been able to lose most of the weight after gaining sixty pounds and growing breasts large enough to nurse a third world country, with each successive pregnancy. But, my once bikini body, while clothed looked well enough, undressed looked like a Shar-Pei wrinkle pup after an especially large litter. So, not wanting to appear too “cute” and in an attempt to be taken more seriously, on September 10th, I had done the most logical thing, in my mind, and shaved my head. Yeah I have issues.
That Tuesday morning I awoke, rubbed my stubbled head and proceeded to watch in horror, as the world or more explicitly, parts of my country blew up; wondering along with everyone else if life would ever be the same. End of mid-life crisis!
Coincidentally, I happened to have ties, albeit loose ones, to each of the locations touched by the day’s events.
I was born in Manhattan, New York and still have close relatives who live in and around the city. I have friends and family living in Pennsylvania. I also have two cousins active in the military; one of which just happened to work at the Pentagon. My husband, a freelance soundman who works mainly for the news media, happened to be out on assignment. He had, immediately following the first plane attacks, called to say that he may be sent to New York by one of the networks to cover Ground Zero once travel arrangements could be sorted out. When I was a child, both my parents worked for United Airlines in various capacities. I even had been a flight attendant for a short period of time for another airline. And I had just finished working a temporary assignment for American Airlines a few months prior. So, needless to say, I was a bit of a mess that morning.
Thankfully, in the midst of all the chaos of the day, I was able to get in contact with each of my personal connections to the tragedy and confirm their well being. My family and friends in both New York and Pennsylvania had not been close enough to where the planes went down to be physically affected. My cousin who worked at the Pentagon had been home sick that day suffering from the side effects of his MS. I never thought I would ever say something as strange as, “Thank God for MS”.
Since all air travel had been suspended indefinitely, my husband could not go to the World Trade Center site. So, I was able to breathe a small personal sigh of relief that all was virtually well in my little world.
September 12th, my birthday came and went without much fan fair; which for me was a rarity. Being an only child, my birthday had come to be somewhat of a national holiday, if only observed by me and those closest to me. I usually started celebrating on the 1st of September and quit just after Halloween. Yes, I will admit this is a bit excessive. But anyone brought up in a two working parent household with the destructive luxury of overcompensation via S.R.S. (i.e. Spoiled Rotten Syndrome) will understand completely.
As a result of the recent events, this year my kids forgot all about my big day, which was just fine. My husband worked late that night and had to be back on the job early the next morning, so we didn’t go anywhere. My aunt and my mother did call in the evening to say “happy birthday,” then it was over. I spent the next few days wondering, with the rest of the country, about the future, hoping to return to normalcy. Then I realized my dad hadn’t called to wish me a happy birthday.
When I first realized that I hadn’t heard from my dad, it was just a small thought that popped into my head for a second. I’m not even sure exactly when I first had the thought. All I remember was thinking, Hmm, Dad didn’t call me for my birthday, that’s odd.
My dad lived in Fort Pierce, Florida, a small town on the east coast of Florida about two hours south of Orlando. Fort Pierce is where my dad’s mother lived for as long as I can remember and where my dad spent most of his childhood. When I was seventeen, my family (my parents and I) moved to Port Saint Lucie, from Illinois, where I grew up. Port Saint Lucie is one of Ft. Pierce’s neighboring towns. After a failed attempt at owning and running a night club in Illinois, my dad decided to try his hand at the discount general store business in Florida.
My dad moved alone from our home in Illinois to Ft. Pierce and opened a general store in a small strip mall. My mother and I moved down several months later, in the summer before my senior year of high school. The general store venture went about as well as the night club and was closed in less than a year. My mother supported the family on funds from the early retirement she took from United Airlines and the proceeds from the cleaning service she started after the move. After the store went under, my dad tried several other business ventures, funded by his mother. He did everything from running a rooming house on the worst street in Ft. Pierce, Avenue D; to pest control and finally car detailing, all with the same result.
In September 2001, my parents were still living in Florida, but were no longer married. They split up in 1987.
That summer, my then “boyfriend” now “husband”, Mike’s parents got transferred to Illinois. This gave me the opportunity to go “back home” and he and I the opportunity to move in together. The week that Mike and I moved in together, my parents drove my furniture up to us in Illinois from Florida, stayed the weekend, then drove back home. My mother called me the next week to give me “her” new number. The divorce was not exactly pretty or normal. My parents dated each other for several months after they divorced but ended up no longer speaking to each other after my dad found out that my mother had started casually dating one of his old school friends. As far as I know, my parents had only spoken three times in the thirteen years since their divorce was final. Each occasion had been to attend an event for me. The first was in 1989 when I graduated from flight attendant school in Illinois. The second had been when they both came to celebrate my oldest son’s third birthday. And the third was during the previous November.
I did try to make it a habit of calling to check in with both of my parents at least once or twice a year, my dad more so than my mother.
In the thirteen years since the divorce, my dad had become notorious for disappearing for months at a time. Not necessarily physically disappearing, but becoming impossible to get in contact with. This usually had something to do with a woman, jealous boyfriends and/or husbands or God only knew what else. I had learned not to ask questions. My dad, at that time, had been living with and caring for his mother, my grandmother (or as I called her Mama Moore), for the last ten years, who was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease. So not hearing from him for awhile was not an uncommon occurrence. My dad did usually try and make some type of connection for my birthday: card, call, or both. But after an entire week of no birthday contact, I started to worry and decided to call him and give him a good natured ribbing for not calling me.
As I sat listening to the phone ringing, I thought about all of the grief I was going to give my dad for the lack of a celebratory phone call.
I’m an only child for goodness sake. It’s not like you have a bunch of kids’ birthdays to remember, it’s just the one! I thought.
Yes, he has been dealing with all of this stuff with Mama Moore, but he could at least make a quick phone call. I mean, every time I call him he says that he hasn’t been doing anything except watching TV while Mama Moore rambles on driving him crazy. My mind continued.
Wait, he put Mama Moore in the nursing home last month. What the hell has he been doing? Man, it’s taking a long time for him to pick up the phone. Where is he?
Just when I was about to give up and hang up the phone, my dad picked up.
“Hello?” I heard his voice say casually.
What I wanted to say was, “Where the hell have you been!?! Don’t you know the world has blown up!?! We have friends and family that could have been affected! Doesn’t that matter to you!?! I’ve been home alone with the kids everyday for a week watching the world go to war and you didn’t even call me for support or for my birthday!?!
What I actually said was, “Hey dad. What’s up?”
At this point I expected some type of explanation or at least an excuse as to where he had been and why I hadn’t heard from him, not only for my birthday, but for the past three months or so. Thinking about it then, I realized that I had actually tried to call my dad several times over the past few months and had gotten through only once. It was about a month before, right after he had finally had to put his mother into a nursing home. Every other time I tried, either the phone would just ring forever with no answer, or I would get his voice mail, which for some reason was always full, so I hadn’t even been able to leave a message.
Although it was not uncommon for me not to hear from my dad for long stretches of time, whenever I finally would get in touch with him there would always be some story about why he had been MIA. It was usually something about how he had gone down to Ft. Lauderdale to visit an ex-girlfriend. Or he would tell me about some woman in town, who he had been seeing, who had a crazy ex-boyfriend who was upset and he had been avoiding his phone calls. Or he would complain about how my grandmother had been keeping him up every night, so he had been trying to get some sleep and had taken the phone off the hook. There was always a story. So surely, I was about to hear some such elucidation. What my dad actually said next threw me for a loop. “Oh, hey it’s you. Where have you been?”
What!?! Where have I been!?! What do you mean where have I been?” My mind screamed.
He must be joking. What do you mean where have I been? I’ve been right here worrying about what’s happening around the world! Wondering if you’re ok and trying to get in touch with or at least hear from you! I wanted to scream all this and so much more, but instead I just said, “Ah, I’ve been here dad. What’s up? Where have you been?”
His reply threw me again, “Oh, nothing, just this and that. Did you call about the checks?”
Ok, what the hell is going on and what the hell is he talking about?!?! Checks, what checks? The conversation was not going as planned and it wasn’t making any sense either.
Why in the world would he be talking to me about checks? I haven’t even lived in the same state as him for over ten years. Hell, I’ve only been home once in the past ten years. Why would I be calling about checks for him? I worked with my brain to try and figure out what was going on. “Dad, um what checks are you talking about?” I asked, bemused.
Now it was my dad’s turn to sound confused. “At the bank… You didn’t call anybody about the checks? You didn’t have them call me?”
This is getting weirder by the moment. What the heck is he talking about? I’ll try asking another way. “Dad, why would I have anyone call you about checks?” I asked.
“Anything that I would do at the bank wouldn’t have anything to do with you.” I continued. “I’m not exactly sure what you’re talking about. So, I guess the answer would be no, I did not call or have anyone call you about checks. What checks are you talking about?” I finished.
I felt like I sounded as strange as he did, but I was trying to make some sense of this nonsensical conversation. My dad’s response to my last question did not help the situation any at all. “Never mind, I’ll take a look at it and get back to you.” He mumbled.
My brain was reeling. Ok, let’s start this conversation over. I’ll get right to the heart of why I called. “Hey dad, you know you forgot to call me for my birthday. What’s up? What’s been going on?” I said as jokingly as I could, with my mind still trying to recover from the first part of the conversation.
Things got no better with his response. “Oh yeah, I meant to get back with you, sorry. What’s been happening?” Meant to get back with me? What? Something is not right here! He’s not making any sense!
My mind was now in full blown overload. I kept trying to get a hold on what was being said; process it into something logical, but couldn’t. All I could think to say at this point was, “Dad, what’s going on? You’re not making any sense. What’s up with you?”
He then got defensive. “What do you mean what’s up with me? You called me!”
The hairs on the back of my neck were starting to stand at attention; while alarm bells were ringing in my head louder than the church bells at Notre Dame. I desperately needed sanctuary, but there was none to be found.
Alright, this is crazy! I’ve got to change directions because this conversation is going nowhere fast! I decide to switch gears and go with a different topic. Maybe I upset him by calling him out for forgetting my birthday. He has been taking care of Mama Moore twenty-four seven for years, which I’m sure can’t be easy, regardless of when he tells me it’s no big deal. I told myself, forgetting in my confusion that may dad was no longer caring for my grandmother and hadn’t been for at least a month. I know, I’ll talk about September 11th and the war! That will surely get us back on track.
My dad considered himself a trivia expert. He was even supposed to be on Jeopardy when I was a kid, but there had been some type of scheduling problem or something. My dad always loved to discuss world events, at least with me.
I say “at least with me,” because my dad never really said very much to anyone else, unless he was drinking. It was a running gag with people who knew my parents that my dad never talked and my mother never stopped talking. She is where I get my gift of gab.
Mama Moore used to complain that my dad’s idea of a quality visit was to come over to the house, say hello, sit down, turn on the television, watch it for three or four hours, say good-bye and then leave. The sad thing about the complaint was that it was absolutely true. My dad used to visit me and Mike, in the apartment we shared around the corner from him in Florida when we first got married. Even then, he had the same M.O. He would come in, ask what we were doing, which was usually watching TV. If he was interested in what we were watching, he would sit down, stay until whatever we were watching was over or until he got bored, say good-bye and then leave. Mike always found this behavior bizarre, but I was used to it. It was like that at home when I was growing up too. I can remember seeing my parents together all the time. My dad would not say more than two or three short sentences to my mother for days, at least not in my presence. She could talk, and talk, and talk but he just wouldn’t respond. He might grunt or nod, but that was about it. Unless, they were fighting or hanging out drinking with friends; then he was the life of the party, Mr. Social.
My dad and I are very alike in many ways, which might be one of the reasons he talked to me as much as he did. I think I got my social skills from him as well as a love of sci-fi. He actually took me out of school to stand in line for two hours to see the first Star Wars movie. DORK ALERT!
Where my dad and I parted ways was in our taste in music. On one particular occasion mine and my dad’s differing taste in music, (my love of rock and his of R & B and Reggae), saved my virtue and the two of us from an embarrassing incident.
One Saturday night Mike and I rented some movies. The video store had just started renting adult movies, so we got one along with the regular videos. You can see where this is going.
We got home and prepared to have a few drinks and watch our movies. Just as we were sitting down to watch our first video, there was a knock at the door; it was my dad. He came in and asked what we were doing. We told him we had rented some movies and were just about to watch Harlem Nights. Apparently, he wanted to see it because he sat down, asked what we had to drink and proceeded to watch the movie with us. When the movie ended, it was around 10:30 p.m. Since we had been drinking while watching the movie, Mike and I were feeling a bit amorous and were planning on moving the TV and VCR into our bedroom and well, you get the rest… As I hit the rewind button on the VCR, my dad got up as if to leave and then asked what we were getting ready to do. I told him we had gotten another movie so we were probably just going to hang out and watch it. So, of course my dad sat back down.
This was almost twenty years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday. As my dad sat back down he asked, “What other movie did you get?” The look of panicked terror Mike and I exchanged will forever be frozen in time in my mind’s eye. Luckily, I have always been quick on my feet. Without skipping a beat I replied, “Oh, just some rock and roll flick.” To which my dad crinkled his face in displeasure, shook his head, got up, said, “I guess I’ll be going” and left.
Thing is, I hadn’t even lied. The name of the adult “flick” we rented was “Rock and Roll Hump Day.” I love rock n’ roll!
Although my dad and I were more alike, I was closer to my mother when I was growing up. But, the fact that my dad and I had come to some unspoken agreement that he and I would speak as often and as at length as we did, always made me feel kind of special. When we weren’t fighting and/or I wasn’t hating him for whatever reason, my dad and I would talk. When I was not in trouble for something, which I usually was, we would talk. When my dad happened to be home and awake from his shift schedule at United, which was not often, if it was just him and me, we would talk.
We talked about all kinds of things. We talked about TV shows, music, politics, and more recently, women. There was a lot of talk about women after the divorce. Sometimes we would even sing together. “Send in the Clowns” is the song I remember most from childhood. I’m not sure why. My dad also liked to tell me really bad “Dad” jokes. The kinds of jokes that make you go, “DAAAAAAAAAAAADDDD” when he got to the punch-line. So, the conversation that my dad and I were now having was not only not making sense, but it was also out of character. I had to get it back on track…Come on Les you can pull this back together.
“So dad, what do you think about the World Trade Center bombing? Pretty crazy, huh?” I said casually. My dad’s answer to this simple question shredded any last hope I may have had left for his sanity and turned my entire world upside down. “Yeah, I saw that.” He said with the first bit of enthusiasm since the conversation began. “I was sitting at the bar and I looked up and saw the planes crash into each other and the bodies falling out of the sky and I turned to someone and said, ‘Did you see that? Are they making a movie? Look at all of those people falling out of the sky?’ I couldn’t believe it.”
I felt as if someone had just hit me in the gut with a wrecking ball! Hearing those words, my body began to shake involuntarily. The entire time I had been trying to salvage the unsalvageable, which was this phone call, I realized I had been in denial. But there was no denying it. I knew now without a shadow of a doubt what I was hearing and I was terrified.
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