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I
thought I could bang out a column today—a regular column,
a column about my readers’ problems and their freaky fetishes
and all those asshole politicians out there. You know, the
usual.
The day my son was born, I managed to slip out of the maternity
ward and write a column; I wrote one the day I was indicted
by the state of Iowa for licking Gary Bauer’s doorknobs. (I
was actually indicted for voter fraud—on a trumped-up charge,
your honor—but Bauer’s knob needs all the attention it can
get.) I’ve written columns on days that I was dumped and on
the morning of 9/11. So I figured that I could bang out a
column today.
I opened my laptop and started reading your letters. I love
reading your letters—I do. But I couldn’t get into it. I just
don’t have a column in me this week. I’m disappointed in myself.
I write this column at Ann Landers’s desk, for crying out
loud, and the old lady banged out a heartbreaking, truncated
column when her marriage collapsed. If Landers could bang
one out under that kind of emotional strain, then I could
damn well bang one out, too. Just do it, right? Just fucking
do it. But I just fucking can’t.
My mother died on Monday.
Perhaps a sex-advice column isn’t an appropriate place to
eulogize an articulate, elegant woman, a practicing Catholic
named for the patron saint of hopeless causes and, perhaps
consequently, a Cubs fan. I mean, really. Eulogizing my mother
back here with the escort ads? So let’s not think of this
as a eulogy. Let’s think of it as a thank-you note, the kind
of nicety that my mother appreciated.
Forgive the cliché: My mom gave me so much. She gave
me life, of course, and some other stuff besides: her sense
of humor, her bionic bullshit detectors, her colossal sweet
tooth. She also gave me—she gave all four of her children
(Bill, Ed, Dan, Laura)—her unconditional love. Long after
I came out, she told me she always suspected that I might
be gay; I was the quiet one, the boy who liked Broadway musicals
and baking cakes and shared her passion for Strauss waltzes.
When I asked my parents to take me to the national tour of
A Chorus Line for my 13th birthday, that should have
settled the matter. Your third son? Total fag, lady. But my
parents were Catholic and religious and it somehow
still came as a shock when I told them. My mother came around
fast and she came out swinging—rainbow stickers on her car,
a PFLAG membership card in her wallet, and an ultimatum delivered
to the whole family: Anyone who had a problem with me had
a problem with her.
But the real reason I feel compelled to thank her in this
space, back here with the escort ads, is because I wouldn’t
have this space if it weren’t for her.
My mother, as my brother Bill likes to say, made friends like
Rockefeller made money and George W. Bush makes mistakes—and
she was that friend you confided in and went to for advice.
I was a mama’s boy—hello—and I spent a great deal of
time in my mother’s kitchen listening to her tell her friends
exactly what they needed to do. Sometimes gently, sometimes
brusquely, always with a dose of humor. My mom liked to say
that her son got paid to do something that she did for free—and
isn’t that the way the world works? Women cook, men are chefs;
women are housewives, men are butlers; she gave advice,
I got paid to give advice. (And for a few years, she
did too; my mother and I wrote a joint column for a couple
of websites in the 1990s.)
So I want to thank my mom. I wouldn’t be writing this column
today if it weren’t for her gifts and her ability to find
the humor in even the most serious of subjects.
Even death, even her own.
After a long struggle, we had to go into my mother’s hospital
room and tell her that nothing more could be done. She didn’t
go into the hospital expecting to die and she was not ready
go. But she took the news with her characteristic grace. She
said her farewells, asked us never to forget her (as if),
and paused for a moment. Then Mom lifted an eyebrow, shrugged,
and said…
“Shit.”
My mother wasn’t crude; I didn’t get my foul mouth from her.
She used profanity sparingly and then only in italics and
quotation marks. When she said “shit” on her deathbed, we
understood the joke. What she meant was this: “Now, the kind
of person who casually uses profanity might be inclined to
say ‘shit’ at a moment like this. But I’m not the kind of
person who casually uses profanity—and certainly not at a
moment like this. But if I were the kind of person
who casually used profanity, ‘shit’ might be the word I would
use right now. If I were that kind of person. Which I’m not.”
Everyone gathered around her bed—my mother’s husband (my son
has two fathers and so do I), my sister, my aunt—knew what
Mom wanted: She wanted us to laugh. This woman, so full of
life, who wanted so badly to live, having just been told she
would not, she was trying to lift our spirits.
(“Shit,” for the record, wasn’t her last word. Those were
just for the family.)
Anyway, my mom is dead, and I am not in the mood, as
she used to say. (“You are so,” one of us kids would usually
respond. “You’re in a bad mood.”) So I’m going to take
a week or two off, from the column and the podcast, hang out
with the boyfriend and the kid, and burst into tears in coffee
shops and grocery stores. I’ll run some greatest hits in this
space while I’m away—I’ll find a column or two featuring Mom—and
then I’ll be back, just as filthy minded as ever. In lieu
of flowers, please send pictures of your boyfriends’ rear
ends. (Lesbians may send flowers.) If you’re the donation-making
type and you’re so inclined, my mother would be pleased to
see some of your money flow to PFLAG (www.pflag.org) or the
Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation (www.pulmonary fibrosis.org).
Oh, one last thing: I was supposed to take my mother to see
the national tour of The Drowsy Chaperone in Chicago
this Friday, April 11. It was her birthday present. I got
us great seats: seventh row, on the aisle. But I won’t be
able to use our tickets now. Not because it would be too depressing
to go without my mother—not just because—but because,
as rotten, stinking fate would have it, I’m going to be at
my mother’s wake on Friday night.
But I’m practical, like Mom, and I’d hate to see perfectly
good tickets to a national tour of a hit Broadway musical
go to waste. And it occurs to me that there has to be a teenage
boy out there—in Chicago or close enough—who likes musicals
and has a mother who loves him for the little musical-theater
queen that he is. If you know that boy or you are that boy
or you were that boy a decade ago or if you’re that boy’s
mother or grandmother, send me an e-mail and I’ll arrange
to get these tickets to you.
Like I said, they’re great seats. I would go if I could. But
I can’t.
Shit.
Download
a new Savage Love podcast every Tuesday at www.thestranger.com/savage.
mail@savagelove.net
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