100 Years of Fortitude

My grandmother is older than television. She is older than bubble gum. Older than Band-Aids. She is older than sliced bread, frozen food, and stainless steel. 

When she was born Woodrow Wilson was president. No one had yet used a Q-tip. And a stamp was two cents. Milk, six. 

My grandmother is older than the old Yankee Stadium. Older than Radio City Music Hall. Older than the Russian Revolution. She is older than a woman’s right to vote and saw Prohibition come and go. She was born the same year as Joe DiMaggio and Jonas Salk, Dorothy Lamour and Gypsy Rose Lee. Rudolph Valentino died when she was twelve.

My grandmother is older than “The Great Gatsby.” Older than “God Bless America.” She is older than talking movies, parking meters, chocolate chip cookies, Winnie the Pooh, penicillin, and Pyrex.

My grandmother in 1930. 16 years old. 

When I was a kid, my grandmother scared the shit out of me. Even her name seemed designed to frighten children. Mildred. My sister and I called her Grandma. She looked like a cross between Bette Davis and a water buffalo, and she had little patience.

“Peas or corn?” she said to me one evening. I was about eight years old. My sister and I were spending the night at her house with our two cousins, and Mildred was making dinner. When I passed near the kitchen on my way to the bathroom she stopped me, wanting to know which I preferred. “Peas or corn?” she said again, with the freezer door open and her hand inside, hovering over the bags of frozen vegetables. 

Corn, I thought. No contest. I want corn. I hated peas. And that should have been the end of it, but my flaw was in always trying to make other people happy. What about my sister? I thought. What would she want? And my cousins? Maybe they don’t like corn. Maybe my grandmother doesn’t like corn. As I stood there, thinking about corn and peas, I could feel my grandmother growing more and more impatient. “Oh for God sakes,” she finally said, “I’ll make peas.” And she dismissed me with a flick of her wrist.

She was, I’m certain, less annoyed at having to wait for an answer than she was by my inability to make a decision. 

Looking like Bette Davis. 1943.

Later that night, in the middle of it, I fell out of bed. I was still half asleep, piled on the floor, when I made a very quick decision: Get back into bed before she comes in here and yells at me. I could practically hear the terry cloth whipping through the air as Mildred wrapped a bathrobe around herself in her room just down the hall. 

Mildred was all business, 1960s

My plan, once in the bed again, was to pretend to be asleep, as if nothing had happened. And if, in the morning, let’s say, she asked about a thump in the night, I would act like I had no idea what she was talking about. I don’t know, I’d shrug. I didn’t hear a thing. I fancied myself a good liar. I was certain I could pull it off. But no sooner had I formed the plan when there she was, filling the doorway and looking down at me, annoyed. "What are you doing?" she said, as if I had chosen to be on the floor. “Are you hurt?” she asked. I was not. “Alright, then get back into bed and try not to fall out of it again.”

She said it as if she fully expected me to fail at that effort.

==========

                                                 

November 4, 1994

1. Turn the Beat Around, Gloria Estefan

2. December ’63, The Four Seasons

3. Living in Danger, Ace of Base

4. All I Wanna Do, Sheryl Crow

5. I’ll Make Love to You, Boys II Men

6. Get Over It, The Eagles

7. I’ll Stand By You, The Pretenders

8. Endless Love, Luther VanDross & Mariah Carey

9. 100% Pure Love, Crystal Waters

10. Another Night, Real McCoy

In 1994, not long after her 80th birthday, around Christmastime, I took my grandmother for breakfast to a local Niagara Falls restaurant called The Goose’s Roost. As a kid, when I’d only heard people say the name, I thought it was called The Goose Says Roost, as if there were some deranged talking goose inside who went around saying “roost” to everyone. What a crazy goose, I’d think to myself, and hope that one day I’d get to meet him. 

When I pulled up to my grandmother’s house to pick her up, she stepped out in black leather, head to toe. Knee-high boots, a pencil skirt, coat, gloves. All of it leather. All black. It was ten o’clock in the morning. 

At the restaurant, I asked her if she’d like me to hang up her coat. She’ll appreciate this, I thought. I’m taking charge. Making a decision. Being a gentleman. “No, I would not,” she said, as if she’d been anticipating the question and was now giving her prepared statement. She clenched her hands tightly around the lapels of her coat, keeping it firmly in place in case, I don’t know, I tried to pull it off of her or something, and she said: “This is my Christmas gift to myself and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let anyone take it.” 

In her younger days, at 84 years. 

As I got older, I came to find my grandmother’s temperament less intimidating and more amusing. I was able to navigate it, even appreciate it. Perhaps it’s the screenwriting, which demands brevity. There is no room for excess. Like a screenplay, my grandmother does not have time for your bullshit or indecisiveness. She will do what she wants and cares little for what people think of her. Maybe that’s why she’s lasted as long as she has. Maybe that's why I admire her. She is, after all, older than Mount Rushmore. 

Now and then we talk on the phone. The conversations are never too long. In fact, they’re exactly as long as she wants them to be. And when they're over she says I love you in a garbled voice, the result of a bout with throat cancer from many years ago. But I understand her. Better than I ever have. And I know she means it. And I say "I love you, too, Grandma." 

Happy Birthday.  

Old

Nothing makes you feel older than when you mention a popular song from the ‘80s to someone in their 20s and they have no idea what you’re talking about.

May 3, 1983

1. Beat It, Michael Jackson

2. Flashdance, Irene Cara

3. C'mon Eileen, Dexy's Midnight Runners

4. Jukebox, The Flirts

5. One on One, Hall & Oates

6. Little Red Corvette, Prince

7. Der Kommissar, After the Fire

8. She Blinded Me with Science, Thomas Dolby

9. Solitaire, Laura Branigan

10. Shadows of the Night, Pat Benatar

Thirty years ago today I started my Top Ten.  It’s one of the few things I still have from this time.  In 1983 my Great-Great-Aunt Irene, the woman who taught me how to play Canasta, passed away and left my mother some money, which my mother then used to buy my sister and me bedroom furniture.  Until this time, my room was furnished with a twin bed, an old kitchen table that I sometimes gnawed on and used as a desk, and a cardboard dresser for my clothes, the kind of thing that comes folded flat, meant to be assembled in three minutes and hidden away in a closet for extra storage.  A pale moss green color with faux quilting and plastic pulls, this was some fancy shit for a closet.  As bedroom furniture, not so much.

I never minded the cardboard dresser, though.  It made rearranging my room a breeze.  

My new furniture was white Techline.  Two dressers and a drafting table, because I had always intended to be an architect.  I accessorized with yellow.  A pillow for the bed, a swing-arm lamp that clamped to the table, a bucket for trash, and a big jar with a thick yellow lid, because what 12-year-old kid doesn’t need a big jar?  I used mine to hold my collection of ribbons, part of my factory of art supplies that I used to make greeting cards.    

The dressers eventually got replaced, the pillow fell apart, and the yellow lamp fell out of favor, but I still have the jar, the bucket and the drafting table, on which I wrote my first Top Ten chart.  Over the years the jar has held spare change, marbles, sugar and, currently, nothing at all.  As old as it is, it never makes me feel old.  Not like those 20-somethings who don’t know the ‘80s.

     

I recently said the words Debbie Gibson to a 24-year-old and he looked at me with zero recognition.  “Shake Your Love?”  I said.  “Lost In Your Eyes?”  Nothing rang a bell.  Not even the black hat.  

Not long ago, I met a person who had never heard of Cher.  Cher.  This person, not without a head, has fully functional eyes and ears along with unrestricted access to the internet, television, radio, newspapers and magazines, and not once, during the entire course of his nearly 30 years, had he ever even heard of...Cher.  "Cher," I said.  "Sonny and Cher?  'I Got You Babe?'"  Didn't know it.  "'If I Could Turn Back Time?'"  Never heard it.  "'Moonstruck?'  'Mask?'  'Silkwood?'  She won an Oscar!" I cried.  None of it was clicking.  I gave up the fight when I was reduced to mentioning the infomercial for Lori Davis hair-care products.

I get that everyone has a different reality.  I just assumed that all realities included at least one version of Cher.  

This likely happens to every generation, this feeling of old when your pop cultural icons, once household names, become meaningless to the next generation.  And so I wait anxiously for the day when the 20-somethings become 40-somethings and have to explain Justin Bieber.  

Her Boys

Easter was always a big deal in my family, right up there with Christmas and Thanksgiving and all of our birthdays.  Dinner was usually a five- or six-course marathon at my grandmother’s house.  Ham was served with raisin sauce, lamb with mint jelly, and the butter was in the shape of a seated lamb with peppercorns for eyes.  

During my freshman year of college Easter fell late, on April 15, outside of the spring break period, so I stayed in New York instead of going home, the first time I wasn’t with my family for Easter.  My dinner was a Big Mac.  I spent the evening studying in a secluded corner on the seventh floor of the NYU library and walked back to my dorm around eleven that night, ignoring the drug dealers as I crossed Washington Square Park.  The next day my grandmother told me that my mother had waited all night for my Easter call, and when it never came she cried.  

April 15, 1990

1.  Vogue, Madonna

2.  Don’t Wanna Fall in Love, Jane Child

3.  How Can We Be Lovers, Michael Bolton

4.  Nothing Compares to You, Sinead O’Connor

5.  All My Life, Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville

6.  Starting Over Again, Natalie Cole

7.  Heart of Stone, Cher

8.  All That Glitters Isn’t Gold, The Cover Girls

9.  Whole Wide World, A’me Lorain

10. This Old Heart of Mine, Rod Stewart with Ronald Isley 

It’s not often that I make my mother cry.  Including the Easter incident, it’s happened roughly three times.  The first was in collaboration with my sister when she and I, both teenagers at the time, sitting at the dinner table with our mother, threw chicken bones at her.  It was a ridiculous and mean thing to do, which was precisely why we thought it would be funny.  It’s not like we planned a surprise attack.  It was a topic of conversation.  “Wouldn’t it be funny," we said, "wouldn’t it be just horrible, if we threw our chicken bones at you?”  My mother agreed.  And so to test our theory, my sister and I picked up some chicken bones from our plates and flung them at her.  They smacked my mother in the chest and then fell to her lap.  And as we looked at them lying there, meat and cartilage still clinging to the bones, we all laughed at what rotten kids we were.  And then suddenly, hit with the realization that her rotten kids actually threw chicken bones at her, my mother burst out crying.  

The third time I made my mother cry I did it all on my own when I told her I’m gay.  

“You know my friend, Julian?” I said.  I was sitting on a chair in the living room of my mother’s condo, and she was lying on the couch.  She was tired from the day, of picking me up at the airport and readying the house and the food for Thanksgiving.  “Yeah,” she said, half-interested.  We were watching TV.  “Well...” I said, “I’m dating him.”  

My mother turned her head on the pillow and looked at me.  She immediately propped herself up on her elbows then hoisted herself fully upright, staring at me the whole time with confusion in every fiber of her face.  Her hair was a mess, matted flat at the back from lying too long in one position, and her mouth was open, trying to form words that weren’t quite coming, until finally, as if not wanting to jump to any conclusions, she said: “What do you mean?”  Several minutes later she burst out crying.  

I had briefly considered having this conversation earlier that night when my mother and I were dining at the all-you-can-eat buffet inside the Seneca Niagara Casino, just down the street from my mother’s condo.  As we sat among the sea of tables in the massive dining room, people passing with plates crammed with crab legs and slabs of roast beef, I thought I’d casually slip it into the conversation.  “Oh, by the way...” I’d say.  “I keep meaning to tell you...”  And my mother would smile and be happy and we’d talk about it for a while and then go pick out our desserts.  

But now, my God, watching her reaction as she sat on the couch, the sobbing and the choking and her hair all a mess, I pictured this playing out in the casino and congratulated myself on my restraint.  Making your mother cry is one thing but doing it out in public, at an all-you-can-eat buffet, is making a spectacle of yourself, and let’s face it, to be a spectacle at an all-you-can-eat buffet inside a casino is really saying something.   Not to mention it pretty much ends the meal right then and there.  What’s the alternative?  Here’s a napkin, I’m going back for seconds? 

It’s never a good feeling to see your mother cry, especially when you’re the cause of it.  But as I sat there watching her, I felt no unease, no remorse, no guilt.  I felt only relief.  Unlike the other two times I’d made my mother cry, I had no choice in this matter.  I could have chosen to not throw the chicken bones at her.  I could have chosen to call her that Easter Sunday in 1990.  But I couldn’t choose to not be gay.  

My mother, with one of her boys.  

When I awoke the next morning, my mother was still crying.  I found her in the living room standing over the ironing board ironing cloth napkins for dinner that night.  She was wrapped in her bathrobe, and her hair was even more of a mess.  Her eyes were red and wet and nearly swollen shut.  She looked like the star of a Lifetime movie.  My first thought was that someone had died, and in a sense, to her, someone had.  “But it’s okay,” she said.  “It’s not you.  I’m not upset with you.  I just have to do this.”  She did that for three days. 

“You know, you go through life thinking things are going to be one way,” she said, “and then all of a sudden you have to shift everything you’ve ever thought about.”  She’d been looking forward to the day when she could go shopping with a daughter-in-law and pass on to her the china and the crystal.  Now, years later, her thoughts have fully shifted and she’s completely changed her tune.  “Who needs a daughter-in-law when you can have Sean?” she says.   

I’ve been with Sean for four years and in that time my mother has become increasingly more interested in him than she is in me.  “Is Sean home?” she’ll say to me on the phone.  Yes, I’ll say.  “Where is he?”  In the bedroom.   “What’s he doing?”  I don’t know.  Is he on the computer?  Probably.  And then she’ll laugh.  She finds the most mundane details of his life completely fascinating.  “I tell people all the time what he said,” she says to me, knowing I have no idea what she’s talking about and waiting for me to cue her for the answer.  What.  What did he say?  “That he’d rather look at pictures of people’s furniture than pictures of their children.”  

It’s easily one of the best things Sean has ever said, Top 3 for sure, and I laugh with my mother about it.  She loves that he said that.  She loves him.  She’s taken to calling us her boys.  “I tell people at work that I’m picking up my boys from the airport,” she said to me last Christmas.  She had a big smile on her face, a far cry from the days of tears.  “That’s what I call you.  My boys.”  

Happiness or: The Day Whitney Houston Looked At Me

Whitney Houston was always my favorite.  Her voice made me happy.  In the thirteen years of my Top Ten charts she had more songs on my lists, more #1s and won more awards than anyone else.  (Yes, I gave out awards.  Shut up.  And no, no one ever showed up to collect them in person.  Not Mariah Carey.  Not Tina Turner.  Or The Pointer Sisters.  Or Pet Shop Boys.  Not Wham!  Aretha Franklin.  Taylor Dayne.  Cyndi Lauper.  Or Rick Astley.  And not Whitney Houston.)   

“You Give Good Love” was her first single but it was her second, “Saving All My Love For You,” that first got my attention and the first to make it onto my Top 10 chart in the Fall of 1985.  My sister was appalled.  “Ian,” she said, “she’s singing about having an affair with a married man!”  She cited the song's opening lyrics as proof.  A few stolen moments is all that we share.  You’ve got your family and they need you there.  “Well maybe he’s got a sick mother at home,” I said, determined to defend both this so-called “married” man and, more importantly, Whitney herself.  “Maybe he's a widower and he’s got two kids to take care of.”  My sister looked at me.  “Mom!” she said, in a tone that meant: “Are you listening to this?  Your son’s a fucking idiot.  Would you please set him straight.”  But my mother, perhaps reminding herself that art is open to interpretation, wasn’t taking sides.  “No, no,” she said.  “He could be right.  Maybe we’re just looking at it the wrong way.”  

The day Whitney looked at me was the day I went to see her in concert.  July 30, 1991.  The “I’m Your Baby Tonight” tour.  She was singing at an amphitheater in Canandaigua, New York, and my friend John had gotten a group of us front row seats.  It was a relatively small venue that held about 2,600 seats under the roof.   Sitting in the front row, I could easily kick my leg out and hit the stage.  

Whitney opened with “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” which, until that time, was the biggest song to hit my Top Ten, having spent three months at number one in the summer of 1987.  The entire theater was on its feet, dancing and jumping, a bunch of arms in the air.  

My friends, too, were flailing about beside me.  But I just sat there.  “Come on, Ian!  Get up!  Dance!” they said.  But no.  Dancing would have been a distraction.  I wanted to simply watch and listen to Whitney Houston, live and in person, right there in front of me, with nothing in the way.  

Her voice was stronger and fuller than I imagined it could be.  Freed from the constraints of a radio-friendly four minutes, her voice had room to expand.  Bending and twisting the notes, she turned the most familiar and overplayed of her songs into something new and, in some cases, better.  So I sat there, perfectly still, arms folded, taking it all in.  And then she looked at me.  

People often look at me and ask, “What’s wrong?”  Because my normal, static face makes me look as if something is wrong.  I could be in a perfectly good mood or, at the very least, not in a bad mood, and someone will think something is seriously wrong with me.  And so, sitting there in the front row, when Whitney Houston looked at me, she saw the one person not on his feet, the one person who wasn’t shouting or dancing or singing along.  She saw someone just sitting there.  And she must have hated me.  If only she had known.  

No one loved listening to her more than I.  As much as?  Perhaps.  But more than?  

Impossible.  

Saving All My Love For You
Peak: #4
Top 10: September 21 - November 16, 1985

How Will I Know
Peak: #1 (6 times)
Top 10: December 6, 1985 - April 1, 1986

Greatest Love of All
Peak: #1 (17 times)
Top 10: April 1 - July 18, 1986

All At Once
Peak: #2 (5 times)
Top 10: August 11 - September 16, 1986

I Wanna Dance with Somebody
Peak: #1 (22 times)
Top 10: May 6 - August 30, 1987

Didn't We Almost Have It All
Peak: #1 (16 times)
Top 10: August 6 - November 10, 1987

So Emotional
Peak: #1 (4 times)
Top 10: November 2, 1987 - February 18, 1988

Where Do Broken Hearts Go
Peak: #1 (12 times)
Top 10: February 18 - June 13, 1988

Love Will Save the Day
Peak: #1 (13 times)
Top 10: June 25 - September 29, 1988

One Moment in Time
Peak: #1 (22 times)
Top 10: September 17, 1988 - January 7, 1989

It Isn't, It Wasn't, It Ain't Never Gonna Be
Peak: #1 (6 times)
Top 10: June 16 - August 7, 1989

I'm Your Baby Tonight
Peak: #1 (5 times)
Top 10: October 8, 1990 - January 16, 1991

All the Man That I Need
Peak: #1
Top 10: December 19, 1990 - April 6, 1991

The Star-Spangled Banner
Peak: #7 (3 times)
Top 10: February 1 - 9 / March 9 - 25, 1991

Miracle
Peak: #1 (3 times)
Top 10: April 26 - June 25, 1991

My Name Is Not Susan
Peak: #5
Top 10: July 31 - September 5, 1991

I Will Always Love You
Peak: #1 (26 times)
Top 10: October 29, 1992 - March 26, 1993

I'm Every Woman
Peak: #2
Top 10: February 2 - April 19, 1993

I Have Nothing
Peak: #1 (19 times)
Top 10: February 10 - June 18, 1993

Run to You
Peak #4 (7 times)
Top 10: June 22 - August 5, 1993

Exhale
Peak: #1 (9 times)
Top 10: November 12, 1995 - January 28, 1996

A Complete Stop -- Part 2

As the police did what they had to do, I sat on a grassy knoll near the sidewalk with my head in my hands, wishing I had stayed to eat steak.  I heard a woman’s voice say to me: “Is that Laura and Bob’s car?”  I looked up at her.  “Do you know them?”  I said, standing up.  Maybe you could break the news to them I wanted to add.  The woman was a neighbor, out for a walk.  “I don’t know how I’m going to tell them,” I said.  “This has never happened to me before.”  

“Oh, honey,” the woman drawled, “don’t worry about them.  Last year at their Christmas party I spilled red wine all over Laura’s new carpet and they were just fine about it.”  I stared at the woman.  The words are you fucking kidding me marched through my head again.  “I wish all I had done was spill wine on their carpet,” I said.  “I think this is a lot worse.”  I paused after putting emphasis on the word “this” and pointed at the wreckage.  The entire windshield of the car had blown out and was now scattered across the intersection.  Flares were lit.  Cars had stopped.  People were staring.

A tow truck arrived and dragged away the car, its front wheel bent and dangling.  The errant wheel of a shopping cart was more functional than this thing.  “Where are they taking it?” I asked the officer who had been questioning me, but if he answered I hadn’t been paying attention.  My mind was consumed with the thought of how I was going to break the news to Laura and Bob and, more worrisome, how they’d react.  

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” I said, having gotten Bob on the phone at the restaurant.  After the police had dropped me off at the house, I went straight up to the room, sat on the hardwood floor with my back against the four-poster bed and picked up the phone.  “And I’m so sorry that I have to tell you this,” I continued, “but I had an accident.”  The line was silent a moment.  “Okay,” Bob said.  And then he asked me if I was hurt.  I told him I was fine and back at the house.  “Well,” he said matter-of-factly, “that’s the important thing.  I’m gonna go finish my steak now and then we’ll be home in a couple hours.”  I hung up, not sure what that meant.  Home in a couple hours...to kill you?  To impale you on that four poster bed and bury you in the backyard?  

Thirty minutes later an Australian couple staying at the bed and breakfast arrived at the house and came upstairs to find me.  They had been eating at the steak house, too, and had heard about the accident.  Concerned, they built a fire in my room’s fireplace and sat with me until we heard the door open downstairs.  Bob and Laura had returned.  

“Is the car totaled?” Bob said.  He was a tall man, large but not fat, a man who had clearly been enjoying red meat for many years, and he was standing close to me, looking down at my pale, white face.  I briefly considered asking how exactly he defined “totaled,” as my “totaled” might be his “dented,” and why make things sound worse than they needed to be?  But I knew there was only one answer.  Be direct, I thought, if only to get through the conversation as quickly as possible.  “Yes,” I said, then braced myself.  One corner of Bob’s mouth went down while the other went up, and he gave his head a brisk nod.  “Good,” he said.  “Now I can get a Mercedes.”  

Laura had been setting her things down, and she now turned her attention to me.  “Look at you, you’re shaking,” she said.  What did he just say?  I thought, but Laura was moving me into another room.  The bar.  “Let’s get you a drink.”  I hadn’t yet seen this part of the house.  For a bed and breakfast, it was exceedingly large, with twelve fireplaces and multiple sitting rooms.  “She puts a Christmas tree in every one of them,” Bob had told me the night before as we sat in a Ralph Lauren-inspired den done in pine green and plaids, watching a baseball game.  “And they all have a different theme,” he added, shaking his head, clearly thinking it was lunacy but loving her for it anyway.  I had seen what Laura could do with some fake fruit on a Thursday afternoon so I had no doubt so she went all out come Christmastime.  

The Australians joined us in the barroom as Bob opened a bottle of red wine and handed me the first glass.  My hand was in no condition to hold anything steady, but spill away, I thought, recalling the neighbor on the street.  The bar itself was a huge, freestanding piece, “solid cherry,” Bob said, handmade with pillars and a canopy.  It was like something you’d find in the Frontgate catalog.  Frontgate, if you’re unfamiliar, sells things for the kind of people who need a fourteen-foot-long pole with a claw at the end of it to change a light bulb on their ceiling.  Four leather-clad stools were lined up in front of the bar while the rest of the room was furnished with club chairs and a brown, leather sectional.   Behind the couch was a long wall with a hand-painted mural, commissioned by Laura, that she was now considering having repainted.  “I don’t like the way he did this part over here,” she said, gesturing at a small detail in the lower left corner that looked perfectly fine to me.  

We sat and talked like that for the rest of the night, casually, as if nothing had happened, and every now and then someone would notice that I was still shaking and ask how I was feeling.  I took this as an opportunity to apologize, every time.  “This has never happened to me before,” I’d say.  “I’ve never even scratched a car.”  And every time Laura and Bob would listen and shrug and drink their wine and then change the subject.  I tried to act normal, tried calming down, but I was still in shock, mostly from wondering why the hell these people didn’t care about their car.  

When it came time to turn in for the night, I got my answer.  I offered a final apology to Laura as Bob had stepped out of the room.  “Laura,” I said, “again, I am so sorry.”  She immediately cut me off.  “Listen,” she said firmly, her hand raised.  “I don’t want to hear another word about it.  Bob hated that car, he’s hated that car since the day he brought it home, and he’s glad it’s gone.  We’re just glad you’re okay.”  Seems I had done them a favor.  And in return they had done one for me.  

When the phone rang, it was the director, calling to make our plans for the next day.  I told him what had happened and, more surprisingly, what the reaction had been.  “They’ve been really very nice,” I said.  “They really don’t seem to care.”  Red wine on their carpet.  Their Lexus.  “If we happen to burn the house down,” I said, “I’m sure they wouldn’t mind.”    

I often think about Laura and Bob, those Republicans from Kingsport, Tennessee.  They no longer run that bed and breakfast.  I imagine they’re retired now, listening to Dolly Parton, eating steak and drinking wine, driving around in a Mercedes without a care in the world.    

A Complete Stop -- Part 1

I’ve never owned a car.  Living in Manhattan I don’t need one.  Or want one.  I wouldn’t even know how to choose one.  I have a hard enough time picking out household appliances.  I recently bought an iron.  It took me three months. 

I failed my driving test the first time I took it.  The man with the clipboard in the seat beside me seemed to think I hadn’t come to a complete stop at one of the stop signs.  The man with the clipboard in the seat beside me was, I was certain, an idiot.  I went right back to the DMV and signed up to take the test again before my permit expired.  I passed the second time, but looking back on it all, I’d be just fine if I’d never learned how to drive at all.  

November 20, 1988

1 - One Moment in Time, Whitney Houston

2 - Waiting For a Star to Fall, Boy Meets Girl

3 - The Locomotion, Kylie Minogue

4 - Baby I Love Your Way, Will to Power

5 - Look Away, Chicago

6 - Domino Dancing, Pet Shop Boys

7 - Put a Little Love in Your Heart, Annie Lennox and Al Green

8 - The Promise, When in Rome

9 - Chains of Love, Erasure

10 - Kissing a Fool, George Michael

Most times when I do drive I’m in a rental car.  They make commercials now, these rental car companies, where the selling point is getting to choose the car you want.  “Choose any car on the lot!” they say, and, judging by their tone, this is all supposed to be very exciting.  But the thrill is lost on me.  I’d rather they choose.  Personally, I don’t want the responsibility of having to pick out a rental car because more often than not, when given this option, I regret my choice and waste my time wishing I'd chosen a different car.  When it’s their choice I can simply chalk it up to luck, good or bad, which has nothing to do with me.  Frankly, I don’t care what kind of car I get.  It’s not mine.  It’s no reflection on me.  I can’t see what it looks like when I’m driving it.  What do I care what color it is?  As long as the tires stay on I’m good. 

My favorite part about renting a car is giving it back.  Here, take it.  I don’t want this anymore.  Newspapers often like to get people’s opinions on current events, asking questions like Are Movies Better Now or Twenty Years Ago? or Should Implants Be Covered By Insurance?  USA Today once asked What Does Freedom Mean to You?  They had stopped people on the street, snapped unflattering pictures in poor lighting and published the answers, which included standard phrases like “without fear” and “no constraints.”  Well, freedom to me is handing off the keys to a rental car and walking away from it all.  

I used to love to drive.  Then one night, I was driving a car in Tennessee when I was hit by a ten-ton welding truck.  Nobody was hurt.  Except the car.  The car was towed off and never heard from again.   

I was working for Disney at the time, writing a movie set in the Appalachian Mountains.  The director thought it might be a good idea if we did some research, so he and I were sent on a ten-day trip through the area, starting in Tennessee.  I flew down to Charleston, West Virginia and rented a car, which was some make or other, small and blue, and felt like it was made of aluminum.  Cough too hard and the thing was liable to tip over.  I drove to Kingsport, where arrangements had been made for us to stay in a bed and breakfast.  I arrived on a Thursday.  The director would arrive two days later, on Saturday morning.  I pulled into the driveway of the large, brown house and entered through the side door.  Laura and Bob, the middle-aged owners, were in the kitchen.  Laura had shoulder-length, blond hair and was standing at the table pulling fake, green apples from a craft store bag and dropping them into a straight-sided, glass vase.  “Oh, yes,” she said in her friendly, Southern accent when I told her my name.  “You’re the Hollywood people.”  I told her I was from New York, but it was all the same to her.  We passed through a hallway lined with framed portraits of Ronald Reagan and both Bushes as she took me upstairs to my room.  I spent the rest of the evening driving around the area and taking pictures of Tennessee landscapes, calming and colorful in early October.    

I returned to the house to find my hosts sitting on their porch, their “veranda,” as they called it, enjoying a cold drink with two of their neighbors.  How perfectly Southern, I thought, and when I was asked to join them I did.  They questioned me about the movie, and I mentioned that Dolly Parton was the director’s first choice for the lead character.  This led to a discussion on how Whitney Houston had ruined Dolly’s “I Will Always Love You.”  They talked about it as if a murder had taken place, shaking their heads and pursing their lips as the painful memories of it all surfaced.  “What she did to that song,” the neighbor woman said, as if Whitney had bashed it over the head with a two-by-four and then set it on fire.  Earlier, I had made a mental note to not mention politics around these folks, and I now added Whitney Houston to that list.  

The next morning, I drove further south to Jonesborough for the National Storytelling Festival.  This annual, self-explanatory event features storytellers telling stories -- fables and fairy tales, dramas and comedies, fact and fiction -- all in an effort to preserve and honor the art of oral tradition.  I spent the day with thousands of other people, sitting in fold-up chairs beneath large tents or lying out in the open air, on the grass, staring up at the sky and listening to stories.  It was like books on tape, but live and in person and with the smell of kettle corn in the air.  I was having a perfectly pleasant time.  Until that night.    

As the sun set, I drove back to the house in my little tin can.  Laura and Bob invited me to dinner with them and a group of friends.  “We go every Friday,” Bob said, “and have steak.”  Having no other plans, I accepted.  They offered to drive.  I climbed into the back seat of their Lexus, and five minutes later we  had arrived at the steakhouse.  

“I should go back,” I said to Bob about ten minutes later.  I had remembered that the director had said he’d give me a call that night to make plans for the next morning, when he would arrive, and in the days before the annoying ubiquity of cell phones, the only way for me to receive that call was to be in the house, and being new to the job, new to Disney, new to the whole experience of getting paid to write and travel and listen to stories, the last thing I wanted to do was screw it up because I was out eating steak.  For all I knew, I could be fired for a thing like that.  

I told Bob I would simply call a cab, but he insisted I take his car.  “Just park it in the driveway and leave the keys on the kitchen counter,” he said.  “We’ll get a ride home.”  Bob was quite a large man, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer, so I gave him a different answer.  And as I took the keys and climbed into the Lexus, I thought what could go wrong?  Sure it was dark, and I had never driven the Kingsport roads at night, but the house was three minutes away.  Go straight, then right, then left.  That’s all I had to do.  Two turns, three minutes.  So  I drove straight, made the right, and as I sat at a green light on a four-lane road, waiting to make the left, inching into the intersection, watching the passing headlights of the oncoming traffic, I saw the light turn red.  So I did what any reasonable person would do and turned, expecting the headlights to stop.  But, apparently, the light had not turned red.  The red I saw was the other traffic light, angled in such a way as to cast a reflection of red that I mistook for my light when mine was actually still green, which, although I didn’t realize it at the time, was impossible for me to see because I had moved under it.  And as I made my turn, I looked to my right and had the sudden realization that those headlights aren’t stopping.   The words oh shit raced though my head, in capital letters, no doubt, and then a sharp, deadening sound burst through the car.  And as everything went black, the words are you fucking me kidding me ran after the oh shit in my head, along with holy fucking shit I’m hit and this is what it feels like to be in a car accident and I’m in Tennessee in a Lexus that isn’t mine this isn’t my car holy fucking shit are you fucking kidding me I’m in Tennessee.   

When the world stopped spinning and I could see again, I saw that I had spun around and was now facing the other direction, back towards the steakhouse.  There was a deflated airbag in my lap, burns on my arm, a shrill ringing in my ear and a glove compartment where the steering wheel used to be.  

The man with the clipboard in the seat beside me back in 1988 would have been proud.  I had come to a complete stop.  

Carrots - A Christmas Story

It was during the week leading up to Christmas when my grandmother, standing in the middle of her living room while holding a large wreath, looking around for a place to hang it, farted.  

December 25, 1983

1. Karma Chameleon, Culture Club

2. Why Me, Irene Cara

3. Break My Stride, Matthew Wilder

4. Time Will Reveal, DeBarge

5. Holiday, Madonna

6. Union of the Snake, Duran Duran

7. Twist of Fate, Olivia Newton-John

8. Joanna, Kool and the Gang

9. Islands in the Stream, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton

10. Love is a Battlefield, Pat Benatar

I was sitting on a step midway up the carpeted staircase, looking out between the wooden rungs of the banister to the living room down below, watching the decorating take place.  My mother was sitting on the couch along with Carrots, the cleaning lady.  She was called Carrots because, apparently, at an earlier point in her life she had had bright red hair.  But when I knew her she was much older and her hair was dusty gray.  It was curly and puffy, too, but thin. You could see right through it, straight to the other side of her head.  She was short and liked to talk a lot and had a Polish accent.  The word “that” came out as “dat.”  “Three” sounded like “tree.”  “He lived two, tree houses down,” she once said about a neighbor.  My mother and I still say that sentence when we feel like imitating Carrots, who has long since died.  But she was there the night my grandmother farted, and if not for her, my mother and I would have probably forgotten the whole thing.  

Carrots had spent the day cleaning the house because my grandmother was planning a Christmas party for the club girls.  Back when World War II ended and everyone started having babies, my grandmother, her cousin and a few other friends started a club.  It was the mid-1950s and they were housewives in their mid-30s with babies and small children and husbands that worked, so they’d all get together, open up a card table and play Acey-Duecy.  And every year they held a Christmas party, rotating hosting duties among the six or seven of them.  The husbands came to the party, too, and the hostess would give a parting favor to the other girls as a memento.  A santa mug.  A candle.  A small elf head whose body was a bell.  My grandmother displayed these in her living room every Christmas.  She would close the top of the grand piano, spread a cloth doily over the lid and set out the club favors.  That’s what she called them.  She stored them in a square white box labeled “Club Favors.”  On the bottom of each favor she had written the name of the club girl who had given it to her along with the year.  Helen 1963.  Marian 1978.  By the mid-1980s the club girls were still having Christmas parties, and in 1983 it was my grandmother’s turn to host.  

She called in Carrots to help with the cleaning because my grandmother was working a full-time job.  But she wasn’t about to let her busy 9-to-5 stop her from making a good impression, especially with the club girls.  She stocked up on the Creme de Menthe, the Blue Nun, the Peach Schnapps.  She cleaned the silver, the china, the Waterford crystal.  She pulled out all the Christmas decorations that in other years would stay boxed in storage because they were “too much trouble.”  The candle wreaths, the centerpieces, the stockings and the garland and the bows and boughs for the staircase banister.  Everything was shaping up to be perfect.  And so it came as a surprise when she stood there with the wreath, in her stockinged feet, on her gold carpeting, looking around her large living room with its Louis XIV chairs and couch, its cream-colored drapes trimmed with gold fringe, dripping with tassels, and farted.  We all heard it.  And we laughed.  Except my grandmother.  “Oh, oh...” she uttered, horrified.  She quickly moved, acting as if she had a found a place to hang the wreath, trying to put the event behind her as quickly as possible.  And as I said, she may have succeeded had it been just myself and my mother.  But Carrots was there.  

“Oh, dat was cute, Marge,” she said.  My grandmother was doubly horrified. Not only was Carrots calling attention to the fart, she thought it was endearing. “You know,” Carrots continued, “my Joe, he used to fart all da time.”  Just the sound of the word made my grandmother flinch.  She didn’t know what to do with herself, where to go.  She was practically spinning in circles.  “They called him Farty Joe,” Carrots said.  My mother was doubled over on the couch.  She and I both knew how my grandmother felt about farts and here was Carrots, talking about them as if she were telling us what she had for breakfast.  I could tell by look on my grandmother’s face that she wanted to tell Carrots to just shut the hell up, but if there was one thing my grandmother hated more than the farts it was rudeness.  So instead she tried pretending none of it existed, the conversation, us laughing, her fart.  As Carrots kept right on going.  “You’re supposed to let it out, you know, they told him dat in da hospital, my Joe.  They said, ‘if you hold it in you’ll get sick.’”  My grandmother would have gladly contracted tuberculosis if it meant she never had to fart in front of others again.

My grandmother, Marge, in her dining room, not farting.    

My mother and I told this story for years afterwards, and the look on my grandmother’s face was always the same.  “Oh for God sakes,” she’d say.

The other day I asked my mother where my grandmother’s ornaments were.  She had the glass ones from the 50s and 60s, the Shiny Brites.  “I still have them,” my mother said.  “But I finally threw away the club favors. They were so dirty.”  I was saddened by this at first.  The club favors were as much a part of Christmas to me as were any of the other decorations.  But then I realized my grandmother would be fine with their disposal.  She liked things clean.