My Mother’s
Cold Dead Hands Around My Throat by David Evanier
“Yesterday, when I got up,” Daniel said a few months ago, “there was a touch of sun coming in the window. And I suddenly flashed on the early morning sunlight on the curb when I was a kid. There was mica in the cement they used for the sidewalks and it glinted like little jewels. The feeling you got was of the promise of morning and the possible adventures of being a kid outside in a neighborhood that I loved. And then, as I sort of floated there for a bit in that revelry of the past, a wave of sadness washed over me, for the loss of those simple beauties, and the innocence and hope of childhood. I felt the grief of knowing I’d never have those moments again, those moments I had as a kid. They only took place outside on the street, because in my house it was so awful. And what I felt was grief, the sort of grief that clutches you and doesn’t let go.
“I wanted to kill my mother. She killed herself and left a note blaming me.
I had magic powers. Yesterday I started to write a good story. I did a
paragraph, and afterwards my mother came at me like a dog and tried to
strangle me by the throat.”
# # # #
My friend Eddie Colletti came out of the sky after forty years and called me
from Oregon. When he were kids, he would hypnotize pigeons by placing his
finger under their throats. They felt they couldn’t move. They would stay in
that frozen position until a loud noise could break their trance. We talked
of the old neighborhood, and how he had always wanted to be a detective, and
how his father had been killed. We talked of Mr. Fink, our shop teacher in
junior high school 16, and about Betsy Sue Zimmer, who was sloppy, and Sue
Greene with the big bazooms, and Ed deRegian who became a diplomat in the
state department. There was a disconnect of, oh, just 40 years, when we knew
nothing about each other. For Eddie, I was the kid at 15 with my Jolson
records and for me he was the nut guarding my apartment house for Jane
Benson, whom he had a crush on, to get home safely, holding his detective
badge. Eddie and I were opposites. He was a kind of a geek, interested in
the military, science and protocol.
“What was I like?” I asked him.
“Well, I remember you and your mother,” he said. “You had a real calm about
her, like you had control over her. She would be screaming or ranting, I
guess, and you’d wave your arms like you weren’t bothered at all and say
“Oh, don’t worry about that. I can deal with her. That’s just my mother.”
Well, not exactly, Eddie. That scene I acted out for you was a front, hiding
my shame, hiding my terror and demonstrating my mastery of what in fact I
had no control over whatsoever.
# # # #
Louis Armstrong’s house in Corona was a few blocks from where I had lived
all those years as a kid and I visited the house, a museum now, a couple of
years ago. There’s a picture of Louis on his desk with the two Johnson boys,
kids my age then. Louie taught the kids in the neighborhood how to play the
trumpet. I wonder what it would have been like if I’d known him.
Elmhurst had secret places for a kid, fields to sled down, a house with a
well in the garden, lots of trees that shook in the spring and winter rains
and their brown leaves filled the sidewalks and streets and gutters in late
fall. And there was a gypsy girl who waited for me on corners and I did not
understand what she wanted of me.
The streets, the leaves, the wind, the steepled chimneys on the rooftops of
the apartment house, whispered to me as I walked home with my schoolbooks
and yes, Daniel, I hated to go inside my house too, my mother crying on the
bed, or raving at me and my wanting to push her out the window, and yes, I
remember the mica in the sidewalks, now that you mention it, and that it
glinted like little jewels. You said it, Daniel, not me.
# # # #
When my hair began to fall out, I was 16, and I connected that to my
mother’s hatred of me. The dandruff fell all over the bed, and I pulled out
the strands of hair. Soon there was almost nothing left, and I stopped at
every store window to comb the few hairs forward that were left to hide my
barren head. You could see me at street corners with a comb, combing away in
the reflection of the store’s window. But the slightest breeze blew them and
they flew up like angry birds. I smacked my head in a fury. There was
nothing I could do; I had the hair of an old beggar or a maniac. No one, no
young boy looked that ridiculous and vulnerable. I never saw another boy who
had my hair.
And by my twenties my walks across the city were frightening, when the
darkness encroached more and more, in the brutal summer heat rising from the
pavement and down from the sun and within me the that fury that was
engulfing me, and I lived at the Judson Memorial Church. I walked down
Thompson Street, afraid to encounter anyone at the welcoming door of Judson,
afraid of my terror, afraid they would see it and turn away from me, that I
would frighten them, and as I approached Judson where Larry Kornfeld,
latter-day saint, the rabbinic director of Judson’s poet theater and
Gertrude Stein, over-eating Larry, waited to greet me and embrace me in his
tiny room filled with Mann and Dylan Thomas and the Singer brothers, I
plunged myself toward that door, opened it, threw myself through it as if my
life depended on it.
# # # #
Some of those who were curiosities to me while they lived turn real to me
when they died. My mother’s only friend, almost the only person who took
pity on her, was Leo Mindlin, who, when he was in his 90s, lived in a
ravaged house in Flatbush, hopped around on one shaky leg and actually
resembled a radish. Leo, who’d broken his back while flying in the Air Force
in World War Two. Surrounded by hundreds of ticking and broken clocks in the
old house, his language a fractured English. Leo, who’d handled my mother’s
funeral (there was no one else) on a cold bleak winter day. I couldn’t even
figure out how to shovel the dirt onto my mother’s grave: “My fucking mother
couldn’t even teach me that!” I blurted out to Leo and three hungry cousins
waiting for the will--and suddenly Leo falling to the earth and breaking his
hand--he felt light as a sparrow when I picked him up--the hand would never
function again. “Ah, what the hell,” said Leo. “I took a fall for her.” But
Leo had had one great love affair--this one he actually fucked--with a
stripper named Liz Renay, famous for running naked through Union Square in
San Francisco with an appreciative crowd of thousands pursuing her.
Comrade Sophie in the Communist Jefferson Book Shop on East 16th Street off
Union Square toasting Castro with me by taking out liquor miniatures and
adding ice water from the water machine and taking me down to the basement
to hunt for secret books to give me by Stalin and William Z. Foster that
boasted of the Soviet America to come. A week ago--after 30 years-- I
learned what happened to her by looking up the memoirs of a Daily Worker
reporter named Virginia Gardner on the internet. Gardner wrote that Sophie
was “the most wonderful Communist party member I have ever known” and that
after many years of working in the Bookshop for $35 a week (she refused to
take more money), she’d voted the wrong way on a Party resolution. One of
the party honchos, Louis Weinstock, proud of his brutal Leninist machismo,
strode in, walked up to Sophie and said “You’re through. Get out.” I cannot
imagine her face at that moment. I remember Sophie ---I was her young
Lenin--giving me socks and underwear and that at night, she told me, when
her black husband Joe (who had played with the Harlem Globetrotters and sang
and played the guitar for her) slept, in their tenement flat, in order not
to wake him up, she sat on the toilet in their tiny bathroom to read her
beloved Daily Worker, every turgid line of it.
# # # #
I understood Daniel better this morning. I was walking down the steps of my
apartment house and I heard a thump, a clip clop behind me. I turned to see
who was behind me, and no one was there. When I got downstairs, I walked
back and forth in the hallway. The thumps followed me. I wondered if I was
going mad, if this was what it felt like. But I knew that was impossible. I
put down the bag I was carrying and walked back and forth. The thumps
stopped. Two books in the bag had been bumping against my shoulder.
That was Daniel’s life every day. The thumps of his past followed him
everywhere. He knew they weren’t there, but he heard them, and he knew that
no one else did. He knew he heard them and he knew they weren’t there. He
was caught in the middle. He didn’t believe in the thumps, but he couldn’t
help but hear them. He was not psychotic. He understood; he knew what was
happening. And it was driving him crazy even though he was sane.
# # # #
“Last week was the anniversary of my mother’s suicide,” Daniel said to me
once. “My mother killed herself after a long life of misery, fear and anger.
Her life was a terrible life. But she had her joys. She was smart and funny.
She could make jokes. Later on those jokes turned into vicious barbs. She
was like the person who’s drowning and just grasps everyone around them and
tries to drown them too in their panic and fear. I often can’t breathe
because I feel I have her cold dead hands around my throat. She never wanted
me to breathe while she was alive.
“ I grew up being almost always with her. She was in and out of mental
hospitals, when she wasn’t in the house going crazy and doing things that
were seductive, that were bloody-- life was like in a hell, a chaos, a Bosch
painting come alive. I remember her sitting on the couch when I was a kid
and her holding her hand out to me like a claw, the other hand on her
throat. “Don’t you leave me or I’ll die.” And she did kill herself and left
a note blaming me for it. Which she did her whole life. Every time she went
crazy or tried to kill herself, she made it very clear it was my fault, my
being evil, obstreperous, out to get her.”
# # # #
What I had in common with Daniel: the inability to deal with adversity. The
feeling that the world owed me a living--me, so tender, so sensitive so
noble, so dainty,
stroking my chin, martyred to the everlasting glory of literature.
What I have in common now: little pieces of the above, but mainly traces of
the past. As I said to Daniel when he was trying to write a new story:
“Nobody gives a shit if you fail. No one gives a shit. It is up to you. It
will be terrible if you fail. You have to do this.”
One morning I woke up--perhaps it was the 50th anniversary of being in
therapy-- and the past was over for me. I return to it in fits and starts,
but it’s not the controlling force in my life, as it is for Daniel. I accept
that I am broken in places and cannot be fixed, as Hemingway wrote, didn’t
he? Daniel had it far worse than me, yet almost everyone I meet feels their
story is the worst, the most tragic. And their stories often are terrible
beyond belief.
This is not a happy ending.
# # # #
I said that Daniel has two stories left to tell. The second is left over
from his WFCR days. It is about Armand Whitcomb and his wife Linda, a
perfect WFCR couple, who lay side by side all day in bed , reclining on
rumpled sheets and piles of pillows, stacks of books beside them on the
floor, reading, watching TV, drinking wine, eating and smoking pot. Daniel
would sit at the foot of the bed. One day Linda showed Daniel Hitler’s dog
license, the real thing, owned by one of the elderly dying German men Linda
fucked and cultivated. She wanted to sell it for big bucks.
Daniel refuses to tell the story because he is afraid he will hurt Armand
and Linda’s feelings. I think that is bullshit.
I am going to stop there. One day Daniel will tell the story. I cannot rob
him of it. Everything in this story was not written by Daniel, although many
things in this story were said by Daniel.
But Daniel has written the story of the dog license.
I guess that means I really want Daniel to get better.
And that I believe in him, even if he doesn’t.
I think that makes me his friend.
© 2005-2009 Per Contra: The International Journal of the Arts, Literature and Ideas