When I told my grandmother about my mother’s idea, she said, “Well, that’s not right.” The voice of reason.
My grandmother Maxine is from El Paso, Texas. My mother’s entire clan is from Texas. And my father’s clan is from South Philly. So we’re basically white trash. But because of the celebrity factor, I think of us as blue-blooded white trash.
I bring my grandmother up because when my mother was about seven my grandmother locked her in the closet. You know, for not finishing her dinner or her homework. (My grandmother was the one who told this story, by the way.) Anyway, after my mother had been in the closet for about an hour, she asked my grandmother for a glass of water and my grandmother, naturally, said, “Why?” And my mother said, “Because I’ve just spit on all of your dresses and now I’ve run out of spit and I want to spit all over your shoes!”
These are the people I hail from.
When I asked my grandmother later why she thought this form of discipline was appropriate, she said, “Well, we did not have Cosmopolitan magazine in those days so we did not know it was wrong.”
Don’t you think that my family has a really weird relationship with magazines?
Anyway, my mother and I never did go forward with the plan for me to have the baby with Richard, and I think that has turned out to be a good thing. Aside from the obvious—my sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter—my mother ended up hating Richard and for good reason. He took all the money she had made since Harry took the first batch!
So she says to me at this point, “You know, dear, Eddie’s starting to look like the good husband.”
Eddie, The Good Husband by Anton Chekhov.
What could you say about my father?
My father is beyond likeable. I mean you would just love him. My father also smokes four joints a day. Not for medical reasons. So I call him Puff Daddy. But he is just adorable. There’s a reason he got all that high-quality pussy—except for the Miss Louisiana thing, but anyone can make one mistake. So, after he wrote his—well, he called it an autobiography, but I thought of it more as a novel. After he wrote his novel, Been There, Done as I like to call it Been There Done Them That—or as I like to call it, Been There, Done Them because it really was just about the women he’d ever slept with and how the sex was and what their bodies were like (so it is a feel-good read!).
But after I read it… well, for one thing, I wanted to get my DNA fumigated.
But I read it partly out of loyalty and partly because the Enquirer called to ask how I felt about my father alluding to the “fact” that my mother was a lesbian in the book. And not that it matters, but my mother is not a lesbian! She’s just a really, really, bad heterosexual.
4
BOTH HANDS, ONE HEART, TWO MOODS, AND A HEAD
A few years ago my daughter and I visited my father in San Francisco, where he lives because there’s a really big Chinatown there. And the day before, he had just gotten those tiny hearing aids that fit right inside his ears. They’re really, really expensive. Some people say $3,000—others say five—anyway, really expensive. So he’d gotten them the day before, so the night before, he didn’t want to lose them or forget where they were, so he put them in his pill box next to his bed so he’d remember where they were in the morning.
Yes, that’s right, he ate them.
So, whenever he couldn’t hear my daughter or myself, we’d yell into his stomach or his ass. Now he subsequently got those hearing aids again, and I had the opportunity to see them. They were the size of a lima bean—a rubber lima bean with an antenna.
Now look, I adore pills, I’m a huge fan, but these looked like none I’ve ever seen. Now, I don’t know how you are in the morning, I’m not that sharp, but I think I would know if I was eating a rubber lima bean with an antenna! Twice!
Well, if you have a life like mine, then these experiences gradually accumulate until you become known as “a survivor.” This is a term that I loathe. But, the thing is that when you are a survivor, which fine, I reluctantly agree that I am—and who over 40 isn’t?—when you are a survivor, in order to be a really good one, you have to keep getting in trouble to show off your gift.
My mother says, “Well, dear, what are the choices? Not surviving?”
But this is from a woman who when asked for dating advice says, “For what age?”
My mother, who incidentally lives next door to me, she calls me to this day and says, “Hello, dear, this is your mother, Debbie.” (As opposed to my mother Vladimir or Jean-Jacques.)
I have a very loud voice. I used to say that my voice was designed to wrest people from dreams. My mother grew up in Texas, on the border of Mexico, but she learned to speak “properly” with the assistance of Lillian Sydney, her vocal coach at MGM. Over time, she was able to gradually but completely lose her accent—unless she got really angry or frustrated with Todd and me—then she’s been known to say, “Carrie Frances—y’all get your butts in here!” But my mom has what I can only describe as a movie star accent. It’s very breathless and elegant—kind of mid-Atlantic. My brother and I frequently talk this way to each other now: “Hello, dear, this is your brother, Todd.”
A few years back I interviewed my mother for this tragic cable talk show I was doing. This was for the Mother’s Day show.
Anyway, we’re chatting along pretty gaily for straight people, and then suddenly somewhere in the middle of our little chat my mother casually says, “You know, dear, it’s like that time when I was a little girl and I was kidnapped.”
Huh?
“Oh, darling, I told you about all of this, you’ve just forgotten.”
(This was before my ECT, so there’s no way I’d forget something like that. I doubt that even electroconvulsive therapy could banish a story as creepy as that one.)
So on she goes with this horrendous story, which I’m sure you’re all dying to hear, like I was. Just desperate to hear each and every horrifically vivid detail of a tale increasingly tinged with darker hues of molestation. Happy Mother’s Day everyone! After my panic subsides somewhat, I hear her saying that when she was eight or maybe younger, her eighteen-year-old neighbor and his friend scooped her up for a little joy ride. I’ll spare you the more grisly details, but the good news is that despite the fact that something extremely unsavory occurred, my mother wasn’t, in fact, raped.
Anyway, long gross story short, the father of the boy who encouraged my mom to consider a part of his anatomy as a lollipop called my grandmother and pleaded with her not to go to the police.
“I guarantee you I’ll make absolutely sure he’ll never do this again.”
“How?” asked my grandmother, to which the boy’s father somehow conveyed his intention to castrate his son.
“I’ll fix him so he can’t.”
At this point my grandmother generously reminded the boy’s father that he hadn’t raped her daughter, to which the father allegedly replied, “I just wanna make sure he don’t have the chance to do what he done again and maybe next time it’d be worse. He’s disgraced our family enough.”
Ah, the lovely family stories one has.
When I was about fifteen, my mother had started dating a man named Bob Fallon, and my brother and I called him Bob Phallus, because he came equipped with exotic creams and sex toys. You know, aphrodisiacs. Well, actually, Anglo-disiacs, because we’re white. Anyway, thanks to Bob, that Christmas my mother bought both my grandmother and myself vibrators! As unusual as a gift like this sounds, you have to admit that they are the ideal stocking stuffers. I mean, you can fit the vibrator into the long top part of the stocking and still be able to get another cute little gift in the toe!