Teddy #2
I’d nearly died many times because of her. Told her I wanted to die many times because of her. Slept in a shelter. Slept around.
Sneaked into bars. Finally met an old queen everyone called Madame Q who told me I’d be dead in a year if I continued living
the way I was.
“Murder or AIDS, you pick,” he’d told me, sipping a Rose Kennedy.
He let me stay in his casita for free, helped me get my GED and a job. I thought he wanted to sleep with me. One day, I walked
into his bedroom shirtless and asked how I could pay him back.
“Oh, my dear, I don’t eat chicken,” he said with a laugh. “I was just like you when I was young. Too many of us have the same
sad story. Kicked out. Unwanted. Unloved. It’s not fair, but life never is, straight or gay. Want to pay me back? Love yourself.
Be good to yourself. Be proud of who you are. Don’t walk around in shame. Find your community. And give back to your community
when they need it most, and—believe me—they will always need it. When you go to a bar, seek out a friend, not a fuck buddy.
Now, shoo. And eat a burger and some fries.”
My mother didn’t cry or apologize. She just listened.
“Palm Springs,” she finally said. “Your father called it the land of fruits and nuts.”
“That’s not funny, Mama. No child should ever endure what I did,” I said, looking her right in the eye.
“You had the power to stop it, and you didn’t do a thing about it.
And you will face God with that decision.
And if He tells you that you did the right thing, well, then, I’ll be on a different cloud watching The Golden Girls. ”
“Your Great-Aunt Dizzy sent me a bracelet from Palm Springs years ago when she vacationed there.” That was her response to
me. Didn’t protest or deny a thing. “Prettiest thing I ever saw. She told me it was the color of their sunsets over the mountain.”
When she looked at me, I saw one tear.
One tear.
I got my Mama’s one and only tear in life. God, I’m just like her.
“Ssshh!” she then said when the theme music started. “It’s on!”
My mother’s death rattle reared up every time Dorothy landed a zinger.
“You’re just like her,” my mom would say without looking over, jamming a bent finger toward the television. “Damn spitfire.”
When that episode ended, my mother grabbed my face between her hands as I cleared the plates. “We’ve always been a lot alike,
the two of us. In fact, you got both Dorothys in you, Theodore. Me and Bea. And don’t you live your whole life alone like
I have. Die surrounded by friends like them Golden Girls. Surrounded by love. Real love, not pretend love.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a big difference between pretend love and real love. I pretended to love your daddy, but I never did. Grew up in
a time when I didn’t have a chance to do anything else but survive: I wasn’t rich, I wasn’t smart, I wasn’t pretty, but, my
God, I did love you, Teddy. I’m sorry I grew up in a time when we didn’t know how to show it.”
“And Trudy?” I asked.
“Don’t know if she’s capable of being loved.”
“I am loved, Mama,” I finally said. “Even though I’ve never felt like I deserved it.”
Every week when The Golden Girls would end, my mama would always say, “Now I gotta wait another week. What if I’m not around to see a new episode?”
“They got TVs in heaven, Mama,” I’d say, “although I’m not sure that’s exactly where you’re headed. Elevator goes both ways.
But just in case,” I’d add, “I’d better work my magic. You don’t want to wear those ratty old pajamas and nasty housecoat
forever in the afterlife.”
“Do your magic,” she’d say to me.
Before I came home to look after Mama, I had been working the Lanc?me counter at the mall in Rancho Mirage, down valley from
Palm Springs, trying to make corpses look like MTV stars. But I was getting really good with makeup and hair. So good a fine-boned
man asked me one afternoon if I did drag. I didn’t really know what that was at the time.
I learned fast and started doing the wigs and makeup of drag queens all over the desert. Then I started dressing them. I had
a real eye for glamour, it turned out. You can make a black eye go away with concealer and fake lashes. You can become a different
person with the right hair and makeup.
“A little hair, a little paint, makes a lady what she ain’t.”
I just hope God thought Mama was someone else when He greeted her. My handiwork might have been the only thing that gave her
a shot with the Big Guy.
John always told me before we went out on a date that I had to put on something extra nice just in case we got in an accident
and died. He was serious, too.
“If you die today, that’s going to be your ghost outfit,” John said. “You’ll wear it forever in the afterlife. So plan accordingly.”
So, the last night of Mama’s life, I dressed her up real pretty like the ladies she loved on TV and made her some Jeno’s Pizza Rolls.
I worked my magic on Mama while she just watched me: Despite her pain, I got Mama out of her ratty old gown and into a fabulous caftan, a bold cat eye, fake eyelashes, red lipstick and a red wig I teased within an inch of its life.
A sweet hospice nurse had been bringing me wigs from the American Cancer Society.
“You can die in peace now, knowing you look like an angel,” I told Mama when I was done, not expecting it to be a premonition.
“Or a whore,” she said when I held up a mirror.
An hour later, Mama went to heaven or hell looking like Ann-Margret.
Bye Bye Birdie.
Man, Mama hated to miss an episode, so I curled up next to her in that bed, put my head on her shoulder, and we watched it
together, like we’d done every Saturday the past few months.
This was our finale.
And if you don’t think God has a sense of humor, the last episode of The Golden Girls we watched was about a funeral. The show was entitled “It’s a Miserable Life.” How’s that for irony?
In the show, Sophia attends a funeral service for a woman she never liked.
“Pay your respects?” Dorothy asks her mother, stunned by her attendance. “You hated her.”
“I did,” Sophia says. “But when a person dies, you go to their funeral to show the man above you have respect for human life,
no matter how wretched it was. Any idiot knows that.”
God, Mama’s life was wretched.
Why did I go home again? To pay my damn respects.
I quit my job and moved home to take care of a woman who didn’t take care of me.
I even left John and all my friends. I left a man who was too good for me.
Too good for this world. Good people are like butterflies: beautiful, fragile, but short-lived.
But John reminded me what was possible when you believe in the good in life and others.
And you want to know the strangest thing?
When someone believes in you, loves you so much, fills you with so much warmth that you can actually hear your heart crack like the frozen earth on the first spring day in Michigan, it changes how you see the world and yourself.
You see light, not dark.
And that light led me home to the early winter darkness of Michigan to give Mama what she could never give me: a sliver of
forgiveness. A molecule of understanding. One damn moment of peace.
Unconditional love.
Maybe I did it because she didn’t have anyone or any money. A lifetime of living isolated in rural America and outliving her
friends meant she had no one. You sure weren’t coming back now that Daddy was gone. Sure, Mama had Medicaid, but that didn’t
mean the only hospital within a hundred miles accepted it. And how could she even get there on her own for her treatments,
scans and doctor visits?
Maybe I came home because I wasn’t allowed at Daddy’s funeral. No one wanted a scene, but let me clear the air: I wasn’t planning
on causing one. I was simply planning to take a piss on the old man’s grave in front of the whole town just as he’d done to
me my whole life.
Or—let’s be completely honest here, okay?—maybe I came home again to prove to Trudy, Mama and Daddy that I was a better person
than any of them. Maybe I took care of her to prove to myself I was a good person, like the one John saw. Or maybe I did it
to show her I was the same person I’d always been.
Or maybe I did it because I knew that, for the first time in her life, Mama just needed a friend.
Then I called the funeral home to pick up Mama and make the arrangements, and I told them to call my sister and tell her our
mama had died happy, after watching her last episode of The Golden Girls. I couldn’t afford a funeral, I didn’t want to stick around long enough for one, but, mostly, I did it to piss off Daddy:
My God, he loved a funeral. He loved forcing the entire town to come out and pay tribute to a monster they saw as a hero.
As I said, I think God has a sense of humor.
By the time the funeral home called Trudy, I had written a letter to her telling her everything I felt, put the flag up on Mama’s mailbox for the last time, turned around and took the letter back out, and was already back on the road headed west.
The only thing I took from my mama’s house was the beautiful Bakelite bracelet of orange and gold that Dizzy gave her, the
one I used to sneak out of her jewelry box. It was the one I was wearing and waving in the air when I dressed up in Mama’s
finest the first time. I was pretending to be Cher, and Trudy caught me. She called for Daddy to beat the devil out of me.
Inside Dizzy’s bracelet was a stamp that read Vintage Jewelry of Palm Springs.
This was the reason I had gone to the desert in the first place so many moons ago.
I didn’t stop driving until I arrived home to a sunset over the mountains that was as orange and gold as the bracelet I had
slipped around my wrist.
Dizzy was right. This bracelet was magical.
I never heard from Trudy again.
Even after my friends reached out to let her know John had died.
Unlike my bracelet, family and guilt would never be ligatures that strangled Trudy.
A Rose Kennedy is already waiting for me at Streetbar.