Chapter 3 The Bathroom Floor #3
We all shared the sense of the music of this canyon and the lore of the Canyon and the feeling of what it had been, but we also felt something scary there, too.
Behind our closed doors, bad things were happening, and to all of us.
We were all only children with single parents, single moms. Many of the guys who came into our mothers’ lives were bad, bad men.
They were the embodiment of the poor judgment of our desperate, sad mothers, who had had a dream of a family taken from them, only to replace it with distracted decisions, or relationships that started in rainbows and ended in fire.
Consequently, our childhoods veered toward the dark.
None of us had yards to play in, and few of us had siblings, so we’d fill our time trying to steal our moms’ pot or booze.
Then there was the day my friend Lucy got mad at my friend Heather and chased her a full mile up the hill with a butcher’s knife.
Heather, desperately needing protection, headed for my house, burst in, and cowered in my kitchen.
Seeing the huge knife, followed by Lucy, coming around the corner, I pulled a six-pack of Diet Coke out of the fridge and hurled it at Lucy’s head to make her stop.
This did indeed end the confrontation, only for both of them to turn on me.
“You’re so emotional, Christina,” Heather said.
I don’t suppose it helped that I really didn’t want Nancy Priddy to be with anyone else after Joe Lala. I was so afraid of who that man might be, and the shit he’d bring into our lives, that I probably suffocated her in some ways, but I just didn’t want anyone else to hurt her.
Well into the 1980s my mom was still involved in the music scene—whenever we went to New York, for example, she’d see her former producer, Phil Ramone.
By then he’d produced everyone—the Simon twins, Carly and Paul; Celine Dion and Dionne Warwick; Pavarotti; my dear friend growing up Mark Volman, of the band the Turtles; and Peter, Paul, and Mary—and when my mom still hung around with him, he was working with Billy Joel.
For a while my mother had a relationship with one of the members of Billy’s band.
We went to stay at the guy’s place on Long Island for a couple of months, but I was very much in my “Keep Mom single” phase, so one day I jumped up on his bed and pissed all over it.
It seems I was eventually forgiven because Billy Joel himself made me my first banana and peanut butter sandwich.
We were in his kitchen with his whole family, and I can still see him peeling a banana, slicing it right down the middle, and filling it with peanut butter.
Long Island clearly wasn’t the land of warm tuna sandwiches—Billy’s PB she was everything to me.
It’s so poignant, the things we remember of a person we loved.
For me it was that she didn’t have a coffee maker, so she always drank Folgers instant coffee, and if you wanted a cup, you were pointed to the Folgers crystals and a kettle.
To this day that particular taste takes me right back to those moments of my life.
Katherine was a tiny woman with a little puff at her belly—I used to call her Jelly Roll because she felt squishy.
We went to South Bend every Christmas to see her, to her perfect Victorian home on Victoria Street with its gently pitched roof.
It was just Mom and me; we always slept in my mom and her sister’s room, in their twin beds from when they were kids.
There was a smell to the house that I can still remember—something Midwestern and I guess Folgers-y that comforted me throughout all those challenging years of my childhood.
I remember every winter being freezing cold. I was a Laurel Canyon kid, but hell, the Indiana snow was up to our knees so I think anyone would have felt it.
My grandma smelled like the perfume Charlie.
Years later, after she died, I took a bottle of it from her house and sometimes I’ll just put it on to remember her while I sip a Folgers.
Every Christmas my uncle Tommy and his family would come from Naperville, Illinois, and we’d eat from the same menu for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
The stuffing was filled with raisins, water chestnuts, onion, celery…
no sage—that’s too fancy. (Actually, my grandma had to make two different stuffings each year: one for us, and one for my uncle Tom, who required an oyster dressing.
As a kid I never understood what that even meant except that I guessed it had oysters in it?
Ew.) We’d have green bean casserole with Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, spiced up with a little bit of soy sauce—one of the recipes from the side of the can.
Basic super salty mashed potatoes. My mom would always make creamed corn, too, with crumbled-up, buttered saltines on top. There were biscuits, also from a can.
No salad.
Being in Indiana brought me such a beautiful feeling of family that I didn’t otherwise have.
I was the very first grandchild, and I’m not sure what my grandma knew about what was going on in my mom’s life; either way, she turned a blind eye to a lot of it.
I don’t think my mom shared too much either.