Scott Capurro
GT
September 2007
I’ve never been single. As my mother’s only gay son, I’ve been her constant chaperone, confidant and admirer.
We’ve weathered job loss, divorces and drug use. In the early 80s, she was my preferred cocaine dealer. And in 1982, during my first summer home from university, Mom outed me, to myself.
“Honey,” she purred one afternoon, while refilling her white wine mug, then readjusting the bra strap of her black bikini, “we can play this game, but I know you’re gay. Let’s talk about it when you’re ready.”
After I confessed, she removed the burden of revelation with five strategic phone calls. Suddenly, in less than an hour, my entire family knew I was queer. Homing pigeons gasped with admiration.
I notice my skin wrinkling, like hers. From too many years of sun abuse, my pressed belly becomes a series of vertically woven strips, and I think of my mother grabbing one of her three deep, parallel c-section scars and telling me, probably on my birthday, “This is you. This is what you did to me.” She wasn’t accusatory. She was actually bragging. Like the time she told me, drunk, “Your father has a huge cock and he cums buckets. Merry Christmas.” I was eight.
I think we’ve watched Funny Girl together a thousand times. Streisand live, once. In ’94.
“I prefer the film,” my mother later said, over pie.
She reads veraciously, and without a high school degree she raised three kids, mostly on her own. She’s been punched, hard, by men for mouthing off, and she falls asleep in the cinema, and then pretends to have seen the movie. We just have so much in common.
Mom has a very impressive vibrato, and modeled when she was a teenager. She wanted to perform, or fall insanely in love. She did the latter. He was a popular math teacher, and I was still young enough to wish he were my Dad. But he was ill, and he ended his own life; Mom still speaks softly when Bill’s name comes up.
I like her dog, not because it’s a corgi, which actually is a bit of a fucking pain in the ass with its dwarfish legs and neediness, but because she sees qualities in that fat ball of hair I’d never see.
“Look how Gracie loves you.” Gracie stars out the car window. “She adores her Uncle Scott.”
As if she doesn’t express her love enough, Mom offers more, through her pets. She a Pez dispenser of affection, it flies out of her and sometimes it buries me a little.
Donna, my mother, has asthma. It’s become emphysemic. Her lungs are basically gone. Last month, her doctors gave her a sell-by date.
“Ten years?” She asked. They shook their heads.
“Five years?” They shrugged.
Nature is mean, but medicine is much, much meaner.
I’m not prepared to lose her. Even now, I can’t write ‘die’. It seems insane. She’s only just driven me to the airport, she seems to warm, so full of gossip and innuendo. We hate the same people, and while discussing my brother’s first wife over lunch, she’s full of oxygen.
In fact, I can’t get off the phone in less than thirty minutes. She does go on, paying an obsessive attention to schedules. I hear about her entire day, probably because she feels isolated, living on a golf course, with, some days, only that shitting sausage on a leash to keep her company. A while ago, she told me she was lonely, and asked me to call more. So I do.
“I spoke to Karen (her best friend) and Fred (Karen’s husband) has a nephew who…”
And I think, what the fuck? Why am I learning about someone’s nephew? Unless she’s fixing us up. I listen. Nope, she’s just telling me about his eye surgery. Health, poor or otherwise, is always at the top of Mom’s chatty agenda.
I sigh. It’s sunny outside. I’ve got writing to finish. She asks how I’m doing, then cuts me off with a story about my slightly arrogant, but lovable, niece.
And I wonder, Jesus Donna, why haven’t you married a man you like to talk to? Then I think, why haven’t I? If I weren’t talking to my mom right now about my humdrum life, who would be listening?
I’m just not ready. She can’t die. If she goes, then my lifeline to my family disintegrates, maybe slowly, but inevitably. I’ll lose my feeling of permanence. I’ll disappear. Hers is the only Valentine card I’ve received for the last ten years.
Even Hallmark will mourn the loss.