Confessions of a Transylvanian (5 page)

Thursday

As I may have mentioned, I had a really cool Mom. And many of you reading this are thinking: “Me too.”

Her
e’
s the bad news: You did
n’
t.

I mean,
I’
m sure you
think
you did. But the truth is you did not. I know this will come as a blow, but i
t’
s a simple fact: Your Mom was not cool. Mine was.

Do
n’
t get all defensive. Le
t’
s break it down: Your Mom was maybe really lax with the rules or totally flexible with the curfew, let you stay up until the wee hours, run wild in the house and live your own life. Therefore, this hands-off, do-what-you-will attitude made her cool, right?

No, actually, it did
n’
t.

Maybe, instead, your Mom was incredibly strict, demanding that you get home early, homework done and in the sack by 9. Because she cared. It was her adherence to the rule of law, her deep, abiding love of
structure
that made her cool, am I right?

No, it decidedly did not. And I know tha
t’
s tough to hear.

My mother, on the other hand, was cool. Her
e’
s why: First, she was on her own. Raising two young boys without any help at all and, most importantly, not fucking it up automatically gives you an aura of coolness. After all, yo
u’
re stepping up, doing the right thing, proving that yo
u’
re Superwoman. Single mothers who have their shit together? Tha
t’
s the essence of cool.

More than that, our Mom was this wonderfully affectionate person, in that unique, old-school, Irish mother kind of way. Man, try to leave my house without giving Mom a kiss goodbye, sh
e’
d flay you alive.

Best of all, she trusted us. Not to the point of, “Hey, her
e’
s the car keys, do
n’
t bother telling me where yo
u’
re going,” or anything. But she knew she had
n’
t raised morons and treated us accordingly.

Her
e’
s one of Mo
m’
s rules (Do yourself a favor—teach it to your kids. Yo
u’
ll thank me later): If yo
u’
re at a party (she told us) and you find yourself messed up on either drugs or alcohol,
stay there
. Do
n’
t get in a car, do
n’
t try to hitchhike home or do anything stupid like that. Instead, perform two simple tasks: (1) Call home and let Mom know where you are and then (2) go pass out on a couch or something. Do
not
attempt to get home when yo
u’
re all fucked up. Tha
t’
s how kids get killed. Try to
avoid
getting wasted if you could, she said, but if you suddenly found yourself on the other side of the street from sober?
Do
n’
t move
.

And what do you know?
I’
m still alive.

I always thought my Mom could have been anything she wanted to be. Sadly, however, my mothe
r’
s strongest character trait was a complete and utter lack of ambition. Her idea of living a successful life was being able to afford to sit on the back deck of her house, crack open a can of beer, spark up a Virginia Slim and relax by the pool. Her opinion was that if she could enjoy these tiny luxuries and still manage to keep her kids clothed, fed and educated, she was way ahead of the game. Achieving these simple, modest goals—this was the sum total of her hopes and ambitions.

And she realized her dream without ever seeming to break a sweat.

For our part, David and I were latchkey kids. We came home to an empty house almost every day. The reason for this was that, in order to make the bacon, my Mom worked in a bar. She slung drinks at a joint called “E
d’
s Hideaway” from noon to 7 on weeknights, Sundays from 5 to midnight, the tip money going toward our daily fare. This schedule meant that, on most days, nobody would be home after school. W
e’
d see her all day Saturday, but come Sunday night, we were on our own.

But while the house was indeed empty of parental units during these odd hours, it was not empty of the essentials.

See, Mo
m’
s main hobby was cooking. She was a maniac in the kitchen. Trouble was, she had no sense of proportion. There were only three of us in the house, yes. But it was simply not possible for my mother to cook a meal for less than a small army. So when she made a batch of Chicken Tetrazzini, it lasted for weeks.
Weeks
. And you never got tired of it, it was that good. Her chili? It could have kept an entire regiment battle-ready for a fortnight. Her ox-tail soup, a particular specialty, was kept in gallon containers in the freezer, ready whenever we wanted a bowl or two.

And her smoked ham. Dear God. She actually had a hickory smoker built in the backyard out of an old oil drum, hinged in the middle and chock-full of hickory chips, and she regularly
smoked the hams herself
.

Suffice it to say, the woman liked to prepare
food
.

The only thing I can say against her—and as long as w
e’
re being honest I should just mention it and get it out of the way—is this: She was the worst judge of character imaginable. This failing of hers—her inability to spot bums, derelicts and con men—tended to make life a little tough for us. Her many friends, assorted confidants and, most especially, her occasional male companions...she really could pick the losers of the bunch, sad to say.

It killed me to witness the cast of sub-par characters that drifted through her life. And not a one...not a
single one
was worth the shovel-full of dirt it would have taken to bury them.

My Mom? She trusted them all implicitly. Right up until the day they disappointed her, cheated on her or ripped her off. It drove my brother and me completely nuts.

Charlie needed some money, so I lent it to him
.
Big deal
.
H
e’
ll pay me back
.

Mom, Charlie is a complete coke-head
.
Yo
u’
re never seeing that money again
.

Oh, stop being so cynical
.
H
e’
s a good guy
.
I know him
.
H
e’
ll pay me back, you watch
.

This happened a lot. There were a lot of Charlies. But what could you do? She had this completely unjustified, unwavering faith in human nature. Yes, she got burned and was abandoned by these people over and over again, but through it all she never lost her essential belief that, at the end of the day, people were good at heart and that, given the opportunity, they would step up and do the right thing.

My brother and I, in watching our mother, saw exactly what it meant to nurture a kindhearted and trusting spirit. And through her experiences, the two of us gleaned the most valuable life lesson of all. Here it is:

Trust no one. People are snakes. Be careful.

Is that a great teacher or
what
?

Needless to say, when it came time to get permission to do the Rocky show, I was
n’
t really that worried Mom would kill the idea. She was supportive, but careful. Fun-loving, but not reckless. And this sort of adventure was right up her alley.

The Rocky show, I explained to her, was slightly mischievous but still controlled. Sexually charged but not pornographic. And it took place late at night, sure, but...well, what 16-year-old does
n’
t blow their curfew?

She agreed, reluctantly, to let me join the cast and appeared happy to know that
I’
d be spending most of my weekends at the movie theater down the street. As long as my grades did
n’
t suffer, she was all for it.

In other words, she was totally cool.

Unlike, for example,
your
mom.

I’
m just saying.

Friday

The day had finally arrived and, to celebrate, I was up at daw
n’
s crack.

This was mistake. After all, the show did
n’
t even start until midnight, roughly eighteen hours away. By the time showtime finally rolled around, the likelihood was that I would be running on fumes. Falling asleep at my first Rocky show would not be an auspicious start.

On the other hand, there was a chance
I’
d be so ramped up, I would
n’
t be able to sleep
after
the show either. Truth was, I did
n’
t know what was going to happen and tha
t’
s what made it so spine-tingling.

I was practically bouncing off the walls at breakfast and driving my Mom crazy.

“Knock off the coffee. Yo
u’
ve had enough.”

“Have
n’
t touched it, Mom.
I’
m just keyed up about tonight.”

“How are you getting there?”

I had
n’
t really thought about it. “Walking, I guess. I
t’
s only about a mile and a half.”

“If you get a lift home, be careful who you ride with. You do
n’
t know these people.”

“Gotcha.”

My brother was a little mystified by all the hype. “Wha
t’
s the big deal?” he said. “I
t’
s just a movie.”

I shook my head in disbelief. What is
wrong
with this kid? I just did
n’
t get that he did
n’
t get it. He had
been there
when Uncle Mike had spun that disc for us the very first time. Hell, he was there with me just last weekend and seen the show himself. How could he not have caught the same Rocky virus that infected me? How could that experience have seemed to him—or to
anyone
—to be so uninteresting?

But he could not have cared less. It was mystifying. So, since I could
n’
t fathom his complete apathy, I decided that he simply must have an immunity. He was able to resist the RHPS strain because of a Rocky vaccine h
e'
d received as a child, perhaps.

Oddly, I was the one with the sickness, but I felt sorry for
him
.

Time for school. I kissed my Mom goodbye (rules are rules) and headed out the door.

School moved at a
glacial
pace. First period took hours, it seemed. Lunch was easily a month long. And the last class of the day was roughly the duration of the Cretaceous Period. I was living for nothing more than to hear the last bell ring.

I was strung tighter than a piano wire, but I shared nothing about the source of my tension with any of my classmates. They simply
would not
understand.

Just as the watched pot
will
eventually boil even if you stare at it, so the final bell will sound, even if you count the seconds. The buzzer finally, wonderfully went off, announcing the end of the school day and I blew home in a whirlwind.

As usual, I was alone at our place as Mo
m’
s shift did
n’
t end until 7. But, of course, the refrigerator was chock-full of goodies and I was all set for dinner.

Until recently, my brother and I had been using the oven to heat up the dinners Mom left for us. But about six months earlier, Mom had come back from the store with that status symbol of the early
'
80s: a microwave oven. This, you may be surprised to learn, was a pretty extravagant purchase for us poor folk.

What it meant, though, was that David and I could now have meals that used to take half an hour to prepare ready-to-eat in about a minute. It was miraculous.

This was an early version of the microwave, though, not one of your tiny little modern gizmos. The thing was roughly the size of a big-screen television set. It heated up your food all right, but the way it went about its business was terrifying. The moment you turned it on, this monstrosity would roar to life, making a sound so horrifically loud that your first reaction was to back out of the room with a lead shield over your crotch, certain that the radio waves shooting out of this thing were strong enough to fry your gonads.

Still, it beat having to
wait
.

At the conclusion of my tasty little meal, I suddenly found myself with absolutely nothing to do and simply
hours
to do it in. In my haste and excitement, I had (a) arrived home, (b) eaten my dinner, (c) breezed through whatever homework I might have had for the weekend and (d) lined up all my Rocky clothes for the night all in the hope of keeping busy and making the time pass more quickly. Now I was done and it was...about 5:30 in the afternoon. The sun was just starting to set, for crying out loud, and I did
n’
t need to be anywhere for more than five hours.