My mom and dad are New Yorkers who left the tenement streets of the Bronx and came to Los Angeles when West Side Story was real. They have the scars to prove it.
"They used to break bottles on a fence and follow me home. Look where they got me." Mom's story of her scars terrified me.
"They?" Who were "they"--and could they find us here at my grandmother's bungalow in Echo Park? (Which was often filled with people who had been exiled from many places--Socialists and Communists, violin soloists, and lesbians who had fled Castro's Cuba.)
I tell people that my family absorbed lesbians during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Those lesbians were a big part of my childhood, arriving midday wearing military gear and sporting masculine pompadour haircuts. They'd show up with hot bread in thin bags and produce sticks of sweet guava paste while my grandmother poured strong coffee.
Then, the merengue music would begin, and the lesbians would start to dance like Desi Arnaz, taking turns whirling mom around. She would giggle, the flan would jiggle, and for a Proustian moment all was right in the world.
When I remind my mother about this, she laments, "Why don't you remember the skiing and the leather jacket we got you? It's always the lesbians with you!"
Mom was not a butchie; she was boy crazy. During World War II, she worked in a factory that manufactured medals of honor for soldiers. She sat for twelve hours a day attaching the medals to gold braids and ribbons. Then she would place them in blue velvet boxes to be sent overseas. What no one in the factory or the federal government knew was that my mother was writing her name and address on pieces of paper and sticking them into every box. I asked her if she ever met anyone that way, to which she sheepishly replied, "Yes." The topic was dropped.
Our family business was operating batting cages. The pitching machine spit out the balls at lightning speed. Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax. Whitey Ford. 50 cents for 12 pitches. Of course my mother ran the place, and I was her slave: selling candy, hosing down the street, and the most dreaded of all jobs, feeding the pitching machine with balls. I call it my black and blue period.
When the counselors at school began to question the black and blue spots all over my upper torso, they asked if there was anything I would like to report. When I told my mom, she went nuts. "Who the hell is going to abuse you? You tell that Vice Principal that if he thinks there is funny business going on in this house, then he should come down here and try loading up that Don Drysdale machine...Hit you?"
We lived happily in a perfect bubble of nonconformity, creativity, and unmistakable honesty and good cheer in spite of the tailspins that we often went through. When the batting cages tanked, my parents got lured into a shady underworld by my Uncle Louie, who used the batting cages to fence stolen goods. One week there would be cases of Gerber's pineapple and tapioca baby food, the next, cartons of Eve Lemon Twist cigarettes stacked floor to ceiling.
Small trucks came and went. I confronted mom. "What's the big deal? Your Uncle Louie is using the garage for a while, that's all. We get a check. We keep our mouths shut."
"But, mom, it's not the crime, it's the karma."
"Karma? If the candy man can, where do you think he gets his candy from? The crime man. And you know the candy man makes everyone happy. Where did Sammy Davis, Jr. get his candy from, huh? Frank Sinatra?"
This was the logic of my youth.
Years later when I was living in in the Hollywood Hills, the city of Los Angeles exploded in riot over the Rodney King verdict. My parents just happened to be visiting. An hour visit turned into a three day horror show as the National Guard prevented anyone from leaving the area.
We peered from my windows, watching gang members cruise by and throw Molotov cocktails at the foundation of my house. After all those years of wondering who "they" were, here they were. We could smell the smoke of the looters' fires and hear the pops of gun shots.
I said "Let's go upstairs and hide in the attic like Anne Frank."
Mom's eyes narrowed. "Are you nuts? If they set this place on fire, I don't want to be in the attic of burning house... that's not for me."
"Do we know an Anne Frank?" my father asked.
"Anne Frank! The little girl from the Shelley Winters movie," Mom informed him.
Then, we heard an explosion. A Jeep blew up. And then what came out of my mother demonstrated her keen intelligence and innate maternal Darwinian instinct for survival.
"Why don't we get into giant Hefty bags? We can sit in here, nice and still. If they come into this house, they will just think we're garbage."
With the security blanket of the Hefty bags in reach and the sublime logic of my mother, we made it through that night.
Likewise, we've made it through life. My father became the Mayor of Indian Wells, California, a tony desert enclave of rich conservative Republicans. And my lesbian dancing, baseball machine-filling, garbage bag-hiding mother is now the first lady of that town.
Her duties have brought her to shake hands and dine with such people as Barbara Bush, Laura Bush, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and most recently, Her Royal Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan.
I ask her how it went with Queen Noor.
"She was nice... but boy, did that queen eat... You would not expect a queen to eat so much. She ate every roll... all of the food on her plate. I felt bad for her. I offered her my lamb chop, but she wouldn't take it."
I am glad that Her Majesty got to meet my mother and thankful that my mother taught me about the dualistic cosmology of things--a view of the universe as a battleground of contending forces. I'm glad she showed me that kindness has rewards and there is nothing for anyone who wallows in apathy or anger.
I pause to remember and pay my respects to my mother, the woman who, when playing hide and seek with my brothers and me, would fall asleep under laundry, forcing us to look not only in drawers for her, but in bottles of aspirin.
I only wish that all the children of the world had been raised in such an atmosphere of twentieth century optimism and keen encouragement. My mother once looked at my drawing pad filled with watercolors, closed the book, and with great intensity, pointed her finger and said, "I am going to tell you something right now... You are better than Matisse." And she meant it.