Thursday, June 18, 2009

Celebration of Life


My brother-in-law sent me the invitation for Go-Go's upcoming memorial service in August. I don't know why we decided to wait until August to have her "Celebration of Life," considering she died on January 3rd. Maybe it has to do with some unconscious honoring of Midwest tradition- those who die in the winter are stored in the Church mausoleum until the ground thaws when they can be buried. It's not like we needed to wait; Go-Go was cremated in a cardboard box in a low budget crematorium in Bradenton Florida on January 5th. We decided to have her memorial in Wisconsin on her birthday, and at the time it made sense. The fact that we would wait nearly seven months after her death to have closure never occurred to us as a bad idea.

When I opened the invitation and saw the attached photo of her, I felt so sad that she is dead. I might have even said out loud: "damn, you are dead." Then I noticed that the photo was taken in my home in Bernal Heights! Go-Go had only been to my house a few times, and I'm pretty sure this picture was taken the last time she visited. She and Roger sold their place in Naples and decided to take a road trip out to California. They stopped at every gambling establishment between Florida and California. By the time they arrived, a week or so later than scheduled, they were so hungover it was astounding. They were cranky and exhausted and had a bunch of money they were spending like lottery winners, rather than retirees on a fixed income.

One day Trish agreed to take Go-Go, Roger and I shopping to Crate and Barrel in Union Square. Go-Go loved Crate and Barrel and had never seen the San Francisco store. She was beside herself with shopping madness. Moments after arriving inside the store, she began waving her arms in the air while yelling my name with her raspy cigarette and alcohol voice, "Diane, oh, Diane, come here and look at this." My girl was cringing and fighting an urge to hide from us. But Go-Go was oblivious to the inappropriateness of her shouting across the store-she was in shopping heaven. Trish does a great imitation of her inside the Crate and Barrel complete with overhead arm waving. They bought a ton of stuff for my home, stuff that was meant to make me feel loved and cared for, but rather fills me with regret and confusion. She died penniless.

Whenever Go-Go gambled she developed a sleepy eye. It was a combination of lack of sleep and alcohol consumption. I also have one lazy eye, that drifts out of focus when I am over tired. Her right eye was the one that drooped a bit after a night at the casino. In this photo, after weeks of gambling, I recognized the eye tiredness right away. Most people don't even see it. It's like her voice after a few drinks, I always noticed the elongated syllables and slurry cadence, but others looked at me like I was crazy. In this picture she is swollen from years of Prednisone, poor diet and too much booze, and she looks incredibly familiar-like herself. I did not recognize what my feelings were until my friend Jane put a name to them. Seeing that photo made me miss her terribly.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Holding Court

hold·ing (hldng) n.
1. Tending to impede or delay progress: a holding action.
2. Designed for usually short-term storage or retention: a holding tank; a holding cell.

court
(kôrt, krt)n.
1. The retinue of a sovereign, including the royal family and personal servants, advisers, and ministers.
2. A formal meeting or reception presided over by a sovereign.

I woke up in the middle of the night to someone pounding on the glass door in the back of the house. I felt a rush of fear and dread. I somehow knew, even in my sleepy stupor, this ruckus was related to me. I was spending the night at Tracy Higgs’ house and I heard her Mom and brother walk down the stairs toward the disturbance, whispering anxiously to one another. And then I heard Go-Go. The humiliation was excruciating. Up until now, the Higgs’ home had been a sanctuary for me –a place Go-Go had never been or seen. A place free from her bad behavior. I lay frozen in bed as long as I could stand it, hoping that the house would go quiet again and it would be over as quickly as it began. But that was not Go-Go’s way. Once she had it in her mind to have a conversation with someone after the bars closed, there was very little anyone could do to stop her.


Go-Go began to get nervous whenever I formed relationships with girls whose homes I preferred to spend more time in than my own. I was only eleven, but I was already starting my pre-teen rejection of her. The Higgs’ family adopted me for dinners, sleepovers, after school snacks, and weekend outings-I was even enlisted to canvas for George McGovern for President. The family was from Colorado and I guess you could say they were hippies. Tracy’s Mom, who insisted I call her Barbara, had long hair which she wore in a thick braid down her back. She wore long skirts, Birkenstocks, and drove a Volkswagen bus. She was raising her four kids by herself, which was just one more reason Go-Go was suspicious of her – that and the peace sign on the back of her VW bus.

When I came downstairs Go-Go was sitting on the couch, Barbara Higgs and her oldest son Mark were sitting across from her, held hostage by their own politeness and maybe their love for me. I don’t know what was more humiliating, her smeared makeup and slurry speech or watching my friends sit, like statues, unable to interrupt this bizarre and crazy night time intruder, my mom. She went on and on, which was her way when she was this smashed, speaking about things she would otherwise never dare mention; politics and the upcoming election between Nixon and McGovern, how strange their family was to her, how she wondered why I liked them better than my own family, and much, much more.

I don’t remember how long she stayed or how she got home. In my fantasy I imagine a light suddenly going off for her and she stands up and says goodnight – maybe even recognizing how pointless it is to torture these innocents. A more likely scenario is that one of the boys walked her home-our apartment was only a couple hundred feet away. I do recall pleading with her to please leave and let the family go to sleep. Maybe I was the one who finally got my clothes on and dragged her out of the house and aided with her stagger home. Maybe I stayed home rather than wake up the following morning to face the humiliation of the Higgs family seeing me for who I truly was. Maybe I went back to sleep with the rest of the Higgs family and pretended it never happened. Or maybe I apologized for her, which would also have been my way.