Wishful Drinking

“It was a couple of reporters,” she explains, catching her breath. “They heard Todd had been shot in the leg and they wanted to know if I had done it for publicity for the show. You know, to drum up additional ticket sales. I so badly wanted to tell them ‘yes, and now I can only do one more Broadway musical because I only have one child left to shoot for publicity.’”

It’s almost dawn and we’re both so tired by now that we’re a little punchy, so we begin to invent other reasons why my mother might have shot my brother. We came up with everything from he wouldn’t clean his bedroom to he’d stopped feeding his turtle to his grades were down. (All perfectly credible, as far as we were concerned.)

The next day there’s a photograph of my brother in the hospital with my mother in a mink hat smiling beside him on the front page of the Daily News. The headline read, “Picasso Dies.”

Now, one detail I neglected to mention is that right after the gun discharged the blank into my brother’s upper thigh, my mother was naturally frantic seeing all the blood on her only son. So she did what any mother frantic with worry for her child’s welfare might do—she called a cab.

Anyway, cut to thirty years later. My brother arrives at Kennedy Airport in New York on business and he gets in a taxi to take him into the city. And as they drive along, the cab driver keeps looking in the rearview mirror at my brother.

Finally my brother asks, “Is something wrong?”

And the cab driver says, “Are you Todd Fisher?” and after my brother verifies that he is, the cabbie pulls an old, crumpled, bloody strip of sheet out from the visor over the front passenger side of the car and brandishes it for my brother to see.

“I drove the cab that took you to the hospital that night with your mom back in the ’70s.”

Of course he did.

So the cabbie has my brother sign the rag, brown and stiff with age, and then he drives back out of my brother’s life—presumably forever.

3. A NEARBY ARRANGED ALL AROUND HER

My mother has moved into a house she bought next door from mine. There’s this funny thing she does now, which is to offer my brother and me things that we can have after she’s dead. If my eyes happen to rest on anything in her home, she rushes over and says, “Do you like this? Because I can put a little sticker with your name on it to mark it now. Otherwise I’ll leave it for your brother.” Of all her things, I guess I would want the blue dress with the blue beads and the blue fur. The thing is, I’m pretty sure it disappeared. But I still want it sort of pas sionately. I’ll have to ask her to see if she can find it and if she does, ask her to put a red dot on it.

As a kid, I remember thinking, there is no other mother that even comes close to my mom. Then I became a teenager and thought she was an asshole because let’s face it—it’s a teenager’s job to find her parent annoying and ridiculous—just ask my daughter. Anyway, after I was finished thinking she was this trippy lunatic, I realized that she was pretty fucking amazing. I mean, she’s loyal, she’s reliable, she’s just totally great. Seriously. She’s also really quick, and she can be really, really witty. She also still performs at the age of seventy-six, and she never misses a show—whether she’s tired or her foot hurts; when she’s out there onstage, she’s radiant. This woman is the consummate performer. I’ve watched her for my whole life, and she’s got this insanely strong life force. It pours through her veins and her muscles, and her heart. She’s remarkable.

But here’s the thing—she’s also a little eccentric.

She’s always had a lot of unique ideas. For example: She thought it would be a good idea for me to have a child with her last husband because it would have nice eyes! I should probably explain that my mother could no longer have children after having gone through “the Change,” and Richard didn’t have any children of his own and he had nice eyes!

Plus, my womb was free, and we’re family. Now, my mother didn’t bring this up just once or twice like a normal mother would. She brought it up many times—and mostly while I was driving. And when I finally suggested to her that this might be an odd idea, she said, “Oh, darling, have you read the Enquirer lately? We live in a very strange world.”

Well, when the Enquirer becomes your standard for living, you’re in a lot of trouble!

When I told my grandmother about my mother’s idea, she said, “Well, that’s not right.” The voice of reason.

My grandmother Maxine is from El Paso, Texas. My mother’s entire clan is from Texas. And my father’s clan is from South Philly. So we’re basically white trash. But because of the celebrity factor, I think of us as blue-blooded white trash.