FRESH YARN PRESENTS:

My Mother
By Taylor Negron

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Mom ran the place. I was her slave. Selling candy, hosing down the street, and performing the most dreaded of all jobs: feeding the pitching machine with balls.

I refer to this as my black and blue period. When the counselors at school began to question the bruises 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?"

Years later, when I kidded my mom -- "If I only was molested as a child. I could have been on Larry King. I could have been someone," -- she replied flatly: "Who would ever molest you. Ugh? You got a big mouth."

When the batting cage business went bust and money got tight, my parents got lured into a shady underworld by my Uncle Ishmiael, who used the back of the batting cages to fence stolen goods.

One week, there would be cases of Gerber's pineapple and tapioca baby food. The next week cartons of Eve Lemon Twist cigarettes stacked floor to ceiling. Tensor lamps. Small trucks came and went.

My loving, open, Sesame Street mind instinctively knew something was not right and confronted my mom.

"What's the big deal? Ugh? We're not doing anything bad. It's not a crime. Ishmiael is using the garage for a while, that's all. We get a check. We keep our mouths shut. You keep your mouth shut."

"But Mom, it's not the crime, now…" This was the FIRST TIME I ever used this word in all of my twelve years: "It's the Karma."

"Karma scharma. Listen to me. If the candy man can and the crime man can…where do you think the candy man gets his candy from? Ugh? The crime man. And you know the candy man makes everybody happy. Where does Sammy Davis Jr. get his candy from, huh? Frank Sinatra?"

That's how I was raised.

Years later when the city of Los Angeles exploded into a riot over the Rodney King verdict, my parents just happened to be visiting me. Their white Rolls Royce was parked in front of my Hollywood house.

Their one-hour visit turned into a three-day horror show as the police and the National Guard prevented anyone from leaving the area. My parents and I peered from my windows as gang members cruised by and attempted to throw bottles filled with gasoline 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. Hell had shown itself, and my parents looked old and defeated. I had to come up with a plan. "Here is what we are going to do. We'll just go upstairs and hide in the attic like Anne Frank."

My mom's eyes narrowed. "Are you nuts? If they set this place on fire, I don't want to be in the attic of a burning house…that's not for me."

"Do we know an Anne Frank?" I could hear my father ask softly.

"Anne Frank! The little girl from the Shelley Winters movie," Mom snapped.

There was an explosion. A jeep blew up. Pandemonium.

And then what came out of my mother demonstrated her keen intelligence and innate Darwinian instinct for survival.

"Hey…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."

We did hide in the Hefty bags, but when we did we were not garbage…we were just trying to make it through life safely.

Years later, my father went on to become the mayor of Indian Wells, California, an enclave of rich Republicans next to Palm Springs. 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 called her the following day to ask her how it went. "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."

The notion of my mother trying to pawn off a lamb chop on Her Majesty warms my heart.

I only wish that all the children of the world could have been raised in such an atmosphere of twentieth century optimism.

I'm someone who had a mother who once looked at my drawing pad filled with watercolors, closed the book, narrowed her eyes, and with great intensity, pointed her finger and said, "I am going to tell you something right now. You are better than Matisse."

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