FRESH YARN presents: My Mother... by Taylor Negron

FRESH YARN presents:

My Mother
By Taylor Negron

My mother taught me about the dualistic cosmology of things -- a view of the universe as a battleground of contending forces. And she taught me that kindness has rewards, and that there is nothing for anyone who wallows in apathy or anger, and that imagination and invention are the keys to a good life.

Her labor with me was induced by the bite of a black widow spider and I entered the world with great severity and trauma, exhausting everyone. To this day, whenever my life explodes, my mother says, "Goddamn spider."

Both my parents are New Yorkers and left the tenement streets of the Bronx and came to Los Angeles in the late fifties, when West Side Story was real. Mom has the knife marks to prove it.

"They used to break the bottles on a fence and chase me home, all the way cutting the back of my neck. Look where they got me."

The scenario was straight out of one of those Warner Brothers B pictures that she used to let me watch with her on Saturdays on the Fabulous 52.

I was just a kid, and the story of her scars terrified me.

"They." Who were "they"? Could they find us here at my grandmother's bungalow in Echo Park, with its palm trees and dry scrubby backyard? That sorry, bulging bungalow that smelled of freshly ironed drapes and mint, where a distant chicken sang behind an ivy wall.

My grandmother was a lefty, and her house in Echo Park was often filled with people who had been exiled from many places -- Socialists and Communists, violin soloists. For a while it was filled with lesbians who had fled Fidel Castro's Cuba.

I used to tell people that my family "absorbed lesbians during the Cuban Missile Crisis." My mother didn't like me saying this in front of my father; it was too much for Dad's ears.

But those lesbians were a big part of my childhood -- a good part…and a scary part. They would arrive midday wearing camouflage military gear, and sporting masculine pompadour haircuts. Sturdy and unwavering, they had no time for children. I would see their thick legs pass me by from my vantage point under the dining room table.

The Lesbians would arrive with hot bread in thin paper bags. The Lesbians would produce sticks of sweet guava paste and butter while my grandmother poured strong cups of coffee. After they feasted, the meringue music would begin, and all the ladies would start to dance, taking turns whirling my mother around the living room floor. Tossing her shiny brown hair back off of her shoulders, my mother would giggle, the flan would jiggle, and for a Proustian moment all was right in the world.

When I remind my mother about those times, she laments, "Why the hell do you have to only remember The Lesbians? Ugh? Do you remember the skiing? The leather jacket and the gold chain we got you? No! But you have to remember Connie and Irene…Jesus Christ."

Now Mom was not a butchie -- she actually was boy crazy. During World War II, she worked in a factory that manufactured medals of honor for soldiers. She attached the medals to gold braids and ribbons, and placed them in 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 little pieces of paper and sticking those pieces of paper into every velvet box.

I asked her if she ever met anyone that way. "Yeah, after the war ended, there was a knock on the door and it was a tiny Filipino sailor, looking for me. I told him I was my sister and that I had gotten married."

My father was a charismatic sportsman who played short stop for the Watts Giants farm team and lived all sports.

The gloves he wore as a middle-weight championship boxer hung proudly in our garage, the ancient cracked leather reeking of a million bloody punches.

Growing up in the permanent summer of Los Angeles, I used to tell the change of seasons by the change of gear in the front room: baseballs meant summer, footballs meant winter and jock straps meant Indian summer and in this, a time of shellacked baguettes and Virginia Slims, with the help of my mother, my father did very well. We moved into a great ultra-modern Tudor house in the hills of Glendale, California. Glendale, which is so boring it makes Burbank seem like Berlin in the early '30s. And it was here, like Mildred Pierce before us, that we had our new family business! The first batting cages in the Verdugo hills.

The pitching machines sat under a gargantuan chain link cage and spit out the balls at lightning speed. Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax, Whitey Ford. Fifty cents for twelve pitches.

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."