It was 1999. Grandma had just called. She wanted to know if I would go to the cemetery with her and the girls on Sunday. Sunday. Twenty years. She had been gone for twenty years. She was twenty when she had me. That meant I was now her age. That meant that this year, I’d outlive her.
My mother died three months before my fifteenth birthday. Sarchoidosis. It’s a lung disease that afflicts primarily black women. Ironic, isn’t it? As hard as she had tried to run away from her heritage, in the end, she couldn’t.
The question that the guys had asked me on my birthday popped into my head. The question I had avoided answering. The thing I try never to think about. When did I first feel like a grown-up? I know the exact moment that my childhood ended. I was fourteen and Mom had been dead for about ten minutes. Grandma and I were standing in the hospital waiting room. She was crying. In my fourteen years on this earth, I had never seen Grandma cry. Surprisingly, I wasn’t crying. I was numb. I was in shock. Mom had been in the hospital for three weeks and was supposed to be going home the following day. Suddenly, she went into cardiac arrest, then heart failure. Then she died . . . at age thirty-five.
The doctor came out and offered me and Grandma his condolences. Grandma didn’t hear him. She just kept saying over and over, “What we gon’ do, Brian? What we gon’ do?”
I was patting her on the back, trying to offer her some comfort when the doctor said, “I’d like to perform an autopsy.”
Grandma looked up, her face wet with tears. It was almost more than I could bear.
“I’ll need your permission before we can proceed,” he continued.
There was silence as he stood looking at Grandma. Grandma turned and looked at me. The look was like a transference, like one of those bad body-switching movies from the ’80s. I was suddenly the adult and she was the distraught child.
“You tell him what you want to do,” she said.
It was left to me, fourteen-year-old me, to decide whether or not I’d allow these butchers to carve up my mother’s body. After telling the doctor that I wouldn’t allow her to be violated in that manner, I blocked the moment out. I pushed it down with all of the other sewage of my life. I drowned it in drink and in work and in hubris. It worked, until now. Until I was thirty-five; her age. The sewage had finally backed up.
I’d achieved everything she wanted me to and more. I lived in the nicest neighborhood in town, a neighborhood in which she would have been stopped just for walking through. I had a great family. I worked in television and radio. I worked on stage as the opening act for some of the biggest stars in show business. I even had an audience with the president of the United States. I was middle class. Hell, I was upper middle class.
I had spent the first fifteen years of my life trying to please my mother, and the last twenty trying to be my mother. Was that what was wrong?
Was it that stuff way back at the hobby shop with my son that ripped the scabs off of old wounds that had never healed, could that have been it? Or was it that I just didn’t know who I was?
It could have been some of those things. It could have been all of those things. Those four hurtful words rang in my head again. I guess that in a way, they’ve always been there.
“He’s still a nigger.”
The words were loud in the empty house, my family out for the evening. It was just as well. I didn’t want anybody around at that moment.
I hung up the phone and went into the kitchen. I opened the cupboard and took out my silver martini shaker and a martini glass. I filled the shaker with crushed ice and I poured in Russian vodka and silently counted to myself as I watched the stream of clear liquid saturate the ice. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four, one thousand five, one thousand six.
I sat the bottle on the counter. What the hell? I picked the bottle up again. One thousand seven, one thousand eight, one thousand nine.
I poured in vermouth. Just a drop. I like my martinis dry. Like James Bond. That’s not black, is it?
I shook it up, poured the elixir into the martini glass, and dropped in a lemon peel. I grabbed the drink and went into the living room where I kept my big oak humidor. I took out a Cohiba Churchill. Cuban. I’d snuck it into the country from Mexico after my last vacation. (If customs should ask you, I never wrote this part.) I snipped the end of the cigar with my shiny V cutter and I lit it.
I took the drink and the cigar and went out into the garage. I closed all of the doors. I put the top down on my sportscar and I climbed in. I started the motor. I put in a CD of my favorite album from high school—Rick Springfield’s Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet. (Definitely not black.) I listened to the melancholic song he sings about losing his father suddenly. I felt his longing as he ponders the hereafter and takes comfort in the fact that his daddy now knows the great unknown. The great unknown. Mom knows it, too. Soon, so would I.
I downed the martini and threw the empty glass on the passenger seat. I took a drag from the cigar. The smoke was smooth. Cool.
I gently placed the cigar in the ashtray, leaned back, closed my eyes, listened to the motor idle, and I breathed. It was Tuesday. I was born on a Tuesday, too.