On The Side of The Survivors

Tonight, in the car, I saw this plant. It looked weirdly tropical for Upstate NY, like a plant I’d seen in Florida. “See it, guys?” I asked Chris and Brautigan. “Uh huh.”

Of course I don’t blame my husband and child for not being my mother. It’s that I mourn my mother, because if she were alive, I would have called her. And if she was sober enough, she would have had a story to tell about that damn plant. A story from the past or from that afternoon that would have filled my heart and my mind and my moments. I miss her stories so much that it leaves me with a heaviness I can only describe as so sickening it feels like it needs to be thrown up.

Earlier, I thought again of that scene in The Elephant Man, when those jerks forced those women to kiss him. But today I remembered why I think of it as often as I do, of the carelessness of people stuck in their contexts like shit on a shoe, unknowingly spreading their unfortunate predicament wherever they go.

It was a scene my mother shared with me on the day it happened. When she’d been destitute, ashamed, and desperate. A dollar away from homelessness. She’d called this wealthy man she once dated. A married man who’d been madly in love with my beautiful mother, back in the day when she imagined she was on the path to all her hopes and dreams.

Though distinguished in appearance and tone, this man made his money from the pornography world, the business end. It sounds awful and it was, and though my mother was not involved in anything as corrupt, he sent her his money when she needed it. On this occasion, he’d been in Florida at some convention when my mother called asking for help. But instead of wiring cash, he’d asked to take her to dinner.

My mother was in no position to be seated at a table in a restaurant. She was too hungry and too fragile, withdrawing from the alcohol she drank to protect herself from the panic and terror that had become her life. But she needed the money, so she rigged herself as best she could to resemble the woman she’d been before the world squeezed her out of it and took a bus to the restaurant.

After they greeted and my mother began explaining her dire circumstances, he interrupted to insist that what he had to say was far more important. And what it was? That she try on something new he was making all sorts of money from—a pair of vibrating underwear. And there she was, my poor, poor mother. Depleted. Harrowed. And yet still with a soul more in tact than his, enough to realize the metaphor of life before her—the pyramid scheme of human-devouring-human under the guise of civility; the pictures of success, walking entitled through the world, smacking their lips, waiting to appreciate the cultivated flavor of someone’s last shred of dignity.

And my mother, not privileged enough to assert any boundaries beyond her indomitable spirit, put these undies on and sat back at the table knowing he had a remote that he could use as he pleased to amuse himself, while kindly offering her a ticket to laugh along with the spectacle at her own expense.

My mother’s body, enduring yet another person’s mistaking it for a prop, waiting till the show was over so she could leave with his pocket change, stop on the way home for a bottle of something strong enough to fuel the incentive to call and tell me the story of what happened, the story now told properly, so that she was the golden star and that fucker the innocuous peasant.

And we laughed together because we understood the perverse depravity of the functional world and our laughter was our purification from the bits of it that had stained us. Our shared understanding afforded us that larger perspective of life, where the costumes are blurred and everyone in all their various states of decay are just passing through.

But even so, that night, I cried. I cried because it all seemed so damn unfair, who gets to survive and who gets to thrive. And I promised myself, from that moment on, that I’d be on the side of the survivors, no matter how wretched they were as well. That whenever I saw someone who looked the way my mother so aptly described herself, like an empty old worn-out wallet, I would not discard them. Or reach in and see what might be there for me. I’d hold my agenda. Swallow my knock-knock jokes. And tend to the blazing soul before me that still wants to shine. That still yearns to be held in someone's reverence.

Whenever you look hard enough, you will see it. It will stop you in your tracks.

-JLK