Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (32 page)

Now, on the phone, he asked, “What’s wrong?” in that tell-Mama-all-about-it tone I knew and loved so well. It was barely two weeks since I had returned from Thanksgiving in Texas, and I had just made the decision that I would return the next day.

“My mother. My dad just moved her to hospice. She’s dying.”

“Oh, kiddo, I’m so sorry.”

Days after I left Beaumont she stopped eating, refusing even liquids. By Friday, December 10, Dad had called to tell me that they were moving her to hospice. I prayed on the plane ride home for God to take her, because if her remaining gown days were going to be spent catatonic in a wheelchair, well … Despite that prayer, I was blindsided by the news. We chose hospice rather than bringing her home. We decided that the image of her dying in her bedroom, where she’d spent so much of her time, would be too much of a stain on our memories.

For the next five days I debated when I should return. I talked to people I knew who’d had experience with hospice: Liz’s partner, Karen; a sober friend who was a hospice worker; and various others in the hospice set.
What a fun set to be in.
When I told them that she was refusing food, they all said, “Go now.” Then I heard the news that CBS was canceling her beloved soap,
As the World Turns
. That was the final sign I needed.

When I told Dad I was coming home, he said with odd perkiness, “Good! Come on, but you may be down here cooling your heels for a while.” He was still in denial, or maybe he was still in hope.

When I stopped blathering to Dave on the phone, I asked, “So how are you?”

“Well, kid,
I
just started hospice at home today.”

I stopped walking. “Oh, shit.”

“Yeah. Shit. The cancer spread, and it’s inoperable.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“There’s nothing to say. That’s why I came last month. To see my family and those whom I care about. People like you.”

“Oh, Dave. You have to know that you made such a huge difference in my life and getting sober. You must know that.”

“I do. The good thing about going this way is that I’ve had time to say good-bye and close up shop.”

I wish I could have that with Mama Jean.

*   *   *

Twenty-four hours later I was in Beaumont standing next to her deathbed at the antiseptic hospice. Dad sat in a chair next to her bed with his arm outstretched to hold her hand as he read a magazine. A carpet of newspapers was spread at his feet. “Look, honey. It’s Jamie-poo.”

She lay flat on her back, a morphine drip next to the bed. She turned her head to me. Her eyes were open. “Hi, Mom. I’m here.” She blinked her eyes and smiled at me in the way that a baby does, and you want to believe that the baby knows and understands you. She may not have known and understood me then, but she had for most of my life.

Four days later the call came in the middle of the night, when calls like that are supposed to come. Minutes later Dad, Jeffrey, and I piled into Mama Jean’s Cadillac. I drove, but my sitting in that seat didn’t feel right.

The deathbed scene was as slow and steady as the morphine drip by her bed but without any pain relief.

It’s hard to say who needed Mama Jean most. Certainly Dad would be left with the biggest void. “Who’s gonna tell me what to do?” he said. Jeffrey had had a tumultuous relationship with her. He and Mama Jean had come to a kind of mutual peace and respect for each other in that year of living together. When she got sick, he, alongside Dad, had done everything possible to help take care of her. But Ronny may have needed her the most. A loner all his life—he definitely “marched to a different drummer,” as Mama Jean said—he talked to her about
everything,
from his roofing business to his Neil Diamond obsession to his adventures at tittie bars in Houston.

We stood around her bed speechless as her heave-sigh breaths dominated and hushed us. Hours later, we collectively held our breaths as hers came further apart. Each long pause in between fooled us into thinking that every breath was her last. We’d start to let go of our breaths, let go of our tears, let go. But then she’d breathe again. This edge-of-the-cliff breathing—hers and ours—must have gone on for an hour. “Oh, God, she’s gone.” Tears would start, and then another of her long exhales would fill the room.
Not yet!
“She’s still with us. She’s still here.”

Finally, she took her last breath. The room was silent and airless. I know the exact time of the moment, because when it happened I instinctively sent Michahaze an e-mail from my BlackBerry. My friend Smith had dubbed her Mama Jean after witnessing her Auntie Mame side that night at the Teatro ZinZanni in San Francisco. But I never called her that myself. Not until I sent the e-mail to Michahaze: “1:14
PM.
Mama Jean is dead.”

*   *   *

The next afternoon, Dad and I sat across from each other at his desk as we wrote her obit. We had planned the funeral right down to what she would wear. “Your mother was so excited because we were going to have our Christmas party again this year. She was going to wear the red St. John Knits gown with the rhinestone buttons down the middle.” We buried her in that dress.

The obit read: “A force of nature, Jean Brickhouse was known to all for her dynamic personality, irreverent sense of humor, generosity and deep appreciation of family and friends.” We chronicled the list of achievements—Chi Omega, American Real Estate Million-Dollar Producer, top producer and Chairman’s Club at her brokerage firm—all of which I knew well. Except for one: president of Jefferson County Council on Alcoholism.

I shot Dad his signature look. He mirrored the look from across the desk as he said, “Your mother liked to say I was an alcoholic, but I’m
not
.”

“No, you’re not. But she hit the jackpot with me.”

The obit ran with a photo of her flashing her thousand-watt smile, from that night when Smith dubbed her Mama Jean. She was “decorated” for the evening. A beauty mark is affixed to her left cheek like Peggy Lee’s, and a red feather boa is wrapped around her neck.
Showtime!

*   *   *

When she died, I was two weeks away from finally having a year sober. Through it all, not once did I need to drink.

Not at her deathbed.

Not on the drive in her Cadillac to view her body, supine, dressed in the red St. John Knits gown, and looking as if at any second she would turn and tell me, “There are only two kinds of sex.”

Not at the funeral, where her casket lay at the steps of St. Anne’s altar, where she and Dad knelt to get married, where I knelt for my First Communion.

Not at the Flamingo Road open house after the funeral for “Jean’s Last Christmas Party,” which was decorated last-minute by me because after thirteen years of decorating that house, I knew where she wanted every last ornament placed, right down to the Venetian-glass Wise Men on the mantel.

Not during any of those times did I need to drink. But more significantly, I didn’t have the desire to drink. I had her to thank for that.

Five months before she died, I had my last moment with her lucid. It was on that July 30 birthday visit in the geriatric hospital in Houston when I had shown up with a Hugh Jackman photo, my newly reddened hair, and seven months of sobriety. It was my first time seeing her after she had gone haywire, after she stopped being Mama Jean. I wasn’t even sure if she knew me.

When it was time to leave, Dad said that I should kind of drift out of sight rather than say good-bye. He and Jeffrey slipped away first. I stood alone with her in the unforgiving glare of the hall’s ugly fluorescent lights. I hugged her and turned away from her vacant eyes without saying good-bye.

As my mind tried to erase what I had just seen—a madwoman in my mother’s body wearing a worn, pink nightgown, no makeup, and a crushed hairdo—she clamped my forearm in a vise grip.

I turned around and she stood glaring at me. The look on her face was a mix of teeth-baring anger and fear, the same look she wore the night she declared, “You don’t know what love is.” She was furious with me and about to let me have it. She kept one hand gripped on my arm and released the other to point her index finger at me in accusation. “You’ve been drinking.” The nail polish was chipped.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not.” I wasn’t. I never did reschedule that December 29 drinks date.

“You better not be.”

“Remember, Mom? That’s all behind us. You took care of that. I have you to thank.” With seven months sober
again,
I was treading water through the critical period.
Who would blame me if I drank over Mama Jean losing her mind?

But there was another way to look at it.

God
damn
it! If you can’t stay sober for yourself, do it for her.

I looked her straight in the eye. “You don’t have to worry anymore.”

She stared at me warily before she accepted what I said. “Okay.” She raised her finger at me in a warning halt. “But promise me.
Promise
.”

“I promise.”

She froze in that position: eyes narrowed, jaw set, finger raised. Resolute.

The anemic wash of the fluorescent lights seemed to fade away. I saw her again as I always knew her. She was no longer without makeup and unmanicured hands, no longer wearing a nightgown that needed changing. And her hair wasn’t a crushed bouffant. Instead, she was bathed in the glow of a warm spotlight, dressed in her Christmas-red St. John Knits gown, face on, with superbly manicured nails, hair done to perfection: camera-ready. It was the last time she was Mama Jean. The last time she was in the driver’s seat.

THIRTY-ONE

Destiny (Reprise)

It is said that the things an alcoholic loses during the throes of drinking start to come back in sobriety. We’re not talking about material items like a wrecked car, a diamond ring, or a Persian-lamb coat so much as big-picture things like dignity, hope, self-respect, family life, job. At nearly three years sober, not only had those things come back to me, but they came back improved.

December 7, 2011, was the gayest day of my life—and I didn’t go near a cock that wasn’t my own. It was gray and drizzly outside, and everything that went on inside was beautiful. It was almost two years to the date since Mama Jean had died and three weeks shy of my third sober anniversary. I went to an auction of the estate castoffs of Joan Crawford—mostly flea-bitten—in the morning and a preview of Elizabeth Taylor’s jewels at Christie’s in the afternoon, with a life-changing lunch in between.

I’d perused the online catalog of the Crawford auction to consider what I wanted to bid on: her 1969 Golden Globe Award (
too expensive
), a set of silver-plate escargot dishes (
forget it, my grocer never carried snails
), a Margaret D. H. Keane painting (Keane paintings had gone from a joke to collectible kitsch) of one giant, sad eye with a single tear (
now we’re talking
), and various fur coats and stoles (
bingo!
).

I’d never been to an auction before. When I signed up at the counter, I admitted to the clerk, “This
is
my first time at the rodeo.” My reference to a line Faye Dunaway says as Joan Crawford in
Mommie Dearest
sailed over her head. I was registered as Bidder 134 and given a kelly-green plastic paddle with the corresponding number.

When I bid for the first time on the big-eyed Keane portrait, I displayed my gaucherie by throwing paddle number 134 high in the air like a first-grader begging his teacher to call on him. I quickly saw that the other poker-faced bidders merely flicked their wrists to raise their paddle from resting position to just under their chin. The eagle-eyed auctioneeress, who looked more like a Realtor with her bubble of blond hair and reading glasses, had no problem spotting all serious bids. But I worried that I’d have a Lucy moment and scratch my nose and mistakenly bid and win the Golden Globe Award, which went for $25,000.

When the furs came up for auction, I was ready for action. The petite fur coats and jackets would be fun to have, but I couldn’t
wear
them.
I’m a practical gal
. Lot number 1157 was the one that seemed just right. It was a six-and-a-half-foot-long, chestnut-brown, ranch-mink scarf. It was finished with long tail fringes that looked like sinister, glamorous fur fingers. I could see it draped around my neck, dramatically cascading down the front of my coat, the fur fingers wiggling in the cold air. “Nothing keeps you warmer than fur,” I could hear Mama Jean saying. I had to have it.

The bidding began at $300, lower than the estimated value of $600 to $800. Up went paddle number 134. Over the top of her reading glasses the auctioneeress glanced at me in subtle recognition of my bid. “I have a bid of three hundred dollars. Do I hear three hundred fifty?”

With pursed lips and a just-sucked-a-lemon expression, a gray-headed man on the end of my row nonchalantly flicked his paddle. I hated him.

“I have a bid of three hundred and fifty dollars. Do I hear four hundred?”

I raised paddle 134 again. It was a heady moment. The bidding was between me and
Him,
whom I strongly suspected of being a homosexual. The auctioneeress’s eyes darted between Him and me like those of a cat watching a metronome.

“I have a bid of four hundred dollars. Do I hear four hundred fifty?”

Him flicked his paddle again.

“I have a bid of four hundred fifty dollars. Do I hear five hundred? Do I hear five hundred dollars?” Paddle 134 spoke again and she listened. “I have a bid of five hundred dollars. Do I hear five hundred fifty?”

Please don’t raise your paddle,
I silently willed Him. My sphincter muscle was so tight, a midget flea couldn’t have entered.
God
damn
it, I want that fur!

She scanned the room over her reading glasses like a schoolmarm in search of the pupil with the right answer. I held my breath. “I have a bid of five hundred dollars. Do I hear five hundred fifty? This is fair warning.” No paddles moved. “Sold! For five hundred dollars.” She pointed to me. Lot number 1157, or the Crawford Scarf, as I dubbed it, was mine.