Midlife Irish (31 page)

I found this bit so funny I found it in a rental place (it’s on
The Best of John Belushi
). I play it as part of my traditional Saint Patrick’s Day celebration right before the eatin’ of the corned beef. But the
interesting thing is the last words Belushi spits out before collapsing: “Oh, they love their mothers!”

I never met an Irish guy who didn’t love his mother. I love my mother. I’ve never met anyone quite like her. If that sounds
a little Oedipal, well, too bad. I can honestly say that I never saw my mom do or say anything that was in any way “wrong.”
I mean that in a moral sense. In the other senses of the word, she was always doing something “wrong.”

She went to mass every day of her life. In the evenings she
prayed for a couple of hours. I vividly remember a scene from her life. It was pure Anne Forde.

I was about twelve years old. I was with my mom and dad and my brother and sister. We were at the racetrack. Delaware Park,
about an hour from our house, was the only racetrack that admitted children. My dad would let me pick horses. If I won he
would give me the money. It was a fun day. It probably wasn’t the most psychologically healthy thing to let a little kid bet
on horses, but I loved it. I never said we were the Waltons. (I never became a compulsive gambler, but I love horse racing.)
The racetrack was, for us, “family entertainment.” The family that gambles together, stays together.

Anyway, my dad was having a bad day. My mom was having a good day. My mom never bet more than two dollars, while my dad frequented
the hundred-dollar window. On a bad day, my mom would lose maybe twenty dollars. My dad would lose serious Benjamins. My mom
always smiled and laughed and made jokes no matter how she was doing. My dad’s disposition depended on his economic state;
on a bad day he was not Mister Rogers.

It was late afternoon. The eighth race of the day had just finished. My dad had not been at the winner’s window all afternoon.
He was less than thrilled. In the race that had just finished my mom’s horse acted up in the starting gate and was scratched.
This meant that everyone who had bet on that horse would get his money back. But that’s all. If you bet ten bucks you would
get ten bucks back. My mom had just returned from the window. She looked puzzled. She sat down next to my dad, who was wearing
an intense fixed stare. He was looking at nothing, something he did when things weren’t going well.

My mom told my dad her problem. She had gone to the window to get her two dollars back, but the guy at the window had given
her a lot more than two dollars. He had made a mistake and given her the payoff for the winning horse, a
long shot that paid sixty-two dollars. The racetrack had just given my mom sixty dollars.

This news lightened my dad’s mood. I could see a little twinkle in his eyes. I could almost read his thoughts. Sixty dollars.
Not bad. The racetrack just gave us sixty dollars. Life is not that bad.

Then my mom said something that completely shattered his mood.

“I’m going back to give the money back.” And with that, she was gone. I looked over at my dad. I could just make out some
steam coming from his ears.

My mom hadn’t even thought about keeping the money. That was the way she was with everything. Once she went way out of her
way to return a twenty-five-cent pencil she had inadvertently stuck in her purse. She probably spent fifteen dollars giving
back the pencil. The Ten Commandments were, for her, not the “Ten Suggestions.”

My mother told me that when she was a young girl she had a powerful desire to become a nun. She told me that she believed
that God had chosen her. She set out to begin her training three separate times, and three times something happened that prevented
her from going. Sometimes someone got sick and she was needed at home. Sometimes someone got in an automobile accident. My
mom interpreted that as God’s way of telling her that she wasn’t meant to be a nun.

But for my mom, the next best thing would be to be the mother of a nun or, better, a priest. I never really felt her directing
me toward the priesthood. I guess there was something about me that just said, “Not priest material.” But my older brother
received the full treatment. It didn’t take. It didn’t work with my sister Mary either. (She would have been a really aggressive
nun.)

There were always priests around the house when I was growing up. Some of them I liked and some of them I did not. I now know
that they were there to show my brother
what the life of a priest was like. If the priests at our house were typical, the priestly life didn’t look that bad. They
all had cars. Some of them drank a little, some smoked, but none of them had any sexual predilection for young boys. I mention
that only because of recent events, but for years before that, every time you saw an actor playing a priest he was a child
molester. I was an altar boy for seven years and I never saw anything remotely sexual.

I really enjoyed being an altar boy. You got to dress up in exotic clothing. You got to set fire to a lot of stuff (candles,
incense, once in a while the exotic clothing). But the one thing I remember most about being an altar boy is a fellow altar
boy I will call Tommy Ditmar.

Ditmar was about three years older than I was, so I got to observe his altar boy career for about three years. I guess he
was my role model in the religious life. He was an older and wiser altar boy. He was a tall wiry kid with large hands and
crazy hair. His hair looked as if Ditmar had just stuck his hand in an electrical socket. The hair was appropriate. Ditmar
was not the model altar boy.

He would do the usual altar boy bad stuff (sword fights with the candle lighters), but he went way beyond that. He would wait
until the priest was gone. He would make sure of Father Bradley’s absence and then go into his act.

First he would go over to the refrigerator and get out a bottle of Christian Brothers wine, the wine used in the mass. I was
stunned that he had the brass to do that. He would walk around taking gulps out of the bottle while engaging in a stream-of-consciousness
monologue that was really, really obscene and really, really anti-Catholic (anti-everything was closer to it). For my ten-year-old
mind it was the funniest thing I ever heard. While he was doing this, striding around, pretending he was the bishop or the
pope, he would continually munch on a stack of communion wafers.

I remember being really shocked the first time I saw Ditmar’s act. The wafers were, after all, sacred, and here was
Tommy Ditmar buying himself a one-way, no-waiting ticket to hell.

He always ended his rant the same way. He would say something really filthy and anti-God. Then, while everyone was laughing
(usually an audience of two or three other altar boys), he would plop into the big red chair that they had in the corner of
the sacristy, the one underneath the somber portrait of Pope Pius XII. Ditmar, really rolling now, would take a huge slug
of Christian Brothers, clap his hands, and say in a loud, booming voice, a voice like the voice of God in the movies (or as
close as Ditmar could get), “Bring me the dancing girls!”

Ditmar’s performances burned themselves into the template of my mind. Whenever I see an altar boy, I think of him and smile.
Whenever I see an altar boy, I think of Ditmar, the chair, and the dancing girls.

I didn’t become a priest. Sorry, Mom. I blame Ditmar.

I did not know Tommy Ditmar. I saw him only “on duty.” Someone told me that he became a full-fledged substance abuser. I can
only think of him in a big red chair with a bottle of Christian Brothers in his hand and a wild maniacal grin on his face.

I am very happy that my mother never saw one of Ditmar’s performances. For her, the Catholic Church was the holiest of places,
and all the altar boys were like little angels on earth. My mother grew up on a farm outside a little town in County Mayo
named Ballyhaunis. (There are many little towns in Ireland that begin with “Bally.”) Like “Athlone,” this was, for me, merely
a couple of syllables with no meaning. She never talked enough about it to give me a mental picture of Ballyhaunis. When we
got an “official” Basset hound and needed an official registered “last name” for the low-IQ dog, we named it “Norman O’Ballyhaunis.”

He later drank antifreeze and died. It was very sad. We all really loved him. Norman wasn’t too swift in the brain department,
but he was very lovable. He had an Irish name, so it is appropriate that he died because he was too fond of drinking.

As far as my consciousness goes, that is the only real “Ballyhaunis” connection that I have ever had. This seems horrible
to me now, but when I was younger I was not at all interested in my mom’s Irish life. I was extremely close to my mother,
but she rarely talked about her life back in Ireland. If she wanted me to know, I figured, she would have told me about it.

In the DNA department I’m pretty momlike. When I was born, she told me, my relatives said that I resembled my mother’s side
of the family. They said, many, many times in my presence “He’s a Ford, not a Gannon.” When Gerald Ford said that he was a
Ford, not a Lincoln, I was repulsed for a variety of reasons. My dad would stand no Republican associations, however remote.

I have my dad’s weird curly hair, and I’m almost as big as he was. But from the wrist down I’m all Anne Forde’s son. My mother
had tiny hands. They looked almost comical next to my dad’s Sonny Liston hands. I am six-foot-two, but my hands wouldn’t look
out of place on Michael J. Fox. I used to be very self-conscious about the size of my hands. When I was in high school my
friend George Bianchi said that I was the only kid in his high school who needed two hands to play Monopoly.

I, like most American boys, once had a gripping desire to dunk a basketball. I was six-two—I should be able to dunk. I played
a lot of basketball, and my nondunker status was kind of embarrassing. I could jump high enough, but I would always lose the
ball on the way up. I could dunk a volleyball, but my hands were too small for a one-hand dunk with a basketball, and I couldn’t
jump high enough for a two-hand dunk. This used to frustrate me. I once tried gluing the ball to my hand with LaPage’s Mucilage.
This resulted in my injuring myself. The ball stuck to my hand when
I tried to “dunk,” and I dislocated my shoulder. When I told the doctor how I injured myself he looked at me like, “This boy
is really unusually stupid.”

Anne Forde’s chromosomes also got to me in more subtle ways. I loved to sit around and talk to my mom. Unlike my dad she would
talk back to me. I certainly inherited a lot of her personality. I, like the pants at a liquidation mart, have always been
“slightly irregular.” I never quite fit in. I felt as if I was the same type of person as my mother—not criminal, just sort
of confused on some level.

My mom had a very strange sense of humor, which I find very difficult to describe. When she told jokes, she always told them
very badly. She went on past the punch line, or she forgot something, or she added odd details that didn’t add anything, or
she grafted another joke on to the original joke.

Then she would laugh at the wrong moment. She would laugh at her strange version of the joke, not the joke. Sometimes, in
a very strange way, her little addition to the joke
was
funnier. I would sometimes laugh in the middle of her joke. I’d realize that I had laughed at the wrong time. Then I would
look at her and her eyes would say, “I meant to do it that way.”

She would tell the same joke differently every time. If my mom asked, “Have you heard this one?” the answer was always, “No,”
because no one had ever heard it because no one had ever told it. And no one would ever tell it again.

I found that I usually laughed at my mother’s jokes. Often, no one else did. A bond was formed, a bond more basic than the
mother-son relationship, the bond of weirdness.

My mom and I would go to the movies all the time. We would get a cab because she didn’t drive. Someone (not my dad) once tried
to teach her. She described to me her one driving lesson. She sat in the driver’s seat. She put it in reverse. She tried to
get out of the driveway. She didn’t make it. She gave up.

In the taxi, she would sit in the backseat and I would always
want to sit in the little fold-down seat that yellow cabs had back then. I thought it was interesting to unfold the little
fold-down seat they had in front of the rear seating area. It made me feel that I was doing something intricate and important.

So, I’d be facing my mom as we rode into Philadelphia. My mom would talk to the cab driver, but I could tell that she was
also talking to me. She was right in front of me.

My mom loved to talk. She would start talking in a rhythmic, rambling Irish voice the moment she got into the cab, and she
wouldn’t stop until we got there. The cab drivers were usually good talkers too. I could tell that they enjoyed giving a long
five-dollar ride to a talker of this quality. The cab drivers had their themes. They often complained about Philadelphia and
the plight of cabdrivers. My mom sympathized. Sometimes I would make an observation. She would weave my comment into the conversation
so I felt I was engaging in an actual grown-up conversation. My observations were always quickly dismissed, but I was in there
conversing.

She loved baseball and she would talk about the Phillies in great, almost baroque detail. This was often startling to people
who didn’t know her. She did not look like a person who would have a Red Barber-like view of the game.

When I told friends that my mom knew about baseball, they always got the wrong idea. If my friend was over at my house, and
didn’t know my mom, he might ask her something like, “How are the Phillies, Mrs. Gannon?”

This was like asking Alan Dershowitz, “How is the law?”

My mom wouldn’t say “good” or “bad,” as my friend would expect. She would say something like, “Gene Mauch doesn’t use his
bullpen enough.” Or, “They have to get a right-handed pinch hitter, a power hitter if he’s available, because in the late
innings every team in the National League has a left-handed relief guy, and the Phillies can’t do anything at that point.”
Or, “When Tony Gonzalez got hurt, they let
everybody pitch around Callison. They should move him up in the order. He can bat second. He is a good contact hitter.”