CLIFF DUNN, EDITOR
“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.” Oscar Wilde
I have a vivid childhood memory of my mother which had a lasting impact on the man I would become. Like a lot of kids, I had to endure bullies at various times growing up (my high school bully ended up marrying the great-grand-whatever of FDR: talk about your cruel injustices), but I was fortunate to have been inculcated at an early age to stand up for myself. This was a lesson learned from Mom, and it stems from an incident that occurred when I was around five years old. (This story dates practically back to the Stone Age, so I ask you to indulge my fancy.)
My mother was born the youngest of five into a chaotic (and not very warm) Italian family, where competition for resources (including parental love) was fierce. It instilled in her a “Lord of the Flies” sensibility about the way the world works that still staggers me when I consider what a generally cheerful person she was. A single parent at a time when that condition made “the marrieds’s” eyes roll with judgment (this WAS the 1960s), Mom began a tradition while I was still very young of bringing me to see the circus whenever it came to town—the “circus” meaning Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey; “town” referring to Madison Square Garden in midtown Manhattan. Another family “tradition” was an early admonition that, should we ever find ourselves separated in a public place for any length of time, I was to seek out the nearest adult—heck that: the nearest FEMALE adult—and tell her that I couldn’t find my mommy.
I don’t know if this is still the fashion as it was then, but in public places (movie theaters, restaurants, shopping centers), my mother would always escort the post-toddler and prepre- adolescent me to the women’s facilities whenever the call of nature summoned me to my youthful business. Insofar as my earliest memories can recollect, this was more or less de rigueur until one year when Mom took me to see the circus when it came to town. As Mom and I arrived at the Garden on the winter afternoon in question I—with visions of clowns, and acrobats, and elephants dancing inside my head—made the obligatory pit stop at the ladies’ room. It is here that our story gets good.
Unlike the previous occasions when my mom would usher me into the restroom and make for the nearest stall, this time we were challenged by the attending matron (think: restroom attendant but dressed like a nurse, and with more attitude). The selfsame lady— mature African American woman who in memory was built like former L.A. Ram Rosie Grier—challenged Mom and me as we attempted to pass the threshold of the lavatoire femmes. I remember the woman telling her “He’s not coming in here,” referring to me, and the very idea that I might profane the porcelain conveyances intended “For Women Only.”
My mother informed the attendant woman that I “certainly [wasn’t] going to use the Men’s Room by” myself, to which the matron restated her non-negotiable moral position (and shifted her physical one in front of the breezeway to accentuate the point). My mother—ho could ignore a person like no one could when she put her mind to it—urned her back to the obviously deranged bathroom attendant and proceeded to shoo me through the entrance.
It’s possible that Mom brushed past—and into—the woman as she walked past. Admittedly, the details after 40 years have grown hazy, but sometime around this point, the matron gave my mother a shove, and that’s when all Hell broke loose. Two Marine Corps-serving brothers had taught (and bullied) my mother into standing up for herself, and in moments where her “Sicilian” was up, she chucked suggestions of rationality and accountability to the wind. In a physical confrontation that resembled nothing so much as a cartoon knock-down-dragout—in which the participants roll across the floor in a literal ball of flailing arms, legs, and, in this case, handbags—Mom and the matron did what Joe Frazier would do to Muhammad Ali three years later in the same venue (just not in the ladies’ room).
Things snap back into clarity when I recall that the matron—who by this time was locked in mortal combat with Mom in one of the W.C.’s stalls—pulled a street move and, clutching the crown of Mom’s head, grabbed hold of her Saks Fifth Avenue wig and flung it into the toilet. Whatever Mom felt, it must have been the equivalent of seeing “red,” an anger that bears a startling—and frightening—resemblance to a murderous rage, took hold and, reaching her arm all the way behind her, as my Marine Uncle Ferdy had taught her, she slugged the momentarily triumphant matron in the jaw with such force that it rattled her brain around in its constraining pan and knocked the woman out cold.
The circus was pretty good, too. Whatever adjectives conjure when you consider the actions of Chelisa Grimes, the Indianapolis mother who sent her son to school with a stun gun after he was subjected to taunts, harassment, bullying, and eventually violence for months, her words—“What is a parent to do when she has done everything that she felt she was supposed to do? There was nothing else left for me to do but protect my child.”—resonate in a language that is unique to that indomitable species we call mom. I miss mine every day.
