Grandma

I don’t know how old I am at the time. Seven or eight maybe. My Dad is off on a Bad Drunk. Worse than any kind of a drunk you can imagine. Mom is stuck with four kids and no money. A grim situation that recurred like bad weather. This is one of those times: She needed to lighten the load and since I was the oldest I was always the first one she’d drop off.

That makes sense.

I’d end up with Grandma. A week or two. A month maybe. Never too long because She wasn’t too keen on having another kid around. I don’t blame her. Christ. She already raised 7 kids. Two of them died young. And then she had Grandpa to put up with, a real mean bastard from the stories I heard. Grandpa Gooch. He croaked the year I was born. She’d dumped him long before and he was living in some row house in L.A.. They found his body but the money he stuffed in his mattress was gone…snatched by a maid, legend has it.

Anyway, Grandpa Gooch is a whole other story…

She had a hard life, Grandma.

Now, at this time I want to tell you about,1960, or thereabouts, Grandma was living alone in a little house in Salinas, just her and a dime store parakeet. I think she had a cat she named sweetie pie. Or was it the bird named Sweetie Pie? Doesn’t matter. The cat would die and she’d get another one and name it the same thing, Sweetie Pie or something close. Her pets died routinely. Especially the birds. But you could always get a new Parakeet at the dime store for a couple bucks. Goldfish were cheaper. She had one gold fish the cat ate. After that, no more gold fish.

It was a pretty lonely life, from my perspective, staying in that cottage in the town where Steinbeck grew up. Maybe not so lonely for Grandma. I don’t know if she was lonely. I only sense it from the memories I have of over sixty years ago. She did a lot of walking, Grandma. Her and her two-wheeled collapsible shopping stroller.

She didn’t drive. She wouldn’t pay for a taxi. She walked. She walked all over Salinas lugging this stroller. It was always with her. Until it wore out and she’d get another one. Like the cats, and the Parakeets, now and then a new stroller would appear. Freshly minted, bought at the dime store, fated to lug groceries along downtown sidewalks and parking lots until its wheels came loose or some other sad deformity inflicted upon it the result of hard mileage driven by a Old Lady named Suzie Gooch.

As I look back now, being a Minimalist (a kind word for a boat bum), I absolutely admire the way Grandma lived. She didn’t learn her minimalism from the University or hanging out with Artists. Hers came from the school of hard knocks, the Great Depression and living thirty years with a mean cheap-shit Bastard like Grandpa Gooch.

Romance

I don’t remember Grandma having a television. This increased my boredom exponentially. My dim memories are of her listening to a radio and especially of her reading from a heaping stack of Romance Magazines.

She had stacks of these magazines. I don’t know what you’d call them today. Some kind of marginally soft porn. Maybe not even that extreme. They were not pornographic. Certainly no nudity. They were written from a 1950s female perspective. titillating is the word.

They were meant to Titillate.

Grandma had a thing for these magazines. I mean, this is all she read. She had hundreds of them. Her other thing was Elvis Presley. She had a real jones for Elvis. She took me to several of his movies back in the early sixties.

Grandma was from the South and Elvis was her dream southern boy, I guess.

But I’m looking back at it, Grandma was no gym-trimmed Cougar. She was this frumpy sexless 75 year old lugging a stroller down the block to the grocery store. And she dressed like some lady from the nineteen thirties…

Back when I was a kid old women often looked old.

But I suppose she still had fire in her loins. You could tell that from a quick glance at her magazine library…

A place of worship

Grandma never went to church. She wasn’t religious. My mother was religious, lugging us around to various churches especially when the old man was off on a horrible drunk–and especially after he fell apart for good and we were five hapless welfare refugees.

Church became Mom’s bulwark against hard times.

But not my Grandmother. In fact, Grandma Gooch found her youngest daughter, Mom, to be decidedly peculiar. This was her way of labeling Mom dreamy-headed and even a little crazy. My mother longed for a true romance while, I suspect, Grandma longed (apart from the title of one of her more popular magazines) for some good hard protracted bouts of SEX.

Late life sex wasn’t in the cards for Grandma–no more than a Prince Charming was in the cards for Mom.

Fate will deal you a bad hand quite often in this bad old life!

Shit. Where was I?

So one evening out of the blue Grandma took me to church. Just me and Grandma. The stroller stayed home.

It was a night sermon.

I still to this day have no idea what prompted Grandma to take me there or why she felt any urge herself to go.

It was dark, and the chapel, a wooden-pewed assemblage of hard dark wood and wood arches, had the antique look and feel of a real church, not one of those religious dumps Mom dragged us to that felt like a dumpy barracks at a third world army base.

I remember we walked in late and took seats near the back of the crowd of worshippers.

The Sermon

I don’t remember the sermon. Only that it must have involved repentance of one’s sins.

This is what most sermons are about. You fucked up. You’re a sinner. And you must repent. Otherwise you will not be welcomed into the house of the Lord and its requisite paradise. Eternal damnation and a fiery hell await you if you refuse to repent.

This is about the only sermon there is, in fact.

There are variations in style, however.

That good old time religion

This was a four square Baptist church sermon Grandma and I attended.

Founded by this woman, Aimee Semple McPherson, back in the early twenties. A charismatic woman who grew a huge following with the help of radio and Movie stars. No stranger to scandal, she vanished for a time only to reappear in a hotel room resulting in rumors of wild parties with teams of sex hungry men.

But this again is a whole different story.

The point here of Aimee is she was Pentecostal. Hers was that old time religion. The religion of fire and brimstone. Not reserved like the Quakers. Hers was emphatic and emotional.

I’d heard this sermon before from listening to all the ones my Mom dragged me to. So I didn’t really listen. But Grandma was listening. It disturbed me to watch her listen.

She gave the sermon weight.

I know this because she began to cry.

I’d never seen Grandma cry. It was a strange and terrible thing to watch.

Pitying and Pathetic, like watching a large strong dog hit by a car.

Grandma, a large tall woman. Tough. Damned tough in fact. Sitting beside me in that dark church, tears rolling down her cheeks.

It disturbed me greatly to see her cry.

I don’t know how much. It disturbs me now, thinking back on it. Something awful and desperate and lost in her tough long life was welling out of her as a result of this sermon.

Salvation

And then Salvation came.

It came in the form of my reaction to the parishioners, those, particularly, those more lively ones struck hardest by the force of the preacher’s preaching.

It began with the waving of arms. Like people reaching out for some promise that’d be full filled now they’d come up with the money. Only it wasn’t quite that. Because their faces were upturned and it was more like they’d been pinched hard by a mean principal or paddled or something and they were feeling the pain. Or not even that. Something I didn’t quite understand. Only it involved something deeper. Something they’d eagerly strip naked for. Show off their deepest nakedness. A need to do that.

A need to strip themselves naked!

Shocked, I turned to Grandma. She hadn’t quite recovered from her tears. She wiped her eyes with a napkin drawn from her snap purse.

I turned back to find the parishioners were groaning and howling now. And speaking. But not any talk I recognized.

A kind of language. Not Chinese. Not Arabic. Not even good old fashioned down home Salinas style Spanish. It appeared to be some form of Neolithic or even Neanderthalic utterances. With accompanying grunts and howls.

At this juncture I began to giggle.

Because the truth of it had abruptly dawned on me.

I was hearing baby talk.

Grown people talking baby talk.

I turned back to Grandma. She frowned. Meaning I should stop giggling.

Then, for no apparent reason other than the fact of the collected zeal of the baby talkers profoundly affecting him, the man in the pew directly across from me rose up. He began waving his arms wildly, and in a sharp sonic blast like a trumpet player attempting Purple Haze while gargling whiskey, he announced himself!

He fell to his knees in the aisle just beyond me and stared directly at Grandma as if he meant to propose marriage:

“HUGGA HOOGAH GUGA HUGGA GOO GOO DOO DOO!”

I watched for a brief moment in profound silence.

Then I burst out laughing.

And then, to my relief, Grandma began to laugh.

She laughed out loud.

I remember it as one of the happiest moments of my life.

She grabbed hold of my arm and led me out of that Church, all the while choking with laughter.

I like to think we went for ice cream afterwards.