"Billy, listen. We have a big problem. Mom had a stroke."
"What?"
"I found her in the living room. The doctor said she's going to make a complete recovery, but it's bad. She's really confused. We're at the Long Beach Hospital Emergency Room so get here as soon as you can. All right? See you here. Bye."
Stunned by the suddenness and the fear of it all, we drove the hour and a half out to Long Beach. We got there as fast as we could. I met with the doctor. He said, Yes, indeed. She had had a stroke, but if you're going to have a stroke, this is the one you want to have. What the hell does that mean?
He showed me her X-rays. I saw the villain. He explained, as he pointed to the bleed, that it was in a very safe position in her brain. She would make a full recovery--"great"--but her left arm has been weakened badly but he thought it would come back--"great"--she's very confused right now, and that she's over there. He pointed to where she was, a male nurse attending her.
I saw her from the distance. Her left arm had been weakened to the point where it was hanging limply, but she knew that we would be coming. In the first aftermath of the stroke, she started to check out her body to see what this "opponent" had done to her. She saw that the arm was weak. She then took the sheet, and put it in her bad hand and held it as best she could. She evened the sheet off around her waist, so that when we saw her for the first time, we wouldn't know she had a problem. She was protecting us. When I realized what she was doing I said to myself, God, she's great.
"Mom . . . Mom, I'm here now. Janice is here. Rip is flying in. Joel's here. Everything's going to be great, Mom. I spoke to your doctor, he said you're going to make a complete recovery. Isn't that wonderful news?"
She looked at me with very confused eyes. I studied her face. I'd never thought of my mom as old. Even though she was in her eighties, her spirit was always so young. She looked beat up now, worn out, but still so valiant in her struggle to overturn what had just been done to her. She looked like she wanted to sit up and say, "Let's get the hell out of here." Instead, she spoke to me as if she was a little girl.
"My head hurts."
I was shocked, but couldn't let her see that. "I bet it does. I bet it does. There?"
"Yes," came the weak reply.
I massaged the back of her head as I held her good hand.
"I will always take care of you, Mom, always."
"Thank you," she murmured.
Then she stopped talking. No speech, just staring straight ahead. No speech the rest of that day and well into the next day. I ran to the doctor, anger and fear in my voice . . .
"Did you tell me everything? She's not speaking."
"Billy, calm down. Calm down. Your mom can speak if she wants to, but she doesn't want to right now. Her brain is making new connections, trying to figure out what happened to it. And right now, and it's a very normal feeling, she's angry."
He was right. She was furious that God had insulted her body this way.
"Well, how do I get her to speak?"
"Bill, with all due respect, I heard you tell her that you spoke to me, and that I told you she's going to make a complete recovery, which I believe she will, but she doesn't want to hear that now."
"How can I talk to her?" I asked.
"Just talk about everyday things . . . Try to engage her that way. Just talk about everyday things."
"Okay. I'm sorry, Doc."
He nodded sympathetically.
I went back into her room. She was staring at nothing. It was like someone had taken Mom and replaced her with a duplicate. It was her, but not really her . . . I wanted to yell, GIVE ME MY MOTHER BACK . . . I started to talk to her . . .
"Mom, this game last night was unbelievable. The Yankees are losing three to one, ninth inning, two out, O'Neill is on first, Tino's up, and he hits a home run. Ties it up. The Stadium went nuts! Then later, Jeter hits a home run and they win it."
And she suddenly said, "Well, it's about time. Derek hasn't been doing anything."
My elation was short-lived. These strokes are nasty characters. They're mean. It's a mean illness. A little bit of progress like that, and then many steps back. Some days you'd have a smile on your face, and the stroke would know it, and it would slap your other cheek. It's a mean, cunning, nasty illness. It was so hard to go to the hospital.
I kept thinking about the first time she had been in this very same hospital. I was nine years old. It was right after we got the car. She had pneumonia, and they took her out the front door with the ambulance waiting in the driveway, the gurney rolling on the cement, all that noise. I stood in the driveway as she passed me wearing the oxygen mask, the weak wave goodbye.
"Don't worry. I'll be okay."
They put her into the ambulance, the sirens wailed, and she was gone. I was terrified. My mom was going to the hospital.
Terrified. Just the way I felt now.
And the day after she checked in, I called her up. It was a stormy day, very windy and pouring rain. I said, "Mom, I'm coming over to see you. I have a new routine, it's really funny. I want to make you laugh."
She said, "You can't come here, you have to be sixteen."
"So, I'll do it outside," I pleaded . . .
"No, it's pouring. Don't come."
I said, "Mom, you can't stop me."
I hung up and I ran the seven blocks to Long Beach Hospital. The courtyard of the hospital is a U shape, and in the front was a big garden area. Right in the middle was this young sapling tree, about five and a half feet tall, no branches, very frail. They had just planted it. It was held up by some yarn and some stakes, but in the wind and the rain of the day, it was bending over very easily.
I stood next to it, looking up because I saw Mom in the third-floor window sitting up in a chair, looking out. When she saw me in the wind and the rain, she was not happy. She looked down at me in horror, and mouthed her words, broadly, so I could see what she was saying . . .
"Billy, no. I told you not to come. Go home, Billy. Go home."
I shook my head, "No." I came to make her laugh. So I started doing cartwheels and round-offs, back flips . . . all the things I could do back then. And then I got an idea. I took a run and I slid headfirst into the mud like a giant Slip 'N Slide, and I stood up, my face covered with mud, because I wanted to look like James Dean in her favorite movie, Giant. Again horror from the third floor.
"No, no. Crazy boy. You're a crazy boy. Go home. Go Home." She pointed furiously at me to leave . . .
I shook my head, "No" . . . I came to make her laugh.
Wiping the mud off my face, I remembered she loved Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin was her favorite of all time. I started imitating Chaplin as best I could walking around the tree, leaving Charlie's footprints in the mud. Then I got another idea. I started talking to the tree as if it were a beautiful girl, because Charlie flirted with everybody. And then I embraced it, and I bent the tree over, and stole a kiss just like Charlie would do.
I looked up. Mom was laughing, a big warm laugh, her shoulders shaking. She held herself, as if we were hugging each other. Then she mouthed . . .
"Go home."
I got my laugh. She blew me kisses in the rain, and I ran the seven blocks to the house, my Keds never once touching the concrete.
But now I stood by this very same tree, except now this tree was almost fifty years old. Its November branches gnarled and twisted like an old man's hands reaching up to the heavens as if to say "Why?"
I sat with her, holding her hand.
"Mom, remember when you had pneumonia, and I was outside in the rain? I did Chaplin in the rain. Remember that, Mom? You were so mad. Remember when I did Chaplin in the rain? Do you?"
Her eyes opened wide.
"You're Billy Crystal! What are you doing here?"
She didn't know me as her son. These strokes are like bank robbers. They break into your vaults and steal the things that you treasure most, the things that are most valuable to you, your memories. They steal yo
ur life.
But then she rallied, like I knew she would. The arm came back. She got off the bed, started walking with a walker first and then a cane, then with nothing at all. And all of us stood there, the whole family rooting her on. She never complained and always had a sense of humor. One day, as she was walking down the hall with the nurse, she turned to us and said, "Don't just stand there, put up the hurdles."
I had to leave, just for three days, an event I couldn't get out of at the last minute. I flew to Seattle, to perform in a comedy concert. The first time for me alone onstage in fifteen years. Next morning after the show, I called her in the hospital. Joel and Rip put her on the phone.
"Hello, darling. How did the show go?" She remembered . . .
"Mom, it went great."
And she always asks me technical questions. "How many people were in the house, dear?"
"Mom, it was a big joint. You know, it was like Radio City Music Hall. Do you remember Radio City, Mom?"
"Of course. We saw Danny Kaye in The Court Jester there."
"Yes, we did. Yes, we did," I said, tears of hope filling my eyes.
I went into great detail how the show worked for me, where the laughs had flowed, and she just simply stopped me and said, "Billy, dear, were you happy?"
"Yeah, Mom, I was."
"Well, darling, isn't that really all there is?"
She took my breath away . . . Words were difficult to come by . . . "Yeah. Mom, listen. I have one thing I can't get out of tomorrow, a big meeting in L.A. But I'm going to make the red-eye in. I'll be there Tuesday, Mom. We'll have breakfast together. What do you want me to bring you, Mom, you name it. Everything's going to be great. You'll see. Everything's going to--"
She stopped me again and said, "Billy, dear, please. Don't worry about any of that. Darling . . . I'll see you when I see you."
And that's the last time we spoke. The next day the bank robbers broke in again. This time they stole her.
The funeral was as it should have been. Her grandchildren spoke, Uncle Berns read a letter my dad had written to him during the war, telling him how happy he was to be in love with her. Joel was funny, I was funny, and Rip sang. She rests next to Dad, and even in my sorrow, I found some comfort in the fact that they were together again, in their same bed positions, quiet and peaceful, just like I saw them every morning of those 700 Sundays.
So now I'm an orphan. Fifty-seven years old now and an orphan. I know people will say, "Come on, Billy. This is what happens to us. This is what happens to all of us at this point in our lives. This is how life works."
But do you know something? It has an odor to it. I don't know why I thought it would be easier this time. I was fifteen the first time. Fifty-three the second. The tears taste the same. The boulder is just as big, just as heavy, the otherness just as enshrouding.
The anger started to well up again. But an omnipotent being once told me it's the hand I'm dealt. The cards I get to play.
We're at a table. I'm sitting across from "Him," and there are five cards spread in front of me.
I pick up the first . . . "Maybe five foot seven?" Oh come on.
I turn over the second . . . "Lose your father when you're fifteen." Can I get another card?
My third card . . . "Have your mother her entire life."
And the fourth . . . "Marry an incredible woman, have two beautiful daughters, and now your first granddaughter."
The last one . . . "Get to do what you've always wanted to do since you first made them laugh in the living room."
I hold the cards in my hand. He stares me down. I look at them one more time, but I don't really have to. "I'm going to stick, and I'm going to raise you everything I have. What do you got?" I stare at him with confidence, waiting for God to make his move. He stares back. I smile. He folds . . . He can't beat me.
About a year before my mom passed away, it was a Saturday night in Los Angeles, very late, around 12:45 on a Saturday night, which actually makes it a Sunday. The phone rings and I panic, because when you're a Jew and the phone rings late at night, it means somebody's dead. Or worse, they want money. But no. It's Mom calling from the house.
"Mom, are you okay?"
"Yeah. I'm fine, dear."
"But Mom, it's three-thirty in the morning."
"I know. I just wanted to hear your voice, Bill. That's all. I woke up your brothers too, but I wanted to hear your voice."
"But you're okay?"
"Yeah. I just--I couldn't sleep. I've been having trouble sleeping, and I just couldn't sleep."
"Oh, really . . ." I softly said, nodding my head. Her honesty was disarming.
I'm an insomniac myself. I mean, I've been up since 1948. I wanted to find out why she couldn't sleep because somehow it might help me. But, really, I just wanted the conversation to keep going on, because these kinds of conversations with your parents are best when they're not just your parents, but they feel like they're your friends.
"Mom, why can't you sleep?" There was a pause, and then . . .
"Oh, I'm listening for you boys."
I knew exactly what she meant. The cry in the middle of the night, "Mommy, I have a fever." The nightmares, "Mommy, there are pirates in the room!" Then as they get older, the sound of their cars pulling up in the driveway, the jingle of their keys in the front door lock, just so that you know that they're home safe. She was eighty-five years old now, alone in that house, her sons scattered across the country, but she was listening for us.
We sold the house. We had to. Without her in it, it really didn't make much sense to keep it. Somebody else owns it now, but it doesn't belong to them . . . because I can close my eyes and go there anytime I want.
EPILOGUE
700 Sundays is not a lot of time for a kid to have with his dad, but it was enough time to get gifts. Gifts that I keep unwrapping and sharing with my kids. Gifts of love, laughter, family, good food, Jews and jazz, brisket and bourbon, curveballs in the snow, Mickey Mantle, Bill Cosby, Sid Caesar, Uncle Berns and . . . "Consider the rose. Can you dig that? I knew that you could."
I've had a recurring dream. I'm in a car, a gray-on-gray Plymouth Belvedere, and I'm sitting up front because I still don't need legroom. And there's nobody else in the car, and the car is driving itself. I'm not scared because it seems to know exactly where it wants to go. Then suddenly, we're on 42nd Street between Lexington and Third, and we pass the Commodore Music Shop. And we pass the Commodore Hotel.
We pull up in front of Grand Central Terminal, and the car comes to a stop. The door opens and I get out, and I just follow the crowd, past the Oyster Bar, up the ramp into the Great Hall. Except this time, all the stars are real, and they're brightening up the heavens, and it's just so beautiful.
And the terminal is filled with men, and they're all dressed how I best remember Dad--white shirt, sleeves rolled up to just below the elbow, collar open, knit tie hanging. They're all fathers waiting for their sons.
I can't find him, in the crowd, but then I see him and he sees me, and he looks great. He doesn't look worried, he doesn't look upset, and he doesn't look mad. And we walk toward each other. There's no reason to run. There's plenty of time.
"Hi Pop."
He smiles that sweet little smile, puts his hand on my shoulder and simply says . . .
"What's lead?"
"Pb," I answer with confidence.
He nods his head . . . "Good, Bill, good." We look at each other; it's quiet. "Did you eat?"
And I hear the clatter of plates, the laughter of the family, the smell of soup and brisket and noodle pudding. Dad's eyes motion for me to turn, and there they are, all together again at the table . . . Grandma and Grandpa, Uncle Milt, Uncle Barney, Grandma Sophie, and now Mom and Dad, waiting for me to sit down and eat, and then it'll be time to go into the living room, and do a show.
I'll see you when I see you.
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