Navel Gazing

by Michael Ian Black

  We usually talk about once a week. We talk about books and the weather and my work. She asks after the grandkids. Sometimes they get on the phone and tell her about their various doings. Elijah, fourteen, has to be prodded to say anything. Ruthie, eleven, has to be prodded to let anybody else say anything. Sometimes when Mom and I get on the phone, neither of us has much to say at all, so we cut it short. But every phone call ends the same way:

  “Love you, Mikey.”

  “Love you, too, Mom.”

  When somebody you love has a chronic illness, you get used to living with a prickly, low-grade fear. Unpleasant thoughts are always hovering, like a housefly that won’t be swatted. For a time, I can forget about the fear, but then the phone buzzes at ten o’clock at night and my first thought is always of Mom.

  People used to tell me I was Mom’s spitting image. We share the same hair color and skin tone and hazel eyes and full lips. I liked looking like her because it made me feel that I fit somewhere. When Martha and I talk to our own kids about which of us they most resemble, I see in their eyes the same eagerness to know where they belong. Sometimes we pretend to argue about who got whose nose or chin. Now that they’re getting older, though, they’re beginning to look less like us and more like each other. They look like they belong to the same family and sometimes it startles me to realize it’s my family.

  I never knew most of my relatives. When he was alive, Dad wasn’t close with anybody in his family other than his sister Jane. Mom’s family mostly resided in Chicago, whereas Dad’s work had exiled us to suburban New Jersey. Sometimes Mom told stories about growing up enveloped in a thick cloud of aunts and uncles and cousins. But the names—Anna and Mollie and Lefty—meant nothing to me. Even the idea of “family” seemed kind of fuzzy. Whatever understanding I had of families I gleaned from television commercials, which tended to portray them as large groups of overweight people arguing in accented English about who made the best tomato sauce. Families seemed loud and embarrassingly ethnic. I didn’t think I needed one.

  I knew a little bit about my family, of course, including the fact that I am named for a mobster, which is, by far, the coolest thing about me. Although he is long dead, I will refer to this man as “Uncle Mobby” because his relatives are still very much alive and I do not wish to be sued or killed.

  Uncle Mobby was the husband of my great-grandaunt who, by the time I knew her, was an ancient and tiny woman living alone in an elegant Chicago high-rise. The apartment reeked of old-lady smells: potpourri, lemony furniture polish, wet perfume. I liked visiting her because she kept small crystal bowls filled with silky chocolates, protection money in exchange for not destroying her home. Also, she kept an extravagant yellow windup bird in a brass birdcage hung from the ceiling. Every so often she would wind the bird for us. Out came lovely canary song, its yellow-feathered head swiveling, wings flapping. Then it would fall silent again and we would be left to wonder at its hidden workings. According to my mother, this aunt possessed fabulous wealth. With candies and windup birds like that, I didn’t doubt it.

  Uncle Mobby never wielded a tommy gun. Never shook anybody down. Never garroted a rat with piano wire. His participation in Chicago’s Prohibition-era Jewish mafia, or “Kosher Nostra,” was more subdued. Mobby was a money launderer, one of the green-visor guys who “wash” ill-gotten gains through various legitimate businesses so that it may safely be recirculated back into the square world, to be spent on Buicks and chinchilla coats and pinkie rings. One of my uncle’s legitimate businesses was an actual Laundromat, which I suppose is a pretty good joke if you are a mobster.

  He died not long before I was born, and Mom gave me his first initial—M for “Mobby”—as a way of honoring her aunt’s many kindnesses to her throughout her life. The aunt is gone now, too, as is their only child, a boy named Bert who followed his father into the family business.

  When I found Bert’s obituary online, it contained loving words of remembrance about his family and charitable deeds, but mentioned no occupation. I tried to unearth more information about him, finally discovering a corporation he founded in 1980, which named him as vice president and secretary, and his wife as president. As far as I could tell, this company conducted no business activities during the three decades of its existence. It just sat there in a kind of corporate vegetative state. Of course, corporate inactivity doesn’t necessarily imply anything nefarious. I have a company, too, and to the untrained observer it would appear that mostly what I do, as president and CEO, is spend hours a day surfing Twitter. Such an assumption would be insulting, and the fact that it’s correct makes it all the more offensive.

  The Mobbys are my family’s only outlaws. I count no cattle rustlers among our clan. No international drug kingpins, diamond smugglers, or brilliant forgers of art. Instead, my ancestors were an ordinary assemblage of Ukrainian immigrants fleeing religious persecution. In the nineteenth century, Tsar Alexander III passed a series of regulations, known as the May Laws, that restricted the amount of property Jews could own and where they could live. Revisions to the laws over the years prevented Jews from becoming doctors and lawyers, attending universities and high schools, and, eventually, from participating in elections. It was as if Tsar Alexander III decided that Jews would experience all of Russia the same way Kevin Bacon experienced that terrible town in Footloose.

  Millions fled, including my great-great-grandfather Philip. He came to America in 1894 with his second wife, Rose, and nine kids. Rose and Philip had three more children in America, and probably would have kept going had she not done him the great discourtesy of dying. That left Grandpa Philip in a strange country with no wife and twelve children. Twelve. I can’t even imagine. Martha and I only have two, and we needed a battalion of au pairs to survive.

  The family settled in Chicago, where Philip picked up his old job as an “egg candler,” an old-timey term for somebody who inspects fertilized eggs, a job originally performed with the aid of candlelight. His sons followed him into the produce business. Eleven of the twelve eventually married and had children of their own. Most stayed in Chicago, although a few scattered to Texas and California and New Jersey. One married a money launderer for the mob.

  Many of the men served in the armed forces: I have seen their draft registration cards online. There is my great-great-grandfather Philip, age forty-one, registered to serve in the First World War. The cards of various great-uncles registered for the second. Some went to war, and some died. One, a navigator during World War II, received a posthumous Silver Star for sacrificing his own life helping his crewmates escape after their plane was shot down over Austria. My mom’s father, Sam, served in the navy during World War II. I ask Mom if he saw combat. She laughs. In a war that took millions of lives and upended continents, my grandfather found himself stationed in Rio de Janeiro. The closest he got to battle was having an anchor tattooed on his forearm.

  After the war, Grandpa Sam came home and married my grandmother Cecile. He became a salesman, selling restaurant franchises across the country. For years, the family scraped by, but toward the end of his life, he began making what my mom calls “good money” from a fried-chicken restaurant. After years of struggle, the American dream finally seemed at hand. Although Grandpa was overweight, his health appeared good, his ever-expanding stomach the by-product and just reward for a life well lived.

  One day, my mom received a call from her father telling her not to be nervous, but he was at the hospital, having just been rammed from behind in a minor car accident. The doctors wanted to keep him there for observation, he said, and he would be home in a few hours. He never left. While conducting routine tests, the doctors discovered a huge mass. It was the mass, not the fried chicken, making his stomach grow. They tried, but there wasn’t much they could do.

  Now it’s Mom’s turn to deal with cancer, or in her case, its aftereffects. Now I am the anxious child concerned for his parent, and Mom is the one reassuring me not to worry, she’ll be fine, but she also l
ikes to remind me in a half-joking way that she is dying. If I neglect to call her often enough, for example, she’ll say, “Why don’t you call more? Don’t you know I’m dying?” It’s an effective tactic.

  Mom says she wants to be cremated when she dies, her ashes placed in “a very fancy box.” Me too. I don’t like the idea of being stuck in a coffin and lowered into the ground. What if I’m not really dead? Better to get burnt up than buried alive. Sandy wants a proper burial, though, so they’ve decided that after they’re both gone, Mom’s ashes will be placed in Sandy’s casket. They’ve already picked out their plot, discounted because Sandy works at the synagogue.

  I ask Mom if I can have her leftover oxycodone when she dies.

  “Sure,” she says. “Although now that I’m on the pain pump I don’t get prescribed the good stuff.”

  “I’ll take the pain pump then.”

  She agrees to leave me the pain pump.

  I’d always assumed that chronically ill people grow to accept death, the way Martha eventually grew to accept the Portuguese foreign exchange student who shared her bedroom with her when she was fifteen. It wasn’t something she’d asked for, but after ignoring the girl, then fighting with her, she eventually grew to accept this unwelcome guest. I ask Mom if death scares her, expecting her to tell me that, no, she may have been at one point, but now she has learned to accept it.

  “I’m petrified. Not even scared—petrified.”

  So there goes my theory about death being like a Portuguese foreign exchange student.

  “Why?” I ask. Maybe this is a dumb question. Maybe it’s obvious why somebody would be petrified of dying, but Mom’s day-to-day attitude is so good that I have a hard time reconciling her fear with the way she lives her life. I guess I expect her to answer that she’s petrified because, duh, death is scary for everybody, or that she’s, duh, worried about pain, or that, duh, she’s scared because she doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. But I don’t expect the answer she gives.

  “Because I don’t feel like I did anything with my life.”

  Oh.

  That kind of takes the fun out of the conversation we were just having about her imminent demise. My first instinct is to feel offended. Didn’t do anything with her life? She had me, a very attractive man.

  When I press her, she says she feels like she squandered her potential, that she hasn’t made “a contribution.” Death petrifies her because her time is short and now she feels she never will.

  I understand. Most of us want to leave the world having secured some sort of legacy through our works and deeds. But it strikes me as such a futile idea—that we should be remembered at all. Remembered by whom? Do we expect unborn generations to sing our praises? If so, why? What’s the best any of us can hope for, anyway—that some future sixth grader will one day write a book report about us? As the parent of a sixth grader, I can assure you they are lazy researchers and terrible writers.

  Personally, I feel no great need to be remembered, except by my kids and, hopefully one day, grandkids. And when I do die, I don’t want any pomp. I want to be cremated, my ashes flushed down the nearest toilet. In lieu of a funeral, I would like a party held in my honor featuring buffalo wings and Hanson’s “MMMbop” playing on a loop. That’s enough. Besides, now that Maya Angelou is dead, who would speak at my memorial?

  I tried telling Mom all of this, that the best contribution any of us can make is to be there for each other, the way Mom was there for me and Eric and our younger sister, Susan. The way I try to be for Elijah and Ruthie. Our legacies aren’t our own, anyway, I don’t think. I think they’re all bound together with those of the generations that came before and those of the new ones ahead. I’m named for my uncle the mobster, and I carry him around with a certain amount of wicked pride, just like I carry around the legacy of an egg candler who raised twelve kids without a single Swedish nanny, and my grandpa who spent the war at Carnival. Just like I carry around all my great-aunts gathered in a Chicago kitchen arguing in accented English over who makes the best potato pancakes. I tried explaining all this to Mom, but the words didn’t come out right, or maybe she just doesn’t see it the same way.

  Last night at dinner, Elijah said he believes in ghosts. “That’s because you’re an idiot,” I thought, although I refrained from saying so. Thinking about it today, though, I realized I do, too. Not the spooky kind. Not the tormented souls that rattle chains and draw out their vowels when speaking. The ghosts I believe in are more earthly than that. They don’t do any scary shit. In fact, they don’t do much of anything at all. Mostly, my ghosts just sit around a beat-up card table, smoking cigarettes, drinking old cans of Meister Brau. They tell stories, and their stories tell me who I am.

  It’s almost dinnertime again and I’m still out on the trail with the inexhaustible Ole. The big dummy looks at me like I know where I’m going. I don’t. I’m just out here sliding along on the snow and ice. But then, up ahead, I spot a blue rectangle spray-painted on a tree trunk. The trail marker. We follow it through the woods toward home.

  Chapter Two

  “That explains why you look like that,” she said

  One of the unfortunate by-products of conducting genealogical research is cataloguing all the various and sundry ways in which one’s relatives met their ends. Here be congestive heart failure. Here be polio. Here be industrial accidents and lightning strikes and diseases of the spleen. Each ancestor’s death is like a fun-house mirror asking, “Will you too be felled by the French pox?”

  Yes, medical advances have lessened my odds of contracting the plagues of yore, but I hold no faith in living a long and fruitful life. From my earliest days, I have been conditioned to accept the fact that my time here on earth is apt to be brief and horrid. Because I have bad genes.

  We can escape lions and we can escape fire, but we cannot escape our DNA. We are who our ancestors were. Every day, the newspapers are filled with stories of centenarians crediting their longevity to “food, fun, and hard work” or “faith in God.” I even just read about a Texas woman who believes drinking three cans of Dr Pepper a day has sustained her for a hundred and four years. But the truth is, if you want to live a hundred years or more, none of these things will help you very much. What you need, more than anything, are the right genes. Biology is destiny. Which is how I already know I am not going to live to be a hundred. Or even ninety. Eighty is, at best, an iffy proposition. I’ll probably make it to seventy considering Mom has, and she’s basically being held together with Silly Putty at this point.

  The poor quality of my family genes was an oft-discussed topic in our household while I was growing up. On what felt like a nightly basis, Mom would remind me and Eric that our medical futures looked bleak, her words delivered with the weary resignation of a tarot reader who’d just flipped over the Death card.

  I knew my genes to be bad despite all evidence to the contrary: I am of normal height and weight and have never contracted any serious illness. My good cholesterol is good, and my bad cholesterol is also good. Blood pressure fine. Eyes serviceable enough. And most importantly, my back is naturally hairless. Were I to roll these attributes while creating a Dungeons & Dragons character, I would have said the gods had favored me. Yet I remain convinced that I am, at best, moments from a horrific death.

  Cancer runs thick and greasy through my family blood, and the odds are good that one day I will wake up with a tumor growing off me like a clump of poison sumac. The only real mystery is which kind of cancer I’ll get. Mom had uterine cancer, which I think I am safe from due to my lack of having a uterus. But I’ve also heard tales of bone cancer, lung cancer, and prostate cancer scattered across my lineal terrain like so many IEDs. My family’s real bogeyman, though, is colon cancer. In a bit of grim familial symmetry, my father’s mother and mother’s father both died from it. From the time I first gained awareness of my own asshole, Mom has been encouraging me to have it explored. “Get a colonoscopy when you are forty,” she would s
ay, a procedure that, now age forty-three, I have yet to undergo. My brother got one, though, and he’s fine, so I probably don’t need to, since the laws of genetics dictate that whatever is up his butt must also be up my own.

  Yet despite Mom’s relentless fearmongering, it never occurred to me to question whether or not my genes are, in fact, “bad.” Why would I? I found confirmation everywhere I cared to look. My grandparents’ early cancer deaths constituted a potent piece of evidence. So did Eric’s cleft palate, with which he was born, necessitating several childhood surgeries. Plus, our sister Susan has Down syndrome. (I learned later that her form of Downs, trisomy 21, is not genetic, but I didn’t know that while growing up.) Besides, even had I chosen to find out more about my genes, until recently it wasn’t possible to do so. Scientists could peer into the deepest reaches of space and read the story of the universe, but our own genetic code remained indecipherable alphabet soup. That changed in 2003 when a team of biologists, geneticists, and computer scientists first decoded the human genome.

  Since then, genetic testing has advanced so quickly, and the price fallen so much, I was able to go online and order a kit for ninety-nine dollars that accomplishes much of what it took thousands of scientists and cost a billion dollars to discover just over a decade ago.

  Instead of reading the entire genome like goddamned show-offs, companies like the one I ordered my test from use a process called genotyping, which compares markers in an individual’s DNA to reference markers in control DNA. It works like one of those “What’s wrong with this picture” games they have in Highlights for Children magazine, with computers matching your genome against a control genome. The discrepancies between the two are genetic abnormalities that can be linked to your specific health risks. I also ordered a kit for Martha, reasoning that she, too, would enjoy knowing which disease will one day kill her.