Stupid Unconditional Love

Toni

Audio Version

(read by the author)

I don’t fit the stereotypical profile of the comedian who is the product of a dysfunctional family.

But then again, I’m not that funny.

My family was abnormally functional. I used to tell my parents, “I wish you’d have fucked me up more. I would’ve had a better act.”

Instead, I got all this stupid unconditional love.

My dad was the dominant personality in our family, tall, loud, commanding. My mom was short, quiet, deferential. It’s always been easy for me to know what qualities I absorbed from my dad. I was a boy who mirrored his extraverted personality. My mother’s influence on me was more subtle, harder to pinpoint.

Mom was very inclusive and accepting. She always had her eye out for the person who may have been left out, the person on the margins of the conversation. To the extent that I do that, it comes from her.

I also remember being in the kitchen with her when I was about seven or eight years old.

“I hate that!” I said, though I don’t remember what “that” was.

Mom cut in sharply. “You don’t hate anything.”

“I can’t hate anything?”

“No, you don’t hate anything.’

I lifted my foot and pointed to the red tennis shoes[1] I was wearing.

“Not even these tennis shoes?”

She shook her head. “You can’t even hate those tennis shoes.”

I’m sure Mom wouldn’t have remembered that exchange, but it has stuck with me my entire life, like a Post-it note that never fell off the fridge. I hear her words whenever I’m tempted to hate something or someone.

Marie-Antoinette Rose Trinch was born and raised in Franklin, Pennsylvania, the second of four kids, three girls and a boy. Her grandparents came from the province of Calabria in southern Italy in the big immigration wave at the turn of the 20^th century. The original family name was Trinci. But this wasn’t a case where an indifferent immigration clerk mangled a foreign-sounding name at Ellis Island. Apparently, someone in the family thought it best to swap out the “i” for an “h” and anglicize it to “Trinch.” In those days, being an Italian Catholic was more precarious in certain parts of small-town America. Despite this attempt at assimilation, family lore has it that my grandfather’s tiny grocery store had been shut down by the KKK anyway.

Franklin is a town in a valley so deep that an antenna mounted on a roof could not pick up TV signals. Broadcast television had to be run in on a cable. This was long before cable TV as we know it today.

Mom grew up in this hermetically sealed valley that none of her siblings ever truly left. In fact, her two sisters, Mary and Frances never left the house[2]. They lived with their parents and then each other for their entire lives. And Mom’s younger brother, Frank, although married, also lived in town[3] just down Buffalo Street. Mom was the only one who broke out.[CG1] My brother, John, speculates it had to do with Mom’s unique position in the birth order. Mom was second born, not the oldest girl nor the youngest girl and not the boy, which left her with a less defined role in an otherwise tightly controlled family. That may have given her a few degrees of freedom to choose her own path.

Mom went to nursing school[4] and spent ten years working as an operating room nurse in big city veterans’ hospitals in New York, Philadelphia, and eventually Cleveland, where she met my dad. It was during this time that Antoinette became “Toni.” This was right after World War II. In retrospect, I wish I would have asked her more about that time in her life. She must have seen some pretty interesting if not brutal stuff in the aftermath of that war. But she never offered stories that made it seem like anything more than a job.

Mom always said that she wanted four boys. Since she started relatively late,[5] she only got half her wish. I’m the oldest. John is two years younger. It wasn’t until she got to know Shelley that I’m sure she must have thought, “Oh, girls might have been nice, too. Girls actually talk.” Boys after a certain age just grunt.

In my parents’ relationship, my dad was the joke teller. Mom was the audience. And she was the perfect audience, because she could never remember a punchline. Through their years together, Dad told the same jokes over and over again, and Mom always laughed.

Mom, however, was not a big laugher. She wasn’t the type who would throw her head back with her mouth wide open and guffaw. She was a quiet laugher. When something struck her funny, her eyes would light up and she’d grin and shake. Sometimes, though, the grin resembled a grimace. She got this from her grandmother. My mother’s enduring memory of her grandmother, was watching this tiny Italian woman, sitting on an ottoman, feet barely touching the floor, shaking with inaudible laughter whenever her husband farted.

This most likely explains why my demur mother could never resist a fart joke. It took her back to childhood. At the beginning of my stand-up career in Cleveland, I opened for Dave Coulier, later of Full House fame. Dave was a vocal whiz kid with a talent for cartoon voices and other sound effects. Back then, he had an extended run in his act on farts and farting. From the side of the stage I watched Mom, like her grandmother before her, shaking with laughter and not making a sound.

Living in a male-dominated household turned Mom into something of a sports fan. And living in Northeast Ohio turned her into a Cleveland sports fan, with all the pain, anger, and disappointment that comes with that curse.

John and I settled far away from our parents, I and my family in Los Angeles, John and his family in Ithaca, New York. Essentially, we’d see Mom and Dad once a year during the Christmas holidays when we brought our families to the ranch house we grew up in. On one visit, the four of us were lounging in the living room watching a football game. Our wives and kids must have been gone on some rare outing by themselves, because it was just Mom, Dad, John, and me. Like the old days. The original band back together: The Functionals.

Dad was alternately napping and watching from the floor among some large pillows propped next to the fireplace. I was on the couch. John was sitting on the opposite side of the living room and Mom was to my right in a large easy chair. It was half time, and Mike Ditka was analyzing the first half with the rest of the crew. I can’t remember exactly, but the game must have involved the Washington Redskins, which prompted Dad to bring up our own local sports controversy: Native Americans objecting to Chief Wahoo, the Cleveland Indians’ longtime red-faced, toothy logo. Dad muttered something about how ridiculous it was that people were making such a big deal about that.

I don’t know what it was. Maybe we were bored and a little stir crazy, but I glanced at John as if to say, “Should we poke the bear?” John met my gaze with a subtle up nod. That’s all it took. It was go-time, two commandos on a mission to blow up a bridge.

I started. “But Dad, think about it from the Native Americans’ point of view…

Dad: “Arrrghghgh!”

Then John said, “But Dad, you can see that it’s an insulting stereotype?”

Dad: “Arrrrghgh!”

This “But Dad/Arrrrghgh!” sequence repeated a few more times before I heard Mom say, “All right. That’s enough.”

We did not heed her request. The three men had some very important points to make before the game came back on. We were on the clock and needed to settle this once and for all.

Mom got more insistent. “Be quiet.”

We did not be quiet. In fact, we be louder.

“I can’t hear the TV,” she implored.

But she couldn’t break through.

I know what must have been going through our mother’s mind at this point. “Dear Lord, I see all my boys together for a few days every year, and here they are wasting this precious time arguing with each other. It makes me tense and anxious, and I want it to stop.”

But that’s not what she said.

Instead, she yelled, “Hey! You’re too loud!... I’m trying to listen to Ditka!”

As if Mike Ditka was the Oracle of Delphi. As if Mike Ditka was Walter Cronkite, and we were missing the moon landing. As if Mike Ditka was the Pope announcing the second coming of Christ.

Or maybe Ditka was Christ himself. “I’m trying to listen to Jesus! He’s giving a sermon on a mountain, and he’s saying a lot of good stuff! Blessed are the red tennis shoes!”

Nevertheless, this made us stop. And laugh. She knew who she was dealing with.

For the last three-and-a-half years of her life, Mom battled lung cancer. The big city nurse was a smoker and although she had quit for about thirty years, cancer never forgets. She was lucky in that a targeted chemo pill, which we were told only works on about 20% of patients, extended her life for another three years. I remember reading through a stack of cards that friends [CG2] and family sent to her soon after her diagnosis, expressing their universal appreciation for their beloved Toni.

About six weeks before she died, John was sitting on the couch with Mom and noticed on the coffee table a book about angels that a friend from church had sent her. He asked, “When you think about dying, do you think about seeing your mother and father and your sister and your brother?” Our Mom, who never missed Mass and sent both her kids to twelve years of Catholic school, paused, looked at him, and said, “Ah, who knows about any of that stuff anyway.”

He put his arm around her.

In her final days, many friends and family visited the house to say “Goodbye.” On one of these days my cousin, Cyndi, came by with her boyfriend, Alfred, whom Mom had met maybe once or twice. We were sitting around Mom’s bed talking, and at one point she cocked her head. Something was off. She asked, “Where’s Alfred?” Alfred was there. He just happened to be sitting quietly out of her line of sight in deference to the family members. That was Mom still making sure everyone was included, no one left out.

She spent the last week of her life in bed, snowed under with methadone. By this time, she weighed about 80 pounds. John and I were there with my dad for that last week.

Toward the very end I was sitting alone with her in her bedroom, when she indicated to me that she needed to go to the bathroom. We had a portable toilet next to the bed. She really had to go badly and clearly signaled she didn’t want to go into a diaper. I slowly lifted her as gently as I could into a sitting position. Every move was extremely painful for her and being upright made her dizzy, but she wanted to exercise this last shred of agency. She had a small bowel movement. I wiped her.

In that moment, I realized I was holding her in my arms and caring for her as if she were an infant in what turned out to be the last day of her life, much like she must have cared for me on the first day of mine.

A few days before, when our wives and children were still around, Mom was still alert but sleeping a lot. I was in her bedroom with Dad, John, my sister-in-law Jenny, and my niece, Sarah. Sarah was twelve and doing a lot of theater in school. I started telling her a funny theater story I had heard, most likely apocryphal, about a church production of The Passion Play.

It’s the climactic moment of the Crucifixion. Jesus utters his famous last words, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Then he closes his eyes and dies. They had rigged the cross to slowly rise as if Jesus were ascending into heaven. But before that happens, per the Gospel, in a final indignity, a centurion has to pierce Jesus with his spear. Unfortunately, the actor playing the centurion didn’t realize that the rubber tip had fallen off his spear. He spears Jesus, and instead of Jesus’s last words being, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do,” he screams, “Oww! You stabbed me!... You idiot! Oh Christ, that hurts so much!”

The stage crew quickly brings the curtain down. They take poor bleeding Jesus off the cross. But they want to finish the scene. They’ve put too much effort into rigging this big finish where the cross ascends into heaven.

Luckily, they’ve got a back-up Jesus.[6] They boost him onto the cross. They open the curtain. But they don’t realize that back-up Jesus is much lighter than the original Jesus. So when they cut the ropes to release the cross, the cross shoots into the rafters with back-up Jesus shouting, “Shiiiiiiiiit.”

At the end of the story, I looked down at Mom on the bed where I thought she had been sleeping. She was curled on her side, shaking and grimacing, not making a sound.

I bent toward her. “Mom? Are you in pain?”

She shook her head emphatically.

I straightened up. “Are you laughing?”

She nodded just as emphatically.

That’s how I like to remember my mother, the same way she remembered her grandmother.

Shaking with laughter.

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[1] That’s what they were called in Ohio when I was a kid, and still are to this day. I didn’t call them “sneakers” until I lived on the East Coast.

[2] Not literally.

[3] Until the early Eighties when his grown kids moved Uncle Frank and Aunt Jean to Florida.

[4] When Mom and her younger sister, Frances, were kids, they were playing in the kitchen, and a pot of hot water flipped and scalded Frances on the neck, which caused a permanent scar. When it happened, Mom quickly pulled Frances’s sweater off but was later scolded for doing that on the theory that removing the sweater caused, or at the very least, exacerbated the scar. John once asked Mom if that may have been the reason she became a nurse, wanting to know the proper thing to do in a medical emergency. Mom told John that that had never occurred to her but, upon reflection, admitted he was probably right. It’s another example of fortunes turning on an accident of fate. If that pot of hot water doesn’t flip, maybe Mom doesn’t become a nurse, doesn’t meet my dad, and John and I never see the light of day. It also could be that in those days, nursing was one of the few professions open to women (Frances, a model student, became an executive secretary. Oldest sister, Mary, after contemplating being a nun, was a clerk in a department store). Later, when John was born with a cleft pallet, Mom knew the best plastic surgeon in Cleveland, Dr. Kean, who was a God-Like figure in our household for the corrective procedures he performed that didn’t exist only a few years before.

[5] She was almost 33 when she had me.

[6] We should all have a back-up Jesus.

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