Yikes! I just lost half a million dollars and 15 years of my life. Literally. I really wish I was kiddin’ ya, but I’m not. Boy, am I sore!
Since 1999, I have shared our family house in Oxburg, Maryland with my mom. Not an easy woman to get along with. Depression-bred— and she lets everyone know it— she hoards toilet paper and hand soap. Those items were rationed in World War Two, so she can never get enough. There are only the two of us in the house, but— coupons in hand— she overbuys like mad, purchasing everything that is on sale at the store. Everything. “I’m beating the system,” she exclaims. Like an Army Quartermaster, she buys battalion levels of napkins, facial tissues, laundry detergent, crackers, cookies, oatmeal, popcorn, bread, cake, meat and cheese.
I’ve tried to explain the economics of it to her. “You’re being manipulated into spending $3.40 on floor wipes,” I say. “Sure ’20 cents off,’ but who needs them to begin with?”
I’m talkin’ to a wall here. Mrs. Megabucks, she’s having fun, there’s no stopping her.
Neurotic as a bell jar, she managed to alienate my father to the point that he stalked around the house like an angry troll. He was such a piece of work, however, that I sided with my mom. I have lived to re-evaluate that perception.
This is a woman who shares a house with me in suburban Maryland but saves her faith and devotion for Billy Bush on Access Hollywood. Billy can do no wrong. I, on the other hand, am a sore disappointment and constant source of irritation. Or so I am told.
The tail wags the dog. Mom once came home, after a trip, to a dirty house. Therefore, even a two-day excursion requires that the entire residence be scoured and spotless from floor to ceiling. Once, as a teenager, she was twenty minutes early to a concert. She had to stand miserably in the rain. So we are never allowed to arrive anywhere more than two minutes before the appointed time. Behold, in 2005 our in-laws invited us up to New Jersey for Passover. Then to a convergence of June birthdays. And to the breaking of the fast after Yom Kippur. Three visits in one year! If— for any possible reason— we don’t make these three yearly pilgrimages to Mecca, that is because I am being an abusive, uncaring tyrant who is depriving her of the little joy she gets out of life.
So there!
She buys her great-grandkids enormous yellow bags of Swedish Fish and thinks this confers sainthood upon her person. Maybe it does. I don’t know. I’m not a Catholic.
Our kitchen is unusable, out of order, not functional, until the TV set is turned on and blaring. The car cannot be driven without all-news radio. The radio is the first component she adjusts after turning on the ignition. Before the seat belt, before seat adjustment, mirror or steering column. (I’m joking, of course. Mom isn’t aware that you can adjust the steering column. That’s one of those things they teach you in the Armed Forces. A civilian, mom doesn’t know what she doesn’t know.)
Emellertid… Swedish for “in the meantime.” The one constant in the last 15 years has been the refrain, “I am leaving my estate evenly divided between you, your sister Carol and your younger brother Timothy. All my money, all my stocks and bonds, will be evenly divided between the three of you. But not the house. You live here, you get the house.”
Holy Toledo, I live here, I get the house! Located in bucolic Oxburg, Maryland, this splendid 1927 abode is a mere eight blocks from the Metro stop at White Flint. Location, location, location, the appraised value is $650,000. Even after taxes, that’s a cool half mil. I have been willing to put up with a lot of aggravation, knowing that half a million dollars is the jackpot awaiting me at the end of it all.
You look at it and see a red-brick manse. My father Bernard, from New York City, saw it as a southern plantation. On a half acre of land, he planted grass, English ivy, forsythia, pear trees, red maple, loblollies, holly bushes, tomatoes and corn. “You three kids, you get 50¢ a week in allowance,” he decided. “You can take care of the place.” Talk about child labor, he converted us into pickaninnies, little black kids pickin’ cotton on massah‘s plantation. There’s a black and white enlargement on our dining room wall of me pushing the 30-pound steel hand lawnmower in our backyard, circa 1963. I look resigned to my fate.
Today, there are so many black SUV’s on our street, I feel like I’m living in Langley.
How can this tiny house be worth so much?
Here’s my description of Oxburg in a blog post from 2011: “Built by developer Julius Lapidus in 1927, he felt he couldn’t very well name it Lapidusville. Originally, he wanted to, but his wife said ‘no.’ Julius’ vision was a bedroom community for people working in Rockville, Chevy Chase and Bethesda, but also a location with direct access to Washington, D.C. The Blue Line ran local buses to and from the city, giant Studebakers with 6 cylinder, 40-horsepower engines and plate glass windshields. They provided a 1½ hour commute each way. Rockville Pike at the time was what its name implies, a thoroughfare linking several areas of habitation. A visionary, as I say, Julius left substantial lawns around each dwelling. ‘How I’d like to live,’ was his favorite expression. Black and white photos of the area show his billboards advertising ‘Cottage living in a rural paradise, accessible by car with urban centers.’ Pure Julius.
“… Hailing from Philadelphia, Julius named the place for Maryland historical figure John Ox (1617 – 1671) who was said to have owned property in the area. A developer, not a scholar, it never dawned on Julius to check out the bona fides of the man for whom the development was being named. A trip to the Library of Congress would have unearthed the trenchant facts: A Puritan from Boston, John Ox was at constant loggerheads with his Anglican Episcopalian neighbors. Basically a pain in the butt, after a few years, John Ox got run out of Maryland [ tarred and feathered, on a rail ]. No matter. Julius named it ‘Oxburg,’ and Oxburg it remains.”
Mom had an episode in October 2013 which landed her in the hospital for a week. She collapsed in the living room. I saved her life. Since then, her mobility is limited. Sharp as a tack— although she now has “lapses”— she can’t walk very well. Armed with a cane and a walker, she doesn’t want to acknowledge that anything has changed. I do 75% of the chores, bringing in the newspaper in the morning, putting away the dishes stacked in the drying rack, recycling newspapers and bottles and jars and plastic bags, doing laundry service, maid service, gardener, delivery man, handyman, bureaucrat on the telephone (she doesn’t hear well), assistant cook, dishwasher and taking out the garbage at night. Dealing with a compulsive neurotic, the line between caregiver and indentured servant is razor thin! Nothing I do is ever going to be enough. In the last six months, I have been run ragged and I still haven’t even begun a third of the chores she “would like to see done around this place.” When she noticed that I washed down the walls and ceiling in the kitchen, she now expects the same to be done in the bathrooms and bedrooms. She LOVES having a full-time servant whom she doesn’t even have to pay. I get room and board. She feels that I should be delighted she lets me live here.
Over the years I’ve gotten fortune cookies with messages like “If your desires are not extravagant, they will be granted.” A Buddhist, as superstitious as anyone, I admit that these statements lulled me into a false sense of security. Since mom never added my name to the title for the house, that should have set off alarm bells, but if I can’t trust my mom— whom I am living with— whom can I trust?
HA HA HA HA HA!
So while the world goes ape shit over the release of Sgt. Obi-Wan Bergdahl from captivity among the Taliban and the capture of suspected terrorist Wawa al-Kassucki for the attack on the consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi, my mom suddenly announces, “You need to make your arrangements. I’ve decided to sell the house and go into managed care. It may take a year to prepare the place for sale, but once sold, I’ll use the money for my old age. I expect you to stay in the region and take care of my affairs.”
Listening, I say, “Yeah, okay.”
Then I go outside to tear bags and bags of honeysuckle from among the English ivy on our fucking estate. And it dawns on me what I just heard.
Huh??? After 15 years, I am back to 1999, standing on a hillside with my possessions in a wooden crate. For all the years of aggravation and suffering, I am getting the hole in a donut! Nothing. Nada. At dinner that night, at our dining room table, I point this out. “FIFTEEN YEARS OF UNMITIGATED SHIT AND I GET NOTHING! NOTHING! THANKS A LOT, BITCH! TO THINK THAT I BELIEVED YOU! WHAT AN IDIOT I AM !!!”
It’s summer, a fly has gotten in the house, making kamikaze dives at our dinner plates. “Let’s go eat on the porch,” I suggest.
“Thank you very much,” mom frumps. “You’re going out to eat on the porch and leaving me with the fly!”
Congratulations, Oprah! A lifetime of abuse from her parents and her husband has convinced my mom that she is the perennial victim. Everybody is a mean son-of-a-bitch beating up on poor little Rosa.
Ads on the TV indicate that Heather Mizeur is running for governor of Maryland on a platform of improving schools and roads by legalizing and taxing marijuana. These are her own ads! She is proud of this proposal. I can’t imagine a worse idea! Is this woman totally crazy?
My mom has accounts at three different banks: Each of her pensions is a direct deposit into a separate establishment. Instead of consolidating these accounts— which would require an hour’s paperwork and a few phone calls— mom spends hours and hours moving her money around, based on some arcane method as transparent and understandable as tea leaves. When I go to Snazzy Bank to make a deposit for her using a check from United Bank, the Thai lady manager is delighted to meet me. “Hello!” she sings prettily, a small woman, exquisitely appointed.
“Yes, hi, hello. I’m just here making a deposit for my mom.”
“Is your name on the joint account?” she asks.
“Actually,” I admit, “it is. And our safe deposit box as well, thank you. This is an excellent bank.”
It’s not our fault that the local banks move their managers from location to location. We know John, the previous manager, intimately. Now I’m forced to bring someone totally unknown up to speed.
“You should get a Visa card with our low annual APY,” the Thai lady explains. “Do you have a Visa card with our low annual APY?”
“Actually, I’m good,” I assure her.
“Answer the question,” she chirps, unrelenting. “Do you have a Visa card from this bank with our low annual APY?”
There’s a fine line between customer service and becoming a pest, I am discovering.
“I’m fine. My mom is fine. We have our credit and debit cards. I thank you.”
“Yes, but this is a very good deal. You need to fill out this simple-to-read application and apply for a Snazzy Bank Visa Card with bonus points and our low annual APY!”
It’s America. Sales are an important part of the economy. Bank managers’ performance is based on the volume of business they generate. Periodically, they sit down in a classroom environment and practice their skills at creating new business. As an Asian immigrant, this nice, demanding lady wants to succeed. Here in the land of hopes and dreams, here in the land of opportunity. I understand all this.
Which doesn’t mean I want any additional credit cards. The U. of Maryland, my alma mater, offers me a Visa card. American Express, for some obscure reason, keeps sending me solicitations in the mail. Discover Bank in Utah, where I have an exceptional Certificate of Deposit paying a phenomenal 3% per annum, offers, in addition, a Discover Card. Linked to my CD or otherwise, at my discretion. Everybody but the U.S. Post Office and the local library, it seems, is offering me a Visa card or a Master Card. All with exceptionally low APY’s.
“The business of America,” said Calvin Coolidge, our 30th president, “is business.”
With a concerted effort and a mad dash to my car, I escape this persistent Thai lady who is trying to give me the business.
My younger bro Timothy sends my mom a shipment of chocolate-covered strawberries from Shari’s Berries. I love the packaging: “PERISHABLE – Once opened, contents may disappear immediately.”
Band night at the local music emporium on Rockville Pike. The headliners stink. We all help lug in equipment from their van. We stand around while they set up and run a sound check. Then— wham, bam, thank you, ma’am – 130 db of pure crap. “Maybe it’s the venue,” I’m thinking. So I approach the open black guitar case balanced ostentatiously on a chair. Expecting to find CD-R’s for sale— $10 each— from a studio recording session or maybe their rehearsal space in somebody’s garage. Instead I find— get ready for it— cassette tapes. In 2014. For $10 apiece. I mean, you really have to bend over backwards and pull apart your buttocks with both hands to come up with cassette tapes. In this age of digital recording and the resurrection of collectible vinyl, cassette tapes neither win nor place nor show. There just isn’t any market for them. No one has a cassette player!
What are they gonna come up with next, 8-track?
What a blow-out.
Never-the-less, you have to give the promoter credit, here comes DJ Frip carrying a cut-off white plastic milk jug, collecting gas money.
“But they’re awful!” I protest. “Music very bad! No melodies!”
“Hey, man, we’re talkin’ gas money here. They drove all the way from Ohio. GIVE ME TEN DOLLARS!!!” he’s screaming. To be heard.
“No! Fuck you!”
DJ Frip shakes his head sadly and goes to the next listener. Obviously, I’m not gettin’ it. Sure they’re awful, but THEY DROVE ALL THE WAY FROM OHIO!
Man.
It’s summer. Walking to the library, I can’t believe the young lady, as tall as me, raven-haired, standing on the sidewalk. In her frilly nightie. At 12 noon. Pointy nose, she looks like a cupcake, left over from the photo shoot for Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream. Her cell phone firmly clutched in her left hand, she watches me approach and… laughs. “A strange man has just come up to me,” she chortles into the phone. “Hi-i-i-i! ” she tells me, all but melting my plastic wraparound sunglasses. I take them off to stare into her heavily painted soft brown eyes. “I’ll talk to you later, Sandy!” she concludes, snapping shut the cell phone.
“You’re home from college for the summer!” I blurt. Sheer guesswork.
“Uh huh!” she giggles, leaning into me. Somehow the eye contact warrants closer proximity. I lean into her, too, taking off my baseball cap, so I won’t bean her in the forehead with its stiff visor. I find myself dropping everything. I wrap my arms around her waist— really slowly, in case she finds my advances offensive. Not at all! Her left hand snakes behind me, finding the bump on the back of my head. Her little fingers go to work on me. I mean, at this point, we’re embracing.
We kiss, long, full-mouthed kisses.
She stops to look at me. Smirking. “Hi-i-i-i! Y’know, I’m the fraternity mascot for AEPi at U. of Michigan.”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Why do you taste so good?” she asks, her tongue diving back into my mouth. The tang of tobacco makes my tongue tingle. “Do you have a car? Can you drive us shopping? Sandy and I don’t have any money! We want to go shopping,” she explains guilelessly, staring into my eyes. ” ‘Cause it would be, like, really great if we three can all go shopping together. You have a credit card, right?”
Her name— you’re sitting?— God help me, turns out to be Monica.
What won’t we do for a summer romance?
With my car in the shop, I rent one at Luxe. The young agent signs me up for a silver-colored KIA Rio that roars like a lawnmower, revs to 6,000 rpm before every gear shift and glides down the road like an ice flow. The rental agent describes it as “perky.” When I return the car 24 hours later, I’m wearing a T-shirt from the Cayman Islands. “You like-a the Caymans?” asks a young, sandy-haired Englishman with freckles standing behind the counter. All the rental agents are good-looking young dudes in dark slacks and white shirts. Busy listening to this conversation.
“I always thought I’d retire there, but it’s gotten too expensive,” I lament.
“Yes, it’s all that,” he agrees.
“I was once offered a job on Seven Mile Beach as a scuba diving instructor.”
“You’re a Master Diver?” he asks.
“Yes, that’s why they offered me the job.”
“I’m still working on my 1-a certification.”
We talk beaches, coral reefs, moray eels, shark repellent.
“I’m returning the car a day early because I got mine back from the shop before I had expected.”
“Oh,” ask the agents excitedly, “what do you drive? An Alfa Romeo? A Maserati?”
So Kevin Feingold, international sportsman, answers truthfully, “A Toyota Camry.”
“Oh,” say the car rental agents, visibly disappointed.
I also consider myself a semi-pro golfer. I quadruple-bogey every hole.
My Camry has a brand new bumper without a mark on it, so in the grocery store parking lot, some jerkoff has to park his Dodge Ram pressed right up against my front license plate. To show me that my shiny new car don’t impress him much.
Sure, I want to take a hammer and smash in the black hood and fancy grill work on his pickup. Of course I do. This is Maryland. Fortunately, there is a paper thin space between his vehicle and mine. I carefully back up my Camry. I examine the paint job. No marks. All right. But no, I’m an old fox and I know: As soon as you have something you love, some frustrated individual is gonna smash it all to Hell.
When I ask mom for some names of managed care facilities I can look up online, she is back atcha hot and heavy. Med skrik och gap in Swedish. Sitting in her favorite chair, glowering, she shouts over and over, “YOU ARE NOT A BUDDHIST! YOU ARE NOT A BUDDHIST!” My cousin Jimbo in Portland, Oregon tried a similar tactic 20 years ago. “Buddhists don’t care about money! YOU ARE NOT A BUDDHIST!” lectures my mom, the atheist. “You make a fuss over saving the life of little insects, but toward people, your heart is stone cold and totally uncaring. YOU ARE NOT A BUDDHIST!”
Displaying her incomprehension of Buddhism. Yes, I try to preserve (almost) all life on the planet, weeding our flower beds but protecting the lives of flies and spiders. Distaining fly swatters, I catch insects in a paper tissue and release them into the great outdoors. Not having that option regarding human beings, I am careful how I meet and greet. And to whom. If anything, the purpose of my Buddhism is to increase and nurture my ability to get along with my fellows. Whom I find somewhat lacking in intelligence. And with whom I easily lose patience. Imperfect of soul, I need Buddhism to counter this defect. So I don’t argue when people point out my obvious imperfection. Shouting “You are not a Buddhist!” only makes it their problem, not mine.
I once had a Scotsman screw-up under my command who had the audacity to tell a Review Board that all his problems stemmed from me being his superior officer. I was asked to counsel him. “Okay, Colin, what exactly is the problem here?” I asked.
“You’re too friendly with the troops,” he claimed. “I hear nothing but complaints. You fraternize and that causes a newbie like me to have problems.”
“There have been complaints,” I noted aloud and wrote it down on a pad of notepaper. Pen poised, I asked, “How many?”
“A LOT,” said Colin.
“Fine. Let’s get a handle on this. A dozen complaints?” I asked.
“No,” he admitted. “Fewer than that.”
“Oh. Okay-y-y,” I agreed. “A half dozen. Six complaints from the men that I fraternize too much, creasing your style. Six?”
“No,” he admitted, slouching. “More like four.”
In the end, he agreed that the two references he’d heard about my fraternization with the troops maybe weren’t the entire reason he was having difficulty getting adjusted to his new surroundings.
Looking at my mom, I suggest, “You’ve lost friends since I came to live with you?”
“Yes I have!!!”
“How many? Fifty? More than fifty?”
“You know I haven’t put a number on it!” she seethes.
“Okay, 150.”
“That’s not the point. You don’t suffer fools! Well, some of our neighbors are fools. The Johnsons and the Kents,” she says, pointing in their direction. “Carolyn Davis… They were still my friends before you came along. My neighbors used to love me! Since you arrived, they never even ring the doorbell! They shun me.”
“I disagree. Because what they keep saying to me is, ‘Thank God you’re living with your mom and taking care of her, Kevin. We sleep better at night not having to worry about your mom.’ So, yes, they are less involved, but that’s because they think you and I are hunky dory over here, living the life of Riley. When they do take you out to dinner, why do they always invite me if I’m such a monster?”
“They’re just being polite!”
See. Nobody ever wins an argument with my 93-year-old mom!
Blame it on global warming, I’m going fucking crazy and then my neighbor David Davis acts up. Bigtime. I don’t expect someone I know to pop up in my living room like a genie out of a bottle. We leave the back door open in summer, so the physics of it is hardly mindboggling. Still, behaviorally, it’s a bit much.
Add the fact that White Flint Mall is being dismantled, a victim of online shopping and high gas prices. The place looks like Beirut in the 1980’s, rubble everywhere, only a few shops left standing. Jolene’s Hair & Nails is one of the last holdouts, basically because of the huge beige-colored metal chairs women sit in when getting their hair or nails done. Jolene is still scouting a new location. David tells his wife Carolyn to carry this heavy 1½-foot by 1½-foot iron case into the beauty parlor. Gun-metal, it looks like a relic of World War Two.
We all know that David had a checkered past in the Weather Underground. We just don’t talk about it. I still don’t know if he went to prison… or what. Who cares? Indiscretions of youth in the wild 1960’s. God knows I have a backstory as shameful as anyone’s. What I find out now, with a gun stuck in my ribs, is that David, my next-door neighbor— who I thought was mafia or CIA— ran his own business, a military tech firm under government contract, devising and building small-scale, unconventional armament. Coked up, in the middle of a meltdown, David is still lucid enough, standing by my mantelpiece, to explain that the recession killed his biz. The U.S. Government budget impasse in Washington, D.C. resulted in pared-down military appropriations. David’s firm got phased out. Sans recall.
He ain’t Gatsby and I’m not worried about the clock.
“Why me?” I bleat, the lament of every innocent bystander through the ages. Thank God mom is asleep upstairs.
“You’re military! I don’t know what to do!” grunts my neighbor, looking like a wild Russian anarchist, hair standing up spikily, eyes darting all over the room.
“Well, what have you done?” I ask, gently pushing the gun in his hand to one side. I don’t ask David to relinquish it, I just don’t want him pointing it at me.
“I’ve built an IED,” he concedes. “I’ve had my wife take it down to White Flint Mall.”
“WHITE FLINT MALL?” I guffaw. “The place is a dump. It’s moribund. There ain’t no White Flint Mall.”
“It’s a bomb,” David says, sitting on mom’s plush white sofa. Sheisse! Nobody ever sits there. I can just see the dust motes rising in the air. I really wish he’d asked beforehand, so I could have vacuumed the thing.
“What kind of bomb?” I ask.
Staring at the floor miserably, David Davis says, “AN ATOMIC BOMB!”
“Naw, I don’t think so,” I assure him.
“It’s a small atomic bomb.”
“I don’t know if you got hold of enough plutonium to reach critical mass,” I suggest.
“Well, I tried to do the math,” he explains. “But you may be right. In any case, it’s a dirty bomb, spewing plutonium over a wide area.”
“I mean, you’ll let me call the police?” I ask, walking over and plucking the gun from David’s lifeless hand. Rarely have I seen anyone so filled with remorse.
The Maryland State Police come and pick David up for questioning.
An hour later, I get a visit from the FBI in the person of burly black agent Mark Spencer. I take him out to the back porch, so we don’t involve my mom, who is sitting in her favorite chair reading the newspaper.
“Well-l-l,” drawls Mark Spencer, “this certainly sucks. If Mrs. Davis had come down Wisconsin Avenue, street sensors and the overhead satellite scan would have detected heightened radiation levels. Since 9/11, we do measure for this stuff 24/7. But since she never came south of White Flint Mall, the suitcase bomb fell into a dead spot in our satellite surveillance. Technologically, we never even saw the damn bomb.”
I’m trembling so hard, I almost drop my coffee cup. Helpfully, Mark shows me on his smartphone a topographical map of the region and where the blind spot is. He also assures me the NSA is fixing it even as we speak. “Your buddy— ”
“HE ISN’T MY BUDDY!” I shout. “He’s my next-door neighbor.”
“Your neighbor saved us all from a world of grief by constructing an improvised explosive device which malfunctioned. I want to think that was his American patriotism speaking out. He was angry, but he couldn’t bring himself to detonate a weapon of mass destruction on American soil.”
“Hail and amen to all that,” I tell the burly black agent in his alpaca suit. “Domestic terrorism rears its ugly head.”
Agent Spencer seems deeply offended by my attitude. Too flippant? What does he want, I should be a drama queen? Listen, I saw worse in Bosnia.
End of story?
HA HA HA HA HA!
No way.
Two representatives of EPA— dressed in hazmat suits that make them look like bit players from the movie Gravity— ring our doorbell. “Was ist los?” I ask them.
“We’re agents Sanders and Williams from the Environmental Protection Agency. We’ve been informed,” they tell me smoothly— only one does all the talking, the other stands there making faces— “that your carbon footprint is entirely too large for a dwelling this size. When, may we ask, was your current furnace installed?”
“When was the furnace installed?”
“Yes, when was your furnace installed?”
“Shit! 1973. It still works.”
“And pollutes the environment. Unnecessarily,” I am grimly warned. “Your refrigerator?”
“Yes, we have a refrigerator,” I concede, standing on the front step, getting extremely annoyed. “What is this???”
“FBI agent Mark Spencer is deeply concerned that you are breaking environmental laws and polluting the environment.”
Oh ho! The upshot is, the EPA fines mom and me $1,428 and requires us to replace our furnace, the freezer, the refrigerator and the air conditioning, all of which are deemed subpar because they were manufactured back in the Stone Age.
I do point out that the house was built in 1927, but EPA regulations are EPA regulations.
Jesus Christ! It must be summer. What an upheaval!
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