My mom passed away exactly 2.54 years ago today. To mark this anniversary I’m sharing a brief anecdote from her life, one involving violence, drunkenness, profanity, and murder. Incidentally, this explains a lot about my behavior.
Mom always detested one of her brothers, mainly because of all his lying, mooching, drinking, and screwing around. The rest of the family apologized for him and said it was because he’d been in the war. Mom said no, he’d always been a mean, no good bastard.
As a young man, this lying brother suckered someone into loaning him money to build a beer joint. A beer joint was a little bar where people drank beer, danced and engaged in unfortunate shenanigans. There weren’t many places in town to socialize, and the alternative was church. Most everybody hung out at beer joints.
One night Mom and some friends were hanging out at her brother’s beer joint. My not-yet-married father was absent, but he heard plenty of first-hand accounts later. My lying uncle got as plastered as Versailles, and he started knocking his wife around. Mom picked up some object (no one remembers what) and cold-cocked her brother with it. He was not entirely flattened, so turned and slapped his assailant. Then he saw who he’d slapped.
In my father’s words, “That’s when he knew he’d made a fatal mistake.”
Although petite, my mom proceeded to excoriate not just her brother but every other person in the building. She employed screaming, obscenities, moral outrage and physical intimidation to ruin everyone’s good time, followed the whole way by her brother who was crying and begging to be forgiven.
Dad arrived at the beer joint a little while after the calamitous blow had landed. There were no cars in the parking lot. The lights were off, and the door was locked. Mom had chased everyone out and closed the place down. It didn’t open the next day. In fact, her brother left town for a while, and his beer joint never opened again.
Mom had murdered it.
During her lifetime Mom told me this story two or three times, corroborated by my dad. Not everyone can say they’ve single-handedly slaughtered a place of business, and she told this story with lots of amusement. As well as pride.
And a certain amount of threat.
