LSD

“My Mom has forgotten major life events, but she can still sing along to the Andrews Sisters and Simon & Garfunkel.”

I woke Rosie up to ask her a Smiths lyric. “What time is it?” she asked. I told her it was only 8:15, but that didn’t matter. The song was running through my head and it was driving me crazy that I couldn’t remember the word. Who does he want to unite and take over? Sign painters? Shitkickers? Ice dancers?

“Shoplifters!” Rosie said, then rolled over and went back to sleep.

I know I should know that already. It’s one of the best known Smiths songs. I just never got to know them all that well back in high school. Then in college I was dragged to a solo Morrissey concert and it made me want to stay far away from anything he’d done. Now, of course, he’s openly extremely awful.

Rosie loves the Smiths, though, and so does Clay, so I’ve opened myself up.

I was driving my Mom around yesterday and put on Sgt. Pepper’s. One of the wild things about Alzheimers is that the afflicted remember lyrics. My Mom has forgotten major life events, but she can still sing along to the Andrews Sisters and Simon & Garfunkel.

“It was twenty years ago today, Sgt Pepper taught the band to play…” she was singing in the passenger seat. I sang along, too. I will also always know those lyrics.

When we got to Within You Without You, I joked, “Okay, Mom, time to drop some LSD.”

She laughed, then said “I only did that once, and I didn’t really like it.”

My mom has never told me this. It was one of those things she must have thought might be a bad influence on me when I was a kid. Then it never came up later.

I needed more details, though I already suspected what the circumstances might have been.

“With Gus, right?” I asked. She said, “Of course.”

Gus was her first true love, maybe only true love, and is still a great friend of hers. They dated when she was in college, and then later, after they were both divorced from the people they ended up marrying. He’s like an uncle to me. He lived in New York City for most of the years I did, and served as my in loco parentis. With “loco” serving a double meaning. He’s a crazy actor, a great cook, and a man I could count on to be there for me when I needed him. There weren’t a lot of those in my life.

They’d taken the LSD at a party, Mom said, then came more scattered details that I slowly pieced together. “Wait! Did you and Gus…like…um…make out on LSD?”

“Of course,” she said.

“We did a lot of that,” she said.

Making out, she meant. Having sex. Getting it on.

“He was the first man I trusted.”

I can always make her smile by mentioning Gus. The love is deep. I recently showed her a picture of Sidney Poitier, and she said he looked like Gus. With the implication that Sidney was almost as good-looking.

Mom doesn’t drive any more. She would if she could, but she can’t. She was a menace before we took the car away. Leaned on the horn if people didn’t start moving the second the light turned green.

Driving her around a weeks ago, we were caught in some typical Boston auto malarkey, and someone was honking. I complained about it, and she came to their defense. I teased her for being such a fan of honking. “You’re a big honker,” I said, “a honky!”

“I’m not a honky!” she said, indignant.

“I bet Gus would say you are.”

Big smile. “Yeah, he would.”

I remember my Mom singing along to “When I’m Sixty-Four” when I was a kid, and it hit me when we came to it that now I’m closer to that age than she is. It’s in her rearview mirror now. I pointed this out to her.

“I have to sing ‘when I’m seventy-four’ now,” she said.

“Eighty-four, Mom You’re eighty.”

“Oh, that’s right,” she said, then kept singing along.

“Will you still be sending me a Valentine? Birthday greetings? Bottle of wine?”

Gus did. Gus still does.