PLAGUE DIARY 11: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

White Heat (1949)
I was sleeping through this one. Then they tell James Cagney his mother is dead. He’s eating  dinner in a prison mess hall in a long row of inmates. There’s a new guy sitting a few seats away. Cagney gets wind of it. He says to the guy beside him: “Ask him how my mother is.” They whisper that question down the line. The new inmate whispers his answer back. It gets whispered down the line. The guy beside Cagney says: “She’s dead.” It takes Cagney a moment to process the information. But then he starts wheezing. And a second or two later he’s screaming. He stands up on the long prison table and then falls on it, moaning, scattering everyone’s food on the floor —until they carry him out of the prison mess — kicking and making inhuman guttural sounds. I remember when my mother was dying. They had been starving her to death, as she had requested not to be kept alive on life support. My mother was an alcoholic, and had not properly been herself for years: even when I used to visit her in the seniors apartment building where she lived, at 11 am in the morning — it would be the vodka talking, not her. (I tried to take away her vodka once. I’ll never forget it. She phoned me. “What are you doing?” I told her that I had asked the liquor delivery company to stop delivering booze. “Why? Why would you do that?” I told her I was afraid that she might drink herself to death. “I know what I’m doing,” she said. That chillingly honest answer shut me up; I cancelled the cancellation. And she was right; I had no right, certainly not at that late date, to interfere. And I was a bad son because I hadn’t caught the problem years before. But she’d done such a good job of bullying my sister and I that we actually believed she was not an alcoholic.)  So when I discovered they had taken her off life support at the hospital, I took a cab there— my mother was addicted to cabs — and vodka  — as am I. When I got there, I told the person at the desk “I came to see my mother. She’s dying.” The person at the desk said “Who are you?” I said, “her son.” She said. “I’ll have to check  about that.” Then, I turned into my mother. It was instinctual. It was kind of a last tribute to her. You see, my mother refused to take no for an answer. I remember talking to a gay man who worked with her once; he called her a bitch. I knew she was. She demanded the best service, and always treated those she considered ‘the help’  like dirt. But in reality she was no queen. She was born in a small town in Maine, the daughter of an alcoholic, white trash farmer who committed suicide, she was a relatively poor divorcee who ran her own failed corporate headhunting firm. Is that what this was all about? But if she thought she was a failure in her own life you’d never have known it: she walked and talked and acted the part of a big movie star. For awhile she lived at Sutton Place — an apartment hotel. Movie stars used to stay there. Stepping out of a cab at Sutton Place, people mistook her for one. So at the hospital, I went off like my mother used to, I started screaming like James Cagney — “I’m her son! My mother is dying and I have to see my mother! You’ll have to let me see my mother!” It was crazy, the person behind the desk was as intimidated as anyone in the service industry who has had to deal with some crazy nut. She went to get the information. I turned to the people around me in the waiting room: “My mother is dying!” I said. “They have to let me see my mother! “ It was quite the performance. Of course, eventually, they did. When I got to her room, my sister was already there. And my mother was already — effectively  — dead. She had, after all, been unconscious for days. So I sat and watched her die. At that particular moment I didn’t really feel anything. Later in the movie, after his mother has been dead for awhile, James Cagney is interrupted talking to himself in the dark: “I’m just walkin’ out here talking to Ma. Does that sound funny to you? All I ever had was Ma. She’s always trying to put me on top — ‘top o’ the world’ she’d say.” At the end of the film, Cagney dies, perched atop a black oil tank shaped like a giant globe, engulfed in flames — “I'm on top of the world, Ma!” He shouts “I’m on top of the world!” The tank explodes. There’s a lot more going on in this movie than Cagney’s relationship with his mother, for instance: car chases galore, prison breaks, Virginia Mayo cooing in Cagney’s ear as a lying gangster's moll who is about as loyal to him as wet mop, and Edmund O’Brian oozing integrity as the cop working undercover to frame Cagney by posing as his best friend — yes there’s all this. But all I cared about was James Cagney’s relationship to his ‘Ma.’  One of the cops says “He’s got a fierce psychopathic relationship with his mother.” Sure, I get that. And I understand why Cagney talks to his mother after she’s dead. I used to believe my mother could read my mind. It wasn’t until I was 18 years old in group therapy at The Hincks that I figured out that we were actually separate people. I told my social worker that I couldn’t say the word ‘fuck.’ She asked me why, and I said “because my mother wouldn’t like it. “ She asked me how my mother would know I said it, and I replied “I just think she would.” The social worker informed me that my mother couldn’t read my mind. It was at that moment I realized. My mother was in my head. I have not this day, been able to get her out. She still visits me in my dreams. I wake up; and I’ve been dreaming of her, and I sincerely believe we were together. In my dreams she’s beautiful (which she was) and not alcoholic (which she wasn’t) and witty (which she was). We have one of those intimate conversations that we used to have; talking to her was like talking to myself. If you’ve never had a relationship like that, you need to have one, now. James Cagney has anxiety attacks in White Heat, and the only one who can talk him down is ‘Ma.’ It was the same with me. Yes, yes — I know now the reason she made me co-dependent on her was because she was needy and I replaced — in her mind — the perfect man that she could never have. I know also that our relationship was actually emotional incest. But don’t blame me for going to sleep during the car chases in this damn gangster movie. Because, like James Cagney — to this day, I always wake up for ‘Ma.’