This is what we get. Weaker and weaker and sicker and sicker and then gone. Not much humor in that. The mother will soon become nothing. Gone, invisible, as if she never existed. As if it ever even mattered that she existed in the first place. He is driving to her now. The guy on the radio thinks the team made a good trade, callers disagree, how could they have let Denny go? Our Denny, friggin’ Denny. This is nighttime, when you can drive and push the scan button and hear AM radio from hundreds of miles away, from the vague mid-west, from the Yukon Territories. He doesn’t know who Denny is. The radio guys substitute friggin’ or frickin’ for fuckin’ and the censors look the other way. The mother will have a tumor the size of a lemon removed in five hours. He knows about sports but he doesn’t know who Denny is.
The mother needs more power strips. In her new house. Apartment. Her new apartment. Two months ago she sold their house, her house, she sold the house that her son lived in from age six-months to seventeen-years-and-eleven-months, that he visited every year since. The house now belongs to a rich, hipster New York artist who wanted to move upstate, to get away. The artist has hardly been there since he bought it, flying all over the world to art shows, following his model girlfriend to fashion shows. The son knows because the mother tells him the artist has a Russian model girlfriend married to a regular Russian guy. The mother knows because she has lunch sometimes with the artist. She says she worries about the artist, that he is naïve. The son thinks whatever. Then the son wants to thank the artist for giving the mother something to worry about besides him. The mother needs things to worry about besides him.
