Hey Mom Read online

  When the cremation was over, Justin—one of your grandsons, Jimmy’s third son—called me, like I’d asked him to. By this time I was sitting on the plane, about to pull away from the gate. The flight attendant had asked me again to shut down my device but I only pretended to obey, then continued the conversation. My seatmate, rather than giving me the evil eye, seemed sympathetic. She could hear that I was having a genuinely important conversation, which was making me very emotional. Justin told me he had been there throughout the process with Tommy’s body, saying, “I’m right here with you, buddy, I’m right here with you,” until it was ashes. I could barely hold it together. Even though I wasn’t thinking about my seatmate, in another part of my brain I was so appreciative for her understanding.

  When the flight attendant passed our way again, she did not have an understanding expression.

  I had to hang up if I didn’t want to be one of “those people.”

  I felt drained. I was so sad about Tommy. So sad I wasn’t there with him in those final moments. So sorry that Justin had to be there alone with him.

  The plane began to taxi. I looked over at my seatmate. I could tell from her expression that she felt for me.

  “I wish I could get a sign,” I said to her, barely above a whisper. I was crying in front of a stranger and I didn’t care. “I wish . . . I just wish I could get a sign from God that everything is okay. Something.”

  She nodded and faced the window.

  The plane turned onto the runway—and as it did, Mom, I swear to you, the biggest, brightest field of sunlight poured through the window, blinding me and my seatmate.

  She turned to me, her eyes wider than it looked like they should go. My eyes must have been just as wide.

  A tremendous peace washed over me.

  Oh, Tommy.

  Louie

  Life Is Funny

  Hey Mom,

  Now that the first season of Baskets has aired, fans of the show and of Christine have been communicating with me, sharing thoughts about what they see in her, and memories of their own moms, too. It’s beautiful.

  The show got picked up for a second season, which is great. But I received word the day after Tommy died, so I was in a fog.

  I’m still in a fog.

  I’ve lost so many siblings, Mom, too many. I can’t believe it’s seven sisters and brothers I’ve lost. What an awful number for that description. It was six and now it’s seven.

  You lost siblings, too, Mom. Your sister, Aunt Iona, died years after you did, but you lost Perry, who I got my middle name from. And there was Viroca, your sister you never knew. (How did she get that name? Another question I wish I had asked.) Viroca, who got pneumonia when she was a baby and died at one year old. Aunt Iona said she remembered Grandma Bertha sobbing and sobbing when the baby died.

  So many tears are shed, Mom. When Uncle Perry went to visit Aunt Iona and Uncle Ike in South Dakota, he had a dog, and Iona wouldn’t let pets in the house. So Shanna, who was a little girl then and living with them, of course wanted to see the dog. And she walked outside the house with Uncle Perry to his car, where he had to keep the dog, with the window almost closed, and she saw this little Chihuahua in the car. And Shanna says the dog was crying. Not just whimpering, like dogs do, but looking up at Shanna and Uncle Perry and shedding actual tears. “Just like a human,” she said. “I never got over it.”

  Love,

  Louie

  Comedian? Movie Star? Leader of the Free World?

  Hey Mom,

  I’m in the green room for Live! With Kelly and Michael, preparing to talk about Baskets.

  I don’t want to sound big-headed, Mom, but I always thought I could be a great actor. I dreamed I would win an Oscar some day, either for acting or directing. I dreamed I would be one of the very few performers to win an Oscar, Tony, Emmy, and Grammy. Well, I’ve won only one of those so far (the Emmys for Life with Louie), though I’ve won some other awards, too. A few years ago I was on this TV show called Splash, which was a really great experience for me because I got to face my fear of heights by jumping into a swimming pool from a ten-meter diving board, in front of lots of people live and millions more on TV. I couldn’t turn back—I could, but if I did I’d have loads of shame, and video evidence of it for eternity. Yes, it was quite a splash, Mom, and I loved doing it—but besides giving me strength (and some exposure to a younger audience), after I did my splash on Splash, the United States Diving Association gave me an award of sorts, making me an honorary member of the U.S. Diving team. I guess when a 420-pound person jumps off a ten-meter diving board in front of a national TV audience, he should get something. The whole experience was a gift. I finally got a chance to climb the rope I never could in high school gym class. Not only climb, but climb to the top and leave my initials up there for all time.

  Where was I? Right, winning awards. Maybe I always thought too much of myself. Before I wanted to be a comedian, I wanted to be a politician, but only president, nothing short of that.

  Fortunately, I found stand-up comedy. You know I wasn’t much of a student. For a while after high school I was employed by the St. Joe’s Home for Children in Minneapolis, working with kids from troubled homes, and the experience taught me a great deal while at the same time it broke my heart, preparing me to be a better person someday. But I wanted to do comedy. I was lucky that it came so naturally. I was able to make people laugh just with silence, which is a gift. Of course you have to have lots of material, and I do, but if you can get people to laugh just by raising an eyebrow or barely twitching your mouth and being quiet . . . Jack Benny was the master. Anyway, I knew I had something because I would try to make people laugh and they would laugh. Then I would be serious—and people would still laugh. “I’m being serious!” I would say—and they would laugh even harder. “You guys!” Then I realized, Oh, right, Louie, you come from a funny family, a funny, tragic, crazy family. When you’re in a situation with an alcoholic parent or anyone who is crueler than usual, there’s humor there because you have to find humor there. Or you’ll go crazy. Or kill yourself. Dad’s knocked out from drinking? Fake-stab him in the chest. Yeah, you’ll be in a ton of trouble if he wakes up while you’re doing it, but it’s funny to do this to someone who’s caused you so much pain and especially to do it in front of your kid brother to make him laugh and, anyway, there’s almost no chance the drunk is waking up. Or kneel behind your dad, or watch your brother kneel behind him, like you’re fake-pushing him down the basement stairs. Or lock the front door as your dad goes out to start the car in the freezing cold so he can’t get back in. Cruelty begets cruelty. Do you have to be a cruel person to make such jokes? No. You do need to understand cruelty, and possibly to have actually experienced it, so you can find the humor in it. I really believe, Mom, that human beings have a cruel streak. You see it with chimpanzees. Sometimes chimps just randomly turn on each other, or drive other chimps away, or beat up a chimp that looks beat-uppable. I guess deep down a lot of us are just bullies. Most of us handle it well. We’ve learned to repress that side of us. But when the opportunity arises for a weaker creature to be bullied, the less brave bullies in the group, the less evolved, less mature ones who can’t manage our natural bullying tendencies, spring into action.

  Chimps, humans—same thing.

  Now and then in my act, I do jokes that touch on real darkness, but I have to be very careful or the crowd gets sad and concerned for me. So I go broad instead and joke, say, about killing the whole family. Or take this joke I came up with about hecklers. Once, after a heckler said his piece and I dealt with him, I said to the audience, “Wouldn’t it be something if one night I came out and did my routine and I killed a heckler? It would change comedy. Next week, I do my show and a guy starts in with ‘Louie, you suck—’ and the guy next to him leans over and whispers, ‘He killed a heckler last week.’ That would change things, wouldn’t it?”

  How did I turn into a comedian?

  Sometimes, I like to think I
was some sort of “pod,” the tenth child, the sadness and goofiness and fear and desire to make people smile and laugh all brewing in me at some optimum chemical rate, until it created me, Louie Anderson, stand-up comedian. So I went from dreaming about being president and helping people that way (and making them like and love me for that) to being a comedian and helping people that way (and making them like and love me for that). It was a no-brainer because being funny was easy for me.

  Then I made either my greatest discovery or my biggest blunder. I created a fat character and started writing jokes about being fat.

  It made me very successful. But it also put me in a corner, a place where it caused me great anxiety to lose weight. Because whenever I lost enough weight to notice, people would say to me the cruelest thing they could possibly say, though they didn’t realize it. “Why would you want to get skinny? You won’t be funny anymore!” It ticked me off. They thought I was funny because I was fat. Maybe that’s all I am, to some people: a fat comic. I just knew that if I believed that, I’d be dead by now. I believe I’m a comic who happens to be fat.

  People don’t like to see other people change. It’s jarring. It’s a threat to their own inability to change. Richard Pryor quit drinking and drugs and suddenly people didn’t think he was funny anymore. Richard was funny till the day he died. It’s just that some of his fans didn’t want him to exorcise the demons that for so many years had animated his comedy and intelligence, and their memory of him. They liked that Richard Pryor.

  “Louie, where are the fat jokes we love?!”

  I assumed a character that is mostly sweetness and niceness—not the worst character in the world for me to play, Mom, but it didn’t give people enough, and it didn’t give me enough. You need some sides with your entrée. You need horseradish on your roast beef. Who wants to see sweet and nice with no loose cannon at the end of it? The thing that made Archie Bunker so popular was that he could say the most horrible thing—but he could also find redemption in himself. He could repent. He was more all of us.

  I never knew how to be all of us until I put that dress on as Christine Baskets.

  With Christine, I can be mean and nice, happy and sad. I can be everything in that character. I should have found that sort of character a lot earlier, and stuck to my guns that I could play and be someone who was not just Mr. Nice Fat Guy. (Mr. Fat Nice Guy? Are they two different people?)

  But maybe, Mom, I wasn’t ready for that next character until now. It’s easy for me to blame the industry or the culture. But I have to take responsibility for my choices. No one twisted my arm to do the comedy and pursue the opportunities that I did. Yes, it’s hard to stick to your guns in show business, but you just have to do it, before it gets too late. When you’re a comedian, or even an actor, at some point you better know who you are. You better stick to who you really are and not try to sell anything else. Because if you do, it’ll backfire. You won’t be considered anything. And if there happen to be videos or recordings of you performing in a way that’s not really you—and there will be—you’ll die every time you have to watch it.

  Is the message of this letter, To thine own self be true?

  Not to knock Shakespeare but it’s more than that.

  To thine own self be everything you are. Be everything that’s true about you.

  The good thing, Mom, is that I may have saved my best for last—or let’s say my best for later. We serve dessert at the end of the meal because if we ate it first, none of the rest of the food would get eaten. This Christine Baskets character might be the beginning of a great new period for me. New kinds of roles.

  Who knows? I might even play a man next.

  Love,

  Louie

  Make Your Date

  Hey Mom,

  Happy Mother’s Day!

  Remember when you and I appeared on TV for that Mother’s Day special, on Twin Cities Live, with other Twin Cities personalities and their moms? You were so nervous. I could see it. But you held it together and turned out to be the star, no question. Very funny and sassy. I was the butt of a lot of your jokes, a lot of fat jokes, and didn’t mind one bit. Your timing was beautiful. Shanna was in the audience. She cried.

  Anyway, today I did this Mother’s Day event in Detroit, something I started doing a couple of Mother’s Days ago. That’s when my manager, Ahmos, asked me if I would perform at a benefit to help raise money for this program started by his sister Sonia, a maternal-fetal medicine doctor (an obstetrician specializing in high-risk pregnancies). It’s called “Make Your Date,” or as I like to call it, “Baby Momma.” When I heard what they did, of course I said yes, partly because Ahmos’s family has kind of adopted me, partly because it’s such a good cause, partly because you had all those kids, Mom.

  Make Your Date helps pregnant teens and young women in Detroit who don’t have the means to get carfare for their regular appointments at clinics and/or with OB-GYNs, it helps moms with resources like health insurance, home visits, and prenatal care, and it provides them with a plan to help manage doctors’ appointments and other steps important to a healthy pregnancy, birth, and baby. Make Your Date gives these young moms-to-be classes to learn more about their pregnancy and health. So far the organization has helped more than six thousand young women. When you’re pregnant and poor, and maybe feel even more stressed and crappy because the guy’s not involved, it’s way too easy for these girls and young women to not schedule regular checkups or miss them because they simply can’t get time off from work or school or they lack the money to go. They might think it’s not that important to “make the date” for these appointments. By missing them, and not finding out important things about the developing fetus and their own health, the young women increase the chance of a low-birth-weight delivery and deliver their babies pre-term, which is the leading cause of infant mortality. (Detroit has the nation’s second-highest infant mortality rate, after Cleveland.) So this great organization steps in to make these mothers-to-be more aware and able to get the help they need, and most important, the support they lack. Support goes a long way in times of need.

  Remember how much we used to get when we were on welfare, Mom? Fifty-three dollars a month. It just about paid for rent in the projects.

  Mom, how could I not melt for an organization like Make Your Date? You were pregnant more than half your life, weren’t you? Okay, not quite but it must have seemed that way for a couple decades there. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to help, plus having five sisters of my own, all of whom gave birth. Each year that I do the benefit I think of you and how important it was for you to get to those appointments, yet how proud you were even when you didn’t have enough gas money or bus money or any money. Being poor is a drag. I remember we got the help from welfare and then we weren’t supposed to have a color TV, so when the welfare lady came by to check on us, we had to hide the Magnavox. What a terrible situation, being penalized for having things that Dad actually got at the dump and fixed himself. And if he made too much money at his job, we would lose all the benefits we received from Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Once you’re poor, they really want to keep you poor. We should support poor people a lot more, Mom. Yeah, I know some people take advantage of welfare and food stamps. I know people take advantage of the government—especially really rich people. As usual, though, those who misuse the system cause a problem for those who don’t. There’s a whole big group of poor people who are so thankful and grateful for the help they get. I think about how you and Dad were so resourceful at cutting corners, cutting coupons, you even cutting our hair, Mom, that terrible bowl cut. Remember those times when we had just enough money to pay either the gas bill or the electric bill but not both, and you of course would pay the gas bill because we needed it for heating and cooking? So it was dark and you lit lots of candles, including all the church candles you stole. And, Mom, remember how we somehow had a Hanukkah menorah (you’re such a pack rat, like me), which holds nine candles, and even though you
r family goes all the way back to the Mayflower and Dad’s family is Scandinavian-Lutheran, you used the menorah to help light the house?

  That was a mitzvah. You were always so resourceful, Mom, which poor people have to be so much more than those who aren’t poor. Your kindness saved us—literally. We were poor, and there were so many of us, but because you were sweet and thoughtful, and so beloved by your friends, they helped us get through. Every few weeks, after Monny’s husband left for work, you would go over to her place by the Hans Brewery, and she would open up her big freezer, and take out these big roasts and give them to you, for all of us. Monny had as big a heart as you. There’s pride and then there’s survival. You always knew what mattered.

  I remember Halloween for the candy but also how all us kids from poorer families would go either as ghosts or bums because everyone at least had a sheet. Hopefully it was clean.

  Anyway, Mom, helping with Make Your Date is about the best thing I can think to do on Mother’s Day, and it helps all these young women and especially these babies, and one of those babies might one day save us all. That’s what I always think: Who is going to save us? Is it going to be just one person? A bunch of people? I’m counting on it. I mean, I know we all have to save ourselves but . . . you get it. Someone to save us from all the other big scary stuff out there. I hope somebody comes along and says the right thing that sparks us to start getting along better, to start feeling more inclusive toward one another, to start being less divisive. We really need people to start reaching out. From church pew to church pew, neighbor to neighbor, make us realize that we’re all in the same boat and it’s sinking and no one seems to care and the people who aren’t helping are the ones who aren’t in the boat or they think they aren’t but really they are, right along with the rest of us, and they’re going down with all of us unless we all—all—take a hard look at who we are and what we’re doing. I try to take that hard look but I also know I can be selfish at times. I need to work even more at being a nicer person, a more giving person. Make Your Date might just save lives. Healthier babies will be born into the world. Pretty fantastic. You saved our lives, Mom. I don’t think you looked at it like that but you did. I have so many more questions for you, like, Did you give birth to any babies at home? I remember you said that when Kent was a baby, there was no crib, so he slept in the top drawer of the dresser. They’re selling that concept again with these baby boxes. What goes around comes around, I guess, because so many of the old ideas were actually pretty smart. History matters. It matters if we’re going to make the best of things in our own individual lives, in America, in the world. What are we doing to our world? God, I sound like a preacher or a blowhard. Mom, you always liked to call people “blowhards” when they were being, well, blowhards. Sorry about that. But I know you’re proud of me for doing what I did today.