Here Comes Trouble (12 page)

On my pass by the
Pietà
I was frozen in amazement. I had never seen anything like it. Suddenly, all the exhibits depicting the future were a distant memory, because this piece of marble from four hundred years ago had me transfixed. The moving walkway sped by far too fast for me, and as I passed by I cranked my neck back as far as it would go, until the conveyor belt deposited me out of the room.

“I want to go back again!” I told my mom.

“Really? Um, OK. Girls, let’s get back in line.”

We got back in line, and within the hour, we were on the movable belt again.

This time I locked my eyes in slow motion and soaked up every inch of the
Pietà.
Here was Mary holding her only son—her dead son—but she wasn’t sad! Her face was young and smooth and…
content.
What could be a worse moment in anyone’s life, to lose one’s child? And to have it happen in such a violent, barbaric way—and you, the mother, were forced to watch the whole sickening ordeal? And yet, there was no sign of any violence in the
Pietà,
just a mother gazing down at her son as he slept in her arms. And that was what Jesus looked like—serenely asleep in her arms. No blood from the crown of thorns, no hole in his side from the Roman’s spear. It was as if he would wake up at any moment—and she knew it. There was death, but there was life.

I couldn’t take it much further than that—I mean, I
was
eleven!—but it was profound and it had my head spinning—
and I wanted to see it again!

“No, we have to move on,” my mother responded to my pleas. My sisters, too, had had it with me, as they wanted to get back over to the more fun parts of the Fair.

“But I want to get a picture! We have to show Dad!”

That won the argument: something for Dad, back home, toiling away in the factory. And fortunately she hadn’t seen the N
O
P
HOTOGRAPHY
signs. So back in we went for a third time, my mother with the 8mm home movie Bell & Howell, me with the Kodak Brownie in hand.

On the third pass—where we were chastised for the cameras (this disturbed my mother, who did not like to be told to do anything by anybody)—I was now completely focused on the face of the mother Mary. At one point I turned away to look at my mother’s face, and I decided that the resemblance was significant enough to warrant better treatment of her in the weeks to come.

Before exiting the Vatican City pavilion, I approached a bevy of monsignors in robes who stood near the Swiss Guards. I had two questions I wanted to ask. A friendly-looking, Irish-accented priest with a nose as red as Rudolph’s offered his assistance.

“There was some writing carved into Mary’s clothes,” I asked, innocently. “Do you know what it says?”

“It says MICHAEL. ANGELUS. BONAROTUS. FLORENTIN. FACIEBAT—‘Michelangelo Buonarroti of Florence Created This.’ He carved it in there because when he attended the unveiling of the sculpture he heard people in the crowd give credit to another famous sculptor at the time, saying ‘so-and-so must have made this!’ It upset him, so that night he came into St. Peter’s and carved that inscription across Mary’s sash. But when he came back the next day, he saw what that looked like, and he was ashamed and upset that he had defaced his own artwork because of his pride and vanity. He vowed at that moment, as his penance, never to sign another sculpture of his again. And he never did.”

I paused to take that in, and it seemed like a good lesson to hear.

My other question was a simpler one. “What does
Pietà
mean?”

“It’s Italian,” the priest said.

“It means ‘pity.’”

“I want to see where the Towers stood,” she said, and she wouldn’t let me talk her out of it. I did not want to take my mother down to lower Manhattan. I did not want this to be her last possible memory of the city she loved, a place that was so much a part of her imagination and memories and a lifelong source of joy for her whenever she stepped onto this island. That magical place was now still smoldering, the fires underground still burning, some ten weeks after the attack. It still felt and smelled of death, and the progress of combing through the 220 stories of twisted steel and pulverized concrete in search of the departed was painstakingly slow.

“I want to see it.”

Days before, I went out to LaGuardia Airport in our Volkswagen Beetle to pick up my parents who had flown in to be with us for the Thanksgiving weekend. As I stood behind the newly tightened airport security zone I could see the two of them coming up the aisle of the Northwest Airlines terminal. My mother had not been well, and her health was deteriorating as each month went by. Yet there she was, walking three paces ahead of my dad as if she were twenty years younger, the kind of lilt in her step that only New York could give her. She also spotted me long before my dad did and started waving enthusiastically. I waved back.

Whatever “slowing down” she had done back at home was not evident once she was firmly planted in Manhattan. No longer forced to take the ferry and the bus to get into the city from her sister’s house on Staten Island, she was now “sitting pretty,” as my dad would say, in our West Side apartment. He would walk into my condo building and, without fail, remark that I was “sure livin’ high on the hog!” This was beyond anything he could have imagined on the factory floor of AC Spark Plug, and while he enjoyed the amenities and the view of the city, he remained appropriately skeptical for a man of his means.

The night before Thanksgiving, my wife and I took them over to West Eighty-First Street and along Central Park West so they could see the balloons being inflated for the Macy’s Parade the next day. It was cold and we bundled them as best we could, and for a short time they enjoyed being with thousands of New Yorkers marveling at the deflated Snoopy and slightly inflated Bart Simpson lying on the ground (though they had no idea who the latter was). It was a peek behind the curtain, one of many they had been given, due to my Life After Flint—a trip to the Cannes Film Festival with a walk up the stairs of the Palais, a seat at the Emmy Awards next to Sid Caesar the night we won, a chance to have people like Rob Reiner tell them that “your son’s film has the impact of an
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
”—that alone being worth the price of admission if you’re a parent, slightly embarrassing if you’re the son.

But now my mother wanted to see Ground Zero, the site of the recent massacre of 2,752 people. I acquiesced and, thinking that Thanksgiving Day would find it the least crowded there, I loaded them in the Beetle and headed down the West Side Highway.

By mid-November of 2001, the authorities had opened up more streets in Tribeca to traffic, and it was possible to drive right up the perimeter of the World Trade Center’s former location. The place was every bit the disaster area it had been for the past two months, and smoke could still be seen wafting its way up from the ruins.

I slowed down so they could get a better look. I glanced over at my mother, who was sitting in the front seat with me. There were tears in her eyes, and I would have to go back to the death of her sister to recall such a look of sadness on her face. It was like her facial muscles had just collapsed on their own. She looked down, and then away, and then back again at the destruction. This was not the New York of Ed Sullivan or the Rainbow Room or giving your regards to Broadway.

This was the future not promised, her world of tomorrow, and I was sorry for her to see it.

“Mike!
Mike!
”

I was sitting in the living room of our home in northern Michigan, planning which movie I was going to take the family to in the next half hour. The choice was between
Men in Black II
or
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
It was the Fourth of July weekend, 2002, and my sister Veronica had flown in from California with her kids to be with my wife and daughter and our parents. It was Saturday, early evening, and we had spent the day on the lake, taking the kids tubing, and giving Mom and Dad a spin on the boat. My mother hung on to her hat and laughed and admonished me to slow down as the kids on the inner tube shouted to go faster.

Afterward, before dinner, I sat with my mom in the Adirondack chairs on top of the small hill beside the lake. She rolled up her pants to get some sun on her legs and closed her eyes, and you could see it all felt good to her.

For the past three weeks I had taken off from work and come to Davison to hang out with them. I took them out for a wedding anniversary dinner, and we did driving tours of all their old haunts from their years of growing up in the Flint area. We visited the graves of all the ancestors, some with birthdates going back to the late 1700s. We planted flowers, we visited the free legal service provide by the UAW (they wanted to update their wills), and we went to a Tigers ball game in Detroit. It was, without a doubt, three of the best weeks I ever spent with them. Though my mother was fading in energy, she participated in everything. But I noticed her time in the bathroom seemed to be getting longer and longer. My dad complained about it, and I agreed we should take her to the doctor and get her checked out.

“Mike! Mike!!”
It was my mother’s voice, but it wasn’t coming from inside the house where the rest of us were. It was coming from the back deck. I went out to see what she needed.

When I came out the door, it was clear she was very, very sick.

“I need to get to the bathroom—” She threw up at that moment, and what she threw up was pitch-black gunk. My dad, by then, had come outside to see what was the matter, and he and I helped her up and took her inside. My wife called the local hospital to see what they suggested.

“Pepto Bismol,” my wife said, relaying the message. This did not seem like a job for a pink liquid. My mother continued to throw up. “I think we should take her to the hospital,” I said. I did not want to call an ambulance as that would take a long time (the nearest one was at least eight miles away).

We walked her slowly out to my dad’s Ford, and my wife and sister made her comfortable in the back seat. I got behind the wheel and headed down our long driveway to the road. We lived deep in the middle of nowhere (in 2002, our road still wasn’t wired for cable TV).

As I reached the end of the driveway, I had a quick decision to make: Do I take her to the
nearest
hospital—or do I take her to the
better
hospital? The nearest hospital was in a small town twenty-three miles to the north. The better hospital, the best in northern Michigan, was in the opposite direction, forty-five miles away, twice the drive. So there was the dilemma. Your mother is seriously ill, you don’t know why, but it doesn’t look good. Do you get her help immediately or, if she’s much worse than even you realize, do you drive the longer distance and end up with a better array of doctors and facilities available?

What would
you
do? You’d get her to the quickest hospital, right?
Right?
That’s what I did. I chose the nearest hospital.

I got there in record time—less than twenty minutes—and we took her in, told them the problem, and they saw to her right away. There was only one doctor on duty, but it wasn’t long before he looked at her.

“It seems that her intestinal tract is blocked. We’re going to take some X-rays.” And, sure enough, the X-rays confirmed the doctor’s suspicions.

They gave her liquids that they said should help. It didn’t. They gave her an IV and they said that should do the trick. It didn’t. While waiting to see which procedure would get the expected results and then seeing no results, the clock had peeled away the hours; it was well past midnight.

“OK,” said the doctor finally. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to give her a series of four or five enemas and keep her overnight. This should work and she should be able to go home tomorrow.”

We went with her to the room they had given her and we stayed until they were ready to start the enema procedures. At that point the nurse suggested, “It’s almost three a.m.—why don’t you go get some sleep and come back in the morning?”

Our mother agreed. “Take your father home and let him get some rest. I’ll be fine. I’ll see you in the morning.”

For reasons we could never later explain to ourselves, we took her advice and, amazingly—shockingly—left her alone there in this tiny hospital. We went home and crashed quickly—and just as quickly we were awoken a few hours later.

“Is this Michael Moore?” said the voice on the phone. “This is Dr. Calkins, the surgeon here at the hospital. The enemas didn’t work on your mother, and she’s taken a turn. We need to operate. How soon can you be here?”

In less than twenty minutes we were there. Mom looked embarrassed and sorry to be putting everyone out for the trouble she was causing. “Did you get some sleep?” was all that was on her mind.

“Don’t worry about us,” I said. “How are
you
doing?”

“Well, nothing seems to be working. They want to operate,” she said with a weak voice.