Meet Beelzebubbe

I now call my dead grandmother Beelzebubbe, which is a combination of "Bubbe," the Jewish word for grandmother and "Beelzebub," another name for Satan. I say it with love. Really. But it is a recent name. For most of our lives we call her "Buddie" instead of Bubbe, since we aren't really Jewish about being Jewish.

When I am insatiably curious about the woman who has emerged as the secret mother of my older brothers it is Buddie who gives me all the gory details, breathlessly recounting in her cigarette rasp of a voice her version of how Helen tries to kill both children and tries to kill herself, before ending up confined to the loony bin, whereupon my father meets my mother in a bowling alley and marries her.

When the court gives Helen's family custody of Gary and Aaron anyway (apparently her dad is a judge) our father steals both kids, then just babies, and whisks them, along with his new wife Sally, destined to be my mother, to Mexico, where they hide out from American authorities for a year or two.

So... He steals the two kids from their mother and leaves. Is it just me, or is a pattern emerging here?

My grandmother’s voice is a throaty cross between Bea Arthur, Marlon Brando in "The Godafther," and Harvey Fierstein. A few years later, after her favorite grandchild, my brother Gary, dies, I will move from second-best into the number one slot. But at the moment I am eager to please her, eager to bond somehow. Her bile at Helen, my brother's birth mother, proves a way in.

When I visit her alone a few months after the running away incident, she isn't particularly upset or surprised that we bolted. Nothing ever really surprises her. We shop for clothes and go to the all-you-can-eat Pizza Hut buffet where I flirt with bulimia while she sits glamorously, just having coffee, pouring out the cold remains in my water glass when the waiter comes to refill her cup, leaving lipstick stains, clicking her long, polished nails against the rim of the coffee cup.

For her the story of Revelation and our running away is about how much of a little monster Adam has always been, and how he was always out to give her as much grief as possible. "He and Helen put me through hell,” she says, "Absolute hell." She does not tell me to respect my father. She calls him a bastard, warming to how much obvious delight I take in her storytelling skills.

She tells me about my grandfather's mistress, bellowing, "I don’t know what he does with her, since with his kidney problems he's bleeding from his goddamned penis." Cool.

I revel in our new closeness. We were equals now and I want more than anything to light one of her cigarettes and smoke it just like she does, taking deep, elegant drags, blowing the smoke away from the table, in between shocking disclosures.