Scotch and Sympathy

Once my grandmother, Beelzebubbe, starts giving me the dirt on my brothers' crazy birth mother, the floodgates open and she begins sharing with me the details of her various lawless escapades. She even involves me in minor ones, like shoplifting from supermarkets and filching bits of dishware from restaurants. "Here," she cracks , handing me a stack of sheets and towels from the maid's cart at the Parker Meridien in New York, "Stick these in your suitcase. And could you get some boxes of Kleenex in there too?" I was nervous about it at first. "What's the big deal?!" she says, "They want you to take it!"

She loves breaking the law but never considers herself guilty of anything as serious as stealing, insurance fraud, or international customs violations; which is, properly speaking, what she actually is guilty of. The next time your grandmother starts stuffing Sweet n' Low into her pocketbook at McDonald's, remember, it could be a gateway crime.

Much later, when I am seventeen and move to New York to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, she calls often, cackling over the phone, "Have mink, will travel!" to let me know she wants to see me. I think she's great. She gambles, drinks, bleaches her hair, says "fuck" a lot, and wear an eight carat diamond ring. On her visits to New York we sit up all night playing gin and eating brisket sandwiches from Wolf's on 57th Street.

She's tough. Game. A real broad. I believe she is capable of killing, like Barbara Stanwyck in "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers." I like that. I adore her for all the wrong reasons. I'm embarrassed to admit that it's only just now occurring to me how much she resembles Helen Lawson, the boozy, cruel, beast of Broadway, a viciously funny caricature of Ethel Merman in "Valley of the Dolls" - but then for me everything does somehow loop-the-loop back to Jacqueline Susann.

When I am very little, as young as five, Beelzebubbe has cocktail hour, pouring me a large glass of water with a small amount of Dewar's scotch in it. She believes that an early introduction to alcohol will demystify it enough to keep me from overindulging once I come of age. In actual practice it gives me an incredible tolerance for alcohol. Before I turn fourteen I can drink any adult under the table.