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- [00:00]
Rosetta Stone Advertiser
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- [01:09]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. The Moth features true stories told live without notes and all stories on the podcast are taken from our ongoing storytelling series in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit and from our tour shows across the country. Visit themoth.org this episode of the Moth and our special insider survey for the podcast are brought to you by the new 2011 Hyundai Equus Discover the Hyundai Equus, the new premium luxury sedan from Hyundai offering first class refinement and features including an iPad equipped with the Equus Owner's Manual app and take the insider survey for this part podcast at podcast insider survey.com that's podcast insider survey.com the story you're about to hear by Peter Aguero was recorded live in December 2009 for a special Moth evening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The theme of the night was American Stories.
- [02:18]
Peter Aguero
So this is a reading from the Book of Peter, chapter 19, verse 2. I was 19 years old and I just finished my first semester of college and I got home with my bag of laundry and things weren't looking too good for me and my mom. I walked into the house and she had told me over that semester to expect some changes when I got home and it didn't really hit me until I walked in the door and the first thing that I saw was that her upright piano that she had had since she was a kid was gone. She had sold It I walked through the foyer into the living room and there was just a broken couch and television on top of another television. One had a working picture and the other had working sound. And all the other furniture was gone. My dad had taken it four years ago when he had left. And for some reason the impressions from his La Z boy were still there as some kind of reminder of what a dick he is. And I walked up, passed through the living room and went up through toward the dining room. And the beautiful dining room set that had been in her family for generations was gone. It was a dark mahogany set, really ornate and with these beautiful carved chairs and a glass break front and a buffet table. And that was gone. And I walked upstairs to put my stuff away. And her bedroom door was open. And the only thing left in the room was her bed. Her bedroom set was gone. There's nothing more depressing than a bedroom with no furniture. You can see all the little dings and mistakes and tears in the wallpaper that are hidden by things. And then I saw my sister's room. It was still a shrine to my sister that had moved in with my dad with her Pepto Bismol pink walls and her canopy bed and her toy box. Like she was gonna move back and become a little child again. But she wasn't. My bedroom was just the way it always was. Covered in posters with broken particle board furniture and a waterbed for some reason with a broken heater, so you had to put quilts on top of it so you wouldn't get arthritis. She couldn't sell any of that anyway. I told my mother for years after the divorce to just sell the house. It was too big for the two of us after my sister left. It was especially too big once I was gone, when I went to college. And the bills had to have been killing her. But her stubborn Polish pride kept her in the house. I guess she wanted to show to the outside world that everything was okay, but on the inside it was just kind of decaying around her. But she wasn't able to really deal with it in any kind of a real way. There was just selling things and taking it day by day. She was a nurse, she still is. And at the time she was working on the weekends doing 24, 40 shifts at a dual diagnosis psychiatric drug unit. And during the week she took a job at a perfume counter in the mall to make some extra money. And she doesn't like people telling her when to take a break, so that wasn't going to last long. She was a polack A strong, big headed, pumpkin headed Polack. She got home that day and she was happy to see me. Not as effusive as usual, but, you know, she made dinner. She made a tomato casserole that she always made with canned tomatoes, Wonder Bread and American cheese. Yeah. And we sat in the kitchen on the two chairs on the kitchen table because the other chair I broke and the other chair I also broke. And we ate our food and we kind of talked about college that semester being over. And she said, peter, we can't really have much of a Christmas this year. There's not going to be any presents. I got your sister a little something, you know, because she doesn't live here anymore, but we really can't afford any presents. I said, are we gonna have a tree? We really. We can't afford a tree Decorations. I don't have time to decorate. Okay. You know, all right. You know. Okay. So she said, I got an idea. I thought this would be funny. Why don't we, over the next two weeks, we'll cut out pictures out of catalogs and magazines of things that we would give to each other if we could. Oh, go ahead. And we laughed about it, you know, and then we cried about it. And then we laughed about it again, because if you don't laugh about it, you're going to eat a bullet. So the next morning, she went off to work, and I decided I was going to throw myself into Christmas. And I decided I was going to go get a tree, and I was going to make this the best Christmas I possibly could. So I went. This was before. This is down in South Jersey, small town. And this was before Walmart and Home Depot and outlet stores were down there. So there was one Christmas tree farm, the Debault Christmas Tree Farm. So I went over there, figuring they'd give me a deal because I used to date their daughter. But turns out they didn't give me a deal because I used to date their daughter. The tree was like 60 bucks. I was like, screw that. So I went back home and I got a hacksaw and I cut out a tree for my side yard. And it wasn't even like a pine tree. It was some kind of, like, stunted maple tree. And I brought it in the house and I put it in the tree holder in the stand. And I went and went up in the attic and I got the box of decorations and ornaments and I hung about. There were about six branches. I put about 20 ornaments on each branch. And then I just took the tangled lights and I just threw them on it. It was beautiful. You know, it was really kind of nice. She came home and you know, she was, I guess happy, you know, and you know, that was how that was. And I just started throwing myself into this project of giving my mother everything I possibly could give her for Christmas. You know, she always wanted a forest green Jaguar convertible, so I cut out one of those and she wanted a Jacuzzi, had a shower called the J dream with about 20 nozzles and like a little dude that made sandwiches and. And like I cut out one of those and like gold and diamonds and jewelry and a new vacuum cleaner and everything she could ever possibly want in the world. And I really kind of sunk myself into it. I was, you know, I'd go over and hang out at my friends houses and like, kind of take their mom's Courier and Ives catalogs and like, you know, and like get all these catalogs and magazines so I could give my mom the best Christmas ever, you know. And I felt like it was in a kind of bizarro O. Henry novel and one that he never should have written. And that just kind of consumed me over the next couple weeks. And I figured, you know, this is sad, but this is beautiful and we're going to connect over this and it's going to be okay. It's going to be fine. It was one night in between coming home and Christmas and the two of us were sitting watching the Charlie Brown Christmas special. And One of the TVs was on cable and the other was on broadcast. So like the video was a little ahead of the audio because the audio was on broadcast. But you know, you just pretend, I don't know, you're in Japan, it doesn't matter. So you know, we're watching that and my mom was so distracted. You know, she wasn't, she was there, but she wasn't there. And you know, my mother and I were like partners when my parents marriage broke up. She still feels guilty to this day about maybe making me grow up sooner than I did as being the man of the house or whatever. And we were friends and roommates and partners. It was me and her against the world. And she was the one I always loved coming home to and the one that would let me get away with anything and the one that would always be the one to be proud of me when I did something right and would take a day off from work and drive to the zoo with me when I did something wrong. And she was not there anymore. This house was crushing her, just crushing her and all because she couldn't see the option of getting rid of it. And, you know, it was killing me, man. That's my road dog. That's my mom, you know, that's my girl. And I lost her. She just wasn't there anymore. And it was just. It was just killing me. Her eyes were just empty, you know, she was in another world. And she was worried about things that she couldn't. She couldn't figure out how to fix. So on Christmas Eve, I went with my buddy Brian. We got drunk on a jug of Livingston Cellars wine and went to midnight mass. Because when you're under 21 and Catholic, that's where you go to see your friends, you know, because you can't get into the bars yet. And it was great, man. Mass was awesome. My mom didn't go to midnight mass anymore because four years before, when my dad left us, it was during midnight mass. As the priest. Yeah, what a dick. Like, as the priest was walking up, he stood up and walked out in front of everyone that we knew, Everyone she grew up with, everyone I grew up with, everyone we went to school with, went to church with, hung out with. They all saw our family crumbling in front of us. So my mom doesn't. My dad's a dick. Like, I mean, is he here tonight? No, he's not. Cause he's a dick. You know what I mean? Such a dick. So my mom doesn't go to midnight mass anymore. I got home that night and the next morning I woke up late and I brought my little bundles of pictures tied up with scraps of ribbon, and I put them under the tree and I waited for my mom to come down. And I heard her stirring upstairs and heard her come down and making coffee. And she came downstairs in her big red Sally Jesse Raphael morning glasses, and she came down with a cup of coffee and she looked at the things I was offering her and she just went, oh, wait a minute. And she went back upstairs. And she was up there for a couple minutes. I'm like, what does she. How long does it take to bring down some papers? I hope she's okay. She. She have diarrhea. Like it's Christmas. I don't know, like post traumatic whatever. But. So anyway, she comes back down and we start to exchange our gifts, and she's opening up a car and a vacuum in the shower and gold and a brand new piano and a bedroom set and a beautiful, beautiful picture of a dining room set that would, you know, that would be at home in the white house. You know, I tried to give her everything that she had had to get rid of to keep this life together. She wanted there more than anything in the world. She wanted there to be some stability for her kids, to have a place that was always going to be home, the home that we grew up in. And it was killing her. And I was trying to do anything I could to maybe make that better, you know? And so she's just looking at these things and just smiling and laughing. And then I start to open up mine. And there's three of them. And there's one. It's a picture of some Reese's peanut butter cups and a picture of some Homer Simpson slippers and a picture of a karaoke machine, all from the same Rite Aid catalog that was up in her bathroom upstairs because she completely forgot. And this thing that I really thought it was just, you know, it was the one sided thing. And she's laughing about it now over there. That's hilarious. Yeah, Wave. And then so she went upstairs to make breakfast in the kitchen. And I sat there and it was. It was just kind of. I don't know, like, I don't want to be too silly about it. It was like a needle piercing me in the heart. Thank you, Madison. It was. It was just like this life that we had that was. The two of us was just gone. She would have done anything for me, and she still was, but it just wasn't working anymore. And she forgot this thing because the house was killing her, money was killing her, and everything was killing her. There was nothing I could do. Just nothing. So I went upstairs and she did make pancakes. My mom makes really good pancakes. She fries them up in, like, bacon grease and they're like, God, they're all crispy around the edges. And she makes me one that's as big as the frying pan and cuts it out to look like Pac man and puts it on my plate. Ever since I was a little boy. She'll give me a second one if I wanted. But this day, there was no Pac man face. It was just silver dollar pancakes. And they were all burnt. And we sat there eating these burnt pancakes, wondering what the hell was going on with our lives. If you. Today, 14 years later, if you go to my mother's house where she lives with her new husband, you can go down in the basement and you can kind of see a million boxes. And you walk past the Ark of the Covenant and you go over in the back, and if you were an archaeologist, you could kind of look at the strata of our lives and pick out which year these things happened. And oh, this is when Peter quit for and this is when, you know Michelle had epilepsy growing up. And this is when you know their dad was a dick. That's all of them. And then there's one box. If you look at it in Christmas in 1995, if you dig into it, you can see a little velvet bag with a bunch of small pictures cut out of catalogs and magazines. And right underneath of that was stuff that took place. A couple months later, I got my belated Christmas present. It was a picture that my mom sent me when I was away at school of her standing in front of the house with a For Sale sign in front of it. She decided to sell the house and she moved into a small townhouse and she took a little hit on her pride. But I got my girl back. Thank you.
- [16:52]
Dan Kennedy
Peter Aguero was born and raised in the wilds of South Jersey. He resides in Queens, New York with his lovely wife Sarah. Peter is a Moth Grand Slam Champion Story Slam Host and an instructor for the Moth Shop Community Program. He is also the singer of the BTK Band, New York City's only improvised storytelling rock band. Peter loves his mom this episode of the Moth and a special insider survey for this podcast are brought to you by the new 2011 Hyundai Equus. We're polling our audience and here's what you had to say so far. Everyone is completely split between the favorite storytellers over the past five episodes of our podcast, so that's still an even race for the favorite. Over 90% of you so far have never been to a live Moth event. Man, that kind of amazes me. But that's certainly one for your New Year's resolution list. I sure hope to see you at 1. Over 40% of you would put your name in the hat at one of our open mic story slams, so that's really cool. But 31% of you aren't sure if you would so. Well, when you come to that live Moth event that's on your New Year's resolution list, I personally invite you to reconsider putting your name in. Thanks to Hyundai and the new 2011 Equus for bringing us this survey. Discover the Hyundai Equus, the new premium luxury sedan from Hyundai offering first class refinement featuring an iPad, equipped with the Equus owner's manual app and first class everything including heated and cooled seats, complete with driver's back massage. You can learn more and take the special survey for the moth podcast@podcastinsidersurvey.com that's podcastinsidersurvey.com hi, this is Jay Allison, producer.
- [18:46]
Peter Aguero
Of the Moth Radio Hour. Our full season of new shows should be appearing now at a public radio station near you.
- [18:52]
Dan Kennedy
You can find a complete listing of.
- [18:54]
Peter Aguero
Stations@Themost.Org it's produced by the Moth and by us at Atlantic Public Media here.
- [19:00]
Dan Kennedy
On Cape Cod and distributed by the public radio exchange.
- [19:04]
Rosetta Stone Advertiser
Prx.org Our podcast host, Dan Kennedy is the author of the book Rock An Office Power Ballad. Learn more@rockonthebook.com thanks to all of you.
- [19:15]
Dan Kennedy
For listening and we hope you have a story worthy week. Podcast audio production by Paul Ruest at the Argo Studios in New York Podcast hosting by PRX Public Radio Exchange Helping make public radio more public@prx.org.