Richard Price - Hatpin Mary

 

My grandmother was five-foot tall and 300 pounds. She basically spent much of her life unloved and, despite her size, feeling utterly invisible. She was born in Harlem in 1902, which is when Jews on the Lower East Side had two quarters to rub together. At the end of the week, they moved up to Harlem, because there was a little more air between the buildings, and the infant mortality rate went down a little bit. She found my grandfather. She was like a roommate. Her father was a furrier and had a little bit of money. She found my grandfather, who was basically a thug, dropped out of school in eighth grade for punching out his gym teacher at DeWitt Clinton.

 

He drove a truck, was a union head breaker, was in and out of jail, had a tattoo, which is a holy cow. [audience laughter] They got married on April 23rd, 1923, at about 10:30 in the morning. As of about noon, they started hating on each other for 50 years until she died. [audience laughter] She had two kids, one of which was my mother. I was born in 1949. I was born with mild cerebral palsy, so she and I got on like gangbusters. She was my most loving relative, not to diss my nuclear family, but every time I would go to the South Bronx, into this tenement where she lived, it was like parole or reprieve or whatever.

 

Our typical days would start out-- I'd get in her bed with about 1,000 baseball cards, and she'd cover up the player and the position and the team, and I would go, "Chico Carrasquel, second base, Chicago White Sox. Okay, next. Sandy Koufax, picture Brooklyn Dodgers next. Don Mossi, picture Cleveland Indians.” We'd get out of bed. The day consisted of four things. Looking out the window and being horrified by what we saw, [audience laughter] going to triple monster movies, coming home watching roller derby, and then professional wrestling, and then Zacherley Shock Theater, which is horror movies. [audience laughter] 

 

I actually learned how to tell stories from my grandmother. My grandfather on the other side was an actual poet, but his poems were all symbolic and about guttering candles. [audience laughter] But she would sit there in the third-floor window in this beach chair that was chrome and vinyl strips on the third floor and look down on Vyse Avenue and 172nd Street. This is 1955. The radio would be playing WEVD foreign language radio, and it'd be just Yiddish like, [Yiddish language] Every once in a while, I'd hear President Eisenhower or John Foster Dulles. She'd be looking out the window and she had something to say about everybody. 

 

So, there'd be some Maynard G. Krebs looking junkie walking down the street, and she'd go, "Oh, look at that guy. It's like, he's a junkie. Every time he sticks a needle in his arm, it's like sticking a needle in his mother's heart. She comes to me, Mrs. Rosenbaum, ‘What should I do? What should I do?’ Richard, what do I tell her? What do I tell her?'" And I'm five years old. [audience laughter] And then, we'd pack these giant valises to go to the movies. And in the valises would be peaches, plums, nectarines. I didn't think they had ugly fruit then, but grapefruits, pineapples. There'd be carcasses of chicken and turkey from the night before. [audience chuckles] There'd be a thermos of coffee, a thermos of chocolate milk. It's like, we were going to the desert. [audience laughter] 

 

And so, we'd go to the Simpson or the Freeman, and we'd see The Attack of the Giant Leeches, The Attack of the 50 Foot-- the attack of everything. [audience laughter] She'd sit there and she'd eat and she'd talk to the screen. [audience laughter] She was the only person over 15 years old. This is a Saturday matinee. [audience laughter] I remember at one point we were watching Rodan, which is this Japanese horror movie, where a flame-breathing pterodactyl is torching Tokyo. At the end of the movie, the Japanese army's got flamethrowers and they burn up Rodan. My grandmother screams out, "Good for you, bastard. How do you like it?" [audience laughter] 

 

And then, we go home, then we watch roller derby. Roller derby consists of a bunch of women on rollerblades going around in a circle, slamming the shit out of each other with elbows. Everybody's nickname was Tuffy. [audience laughter] I didn't get it, and I don't get it, and I don't have enough time. [audience laughter] But her true love, and our true love, was professional wrestling. We'd watch it on TV. My grandmother like screaming at Rodan, would get down and wrestle on the floor with the wrestlers on TV. One of the great shows, Bedlam from Boston. One of her favorite wrestlers was a freak, a guy named the French Angel. 

 

And the French Angel had acromegaly, which is giantism. You see Andre the Giant, I guess, had it, too, where it's a glandular disorder where your face completely grows out of proportion, and your hands grow out of proportion. It doesn't make you big and strong, it just makes things out of proportion and big. Because you're ugly, you're cast as a villain. My grandmother didn't like villains, but she liked the French Angel. I guess she identified with him. She would tell me things about the French Angel when he was wrestling. Like, he could speak 732 languages, [audience laughter] and he was an international chess champion, [audience laughter] and he graduated from the Sorbonne. [audience laughter] I don't know where she came up with this shit. [audience chuckles] 

 

And then, I remember one time she told me this story about him. She said that he was such a good-hearted soul. I mean, she was so into The Beauty and the Beast. That was her thing. She said he was such a good-hearted soul, and he felt bad for lepers. So, he went on a wrestling tour of all the leper colonies in the world. [audience laughter] She would be starting to cry, and then I'd be starting to cry, and then she'd say, “He had such a kind heart. He would wrestle for the lepers. And the lepers were so grateful, but they couldn't touch him because they had leprosy. So, they would bend down and kiss his shadow.” We'd both be like sobbing like crazy. [audience laughter] And it wasn't until years later I'd say, "Who the fuck was he wrestling?" [audience laughter] It's like, “Wait a minute, he was just wrestling him, throwing himself down, getting himself in the head.” Anyways, all right, so that was the French Angel. And that was like TV. I never met him personally.

 

However, I did go to a live wrestling match with my grandmother in Peekskill, New York, in about 1955, when I was about four years old. It was in the middle of a titanic summer heat wave, and it was in a tent, so it was about 120 degrees. And my grandmother was the type of a woman that was known in wrestling circles as a Hatpin Mary. And a Hatpin Mary was usually a woman who looked like my grandmother who would take one of those hatpins that long pins that would have that Bakelite amber-colored thing with the thumb depression, and she would hide it and sit on the aisle. Whenever a villain would come down the aisle, she would jab him in the ass. [audience laughter]

 

Now, my grandmother was a Hatpin Mary. But she had me on her lap, which is pretty tricky given the convexity of the physics there. [audience chuckles] It was really sweltering and it was packed, and everybody was going like melting. You hope that the villain's going to come down your aisle, because if the good guy comes down your aisle, it's a waste. But she got one of the bad guys, and his name was Karl Von Hess. He had a Bismarck goatee, and he had jackboots with iron crosses, and he always goose-stepped down the aisle, and he always wrestled a guy named Abe "Six Million" Jacobs, [audience laughter] and always got him in the hangman's noose. That was his favorite hold. 

 

We're getting Karl Von Hess, the Nazi, coming down the aisle, and my grandmother just couldn't wait. I'm five, and he's coming down the aisle. My grandmother takes this hatpin and whams him in the ass. This guy went up in the air about 12 feet, [audience laughter] came down holding his ass, and said, "Cocksucker," with a Brooklyn accent. It was the first profanity I've ever heard in my entire life. I had no idea what it meant, but it sounded really bad. And the guy's looking around. My grandmother's got the hatpin behind her back. He's going down to the ring like this. Abe Jacobs beat him that night. I think it was one of the few times that Abe Jacobs beat Karl Von Hess. They're probably best friends in real life. So, that's cool. [audience chuckles] 

 

Then the next match featured a villain named "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers, who later became the world wrestling champion of 1960. And I remember passing a note at my Bar Mitzvah, "Buddy Rogers beat Pat O'Connor." Anyways, “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers started coming downhill. Now, Nature Boy was like this exaggerated caricature of masculinity. He had platinum pompadoured hair, he had a chest that went out like Mamie Van Doren. [audience chuckles] He wore a one-shoulder leopard-skin toga and snow-white boots, and he would just come down the aisle like this. My grandmother looked at him, this poor woman, and she was all eyeballs. She had the hatpin, but she was paralyzed by his appearance.

 

As he was walking down the aisle, all these people in the audience had seen my grandmother jab Karl Von Hess, and they started chanting, "Stick 'em. Stick 'em. Stick 'em. Stick 'em. Stick 'em. Stick 'em." [audience laughter] Jackie Gleason like, “Homina, homina, homina, [audience laughter] she couldn't move. Nature Boy started hearing this chanting, "Stick 'em," and he started looking around and he saw my grandmother with the hatpin in her hand. He went up to her and up to me. 

 

His chest was so big that you could only see his eyes, [audience laughter] because his pectorals rose over his mouth and nose. He just stood there like this, like, "Go ahead." And at one point, when he realized she wasn't going to do anything, he bowed down, he took her hand with the hatpin, and he kissed her hand and said, "Madame," at which point I fell off her lap, I remember that. I was picking my nose, my finger went right through my forehead. [audience laughter]  My grandmother was just speechless for the rest of her life, basically. [audience laughter] He went into the ring and did his thing, probably figure-four leg vine or whatever. 

 

Anyways, this is 1955. 1968, I go off to college. And in that year of 1968, any provincial working-class white kid goes to college in September, comes back November, fully converted, argumentative, and realizes his whole family of working-class schmoes has basically turned into Mississippi lynchers. All you do is scream and cry and yell at your family for being morons and being racist. It was called the generation gap. We haven't heard that word in a long time, just heard "The gap." I just remember one of the last times I spoke to my grandmother before she died, I was sitting in a room with her, and I was just screaming at her, telling her what a racist she was. She was crying, and I was crying. We both got exhausted from crying and yelling at each other, and she turned on the TV and it was wrestling, and she just looked in this distant way and she said, "I wonder how the Nature Boy's doing. He was such a nice fellow." Thank you.