Since I live on the opposite side of the continent, I call my mother once a week. She's says I call once a month. There's no knowing which is true since neither of us is a reliable source of information about the other.

It's only fair to warn you it's possible that none of what follows is accurate. I may be spinning bizarre fantasies in public just to mortify my mother – after all, she did make me a homosexual – or I may simply be repeating the terrible lies she tells in order to scare away any other lurking, predatory mothers with designs on me.

One thing that you can be sure of is that my mother is wrong about absolutely everything. Compared to me, her grasp of reality has always been so tenuous that we can only speculate on how she managed to raise two functional sons. Even she admits to being unclear how her plans for Wally and Beaver Cleaver resulted in creepy, high IQ versions of Dudley Do-right and Edward Scissorhands. What else could we reasonably expect from someone who resembles Bea Arthur in Betty Grable's body, and who once bludgeoned her husband with the morning newspaper over something he had done to her in a dream? This is a woman who sent her eleven-year-old son to Catholic school and then let him give a book report on Jacqueline Suzanne's Valley of the Dolls to a nun.

The point here is that where my mother is concerned, anything is possible, which is part of why I call – weekly, thank you.

“Hello?”

“Good morning. This is the changeling calling.”

I am of the opinion that it comforts my mother to imagine I am not actually her child. She believes it comforts me. Anything is possible.

“How are you?”

“Oh, fine… It's freezing here. I may have wet the bed.”

“Is that how you usually react to cold? What do you mean,‘may have?’ You're not sure? Does that mean someone else was in bed with you?”

This last somewhat squalid but nonetheless glamorous prospect intrigues me. (I've always regretted not having been around to witness my conception. I hope their ecstasy shredded the sheets and woke up the neighbors. After all, it's probably the last pleasure either of them ever associated with my existence.) I try to convey a jolly camaraderie in hopes that Mom will continue in this vein.

“Mom, most of the guys I know who're into piss don't do it in bed.”

“You do not say things like that to your mother!”

Of course I don't. When it comes to requirements for motherhood, Olympic-class denial is second only to sperm. It occurs to me she might be ill and that we shouldn't become distracted.

“Are you ok? Were you sick?”

I make a mental note to call my sister-in-law later since I have no expectation of an accurate answer to this question. It's not that we're dishonest; it's more like we're the ones who made Pontius Pilate ask “What is truth?” Crucify us all and let God sort it out.

“What? No! Of course I'm not sick. Don't be ridiculous. I already told you, I'm fine.”

In my family, “Are you well?” is an accusation. While imminent death is respectable, even admirable, minor illness is a sign of weak moral fiber second only to designer clothing and psychotherapy. Brain cancer inspires sympathy, tasty casseroles, and constancy; colds evoke blame.

Feeling like the flow of useful information is dwindling, I decide to whack the pipes with a toilet plunger.

“So you're saying you wet the bed on purpose? I think I have some pornography about that sort of thing. It's nothing to be ashamed of – you know we would never judge you. We only want you to be happy.”

“Did you call me up just to say horrible things?”

It occurs to me to say yes, that I've done just that, having insidiously scripted this entire conversation in advance, but in fact I'm winging it. I've been improvising since my alleged first words in Mom's arms: “Stop talking now and listen to me!” (I'm told she screamed and dropped me, which strikes me as reasonable.) But I digress, unlike Mom, who is in pit bull mode.

“I did not wet the bed. I just thought I did. Or something. I must have gotten thirsty in the middle of the nigh, and spilled the water I keep on the night stand. I didn't notice it until I woke up.”

I'm afraid I'm about to hear how she went to change the sheets and mistook them for the Ku Klux Klan, despite the Klan not exactly being known for invading the bedrooms of elderly white women. I adopt a cheerful Martha Stewart nasality.

“Tonight, fill your bedside water glass with vodka. Your incontinent secret lover will be inspired, and accidental spills will evaporate by morning, leaving no stain!”

Have I distracted her?

“It just a little water. I didn't even have to change the bed. But it did make me wonder.”

No, I have not distracted her. I accept that I'm destined to hear just what it is that my mother's imaginary urine makes her wonder about, but then she adds, in a very different voice:

“Do you remember what you said to me?”

Some explanation may be required here. I will soon turn fifty around the same time my mother is scheduled achieve eighty. This has brought us closer than we've been since I gave up breast feeding in favor of screaming and banging my bloody head against my crib. Now that I've had AIDS for 20 years and she's a pain-wracked ruin, we share our mutual suppressed rage regarding our decrepitude. Not that my family has ever been given to either hushed tones or squeamishness, but now that we have looking eighty in common, Mom and I occasionally actually listen to what we're shouting, snarling, and insinuating at each other, if only to glean useful tips on which mixers go best with pain medication.

Consequently, I know exactly what she's talking about. Never mind that it occurred when I was nine and we haven't discussed it since. Since I clearly inherited it from her, my ability to read my mother's mind is probably the final damning evidence that I'm not in fact the abandoned twilight love child of Dorothy Parker and Ramón Novarro. (I choose to ignore this, just as I do the fact they were both in their sixties when I was born.) Regardless, I know what Mom is talking about; I just don't know why.

Nonetheless, a good offense is the best way to be offensive, and I waste no time placing the blame for what hasn't actually been mentioned yet.

“I was very upset at the time. You separated my G.I. Joes.”

I am alarmed to hear myself sound plaintive. I don't do plaintive. I do forthright – it goes better with being right. Of course I'm also being stupid, because if my being right could derail my mother's Byzantine trains of thought, the entire universe would have evolved along very different lines. She continues.

“You shouted it! You said to me that when I was old…”

Suddenly her voice reminds of how she sounded when she was young. This is an alarming development – youth implies strength and the ability to win fights – so I interrupt, sounding like some sanctimonious wingnut defending marriage from attack by terrorist sodomite minks.

“The G.I. Joes were deeply in love. It's a traditional relationship for soldiers going back 5,000 years. You had no right to separate them.”

This doesn't work. Mom doesn't really understand about comrades in arms, no matter how many military boyfriends I've brought home. She is implacable.

“They were tied back to back! And you said to me…”

I'm incensed. Meddling mothers are a menace at all times, but never more so than to pubescent gay boys.

“They were perfectly happy! You had no business interfering.”

Unfortunately, meddling is apparently the only style mothers come in, and unlike shoes, the fashion never changes. I have an unpleasant feeling she's on a roll.

“They were wearing black rubber suits and boots! It was weird, and you shouted at me, ‘When you're old…’”

This is patently ridiculous.

“They were skin divers! What did you expect them to wear, tuxedos?”

Surely even straight people can be required to have some sense of appropriate dress?

“Well then they had on skin diver suits like little Jacques Cousteaus and you had blindfolded them with your father's electrical tape. They were tied up with rawhide shoelaces! They might have drowned!”

This last is so bizarre it reminds me of why I love my mother, as well as the origins of my own somewhat veering approach to reality. Reality has never much impressed either of us. This is touching, but I know better than to be deterred by sentiment.

The War of Italics is now well underway. In person, my mother achieves italics by elegantly arching her right eyebrow. She envisions herself in glossy black and white, evoking the plucky Hollywood heroines of yesteryear. I traditionally counterattack with, “Oh look! Here comes Mrs. Spock.” Before my hetero older brother went into a permanent emotional coma at eighteen and lost the ability to speak in italics, we used to fix her with four baleful eyes and intone in deadpan stereo, “Fascinating.”

My version of italics involves baring my teeth and laying my ears back. If I had a tail, I'd thrash it. I'm convinced this conveys a masculine feline elegance along with the threat of imminent death. Mom traditionally retaliates by saying, “Of course I'm a horrible person. I gave birth to a gargoyle.”

Needless to say, by now my ears are laid so far back that my phone can no longer reach from there to my mouth. Never mind – I've a trained bass and volume is not a problem. Cecil B. DeMille did not need a cell phone to deliver the Ten Commandments.

“You are insane. And nosey!  The Joes were in my underwear drawer. My underwear drawer, with my underwear. Would you like to finally reveal what planet are you from, where people are afraid Jacques Cousteau will drown in their son's underwear drawer?”

This last strikes even me as as a deeply odd question. Mom is not deterred.

“That's my point, exactly! There were these two men in rubber suits, tied up in your underwear drawer! And they were sticky.”

It's clear neither of us knows where this conversation is going, and while I'm still determined to get there first, I'm now distracted by nostalgia.

“I'd been licking them. Their little wetsuits tasted interesting. I used to rub their fuzzy hair and beards on my face. It was relaxing.”

In my family there is no such thing as Too Much Information. But while she started it, even I know now that Tosca is about to throw herself off the tower, there's no stopping gravity. I sigh, close my mouth, and wait for her high E-flat.

“Exactly! Tied up in rubber suits, under your little jockstrap! What was I supposed to think? And when I untied them, you burst into tears and shouted at me.”

Oh. I suddenly remember what I shouted. I should feel guilty, but having just had the words “your little jockstrap” italicized at me by my own mother, I'm thinking, “Oedipus Rex, not just for heterosexuals anymore!”

“You looked at me and you shouted, ‘When you're old and in the nursing home, don't wonder why NOBODY EVER VISITS OR CHANGES YOUR PEE SOAKED SHEETS!’”

I consider gouging out my eardrums, but it's too late. Besides, this is really fascinating in a “Mom drops nukes where angels fear to tread" kind of way. One wonders what sort of deformed cherubs will be born due to fallout.

“You said ‘old’ like it was some sort of crime I was committing and you wanted me to go to hell for it! I felt like the most horrible mother in the world. You made me cry!”

And it's clear she is – crying. I suppress a flaring annoyance with her for resorting to such a cowardly tactic, not because I'm a nice person but because I have a sudden intimation of what this is really about. After all, if I were capable of leaving a puzzle unsolved I would have stopped these calls long ago.

“Mom…”

“It was very disturbing. You were only nine. Nine! I couldn't tell anyone.”

“Mom…”

“I was so worried! I was terrified of what might happen to you!”

“Mom, quit with the italics. You're giving me an eyebrow ache.”

“What italics? Is something wrong with your eye? Do you you know I never know what you're talking about? Never!”

“Mom, were you afraid this morning, when your sheets were wet? Did it make you feel old?”

There is a pause during which I realize the phone has been hurting my left ear for some time. I switch it to the right one and wiggle my finger in the left one while I wait. This gives her next words a weird, squishy reverb, like talking kettle drums made of Jello.

“I didn't know what to think. I sat there and cried like some like stupid old woman. I am a stupid old woman.”

I stop wiggling. In case it's not clear, she's not feeling sorry for herself: she's angry. In my family, we don't do self pity – we do outrage. I think of the unwelcome morning additions to my linens I've encountered in the past 25 years of plague and its medication. I once hurled an entire set of 600-thread-per-inch Egyptian cotton out an upper story window and shouted “With God as my witness I will never do laundry again,” before collapsing with a high fever. (This was in San Francisco, where defenestrating one's sheets is a protected First Amendment right.)

I regard rage as the inevitable consequence of paying attention to the universe in which we live, which is why I usually don't. I'm certainly angry now. Also sad. I want to rescue my mother. Of course I want to rescue her. Superman is another family trait.

“Mom, would you like me to come for a visit?”

Unfortunately, kryptonite is also a family trait and I seldom do visit. I live on another planet, neither Earth nor Krypton. Some planet where, among other things, men in rubber suits dream happily in one another's company, tied up in their underwear drawer. Nobody drowns, except metaphorically.

“Oh God no. Don't fly here. Airfares are horrible. Save your money. I wonder whatever happened to those G.I. Joes?”

“They grew up and gentrified the Lower East Side, Dupont Circle, the Castro, and 50% of the now-choice real estate in America. They wrote A Chorus Line and dropped dead rather than listen to “What I Did for Love” one more time.”

“Oh Bryan.”

We are silent for a moment. I wonder if silence occurs between us so rarely because she's eighty and I've been more or less terminally ill for half my life. After all, one can never be absolutely sure of another opportunity to holler at the people you love. Carpe diem, preferably by the throat.

“I love you, Mom.”

“Well of course you do. I love you.”

And so it goes, until it doesn't. Eventually we say goodbye. Until next week… month.

They did grow up, those Gay Icon Joes. They left the underwear drawer and went out into the world. Every thing their mothers feared came to pass, but perhaps you have to be a GI yourself to understand how having comrades and arms is worth any amount of suffering. Perhaps they didn't live happily - ever after or otherwise - but so what? Many comrades, strong arms. Along with a lot of grief, they found immense joy in the unlikeliest of places, and most important of all, they were, and are, very seldom bored.

Some of them even have rubber suits and other important silliness, along with much to think about and enough time to think it. They call home occasionally, across a gulf that takes more than telecommunications to bridge. If any of this was ever in doubt, it isn't any longer.

The only question left is how to tell it.