Mom   aka Queen Kool    1937-2015

Daylight dims leaving cold fluorescents
Difficult to see you in this light
TOOL - "Wings For Marie (Pt 1)" - 10,000 Days - 2006

My problems with Mom were avoidable. We'd have nary butted heads had I just done as she wanted, became what she wanted, and turned blind eyes, deaf ears, and mute tongue to her perpetual foolishness and frequent mistreatment of Dad.

Mom, a European, was born into great wealth in Istanbul, Turkey. She described a barren, lonely childhood, cared for by servants in a home led by the ice princess Zsa Zsa and the mercurial lunatic con artist Mutchie. A lanky, awkward child, she was scholastically mighty, but lacking contentment and the feeling of security all children should enjoy.

I'm still shamefully unclear on what her father situation was, with Grandpa Theo playing a role and a fellow named Pappy Roseo involved. I failed badly in not learning more about Mom's (and, consequently my) heritage before it was too late.

She blossomed into a lovely young lady with movie star looks who was a crack equestrienne and snow skiier and aced a very demanding Swiss boarding school education, finishing our equivalent of high school at age 15. Quickly, she would become well-versed in 7 languages.

Enter The Sultan 
At age 16, she married the smothering, narcissistic creep Aydin (The Sultan of Sodomy), a Turk twice her age who insisted on having constant stimulation and total control over her. The next year, John (The Golden Psycho) was born, followed by Neila (The Sue Chef) 4 years later.

A few years after John was born, Mom presented with some troubling symptoms and was diagnosed with gonorrhea. It only could have come from one place - The Sultan's busy meat rocket. He tried some pathetic lies, but Mom quickly mowed them down and wrenched the truth from him. Enter divorce lawyer. At great odds with The Flozberk Way, Mom did not ask for any money. None.

In one of the most memorable conversations of my life, I learned that Mom dumped Aydin because he cheated on her with abandon and gave her an STD after she wouldn't let him fuck her in the ass. I think that may have been mentioned somewhere else on this site ;)

Of course, just to make sure there stands little or nothing normal about these people, the divorce was secret.

The Mule. 
Dad was in Istanbul for business with one of Aydin's clients. He and Mom crossed paths. He was smitten immediately. After recent coups and unrest, Mom wanted the bloody hell out of Turkey. Turks could not take anything of value out of the country, but foreigners could.

Next damn thing Dad knew, he was Mom's damn jewelry mule!

She loaded Dad's 34-year-old country boy ass down with her and Mutchies jewelry and other stuff to smuggle to Greece, where they arranged to meet. Then, a series of unlikely events and coincidences involving Athens, Zurich, NYC, and yes, even Arkansas threw them together and they bonded. Mom was bowled over by how different Dad was from Aydin.

They came to Dallas, did a test run in separate apartments, and were married in 1965, a half-year after meeting.  I came along three years later and my odyssey began. Me, Mom, Dad, John, Neila, Grandpa Theo, Mutchie, and yes, Aydin, too.

Dad worked as an engineer for a medium-sized company and moonlighted in our garage, building cotton gin control units. Mom worked at a carpet company, claiming to do the work of three of the lazy, ignorant men there.

Then, one day, as the story has it, one day she came home and informed Dad he was now in the apartment business and they were six figures in the hole. That venture would eventually cover four complexes and last about 22 years. This made life interesting, for I spent lots of time at the inner-city Dallas apartments and saw all kinds of stuff from age 7 until 29.

All kinds of stuff. Mercy!

A few years into the apartment adventure, the wheels started a-fallin' off. Grandpa Theo's wheels did same, leaving Mom aghast at the quality of elder care in Texas vs. Europe. I got run over by a hippie in a Camaro, then got very badly shot in a hunting accident a year later.

Pee Pipe 
In 1978, we took our first real vacation. Since Mom's life was ruled by TV, it was a cruise inspired by The Love Boat, which she loved. Later that yeat, she got extremely sick, with code blue action, from a kidney stone that lodged in her ureter and tore it, causing peritonitis and gram negative shock. She went to the ER, miserable...no, no, no - dying - only to be patronized, told she had anxiety and a backache, offered Valium, and sent home.

Uh, of course Mom had anxiety - she's Mom -  but that don't mean there ain't also a god damn rock lodged in her upper pee pipe.

The shit hit the fan HARD a day later. ICU, life support, massive surgical scar, two weeks in the hospital. She was in such bad shape that they had to shortcut putting her back together. She sort of recovered, but was forever hobbled by it.

Then another cruise the next spring on a Russian ship out of New Orleans, which was wonderful, and after that Mom was stricken down again, this time by a real bad neck. She had a multilevel cervical laminectomy that, again, she never quite recovered from. The next year I got severely and gruesomely injured, upsetting her terribly.

Pretty much all this bummer stuff happened in Novembers. We came to dread the month.

Queen Kool
We must note that throughout this, and since her early teens until her late 60s, Mom smoked her ass off. Kool menthols. And, she only had one working lung due to TB as a child, so there's that.

She didn't like it here, had no friends, and no hobbies. She watched TV, ran her little empire from the sofa, and smoked her ass off. Far too young, she found herself racked with COPD, unwilling or unable to do most normal people stuff.

The Mysterious Queen Kool 
Mom was mysterious, and I'm not just talking about her behavior. Her fuzzy early memories suggest she was kept somewhere, like a convent or the like, and then Zsa Zsa and Mutchie suddenly popped up. She looks related to neither of them and I remain unclear on her actual father. She was from Turkey, but not Turkish, and her ancestry was unclear, with French, Greek, and German cited.

After she died, going through the safe, I found a document with her original real first name on it, a word I had never seen in my life until then. Her date of birth was a day off from what we'd always celebrated. This is not how things go with most people, but we ain't most people, see.

Isolation
Dad liked to socialize, but Mom kept us isolated. We knew few of our neighbors. They had no real friends.

Dad's family was almost entirely erased from our lives. His plenty-nice brother Leo and his wonderful wife Betty lived 15 minutes from us in Dallas, but I recall us eating at their house once (the day I discovered ranch dressing) and them setting foot in our house twice. He was similarly separated from the remainder of his very solid clan, concentrated in Arkansas plus a couple other places.

Mom just thought they were all the hominid equivalent of cows. Dad's family. Reagan. Reagan's family. Kay. Kay's family. Langdon. Langdon's family. All 3 of my serious partners. Me. If they were regular Americans, they were junk. Everybody fell short...except for John's women after Kay - Mom was high on them.

One of them, third wife/third ex-wife Claudia, would be instrumental in the life-crushing conflict over Aydin, acting like a total nut after Mom lavished praise on her and angrily dismissed the many red flags I discerned within minutes of meeting her.

But, I digress...

She didn't get involved with my school or attend things I was in. She didn't read food labels, never used recipes, and didn't remember my friends' names, never interacting with them as a humble equal. I don't recall a single time in which she popped up with a tray of drinks or snacks for my friends and me. Mom just didn't do that stuff.

With astronomical statistical contrast, we drowned in The Istanbul Bunch. Thousands and thousands of interactions vs. a handful on Dad's side. The disparity was jaw-dropping, a literal 99.xx% to 0.xx% imbalance and a magnitude equaled or approached in many other imbalances.

And, to her, the whole nation sucked, too. We took 4 vacations total, a few days in Galveston then 2 cruises in the 70s and a 1985 six-week European grinder that marked the end of Mom's engagement with normal life. Just once did the family go to Arkansas after my memory banks turned on, and that's among my earliest recollections, boosted by a souvenir scar under my eyebrow from a fall at Grandma's.

They were their own bosses and we had money, but never did we go rent a lake cabin or take a road trip. Beautiful fall climate and color were up the road in OK and AR, the ocean and fresh seafood down I-45 at the Gulf. I don't even recall us taking a walk together in the USA.

Dad and I went to Arkansas twice for a total of 5 days and, there was literal hell for him to pay each time. We went on one hunting trip, but I done played the fool and up an' blowed my damn leg half off on the first day.

A Flozberk Way Universe 
Mom welded herself into a rut and pretty much stayed there forever, trying to keep things as much the same as possible with her small circle our universe and all else shut out and/or mocked and derided.

We built our new house and Mom got more and more wedded to the sofa through the 80s, By late in the decade, she was a shut-in, glued to the sofa, with Dad as her servant, errand/whipping boy, and someone to talk to. Their succession of dogs had the highest status in the home.

And on that sofa she stayed until her hospice year (a very long stint - average is 78 days), then demise in 2015 at the surprisingly old age of 78 and 1/2 from failure to thirve, just over two months after her and Dad's 50th anniversary.

The Big Boss
Mom had a gold ruler on which "The Big Boss" was engraved and reigned over Dad and the house with an iron fist.   The smothering she suffered from Aydin hitched a ride across the Atlantic with them to ironically be wreaked upon Dad by Mom as if it were a transferrable warranty.

Starting in about the 3rd grade, I became was much less moved by authority than Dad was. A budding Istanbul Bunch autocrat for a while, I had no trepidations about yelling at my parents or telling them they were nuts, for, ironically, I'd watched Mom do it dozens of times. Through what she taught me by example, I became her arch nemesis.

The first time I dared to say that to her, she became upset. I could only dryly reply with, "What, you hadn't noticed?" and pick apart how ridiculous it was that she disputed something was so obvious and enduring. It was like a longtime Phoenix resident becoming incredulous when told it was often hot there.

Yes, I was her archnemesis in explaining that I was her archnemesis.

When challenged or upset, Mom deployed the widest range of tricks, mind games, fallacies, and other misbehaviors I've ever seen from one person. In fact, looking over at the list, a dig into that one is going to require its own work over in Appendices. There's just too much.

People have a fundamental duty to deal in good faith with their family and friends, and, ideally, all others unless there's a damn good reason not to. Mom, when rubbed the wrong way, would often refuse to do so, and her massive bag of tricks would lead conflicts in wild directions, causing escalations and greatly compromising outcomes.

Autocrats like Mom, Neila, John, and Aydin depend on their tricks working without resistance. When resisted, their only options are atonement, silence, or more trickery.

Polemical Imbalance
By far, Mom was the most interesting and unusual person I've ever known, a true mosaic of extremes. The average of 49 and 51 is 50. So is the average of zero and 100. We leaned more toward the latter path.

Mom had a heart of gold and a heart of stone. She was feeble and frail, yet was often a mover of mountains. Egalitarian, yet discriminating to a fault. Impressively refined, yet often quite uncouth. Comforting, yet intimidating. An unaccountable, autocratic grand dame, while often humble, practical, responsible, and helpful. Anxious and fearful, but able to summon the spirit and constitution of the toughest Viking ever to crush an enemy's skull to a bloody pulp.

Unfortunately, that spirit was mostly used to keep slogging through the self-destruction she so ardently pursued and the havoc The Flozberks repeatedly heaved onto the table. What a waste.

She was both a go-getter, mover, and shaker and a sloth who let things rot. Impressively brilliant and depressingly foolish. She was permissive and uptight. Bawdy and repressed. Progressive and regressive. Would eat anything like anchovy paste and the offal from a cow, yet was staggeringly finicky.

This shockingly odd and imbalanced soul took her last breaths right at the middle of the year, a few minutes after midnight on the first of July.

Fittingly, she was a source of great enrichment and enlightenment in my life while also a source of great pain, frustration, and bafflement. We held many similar core values, were largely kindred spirits in a pool of less-sophisticated people, and, despite all the jackassery you'll read about here, I'm happy to have had her as a mother.

Would I have changed anything? Oh, FUCK yeah - a whole bunch of shit.

Watch Mom's music video "16,000 Days" HERE:
    also includes my music video "Gray Morning Compromise"
Read more about Mom in Appendices

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