SON of a BITCH: A Family Saga

By Russ Woody

He's a pretty good guy, Robert. Reasonably honest, compassionate, dependable, maybe a little too sarcastic, but all in all, a decent human being. And that's how he gets screwed by his family. So for the past fifteen years or so, since finishing college, he's managed, for the most part, to avoid them.

With the death of his father, however, he finds himself being sucked back into the familial vortex. At its center is the glue that binds the Nirth family, or rather, the sucking tar pit that traps them, Robert's mother—Helen. After her husband's death, she embraces the role of martyred widow with the panache of Mary Todd Lincoln. And because she knows she's now dependent on Robert for her very survival (he is, after all, her only reliable offspring), she works his sense of humanity like a maestro. All that said, deep down, beneath her callous shell and disparaging remarks... well, she's callous and disparaging.

Robert's older sister, Darlene, is a born-again Christian with a successful husband, two perfect children with an addiction to alcohol and extramarital sex. She believes that Robert judges her, and she resents him deeply for it. Robert's older brother Lenny, on the other hand, resents him because he has a steady income. Ten years Robert's senior, Lenny is still living the rock 'n' roll dream. But, at forty-six, with thinning hair, a hanging gut, and an abundant lack of talent, Lenny's drive to push his band, Pink Lloyd, has left him broke and wildly bitter.

Robert's perspective on his family begins to change, however, when he meets Amy, the beautiful sister of his gay, overweight, paraplegic neighbor. Amy is an astonishingly independent woman who captures his heart, and—after he hears her story—makes him realize that he doesn't have to remain the victim of a destructive family.

Robert's also getting to know and love his 10-year-old nephew, Danny (who isn't the kid Robert thought he was). Through Danny, Robert realizes that his sister is much like his mother, and that Danny is living a childhood as bad as his own. These revelations—in the midst of awe-inspiring acts of selfish retribution by his family—lead Robert to make the most crucial decision of this life: to break with them, and rescue his nephew.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350953909

Russ Woody

Russ Woody is an Emmy and Golden Globe winning television writer. He has written and produced Murphy Brown, Mad About You, Cybill, Becker, The Slap Maxwell Story, The Middle, and The Drew Carey Show, among other comedies. He has also written for the award-winning dramas Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere.

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Son of a Bitch: Saga of a Family

Copyright © 2024 by Russ Woody

Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Law, no part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 979-8-3509486-7-7

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

"Relations are simply a tedious pack of people,

who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live,

nor the smallest instinct about when to die."

Oscar Wilde

The Importance of Being Earnest

Table of Contents

The Phone Call

Helen & Paul

Darlene

Lenny

Black Pussy

The Hospital

Paul

Amy

The Date

Amy and Helen

Leisure Village

Danny

Elaine

On Our Way

Tahoe

One

The Phone Call

I’m sitting on the floor in the greeting card aisle of CVS reading through a stack of greeting cards; you know, the ones about loving families, beloved mothers and fathers, to my brother with love, my sister, that sort of shit. I usually gather a bunch of cards, sit down in the aisle and read through, looking for something that’ll give me fodder—a spark of an idea, something—for my next script. Oh, I write screenplays, movies, for the Hallmark Channel, about loving families at Christmas. Christmas movies. The type that, hopefully, make you cry.

The job wrings just about every last sloppy drop of creativity out of me, since I’ve got nothing from my life to draw on. So I usually come up with a schmaltzy idea from a greeting card or one of those saccharine posts on TikTok or Instagram. Children’s books, embroidered throw pillows. The stories are all over the place if you look, but greeting cards are usually surefire. (Hence Home for Christmas last year and Christmas is for Family the year before that.) I first get some air-fairy cliché idea, twist it a bit, then write the first draft with utter and brutal sarcasm. A turn-your-stomach sort of familial love-conquers-all bullshit. Then I rewrite it, bring it down to something that fills the soul with overwhelming love and joy, tears, and aggressive hugging. But, seriously, in my mind, it starts as a joke, something I can make ass fun of.

So I’m sitting on the floor in CVS like a kid sorting baseball cards, when Becky trips over me. Chivalrous as I am, I get up to apologize and then notice she has teeth like a Pepsodent ad and ample breasts beneath medical scrubs. Her hair is dark chocolate, dipping down and curling up at her shoulder, gently brushing the divot above her clavicle. I have no idea why, but clavicles and their divots have always been sexy to me. Maybe I have a fetish, I don’t know. I’ll have to ask my doctor. Oh, and breasts, that’s my other fetish. But that might be more common.

We chat a bit and I find out she’s an ER nurse, which impresses me greatly. After all, ER nurses, nurses in general, deal, on a daily basis, with all sorts of bodily functions and disgusting fluids, and are therefore pragmatic, innovative, nasty.

What could be better, right?

Which is what I’m thinking. But I realize I’m wrong when I find out her particular type of nasty.

The next night, we go to dinner. Italian. A bottle of Nebbiolo. I order light—don’t want to be groggy, you know, in case something happens—a radicchio salad with baby arugula, thin slices of Parmesan cheese and the white fish. She has the potato soup with chicken, and the gnocchi with duck ragout.

So, it starts well. But, by the end of the meal I’ve learned every last fucking minute tiny itty-bitty detail about the nursing and medical profession—a line of work with far too many nuances. So many, in fact, that despite her exemplary breasts and clavicles, I just want to go home. Which is what I say. But the sentence, Well, I think I’ll be heading home, is not nearly as definitive as it should be.

Sure, she says. That sounds great. I was gonna say my place, but your place would be fun.

Oh, uh…

And then, just when I’m going to be courageous and superior, when I’m about to declare exactly what I mean—because I’m a man not bullied by the Power of the P—she adds this little tidbit: You have a headboard, right?

I… my synapses are firing like a misplaced jumper cable, a headboard? On my bed?

Of course, on your bed, silly. That’s her.

She smiles and pulls a roll of surgical tape from her purse. I want you to tape me to it.

I’m intensely casual with this next: ‘Kay.

And then I want you to smear warm oil on my breasts. My nipples. And I want you to suck my pussy, she says. That sound okay?

What I don’t know—as I slam a credit card in the waiter’s hand and rip our coats from the hanger beside the table—is this: her love of all things medical is not just professional or humanitarian or academic—it’s sexual.

After dutifully taping her wrists to the headboard; because I am nothing if not accommodating, I have skillfully moved from her clavicular divot, down her body where I am working my lingual magic, and she is writhing like a windsock, expressing her appreciation with, Oh God, Robert, yes! Yes! Which is not the part I have a problem with. What starts to get on my nerves is how she includes details about her workaday world: …and there were five of them, she says, still wind-socking, coming in with the EMTs… Her back arching. Oh yeah, it’s so good, Robert... so good… uh-huh… More breathing, writhing. All in bad shape… they need to be intubated… an eyeball… dangling from this guy’s… uh-huh, right there, baby, good… it’s so good… it’s hanging… out of its socket… flopping around…

Me, I’m trying to concentrate on the work at hand and starting to wish she was a claims adjuster.

Oh God, yes, right there, right there… Breathing, arching. His arm… on ice… in the other room. Your tongue, amazing… amazing… and his intestines… roll out… on the floor… yes, yes, like that, yes… squish under my feet… his liver… it’s slippery…

This is where I’m having trouble keeping the concentration I mentioned a moment ago. I’ve never been good with internal organs out of place. To my thinking, they are internal for a reason—no one wants to see them on floors and underfoot. So I am both nauseated and aroused, which, for me, is new. I’m oddly reminded of that joke about trying to think of baseball during sex, only I’m trying to think of sex during sex. I decide to take a break so that I don’t, you know, throw up.

She, of course, notices right away. What’s the matter? I was so close…

It’s a peculiar juxtaposition—the sex thing along with the other—and I am quietly praying that my psyche will just accept it, roll with it, embrace the image of sliding viscera… in a sexual way. I try to think of an open eye socket with a dangling eyeball in an arousing context. It doesn’t work, so now I’m sitting on the side of the bed, my head between my legs. Breathing. Nothing, I say to her what’s-the-matter question, but mostly say it to my withering dick. Finally, I look over, ready to level with her because sometimes honesty can be an acceptable option with women.

But she beats me to the punch. You don’t like this? she says, her eyes now bigger, greener, more ingenuous than I recall their being at CVS or the restaurant. She bites her lower lip, which is oddly both childlike and hot—she’s good at these juxtapositions. You don’t like the tape? she says, nodding to her wrists, because I can’t wait to do this to you. I can’t wait to suck your cock.

A moment later, she is arching her back again, regaining lost ground, undulating with the movement of my tongue. Ooooo yes, baby, yes… she says thrusting her pelvis at me like a court summons. That’s right, uh-huh…

I’m an artist, a virtuoso… I am the conductor of a great philharmonic orchestra, brilliantly guiding with my tongue a multitude of disparate musical instruments through The William Tell Overture toward a magnificent crescendo.

…it’s sooooo good… so hot, so hot, sooooo warm, the intestines… running down my leg… oh yeah, baby… there’s slime inside my shoe…

I am making every effort now to stanch the returning mental images of slithering guts... the missing arm, the eyeball still dangling. It is a hopeless cerebral game of whack-a-mole.

She notices again that I’ve withdrawn. Still breathing hard, she asks what’s wrong.

Nothing. I just…

She’s staring at me.

You know, Becky… as much fun as this has been with the tape and all… (hold on, hold on—the synapses are firing again), "…the tape, the tape is great, because I love the tape!" I grab it off the floor, tear off another piece, and paste it across her mouth.

This I am proud of. This is as near to genius as I will ever get. This is like discovering gold at Sutter’s Mill (without all the shouting).

I wait though, study her face, see if it is going to work for me or against me. (You can never be sure when you’ve just taped a woman’s mouth shut.) She is surprised, that much I can tell because her eyes are wide, intense. But as to whether she is smiling or frowning… well, I can’t see her mouth anymore. Then I feel her torso press against me, her right breast drops delicately to the side as she pushes into me, and there is a moan.

I have done good.

In fact, she is moving on her own—she is a locomotive that I have hurled heaping shovels-full of coal into. I smile and edge back down her twisting, turning body, to return to my previous line of work. Once there, she is most receptive to my efforts, and I can tell she is a mere moment or two from cresting the hill. She is shoving herself at me; her legs wrapped tightly around my head… which is why I can barely hear my phone ring.

It’s on the nightstand beside us, so she sees it. She sees that my phone says DAD, and surmises, incredibly, that it is my dad. Now she is suddenly transitioning from moaning behind the tape to a muffled verisimilitude of words. She is insisting on something. I look up from her nether regions as my phone continues to rattle. I reach for the tape on her mouth and gently remove it. She is still breathing hard, but she’s become someone else. Someone serious.

"It’s your dad."

Oh, okay, great, I’ll call him back, I say, before I move back down and try to bring back the momentum. But I am getting no response.

"You have to answer it," she says, and I perceive some irritation, as I realize I am now dealing with an unresponsive vagina (not all that common).

This is not a suggestion. It is said in a way that leaves me no option. I reach over and grab the phone, bring it to my ear. Hey, Dad…

Is this Robert? Robert? Then, as though he’s offering vital information: It’s your dad. Why he and the rest of his generation refuse to embrace the technology of today—and realize that the calling person’s name is on the phone of the person being called—I can’t figure out. He will forever identify himself to everyone who already knows who he is.

Yeah, Dad, I know. I always say this. What’s going on? Now I’m sitting on the side of the bed and Becky is watching me closely. She has become a jury of my peers, gathering information for judgement.

It’s your mother. I’m afraid she’s very sick. This from my dad.

Becky gasps. Now I know she can hear the conversation. I think about moving away, but it’s too late, she might take offense.

Uh-huh… I run my free hand up Becky’s smooth inner thigh.

Seriously, Rob, my dad says.

Okay…

I think she’s dying.

Another gasp from Becky.

And it might even be real this time.

Right. Well shoot. I know that’s not the right response, given the precarious position I’m in. Boy… I say, pushing it, that’s not good. That’s bad. It’s as sincere as I can be, but it elicits only a curious border-line glare from Becky.

A couple of things are going on here between me and my dad that you need to understand. One: as you may have gathered, this dying mother thing is not unfamiliar territory. And two: it’s possible that I have some unresolved issues with my mother. Which my shrink has all sorts of theories about.

Listen, Dad, I’m right in the middle of something. Can I call you back? I glance at Becky and see that her eyes have narrowed in a new way—it is inscrutable, this narrowing of the eyes—indicating something possibly perilous.

Meanwhile my dad is barreling ahead: Yeah, I took her over to the hospital this morning, after we found some blood in her poop…

For the record, there are so many things that disturb me about this… and it’s not just my father’s use of the word poop where stool might’ve been more appropriate. It is primarily the word we—as in, "we found some blood"—that paints a vexing picture for me, where I see the two of them, huddling over the toilet, examining my mother’s bloody shit.

My father continues, And there was some greenish, black chunks a somethin’ or other in there too. I’m so delighted to learn this tidbit too, as now I’m envisioning my parents with what, a flashlight, a magnifying glass, poking at her shit with a pencil? Don’t know what the hell those were, he adds, …kinda spongy, fell apart as soon as I stuck it with one of her nail files.

Now we have crossed the Rubicon.

So many things about my father puzzle me. Why, for instance, does he continue in perpetuity to entertain her hypochondria, her paranoia, her bottomless skewed perspective on the world? How does he just keep floating languidly down a river of crashing rapids? A river that might kill a skilled kayaker.

So I drove her over here to St. Michaels, my dad continues. She says she’d really like to see you… in case she passes.

Oh. Well, I’d love to, Dad, but I’ve gotta pitch a story in L.A. next week, so I’ve really need to work on it. Kind of a tight deadline.

Out of the corner of my eye, something about Becky’s face has gone from bad to worse. Will you un-tape my hands, please? This she says in a quick monotone that implies something close to hatred.

Who’s that? my dad asks.

Huh? Oh… a friend.

Un-tape me, please. This is firm, insistent, ice cycles hang from her breath.

What’s the matter with her? my dad asks.

Nothing. I just taped her wrists to the headboard, I say, as I reach for the scissors in the nightstand.

Oh, my father says, and then tells me about certain hospital foods that my mother is unhappy with. I cradle the phone between my ear and my shoulder, slip the point of a scissor blade under the twisted surgical tape at Becky’s wrist and work it slowly. I’m certain now her mood has taken a turn, though I’m still in a vastly gray area regarding her intentions. After all, when her hands are free, she could very well wrestle the scissors from me and slice me to pieces (just to see my innards slide around on the floor, ha-ha). My dad is saying things that I’m not hearing because I’m watching Becky free herself. Her breasts swing gently with her movement, so naturally the thought of renewed sex creeps up. But the thought is insane for a number of reasons, not the least of which is she looks seriously like she intends to kill me.

All of this, these thoughts, as entertaining and destructive as they are, are rollicking though my head like dancing cherubs, until vaguely I hear my father infuse: So, Robert, I need you to come over. Tomorrow? To the hospital. Now it’s a yes or no thing, and I’ve already used the busy-with-work excuse.

Tomorrow… uh, yeah, I’ll see if that works. This allows me time to find a buyable excuse in the interim. It’s a manageable task because I’m a vastly creative person.

Becky is now tearing the tape away from her wrists like they are on fire. All while watching me like I have sworn allegiance to the Third Reich.

I need you to talk to your brother and sister, too. I’m having a hard time getting in touch.

Oh. Gee, uh… …I don’t know, Dad. They’re… they’re not really people that I’m, you know… comfortable with.

Becky is free now, so my life is hanging in the balance. I decide to put the scissors back in the nightstand drawer, the back of it, where her accessing them would give me time to escape.

"And it’s important to me, Rob."

Crap. This is what my father does. He asks me to do things for my mother, not so much for my mother, but for him. I’ve been cornered. Yeah, sure, is what I finally say because I have no choice.

I actually like my dad, so this sort of tactic is wholly unfair. But for some reason, this anything-to-keep-the-peace is a weight he’s chosen to carry. It is a weight I cannot fathom.

Dr. Kagan is not so kind. He says my father’s quiet calm, his acquiescence in the face of my mother’s insanity and occasional cruelty, allows her to wield it unrestrained. And I, Kagan says, have been its victim. Especially in my youth. This isn’t to say my brother and sister haven’t been victims as well, but they came out of the meat grinder in two distinctly different ways. My brother, on the one hand, is an asshole without drive; my sister is a hypocrite… and some other things. Me, I’m subject to the occasional crippling depressive episode. Which, for the most part, is held at bay by my finely honed sense of sarcasm. And meds.

I’m off the phone now and see that Becky is by the door, her dress half on, her left breast still exposed; her shoes, bra, panties are all clutched tightly in one hand, her face red like the backside of a baboon. You are one fucked up asshole! This doesn’t really catch me by surprise, and while I’m trying to think of a clever pot-calling-the-kettle-black response—you know, with a twist—she adds, "How can you treat your own mother that way? Your own mother. She’s your family. You fucked-up asshole! Adding, Do not call me!" (As if there was a chance of that.)

And she is gone.

In a way, I feel sorry for her. She believes in a fantasy, a world that doesn’t really exist because (obviously) her parents created an illusion for her. No doubt they stuffed their marital problems just far enough below the surface to present a viable façade for poor Becky. But still those sub-rosa problems were existent enough to fuck her up. (On the other hand, the eviscerated body parts fetish is not so easy to figure out. My only guess is that her parents decorated her room with posters of bloody livers, lungs, tongues and of course, an eyeball.)

No matter what, she obviously feels a need to fight for her idea of a loving family in order to maintain her own illusion. She, I’m sure, expects to have an attentive husband and delightful, wondrous funny children who love and cuddle and respect her. She thinks she’ll celebrate teary-eyed anniversaries and birthdays, outdoorsy vacations in Yosemite. She’ll beam at graduations, sniffle at weddings, laugh at the Thanksgiving table and open thoughtful homemade gifts at Christmas. Well, fat chance. For one thing, that sort of thing takes two to tango and, from what I can see, she’s never taken a dance lesson. For another thing—who the fuck ever ends up with that?

Anyway this pissed off thing of Becky’s over my mother, it’s something that happens to me with women. They get pissed because I say something sarcastic or cynical about family; especially my family, especially my mother. And, of course, I get, Your mother is your mother. Sometimes, She gave you life, like that. Or, How can you be so ungrateful? And then I say something even more sarcastic and, bam, out the door they go.

I’m not saying it’s them, that they’re all crazy like Becky or irrational or misguided. Like Becky. It’s entirely possible the problem is, to a reasonable extent, me.

In my defense, Dr. Kagan says it’s not my fault, says I am who I am because I was raised in a less than nurturing environment with a pitiful maternal figure and therefore I’m not good at relationships with women.