My Sister Emily

My sister Emily called from Oakland Sunday night.

“Are you all right?” she said in an anxious voice.

“I’m fine.”

“I worried about you during The Trouble.”

“There was no trouble,” I said. “Everything is normal.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. We couldn’t be more normal. There was a car fire on the San Diego this morning, a mattress on the Ventura and a naked fat lady hitchhiking on the Hollywood. Life goes on in post-Verdict L.A.”

“I prayed for you.”

She has been praying for me for 50 years.

She prayed for me when I discovered sex, when I entered college, when I went to war, when I began drinking martinis and when I moved to L.A.

Since I have managed to survive all those episodes, she gives full credit to her supplications. It’s like the guy who hangs garlic on his door to protect him from vampires. Laugh at him and he says, “I’ve never been bitten by one, have I?”

Emily, like everyone else, doesn’t believe the media. She is certain there was trouble in L.A. but it is being covered up.

“Let me assure you,” I said, “there was more chaos in our house Saturday than there was in the South-Central section of the city.”

Our grandchildren were over for the weekend. Travis, Shana and Nicole. They ran hooting clockwise through the house.

Nicole led the rampage. “Everybody holler and wave their arms!” she said.

“I’m not sure there still won’t be trouble,” Emily said.

“Don’t do this to me. We’ve come through a long, cold winter of the soul. Let it be.”

“But you still have elections coming up,” she warned. Dire warnings are as much a part of Emily as drool is to a baby.

“Our elections don’t cause riots. They’re never that exciting. The most noteworthy moment of this campaign, for instance, was when one candidate almost drowned trying to hold an underwater press conference.”

“Oh, my God,” Emily said. “I’ll pray for him.”

“I think it’s too late.”

“He died?”

“No, but he hasn’t got a chance in hell of winning.”

I became more emphatic.

“Look,” I said, “the crisis is past in L.A. We’re OK, really. There are bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover.”

Emily loved the songs of World War II. She still prays for them.

“What about that boogie-woogie concert?”

She meant the rap concert at Six Flags Magic Mountain.

“That was just your normal too-many-people, not-enough-seats rap and civic disturbance concert. Psychologists would explain it by saying those unable to get in suffered flashbacks of infantile rejection and were expressing repressed anger.”

“Didn’t they break windows at some restaurant?”

“That had to do with self-hatred,” I explained. “They were smashing their own reflected images. They’ll be on the ‘Phil Donahue Show’ Thursday to explain everything.”

“I’ll pray for them.”

I was delighted to report to Emily how truly boringly calm everything seemed to be that Sunday night.

I had watched the 11 o’clock news just to be sure. There wasn’t even an animal atrocity in Sun Valley.

Emily called after the newscast was over. She never sleeps. Good Catholics are always on the alert for evil.

When I was 12, I ran away from home. They found me sinking in quicksand at the Oakland Estuary at 3 o’clock in the morning.

Emily was ready. She prayed for me. “Thank God you’re safe,” she said when they dragged me out.

“You rotten little scum,” a Protestant cop said. “You do this again, I’ll break every bone in your mackerel-snapping body.”

“Torture him,” my sister Mary said. She was less merciful than Emily.

When we got home, Emily gave me the Dutch rub. It consisted of rubbing one’s knuckles hard over the victim’s head. She was not completely without what Horace called “a transient madness.”

“That’ll keep him out of the muck,” Mary said. “Now smack him.”

By the time Emily hung up Sunday night, she was reasonably convinced she had once more conned God into looking out for me.

“But if there’s even the hint of trouble,” she admonished, “you call me right away.”

That goes without saying. There’s nothing like prayer, bullets and fear of the old Dutch rub to ward off the evil spirits of L.A.