But mention cutting back on the meds—especially the expired stuff she gets from the lady upstairs—and she screams, “I NEED my medicine. I KNOW MY OWN BODY!” And she does. She stays on top of it. She’s taken over all of her body’s involuntary functions because she thinks she knows how to do it better. She wears her blood pressure cuff all day long and checks it on the hour, like a big rubber watch.

One day, the phone rings five minutes after I get to work and I know it’s my mother, because she’s the only one who calls five minutes after I get to work. I also know it’s her because even from my office on 9th Avenue in Manhattan, I can see her 84-year-old voice coiling up the phone cord all the way from Florida, like a spark on a fuse, until it hits and the receiver and goes off like a fire alarm. Which reminds me to put out my cigarette before I pick up. If I don’t, she’ll hear me inhaling smoke instead of air and say, “You know, cigarettes killed your father.” And then she’ll be ahead, points-wise.

She’s already talking when I get the phone to my ear. She wants to make sure I renewed the insurance policy that covers her prescriptions—her dozens of prescriptions. Without the coverage, she could never afford her medicine. Without the coverage, she’ll go broke in a month. Then she’ll run out of pills, which she thinks she needs to keep her heart pumping. Then she’ll die. Then she’ll blame it on me.

Which is why my heart stops when she asks me about it, because I don’t even know where the renewal application is. She mailed me the forms and her financial statements two months ago, but when I opened the envelope and it wasn’t a birthday card with money, I put it aside to fill out later. I do remember it was an irreplaceable-looking official document with account numbers and financial questions and my mother’s signature, which she signed before mailing it. And a line of red type: TO AVOID CANCELLATION OF THIS POLICY, RETURN PROMPTLY BY_____. A date that was now two days away. She could have called earlier to remind me, but as usual, she waited until the last possible minute, after she was sure I screwed up. Because I have to learn. And she believes that panic is the best teacher. (She lived though the War in Europe.)

I can’t tell her I already mailed in the application because she’ll hear me lying, the same way she can hear me smoking, from 2,000 miles away. So I tell her I’ll do it tonight. It’s at home. Which may be the truth, for all I know—I have no idea where it is.

“You lost it!” she says.

“No!” I say, “It’s at home…It’s probably at home.”

My mother takes care of herself. She vacuums. She does her own laundry. She pays the maintenance on her one-bedroom condo in Florida. She survives hurricanes. She calls the phone company if she sees something funny on her bill. She understands her phone bill. The only thing she leaves to me is this one life-and-death detail. I think she wants to see exactly how much I want her to live.

“Andreas,” she says (she refuses to call me Andy like everybody else. She named me Andreas. It’s my slave name), “I need my medicine. How could you be so sloppy? Is that how you run your business?” As a matter of fact it is. I have nothing but 22-cent stamps and dried-out Bics.

Now I need my cigarettes. I’m staring at them the whole time she’s telling me what’ll happen if she loses her insurance. She goes through the classic stages of dying—denial, anger, depression, but she’s strong enough to slam down the phone before she gets to “acceptance.”

Then I light up a Merit and start tearing apart my1,000 square foot office looking for her 11-inch envelope. I’m digging though piles of unopened mail that look important, IRS stuff mainly, but I keep going. If my mother’s envelope isn’t here, I’ll have to run home and tear up my apartment, too. I’ve got to get this thing in the mail now. I can’t believe I let this happen—again.

I’m losing hope, thinking she’s got me this time, when suddenly there it is, under a pile of junk mail. Right where I left it. I pull out the renewal application and the bank statements and I immediately fill in the blanks.

Then I pick up the phone and call my mother. I’m back on top, so I don’t even put out the cigarette. Besides, I can always spin the receiver away from my mouth so she won’t hear me when I take a puff. But when she answers, I chicken out and lay the cigarette in the ashtray and I say, “Okay, it’s done. You worry too much.”

I can hear her breathing. I can tell she’s trying to regroup. She’s looking for an angle but she can’t find one. I’m in total control.

So I reach for my cigarette.

But it’s not in the ashtray.

It rolled off, and is now smoldering on top of the insurance forms. It’s in the middle of an expanding brown hole with glowing edges. It’s burning right through the account numbers, the social security number, the pre-paid return envelope—everything that means anything.

I tell my mother I better get it in the mail right away, hang up, and frantically swat out the flames. I was THIS CLOSE, and now everything is literally up in smoke. The only readable thing left in the pile of ash is the insurance company’s logo and a 1-800 phone number. I call and—miraculously—a human answers. The woman on the line laughs when I confess what’s going on—I’m way too rattled to think up any lies. She tells me not to panic. I’ve still got two days until the deadline. She’ll just overnight me a new application with all the important info. I have plenty of time to fill it out and overnight it right back to her. I tell her to make sure she sends it to me, not my mother. Then just to be sure, I tell her again: “Send it to me, not my mother.”

Thankfully, it arrives the next morning at nine. As I fill out the forms, I am suddenly, eerily reminded of forging my mother’s signature on my report cards as a boy. I lick the envelope closed and I’m at FedEx by eleven, waiting in line and wondering why my mother keeps asking me to handle this stuff when it just pisses us both off.

As the line snakes forward, I realize why she keeps trying. She could easily handle it herself, but she wants to give me a chance to get it right. And that makes me less annoyed. Stepping up to the counter, I swear to myself that I’ll get better at this kind of thing.

Because Mom won’t be around forever. And when she passes on—well, funerals are complicated. Who knows what kind of paperwork I’ll have to deal with.

“When I lost my corporate driver’s job last year, I traded in a black car for a yellow one but didn’t see any reason to stop providing professional, courteous, positive service to my clients. Think of me as an icon on your computer desktop. A ‘POSITIVITY’ icon. If you’re feeling down, just double-click on me.”

Then he passed a homemade computer-generated greeting card trough the bulletproof divider. It said, “Thank You…” in fancy script on the front above a bucolic scene of swans on a lake. The message continued inside: “… for being a valued client! I have appreciated serving you. Paul J.– Your POSITIVE Cabby.” And despite my usual cynicism, the guy actually brightened my morning.

I thanked him and he gave me a little tip of the hat in the mirror. Then he became quiet for a few blocks, apparently out of script. At the next red light he said, “Once the convention gets here next week, this traffic’s going to be a fucking nightmare.”

This was 40 years ago. I was 13. Emil was about 65. When we first met, Emil said my name out loud, then repeated it backwards. I was Eetserk Eedna. He did this with everyone. We called Emil Schupp “Puh-push Lime,” with a little stutter on the P. Or simply, “Mr. Puh-push.”

He was one of Dad’s tenants in the single-room boarding house above the luncheonette and an obsessive-compulsive 3-ring circus.

Emil kept a written record of the times he turned on and off every light in his place. He kept a running total for each bulb, keeping an eye on how close it was getting to the manufacturer’s promised life-expectancy printed on the package. With a 1000-hour bulb, he started getting anxious around hour 800 and set out a fresh one next to the reading lamp on his nightstand. It was on deck. If a bulb died after only 500 hours, he wrote an irate note to G.E. or Sylvania and started checking his mail exactly a week later. He once showed me a free six pack of 75-watt Soft Whites he got, along with a letter of apology.

Up in his apartment Emil had a dozen pairs of identical black dress shoes that he polished every Sunday, even the ones he hadn’t worn. Sometimes I helped him, but I had to follow his instructions to the letter. He kept them lined up against the wall by his bed and covered with a long sheet of wax paper to keep off the dust. Once a week he shook the paper out the window. Once a month he rolled out a fresh sheet.

He was very particular.

He wore a suit and hat every day and he always smelled like baby powder. The plump body under his clothes must have been as dry and white as a powdered donut.

At the lucheonette, Emil never spread the pats of butter that came with his breakfast. He centered the yellow square tiles perfectly on the brown square toast and let them melt slowly while he unfolded his paper napkin and centered it on his lap.

Every Friday night, while my father was working, Emil and I went bowling together. Dad felt bad for him because he was alone and said it wouldn’t kill me if once a week I acted like the grandson he never had. We went to Bowlmor Lanes over on University Place. Emil didn’t trust the food there–French fries and hot dogs–so for snacks he always brought along two strange, dry foreign cookies that I’d never seen anyone else eat. One for me and one for him.

Emil would unpack his bowling shoes and mint-condition ball, then spend half an hour picking though the alley balls until he found one that was weighted and balanced perfectly for me.

I was a lousy bowler. Because, like everything, I never took it as seriously as Emil took, well, everything. But after each ball he’d say, “Not bad, but move your approach one board to the right and aim one board to the left of the second arrow.” And I’d roll again and pick up maybe two pins. “Okay,” he’d say, “now try moving forward half a shoe and twist your wrist five degrees.”

Emil worried about my game, not his. He had plenty of time to practice alone during the week when the alleys were empty and he could concentrate.

When we finished three games, he’d fold up the score sheet, in eighths, and take it home with him to analyze the data. The next morning, at his regular stool in the luncheonette, he’d explain what I needed to work on if I wanted to raise my lifetime average by one pin.

So one Saturday morning he shows up at the luncheonette, excited as usual. With his shiny shoes and baby smell and the notebook containing every stat on every game we ever bowled together, and he heads for his regular stool at the end of the counter.

And a stranger is sitting there.

I’m behind the counter helping out while Dad’s in the kitchen, but I forgot to reserve Emil’s spot for him like we’re supposed to. So Emil is completely unhinged and he waits in the aisle right behind this guy, staring over his shoulder, watching him just start on an omelet. He’s totally rattled. His baby powder is probably caking up. And he’s not even looking at all the empty stools at the counter.

He’s been standing there holding my bowling record book for about 15 minutes when I start wondering how long he’ll last. Half an hour? A week? I don’t know. But this is an irresistible opportunity to find out. So when the stranger finally asks for his check and I see Emil perk up, I hand the guy a Daily News from behind the counter and pour him a fresh cup of coffee. “Free refills,” I say–which is not Dad’s policy–and he lights a cigarette and opens the paper and settles in for the day. Just like I planned.

I look over the stranger’s shoulder at Emil, standing in the aisle behind him. Emil’s mouth is open. His eyes are going pink around the rims and they’re wide and they’re staring at me. Like he doesn’t understand why I just stabbed him in the heart. And I know that’s exactly what I just did. And I can’t look at him, so I make believe I’m busy wiping off the other end of counter.

When I finally look up, Emil is gone. His notebook is on the counter next to the stranger who stole his place.

He never came back to the luncheonette and I never helped him with his shoes again, and we never went bowling again.

There are healthy obsessions and unhealthy obsessions. Most people have a couple of each. I’ve always thought I have neither.

I’d love to be a Revolutionary War nut, or a car nut, or someone who still loses sleep over the Warren Commission, or even someone who is compelled to count every crack in the sidewalk. But I’m not. I’m just regular. Unlike Emil.

I knew him over 40 years ago. So, okay, maybe I do have one obsession. I mean sometimes I might lose a little sleep over Mr. Puh-push.