Radio Free Montone: Remembering Bruna Montone, 'The Hill Street Wildcat'
By John Montone, 1010 WINS
Another legend is gone and right before the hurricane.
That was a text sent by a friend upon learning that my mother had passed away last week even as Joaquin was gathering strength in the Atlantic. And she nailed it. Because my mother's life was like a cyclone. Always threatening to blow away everything in sight.
As a child in Hudson County she was known as, "The Hill Street Wildcat," a nicknamed earned by her obsession with striking out at those neighborhood kids who had done her wrong. Decades later she still proudly spoke of a little boy who idolized her and to gain favor would carry out her commands, once firing a large clump of dog poop at two sisters who refused to allow my mother to join them in their backyard.
Her credo was, "I don't get mad, I get even." And if there was a grudge-holder's hall of fame, Bruna Montone would be enshrined. She never passed a certain family member's house without slowing down to make a hand gesture that roughly meant, "Stick it where the sun don't shine." And at her wake a dear old friend who was no longer on speaking terms with my mother said, "You never knew when you'd end up on her…list."
I spent many a week, even a month at a time on her "list." Often not knowing why. And my term would not end until I apologized. For "sorry" was not a word that came easily to my mother. But in other situations she was ready and able to let her tongue run wild. I'm convinced she invented "road rage." For when another driver cut her off she would roll down the window of our family's Dodge Dart and scream, "Two blankin' flats!" Yea, she used that word in all of its grammatical forms. "That fat blank." "Tell him to blank himself." Or her favorite, "Blank, blank blank!"
My mother was physically beautiful. Quite smart. And artistic. I have no doubt that had she been a baby boomer she would have gone to college and enjoyed a successful career in fashion or home decorating. As it was she mostly avoided work and was miserable when she toiled as an office clerk. So she shopped. For clothes. For furniture. Just for the sake of shopping and driving my penny-pinching father crazy.
She loved her three grand children and they loved her. "Nonni," they called her. They had food fights with her when they were young and they drank with her as young adults. Did I mention she liked to drink? Well, she did.
What she also enjoyed was playing Scrabble. She played with friends and a cousin and with me. I believed her when she said she almost always beat her friends and her cousin. But she could not beat me. For reasons probably best left to Dr. Freud we played those games as if the outcomes would settle some unspoken, mortal competition that had little to do with which one of us had a better vocabulary.
I liked to remind her that I was undefeated. And she would remind me that once while on vacation she had a big lead when we had to set the board aside for dinner, during which my first son in the throes of terrible-two-dom, flipped over the board and tiles.
My mother immediately declared victory.
But I refused to concede defeat for more than twenty years. Until I spoke at her grave. "I give you that win, mom" I said. I just wish I hadn't waited until then to say it.
