My Problematic Mother
Lane Schwartz ~ 01/08/2025
First of all, Hi, I’m Lane and I should introduce myself. I’m the new contributor here at Riot Club. But I’m so much more than that, I’m an artist, a dancer, a DJ, an intellectual, an amateur freelance psychoanalyst, and a proud defender of women. I hope to bring a calming and feminine presence to a magazine rife with subtle misogyny and testosterone.
That being said, I thought I’d write a piece about my “mother”. I put mother in quotations, because she has deemed (and I wholly agree) that is her slave name. For the remainder of my essay, I will refer to her chosen name Ra-Puram or RP.
Despite being born to a middle class family in Ann Arbor, Michigan, RP rejected the post-industrialism and development of the greater Detroit area and fled to Los Angeles to pursue a modeling career at the age of 20. It was there she met who would become my father, or as we would call him during my adolescence, “The Captain”. It wasn’t until I was at NYU when I found out that he was nothing more than a part-time reservist, but that is a story for another day.
When he had impregnated my mother, she had bravely attempted to obtain an abortion, but was intercepted before she made it to the door by a nude modeling agent recruiting pregnant women for a fetish magazine he was producing a shoot for.
* * *
On several occasions through my childhood, Ra-Puram and I would attend many different types of religious and spiritual services. You would have thought when we left Heaven’s Gate in 1997, RP would have reevaluated her spiritual journey, but she courageously intensified her soul searching. Does that remind you of anyone you know? Haha.
After her name change, her subsequent passing off of motherly duties to her parents in Ann Arbor, I (now 10) became accustomed to a different life.
* * *
Between my 1st and 2nd senior year at NYU, Ra-Puram reached out to me for the first time in years. I was not resentful in any way, she was just living her truth. She had reached out to express her concern for my impending volunteering in Australia I was going to spend the summer doing. You see, the indigenous peoples of Australia, more commonly known as aboriginals are a neglected people. The disgusting Aussie truckers sometimes refer to them as “thwacks” for the sound they make when they are caught in the middle of the road and fatally struck by a truck. Charities and aboriginal outreach programs have worked tirelessly to help the indigenous people understand that roads cannot be stood on or slept on, receive medical care, and get food and shelter assistance. While I was looking for opportunities to give back, I coincidentally met a guy at a RAINN meeting and he started telling me about DeeJays Without Borders and I knew it was the right move for me. I used almost HALF of my birthday money from my grammy and grampy and decided to purchase about $8,000 dollars in DJ equipment. I know it was so generous of me, but I really felt moved to bring the joys of electronic dance music to these impoverished people. Ra-Puram had reached out to tell me she was concerned for my safety as her boyfriend Pajeetan saw a video where their leader C8 told them Australia was going to burst into flames in that summer. Thankfully, his prediction was wrong, because I was undeterred.
My time in Australia was transformative. While there, I had temporarily adopted a little aboriginal boy to act as my assistant, carrying my equipment, setting up the gear, and preventing thieves from walking off with my turntables. He was quite a worker and as much as it tore me apart we left him in a village on our last stop of the Deejays without borders tour. It was there I met my friend Andrew who would later get me into stand-up comedy and performance art. Anyways, I heard my boy-assistant was killed by a truck while he slept in the road. His name was Daku Daku, meaning in his language “Sand Hill, Sand Hill” . To this day, I can’t see a sand hill without remembering the fun times we had together.
