Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison

being haunted by a Jewish mother’s ghost was the neatness. Lance’s mother had been an extremely neat person. One could eat off the floor. Lance had never understood the efficacy of such an act, but his mother had always used it as a yardstick of worthiness for housekeeping.
    Lance, on the other hand, was a slob. He liked it that way, and for most of his thirty years umbilically linked to his mother, he had suffered the pains of a running battle about clothes dropped on the floor, rings from coffee cups permanently staining the teak table, cigarette ashes dumped into the waste baskets from overflowing ashtrays without benefit of a trash can liner. He could recite by heart the diatribe attendant on his mother’s having to scour out the wastebasket with Dow Spray.
    And now, when by all rights he should have been free to live as he chose, at long last, after thirty years, he had been forced to become a housemaid for himself.
    No matter where he went in the house, Mom was there. Hanging from the ceiling, hiding in the nap of the rug, speaking up at him from the sink drain, calling him from the cabinet where the vacuum cleaner reposed in blissful disuse. “A pigsty,” would come the voice, from empty air. “A certifiable pigsty. My son lives in filth.”
    “Mom,” Lance would reply, pulling a pop-tab off a fresh can of beer or flipping a page in Oui , “this is not a pigsty. It’s an average semiclean domicile in which a normal, growing American boy lives.”
    “There’s shmootz all over the sink from the peanut butter and jelly. You’ll draw ants.”
    “Ants have more sense than to venture in here and take their chances with you.” He was finding it difficult to live. “Mom, why don’t you get off my case?”
    “I saw you playing with yourself last night.”
    Lance sat up straight. “You’ve been spying on me!”
    “Spying? A mother is spying when she’s concerned her son will go blind from doing personal abuse things to himself? That’s the thanks I get after thirty years of raising. A son who’s become a pervert.”
    “Mom, masturbation is not perversion.”
    “How about those filthy magazines you read with the girls in leather.”
    “You’ve been going through my drawers.”
    “Without opening them,” she murmured.
    “This’s got to stop!” he shouted. “It’s got to end. E-n-d. End! I’m going crazy with you hanging around!”
    There was silence. A long silence. Lance wanted to go to the toilet, but he was afraid she’d check it out to make sure his stools were firm and hard. The silence went on and on.
    Finally, he stood up and said, “Okay, I’m sorry.”
    Still silence.
    “I said I was sorry, fer chrissakes! What more do you want from me?”
    “A little respect.”
    “That’s what I give you. A little respect.”
    More silence.
    “Mom, you’ve got to face it, I’m not your little boy anymore. I’m an adult, with a job and a life and adult needs and…and…”
    He wandered around the house but there was only more silence and more free-floating guilt, and finally he decided he would go for a walk, maybe go to a movie. In hopes Mom was housebound by the rules for ghost mothers.
    The only movie he hadn’t seen was a sequel to a Hong Kong kung fu film, Return of the Street Fighter . But he paid his money and went in. No sooner had Sonny Chiba ripped out a man’s genitals, all moist and bloody, and displayed them to the audience in tight closeup, than Lance heard the voice of his mother behind him. “This is revolting. How can a son of mine watch such awful?”
    “Mom!” he screamed, and the manager came down and made him leave. His box of popcorn was still half full.
    On the street, passersby continued to turn and look at him as he walked past conversing with empty air.
    “You’ve got to leave me alone. I need to be left alone. This is cruel and inhuman torture. I was never that Jewish!”
    He heard sobbing, from just beside his right ear. He threw up his hands. Now came