I said, “Endi here’s a singer just like you.”
“No kidding?”
She shook her head in protest. “Just for fun.”
“No, no, she did an amateur show over in Venice last week—rocked the house.”
Candy Crush lady raised her head from her cell phone to glare at us.
Jensen said, “You guys wanna go downstairs and grab a coffee?”
“Good idea,” I said. “Looks like it could be a while.”
We rode the elevator down to the windowless café, got coffees, and found a little plastic booth. Looking out over the fluorescent-lit cafeteria, Endi said, “I really hate hospitals. When I was eighteen, I lived through my father’s heart attack.”
“Did he make it through?” Jensen asked.
“Yeah, sorta. I mean, he survived. But we thought it would scare him into relaxing a little. Instead, as soon as he returned to work, he got into this long-standing feud and almost lost his tenure. I mean, you’d think at his age he’d want to avoid stupid petty conflicts but…” She shrugged.
“That’s not how it works,” Jensen said sympathetically. “The older they get, the less they back down.”
“So true,” I said. “My uncle was very stubborn toward the end and…we had a falling out. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been trying to help Elkaim a little.”
“You mean,” Jensen said, “like…you’re trying to get some peace about feuding with your uncle by…helping his friend?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know it sounds crazy.”
“Not crazy at all,” Jensen said. “But it is a trip; it’s almost like…the whole purpose of life is really to just understand our parents or parent-figures or whatever.”
“You think?” Endi said.
“Speaking for myself?” Jensen stopped to consider—he was older than us by more than a few years, and I got the impression something paternal in him wanted to set us on the right path. “Yeah, definitely. Man, I thought my dad was larger-than-life. Only later did I figure out he was really just larger-than-life to me. My dad did Korea—he was convinced some divine force had seen him through battle.”
“What did he do when he came home?” Endi said.
“My dad? He tried to make it as an actor. He had the looks and plenty of charm.”
“Did he get work?”
“Eh, a little, a few small speaking parts in some junky TV stuff. Plus, he had a second-billing role in a thriller called Down a Dark Road, and after that he couldn’t get arrested. I think—well, this is the one thing he could never admit. But later, after a lot of psychoanalysis, I had to admit that maybe the reason things petered out for him was ’cause he got his shot in that movie, and it kind of proved he wasn’t…not that he couldn’t act, but he wasn’t star material. The movie’s not very good, and he’s part of why it ain’t that good.”
“That’s awful,” Endi said.
“No,” Jensen said, “it’s honest.”
I said, “Did he, like, give up?”
“Yup. After the movie tanked, he worked his way through law school selling appliances at Goodwin’s, and he did real good at all that. Not that he cared. I mean, here he was, a middle-class guy, a lawyer with two cars and a two-story home, best part of town, but he was miserable. Or at least he seemed miserable to me. All the good fortune in the world couldn’t heal that wound—he still thought of himself as a flop. He was kind of an ogre, too—verbally abusive to my ma. He could flip on a dime and go off, scare the daylights out of us.”
“That must have been so hard for you,” Endi said.
“Worst part was he…he exuded this real gnarly dissatisfaction. Nothing ever seemed to please him, like daily life was a chore or a humiliation. ’Cause no matter how good things got, well—he expected a different destiny.”
“My uncle had a little bit of that,” I said. “He made it through Korea too. He was a good man, he never took it out on us, but I don’t think he ever got over his big band days. And I wanted to cheer him up so bad.”
“Me too, man!” Jensen said. “I wanted to turn that shit around. I wanted to achieve what my pops couldn’t.”
“Like that would’ve helped,” Endi said wryly.
“It’s a child’s logic,” Jensen said. “Any shrink’ll tell you, you can’t beat someone at their own game and honor them at the same time. I got close—maybe closer than he ever got. I had a few tunes that were picked up for a silly beach flick, but to my surprise he wasn’t happy about it at all. ‘Frame the check,’ was what he said, which was just a potshot ’cause he knew they were paying me sub-scale.”
I said, “Ouch.”
“Anyway, the deal never even went down and he started encouraging me to quit. ‘Let’s just say showbiz wasn’t very kind to you.’ All kinds of subtle, nasty shit.”
“Such a bummer,” I said. “I can totally relate. I never did save my uncle’s good name.”
“Yup,” Jensen said with a sigh. “It’s hard.”
“But you persevered,” Endi said to him. “And you’re still making music. And helping people. That’s what counts.”
“That’s right,” Jensen said. “I turn to the art form for my sustenance. I try to get past the showbiz, the liars and grabbers and all that petty ego shit, and just do the work. And it isn’t about fame. It’s about putting a smile on their faces.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Hold on—lightbulb! Could Endi come to the nursing home for one of the sings? She really does have an amazing voice and the seniors would love her.”
Jensen said, “That’d be great.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t, I—”
