“Well, if you find one, you are going to hold on to every last thing that connects you.” I started to smirk and she said, “No, I’m serious, Adam. You will never know a minute’s peace till you have peace with the people you love.”
The rain picked up. I shoved the envelope back in my pocket and made for the glass doors, but she followed, grabbed my arm, and stopped me.
“Please. Let him sleep. Let him dream. He only wants his Emil back.”
“I can’t give him that.”
“But you can give him hope.”
“Hope for what?” My whisper went hard. “It isn’t safe here, Cinnamon. You should go home.”
Softly but firmly, she said, “This is home. I finally made it home.” Then she pulled the sliding glass door and stepped inside.
I left her sitting by his side in the dark and backed out the door, closed it, and staggered down the gray nursing home hall, agitated, panicky, and confused. Ten steps and I stopped in my tracks, looked over my shoulder and almost ran back—to plead maybe—but for what? She was ready to face the music, the impasse, put everything on the line while I fled like a coward. I turned for the door and a silver drinking fountain down the long hall stole my gaze—a vision—the ghost of Herschel standing there, bent over the arc of water, bent on survival. He turned his phantom face to me and a memory surged, one of those strange interruptions so vivid, it throttled me as I pushed out the door and made my way back to the car and sat behind the wheel, paralyzed.
The impasse. My impasse. The last phone call.
I was twenty-nine—that sobering age—no idea Herschel’s health was failing. I knew he was at the Shalom Terrace but visiting was out of the question—I wanted to spare him fresh bad news. I was broke again, flat broke, in debt and out of work. Maxed-out credit cards—for the weighted keyboard, the ProTools M Box, Logic software, eight-channel mixer, Carl’s Jr., etcetera. Then the unemployment checks ran out. In a panic, I did the job counseling thing—the lady they assigned me had that Resting Judgy Face. In some kind of kamikaze move, I confessed my dream—to become a professional songwriter. She managed to translate this to mean performer and went on a twenty-minute spiel about how I needed to be willing to play birthdays and weddings and bar mitzvahs. When I said, “Will I need to buy a clown suit?” she faked a smile. She had me marked as one of The Doomed.
Now I sat in my car but could not turn the key, eaten alive by flashbacks. Bahari was right. I was Mr. Unfinished Business. The last phone call—I held it off.
Next memory came like chain lightning. From the defeat of career counseling, I got a real estate broker’s license and entered the ninety-day New Salesman program at Keller Williams—the senior partner who came in twice a week to mentor had this odd verbal tic. “When the person client seller individual is seeking and desiring to unload their home house domicile residence—” A complete loon. But he was a closer. I, on the other hand, was not a closer. Every way a broker can, I dropped the ball. The office manager, overhearing me trying to make a phone sale said, “Jesus, Adam—stop being so damn gushing.” But how could I be anything but? I was walking wounded, gushing blood.
And I had such ambitions! Crazy ambitions!
I was going to be Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields or Lennon-McCartney, except in one person and during the twenty-first century. I was going to be Berlin, Porter, Dylan, Newman, and Buffet—the madman hubris of it, crazy enough to believe…no, not believe, to talk myself into believing. This was the primary business of my psyche—the talking oneself into. And I’d hit the wall, the place where you just can’t. The selling off of my gear was painful—one guy offered to buy my portable Tascam DR-100MKIII stereo recorder for $170—half of what I paid. I met him at Echo Park Lake, handheld recorder in my grip, and he got there fifteen minutes late with six $20 bills—$50 short. I thrust the damn recorder in his hand and walked off with the cash. Rent was eleven days late and I’d gotten into a fender bender with insurance lapsed. I needed exactly $1,450 to stay off the street.
And so I did the unthinkable. I called Uncle Herschel at the Shalom Terrace.
Now, sitting alone in my car in the rain, the last phone call came to me as crystalline and uncontainable as the rivulets streaming down the window.
I called from a park bench.
A nurse picked up and went to get him. The wait was endless. In the background I heard television, coughs, the delirious anti-quiet of midafternoon nursing home life.
Finally, Herschel with that gruffness: “Hullo?”
The last time I ever heard that voice, that hello.
And I’d said to him, explained in my cloying way, that I was desperate, the real estate thing had not worked out, and was there any way he could float me—a bridge loan—until…
“Genug.” He shut me up quick and furious. “Enough. You and I both know I am going to give you the money, so come and get the check. But don’t tire me with another story, Adam. Instead, ask yourself: Then what? These songs—you aren’t a little boy anymore.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means there comes a time when a man must face his limitations. A man—”
“Please, Uncle Herschel, don’t. I just need a short-term loan; you don’t have to dress down my whole character.”
“What character? Character is dropping every job? Living in a shoe closet?”
“That’s not what I mean. You don’t have to insult my music.”
“I am talking about your music—if you had what it takes you wouldn’t be in this predicament. Time’s up.”
“You don’t know that. You can’t say that. People tell me I’ve got something, they say—”
“Adam, what is going to happen to you when I’m gone? Who are you going to borrow from then?”
“No, that’s not—”
“Adam, I cannot stand here all day—I cannot stand to listen.”
“Yeah?” I said to the man who raised me, who always came through for me. “Well, this is who I am, take it or leave it.”
A pause, a millisecond that hangs in the ether for all eternity.
Herschel said, “Then I leave it,” and hung up.
I never went to pick up the check and I never spoke with him again.
Now I started the car, with a terrible, restless yearning—to see him, to be with him one last time, to apologize, mend the unmendable. Gasping for air—the memory of his final rejection only made me crave more, to connect, bond, bind for all time, but what could I possibly do with this violent frenzy of the heart? I could visit his grave, but the thought twisted me up inside like an old rag, and anyway I didn’t even know where his grave was. I headed for Maya’s, almost weeping again for the second time in twenty-four hours—I was losing it. I drove the freeway reckless. When I got there nobody was home—of course not. Steph was in elementary school; they were all at work. I knew they hid the key under the garage clicker, behind the pots. I let myself in and went upstairs, up into the attic, and knelt before Herschel’s trunk.
The impasse.
I started digging through—old letters, postcards, a photo book—the wedding, Lydia in white, all that jet-black-and-white hair, the Semites. Herschel’s diary—tomatoes / Food King = $1.18. There was a small, framed picture of my mom in there—I didn’t have the heart to stare at it for long. Then I opened the trumpet case—the horn was beautiful, golden, engraved—Fred Berman for Martin Custom, 1954. I tried to blow a note through it but only got a little squeak. With great care I placed it back in the purple velvet.
I kept digging—tax returns, meticulous stapled receipts, a matchbook from Earl Scheib Auto Body. Then, at the bottom, wedged under the trumpet case, an old pad, foolscap, top page blank. I flipped it open. Marked-up drafts, of letters he wrote—most to Maya, one to his cousins in Cleveland, one to his bosses at the DWP, and then the last one, to Charles Elkaim, August 16, 2016—he was not yet in the home. I sat with the fanned-out pages on my lap, scanned the neat cursive, nervous for what I might find, then my name—
