The Will

His will is a joke, but it's legally binding one. Now that he's dead the punchline is knocking the wind out of his family.

And the sun came again as it always does. Creeping across the earth creating new dawns just micrometers away from the last ones. This particular morning’s sun, the sun that appeared in the sky the day after my father’s funeral, had snuck its rays in through the bedroom window and landed them directly across my eyes. I imagined the sun’s brass teeth reflecting off a giant bepearled mirror as he smiled knowingly at himself with his back to us. I succumbed to his urgings and put my feet to the floor.

The morning’s business was grave: A hunched schlep to the bathroom, head down in the shower with hand on wall as the water came to a point at my nose and fell to the tub floor. Last week’s towel facing the challenges of today. Today: the sixth day of my life in which talking to my father was completely out of the question.

In the living room I sat for a moment on the arm of the couch and rifled through the papers I’d received from Dad’s lawyer. The meeting with his lawyer was today, but ever since Dad died I’ve had a hard time with seeing his name in 12 pt. Times New Roman alongside words like ‘executor’ and ‘codicil’. When a man like Dad gets called up to The Big Brass Tooth Polishers Union or whatever In The Sky, he is to leave behind several vertical yards of stacked bland black and white paper. It’s the job of level headed people in grey or blue or black suits to see to it that these papers pass through their brains and leave their client’s next of kin with some tangible semblance of what happens next. Their offices are like a player piano, the documents are the roll of hole punched melody, the minds of the level headed people in grey or blue suits are the pressurized air that brings you the music. Money is the hand that plugs the whole mess into the wall.

As I shuffled to my car, eyes watery from an ill-advised glance at Mr. Morning Sun and car key narrowly missing the keyhole by a matter of micrometers, I heard my name cried out from across the street. When I looked in the direction of the exclamation I was met with a familiar face.

“You hear all those cops last night?’ my neighbor Harry spat out in maybe five syllables, max.

“I did.” I said slowly and deliberately “What do you think it was?”

“I can only hear them from my bathroom and I heard them two times in a row so I guess there musta been at least a…” he gently trailed off and looked glassily into the distance as he plunged into a bog of tricky bathroom visit calculations.

“Yeah there were lots of sirens” I said while taking a step backwards, hoping to break the spell cast by the calculations by implying with body language that I was going to go ahead and get into my car now. “Well, see you later Harry”

“Yeah see ya” he said, without fully closing his mouth or breaking eye contact with the distance.

By the time I got to dad’s lawyer’s place, an old repurposed bank in the middle of downtown, my palms were sweating and the voice in my head was broadcasting a catalog of all the things I could convince myself I needed to do before thinking or talking about my dad’s will. It was knowing that I’d never find a parking spot this good downtown again that convinced me it was time to get out and get it over with. Dad would have found the perfect parking spot and walked right in without any hand wringing.

“Alan’s with another client but they’ll be done any minute” said Shannon, the receptionist at Dad’s estate lawyer’s office as I walked through the door. Without looking up from her computer she added “this can’t possibly take long…I’ve seen the finances”, and proceeded to mouth the word “broke” silently.

“Oh g-good” I said, realizing halfway through that Shannon’s playful candidness about the affairs of mourning spouses and children is less fun from my side than her’s.

“Didja hear all those sirens last night? They must’ve had every cop in town going down Main.” she said to somebody I could only assume was me.

“Yeah there was a-“

“I know, talk about a good time to rob the 7-11” she giggled to the person on the other end of the bluetooth headset she had in her ear.

I blushed to no one and reached for a magazine from the table in the middle of the waiting room. My hand was halfway to the May 2014 issue Field & Stream when the door to Alan Adams’ office creaked open and I was met with the anguished face of two identical middle aged men.

“We’ll talk soon, fellas. Drive safe” said Alan Adams in his big booming voice as he held the door open for the twins.

“Thanks Alan” the men said in perfect doleful unison as they made their way heavily across the waiting room.

“Nice boys” Alan said to to me over his shoulder as he led me down the thick green carpeted hall “Their seventy five year old father was mowed down in the crosswalk not three blocks from here a few weeks back. You hear about that? Now they’re in a battle with the aunt over the diminutive family jewels and it’s getting ugly. Again, I’m sorry about your dad. You hear all those sirens last night?” Before I could respond he ushered me into his office and slammed the door behind us.

Remember the main song from that Mel Gibson movie where he’s like a hapless handyman in a small town who who falls in love with the reclusive lady who lives in the rundown mansion? Dad wrote that. He also wrote a bunch of theme songs for kid’s shows, as well as a couple pricy cuts you could only hear in the exclusive armored elevator cars in Trump Tower in the 90s. He’d sell his music to whomever was buying, but the truth was that these songs - born in his head, raised on the piano in our living room, and buried in the hearts of just about everyone who heard them - would’ve existed whether they made him money or not. He spent so much time humming to himself that the flower portrait at his funeral had “hmmmm mmm” spelled out in miniature carnations next to his mouth. Everyone agreed that it made the likeness much more realistic.  He enjoyed of his work as a songwriter for hire, but he reserved a special wistful, distant smile for when he was talking about his old band The Copper Kettles.

The Copper Kettles were a seminal psychedelic folk band that rose to prominence in the late 60s, then, like all good psychedelic folk rock bands, sort of just fizzled out in the late 70s. They snuck into the limelight as part of the British Invasion, though they were, in fact, all from the suburbs outside Chicago. Why Michael Reinchower, The Kettles’ vocalist/bassist/democratically elected talking head decided to adopt a Liverpudlian Scouse when talking on stage or giving an interview is a mystery, though his later adoption of existential nihilism would suggest he did it “because why not?”.

Dad was really just the chord man. That is to say, he was not invited to jam in Reinchower’s mother’s garage that gloomy day in 1964 because of his jacket fringe length choices, and he definitely wasn’t begged to tour the world on a private jet playing sold out stadiums in 1977 because of his groundbreaking ideas regarding sideburns. No, he was there to make everyone sound good. He had an uncanny ability to fix the mistakes the other guys would make in real time. He could feel a clam coming from any direction, and he’d modify the chords to wrap around the sour note and justify it. What’s more, he did this with a tact and grace that kept him revered by the critics and somewhat overlooked by the fans. Right where he wanted to be.

The Kettles’ star rose fast. When a local radio DJ heard their set at a dance marathon he set out to make sure everyone in Chicago knew their name. From there it was a whirlwind of grimy bars, motels, recording studios, ballrooms, hotels, and mansions. Then, just as quickly as it happened, it was over. No hard feelings, no strings attached. My sister and I were born in the 80s and it all became a hazy fairytale.

From the diary of Michael Reinchower - June 23rd, 1970 -

    Seventeen days out and the madness is already setting in. Seems it happens earlier each time. The boys and me don't go looking for highs so much as concentrated doses of overexposure. Find yourself out on a raft in the middle of the Atlantic and you'll see God. After the hunger pains find their way into your bones, but before the sun takes your voice and eyesight, He'll show. He's got a sense of humor. In their own way, everyone does. The Eskimos have 50 words for snow and I'll bet dollars to donuts one of them is about how cold it is on your balls if you misjudge a squat. The road is the sea. The miles must be covered, no matter how many creature comforts we indulge in, and home is everywhere and nowhere. Some of the boys find comfort in the arms of party crashers and wanderers, others find it in the negative space between the flecks of whatever's going up their noses that week. I once woke up at the bottom of a swimming pool when I was nine. Sleepwalking. The frantic dream I was having required me to keep my mouth clamped shut, lest I give away the secret location of my parents to the white hot goblin pursuing me in my peripherals. I must have sucked an 8-ball's worth of chlorine through my nose on that warm July night, and now I get a little touchy about what goes up there. When the boys are riding the whitening I just watch and drink and pray.

Last night we got into a bad one. I've tried to piece it together, but there's an upside down fifth of Jim taking up the center third of my field of vision in about eighty percent of the flashes. The gig was a wildfire and our feet never touched the ground. Seventeen days in is where we're reintroduced to our real selves. The riffs lock and the mix is cleaned up and our voices are in their golden hour. It's a dangerous time. We've still got it in our guts to howl at the moon. Mix that with the high you get from looking out into a sea of reverent faces for an hour and you've got a recipe for dilated pupils at dawn. Gutter turndown service. The boys and me got mixed up with some lower east side royalty early in the evening. Bo Walkoviak, the photographer, caught us as we were going up the stairs at the Fillmore East and we couldn't shake him. He's in the bathroom now blowing his nose and clogging the toilet with the bloody wads. Bo's got a new exhibit opening next month and he's hung up on it. He was talking about it all damn night, and he was always getting down on his stomach on the hot NYC sidewalk to snap pictures of garbage. His whole exhibit is black and white pictures of garbage. He said it's like writing a song.

           The boys were getting out of their minds and I was there to watch it all go down. The boys and Bo wrote up their wills on the back of a sign that said ‘Charles Goodell for Senate’. Bo dragged us uptown to his lawyer's place and screamed to him from the street until he opened the window and told Bo he didn't need a lawyer to make the wills binding. We were all witnesses. We signed in blood and outlined the streaks in black felt pen. Snowblind in June and I was in no state to drive the plow.

           Heavy from my meeting with Alan, I wandered outside and stared up at the skyscrapers of downtown like an ant among tombstones. I scurried to the car and sat down in the driver's seat to let the new information sink in. If thoughts and worry had mass, the Subaru’s suspension would be fully compressed by now. Dad didn't give much thought to dying, but he had definitely put a lot of thought into the big finish. He told me once about Paul Desmond loaning his piano to a club owner, so long as it was agreed that it would be moved back to Paul's apartment after his death. Once they got the piano back to Desmond's apartment and read his will they discovered that he had left it to the club owner and his club all along. "You can almost hear Paul's laughter turning into a hacking cough from down below" said dad with a smile. I wasn't smiling now. I loved my Dad, and I always skipped past the Rolling Stone articles that mentioned his peculiar last wishes. There was nowhere to hide now. An ant among tombstones. I think Dad would've changed his will to spare us all the agony and horror of its contents if he actually thought he could die, but that wasn't really him. I think he found it hard to imagine that Death would come ripping if he was halfway through a tune, so he always juggled five or six. Surely the reaper would wait until he finished the watermelon in the fridge or the tank of gas in the car. That's not really how death works. He finishes the watermelon for you by making your family too grief stricken to eat. The family sells the car because they can't stand how it still smells like you, and the new owner gets a free almost full tank as a quick cosmic bonus to tip the scale in their favor until they leave behind their own surplus.

           I wouldn't be so worried about Dad's will if I didn't have this debt. Weighing me down, flashing in orange and green from just out of frame, screaming in my ears when I lay in bed at night. My addiction was slowly dismantling the almost-normal life I had built for myself.

           I guess I started putting the organ together when I was around 19. At the time I was working as an engineer's apprentice at the studio where Dad did most of his small combo  recording. The gig was as easy to secure as Dad saying "hey can my boy come by here and learn to work the board sometime?" offhandedly to the owner one day over a smoke in the parking lot. I enjoyed the work, and eventually I made my way up to head engineer of Studio B. The small room with the green walls. The bump in title came with a bump in responsibility, which was fine by me; I could handle hungover drummers and the occasional fried circuit board. It also came with more money, which is where this story, as well as so many others, goes south.

           Dad always had keyboards of all shapes and sizes around when I was a kid, and my infatuation started then. He'd stack them up in the living room and jam along to whatever records people had sent him that month. Drifting in and out of time and key, his ability to alter the entire soul of a song with a few well placed notes fascinated me. Sometimes I'd sit next to him on the piano bench and he'd guide me through the changes of an old do wop number, other times we'd both go nuts on the Moog to B*****s Brew or Live at Fillmore. These special moments in which my father and I were creating music together felt maybe how Jackson Pollock would probably feel splattering his drunken misery all over a DaVinci. Soon enough my dad was kindly asked by my mother to move all but the Steinway baby grand to the studio he was spending most of his work hours in, and our living room voyages were over. Though I never learned to play the piano properly, I did still keep a keyboard in my room to play along to records by myself, always chasing the feeling of sitting next to a master and absorbing his triumphs as my own.

           After a few months on the job I got a two bedroom place of my own by the beach. A year after that I bought a secondhand organ from a friend of my father's who had modified it to play a range of sounds far removed with what you'd hear in a church. I mounted my keyboard on the wall above it, well within reach.

Cut to a few years down the line and we’re talking about the only part of the floor not covered in cables is the acute triangle cleared out by the door when I squeeze in. I’ll spare you the real gristly details of the steps I had to take to turn the entire room into a 360° keyboard monstrosity, but let’s just say I won’t be getting my deposit back. Who’s the landlord to judge my life choices, anyway? I’m pretty sure the lady below me microwaves her cat’s food three times a day.

It brings me a wonderful dulling comfort to slip into my organ and sail away. Amidst the snarl of cables and switches there’s a single headphone jack where I plug in, like a needle in a needful vein. When people come by to visit I keep the organ door closed. The further I got along in its construction the more ashamed of it I became. It’s a feeling that a vintage Pez dispenser collector and I could probably relate to each other about. My disease at least looks cool until you hear me drowning in it.

So I was out many, many thousands of dollars due to my addiction to my music cell. The specially fabricated shelving units are non refundable, obviously. Plus, due to the shifting sands in the world of vintage keyboard collecting, my preferred rig was recently downgraded to “barely even choice”  by the editor of Key Junkie Magazine. So there go my hopes for selling it to gain a foothold at the bottom of the pit. Also I love it and don’t want to sell it.

My phone rang and startled me back into reality. My mother’s frantic voice set the tone for the scene back at her place.

“Have you heard from your sister today?” she asked as I walked through the door of my parent’s beach house twenty minutes later, the sentence oscillating in relationship to the b-line she cut in front of me from the master bedroom to the picture window in the den. She was clutching to her chest a twisted brass curtain rod with the heavy red curtain still attached. “I’m just trying to get this place together and I can’t get a hold of her. She’s the only one who understood your father’s bookkeeping system, you know.” She gazed out the window at the Pacific ocean and readjusted her grip on the curtain and rod, shifting from the lover’s embrace to the mother’s cradle. “I can’t get a hold of her” she repeated absently.

“Ok mom, well let's-” I started before getting distracted by the sound of what could only be described as pound of ham being fed to a garbage disposal coming from the other end of the house. My eyes met my mother’s and we both jerked our heads in that direction. “Who’s here?” I asked as I hurriedly made my way down the hall to the kitchen. My mother was not an exceptionally social person, and the idea that someone who’s willing to run the garbage disposal so soon after her husband’s funeral was in the kitchen doing just that made me strangely agitated.

I stormed into the kitchen to find a man feeding what was probably about a half pound of roast beef to the garbage disposal. His coveralls said “Pat’s Geddit Gone”

“Hey” he said, glancing over his shoulder.

“I’ve hired someone to start disposing of everything perishable” said my mother from halfway down the hall behind me.

I opened the refrigerator and saw what I could only guess was Pat’s handiwork. I also assumed the man looking at me from across the kitchen with a wad of meat in his right hand was Pat. He sure looked like a Pat. Almost everything except for the condiments was cleared out.

“Why are you getting rid of all your food, mom?” I asked, reaching into the refrigerator to twist the Sriracha nozzle closed. The fact that it was my father who had twisted the nozzle open made my heart flutter.

“I have to get rid of everything perishable, pretty much” she said as she set the curtain and rod down on the kitchen table. “I’m just panicking. I need to leave the house, honey. I just can’t be in this house” she said, her voice rising in pitch all the way to the end and crescendoing in a single stinging tear filling each eye.

“Are you getting a hotel or staying with someone or…”

“I have a room at the Zuma, but I wanted to get this place squared away before I left.”

I ushered her out of the kitchen and what I assumed was out of earshot of the man I assumed was Pat.

“Do you really need Pat here? I can clean out your refrigerator for you mom, no charge” I said, looking back at the man whose name was, at this point I was pretty much ready to stake my life on it, Pat. At that particular moment he happened to be deriving quite a bit of pleasure from squeezing out a mostly full bottle of ketchup into the sink.

“Oh that’s Dennis, he works for Pat. I didn’t want to inconvenience you, what with all the stuff that’s going on with the will. How’s that going, by the way?”

The panic seemed to have left from her eyes for the time being, and the last thing I wanted to do was bring it all back by telling her about my morning’s visit with Allan.

“Oh it’s...you know. Allan’s still working on it.”

Half an hour later I pulled out of my parent’s driveway onto the residential street that eventually funneled me into the anonymizing Pacific Coast Highway. The unrest I’d felt from the moment my father passed away had evolved. Like a fine wine or a line from a movie that everyone gets wrong. Play it again, Sam.

The drive to my sister’s house was mostly spent zoning out and thinking about the machinery of it all. These cars, all occupied by at least one person. These people, all occupied by at least one worst memory. A memory of an exact moment, or maybe a hazy (or cruelly crystal clear) couple weeks that are better left buried in the subcortex. I saw a digital billboard advertising a TV show called Can You Cut It?. It told me that at this moment, six contestants with zero previous medical training were each attempting to learn how to perform a single major operation on a live person.

When I walked into my sister’s house, having already knocked, said her name loudly, tried the doorknob to find it unlocked, cracked the door, and said her name into the house from outside, I was greeted with an eerie calm.

“Rose?” I said loudly. “Are you here?”

“In here” came a voice from the kitchen. At first I didn’t see her when I entered the kitchen, and I almost jumped out of my skin when I caught sight of her sitting cross-legged on top of the refrigerator in what appeared to be deep meditation.

“Gah! What are you doing up there?” I yelped, putting my hand to my heart.

“I just got home” she said, keeping her eyes closed. “Well, I got home probably five hours ago, but I’ve just been doing this since then.

“You ok Rose?” I asked, hoping my gentle tone didn’t sound too patronising. Dad’s dead and we all just need to be nice to each other goddamnit.

“In the last hour my mood has really elevated” she said, finally opening her eyes and looking down to me with a smile. “I didn’t know what to do after the funeral, so I just went for a run.” I glanced at her feet to see she was wearing some of those special running shoes that are 3D printed and come stuck to a sheet like stickers. She’d misaligned two sections of the shoe stickers and in the space between them was a gruesome bloody blister.

After she showered and changed clothes, she joined me in her living room.

“My mood has dropped slightly, but I feel better than I felt 17 hours ago” A little mental math on my part revealed that this was her way of saying she was 12 miles into her big jog when she last felt lower. She flopped down on the couch, only to immediately leap to her feet. “Ooh! I have something you want to see” she said, briskly walking but slightly limping out of the living room and into the direction of the bedrooms. She returned with what I’d feared she’d return with. Clutched in her crossed arms like a teenager with a yearbook on the last day of school, was my father’s will.

There are many stories about my father’s will out there. I remember when I was a kid people would stop him on the street occasionally to tell him they loved his music, and about 60 percent of the time these people would mention the will. Over the years his friends would send him little things to stick to it or tie around it, and it was always fun and lighthearted. But today, looking at the actual will, suddenly not sure that I’d ever actually seen it up close, the ancient piece of former New York City street garbage looked about as fun as realizing your only hope for getting that major surgery was to apply to appear on Can You Cut It?

The piece of posterboard was wrapped in a mangy light orange pelt. One side was adorned with an assortment of dangly earrings which once presumably belonged to an assortment of fun loving roadies, groupies, assistants, accountants, and backup singers. The thing was unpleasant to hold, but even more unpleasant to read.

From the diary of Michael Reinchower

Home from tour. I woke up thinking I was back in that motel off the interstate in Tulsa next to Jeff on that hard twin bed. Annie don't snore like Jeff, and Jeff never put his leg on mine in the night, so I put the pieces together eventually. It's hard to get back to my old ways, or maybe it’s hard to get away from them. I haven't been up by 10 AM in three months, but I'm relieved to see it still exists. Yesterday Annie took all the film from the little Nikon she gave me for Christmas down to the drug store to get developed, and this morning I found her staring at one of the pictures when I came down from the bedroom. She looked up at me with a furrowed brow. I don’t remember taking pictures of anything that would make her look at me that way. My heart sank a little, did a little flutter. “What?” I asked. She handed over the picture she was holding and asked what it meant. I chuckled as the memory came flooding back. The will. It’s his will. Thinking about it now it’s kind of funny. He was in a different state of mind that night, sure, but just because he was off his a*s on who knows what doesn’t mean that fucked up idea wasn’t already in his brain. I don’t believe drugs give you new ideas. They maybe help you put ideas you already have together in strange ways. It was funny at the time, but the look on Annie’s face made me feel like I hadn’t been there at all. Written on the piece of posterboard were the following words:

WHEN I DIE MY FAMILY DOESN’T GET ANY MONEY UNTIL THEY BUILD A ROLLERCOASTER THAT GOES AROUND MY HOUSE. MY DEAD BODY IS TO BE GLUED TO THE FRONT SEAT AND THE ROLLERCOASTER ISN’T TO STOP RUNNING UNTIL I’M GONE. LOVE IS COMPROMISE.

Reviews

[Shy Joe]

Alright. I read through your story in more detail and MAN! This is very well written! Honestly, these are not my kind of stories. The detail and slowness of them bore me.

But your dialogue and some of the lines:
"The Eskimos have 50 words for snow and I'll bet dollars to donuts one of them is about how cold it is on your balls if you misjudge a squat."

GOLDEN! You added so much life to the characters. I am definitely going to check out more of your work.

Once again thanks for sharing.

[Shy Joe]

Ok I'm going to be honest. I skimmed through your story, but what I skimmed through I loved. The dialogue you implemented between the characters was topnotch. The use of measurements and technical terms, "micrometers" "pressurised", leads me to believe you have been in the engineering buissness. These can kind of turn some of the less inclined readers off a bit, but each to their own. Just a suggestion.

When I get more time I will read through this in more in detail. The last paragraph in bold just takes the cake!

I loved what I read. Thanks for sharing.