* * *
By the next morning, more flowers had appeared on the stoop and someone had drawn a sad face on the original note. There was also a bag of almonds and a squeegee, signs of other friends in the building, of other private jokes that were now one-way. These objects provided me with a sense of comfort when I bumped into my super, his gruffness barely pruned by death. He told me that Don made a wrong turn on his motorcycle, drove headlong into a bus on Second Avenue, and was in a coma for six days before he died. My super seemed surprised by my upset.
“He sent those berries to himself, you know.”
I think part of me had known that. I never heard a single visitor in Don’s apartment. I never ran into him on the street accompanied by anyone but himself. I never saw him with more than one bag of groceries in his hand. To live alone can be a glorious thing. Between jags of crippling loneliness and wretched TV, it’s an education in self-sufficiency, self-actualization, and self-tanner. But it is possible to have too many rooms of one’s own.
There was a service for Don at an Italian restaurant in Jersey City. I didn’t know he had family in Jersey City. I also didn’t go. The invitation asked for charitable donations instead of flowers. I sent neither, though I knew Don would have liked both. But perhaps that’s tribute enough, having people around who knew that you were here, who can say what you would have liked. I tried to keep up Don’s habit of putting flowers in the vase. But my flowers were half as nice and twice as expensive. You really have to buy two bunches of the bodega kind unless you want your vase to look more wretched than it did before you put the flowers in. I also did not enjoy the face the bodega man made each time I told him that he didn’t have to bother wrapping my roses in paper.
The new tenants moved in quickly. These neighbors were also adults but a different brand of adult than Don. They wanted a place to sit outside and read the Sunday paper, a place for their toddler to play that wasn’t a coliseum of thorns and jagged rocks. They wanted patio furniture with cushions and they got it. They uprooted everything, including the vegetables and the moss, including the grapevines. I had to install curtains.
Right Aid
At my local Rite Aid works a woman who once looked at my ID and said, “We have the same birthday!” She hasn’t mentioned it since. I think how I might like to surprise her with this information on the day. But that will mean both that I am in a Rite Aid on my birthday and that I am still smoking cigarettes. Instead, I go in a few days before our big day, in need of paper towels. I ask her if she has any exciting weekend plans. She blinks at me, processing the question. Then she tells me that she only dates men.
Relative Stranger
The most important thing you need to know about my uncle, the porn star, is that he’s not my actual uncle. He’s my mother’s cousin, which makes him my first cousin once removed. The oldest of three brothers, Johnny is now a seventy-four-year-old man partial to books-on-tape and cantaloupe, but between 1973 and 1987, he starred in 116 adult films. He was Man in Car, Man with Book, Man on Bus, Man in Hot Tub, Orgy Guy in Red Chair, Party Guy, Guy Wearing Glasses, Delivery Boy, and, perplexingly, Guy in Credits. He was the porn equivalent of Barbie, who can count astronaut, zookeeper, and aerobics instructor among her professional accomplishments. Except that Barbie, like Jesus before her and Prince after her, has no last name. Whereas Johnny’s last name, his actual last name, is Seeman. This is a fact too absurd to warrant further analysis.
I didn’t snoop around about Johnny until college, but this was not for lack of interest. My college years happened to coincide with the late nineties, when the Internet was fast becoming a tool for personal research. Before that, my generation mostly used it for chain letters and lightbulb jokes—How many Harvard students does it take to change a lightbulb? Two. One to hold the lightbulb and the other to rotate the world around him. But suddenly I had a vehicle for my curiosity. So I looked up Johnny to see what I could find. I was neither brave nor willing enough to search for video footage for fear of noticing any genetic resemblance to my mother’s brothers. Even the Greeks don’t have a name for that specific a complex. Instead, I read. My favorite article to this day was one in which Johnny is referred to—revered by, really—as the most famous stunt cock ever. That was the headline—Johnny Seeman: The Most Famous Stunt Cock Ever.
This superlative seared into my brain. How many self-identifying stunt cocks have walked the earth to make “ever” meaningful? Forty? “Ever” seemed a touch hyperbolic for an unquantifiable group of people. I also wondered if Johnny’s unique endowments meant I, too, had the good genitalia gene. If I have a son, will he be pretty much set in that department? That might be a nice bonus attribute, though hopefully not one he will have to rely on for money.
In case you’re not familiar, a stunt cock is the guy who steps in to produce the money shot if an actor can’t maintain an erection. I imagine this was handy in the era before little blue pills and digital film, but it seems like a real morale dampener for everyone else. This is the guy who opens the pickle jar after you’ve loosened it, the one who carries the birthday cake you baked out of the kitchen. More than anything, it struck me as an odd hook for an interview. It’s
