by Tod Goldberg
Calvin Woods would be a reasonable man, would understand the predicament Richard faced and make it right. And didn’t Richard deserve a little grace here?
After rolling through a series of receptionists and secretaries, Calvin Woods finally answered the phone in the way all lawyers seemed to these days, by announcing his own name as a greeting: “Calvin Woods.”
“Yes,” Richard said, “hello. This is Richard Charsten. How are you today?”
“I’m fine, Mr. Charsten,” Calvin said. Richard noted a definite lilt in his voice that indicated a level of annoyance. “I presume you received your father’s will today.”
“Yes, yes,” Richard said. For some reason, Richard felt like he was being examined and recorded, which immediately sent him into what he considered his Upper Crust Mode, where he was all apologies and thank-yous and practiced civility, all staples of a previous life. “So sorry to bother you on this, Calvin,” he said. “But I noticed a trivial issue here in the will that I thought we could rectify if you have just a moment of free time.”
“I presume you’re speaking of the Kingdome clause,” Calvin said.
“Yes, yes, thank you,” Richard said. The sound of his own voice was beginning to grate on Richard, the false civility, the undue thanks. He wasn’t really sure where this persona came from as he sure as fuck couldn’t remember his father thanking anyone for anything, while his mother was more the kind who expected people to thank her for her mere presence on Earth, as if being a socialite was some kind of ordained position.
“Well,” Calvin said, “I’m afraid there’s not much that can be done. Your father went back over his will shortly after your sister died and didn’t make any changes. What you see is what he wanted.”
“You’re not hearing me,” Richard said, and for the first time, he thought he actually heard his real voice pinging in his head. “That shit is my birthright, okay? That shit is mine by the word of the fucking law. He blew up the Kingdome himself. I saw him flip the ignition on ESPN. Why would he want his ashes spread somewhere that didn’t exist? Okay? Why would he keep that in his will unless he was, you know, temporarily insane or something? You hear what I’m saying?”
“Maybe,” Calvin said, “he didn’t want you to get the money, Mr. Charsten.”
Cruelty, Richard understood, after he called Calvin Woods an ass-fucking cocksucker and hung up on his uppity ass, wasn’t an activity born out of necessity, but out of benign indifference: other people simply weren’t as important. It was a lesson Richard learned in community college, jail, and marriage but which never failed to rearrange the way he looked at the world. It was true that Richard had, on occasion, felt the same way in the process of stealing identities or stealing cars or stealing the contents of an entire home from some Beverly Hills asshole (and Richard made sure of this: he didn’t steal from people worse off than himself ), but with the simple proviso that people of better circumstances were the non-important ones. And yet, he felt like even in death Deuce was sticking it to him. And for what? Not being Amy? Not being Trey to his Deuce? There was something else, though, some hope that this Calvin character simply didn’t know what he was talking about. If Deuce didn’t want Richard to have the money now, he certainly hadn’t wanted him to have it in 1996, either. Or any of the intervening years, so why not correct the fucking thing to say that Richard was out all together? No, that money was his.
It took Richard a full day to come to grips with the possibilities attached to the station in life he was primed to lose yet again. It wasn’t just the $250 million dollars—Richard was confident even he couldn’t screw up $250 million dollars—it was the minutia of other valuables now in his name, provided he could turn up a domed baseball stadium sometime in the next nine days. Of most interest to Richard was his father’s childhood home in Sarasota, Florida.
He couldn’t remember ever stepping foot in the home, his grandparents having died when he was just a toddler, but merely seeing the address evoked a kind of muted sadness. Whenever Deuce wanted to prove a point to Richard (never to Amy as Amy pretty much sharpened points as her life’s work) he’d drag out a crinkled old photo of the place or, if a photo wasn’t available, a crinkled old memory, and would regale Richard with the bullet points of his hard-luck past, all of which added up to the simple phrase: I had to earn it, Richard. It was true, Richard knew. His father had earned enough to even own his past.
Still, when Richard opened his front door that morning and a messenger handed him his father’s remains, housed handsomely inside a platinum urn that was likely more valuable than anything Richard had ever owned or filched, he couldn’t help but notice how light the contents were. At most, his father weighed five pounds. It was a wonder to Richard that a man of his father’s cosmic weight could be cooked down to this final compound.
He brought the urn over to his coffee table and set it down next to a stack of magazines and newspapers that all bore notices of his father’s passing. The owner of the Yankees called Deuce “a true pioneer” while the commissioner of baseball mentioned a legacy of “hard bargaining” and the owner of the A’s remembered how Deuce “always found the loophole and was as driven on the golf course as he was in the front office.” Richard’s childhood hero, the former Mariner First Baseman Alvin Bradley, said that Deuce was “the first person to show faith in my abilities.”
When Richard read these plaudits, the first thought that occurred to him was that it was like reading an algebraic equation where the answer is given but the path to the answer remains mysterious. He’d seen the Yankees’ owner actually slap his father. The commissioner of baseball, back when he still owned the Brewers, once left a message with an eleven-year-old Richard that started, “Tell your asshole of a father that I demand a call back.” He was also fairly certain that the owner of the A’s had slept with his mother simply out of revenge. Alvin Bradley? Well, good old Alvin had been one of Richard’s best clients in the late ’90s, back when he was moving crank in and out of Phoenix, and had told him on more than one occasion that it was Richard’s father who got him hooked on uppers back in the day.
Of course Deuce was also lauded for his philanthropy, particularly for breast cancer awareness (which had claimed Richard’s mother) and his role in helping to open up shipping lines to China, and his sentient move into the coffee business back when people were still paying fifty cents for a refillable cup.
The weird thing was, prior to receiving the will, Richard hadn’t really felt much of anything about his father’s passing other than a troubling sense of relief. He’d tried to cry a little bit when the news first hit. He was watching SportsCenter in bed, where he’d been spending much of his days and nights since his sister passed, and the anchors did their grave faces and muted tones bit before flashing a photo of Deuce with the dates of his life typed neatly beneath his chin. The first thing he thought was, That’s no good. And then he thought, I should cry. And then he tried to do just that, but nothing came. He pictured his sister in her casket—something he didn’t actually see as her husband called him and told him to stay away—and that brought the tears, but once he tried to transfer them to his father . . . nothing.
But now, with his father resting in peace on his bongwater stained coffee table, he couldn’t shake the sense that he sort of wanted to crawl into the urn with him, or at least grab a handful of his ashes tight between his hands, to let his father know that he wasn’t alone. Why else would he have wanted his ashes spread out over a domed baseball diamond—particularly one with artificial surface, which meant he was likely to be vacuumed up or sucked into the dome’s ventilation system and spit back out into downtown Seattle—unless he was afraid of being alone?
The first time Richard was arrested, when he was nineteen, his father actually came down to the Manhattan Beach jail to bail him out, but not before asking the cop on duty at the boutique cop shop to show him his son’s cell. Deuce stood there for a good ten minutes just staring at his son and the eight by eight slab of
concrete Richard was drying out in. Richard remembered well the pained look on his father’s face, as if he were the one who’d spent the night trying to sleep on the piss-smelling institutional mat.
“You get used to this,” Deuce said. “You remember this place. You remember how small and lonely it is, and then, next time you feel like shaming me, maybe you’ll opt to take another route.”
“You think I wanted to be here?” Richard said. “This wasn’t my choice, Dad. You put me in this position.”
“That’s your excuse?” Deuce said. “That it wasn’t your choice? You’ve decided to live your life blaming others, Richard; that’s your big choice. If this is your path, then I’m not afraid to say that you won’t be missed.”
A cop came up then, roused by Deuce’s rising tenor no doubt, and unlocked Richard’s cell. By the time Richard had collected his personal effects—a wallet on a chain, Doc Martens, and a Swiss Army knife he’d received for his fifteenth birthday all sealed nicely in a plastic bag—his father was long gone.
And yet, after all these years, after all the fighting, after trying to forget his father, after being arrested at least thirty more times, each arrest earning a bullet point on the sports wire, here Richard was, face-to-face with his father, and he still had nothing to offer, not even a decent burial.
Walking through the Forest Lawn Cemetery on Saturday, his father’s urn tucked under his arm in an insulated Trader Joe’s shopping bag along with the will, Richard couldn’t help but notice how many of the people he saw actually appeared fairly happy. Of course there were a share of people crowded in the distance around mounds of fresh dirt who were unquestionably sad, but the people Richard encountered as he worked his way through the maze of gravestones in search of his sister’s seemed to be uniformly in good spirits. Richard counted at least a half dozen family picnics, several bounding dogs, and at least one full-scale birthday for a young child, balloons and clown included.
So Richard wasn’t terribly surprised when he encountered three older Mexican men sitting in folding chairs around the gravestone just adjacent to Amy’s. They had a small radio that was playing Tejano music at a respectful level, a cooler filled with bottles of beer, soda, and sandwiches, and an arthritic-looking golden retriever that managed to look quite at home lying across the grave. Richard tried not to make eye contact with anyone, not even the dog, but as he passed, one of the men waved at him and smiled, so Richard sputtered out a quick, “How you doing?” hoping the man would just nod in response.
“Blessed,” the man said.
“Happy to hear it,” Richard said. He tried to keep walking, but the man—he couldn’t have been less than seventy, and years in the sun had turned his flesh ruddy and thick—stood up and motioned Richard over to the cooler.
“You like a beer? We have plenty.”
“No thanks,” Richard said, though he dearly did. The other men were just as old, maybe a year or two separated each of them. Richard looked at the gravestone and saw that it read: Manuela Rios, Devoted Mother, Sister, Wife. 1910–1972. Now and Forever In God’s Hands. Thirty-five years Manuela Rios had been dead and still there were people who cared enough to throw a little fiesta for her. Richard doubted anyone would bother to do likewise for him, at least not those who knew him now. When he looked back up, all three men—and the dog—were staring at him. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he mumbled, because he couldn’t figure out what to say, having never attended a picnic on top of a corpse, but the three men didn’t seem to hear him or, if they did, didn’t bother to react. Of course not, he thought, it’s been thirty-five years! It’s not a loss anymore, it’s a fucking fact. He wasn’t sure precisely when loss stopped being simple sorrow and turned into a condition of your existence, but he was beginning to suspect that it was something like an undertow and that he wouldn’t be aware of it until he was far off to sea with no way of getting back to shore.
The man motioned toward the elaborate marble headstone only a few feet away. “You here for Amy Charsten?” the man asked.
It was so weird hearing Amy’s name come from this man’s mouth, the way her entire life had ended up as two words uttered by a stranger in a cemetery. Amy was proud of her name, proud that she was the only woman alive who had it, proud that she’d found a man who didn’t care that she’d decided to keep it when she married, and now that was all that was left of her. Whatever was underground wasn’t his twin sister, Richard knew, because he was still alive and he was part of her, was her, could have been her.
“She was my twin sister,” Richard said. “I haven’t made it out here before, but I felt like it was time.”
“Yeah,” the man said. “Well, her husband say, you know, if I see you here call him and he’ll call the cops. He even gave me a photo.” The man reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, and from there retrieved a folded picture and handed it to Richard. It was actually a photo of Amy and Richard sitting together on the swing Amy had on her back porch, except that Amy had been dutifully sliced out of the frame. Or, more like it, Richard had been sliced out. Richard remembered precisely when it was taken: Thanksgiving, 1999. He’d just gotten out of jail the day before, and Amy had graciously taken him into her home in the gated compound in Calabasas. The next day, Amy presented him with the keys to his apartment and, she said, “a new lease on life.” They’d both laughed at the silly pun, and for a few moments they’d just been brother and sister again. It was one of those memories he’d latched onto after her death, looking for some deeper resonance.
“That’s me,” Richard said and attempted to hand the photo back.
“No, no,” the man said. “You keep it. We’re here every week, you know, just being with our mother, and we don’t see Amy’s husband but twice since the funeral, so we say, you know, maybe we’ll call the cops on him for not being here more, that’s what we should do.”
Richard just nodded. When all of this will business was settled, he’d get in contact with Jeff, his brother-in-law, and just tell him how it was all a mistake, one of a series of terrible mistakes, one that ended up being the culmination of all the worst decisions of his life. He’d do that. In fact, he decided, he’d give Jeff half of everything. Maybe two-thirds. Maybe he’d give him 90 percent. How much money did he actually need? Not $250 million, certainly. Not even $25 million. He might give 99 percent to Jeff, just take the yacht and some scratch for food and beer. And then what? A life of leisure? Yes. Yes. He’d earned that. Hadn’t he earned that? Hadn’t he suffered enough to live out the next fifty years in relative comfort? Wasn’t it his time?
But before he could even dwell on that possibility, Richard found himself slumped over and sobbing, the Mexican man patting him gently on the back, telling him it would all be okay, that it gets better, that it can suffocate you unless you handle it, but Richard wasn’t even sure who he was crying for. What was he doing here? Why had he bothered to bring his father’s ashes? What did he think he’d accomplish? That he’d place Deuce’s ashes next to Amy’s grave, he’d spread out the will, and the three of them would just hash it out until someone came up with a way for Richard to claim his inheritance? He would have been better off bringing in Tarot cards and a fucking shaman.
It was all out in front of him, though Richard couldn’t accurately pinpoint what “it” was. He thought it might be something about getting what was deserved, something he’d earned, something he’d value for the rest of his life: the opportunity to try on a new skin, a new life, push forward into the sunset of existence with an idea that there was equity in all of the failure. For nearly two decades he’d believed that his father had cursed him that first day in the cell in Manhattan Beach—a cell he’d recall as the nicest one he’d had the pleasure of drying out in—but now things were starting to filter out into clearer focus. You won’t be missed. It wasn’t a curse, Richard understood now, it was a premonition. There was always a loophole.
Eventually, the Mexican men must have determined that Richard needed to
be alone with his sobbing, because they quietly packed up their beer and folding chairs and left him alone in the damp grass at the base of Amy’s grave, where he sat for a long time reading through Deuce’s will, slowly realizing that the loophole was right where it should be.
Richard often thought of his mistakes as being like falling into and out of love. When you were deep in with someone new, figuring out what felt right and shit, everything was electric. It’s all sex in public places, boozy nights, and secret-telling. But actually being in love, sustaining love, is a fucking bear. It’s taxes and phone bills and excuses and lies and degradation and where do you end up? Regretting everything, trying to piece together how you could have ever made such a foolish decision as to whom to love and trust. At some point—and Richard felt he’d crossed a precipice in this regard—you decide you do not want to be defined by your worst mistakes.
The unfortunate thing, Richard knew now, standing shirtless in the backyard of Deuce’s childhood home in Sarasota, spreading red clay across a swatch of AstroTurf, was that it took him thirty-five years plus ten long days and now, well, a single night to figure out how to break the cycle without falling off the bike all together. What was deserved ultimately was what one already had. Trying had only reinforced in Richard the sense that he could steal identities and apply them to himself any old time he pleased without any regard for karmic ramifications or simple, unmitigated guilt.