“Amy lived in there. It’s a long story.”
“Come on, let’s go get a cup of coffee; you can tell me all about it.” So we went to an all-night coffee shop, and I told him the whole enchillada, about how Whitlock cut my grant and how I ended up scaring the hell out of him; how we then became best buddies and later sworn enemies. I explained how I got work as a proofreader and met the high-strung Amy, who became my psycho roommate; the court battles that ensued; the faux enhancement operations; and finally, how I actually deduced I was Whitlock’s lost son, something we both laughed at. I also told him how I first thought I had made love to Amy and then I thought I hadn’t, and then I learned I did, but I still wasn’t sure.
“A regular loverboy, aren’t you?” he joked as the sun rose, and the waiter finally brought over the check. He paid it, I left the tip, and we stepped outside. We silently, tiredly meandered south down Lexington Avenue as the city slowly awoke before us.
“I’m truly sorry, Joe,” Ngm said out of the blue.
“No big deal.”
“I don’t mean that; I mean I’m sorry for failing you as a father. The truth of the matter is, I lost faith in humans long ago. I suppose that’s the reason I turned to flora.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I replied, searching for a quick and unsentimental departure.
“Joey, can you come over for dinner tonight?” he asked in a woebegone tone.
“I’d like to,” I replied in a devil-may-care manner. “But I really fell behind ‘cause of Whitlock and all, and I really do have to catch up on my history tonight.”
He got the message and nodded a bit, looking off. I started receding, like one of night’s shadows.
“Did you know that in 1581,” he called out, “Ivan the Terrible accidentally killed his son and spent the last of his days in severe depression.” I could see his sadness rising like steam through his grating attempts at reconciliation.
It was olive branch time: “Well, if you put it that way, Mr. Ngm, what time’s dinner?”
“I’m not the great Whitlock, but I’d be honored if you called me Dad.”
I did so and offered the man a handshake. He grabbed me and gave me a hug. For a minute I panicked, but then I hugged him back. And, for the first time ever, he kissed me on the cheek. A desperately unoccupied cabby screeched to a halt, unsummoned, compelling us to unhug. Dad smiled, I nodded, and Dad got in.
From out of the rolled-down car window in the backseat, before the cabby could zoom madly away, he pondered aloud, “Maybe all this wasn’t so bad, son.”
And poof! Dad was….
“All I asked was ‘Did you make love with her?’” interrupted the fiftyish-year-old scion I was explaining all this to some sixty years later.
“All I told you was the answer,” I replied, scanning the cherry-wood paneling that lined his private library.
“No one could remember all those tiresome details. Your senility must have embellished.” Although I was old, my memory was still Viagra-erect.
A butler had just entered and stood behind me, alongside two brutish bodyguards. The rich prick, who resembled someone I couldn’t place, waved him forward. The servant handed him an envelope.
“What is that?” I asked.
As the rich prick read its contents, he enlightened, “The only reason I let you ramble on like that was to hold you here for the results of your blood test.”
I recalled having a pin-prick of blood extracted from me hours earlier, when his two thugs snatched me off the street and brought me to this castle in Long Island.
Looking up from the document, he uttered, “You could have just said yes.”
“Yes to what?” I asked.
“My father died forty years ago,” he elucidated. “My mother was killed in a plane crash about thirty years ago.”
“Who were they?”
“Amy and Andrew Whitlock. After she left you, she married my father.” I would have thought this was a final twist of mind-fuckery, but it was true. I had read it in all the newspapers as it happened.
“What does this have to do with me?”
“About ten years ago, I learned that my presumed father had been left sterile due to a childhood bout of Mumps. I spent the last few years trying to figure out who my sperm provider was. I had corpses exhumed and gave work to teams of private investigators. Finally, while perusing the privately printed memoirs of Andrew Whitlock’s manservant, Wylie Mandrylle, I stumbled upon this sordid little tale of a negligible sub-subordinate—you.” He held up the letter. “The DNA test confirms it—Dad!”
Never had the word been said with such haunting sarcasm. The rich prick truly resembled a healthy, younger me in an Amyish sort of way.
“I refuse to believe any of it!” I said automatically. “It’s part of that one great lie!”
“What lie?”
“The lie that compelled two Republican House Speakers to resign for the same sin they were impeaching a president for in the old millenium. The lie which stretches like an invisible wall that separates the rich from the poor. The lie that the ‘religious wrong’ lord over the rest of this country until they get caught with their robes up and beg for forgiveness into TV cameras. The lie that the old Soviet Union…”
“What the hell are you rambling on about?” He pushed my pause button.
“The lie of propriety! The lie of sanctimony! The lie of hypocrisy!”
“This is more of your paronoid pablum that my mother tried to keep in check, isn’t it? Think about it. Since you’re old and penniless, and I am one of the world’s wealthiest men, this mess only splatters upon me, you senile numbskull”—spoken like a true son.
The boy was absolutely right. My Alzheimerish rebuttal had gotten the best of me. Absorbing the wealth that surrounded us, I realized that being his father—even if it wasn’t true—was a good thing.
He sighed the sigh of kings, and asked, “You finally got the great Whitlock back. How does it feel?”
I shrugged gleelessly; it was all another lifetime ago. But for a moment an old feeling struck. I was finally rich. My son, the unwitting chip off my unworthy block, had usurped the monster and now he was welcoming me up to the throne—the start of a new dynasty. Crappy, freebee meals at senior citizen centers with tattooed and pierced, geriatric rock and rollers—gone. Waiting in foul-smelling lines with other octogenarian orphans for mediocre hospital services—done. All the discomforts of an impoverished old age were over.
“Sonny boy, what’s mine is yours, and the opposite!” I said, trying to hug my heir.
“Let me ask you something, Papa: Did you ever finish your grad-school education?”
“Not in the traditional sense, but…”
“What exactly did you do with your long life, Dad?” The rich man, my son, my savior, was asking me to open my files.
“Proofreading, TV, fun stuff like that.” I assumed that he wanted to spend some quality time together, hang out.
“So you did nothing with your life.” Like so many, he moved to premature judgement.
“Well that depends on how…”
“Boys, take out the trash,” he said to the two apes that brought me in hours earlier.
They lifted me silently, carried me out the door, and tossed me into the backseat of their luxury sedan. After a fidgety hour and a half in which I speculated upon bringing a backward paternity suit—an infanity suit?—the car slowed down. One large paw opened my door, the other shoved me out. I rolled to a stop as they sped off.
I staggered to my feet and inspected myself for injury. My frail and wrinkly body was like a shriveled penis that would never know another erection. Of all the pranks played on me, old age was the greatest. My muscles and bones had dehydrated. My flesh and mind had lost their grip and luster. Even my veins were squirming away like earthworms on a rainy day.
The toss left me scratched and bruised. Passing between abandoned brownstones and the skeletal remains of vandalized cars, I recalled the old days—
fin de millenial New York. The quality of life, 100 percent-rented, Starbucks-on-every-corner city was all but gone.
We had bad neighborhoods again: turnstile jumpers, sidewalk drug dealers, hostile panhandlers, funky junkies, hectic ethnics of all shapes and sizes. People didn’t even scoop the poop anymore, and porn theaters blistered like herpes sores around Times Square once again.
As I walked, my son’s question echoed in my hairy ears: What exactly did you do with your long life, Dad? I had fought for an apartment no one would now want, and had stored in it a lot of multifarious memories. I didn’t leave behind any sandcastles of money or art. But is it so wrong to just live life and enjoy it? Between fun and function why must we choose the latter?
What else had I done with my life? I had slipped a changeling into a gilded cradle. One of the great American dynasties of wealth and power was headed by my offspring. The boy looked just like me, and even if he held me in contempt and claimed to be Whitlock pedigree, he was my DNA. A fart by any other name smells as foul.
And now, long after solitude, after need, long after anguish, and finally love, there was still endurance. I entered my musty, rent-controlled apartment—half-dilapidated, half-renovated by Amy all those years ago—and locked the door behind me.
ARTHUR NERSESIAN is the author of nine novels, including The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx, The Swing Voter of Staten Island, Suicide Casanova, Manhattan Loverboy, East Village Tetrology, the cult-classic The Fuck-Up (more than 100,000 copies sold), dogrun, and Mesopotamia. He lives in New York City.
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