INHERITANCE: “ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY”

AUGUST 28, 2023 – The back entryway was bursting with clutter.  I stopped to survey the wreckage: a broken umbrella; large plastic garbage bags stuffed with crap; shovels and rakes leaning in all directions of the compass; several randomly placed outdoor thermometers still in their K-Mart packaging; a precarious pile of rotting newspapers with an empty kitty litter sack draped over the top;  a bunch of  fluorescent tubes sticking out of a corner; and a couple of worn-out overcoats covering a mound of who-knows-what.  It had looked that way ever since I had been a teenager but not before that, I was sure.  Not when I was a kid.

Next, and with increased trepidation, I entered the kitchen, the house proper.  If the entryway was storage for clutter, the kitchen was a major recycling receiving center.  Irregular mounds, leaning piles, randomly strewn collections of newspapers, junk mail, envelopes, note pads, note pad paper, and files and folders covered the table, chairs, countertops, and clothes washer, not to mention the floor. Slim-Fast cans, saltine cracker boxes, laundry detergent containers, and empty Hefty-Bag packages floated among the sea of paper.  Shoeboxes crammed with vitamin pills and medications sat atop the table clutter, and flung over chair backs were shirts, slacks and raincoats. Taped to the cupboard doors was an array of handyman and medical business cards, along with lists of phone numbers writ large.   In the far corner, barely accessible, stood a large, outdoor, plastic, refuse container, overflowing with food scraps and containers.  Resting atop the console over the stove were two big, round, cheap, plastic clocks, and above these, UB had taped labels big enough for a cataract patient to see.  One read “LONDON,” and the other, “NEW YORK.”  These clocks, I noticed, had plenty of siblings around the room, along with a good number of cousins—thermometers—all still in their packaging.  Some were nailed to a wall and others were simply propped up against a wall.

Aside from all that, the room looked pretty much like a pigsty.  I forged on, into the hallway beyond the kitchen.  More crap, junk and stuff.  Then to my right, the site of the old parlor of la grande maison,  was . . . My God!  . . . the little fucker’s bedroom.  Cliff’s moniker for the live-in boyfriend rang in my ears. Next to the window opposite the doorway, a cot-like bed.  At the head of it, a low-standing table. To one side, an open laptop atop a TV-tray table.  Off to the other side, on the floor, a large suitcase filled with folded clothing.  Time to do my detective work.

I stepped cautiously toward the bed and first noticed an ashtray full of butts sitting on the window sill.  How could any of this be, but above all, how could this be?  Not only was the little fucker a little fucker—I couldn’t keep the echo of Cliff’s voice out of my mind—and not only was the little fucker living in the house my great grandparents had built, but the little fucker was a smoker, a smoker inside 42 Lincoln, a smoker in bed, for crying out loud.  Quick! I said to myself.  Who is the all-time most vehemently anti-smoker you’ve ever known or heard about?  Who was it who years before at a restaurant had embarrassed Elsa—herself one of the world’s most vehemently anti-smokers—by pulling out a battery-operated fan and turning it on in the direction of the smoking diners at the next table?  Who was it who, at the ski dorms in Vermont had embarrassed me by railing against people who might smoke in bed? Exactly: UB.  And let’s see, what had happened to this very house?  Oh yes.  It had been been wrecked by a fire.

Before my anger itself could burst into flame, I grabbed a hold of my senses to focus on my investigation. I turned on the laptop, and while it booted up, I moved to the suitcase.  At first, I felt as though I were breaking the law.  Some kind of law of privacy, of decency, of, “unless you’re a cop with a warrant, you just don’t go looking through another person’s stuff.”  But then I reminded myself that it was the other way around.  It was our stuff, our family’s legacy that the suitcase owner was violating.  I told myself I was a soldier defending the homeland.

The invader’s suitcase was packed in marked contrast to the chaos in the house around it.  Each shirt and pair of trousers was carefully folded and neatly arranged. Underneath my hands struck a small collection of DVD cases.  I drew them out, expecting subject matter as disgusting as the nature of the owner’s relationship with UB but they turned out to be simply run-of-the-mill Hollywood junk.  I stuffed them back between a couple of shirts.  I dug deeper, felt a plastic bag, and pulled it out.  Toiletries. And Trojans.  I thought I would faint: the penalty for snooping, I told myself.  No, no! You have every right to snoop, remember? Only it’s not snooping.  It’s defending the family honor.  Honor?  What honor?  None was left in this house.

In the midst of drawing a deep breath, I halted.  Who knew what was in the air?  I rose from my knees to check the laptop.  I clicked on the browser and checked “history.” What appeared was a mix of visits to “Barclay’s” website and sites that had “gay” or “boys” in the addresses.  Without laying any tracks, I closed the browser, then prowled around the hard drive.  There was little that revealed anything about the user.

I surveyed the room again, and by the bed, I found an address and appointment book.  I thumbed through it and saw a number of Serbian names with London and Belgrade addresses.  The book yielded nothing more. A gay visitor with Serbian connections.  That much my investigation confirmed.  But I had known that already.  There was nothing that answered the burning questions: the how and why of the gay Serbian’s relationship with UB.

Just then, Cliff phoned.  “Cliff!” I answered.

“What’s happenin’?”

“I’ve gone through all his stuff, Cliff, and there’s just not a lot of answers here.  Some condoms, which frankly, gave me a chance to faint, a bunch of butts, and a laptop with proof the guy is gay and does online banking, but there’s just nothing else here, Cliff. No sign of drugs, no cash, no gun—smoking or otherwise.”

“Huh,” was all Cliff could say in the moment.

“Oh, and by the way, entryway and kitchen and hallway leading to where Alex is staying, is a municipal dump from a time pre-dating any government regulation.”

“No surprise there.”

“So how’s your visit going with Uncle Bruce?”

“Fine, fine. Alex and Uncle Bruce are visiting right now. You need more time?”  Before I could answer, Cliff did so for me.  “Tell you what, since you’re there, why don’t you go upstairs and see what you can find. I mean, we know how disgusting everything is from the back entryway and right straight through the kitchen, but what do you suppose Uncle Bruce is keeping upstairs?  I can keep the visit here going another 20 minutes or so, and then it’s going to take another 15 or 20 minutes to get back, so you’ll have some time.  I’ll call you again when we’re leaving the hospital.”

“Sounds good.”

My memory flashed back to the last time I had mounted the wrecked mahogany steps to the second floor, then back to the time when Gaga was still alive, then all the way back to the first time I as a toddler had climbed the steps.  How ironic, I thought, that by going up these stairs, I was descending into hell.

My first encounter with the infernal region at the top was through my nostrils.  As I stepped onto the second floor, a strong stench of stale urine wafted from the bathroom to my right.  As any of us would have done when visiting during Gaga’s last 25 years, I headed straight for her “day room,” ahead and off to the left.  In contrast to those days, however, the floor space outside the second floor rooms was littered with the wreckage of a madman’s daily existence—empty Slimfast containers, discarded light bulb cartons, magazines, newspapers and dirty clothing.  And the thick, now wrecked, mahogany door to Gaga’s “day room” was shut tight.  I placed my hand on the glass knob, and across my eyes flashed the image of Gaga seated at a Scrabble game on her card table inside the room. I turned the knob and pressed on the door.  It yielded reluctantly, as if to protect me from what was inside.  As I gained entry, the odor of cat pee and crap slammed me in the face. Reflexively, I yanked the door closed to trap the cat and the cat stink.

I unbuttoned the top two buttons of my shirt and pulled my T-shirt up over my nose.  This time I opened the door carefully to allow myself to slip into the room without letting its horrors slip out.  Off to the left sat the offending box of kitty litter, loaded with a week’s worth of cat waste, and off to the side was a large dish of cat feed and a big bowl of water with floating cat hair.  Beside a cheap cot below one of the windows, lay . . . the cat.  It was alive, but it looked ancient, and its black and white fur was dull and mangy.  The poor creature lacked the senses to detect my presence.  I leaned down to examine it and soon realized that it was as blind as it was deaf.

There were two cots in the room, each against an outer wall, and between the end of each was a low table bearing a small TV atop a video player.  Aside the TV and video were several videotapes, each with a white label on the spine, bearing a title in UB’s bold and unmistakable printing.  “Man on Man”; “Man to Man”; “Sweat Dreams.” I examined the cheap original labels on the covers: all were of Serbian or Bulgarian origin. Gay porn?  It had to be.

Next to the tapes was a spiral notebook with a plastic, orange cover. I picked it up at the same time I glanced at one of the cots as you glance instinctively at a chair before you sit on it.  I didn’t sit down.  Instead, I nearly threw up.  The sheet and pillow were filthy with cat hair, cat dust and cat dirt. A strange reddish powder had been smudged into the pillow case.  I took a step away from the cot and opened the notebook.

Inside were many pages of accounting paper, the kind that bookkeepers used before the advent of computerized spreadsheets.  They recalled for me that summer in ’75 when I worked for Holman Inc., by that time a mere shadow of the once thriving enterprise that Grandpa had built up and commanded for so many years.  As much as Grandpa respected prestigious colleges and universities, he was always emphasizing the need to learn “practical things, like accounting.”  He even insisted that I sign up for an accounting class offered in the evening program at local Farleigh-Dickenson University, and while I was on the job during the daytime, he saw to it that I used lots of accounting paper of the sort I was now looking at in UB’s notebook. “You should always use a pencil,” he said, “so if you make a mistake, you can erase it.”

The pages in UB’s notebook were all done in pencil.  Atop each page, he had scribbled a name, each looking very Slavic or more specifically, I thought, Serbian:.  “Zoltan,” “Vlad,” “Pavel,” “Milo,” “Radec.”  On the far left column of each page, he had written a series of numbers, and in the adjoining columns, a word or two corresponding with each set of numbers in the left-hand column. At first unable to understand what it was I was viewing, I turned the pages over and tried to decipher the jottings much as a crime lab detective would turn the knob on a microscope to bring evidence into focus.  I went back to the first page, and within a second or two, the repulsive, terrifying solution to the puzzle formed: the debits and credits on this accounting paper measured something a universe away from Gaga’s Scrabble scores.

The numbers, I realized, denoted the footage time on a gay porno video, and the words described what was on the footage.  “3-05 /  Zoltan on path” ; “5-49 / uncovers dick”; 6-56 / starts suck”; “8-24 “shows butt”: “8-47 “shows dick.”  I felt nauseous as the frame-by-frame descriptions grew more graphic.

As if I were in the middle of a plane’s fiery crash down the center of a runway, I felt time slow to a nano-second-by-nano-second rate until all was “freeze-framed.”  Frame 1: How insane is it for an 83-year old man who is your only uncle to be rating porn scene by scene, one long tape after another? Frame2: How did he get this way? Frame 3:  If there is such a thing as a prescient soul, would this all be enough to kill Gaga’s soul? Frame 4: This is all part of our family’s inheritance, and I’m now the de facto executor of UB’s insanity.

I closed the notebook and dropped it back onto the table, just as I caught another strong whiff of cat litter.  There was more than the cat to keep locked up in the room—the room in which Gaga had played many games of innocent solitaire and where UB was now playing many rounds of another kind of solitaire.

As I reached for the doorknob, I noticed the closet right next to the door.  Filling the space was enough footwear to stock a shoe store.  Stacks of boxes careened this way and that, with unworn pairs outside of the boxes filling the shelves and covering the floor.  I found several order forms, which revealed that many of the shoes had been shipped to UB straight from England.  What would an utter slob like UB be doing with so many pairs of brand new, imported shoes, many of them being exactly the same?  Interesting, I thought, how in the middle of such a trashed-out house, he would choose to stash his shoes—dozens of them—in a place where they belonged.

I turned to make sure the cat wasn’t planning to escape, but it hadn’t moved from the position I’d found it in upon my entry into the room.  I exited and walked across to UB’s bedroom, where the door was ajar.  Another trash heap greeted me. More Slimfast containers, saltine cracker packaging, file cabinets, carts full of video tapes, another cheap cot with filthy sheets and red powder stains on the pillow case, and next to the cot, another cart overloaded with bedside items—alarm clocks, books, magazines, and empty Slimfast containers filled with sundries. Several thermometers—still in their packaging—were propped up around the room.

I first examined the labels on some of the uncountable number of VHS videotapes.  Each label was white with UB’s bold, black, magic-marker lettering. Judging by the titles, anyway, the tapes seemed to be separated between porn and non-porn.  The non-porn, in turn, were further divided between conventional movies and PBS documentaries. As between porn and non-porn, however, my rough estimate put the ratio at one-to-one. I knew that Cliff knew none of what was before me.  I also knew he’d go bonkers when he did see it.

Next, I examined the box of sundries on the “bedside” cart:  Rolaids, gum wrappers, pencils, and . . . Wha-a-a-a-?  Two Trojan packages.  My stomach sounded its rebellion the instant “Trojan” registered on the back of my retinas.  The ring of my cell phone put down the rebellion before it could enter my esophagus.  It was Cliff.

“What’s happenin’?”

“Holy shit!”

“What?”

“For now, let’s just stick with expletives.”

“Hah!  Do you need more time?”

“Time to get the hell out of here? No!”

“Gees, I’m sorry.  Well look, Alex and Uncle Bruce are talking fashion right now.  I can break it up or I can let the bullshit flow a little longer.  What do you want me to do?”

“Well, look, I’m just going to check out a couple more things—a couple more rooms.  Then I’m going to head over to the office and see what nightmares are raging there. So just call me before you leave, to make sure, but Cliff, this whole place is worse than a train wreck. It’s a head-on crash of garbage trucks filled to the gills.”

“Okay.  I’ll call.”

As I hung up, I realized I was peering out the window at Emily Jones’s house next door.  Or rather, the house that Grandpa had owned and rented to “Miss Jones,” his retired secretary, and later deeded over to UB, who, in turn, had collected the same monthly rent that had been established in 1962, without ever setting foot in the house or arranging for its maintenance.  I wondered how the religious 106-year old woman would react if she knew what was going on in the room on the other side of a window that faced the house in which she lived and said her daily prayers.

I left the room to continue my survey of the upstairs.  Gaga’s old sewing room—between UB’s room and Gaga’s day room—was filled with cardboard boxes stuffed with K-Mart overstock.  More cheap clocks and thermometers, paper cups, clothes-hangers, overcoats, a jumble of chairs, paper tablets, paperback books, and more video tapes, except as far as I could tell they were “regular” movies.  There was no order to anything, except that gravity pretty much kept things off the ceiling.  Gone, of course, was the small, framed portrait of Gaga’s father, looking dapper in his prime just before the Great Crash in 1929.  The great fire nearly 70 years later had finished off his photo.

Next, I ventured into what had been Gaga and Grandpa’s bedroom.  It looked as though UB had thought of turning it into an office but then suddenly changed his mind and decided it should be a flea market . . . before settling on a used kitchen furniture store. When I followed a strong cat litter odor, I discovered that the wall separating the bedroom from Gaga’s day room—now the porno screening room—had been blasted away, and in its stead was a paneled partition.  I hadn’t noticed it during my tour of the porno room on the other side.  Having had quite enough of the cat odor, I backed out of the room before I could examine any of the “office files” that UB had assembled on a couple of carts of hanging files.  They would have to wait.

With goosebumps, I proceeded to the bathroom. Before I got there, however, my nostrils told me that the every square inch of the room needed one helluva cleaning.  Sure enough.  It was time again to fashion a facemask out of my T-shirt.  Over the rim I could see filth on top of more chaos—scum on the floor, black mold on the walls, a vast collection of gummed-up jars and bottles on every flat surface, and an enormous accumulation of spent tissues in a corner. And all over the sink was the same red powder that had found its way onto UB’s pillow cases. I looked around in disgusted awe, and realized that my T-shirt facemask wasn’t up to the task.  I’d had enough.

I glanced at the clock on the back of the toilet.  At the hospital, how much longer would Alex and UB be talking about fashion? I wondered.  In the meantime, I had yet to inspect the library downstairs, the dining room or the billiard room.

Each room was a variation of the previous one—a scene of junk, trash, and chaos, except that the library seemed to be UB’s activity room.  In the center was a sizable table staggering under a confused heap of papers threatening to slide onto the floor if I exhaled too hard, an ancient Apple computer, an antique printer, books, miscellaneous household hardware, an assortment of staples, writing implements, and several packages of light bulbs, along with the ubiquitous Slimfast cartons hanging over the table edge.

Leaning against a chair was a large, rectangular piece of cardboard wrapped in cellophane.  I pulled it back and saw a cheap poster of a voluptuous, bikini-clad model. How many gay 83-year old men could boast such a thing in their libraries? I thought. In the midst of the tragic mess, I found reason to laugh: there on the surface of the wildly shuffled paper was a flyer from the local library:

GET ORGANIZED!

Clear the clutter from:

Your HOME

Your LIFE

Your CAREER

Learn how to find solutions that can improve the quality of your life 

Tuesday Evening, November 15 at 7 pm                                     

Sheila Dempsey, owner of Organized Practice Management, will show you how to simplify you [sic] life—Just in time for the holidays! 

Rutherford Public

Library auditorium     

150 Park Ave.             

Rutherford NJ

This program is FREE. For more information call 201-939-8600

But it wasn’t the only notice of the free class.  UB had photo-copied the flyer, just in case, I supposed, he lost the original and needed a reminder.[1]

I turned my eyes to the old, built-in, mahogany bookcases, which had once housed all sorts of staid titles. Gone were the books, and in their place were clocks, thermometers and office supplies—reams of paper, pens, pencils, folders, tablets, all sorts of items that UB must have acquired for order’s sake.  But it wasn’t a question of supplies; it was a question of what really went on in that mind of his and why and how it was that a Serbian émigré fashion designer from London was now living in the grand house that UB had trashed.

I decided it was time to leave the madhouse, or rather the trashed-out house of a madman. With my memories clashing in despair with current images, I passed through the hallway, out the kitchen, past the garbage in the entryway and onto the rotten ramp that was still in place a dozen years after Gaga’s wheelchair had last rolled down it.  Just then I realized that I had forgotten about the third floor of the house. But straight ahead of me were the warehouses and my next destination—UB’s office. I could not yet know that in time it would yield far more about Alex than the house had.

With the keys that Cliff had given me, I gained entry through the door facing Highland Cross, then mounted the stairs up to the second floor, where UB maintained his office.  Just as I inserted the key into the lock of the ancient door, I heard a disturbance down the hall.  The noise was one of the office tenants stepping out of his tight quarters and walking down the creaking floor, perhaps to the mean little restroom just around the corner from where I stood.  I didn’t want to have to explain who I was or what I was doing.  I quietly stepped aside to avoid notice, and waited until the tenant, or whoever it was, had returned to his quarters and closed the door.  I then let myself into UB’s office.

As if my head were a documentarian’s camera, I slowly panned the room and let my eyes absorb the sights: tumultuous collections of files, folders, perched precariously on six-foot high metal shelving; books and binders crammed into cardboard boxes; mounds of loose forms and papers lying all about; ancient, battered, mismatched, stacked, metal cabinets; scratched-up office chairs from yesteryear; tables supporting boxes loaded with just plain stuff; a former floor lamp jerry-rigged with an overcoat to form a contraption, whose purpose only UB could explain; and of course, the usual redundant reminders of time and temperature.  The windows were largely blocked by junk, and the outside light that filtered through the obstructions seemed to be dusty and from some long-gone era.

Slowly, I moved into the room and waded into its depths.  A corridor bordered by discarded containers, office equipment, and metal shelving careening in different directions led to another large space. Jammed between floor and ceiling was the stuff of a scrapyard, which, the best I could tell, was junk from the great house fire.

I recalled Cliff’s account eight years before; how after the hired clean-up crew had filled the dumpsters with wrecked contents from the house after the fire, UB went out and “salvaged” much of the trash by hauling it into the warehouse.  Much of it must have wound up in the room in which I now found myself.  Once I focused I recognized some of the refuse—books, articles of furniture, wall hangings, and the candlestick holders with the hanging prisms, which had once graced the elegant buffet in the parlor and bedazzled my young eyes when the afternoon sun filled the room.  Now the candlestick holders were pressed in despair against a torn carton of old kitchen utensils.  The prisms were dull and dusty and pushed in unnatural positions, like former members of high society cruelly tossed into a concentration camp and forgotten by the outside world.

Around the corner I found the symbolic headquarters to this unbearable chamber: a toilet stall.  Miraculously, no overpowering odors wafted forth, and I surmised that the commode had not been used in a very long time.  Nor had the container of toilet bowl cleaner that guarded the stool from the vantage point of the tank.  The bowl itself was all colors of the dark end of the spectrum. If there had been a day when it was an industrial size biology lab, whatever crud now covered the toilet had surely transmuted to something more geologic than organic.

It was on my return to UB’s office next to the fire salvage space that I encountered the embodiment of Cliff’s oft-repeated quip when talking about UB: “You can’t make this stuff up.”  In plain sight atop an unsteady pile of papers lay a textbook entitled . . . Abnormal Psychology.

A rush of anxiety swept over me.  I hadn’t checked my office voice mail or email since I’d landed at the Newark Airport several hours earlier.  Which clients were getting upset that I hadn’t answered their burning questions? My regular work life would have to wait.

Just then I realized that it had been a while since I’d communicated with Cliff.  What was the next step in confronting this intruder Alex?  Alex. A bizarre stranger was living in the wrecked house of my great-grandparents, a house wrecked by my uncle the madman, who was in a nearby hospital recovering from triple-bypass surgery, and whom I hadn’t yet visited, because, I reminded myself, my primary mission in New Jersey was investigative, not humanitarian.  However much Mother would assume that my main purpose was to give succor and moral support to her brother in his convalescence, I knew better.  I was there to uncover the disgusting truth behind UB’s sordidly secret life, and the occasion of his surgery is what afforded me the chance to shed light on darkness.

Yet this was not how my sisters and I had been raised.  We had always put the physical, mental and emotional health of each other ahead of all other considerations, certainly financial and business (despite Grandpa at all times having been all about bidness).  Now, for the first time, one of us—and the one was I—was putting business ahead of the unspoken priorities.

My newly assumed financial and business priorities, however, clashed immediately with the reality that surrounded UB’s out-of-control life.  What I faced wasn’t so much a financial or business problem. It was fraught with psychological and probably psychiatric challenges. I was no doctor and until my self-guided tour of UB’s office I’d never even cracked open a psychology textbook.  My only exposure to mental illness was Mother, and she was an easy case compared to UB. With his disordered mind he was well down a destructive path—so far down, there might be no return for him personally.  But it was incumbent on me, on someone in the family, to salvage what could be salvaged, to set right what could be set right.

I pulled out my phone and called Cliff.

“Hey, what’s happenin’.”  As usual, Cliff’s question didn’t even come with the inflection of a question, and didn’t wait for me to answer.  “Just a sec.”

“Okay, now I’m out of the room. Alex is still in there with Uncle Bruce, and Uncle Bruce is doing most of the talking. Did you get a chance to look at everything you needed to see?”

“Actually, it’s a house of horrors, Cliff.  You’re not gonna believe what’s in there.”

“Hey! You’re forgetting who you’re talkin’ to, Eric! Cliff, the master of horror!”

“Yeah, but this is the real thing, Cliff. ”

“Did you find anything about Alex upstairs?  Are you in the house now?”

“Nothing and no.  There just wasn’t much I could find on Alex.  I didn’t—I couldn’t—look through all of UB’s trash upstairs, but I didn’t see anything about Alex.  I’m over in the office now, and it’s a train wreck.  You can head back any time now.”

“Fine.  I’ll break up the party.  See you in a few minutes.”

I cleared the pile of papers from the rickety swivel chair at what appeared to be UB’s working table desk and sat down to the keyboard of his antique Apple computer with its eight-inch screen.  The machine was on, and next to it I found a tray full of floppy disks ready to be searched.  Frantically, I inserted one after another, and like a spelunker, I wound myself deeper and deeper into the passageways of UB’s twisted mind.  One file after another produced writing to or about Alex.

Some entries contained UB’s psychiatric observations about Alex: “October 12 – Today he was quite calm.  Didn’t get mad. Seemed depressed. Complained about headache.  I told him he should take some aspirin.  Didn’t want to.  Slept all afternoon.” And “November 2 – A threw another tantrum today. I told him he was under stress and needed rest.  He smashed my laptop against the wall, wrecking the screen.  He might be bipolar.”  UB was putting Abnormal Psychology to practical use.

There were also many letters—copies or unsent, I couldn’t tell—addressed to Alex, except they were all signed “George.”  They covered a number of subjects but focused mainly on Alex’s apparent mood swings, his troubled finances and the Serb’s attempt to get his fashion line launched.

I could see that there were enough computer files to consume a day or two of my time.  After a few minutes inside these, I turned to another part of the UB “data storage”—one of the tall metal file cabinets that stood next to the table.  The top drawer contained a cache of audio cassette tapes—a couple dozen, at least. Little did I know how devasting these would be. The rest of the drawers were stuffed with folders, but to UB’s credit, they were labeled (with the markings of UB’s implement of choice—a heavy, black magic marker or large computer-generated labels—and more or less in alphabetical order.  The first one, marked “ALEX,” was particularly wide.

Inside the folder was a thicket of frenetic writings, newspaper clippings, pictures, printouts (on old computer paper) of lengthy word processing projects, and perhaps most telling, an unsigned promissory note for $50,000 to be signed by Alex. I riffled through the contents, oblivious now to time and surroundings and ever more curious about the bizarre relationship that my 83-year old uncle had struck up with a Serbian fashion designer. In the middle of things, I found a large, window envelope—the sort that in which corporate proxy statements are sent.  On the backside, hastily written in pencil, was the following message:

ALEX

1. 12:30PM – YOU ARE ASLEEP [“12:30” crossed out and substituted with “1:30.”]

2. I AM AT WORK FOR MY BUSINESS

3. YOU CAN COMMUNICATE IF

      YOU WANT – CELL IS WITH ME NOW

4. PLEASE, PLEASE KEEP COOL AND

      FORGIVE OUR MISTAKES.

A few sheets of paper later, I found two sentences scrawled across the middle of page:

Maybe we can find the same happiness we found on Father’s Day.  You helped me get over the terrible tragedy in my life—the death of my wife and only son in a terrible car accident.

What in the world was this about?  A wife? A son? A “terrible car accident”?  It was pure fiction.

At that moment, I heard footsteps outside the office.  I looked up just in time to see Cliff’s unmistakable outline on the other side of the frosted window of the office door.  I let him in.

“What’s happenin’?”

“Cliff, we’re talkin’ abnormal psychology here.”

“You mean way abnormal,” said Cliff as he surveyed the premises. I stepped over to the pile of papers topped by the textbook, pulled book away and handed it to Cliff.

He laughed so hard I jumped. “I mean,” he said, barely getting the words out, “You can’t make this stuff up!”

It took us a while to recover.

“I’m finding some interesting stuff, I said, as I handed Cliff the “ALEX” folder and turned again to the open file cabinet drawer.  While Cliff stood at my side and perused UB’s dossier on the Serb, I pulled the next folder—”BONDS.”  It contained a three-ring binder with over 75 Series-E United States Government Bonds, all in Grandpa Holman’s name, and the latest maturity that I could find was December 1963. A pittance against the 10 million figure that Cliff was convinced represented Gaga’s wealth at the time of her death 12 years before.

“You could spend days in here and not get to the bottom of things,” Cliff said. “How long are you plannin’ to be out here—three days counting today?—I say you spend most of your time in here finding out all you can about your uncle’s bizarre life.  But in the meantime, what do you say I introduce you to Alex—he’s over in the house—and then I take you up to the hospital to see Uncle Bruce.”  He flipped through a few more papers in the ALEX folder while I opened the next drawer and noticed the name on the first folder—”KATERINA.”

“Hey, what’s this?” I asked.  Inside the folder were a number of photographs of a several women inside a cramped living room and a tiny kitchen.  The people and the settings looked very European.

Cliff looked down at the photos in my hand and shook his head. “Did Uncle Bruce take these pictures? Did he meet them in London? In Belgrade? Must be a bunch more Serbians,” Cliff surmised. “Damn!  This whole situation is really fucked up, Eric.  You’re gonna have fun in this office over the next couple of days trying to get to the bottom of all this.  But look, you really ought to meet Alex now.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson

[1] While visiting 42 Lincoln many years before, I had noticed atop the toilet tank in the downstairs “powder room,” as Gaga called it, a paperback entitled something very close to “How to Get Organized.” Inside the book, I found lots of highlighted and underscored passages and margin comments in UB’s handwriting.  The irony it posed made me laugh out loud, for if most of the house was then under control, UB’s downstairs territory (what had been known as the “parlor”) was pretty much a wreck by that time.  But it was a “confined” wreck, and though my sisters and I commented about it to each other, we didn’t see that it represented deep mental disturbances on the part of its primary occupant.  In retrospect, I wonder if UB wasn’t at times keenly aware of how totally out of control he was and how his highlighting, underlining, and margin comments in the organization book were a desperate attempt to regain control.