AUGUST 27, 2023 – His health crisis per se wasn’t the prime motivation for me to make a hastily arranged flight to New Jersey for the first time in seven and a half years. Who knows how much longer it would have been had he not undergone emergency, triple bypass surgery. It was the opportunity created by UB’s extended hospitalization—the opportunity to investigate the latest scandal in UB’s life—that put me on an early morning flight from Minnesota to Newark.
It had all started many months before when UB, at 83, announced casually to Nina that he was “going to London to attend the graduation of a fellow I’d put through school.” Nina promptly conveyed this interesting bit of information to Elsa, Jenny and me. At a minimum, it stung. What? Putting some “fellow” through school when we, UB’s closest relatives, had had to rob, cheat and steal (and borrow) to educate the next generation—after having asked him for financial assistance and having received nothing but silence?
More months passed, and then, around Thanksgiving 2005, Nina came face-to-face with the “fellow.” She was on tour in Newark with the Boston Pops, and UB was in attendance. Afterward they met, and UB introduced his friend “Alex”—the “fellow” UB had “put through school.” Nina was taken aback. She would soon report to us that this man Alex was in his thirties, a Serbian émigré living in London, a clothes designer, exceptionally nervous, said very little, and when he did, he displayed a pronounced lisp.
Another month passed. Christmas time. Jenny and Garrison invited UB to find his way over to their apartment in Manhattan to help celebrate with friends. UB appeared—with his “friend, Alex.” “Alex,” Jenny wrote the next day, “seemed to be a nice person and fairly talkative.” He was friendly and talked about his work as a fashion designer. They stayed for several hours. I checked out his website, and he seems to be legitimate. His full name is Alexander Nikolic. He’s been staying with UB for the last several weeks.”
If it was a little weird, perhaps, that UB was coming out of the closet at the age of 83, none of—my sisters, Cliff and I—could say it was a surprise, and I sensed an understanding among us, that in theory, at least, there was nothing patently wrong with the idea that UB, indeed, a gay UB, could find a gay partner, albeit a “fellow” a good half century his junior. In fact, good for the energetic octogenarian to find such a far younger man. Unless . . . it was about money.
Yet another month passed. By chance, Elsa was visiting Mother and Dad one afternoon when UB happened to call. After chatting with him for awhile, Mother handed the phone over to Elsa. In some related context or perhaps just to make conversation, Elsa remarked, “I hear that Jenny met Alex and that he is a nice person.”
“No he’s not,” UB said abruptly. “He gets violent and starts throwing things around. He smashed my computer against the wall.”
In response to Elsa’s email about this, Jenny wrote,
I think my primary concern is UB’s safety!! I just worry that he is entangled with someone who is not to his liking anymore, and who knows, maybe it is all so weird that UB feels he will be blackmailed in some way if he tries to tell A to beat it . . . How very odd the whole thing is. I will say this: I noticed that the entire time UB and A were with us on Christmas, I don’t think they exchanged one word, and maybe not even a glance.
All of this I had passed on to Beth, of course, so that in early February 2006, when I told her about Mother’s call informing me of UB’s hospitalization, Beth issued a directive in the form of an emphatic suggestion: “You know what you need to do? While your uncle is in the hospital, you need to go out there and figure out what’s going on, figure out who this Alex character is.”
And so it was that each of us played a role that fit our disposition, our experience, our place in the order of things. As the oldest, Nina had gotten the first exposure and, in keeping with her “imaginative anxiety,” observed things about Alex that suggested he was a dark character. Jenny, being the youngest and the most optimistic, was treated to behavior that initially, at least, seemed to be trustworthy, even likable. Elsa, the realist among us, received from the horse’s mouth, an attestation that Alex was simple bad news. Beth fulfilled her usual role, which was to size things up quickly and correctly and then take direct action. But ultimately it fell upon me to do battle again with the demons in New Jersey—a role that had been mine since the summer of 1975, when I first plunged into the quagmire of our “inheritance.”
On the eve of my departure for New Jersey, Elsa called me to wish me good luck and to express her a concern.
“You be careful out there, Eric,” she said. “Who knows who the hell this Alex character is. He could be very dangerous. He could have a gun. I just want you to be extremely careful going out there, Eric.”
Despite UB’s earlier disclosure to Elsa that “Alex was violent,” I was much more moved by Elsa’s expression of concern than I was by the concern itself. Among her many other gifts, Elsa’s active compassion for others had always been remarkable.
Late the next morning, Cliff’s van pulled up alongside the curb where I was standing just outside the Newark Airport terminal.
“Cliff!” I greeted him, as I opened the door.
“What’s happenin’!” he said with his surround-smile. We shook hands hard in a sort of mutual, unspoken acknowledgment that the years since our last meeting had been all too long. The handshake was broken by the ring of Cliff’s cell phone. He answered it while flooring the van into the stream of traffic that led away from the terminal.
“Hello, it’s Cliff.” A few seconds passed while Cliff listened and I imagined we were going to get in an accident with any one of a number of candidate vehicles racing alongside of us. “Yeah, tell him I’ll be there tomorrow at 10. I can’t meet him today. Tell him my cousin is in town . . .” Cliff took his eyes off traffic long enough to wink at me over his reference to me as his cousin. I winked back. “We’re dealing with important business that just can’t wait and then call Frank . . . I know, I know. He knows that, Jimmy. Huh? Yeah, okay, but just tell him I have an emergency and I’ll meet with him tomorrow. But then you have to call Frank and tell him he’s gonna have to get his shit together, because this is a big gig and we have to show these people that . . . yeah, okay. Thanks, Jimmy.” Cliff hung up and turned to me, “That was my office. Eric, I’m telling you, I’ve been busy as ever lately. Valentine’s Day is one of my busiest times of the year, and wouldn’t you know, but Uncle Bruce decides to have a big medical emergency when? The week before! And now it’s just a couple of days away. It’s just nuts but it’s good for business.”
“As long as I’ve know you, Cliff, business has been good for you.”
“Yeah, I’m very lucky, Eric. Very lucky. You should see the stuff I’m doing now. I mean it’s some really big stuff, and you know what? I really enjoy it and now I have some really good people working for me. You’ll meet them. But for now, Eric, we have to talk about Uncle Bruce and this guy Alex. I mean, Eric,” Cliff laughed, as he slapped the steering wheel with his right hand and then swerved to our right as he accelerated around a delivery truck braking in front of us. “You can’t make this stuff up!
“Last Thursday, Uncle Bruce was having chest pains, so I took him to the doctor, and the doctor told him he had to go to the hospital right away, and before you know it, he’s having fucking triple bypass surgery! And Eric, I’ve been so busy lately, I haven’t been able to keep track of him, but I find out that Uncle Bruce has had a houseguest, this Alex character, for the past month or more. It’s totally whacked!”
“Yeah, as I told you over the phone, Cliff, that’s a big reason why I’m out here—to see what the hell is going on with that guy.”
“Thank you!” Cliff said. “I know you and your sisters are busy . . . just as busy as I am, but what you guys have to realize is that ol’ Cliff here is always at ground zero, man. And in case you didn’t notice, your uncle no longer lives at 42 Lincoln Avenue. For quite awhile now, it’s been 42 Baghdad Street.”
“I know, I know,” I said, remembering how long I’d been away from ground zero. “How’s Uncle Bruce doing?”
“Quite good, actually,” said Cliff, with inflective emphasis on the ‘quite good.’ He began to laugh.
“What?” I said, joining in.
“Oh, Eric, you had to be there,” he said, slapping the steering wheel just as a car pulled around us, honking. “Last night I went to visit him and there he was, sitting in a hospital chair, his toupee on . . . but on backwards. God damn but he looked just like Ringo!” Cliff laughed full force as he recalled the scene. I could imagine it too and laughed so hard I figured neither one of us would feel a thing if Cliff drove off the road and we got terribly hurt in the resulting crash. Cliff recovered his equilibrium before I did, though, and said, “Yeah, and Ringo wants to go skiing! He’s already doing his exercises. He pulled through the surgery very well, and his Doctor tells me that he should come out of this okay. He’s in great shape otherwise, so as serious as it was, he’s probably going to be fine, though it will take him awhile to get to full recovery stage.
“At the very least, he’s going to be in the hospital for awhile, so now’s a perfect time for you to be here, Eric. Just before he went into the hospital, he gave me keys to everything, so I have access to everything. I think you’re gonna want to see what you can see and get some answers to stuff, starting with this guy Alex.”
“When’s the last time you were in the house?” I asked.
“I was in there the other day; just in the back entryway, but that was the first time he’s allowed me in even that far for years. Remember, before the fire, I used to go in there all the time, but since he’s remodeled,” Cliff laughed, “when I say, ‘remodeled,’ remember, it’s the world according to Bruce, but since he’s remodeled, he hasn’t let anyone into that house, as far as I can tell, except now this guy Alex.” Cliff’s tone turned more serious. “Eric, we have to get to the bottom of Uncle Bruce’s relationship with this guy Alex.”
I related all that my sisters had said about their limited encounters with the mystery man from Serbia, living in London, now living in the tarnished jewel of our inheritance, of all places. I was surprised that Cliff knew less about him than we did.
“Here’s what we’re gonna do,” said Cliff, the consummate man of action. “I’m gonna drop you off at my office. Then I’m going to go get Alex and tell him that he and I are going to go visit Uncle Bruce. You can stand inside the garage of the warehouse and wait for us to leave the back of the house. After we’ve driven away, you can go in the house—I’ll give you my key—and you can go through his stuff and see what you can find out about this guy. I’ll call you when we leave the hospital, which is about a half hour away, so you’ll know to get out of the house before we show up again.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said.
Minutes later, we pulled into the spacious driveway between the old, Dickensian Holman warehouses and what had become UB’s fortress—the house that a four-alarm fire couldn’t destroy, the house that he had rebuilt according to his eccentric view of the world—and without any input, it turned out, from the good, promising architect, Gary Klietsch, in whom I’d placed such hope seven and a half years before. UB changed his mind about him the day after I’d left New Jersey in the fall of 1998. “You knew it was all too good to be true,” Cliff had said to me over the phone when he’d called to inform me.
Cliff led me to the pedestrian doorway tucked away in the back of the warehouse complex. Inside was the industrial garage where in the Holman heyday, one bustling crew serviced trucks and other sweating teams of workers loaded and unloaded moving vans parked by loading dock. Now the area provided storage for an immense clutter of stuff, for which I presumed some kind of rent was being collected: a bright yellow Corvette stingray, a couple of antique cars, miscellaneous crates and boxes, someone’s big trailer, and next to Cliff’s hearse, which he put to good use for Halloween parties, Cliff’s huge haunted house props, piled precariously a mile high.
“I got a good deal on the hearse,” Cliff said as we passed the shining vehicle. “For Halloween, people love to rent the thing—complete with me, decked out in horror stuff, as the driver, and my corpse-in-a-coffin in the back. Eric, you should see the corpse. It’s unbelievable. I had a guy I know, a special props expert—does stuff for Hollywood—I had him do up this corpse that is so realistic, so unbelievably disgusting that I’ve actually seen people throw up when they see it—even when they know it’s just a Halloween prop. I’m telling you, I have some amazing stuff here.
“Look,” he continued, as we approached a door at the back of the garage. “I have to check on a couple of things here in my office—we can go in the back way—and then I’ll go over and get Alex.” As I looked up at the Halloween props and thought about people throwing up at the sight of Cliff’s corpse-in-a-coffin, I almost forgot why I had flown out to New Jersey.
From the garage, we stepped into Cliff’s spacious, windowless office. It was reasonably tidy, but nothing fancy. Old, cheap carpeting covered the floor and matched the quality of the wall paneling. However, most of the paneling was covered by framed photos and plaques of all sorts. Cliff pitched his set of a dozen keys onto his large, old, largely bare, wooden desk, and sent his cell phone sliding after the keys.
“Give me just a sec to check my mail,” he said, picking up a stack of envelopes off his chair. As he sat down at the desk, I surveyed the wall adornments. They revealed the active life of a highly creative promoter extraordinaire. Here was a photo of Cliff standing happily between a couple of well-endowed, authentic-looking belly-dancers, doubtless hired for some upscale gig. There was a photo featuring Cliff next to a guy wearing a New Jersey Nets uniform, with a bold autograph over the corner of the picture. In yet another photo was Cliff next to several men who looked like local dignitaries standing under a large event banner. Next to that was a plaque commemorating Cliff’s contribution to the success of a big-fund raising event for a local charity. Atop several stands of file cabinets rested a number of ghoulish props: a bloody, gory hand, a skull with ruby eyes, a leprous rubber mask, a plaster bust with an anguished face and a dangling eyeball. But Cliff traded in more than horror. A clown suit was draped over a chair, a magic kit sat on the floor, and balloons with “Happy Birthday!” greetings written across them in festive lettering bobbed against the ceiling in a corner of the office.
“So what do you think of my world?” Cliff asked, noticing my interest in things.
Before I could answer, a door swung open—the door facing the back doorway through which Cliff and I had entered. “Oh, you are here,” the woman said, looking at Cliff. It was ‘Sis,’ Cliff’s mother. She turned to me and smiled. “Eric! Good to see you. It’s been a long time. Cliff told me you would be coming out to see your uncle. Quite a time he’s having. I hope he’s going to be okay.”
“Hi,” I said, without adding a name to the greeting. I didn’t feel familiar enough to call her “Sis,” and I didn’t know her first name and “Mrs. Witmyer,” I thought, was way too formal. “Yeah, pretty amazing, but the guy kind of has nine lives, so I’m sure he’s going to pull through this time too.”
“Yes, that’s for sure. He’s a pretty tough customer, so I think he’ll do great. Good to see you, Eric.”
“Thanks. You too.”
“So what is it, Sis?” Cliff said, with a mild tone of annoyance over her intrusion.
“Elvis is here to get paid. He said we owed him $250 for his appearance at Firelli’s birthday party last night, but I didn’t have any record of what we told him, so I thought I’d double-check with you.”
On each side of Sis, who remained in the doorway, with her hands wrapped around the edge of the door, I could see and hear controlled bedlam. Phones ringing, people walking across and back, the bell over the exterior door jingling as customers entered and exited the premises, and Cliff’s staff shouting questions and answers at each other, bantering and laughing. And apparently an Elvis impersonator stood in the midst of it.
“Yeah, I told him $250, and Firelli thought he was the best Elvis he’d ever seen.”
“Okay,” said Sis. “I’ll pay him. Do you want the door closed?”
“No, that’s okay,” answered Cliff, dumping the mail onto the desk, rising out of his chair and straightening his tall frame. He glanced at me as he moved toward the doorway and said, “Before I go get Alex, I’d better check on the level of insanity out there among my employees.”
I followed Cliff into the midst of it. Arrayed in two rows was his staff, three on each side. Each sat at a desk occupied by a phone and snazzy new computer and covered with unruly papers. As they jabbered away on their phones, to each other, and to several customer-visitors, I noticed Elvis, who stood in front of Sis’s desk while she wrote out a check. “Let me introduce you to these characters,” said Cliff.
But before he could, one of the characters yelled out, “Hey Cliff!”
“This is Jimmy,” Cliff said to me. “He’s a trained actor, and believe me, in this job, it helps to be an actor.” ‘Jimmy’ was a short, feisty guy in his mid-to-late thirties, with short, curly hair. He pressed the phone receiver hard against his T-shirt. “Hi,” he said to me, flashing a quick smile before his eyes darted onto Cliff. “It’s Dan Marino. You know, the guy you hired for the Rubenstein gig up in Saddlebrook, tomorrow. He says he doesn’t do appearances before noon.”
“Tell him for an extra $100 he doesn’t do appearances before eleven o’clock in the morning, which is when I expect him to be there,” Cliff shot back.
Jimmy lifted the phone off his T-shirt. “For an extra hundred bucks, you do appearances at eleven. . . . Okay, okay. I’ll ask.”
“For an extra hundred he does appearances at 11:30,” Jimmy relayed to Cliff.
“I told Rubensteins eleven, so it’s got to be eleven,” said Cliff. “And tell Marino that for the extra hundred, he better be damn good this time.”
“The boss says you’re gonna be there at eleven and you’re gonna have to be damn good if you want the extra hundred. . . . Good, good, I knew you could.” Jimmy delivered his lines as if he were auditioning for a stage role.
As Jimmy finished the call, Cliff introduced me to the other staff members. “Kathleen,” Cliff said, as he stepped up to the desk occupied by a very large but not overweight woman perhaps in her late fifties, “I’d like you to meet Bruce’s nephew Eric from Minnesota.
“Glad to meet you, Eric,” she said, extending her hand.
“Likewise,” I said.
“So you’re the nephew. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“A lot good, I hope.”
“Oh yes, yes, all good. So you’re out here to deal with . . . Oops! I’m sorry,” she said with a nervous laugh. “I mean, you’re out here to check up on your uncle, huh? How’s he doing, Cliff?”
“We’re about to go up there to check on him,” said Cliff.
Just then Kathleen’s phone rang. “Nice meeting you, Eric,” she said quickly, as she reached for the receiver. “Fun Ghoul . . .”
“And this is Tom,” Cliff said, turning to a lanky man with short gray hair, intelligent green eyes, a weathered face, and really bad teeth, not to mention the missing ones.
“So you’ve come out here all the way from Minnesota to make sure your uncle is behavin’ himself, huh?” Tom’s kind, friendly face made up for his teeth.
“Yeah, that’s right,” I laughed.
“Well I’ve seen a lot of characters in my day,” Tom said, as he released a hearty laugh sculpted doubtless by many years of heavy smoking, “and if you don’t mind my saying so, your uncle is about as big a character as you’re gonna find out there.”
“Yeah, I know, I said, with a laugh intended to confirm my verbal agreement with Tom’s candid assessment.
“And this is Jerry,” Cliff went on to the next employee. Just then, another staffer who was waiting on a couple of customers, called out to Cliff. She was a woman about Kathleen’s age but with a less authoritative stature. “Cliff, these gentlemen want to know how long a fireworks show you can put on for that promotion we’re doing for the new center in Hoboken?”
“Just a sec,” Cliff said to me, as he stepped away to introduce himself to the visitors.
I stuck with Jerry. “Hi, Jerry,” I said, shaking hands with a man who looked like a civilized, modern version of Queequeg in Moby Dick. Tall, in good shape, with a completely bald head and skin color that made him look like either a very tan Caucasian or a very light I-couldn’t-be-sure-what, Jerry too seemed very approachable and intelligent. While Cliff was dealing with the fireworks question, I engaged Queequeg in conversation, learning that he had had several careers over the past 20 years, mostly in IT areas of large companies, but that he had always been a kid at heart.
“When I saw the ad in the paper for a job here with Fun Ghoul, I couldn’t call fast enough. This was something I’d always wanted to do, you know, working on all the stuff Cliff does—costumes, Halloween props, putting on big events with all kinds of acts and clowns and characters, and well, it’s more fun than you can imagine, and Cliff runs one helluva business, I mean, he’s famous in his field, and gees, we just have great fun working.”
“It’s quite an enterprise, I can see that,” I said.
“Yeah,” Queequeg laughed. “It gets pretty crazy around here, especially pretty much all the time . . .”
“Okay,” Cliff broke in, having dispensed with the fireworks question. “Eric, we’ve got to get the plan underway here. Come on, let’s go,” he called out, striding toward his back office. As we passed his desk, he grabbed his keys and reached for his cell phone just as it went off.
“This is Cliff,” he said into his phone, as he opened the back exit to his office and walked slowly past the piles of props in the garage. “Hi Doris. No, I can’t meet at noon. An emergency has come up. My uncle . . . yeah, he’s in the hospital. . . Huh? Triple by-pass. . . Yeah, a couple of days ago. . . Thanks. . . yeah, I think he’s going to pull through, but he’s in intensive care right now . . . . yeah, well it’s going to be really hard to meet today, can we meet first thing tomorrow? . . . No? What are you doing at 10:00? . . . .Okay, yeah, call me and we’ll set something up. Look, I’m really sorry. You know, this event is at the top of my list. . . . Yeah, I know, okay. . . .Don’t worry, this will be over the top, Doris.”
Cliff closed up his phone. “That was this super rich woman who wants me to do a huge promotion for a charity next month. I mean its huge and unfortunately I’ve had to put her off several times because I’ve been so damned busy, and now I think she’s losing patience, and well, gees, we’ve really got to get to the bottom of what this guy Alex is all about. That can’t wait for anything. Shit. What am I gonna do . . .” Cliff’s voice trailed off, as he shifted into a more deliberate pace toward the exit of the tired, cluttered garage.
“And in the middle of it, there’s the world according to Bruce!” Cliff said with a laugh, remembering the mission before us. I laughed with him.
When we reached the pedestrian doorway, Cliff stopped and handed me a ring of keys. “Here they are,” he said, fingering through them. “These two are for the back of the house, this one is for this door right here, this one is for the door into the hallway, this one is for the door on the other side of the building, this one . . . I don’t know what that one’s for . . . and this one here is the key to his office. Later you’re gonna want to go up there and check it out.” He handed the bunch over to me as he summarized the plan again. “Wait here and watch for me and Alex to leave the house and get on our way. Then you go in and turn that little fucker’s stuff inside out to find out who the hell he is. I’ll call you when we’re leaving the hospital.
“Oh, and good luck!” With that, Cliff slipped through the doorway and strode over to the house. I stepped over to a window in the main, overhead garage door and waited, wondering what this interloper, this intruder, this mystery man, this Serbian “house guest” looked like. What the hell was UB—83 and a half years old—doing with a guy who, according to my sisters’ reports, was at least half a century younger? Unfortunately, I knew the answer. I just couldn’t square it with all the images and icons of the Holman clan.
About five minutes later, I saw the back door swing open. Cliff led the way down Gaga’s old wheelchair ramp, which had survived her by a good dozen years. Behind him was Alex. He was of average height and build, had close-cropped dark hair, and wore jeans and a black leather jacket. His gait told me that he wasn’t about to challenge any suggestion or direction coming from Cliff. I waited for Cliff’s van to turn out onto Highland Cross, and then I walked to the house. I was approaching it for the first time since September 1998.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
