AUGUST 29, 2023 – We met in the kitchen. His eyes were dark and nervous, and he looked scared and pathetic. Just as Nina had observed, Alex had the shakes. A very bad case of them. I started right in on the deposition, as it were.
“Sit down, Alex. I have some questions I need to ask you.”
“Thure,” he said, shivering despite the heat being cranked up.
“I know my uncle very well, and I have to tell you, it’s just plain weird how he’s hooked up with a guy your age, with your background, living here in his house. This is my great-grandparents’ house you know, and well, it’s just really hard for me to understand what’s going on. Let’s start with how you met.”
“Thure. I wath with my friend Katerina vithiting New York and we were at the Metropolitan and your uncle came up to uth out of nowhere and kept bothering uth and kept athking if we wanted to join him for dinner and we thaid ‘no’ but he kept athking tho finally we gave in and he took uth to a very nithe rethteraunt.”
I wasn’t sure if the lisp was affected or a speech impediment. His English was quite good, I thought, though the Serbian accent was unmistakable.
“He thaid he had a lot of money and wanted to be frienth with uth. I gave him my phone number and then he wanted me to thtay with him and I did. I felt thorry for him really.”
“You felt sorry for him?”
“Yeth. He told me I reminded me of hith thon who died in the car acthident with your unclth wife, and tho I felt thorry for him . . .”
I felt an odd kind of relief knowing that I wasn’t hearing this fiction for the first time. “Alex . . .” I said. “He never had a wife, and he never had a son. Believe me. Never.”
“Oh Gahd!” Alex put his large hand to his mouth.
I continued my interrogation. “And one thing I can’t figure out, Alex, is who the hell is ‘George’? I was going through my uncle’s papers over in his office, and I found all sorts of references to George, as if he is someone close to you and to him.”
Alex lowered his hand. “George is your uncle,” he said, as puzzlement filled broad face.
“No it isn’t. He’s always gone by ‘Bruce,’ and in any event, his first name is ‘Griswold’ not ‘George.’”
Cliff, of course, had been standing right beside me, listening intently, and he couldn’t resist jumping in. “Alex,” he started, “I have personal question for you, and I apologize for asking it, but we need to get to the bottom of things here.”
“Yeth, I underthtand,” he said, shaking his hands as he clasped them, then unclasped them. He looked as nervous as a juvenile under heavy policy interrogation for the first time in his life.
Then Cliff fired off his burning question: “Are you gay?” It even caught me off guard.
“I’m bi-thextual,” said Alex, with nervousness turning to fear.
“That would be gay,” said Cliff. “Now, let me ask you, Alex, have you ever gotten intimate with Mr. Holman?”
I cringed, probably visibly. “No, no!” said Alex, to my relief.
But how could we believe him? How could he explain the condoms? I felt light-headed.
“But I know heeth kind of obthethd with me. I know heeth watched me in the thower, and one time I woke up one night and he wath outhide watching me through the window right by my bed. And he ith alwayth trying to take picturth of me.”
I thought of Gaga, Grandpa, Mother, my sisters, Dad, our whole family and how everything about the scene in which I found myself was antithetical to everything about us. I wanted to leave right then and never, ever return to Rutherford, New Jersey, ever, ever again.
But Alex was the one who was supposed to leave and never return. “Look, Alex, you need to level with us,” Cliff continued. “We want you outta here and pretty much as soon as you can pack your bags and book a flight back to London or wherever the hell you’re from.” No matter what the context, it never took Cliff long to get down to brass tacks.
“Yeth! I will. I really, really want to go. I don’t like being here. I want to go.”
“Then why haven’t you gone?” Cliff asked.
“Becauth George—I mean Mr. Holman—forced me to thtay with him.”
“What do you mean forced you to stay?”
“He took my pathport, took my plane ticket, and he hid them and he wouldn’t tell me where he put them, and I didn’t know whether to call the poleeth or what, but then he got the heart thurgery and I felt thorry for him and didn’t know what to do, tho I thought I would jutht thtay until he wath out of the hothpital and then I’d athk for my pathport and plane ticket back and go back to London.”
“Alex,” Cliff resumed, “we’ll get your passport back and we’ll get your plane ticket back[1], and then you’re goin’ straight home and you’re never coming back here, you understand?”
“Thank Gahd!” Alex said, his eyes growing very large.
But I had one more question, at least for the time being. “Alex. How much money has my uncle given you?”
Alex resumed his shaking. “I really don’t know how much, but I’ve never athked for it, he’th jutht alwayth given it to me, forthing me to take it. I don’t want hith money, and I’ve told him I don’t want your money, but then he thenthth it anyway.” I was skeptical, but I had no idea just how skeptical I should have been.
“Eric, “ Cliff said abruptly. “Let’s go up stairs and have a look around. Alex, you stay down here.” I led Cliff up the stairs to the horrors I had discovered earlier. Normally Cliff used swear words judiciously and therefore, effectively, but as he surveyed the scenes of UB’s private life, he let go with damned near his entire repertoire of expletive phrases: “Holy shit!” “Oh my fucking word!” “You can’t get any more fucked up than this!” “Jesus Fucking Christ!” “What a bunch of unbelievable shit!”
There was more than surprise, however, in Cliff’s reaction. I discerned genuine grief, anger and disappointment. Later that evening, he would tell me how with each turn, each “corner of bullshit,” as he put it, he saw flashes of that God-awful night eight years before, and how Cliff had pulled UB’s bacon from the fire. And here UB was again, regressed into the swamp. Cliff felt betrayed.
“Tomorrow,” Cliff announced, “we’re gonna get all this bullshit pornography cleaned up. We’re gonna clean up this fucking pig sty once and for all, and that little cock-sucker downstairs is gonna help before he gets on his one-way plane back to London!”
Cliff’s anger yielded to a laugh, as he uttered the reference to Alex. I joined the laughter. “But right now, what do you say we go visit Uncle Bruce? I mean, you got here at what, about 10, and here it is almost four o’clock and you haven’t even seen Uncle Bruce yet.”
Cliff and I went back downstairs and found Alex still sitting in the kitchen, shaking. “Alex,” Cliff addressed him, “have you ever been upstairs?”
“No! Mr. Holman didn’t want me to go up there, tho I never did.”
“Well good, because it’s pretty gross, and you just better not go up there because you’d find it really upsetting, you hear me?”
“Yeth, yeth.”
“Eric and I are going to go to the hospital so Eric can visit his uncle. In the meantime, you’re going to look into reservations for a flight back to London, you understand?”
“Yeth, yeth,” the Serb agreed. He looked as though he was going to cry and pee in his pants.
“And tomorrow, before you leave, you’re gonna help us clean up all the trash in this house, is that understood?”
“Yeth!”
Cliff was one of a kind, I thought, as I followed him out the door.
“So what do you make of Alex?” Cliff asked, as he maneuvered his van around the driveway.
“To be honest, I’m not sure what to make of it. He’s a sorry character, I mean the way he shakes and winds up living with an 83-year old nut case, and I don’t doubt for a minute that he’s getting or taking money from Uncle Bruce, but gees, based on the stuff I found in Uncle Bruce’s office and what Alex was saying about how they met and Uncle Bruce taking his passport and plane ticket and stalking him, it looks as if Uncle Bruce is obsessed with the guy—obsessed to the point of holding him hostage. I guess it comes down to the basics: money and sex. Money for sex and sex for money.”
“Yeah, pretty fucking weird, if you ask me, because the sex is between an 83-year old man with a toupee that doesn’t fit, who lives in a trashed out house in Rutherford, New Jersey, and a thirty-something Serbian fucker who is a fashion designer in London. How do you figure that? So, Eric, did you find any evidence that the guy is doing drugs? Any syringes or pills or cocaine or anything like that?”
“None.”
“I don’t get it, Eric. I just don’t get it. But you know, maybe your uncle is just so incredibly lonely, maybe he was so desperate for friendship, and we know he’s gay, so who knows, maybe he just went out and found this guy and paid him a bunch of money to be his friend and it’s all led to this Alex character living with him, and who knows but the guy isn’t robbing Uncle Bruce blind.”
Cliff’s rumination brought guilt to my soul. Here I was in New Jersey, not for the primary purpose of giving UB support through his medical crisis but to take advantage of his hospitalization so that I could get to the bottom of his relationship with a “friend,” however bizarre the “friend” or “relationship,” and I knew darn well, that it wasn’t just the “friend” and the “relationship” I was investigating but the rest of UB’s personal life too, because I was hyper-judgmental about that too, since it didn’t square with who we were as a family, and meanwhile he was squandering our inheritance, my sisters’ and mine, and Mother’s.
Yet, for years none of my sisters or I had shown much concern about UB’s emotional needs. We hadn’t visited, we hadn’t called, we hadn’t written, except for a few lines in a birthday card in August and a Christmas card in December. Of course, had he sent any of us a card or picked up the phone and called any of us or shown any interest in what was going on our lives? But each of us was doing well and had plenty of interaction with others. It was he who lived alone, it was he who was lonely, who needed support, a show of our love and concern, some reciprocity for all the things he had done for us over the years. Moreover, as Mother had drummed into us, albeit out of a deep sense of guilt on her part, it was UB who had sacrificed his freedom and independence for some 25 years so that he could look after Gaga and Grandpa in their old age, thereby making their lives comfortable, allowing them to live out their years—or more accurately, their decades—in dignity and in their own home. Now it was a dozen years since Gaga had died, and he himself was well into his eighties and cursed with an imbalance in his brain chemistry on top of being gay and alone and lonely. UB wanted to make up for the years he had lost and was desperate for affection and companionship, which Cliff, for all his loyalty, for all his generosity of time and spirit, couldn’t provide, because he led such a crazy, busy life and wasn’t gay.
Therefore, who was I to condemn UB for enticing a young, bi-sexual Serbian fashion designer to shack up with him to fill a void that none of the rest of us cared about, except Cliff, with his huge heart, who, for Christ’s sake, deserved more of an inheritance than any of the rest of us? And who was I to condemn the poor soul, as low and dysfunctional as Alex might be, who fulfilled UB’s bottomless needs?
As Cliff pulled into a parking space at the hospital, I wondered—was it UB who was squandering my inheritance or was it I who was squandering the example of love and devotion that he had shown the rest of us through all his years of caring for Gaga and Grandpa? I wished that when I had arrived in Newark that morning, Cliff had taken me straight to the hospital instead of to 42 Baghdad Street.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] In a sleuthing effort upstairs immediately following the interrogation, Cliff and I found the passport. We never found the plane ticket.
