AUGUST 18, 2023 – At 4:00, I left UB at headquarters and found my way back down to Cliff’s store. He issued a few directives to his staff, then suggested that we go out for a serious talk. Cliff drove us to a nearby establishment where we sat at an outside table and ordered iced tea.
“So, Eric, how’s the world according to Bruce?”
“It’s quite a world.”
“You don’t know nothin’ yet,” said Cliff, as he removed his sunglasses and placed them on the table.
“What do you mean, Cliff. Here I am—here we are, just the two of us. You said you couldn’t tell me over the phone, that I’d have to wait until I came out here. Well, here I am, ready to hear it.”
“Not here, not yet,” said Cliff, surveying the patrons at nearby tables. “Tell you what. You’re staying over in New York, tonight and tomorrow, right?”
“Yes, at Jenny and Garrison’s apartment.”
“Okay, why don’t you plan on staying with Jeanette and me Friday night. Jeanette’s a great cook, so we’ll have a nice dinner and then afterward I’ll tell you what I have to tell you.”
“You’ve certainly piqued my curiosity, but okay, I’m seeing enough to keep me amused, so what’s another couple of days.”
Cliff put his sunglasses back on but for effect slid them an inch or so down his nose, peered at me over the tops of them and said, “What I have to tell you is more than amusing.”
“Something to do with the fire, I suppose.”
Cliff waited for the waitress to put our ice tea tumblers down on the table. He removed the straw from its paper, stuck it into the ice tea and sucked down a full two inches of liquid. “It’s related to the fire, yes,” he said after taking a big swallow. “But in the meantime, I gotta tell you Eric, getting that disaster cleaned up was a goddamn awful mess. Uncle Bruce wanted to save and salvage everything—absolute crap he wanted to save. Eric, you wouldn’t believe it. The day after the fire, I ordered four industrial size dumpsters to be parked in the driveway. I got some of my people to help Uncle Bruce cart stuff out—shit that had been totally destroyed, so gone, so wrecked, a lot of it you couldn’t even tell what the hell it was—just that it was black, wet, heavy crap. But then, one evening, after work, I came around to get in my car, and what should I see but Uncle Bruce climbing out of a dumpster and carrying all kinds of shit. I couldn’t believe it!”
“Did you say anything?”
“Say anything?! Of course. I walked over and said, ‘Bruce, what the hell are you doing that for? We spent all day throwing that shit in there and now you’re pulling it out? Why? For what?’ But he couldn’t tell me.
“Eric, one of the things that he’d pulled out was a bunch of what must have been your grandmother’s fur coats, only they weren’t fur anymore, but slimy, moldy, mildewed, completely destroyed, hanging shit on a bunch of coat-hangers in torn plastic bags, and they smelled to high heaven[4].
“The next day, I found that he’d been pulling more shit out and hauling it up to the third floor of the warehouse. Eric, it’s complete garbage.”
“I think I saw a fair amount of it on the second floor of the warehouse too,” I said.
“Oh, I know, it’s nuts, Eric, absolutely nuts.”
“So let me ask you,” said Cliff, as he waved the waitress over for a refill of ice tea. “What did you think of the house itself?”
“I met Frank, the insurance guy, and Duane the builder. I get the impression that there’s just a bit of corruption and palm-greasing going on here.”
Cliff laughed. “This isn’t Minnesota. It’s New Jersey, where everyone—everyone, Eric—is on the take, where you have to know how to play the game. Believe, me, I’ve been playing the game for Uncle Bruce for years now.
“Example. [REDACTED . . .]
“But that’s nothin’,” said Cliff, drawing down on his ice tea.
“Well anyway,” I continued, “one question is where will Uncle Bruce live? I thought his apartment was perfect, and initially he agreed with me, but then, without any warning, as you know, he nixed that idea.”
“Welcome to the world according to Bruce! I deal with that all the time. One day he’ll agree with an idea 100 percent, and then, the next day, he’ll turn on the old ‘Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde’ and say, ‘Nope, nope! I’m not doin’ that.’
“That happens all the time with tenant prospects. A guy will want to rent space and he’ll find Uncle Bruce and Uncle Bruce will send him to me and the guy will ask, ‘So what does he want for such and such space?’ and I’ll throw him an outlandishly high figure—twice what anyone else is currently paying—and he’ll say fine. I’ll then go back to Uncle Bruce and tell him I got a helluva deal, and Uncle Bruce will be all happy about it, but then the next day, he gives me some dumb-ass lease application form that’s five pages long and is more suitable for the Empire State Building than for converted office space in a an old, brick, warehouse building with a leaky roof, patched-up sprinkler system and heating system that is held together with wire and duct-tape. And the guy fills it out, and Uncle Bruce says, ‘Okay, fine, here’s a lease,’ and the guy signs and then the next day Uncle Bruce says, ‘I changed my mind. I don’t want to rent to the guy.’ And I say ‘Why not?’ and he says, ‘I don’t want to get into it. I just don’t want to rent to him.’ So I tell the guy, who then says, ‘Why not?’ and I say, ‘Because. Isn’t that good enough reason?’ And the guy says, ‘How much rent does he want? I’m willing to pay more,’ but nope, Uncle Bruce doesn’t want to rent to the guy, period. That’s happened a number of times. And he never wants to deal with these people directly. He has me do all the work for him, but I’m busy, and gees, Eric, it’s crazy.”
“I had no idea,” I said, taking a sip of ice tea. I realized just how distant the family was from Uncle Bruce’s day-to-day living and his goofball management of the property. “But back to the house—getting it restored is going to be a major project. It is amazing, don’t you think, that the place is still standing?”
“That house is built like a fortress,” said Cliff, sitting back in his chair. “I mean, how many houses do you think could catch fire so bad it takes four fire departments all night long to put the blaze out, and afterward, the place is still standing?”
“I just hope Uncle Bruce will restore it to at least a shadow of its former grandeur.”
“That’s not going to happen, Eric. Remember, it’s the world according to Bruce! He’s going to want some crap-ass design that is uglier than sin, and then he’ll order all the materials from K-Mart and have some cheap, schlocky builder patch it up for him. And in two weeks, all the shit that we carried out of there will be back in, along with whole new piles of garbage. Eric, I love the guy, but he’s turned into an absolute pig.”
“You know, there are other issues too.”
“Oh yeah?” said Cliff, unable to stifle a chuckle. “Like what?” He seemed to know something I didn’t—something that apparently would have to wait until Friday evening.
“Just before I came out here, Mother asked me about the status of Gaga’s estate.”
“What do you mean? Hasn’t she gotten anything yet?”
“No. And it’s been almost four years since Gaga died.”
“That’s ridiculous. You know what she was worth, Eric.”
“I’m not sure, Cliff. Uncle Bruce told me this morning that Mother’s share was only about sixty to seventy thousand.”
“That’s bullshit, Eric, and you know it. It should be millions, and that doesn’t include the 42 Lincoln, the warehouses or the house in Connecticut.”
“Part of my mission out here, Cliff, is to try to get to the bottom of all this.”
“Good luck.”
We lingered for a few minutes, engaged in lighter conversation, then returned to “disaster central.”
A while later, UB, Cliff and I had dinner at the China Buffet in Lyndhurst the next town over from Rutherford. I then caught a bus back to Manhattan, and to give myself a chance to mull over the day’s encounters and observations, I hiked 50 blocks from Port Authority up to Jenny and Garrison’s apartment on the Upper West Side. Once there, I found a CD featuring Schubert chamber music, and with a pen and pad of paper, leaned back to outline a grand plan for addressing the issues across the river.
I worked late into the night. The outline covered UB’s financial (income) needs, health care insurance, residential accommodations, hobbies (travel, gardening and dabbling with the commercial property), the need for professional management of the commercial property, and most ambitious, an estate plan, the central feature of which would be to preserve the property in Lyme, Connecticut, so that successive generations could enjoy that precious legacy of our great-grandparents.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[4] Among other losses on the third floor of the house were my great-grandfather’s collection of rare mantel clocks, beautiful cherry and mahogany furniture and other precious items that had been stored there—including Nina’s wedding dress. After she and Dean were married (1977) at Grace Episcopal Church in Rutherford (so Gaga wouldn’t have to travel to attend; our parents had been married there 31 years earlier), Nina had had the dress cleaned and preserved—and packed away in a third floor closet.
