A couple times they have asked me if I believe in God. My instinct is to dodge the question the way I used to when they asked whether Santa is real. “Do you think Santa is real?” I would parrot to them, which, for some reason, provoked their feeble little brains into muddled silence. Unfortunately, their intellects have now matured enough that they demand real answers to real questions. But I have no answers. I have nothing to offer them. A father should not appear to be a flailing idiot in front of his children. Yet when it comes to matters of faith, a flailing idiot is what I am. So rather than trying to skirt the issue in the hope of preserving their naïve faith, I go with the truth.
“I don’t know what to believe,” I tell them. “I think the world is a beautiful place and I think there is a lot of love in the world. Did God create the world and the love? A lot of people think so, but personally I don’t know.”
It’s the best answer I can give, but I can see in their eyes that they want something more definitive. Because I am their father, sometimes I can read their thoughts. This is one of those times, and what they are thinking is this: “Dad sucks.”
They’re right. I do suck. But it’s not my fault. All blame for my spiritual shortcomings rests with my parents. They are the ones who raised me without religion, so it is only natural that I am faithless. Mom only allowed herself to grow reacquainted with Judaism as part of her courtship with Sandy, a devout Jew. They attended synagogue together, shared Shabbat dinners with Sandy’s friends, and, together, discovered new and terrible Jewish music.
When it finally reawakened after decades in hibernation, Mom’s Judaism expressed itself with the fierce righteousness of the once were lost but now are found. For a while, she threatened to cross the dividing line between regular Jew and Super Jew, even doing that cute thing moms do where they throw a tearful fit about their son’s Catholic wedding ceremony not including any Judaic traditions even though she raised that son without religion and the son never even set foot in an actual temple other than to attend other people’s bar mitzvahs so it seemed a touch odd to her son that she should get so upset about it and certainly not worth throwing a hissy fit over in front of the priest her son had reluctantly agreed to allow to officiate to appease his fiancée and almost ruining the wedding for everybody. Cute mom stuff like that.
Thankfully, Mom soon burned off most of her white-hot religiosity. Now it just kind of burbles away at a low simmer. She sends cards and Hanukkah gifts and five-dollar bills to the kids during the High Holidays but she doesn’t push it on me or them. Honestly, it’s nice. The kids know they are half Jewish, although they would be hard-pressed to explain what that means, since I don’t really know what being Jewish means, other than the happy fact that I control the media.
Somehow for Mom, receiving an unexpected supernatural message fit into her worldview. When it came, she never questioned its validity. A voice (or “Voice”) told her the tumor was benign, and so it was and so it ever shall be. End of story. I envy her. Were it me, I would be forever turning over the events in my mind, trying to convince myself that what I knew had happened didn’t actually occur.
I ask Mom if she ever heard the Voice again. She says yes, one other time.
“Really?! What did it say?”
“I can’t remember,” she responds.
“You can’t remember?”
“I really can’t.”
How do you not remember what a voice—a voice you believe might be the actual voice of God—tells you? I am not the most conscientious listener, but when a prophetic voice starts whispering the secrets of the universe in my ear, at the very least, I jot the message down on a Post-it note. You know, just in case I forget what it said. WHICH I WOULDN’T DO! I mean, I met Dan Aykroyd twenty years ago and I can remember every word of that conversation, but my mom can’t remember what God Almighty told her? What if it was the secret to world peace? Or, more importantly, what if it was about me? I have not been this angry at my mother since she convinced me to get a perm in sixth grade. She promises to tell me what it said if she ever remembers. Thanks, Mom.
Chapter Four
Too good to be true
Although I can’t quite bring myself to believe in God, I pretty much believe in everything else. I’m willing to entertain any crank theory about UFOs, the authorship of William Shakespeare’s plays, fluoride in the water, the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, black helicopters, false flag operations, and Star Children. You say Lee Harvey Oswald was the patsy in a Russian/Cuban/CIA/mafia conspiracy? I believe it. You say Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone? I believe it. At any given moment, the conviction I hold most dear is whichever thing is the last one I heard. Yet even I—gullible idiot that I am—know that when a telephone rings and a man on the other end tells you a long-lost uncle has died and left you money, that man is a liar. So when I received such a call several years ago at my office, I said to the man, “You, sir, are a liar.”
Everybody knows that long-lost uncles are not a real thing. They may have been at one time, perhaps in the days of Charles Dickens, when people were routinely shanghaied from cobblestone streets and disappeared onto pirate ships, never to be heard from again. Back then, everybody had a long-lost uncle, or at least a misplaced cousin or two. But long-lost uncles are not a thing now. Not when we have GPS and the NSA. Nobody’s uncles are ever “lost.” They are either at home building model railroad sets or in jail for touching their nieces.
Besides, the idea that a relative of mine would leave behind any kind of worthwhile estate was ridiculous. Other than my gangland namesake, my family has never had much money. If they had, it either would have been squandered on dubious business opportunities or invested with Bernie Madoff or something. To die with more assets than liabilities is as exotic a concept to my family as crunking.
When I called the man on the phone a liar, he sighed. “That’s what everybody says when I call, but it’s true. You have a great-uncle on your father’s side who recently died.” He then detailed a fair amount of information to me about myself and my family, and told me he would be sending me a form so I could claim my inheritance.
“How much money is it?” I asked. I didn’t mean to be indelicate about the subject, but etiquette seemed unimportant while discussing fictional sums.
“I can’t say,” the man told me. Did that mean he didn’t know or he wasn’t allowed to say? He told me he didn’t know, that his job was to locate the estate’s heirs, which he had now done. Click.
After hanging up, I told my coworkers about the call. They agreed it sounded like a load of hooey. Worse, it wasn’t even persuasive hooey. Long-lost uncle. Please. This was amateur hour. This was “You wanna buy the Brooklyn Bridge?”–level bad. Of course, I wanted to believe the guy. Who wouldn’t want to believe such a thing? I am a huge fan of receiving money for doing nothing; it’s the main reason I became an actor. But this was too good to be true.
Later that night, I told Martha about the call. “That sounds too good to be true,” she said.
“I know.”
“But what if it is true?”
“How could it be true?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “How much money is it?”
“He wouldn’t say.”
We thought about it for a bit.
“Maybe it is true,” she said.
“It’s not true.”
Still, the call kept tickling at me. The one thing that prevented me from dismissing it entirely was the fact that I actually didn’t know much about my father’s side of the family. After Dad died, we fell out of touch with them all, and even when he was alive, we rarely saw any of his relatives other than his sister, our aunt Jane.
Dad used to take us to Aunt Jane’s to hang out with our cousins, two girls close to us in age. I liked visiting them, mostly because Aunt Jane kept her house well stocked with snacks. And not “snacks,” like the healthy crap Mom tried to pass off on us, handfuls of baby carrots and tiny boxes of raisins and shit like that. Real snacks contai
ning real American corn syrup. Fruit Roll-Ups and Cracker Jack and Doritos. The kinds of snacks any child would be proud to consume. My own house held no such wonders. “Have an apple” was my mother’s favorite reply to our repeated complaints that we had nothing good to eat in the house, as if she didn’t know that apples were precisely the kind of garbage we were complaining about. But other than enjoying their good snacks and the fact that my cousins were allowed to watch MTV in their basement playroom, I didn’t feel one way or another about hanging out with them. They were just kind of around, an immutable fact of our upbringing.
I have no treasured memories from those days. Mostly, we spent our time together loitering on their local playground, or just trawling the neighborhood streets. It seems strange now to recall a time when children were allowed to wander unsupervised across the vast suburban landscape like refugees, but that’s what we did. When Eric and I fell out of touch with them after Dad died, I didn’t feel too much about it other than the occasional twinge of mild guilt at having given away something I knew to be valuable even if I couldn’t exactly identify what. Mostly, though, I didn’t think about them at all, because thinking about my aunt and cousins meant thinking about my dad, and even fifteen years after the fact, I still hadn’t come to terms with his death.
(I am not going to write about his death here because I did so in my previous book. I also told the story on the radio show This American Life. If you are interested, I would suggest buying the book since I don’t receive royalties from This American Life because the host, Ira Glass, is a son of a bitch.*)
As I thought some more about the call offering me a mysterious inheritance, an unsettling possibility began percolating in my mind. Perhaps the situation was the exact opposite of what I believed it to be. Perhaps a long-lost uncle hadn’t suddenly popped into existence. Perhaps, instead, we were the ones who had disappeared. After all, an entire side of my family was still out there somewhere, but from their point of view, it was we who had vanished. It must have seemed to them as if we’d died along with Dad.
An envelope bearing the name of a fussy-sounding law firm arrived a few days later. Inside, I found an affidavit asking me to affirm that I was who I said I was. Which I did; I am me, so says I. The letter asked for no money, no personal information like my Social Security number. Just a straightforward-seeming legal document. These con artists were very, very good.
I called my brother. He’d received the same call, the same letter, harbored the same doubts. We discussed the likelihood of fraud. But as we talked, we began doubting our doubts.
“Maybe it’s true,” he said.
“Maybe it’s true,” I said.
My father’s father was a cop. He joined the NYPD in 1941, right before America entered WWII, but his police work in Harlem excused him from military service because, as my aunt says, “Our own war was pretty hot in Harlem.” Grandpa Leon spent about thirty years in the force, eventually rising to assistant borough commander in Queens, an impressive rise for a first-generation Jewish-American cop. My memories of him are dim. While Dad was alive we didn’t see Grandpa much; after Dad died, we never saw him again. The vague impression I have of him is of a large, taciturn man with a Walt Disney mustache and a Tony Soprano gut. I ask Jane what growing up with him was like. “Unhappy,” she says. Her parents fought frequently, and Leon kept the household on edge.
“Was he a yeller?”
No, she told me, worse. When he and my grandmother fought, rather than yell and be done with it, he would shut down, sometimes for weeks at a time. He closed off the entire world: family members, friends, neighbors, everybody. A heavy, ugly silence filled the house like carbon monoxide, choking off all conversation. “It was like living with a dead man,” she says.
“Nice,” I think. “Very mature.” A second later, though, I realize that I do the same thing. When Martha and I fight, she yells and I disengage. The more she screams, the more I curl up into myself, until she is left arguing with a hedgehog. Never for weeks, though. A few days at the most. Not because I want to nurse the grudge, but because once I burrow into my own head, it’s tough for me to dig my way out again, and also because it sometimes takes a few days for her to even realize I am not speaking to her.
Given his introversion, perhaps it is not surprising that Grandpa didn’t maintain close relationships with anyone, not his son or his son’s kids, or his siblings. He had two—a sister, Ruth, and a brother, Seymour. Ruth and Seymour married a brother and sister whose last name was Pincus, which seems wrong somehow, but I guess is okay in the eyes of the law and the Lord.
Sometime in the ’70s, Seymour and his wife, Pearl, moved to South Florida with their only son, Marc. Pearl died. Marc died. Ruth died. My grandfather died. Seymour was the only one left. When he finally died, he did so without a will, which meant his estate would pass to his nearest living relatives: Aunt Jane and Dad’s children, the three of us. That’s when I got a phone call at work from a man used to being called a liar. A few weeks later, I signed for an envelope from FedEx. Inside was another envelope. Inside that envelope was a check.
It was true.
In my hand, I held an envelope containing one-third of one-half of my dearly beloved uncle Seymour’s estate. I didn’t know how much money I was about to inherit, but I figured it had to be a lot. Why else would they go to all the trouble of tracking us down? The only times people track other people down is to collect a bounty or to give them fantastic sums of money. I figured, at a minimum, I was probably looking at a couple hundred thousand dollars. As for the maximum, well, I supposed the maximum could be anything. A million dollars. A billion dollars. Possibly even a zillion dollars. Regardless of the exact amount, it was clear my life was about to change forever.
I opened the envelope and looked at the check: $3,280.
My life was not about to change forever.
A little perspective: On any other occasion, I would be thrilled to receive, out of the blue, a check for three grand. That’s a lot of money to get for answering the phone. But in these very specific, once-in-a-lifetime circumstances—mystery man on the other end of the phone, long-lost uncle, notarized documents, unspecified sum of money—it’s hard to view three thousand dollars as anything other than a disappointment. It’s like the universe tossed me a few Ben Franklins and went, “Here, you greedy, covetous prick. Don’t spend it all in one place.” Well, guess what, universe? I did spend it all in one place. I bought a new laptop computer, a printer, and some books about poker. The only inheritance I am ever likely to receive squandered in a twenty-minute online shopping binge. Worse, the books I bought probably cost me another three grand in poker losses.
So that was the end of that, at least until a month or so later, when I received a letter from Aunt Jane, the first time I’d heard from her in years. She’d gotten my address from the law firm that handled the estate. Whatever guilt I’d felt about losing my relationship with her and my cousins, she confessed to feeling a hundredfold in her letter to me, which in turn, made me feel a hundred times worse on top of that.
Jane apologized for having lost contact with me and my siblings all those years ago. She filled me in on our cousins’ lives, and hers. She lived (like everybody else in my family) in South Florida with a new husband and a menagerie of yippy little dogs. Life was good, she wrote, and she felt so happy to be back in touch. I wrote back, filling her in on my own life: wife, baby boy, global television superstar. We agreed to get together the next time I came down to Florida to visit Mom.
Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I inadvertently adjust my torso a certain way so that my hip lets out a sudden crack, bursting apart some long-held tension I hadn’t even been aware I’d been carrying. That’s what seeing Aunt Jane again felt like. When we finally met, maybe six months later, she wrapped me in a big hug and I felt some small, pained part of me slip back into place. That’s what family is, I guess—finding a place for all the parts of ourselves that fit nowhere else.
&nbs
p; We sat and talked, and her response to everything I said was “Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful” in the slight Queens accent she’d carried south with her. Chatting with my aunt felt like rediscovering some long-forgotten foreign language. It brought me right back to those summer afternoons in my cousins’ basement sucking on ice pops while the grown-ups talked upstairs. I imagine it must have been weird for her, seeing me for the first time in decades, now grown with a family of my own, about the same age her brother was when he died.
I don’t mean to exaggerate the evening. All we really did was eat dinner and chat and play with those yippy dogs. We talked about Dad. We toured her home. We did what people do. And when the evening ended, we hugged again and promised to stay in touch, which we have done, although more sporadically than I think either of us would like, but enough so that now and again we get together, and now and again, she answers my e-mail questions about what it was like to grow up unhappy with a cop who didn’t talk.
I’ve since grown reacquainted with my cousins, too, and their husbands, and now their kids. Once a year, we all assemble for an afternoon to catch up on each other’s lives. My brother burns hamburgers on the infrared grill he bought because he read somewhere that infrared is the best kind of grill (we share the same bad genes, so he, too, is a gullible idiot). As the afternoon is ending, we tie the children together with rope so we can take a group photo without them scattering in every direction. We hang out. It’s a small thing, an afternoon with family. But it’s my inheritance. And it’s wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.
* * *
* I am joking about Ira Glass. He is a lovely and generous man, and I am not just saying that in anticipation of asking him to blurb my book.
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