It was about a month ago that Michael slipped into his semi-coma, and I began to cry about it all. Early mourning. The wrenching, very physical sense of loss had already begun. I continued to believe, somehow, that I could save him by continuing the ongoing novena to St. Jude. The Friday night before he was totally gone I went down to the Cathedral, with one of his mother’s rosaries in the zippered inside pocket of the black Barbour jacket, went to the St. Jude shrine—first one on the left it is, and knelt on the hard marble. No cushions or hassocks there. Took out the holy card with prayer that I keep in my 2023 Moleskine pocket diary. (I’d come across one of these left on the prie-dieu in front of St. Jude at St. Paul the Apostle a few months before, and carried it around until it went walkabout. The shop at St. P.A. got a new supply of holy cards, and so I got a new Jude, only a dollar. It’s still in my Moleskine.)
And I was crying so hard I couldn’t even read the print easily. “Please bring him back, please cure him, please make him better.” I walked around the inside perimeter of the Cathedral, still teared-up. Past the Lady Chapel, where my parents married in 1950, and where Moki and I sometimes half-seriously said we’d do a real wedding someday.
Streets very crowded. It’s the day after Thanksgiving, tourists out and kids home from school. Very reassuring, my eyes dried up a bit. I think I got a dragon roll, or something like that, at Dainobo, and then a pint of Svedka at Shirley’s. Unless that’s when they were out of Svedka and I got Smirnoff’s instead.
I probably conked out early; had been up since the wee hours, writing the blog, writing the Substack. I get up around dawn, Saturday morning, and Michael is gone. In the afternoon the corpse has gone stiff and I realize I have to do something. I wait until late Sunday morning to call 911, that being the only option I know of. Then the first responders, and the medical examiner, and the two girl cops, ask me in various ways why I didn’t call before. It’s because I didn’t know what to do; it’s all new to me, I say, more or less. It would have been easier to say I woke today, Sunday, and my superannuated husband was dead. But I was thinking, they’ll be able to gauge the time of death. As it happens the medical examiner lady declared him dead just after 3 in the afternoon on Sunday the 26th November, so that’s what we have on the death certificate.
I keep going back over these things, like Emma Bovary remembering the ball and the night she danced with the Baron. Only two weeks ago! Three weeks! Four weeks!
In the past week I’ve a couple of other shocks, and although I’m still crying, it’s perhaps less from the awfully physical sense of wrenching separation from the person I loved, than a sense of abandonment and finding myself facing a world of sorrows. Bills, debts, unpaid rent. Have reupped with NYC’s Access HRA. A public assistance program I tried to enroll us in early this year. But Moki was the lead on the form, and when someone from the office phoned him up on his landline in April or May for an extensive interview, he didn’t answer or return the call. He’d taken to bed more or less permanently, except for visits to the bathroom, and sometimes staggering out for a football or liter. An HRA notice by mail came in around June, telling us they’d terminated the application for this reason.
And last Sunday, four days ago, I get a notice from Civil Court telling me there’s a judgment against me. Went down November 9th, but the letter is dated December 11th. I need to get this vacated. Also need to part out any substantive bank account holdings, put them in USAA and HSBC, leave tidbits in WF and Chase, bare minimum at Citi. I found this while shoving off for TMPL on Sunday afternoon. I was so unnerved that I cut my TMPL visit short. No workout, no shower. I was sitting on the C2 for a bare minute, pondering: This is the shock that has blown the Moki loss out of the water. I will never break down in tears over him again.
But of course I would, and have. Though right now I tell myself he’s still with me and always will be. More and more my tears are those of self-pity. After leaving TMPL I trudged up 9th Ave. and bought a pint of Smirnoff. Nobody’s going to fuck me over with funny-money judgment. I have four or give solid counts for vacating this bullshit.
Last Tuesday week, after breakfast with Tom, I stopped in at the First Presbyterian Church. Fog Lifters are no longer upstairs, they’re just off the entrance, to the right. Still 12:30pm, but only one meeting, no Beginners session around a conference table. It seemed a plausible exercise last week, but I’ve been drinking every day since. Other thing I’ve been doing that’s less than healthful is gulping two or three cups of coffee, from a Pike Place Blend I bought at the drugstore a week or so ago when I decided to stop using the Starbucks app, which was costing me five or ten dollars a day. Feeble Moki loved that in his last couple of weeks, when I ordered coffee and would bring it up. One of his wandering thoughts when I made tea instead a few days later was, “When did we start drinking tea? Why did we start drinking tea?” We started, in the last year, because one day we had no coffee in the house, but I had lots of tea bags. I gave my microwave tea formula. One or two bags, a dollop of honey, water in the cup, 2:30 on high. He much enjoyed it, though he wasn’t out of bed to make himself any after August.
Pennsylvania Vital Records notifies me that after two attempts, they’ve finally produced my requested birth certificate copies and have shipped them. I’d ordered them maybe ten days ago because I need to make the name change official. One new obstacle in this is that the judgment will count against me if it’s not vacated. Perhaps not: I’m not totally changing my name, just officially taking on my husband’s name.
Banking nuisances the other day, Tuesday, after spending a few hours uploading documents to HRA. The $350 Moki check I deposited into Chase a week ago has been returned, NSF. I blamed this on USAA. They sequestered Moki’s accounts, it would seem, without notifying me. I’m told to fill out a “Letter of Instruction” and upload it back. Then I go downstairs and find a pile of correspondence from USAA to me and to Estate of Mr. Michael E. Burns. Among other things they’ve turned back the last SS deposit, which they claim was December 1. I know I got a balance statement out of the Duane Reade ATM on November 30 (can’t find it now) and it was $1200 or so. I took $100 out and spent maybe $750 the overdue Verizon bill (must cut that to almost nothing) on December 6. If another $1200 or so was deposited and/or reversed in December, then the thing cannot be zeroed out. Oh but wait, $310 to the USAA American Express card around December 6. And Netflix too. I didn’t realize USAA might have taken some action until Dec.11th, last Monday week, when I tried to use the debit card to buy that $17 salad at Mangia…
What else on Tuesday. Damn JetBlue card from Barclays ran up a $5700 debt on the card (on a credit line of $3300) in order to effect a balance transfer of my Amazon Chase Visa. But it never showed up on that Visa, after more than two weeks. Aha, but I check again on Wednesday, yesterday, and there it is.
I have not been reimbursed by A.T. for the cremation. That’s $2210 I badly need. Call her today. After checking the mail. And throwing out trash.
Some bright spots in the last week. There is the case of Isolde Y., mysteriously murdered back in 1975, body discovered in 1976, finally verified as her remains last July. Her younger sister Fredericka (now an ophthamologist in Houston) did a DNA test, and there was a match. I wrote a short piece on it for C-C. (Greg’s suggestion.) Her first cousin Connie, Vinette’s daughter, married Bill M. way back when, not long after I first met him. (I shall need to privatize this blog post or use initials because the search engines will be screaming for more details.) Every bit as headstrong and intellectual as Uncle Frank, though much more stable, and not a risk-taker. A half-century of marriage, with neither partner as yet decrepit, is an impressive achievement. Over the past 25 years or so, Connie had her widowed mother and aunt Alice move to her Valley community in Virginia. Both are now deceased. This is an extraordinary clan. I’d like to ask Connie if she’s aware of Isolde’s murder and revelation, but there’s absolutely no tactful way of doing this.
Pat E. and speak every few days. He calls on Moki’s phone. One of the first Moki friends I notified. Yesterday he calls me after three, suggests getting a burger up at that place around 73rd and Third. “J.G. Melon’s,” I say? Well sure, Then he makes complicated plans to have his son drive us there. By the time I get picked up it’s about 6:30. And the place is packed, with the usual young crowd. Pat slips Mine Host a wad of bills, and in a few minutes we bypass the kids in queue and get a tiny table at the back. He tells me about his girlfriend Susan with her 7500 sq ft duplex coop or condo in PB. He tells me about being accepted into Columbia when he was 17, only the faculty from Powers Memorial disapproves and beards his parents at home. A couple teachers in the living room, the guidance counselor out in the kitchen. Then don’t want him to go to Columbia because “he’ll lose his faith.” (My experience is quite the opposite, based on Moki, his cousin Edmund, and my sister and brothers.) And what was the upshot? I do not know. DID he go to Columbia? Sent his kids to Chicago. And then he tells me about early jobs. Sales training at Johnson & Johnson. Beautiful young redheaded woman named Maureen shows him sanitary napkins, tampons, gauze pads, wants to date him. He must have been quite a looker. Probably blond-red-haired to judge by complexion now. And then Pat’s job in a ticketing agency, same building as Mike Todd’s office. Mike and he become good friends. Pat wants to join the Marines, but the Army drafts him first so he goes down to Fort Dix. Mike Todd calls the base to find Pat, much to the annoyance of a sergeant or base commander, who thinks it’s a prank. Well it is Mike Todd and Mike wants Pat and some army friends to come to his big party in Madison Square Garden, celebrating the one-year anniversary of Around the World in 80 Days. Pat doesn’t have a uniform for some reason; the army is shifting him to another unit, and his boot camp duds get binned. So he borrows his sergeant’s uniform and goes to the city to see Mike and Liz. Something like ten thousand people there.
Mike wants “the sergeant” (Pat) to climb a wobbly stepladder to the top of the cake, and make the first cuts. The cake is fifteen or maybe thirty feet high. With the cameras rolling, someone bumps the ladder, and Pat falls into the cake. He has a hard time explaining to his sergeant how his uniform got all messed up, but apparently he got it cleaned sufficiently after he got back to base.
Corbis Images says the cake was 14′ high. Somebody apparently held the ladder steady for Liz.
Mike and/or Liz and Pat got together for dinner or whatever for a while. Not too long a while, of course: Mike died in that plane crash in March 1958, and he and Pat can’t have known each other for much more than two or three years by that point. Too bad Liz is gone and I’ve only heard this story for the past two years. Something tells me she’d have a vivid memory of it if I’d caught her twenty years ago.
The footage of Pat falling into the cake is lost to history, so far as we know. There is a Walter Cronkite doco about the Mike Todd party, and I’ve watched it online, but it closes off before the cake-cutting. A couple years ago Pat said he’d give me $10,000 if I could find that missing footage. Or even still pictures, I guess. He reiterated this as we went to our respective homes in a taxi.
“Merry Christmas,” Pat had said as we were led to our table at J. G. Melon’s. He pressed a Chicago bankroll into my hands. Felt like a few hundred. It was ten, actually, ten crispies. A thousand in cash, which I really need now.
