I finished the paperwork for the cremation yesterday, and on Wednesday (tomorrow) the earthly remains should be at the Rosehill Crematorium in New Jersey. We may have the ashes back on the weekend. In the morning I gave the credit card number for my Citi Cash card. The damages were 2210.00. This is about twice what I wanted to pay, but it’s the rock-bottom cremation price you’ll get in Manhattan; and even then the cremation doesn’t actually take place here. Until I scrolled down to the credit-card form on Sunday, my intention was to pay with what was left on Moki’s USAA debit card. However, they don’t allow you to use card of the deceased. (Makes sense, particularly with credit cards; Moki is dying with all sorts of unsecured credit-card debt.) And as I do not yet have paper cheques for that USAA account (I guess Moki ran out years ago), I couldn’t just make a check deposit into my own account and pay out of that. So I paid down the Citi Cash card, online, and when that seemed to have gone through Monday morning (yesterday) I finished the form. After that there was some back-and-forth between me and Jared Oswald-King over at Crestwood on West 43rd St. I had to sign and initial some more paperwork. He emailed me, I printed, signed, initialed, scanned, sent new PDF back to him. I missed a spot. The red X he marked didn’t show up well on my b/w laser copies. So I fixed that, made new final PDF, back to Jared. Now the deed seemed done.
Phoned A.T. around 11:30. Happy to hear from me, happy to know I’ve made progress. She asked if perhaps she should attend the cremation. She was under the vague impression the job was being done up near her. I said we might schedule the actual burial (via Alicia’s friend David Dello Russo at the funeral home in Medford) in the months ahead. We have Christmas season coming up, and Mercury goes retrograde next week. She said she’d cover the $2210.00. Oh good, I said. I’ll send her a nice card with letter and ‘invoice.’
A minor, but serious, annoyance came up when I was finishing the paperwork. The toilet in my bathroom is leaking.The flex hose intake to the tank is loose or bad. I think this happened once before, a couple years ago, but it stopped and I never found what caused it. Have to have handyman here in a few yours (after 5 am now). I’ve got a half-dozen sopping towels now lying in the tub in Moki’s bathroom. I think I’ll start the cleanup there shortly. Ugh. The worst toilet in Scotland.
One of those 9-11 victims’ fund lawyers called me in the afternoon. Talked my ear off. Will phone again at 10 this morning.
Spent a couple hours writing a windy Substack draft about my father’s time with Techbuilt. My conceit is that he ended up there because he didn’t cost too much, and he wouldn’t or couldn’t apply to a more substantial operation. Also there was a class thing going. He liked the fact that it seemed a fashionable, boutique outfit out of Cambridge, Mass. I’ve written mostly about the Sturm und Drang in my family in the 1960s, however, and so far little about Techbuilt, and nothing about IEH, the strange little firm that Dad earlier worked for, which much less upscale but which worked on the same principles.
Sent some photos to be printed at the CVS at 57th and Eighth. The primary one there is the one of Michael with his mother, early 1980s (?) in Falmouth. I scanned Michael’s original (hanging in the pantry) and fixed the color degradation in Photoshop. One of these goes to A.T., along with a pretty card and a nice note and mention of that $2210.00…of course.
Found Max Kirby’s phone number and email on Moki’s mobile phone, sent him an email, recalling our get-togethers in the East Village, May 2015. There was the German Bierhaus that only took cash, and a chichi bruncherie calling itself Prune. I remember one of the people outside waiting for a table was a young woman with long blonde hair and a mostly white minidress with colorful design, “Love Is In the Air.” A little bit of research showed this to be from Alice & Olivia, for which I worked up a fascination for much of 205-2016, going along with my Taylor Swift craze. This may have been the dress, but I can’t say for sure:
