For months I’ve wanted to write an incisive review of the Kim Philby/Nick Elliott miniseries. After cranking out and rewriting 2400 words or so (surely too long) I find it to be impenetrable. So I clean it up slightly. Will send it to C-C later, with an end-of-year book wrap-up.

Call from Pat Clark today. Actually he phoned first on the Moki landline, then on my landline. Hung up almost immediately. So I rang back on the Moki iPhone. And we had a good chat. Usual stuff. Can I keep the apartment? What is this about him having two kids? Dottie and/or I posted the Manhattan Cremation obit on Facebook and Pat just saw it.

Teeth and gums occupy my thoughts. Back in September I had that awful abscess above the UR 6-year-molar, which I got rid of with erythromycin from that shop on the UWS. It took a few days. Meanwhile the pain migrated over to the UL side, premolar area. In recent weeks pain has erupted again, just above the UL bicuspid, and it’s spread to the adjacent part of the lower jaw. I take antibiotics and aspirin, and after some hours of severe pain it goes away and I fool myself into thinking it’s gone for good. But aha!

Anyway I signed up again for Delta Dental. I was going to do that end of September, when I was working through that phase of the trouble. Having signed up, I find they have my whole Delta history, going back to early days at AmexPub. I didn’t use them at all until I was booted out of there. Then almost immediately I ran up a $4000+ bill because I allowed myself to be upsold into an extensive periodontal program of cutting and scraping. The Delta insurance paid very little of it and was a bitch to deal with. So no upselling this time. I have an appointment at 11am on January 3rd. No upselling. I was attracted to this dental practice because it had an all-American guy named Scott Pope. But it turns out Scott Pope doesn’t really work at this practice on West 54th. He still spends most of his time out in Walnut Creek.

At the moment my gums do not hurt. But just let me try to eat something. The recent phase began a week ago Wednesday, the day Pat E took me to J. G. Melon. I’d bought a Marie Callender’s pot pie, and was about to eat part of it when Pat called me up and led me on a protracted wait that led well into the evening. So I ate some of the pie anyway and got a sharp stabbing pain in the front of my palate. I’d never had that before. So it hung around, came and went for the next week, with colonies of pain elsewhere in the mouth.

Dottie is having me over again for New Year’s Eve. Weird food, a lot involving eggs. I remind her again I can’t deal with eggs. She’s having caviar on toast points. I guess I can stomach fish roe. She wants margaritas. This means getting tequila and margarita mix. What about Cointreau or triple sec? Don’t they make up some drink?

I was at Dottie’s on Christmas Eve and again on the 26th. Bought Bitdefender for myself and installed it on her Mac Mini. She gets annoying notifications in the upper right. Source unknown. I thought the anti-malware thing would cure it, but no.

Pointless arguments with near-identical fools on Twitter re Caster Semenya, the intersex black South African. They keep insisting that Caster is “male,” even though she was raised female and is IS. This sort of insistence betokens something akin to autism.

Spent yesterday, Christmas Eve, with Dottie. She made me a brunch, part of which I could not eat because it was quiche. I can’t eat eggs; hadn’t told her. Took a big bite. Felt ready to gag. Drank a lot of red wine. Smoked a cigarette. We went up to her roof where I photographed her infected trees and then ourselves. I came out old and flabby and very strange looking. I have conquered this before, however. I’m just not working out. Work out, yoga, swim. All week, then you can run.

She is having computer problems. Unwanted notifications, probably trojans and viruses. I bought Bitdefender to use on my laptops, will install it on her Mac Mini. It found 5 infections on the old Mac Air 13.

Greg wants me to get in close with Fredericka. I think Fredericka will be wary. But I’ve sent her a card and letter, dated Christmas Day. (See bottom.) Also something to Laura, and Paul & Anthony, and to A.T. and to someone else. Oh yes, Dottie. I may go see her tomorrow, late afternoon.

Tried to go to Mass at St. P’s today, in the evening, but the crowds were queued all the way around the Cathedral, and the normal side doors weren’t open.

Made a shitload of spaghetti bolognese this evening, and drank a pint of vodka. The Chinawoman’s was open, and son Sean was there.

Very nice call from young Danny in Tarpon Springs, late morning. After he gets the Buffalo Wild Wings franchise outlets set up (20 of them?) for the Adler Group he’s going to retire. He’s 62. He seemed barely 50 when I met him in Palm Beach. We talked about the many ailments his sisters have had. Liz who died in 2016. Liz was 5 mos. pregnant with Evan when she found she had cancer (some lymphoma on her neck). And then she had a fourth son, Sam, before she died. Max got married in Scotland to a wee demure Scottish lass who had no idea what she was getting into. And I asked about Mimi, who has had Covid and myasthenia gravis and kidney failure and COPD and Lord knows what else.

But then it was a delight in the evening to get a call from Mimi, too, in the evening. We talked death and diseases. The sicknesses plaguing her family seem to have come down through her mother, a Cabot and a Lucci.

Letter to Fredericka Yockey.

Christmas Day, 2025

Dear Dr. Yockey,

Having lost my sister and husband just recently, along with a number of friends, I was doing an end-of-year What We Lost roundup. And some kind soul pointed me in the direction of the semi-solved mystery of your sister Isolde.

That must be the most remarkable certified death of the year. Mercifully—I suppose it was—you had the best part of five decades between her actual murder (as I assume it was) and its confirmation. Furthermore you were living in Europe for a long while afterwards, with medical school to focus on.

By the strangest coincidence, when I read the story about Isolde, I was reminded that an acquaintance of mine from 50 years back married your cousin Connie Coyne (Vinette’s daughter) a year or two after I met him. I hadn’t thought of these people in many years, literally. And, Deo gratias, I resisted the temptation to ask them if they heard or knew anything more about the Isolde story.

I’m further attuned to all this because a fiancé of mine died suddenly and tragically 30 years ago, after amassing a trove of correspondence about your father. After he died, the collection went to the University of Oregon. Years later two people eventually produced their biographies of F. P. Yockey. Both were deep and scholarly, but one was didactic-Leftist, the other mildly sympathetic.

I am thrilled to say I made a slight, perhaps insubstantial, contribution to both books but am not listed in the acknowledgments of either. Perhaps that’s for the best.

With kind regards of the season,

I am

Meg Burns

(etc.)

Letter from Greg.

The mail haul this evening was rather good, all things considered. Little Christmas cards, as yet unopened, from Dottie and Laura. Envelopes of different sizes from USAA, to me and/or to the Estate of——. Two envelopes from PA Vital Records, each with a new-style certified BC copy. They are bigger now, with blue background, and they list your parents’ names and your birthtime. I was expecting all sorts of holdups and frustrations with these, that being par for the course, and this being a funny time of year. And I was told to expect them after the first of January. But no, here they are, reprocessed with my December 14 application, posted on December 19, and they arrived on the 23rd. This means I should be able to change name shortly, unless I get snagged on that judgment.

Other reasons for upbeat thoughts: it does appear that as a survivor I might be able get my husband’s Social Security benefits. It’s not an awful lot, but certainly sweetens the pot. A few ifs there, the description online is ambiguous. Something to pursue next week, along with the ongoing missing-earnings saga.

Went to TMPL but didn’t do much. I felt tired. Drinking wine now, that’s good. Some frozen vindaloo from Westerly, where I stopped mainly to buy some cheap supplement that comes in capsules. This is for the erythromycin. Also baby arugula and more goat cheese. Am going to try for TMPL again tomorrow morning, open 7-12.

Tried to copy the Gordon Sharpe CD to iTunes but it didn’t work. It copied one track, less than a half of the disk. Why? Because it is not a DVD? Why can I not copy the disk image and take it from there?

Dottie’s at one pm tomorrow. I believe I won’t go to Joan Igoe’s. I will plead fragility.

Left message at Jamie Scanlan’s home phone, no callback yet. I think he’s dodging me. I’m going to have to go after Alicia.

A Little Later: Tried the Gordon Sharpe CD again and this time it worked. Only trouble is, it all appears as Track 1 and Track 2. I suppose that’ll be okay. Have it on my iPhone SE now.

“Around the World in 90 Minutes” was the name of the Mike Todd party feature in October 1957, broadcast as an episode of Playhouse 90. It was roundly derided in the press, and some reviewers even regretted that it ran opposite a Hallmark presentation of “Green Pastures” on another network. Then other reviewers (who presumably tuned into “Green Pastures” for a while) cocked a snook at their stuffy colleagues and said the only reason it got praise is that it wasn’t the crazy Mike Todd party, and very few people watched it.

I know I’ve seen this, I thought a couple of nights ago after being out with Pat E. But I couldn’t find it on YouTube or elsewhere. They do seem to have it at the nearby Paley Center (formerly Museum of Broadcasting). But how did I see it a couple of years back? So it comes to me yesterday that I found it at Robert’s Hard to Find Videos and ordered it, for maybe $20. Probably PayPal; check that for late 2021. I watched it on a DVD, via this selfsame Mac Air 13″ (still my favorite). It contained only the broadcast, narrated by Walter Cronkite, with a lot of circus animals and celebs. Pat E’s colossal moment does not appear.

I look for the Robert’s Videos site, all combinations of its name, and it seems they don’t exist or are gone. Maybe Robert died? In Saskatoon. Most likely I kept the DVD disk in the envelope it came in, whether it not it was in a jewel box. Most likely it’s around here. Going to be hard to hunt through CDs, DVDs, similar detritus.

One thing I immediately see in looking at one of my stacks is Gordon Sharpe’s “Relaxing” CD, which should be copied onto our digital devices. Also Pat Whatsisname’s running-rhythm music.

On the credenza, atop the set-top box, are Moki’s passport, a card case with SS card, license, and various other things. The wandering mind thinks: I can set up a new Amazon Associates account for him. But would it be worth it? I didn’t make a cent, even though I was cheating, with my own account. And they cut me off. I just didn’t have traffic on my sites.

Good call to A.T. late yesterday afternoon. Well now, it seems she does remember getting something with a photo of Moki and their mother. Must be only thing that registered with her.

Last night I worked my way quickly through the second pint I bought Wednesday night (it is now Friday) and bought some Rice-A-Roni Spanish Rice mix, San Marzano tomatoes, and jalapeño chicken sausage. I stuffed myself on that, and half of it is still in the skillet, though minus the sausage bits that I picked at.

Tonight or tomorrow I should call Joan Igoe to see if I should come over on Sunday (Christmas Eve). What should I bring? This afternoon or evening I should try Jamie again. Maybe phone him from Moki’s landline. Need that check. I may suggest I travel up there.

  *   *   *

A little later. I went out to the lv rm to start a search through all the CDs, instead decided it would be a good time to hang the Sneem photo. I have done it, more or less aligned, with the picture-hanging hardware picked up from Target earlier this week.The paint is not too streaky, even with the bad lighting here.

I’d gone to Tarzhay mainly to see if there were any more tiny-bulb LED Christmas tree lights for my spindly clot of weeds (remains of an avocado plant that may or may not sprout again, surrounded by what look like tomato plants). Position it pathetically in our dirty windows.

  *   *   *

A little later still. I walked all the way down to St. Agnes on East 43rd, and let me tell you, that is twice as far away as St. Patrick’s. But I was going to Confession for the first time in (modestly estimated) ten years. Got some Filipino or other nonwhite Spanish-tinged priest. Very kindly. Penance, a mere three Our Fathers. Asked me if I lived alone. I do now! Any children? Well they’re grown, and they live in Europe! (Does this count as a sin?) Outside a Mass was slowly going on. The priest there (another foreigner) took his time with the sermon. I left at the cusp of the Offertory. I wasn’t there to receive Communion, I was there to be shriven.

My mind now unravels to thoughts of moving to Front Royal, or Winchester, or someplace farther up the Shenandoah Valley where I might claim distant roots. Northern end has the advantage of being within driving distance of Berkeley Springs while still letting one get to know the TradCat pod around FR. The Yockey kin have burrowed deep into UltraTradCatism, attending a Ukrainian Catholic Church, in a rite and Uniate sect relatively unpozzed by the mainstream. Of course I used to go to a Lithuanian church near Canal Street, because they had convenient midday masses, and a Tridentine Latin one on Sunday. But that wasn’t an Eastern Rite Church.

I do not have the money to move, otherwise I might be tempted. But I’m too old to start over someplace else. I must grow where I’m planted, and maybe visit these places and try to make do. Of course I do not have the money to stay, either. Get a job, a real job, where you show up every day in the office and get a paycheck every two weeks. Do they still exist?

  *   *   *

Terrible tooth and gum pain, last couple of weeks. It’s as bad as the one around my bad tooth, the UR 6-year molar that was drilled to distraction in childhood, and then gloriously root-canaled and crowned in 1987 by a guy who still practices across the street. But that was definitely an abscess. This new pain, in the UL bicuspid area, just feels like severe gum pain, with no swelling or pain high up in the gum. More like a toothache, but I can’t think what brought it on. High sensitivity to heat, as I found while drinking tea this afternoon. I’ve taken aspirin and just now made four capsules of Erythromycin, in case there is an abscess coming on. (Get new capsules of that Ayurvedic herb so I can empty them out and fill them.)

My purple Craft gloves have disappeared. Not in the Barbour coat. Not on the floor.

At Shirley’s I picked up a bottle of the $9.99 plonk I bought a couple of weeks ago. Shirley made Christmas present of this to me, along with a pint of Svedka.

The season is being good to me. Now if only I could get that check from A.T.

I bought a little arugula salad and a log of chevre at Klein’s. May eat it when the pain goes down.

Could not find the Mike Todd disk. Clearly I didn’t value it much. It didn’t have Pat E’s scene. But I did come across the 1958 Aladdin video disk that I bought around 2013-2014 from the same Robert’s Videos place. I posted the Cyril Ritchard opener to YouTube years ago, and later on another kind soul evidently posted the whole damn thing.

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.

No word back from Andy. Well I wrote it to his lawyer email address. Of course a lot of people have only one email address.

Revealed my bereavement to Dottie. Will probably go visit before Christmas. Michael never ceased to wonder at that sixth-floor walkup. He never went, though he gladly accepted her joints and we had a nice birthday dinner at Indochine once. 2015 was it?

I’m not down in that area much anymore, since I’m not running at the 6th Street track (it was closed for a long time) and the NYHRC converted itself into a “Life Time” gym that charges 180% more than the HRC.

Modest workout yesterday evening. Over 30 min on the stationary, a bit over 5 on the C2, just a few on a bumpy-ride elliptical. I really don’t like those Lifefitness ellipticals, with all their funny arms. They got rid of their awful rowing machines and brought Concept 2’s, as I recommended. Why can’t they get some Precor EFX machines as well.

As Max, arguing on Twitter with a couple of autistes over consummation and annulment of marriage. I can’t tell if they really don’t understand what consummation is, or are they’re just winding me up? Another day, another Twitter argument.

Was up betimes (4 am) finishing the painting of the living room wall. Looks okay. No need to slap on another coat. Now to clean the Sneem glass and put a couple of nails or picture hangers in the wall. Next up: figure out how to drag out and clean behind the file cabinet. If we still had the handtruck I might be able to leverage it by sticking the lip under the bottom and working the thing out, one side at a time. But we left the handtruck at the storage facility in early 2022 and never went back for it and the remainder of Moki’s belongings (mainly pictures and files). He stopped paying the storage place. That was sort of the beginning of the end for him. We fell behind on rent and stopped paying that. A.T. had a stroke and stopped sending him his monthly remittance. I recall him still being bright and chipper in the Spring. Late April anyway. May, June, July he’d shuffle out to the Chinawoman for a football or liter, call to me when he came in the door, demand I take the sack and make him a drink. Those are happy times. I told myself he was having trouble walking because he quit cutting his toenails. I told him the VA could take care of those long, curling nails, but he stopped going. When was that? Perhaps the unsorted mail holds the answer. Early this year? Late last year? Anyway I soaked his feet in July and tackled the overgrown nails. Not just long, the big toes had nails that were 1/8″ thick. Why was he producing so much keratin? Was it the Biktarvy?

There was another drug he took, a retroviral I think. Atripla.That was the only HIV med I was aware of till this year, when I found he was taking Biktarvy and the script had run out in March. I called the VA and ordered more a couple of months ago, but too late, perhaps. I must call his physicians at the VA and ask about this. Had he continued on the Atripla, would he have lived?

I was reminded of the Atripla because I came across it in a case on the upper shelf behind Moki’s desk. And I was looking around there because all this attention to the red file cabinet got me wondering whatever became of Moki’s “drug box.” This was a black hinged box with the logo of Hotels International on it, and I believe it dates from his Indianapolis days, when he was EVP of the Indiana Pacers. 25 years ago it might contain some glass crack pipes, copper screens, scrapers (concave metal rods that supposedly came from a windshield wiper), maybe bits of plastic drinking straws. There was a time when Moki went away to a New Zealand bicycling trip in early 1999, and I kept going back to that box, scraping and smoking the bejesus out of that glass. Got decent hits at first, but the residue was soon gone. But I kept imagining that it would grow after a few days, so compulsively I’d go back and check. This is how you know you’re slipping into an addiction. If I’d had a dealer around, I probably would have phoned him up.

Anyway, up near the Atripla there was a metal mesh Container Store box, and inside were Bernzomatic torches (one still in its blister pack), Bic lighters, a scraper or two (the classic kind and a medical-grade one that looks like something you’d clean your toenails with), a clean and empty tina pipe, and…and…a bigger pipe with a bit of stuff at the bottom of the bowl. So I lit up and got a modest hit out of it. Waited a few moments and got an even better one. So now I’m back in the early ’99 mentality, hoping there’s still a good hit waiting for me, but there isn’t, alas, scraping be damned.

Greg’s sent me two emails about articles he wants. I have work ahead of me.

Also from email: Vital Records in PA finally approves my ID, which I had to resend the other day because the apartment number was missing on my form, though it appears on ID. So now they’ll get me my certificate copies, or come back with some other terrible excuse or holdup.

I tried calling Ashley a couple of times a few days ago, but he was on the train, he said. “The New York Central?” I asked. He laughed. “No, the D train. We’re going over a bridge so I have some service.” He said he’d call me later.

Then I noticed he’d tried to phone me on Monday, the 4th, when I was right in the midst of filling in all the forms for the cremation. The reason I was calling Tom now is that I wanted Michael’s friends to learn about his death from me. So far I’ve called Duignan and Egan. They were sad and sorry, but there really wasn’t much more to say.

Now, finally, a couple of nights ago, Tom rings me back, telling he’s going to have a meeting with Tony James, our elusive would-be investor for Learning Sense. He’s not promising anything, but he’s giving a meeting. Tony and Tom know each other through an old babysitter connection, I forget what. So when wrapping up the call, Tom asks, “How is Michael?” and I say, “He’s dead.” And then I break into tears and Tom is stunned. He and Michael go back a long way, because Tom’s oldest friend from Grosse Pointe Farms, Walter Connolly, was at USC with Michael, and the three often hung out together in L.A. in the Sixties.

Tom proposed we get together for breakfast soon, and it looks like 10 am on Tuesday, at the Palace on 57th between Park and Lexington.

Friday, the day I got that evening phone call, I got a call from Manhattan Online Cremation to tell me the death certificates were ready. They will need to be revised later, when we have Michael’s discharge records. The City requires discharge records before declaring the deceased a service veteran. And they misspelled Vliet at Vilet.

Yesterday I got a call that the ashes were in. So I trudged over to West 43rd street a second time, across from Manhattan Plaza, and picked up the nice little compact (but heavy) parcel wrapped in brown paper. They put it in a drawstring bag, and then a tote to carry it all. I was weighted down with my gym bag (my Revlon volumizer brush and case were in that) so I had to walk pretty slowly. First up to 49th St., to go to TMPL for a very slight workout (10 minutes on the C2, maybe 10 on the stationary bike), my first shower in a month or two, and the laborious process of drying my hair, which badly needs cutting and shaping.

I also went to TMPL on Friday, after getting the certificates. John, the guy at the mortuary, is a pleasant, plumpish guy of about 50. We discussed St. Malachy’s for some reason. I was saying where TMPL was, and it was on the other side of Eighth. He knows St. Malachy’s well, as a funeral director ought to. I said, apropos of very little, that Bing Crosby once played the pastor of St. Malachy’s in a movie. His third and last cassock role. I did even less exercise on Friday, and was too weary even to take a shower. So I needed that Saturday.

I hear it’s raining out. Unseasonably warm weather. I will walk back to TMPL, and try again shortly.

I got my JetBlue Master Card (Barclay’s Bank) yesterday, with its mighty $3300 credit line, which I largely wiped out immediately by transferring $2500 of the Chase Amazon Visa onto it. 0% interest balance transfers for a year if you do them in the first 45 days. I’m thinking of putting some cash onto JetBlue, and then do another balance transfer, for either Amazon or Citi Cash Card, which is nearly depleted now, thanks to the $2210 I paid for cremation last Monday.

Drinking a pint a day. This isn’t good, makes me feel woozy and heavy-lidded in the morning. But I’m sleeping well, which I wasn’t doing through much of that last year with Michael.

Yesterday, before mortuary and TMPL, I scraped the flaking paint off the living room wall. It’s been gathering there for two years. We seem still to have a pint of Brandied Crimson from Janovic Plaza in stock.

Finished Teentime Part III (Chapter 5) on the Substack today. It’s narrative stasis, complaining about Hornblower, and mulling over the Sal Mineo business.

Last night after gym (it was indeed night, though only 4:30 in the afternoon) I bought myself two 2/$3 chimichangas from the Duane Reade near 56th. I was just curious. They were okay, but burritos, not chimichangas. And the price was right. Washed ’em down with a new pint of Svedka.

Spent all Thursday morning on the phone to SSA, HQ and local. Negresses very unhelpful about my missing earnings years. The one on 48th St actually told me I’d have to refile my tax returns for 1998-2006 in order to adjust the SS earnings. That makes no sense at all. I’m square with IRS. It’s the SSA that needs to adjust earnings. So I’m going to find some lawyer who specializes in this and has done it a hundred times.

“Oh won’t we have a jolly time
Drinking beer and ale and wine
On Creeemation Day
On jolly Cremation Day!”

Today was the day Moki’s corpse was to go out to the Rosehill Crematory in New Jersey.

Nothing jolly here, really. Still crying. My baby. We didn’t get the basketball book written. That would have needed 110% of my effort, which is 100% more than I could do.

Should I have gone over to West 43rd to take a last look at the corpse, to kiss it, maybe snip a lock of hair? Perhaps, but I will never be settled on this.

Looking through the bric-a-brac on top of the southern bookshelves, I find a small wooden box which might well serve as my own private mini-funerary urn.

I go up to St. Paul the Apostle in the biting cold to continue a novena…but it’s shut. Why? Some Advent ceremony? I’ll say a St. Jude prayer here at home. Bought fried chicken and squash from the steam table at the 9th Ave Morton Williams, then another pint of Svedka from 58th St.

Tears come again.

I wrote a nice, tactful, humorous letter to A.T. today, enclosed it in a big Christmas card (one of the big charitable ones from England years ago) with a copy of the photo of Moki and his mother in Falmouth c. 1983, and of course the Manhattan Online Cremation bill that I paid on Monday. A.T. wants to pay this. Mailed it at Columbus Circle station. I certainly hope I don’t have to chase her down on this. Alicia will step in, I suppose. I phoned Alicia, she was happy to hear from me,

Internet went off at 4 in the morning. Used Moki’s USAA debit card to rev it up again. It came up almost immediately. Later on I spent $83 on that to pay for my Omnis service for the near-useless gallerynews.com.

My avvanta.com $9/3 mo deal was not renewing, perhaps because Paypal wants actual cash in the account. Fuck that, stop using the Paypal card. I gave them the Citi Cash card.

Yesterday a security negress phoned from Wilmington about my new JetBlue credit card. It seems there was a big balance transfer when the card was issued. Well yes, that’s why the card was applied for. I’m trading off some of the Amazon Chase debt for 0% APR balance transfer on the JetBlue thing. The transfer has yet to show up on Amazon Chase.

Tried to call SSA, local and national, couldn’t get through the queue. Again tomorrow. I have a huge lump awaiting me someplace.

Much of the morning, writing the Sal Mineo chapter for ET, which went live today. I wrote some of the following chapter, pieced together from old 2003-2009 Teentime shit. Then I go to the Pleven story, a version of which I put into CC early this year.

I have music from The Godfather running through my head.

Tried to call Ashley. He was talking about setting up a meeting with Tony James. As ever. Asked me to send him the login information. He’s like Moki, doesn’t write this stuff down.

Had sharp stabbing pains in upper left thigh for most of the day. Gone now. Not unusual for me, but I’m hyperwary these days.

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: