Still Foolin' 'Em (34 page)

I walked into the viewing room to do the legal identification. I just started sobbing and saying thank you: Thank you for your love, your inspiration, your support, your guidance, your laughter. When I ran out of thank-yous, I finally said good-bye. What you learn when you witness a death is that once the life is out of someone, the body is just the container of it. His spirit was gone, freed of his illness and frailty. The remains seemed like a costume and a mask, like all the ones he had worn entertaining us when we were kids. “Hocus pocus, chimnio smokus, halaballoo, halaballa” were his magic words as the “Great Bernardo” would make something disappear. Now he had made himself vanish. That afternoon, I went over to his apartment to spend some time with his widow, Deborah. Berns’s devoted aide Alma was there. She had taken care of him for two years. A vibrant Jamaican woman, she had grown to be his close friend. He’d trusted her with his physical problems, and they’d laughed and enjoyed each other’s company. She sat, now; the emptiness in the apartment was huge. In her beautiful Jamaican accent, Alma asked, “Billy, did Berns tell you about your father coming to him?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Before he got real bad, Berns said your father come to him, in the middle of the night, wearing a long black coat with a hood, and told him, ‘It’s time, let go, you’ll be all right.’”

I was stunned. Her face lit up. “He said it was as clear as could be. So I said to Berns, Tell your brother not to come around here no more.”

Can’t Take It with You

I tend to keep things.

I’ve had the same car for eleven years, I wear three-year-old Nikes, and my cell phone is from the Reformation.

This isn’t because I’m OCD or superstitious, afraid that something horrible will happen if I get rid of things—knock on wood three times while standing on my left foot—it’s because of what happened with my high school letter sweater. At Long Beach High, a white sweater with blue trim meant you had earned one sports letter. That was totally cool, but I had the Holy Grail, a blue sweater with white trim, signifying two things: that I had earned four letters (three for baseball, one for basketball) and that, as the possessor of said sweater, I was a superior male specimen and therefore ripe for mating with the high school’s nubile young women. (If I had actually done that, I would have knitted myself a sweater.) I earned the coveted sweater in 1965 and, of course, held on to it because there are two words no young man has ever uttered: spring cleaning.

Fast-forward to July 1976. Janice and I were packing to leave New York for good. “Do you really need this sweater?” she asked.

“Need” as in “Is it essential to keep me from freezing to death in balmy Los Angeles, our new home?” No.

Need emotionally? Of course! I had a deep spiritual connection to it, just like every guy has to his letter sweater, his favorite hat, or his penis.

But the practicality of Janice’s look when she asked the question somehow won the day, and I threw it out.

A few days later, we were pulling away from the curb, leaving the only life we had ever known, when I saw a homeless guy going through our trash, picking through the remains of twenty-eight years of my life … while wearing my letter sweater.

“Janice, that’s my sweater,” I said.

“Don’t look back,” she countered. “Just drive.” To this day, I regret not stopping. The vision of that guy wearing my sweater is what has kept me from giving away anything with any possible significance ever again.

Hey, I have no problem giving away things that don’t have a memory attached. Old suits and clothes go to Goodwill or the Salvation Army. There are at least three people living on the beach in Santa Monica wearing Armani tuxedos topped off with a hat that says
OSCAR HOST
. I give old suits away to the UCLA theater department in hopes that one day the male lead in the student production of
The Book of Mormon
will look really good, as long as he is a 40 regular.

But it doesn’t matter who you are or what you do; by sixty-five, all of us have accumulated what Janice calls
crap
.
Crap
we don’t know where we got it from,
crap
we know where we got it from but don’t remember why. We’re all one Hummel figurine away from being on
Hoarders.

When my kids and their husbands come over and walk into my office, where the walls are lined with things that scream, “Me me me,” I know that they are looking at the treasures of my life and thinking,
We’re going to have to get rid of all this crap one day.
I’ve been in that position. When my mother and my uncle died, it took years to dispose of all the
crap
they had.

It’s so much harder when it comes to your own things. What do you do? You have friends who hit sixty-five and start simplifying and giving things away, then bragging about living a life without clutter. But can you do it?

Now some of my
crap
can go because there are other people to think about. My kids don’t want to be stuck with a mess.

I can get rid of the things that are just objects, that I’m not emotionally attached to. Like what 70 percent of guys in show business do with their first wife.

However, there are things that to everyone else must seem like mere objects (a.k.a.
crap
) but to me are precious mementos with layers and layers of emotional context. Like the tassel from my high school graduation cap, which hangs ten feet away from my work desk, where I can see it every day; it’s staying. I know what you’re thinking: Why does he need that? If I had two, I could spin them from my nipples the next time I play Fifty Shades of Grey: The Home Game, but one? The answer is, I need it. It’s not just a tassel; it’s something that reminds me of high school and all the friends I had then, some of whom remain good buddies today.

Right next to it is the bedroom door from my house in Long Beach, which Joel and Rip took off its hinges and gave me as my fiftieth birthday present. It’s a plain old door covered with decals of Ted Williams and other great ballplayers of the fifties. To me it’s a work of art.

Do you know how many guys have come over to my house, seen that door, and said, “I wish I had the bedroom door from when I was growing up”? Sometimes when I look at it, I wish I could open that door and walk back into my bedroom. There I’d be, sixteen years old, in bed, under the covers, then suddenly turning and saying, “Next time fucking knock—I’m reading!” Let’s just say not one guy wants the mattress from his bed when he was sixteen.

Keeping things like this also happens to be a way to collect something really valuable and not so easily come by these days: smiles. But there’s another use for them: when you hit a certain age, you need something to prompt memories.

So I’m not giving them away. Is that what we’re supposed to do, give away our memories? The idea seems to be: “I’m gonna die tomorrow, so I better not have anything around that reminds me of the good times.”

As my aunts and uncles got older, every purchase was tinged with sadness. “This is it, the last sofa we’ll buy.” “Enjoy it, it’s the last winter coat you’ll need.” “Buy only half a dozen eggs—you never know.”

Some of my relatives not only refused to buy, they started to give everything away. Psychologists tell you to be on the lookout for seniors who give too many things away: it’s a sign that they’re shutting down, that they’re getting ready for the next move in their life, which is about twenty miles to the left and six feet down. Like my uncle Louie. The day he turned his three score and ten, he started unloading everything. “Here, Billy, take this, it’s my favorite gramophone. What do you mean, you don’t have any 78s?” He sensed the end was near. Seventy was old for his generation, so within weeks he was down to a chair, a bed, one suit, one pair of socks, one pair of shoes, one fork, a knife, a plate, and a coffee cup. He lived to be 107.

Me? I have a different plan. I want to keep those things that remind me of where I’ve been, because I know where I’m going.

But even though I know where I’m going eventually, one question remains: Where do I live till I get there? That’s right—what about the house?

I love this house. Almost everything important and meaningful in my life has happened in this house. And that’s what really matters to me. I’m not a hoarder of things, I’m a hoarder of memories (some of which I guess I am giving away—no, sharing—in this book), and every room of this house holds a memory of our kids or of Janice and me.

I can’t tell you what’s right for you. Friends of mine have sold their houses and are perfectly happy in apartments or smaller homes.

Recently people started saying to me, “The kids have their own families—why do the two of you need such a big house?” And you know something? They were 100 percent right.

So we made it bigger.

Is there any more sure sign that you aren’t giving up? Is there any more sure signal that you intend to cling to your memories like a fifteen-year-old grasping her iPhone? When you decide at age sixty-five to do a total renovation and expansion of your house, that’s your way of spitting in the eye of the term life salesman and saying, “I may be sixty-five, but I plan to live and work another thirty years so I can pay off this home equity loan.”

So we did construction, and by construction I mean that afterward they’re going to have to adjust every image on Google Earth.

The idea to make the house bigger was hatched when my grandson Hudson was born. The kids and the grandkids don’t live nearby, so we figured, “If we build it, they will come.”

And that’s because we wanted them to have the memories of going to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, like we did.

When I was a kid, I loved going to my grandparents’ house … until they started to smell stale. What is that smell? It’s some sweet-and-sour combination of cookies, plastic slipcovers, urine-soaked wool, and old books. I wonder if one day our kids will think we smell like Kindles.

Going over was always fun because it was like a visit with the aristocracy. Every time I left their house, I better understood my lineage and where I stood in the world. It was my responsibility to take everything they taught me and, when the time came, pass it on to my kids and make them as petrified and neurotic as my grandparents had made me. I also thought,
They have money, and when they die maybe I’ll get some
.

I want my grandkids to have that same feeling—about the connection and the lineage, not the money part—and to have that generational understanding of our family tree, which keeps growing and reaching for the sky.

And to foster that you need a house, because families need centers, and we wanted our house to be the center, the place where people gathered. Especially for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving at your own house is the best; Thanksgiving at someone else’s house is like being a Chicago Cub at the World Series—in other words, you don’t belong. It’s someone else’s tradition, someone else’s turkey, and, even worse, a strange toilet.

So we wanted our house to be the family center, and we wanted the grandkids to come over more and spend the night, to create more family memories, and to do that we needed more room.

When we bought our house, in 1979, it had three small bedrooms, one of which we turned into a closet. In 2010, Janice decided that it would be perfect if she added an airline terminal to the house.

Think of renovating a house like operating the federal government. You start with a budget and the revenue to finance it. Then the special interests keep adding items to the list; you have to end the war between the interior decorator and the electrician, so you pump in more money to buy peace; and by the time you’re done, you’re $16 trillion in debt and having to borrow money from the Chinese.

Once we got the plans finalized, in late 2012, we started work. Based on the lead contractor’s estimate—and he’s been very accurate on this so far—they should wrap everything up in the year 2037.

I’m not here to tell you how to run your life, but let me say this: You know that swimming with a great white shark while holding a bloody halibut in your mouth is dumb. You know that invading Iraq is dumber. Living in your house while it’s being renovated is even dumber than that. You can’t tell if the house has been blown up or is being put back together. There are people constantly in and out, talking and hammering and working.

They finished the Empire State Building in less time than it’s taking us to redo this house, and that has 102 stories with a basement.

We only have two stories: the story the contractor told us when he started and the story he tells me every day when I ask when he is going to finish.

And every day is the same. The workers get there promptly at seven and, after a brisk forty-five minutes of work, go on a two-hour break.

Back to work at nine forty-five, and then at ten the lunch wagon comes, music blasting out of the speakers, and trust me, that’s something you want in a nice neighborhood, a food truck with a big mural of Cantinflas on the side.

And the guy who owns the truck is clever—he plays the appropriate music for the special of the day.