Still Foolin' 'Em (35 page)

Godfather
theme: spaghetti and meatballs.

“Tequila”: tacos.

And he plays the Mets theme song when the food he has that day stinks.

Some days all the workers cook their own lunch—it must be casual Fridays. They bring their own little grills and hot plates and set up tents and build little fires in the empty lot next to my house. It looks like a Civil War battlefield.

Once they got in the swing of things, there was progress. Until the day the construction chief told me my house had termites. We had no idea until they started to swarm. They flew out of the living room floor and ceiling with their little wings, like the confetti that’s shot out at the end of the Super Bowl.

We first knew something was up when the construction chief pulled out a stethoscope and started listening to the wall. He then took a hammer and opened up the wall, and it was like one of those old-fashioned nightclubs. The termites were in tuxedos and evening gowns, the band was playing, they had on bibs and they were eating prime rib, which in this case was the back of my house.

Termites only do two things: eat wood and make baby termites. We replaced the windows, we knocked down walls, and we even had to install steel beams. We then put in new wood, and they ate that. Our house was a twenty-four-hour termite buffet.

Later on I found out that termites don’t eat redwood. I found that out after we had fed them two more walls and the supervisor of the work crew came over one morning and said, Why didn’t you get redwood? Termites are redwood intolerant; it gives them gas. They’re the Jews of the insect world.

So we rebuilt the entire house out of redwood, and now whenever I go to a meeting the first thing people tell me is that I smell like a picnic table.

As the workers were digging out the hillside to build a retaining wall about twelve feet down, they found bones—a hip and a femur and a few ribs. When they saw the bones, they backed off. It was like a Tarzan movie from the 1930s when the natives get scared and say, “Bad booloo, bad booloo.”

Everything stopped because the health department put up crime tape and it looked like a murder scene; before work could proceed, they had to find out if those were human bones. So they tried to call in a forensic pathologist, but it was hard to find one because they’re all working on television shows. Three days later, the results came back—they think it was an elk or a deer, or some other strange creature like a blogger. We were kind of disappointed because this used to be Indian land, and if they had been Indian bones, I could have turned my house into a casino and lived tax-free.

So the house is now 99 percent done and our idea is working out. The grandkids come here and sleep over, and I can wake up to the sound of them playing. As I listen to them giggling, I get a little misty and think that one day after I’m gone, these beautiful kids, all grown up, will come over here and they’ll have one of their friends or maybe even their intended along and they’ll proudly take them into my office and say, “This was Grandpa Billy’s office. It’s where he had everything that meant so much to him … and once I got rid of all his
crap
, I turned it into a dance studio.”

Buying the Plot

This is the hard one. The chapter I was dreading. The one that took the longest to write because it’s about … death. My death. Our biggest fear. Wait—your biggest fear is not my death. Our own death is our biggest fear. It weighs on us so much that we, as humans, have developed all kinds of psychological ways to deal with it. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross wrote about the five stages as she saw them: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She was a genius. And now she’s dead.

She was
the
expert on death, and now she’s just … dead.

I look at the stages of death differently. To me they are retirement village, assisted living, nursing home, hospice, and burial plot.

I know what you’re thinking:
Billy, you’re such an optimist, and now you’re going dark on us.
No, I’m just being realistic. I do see a silver lining; it’s the satin in my coffin.

The actuarial tables tell us that once we hit sixty-five, we can expect to live into our nineties. And then … bye-bye. And you know how in the back of your mind you’re thinking that you’re going to be the one that gets away with it, that you’re going to be the one that God, like a bouncer at a nightclub, lets slip by? It doesn’t work that way. For anyone. In fact, you know who else thought they might slip by? Every single person now in a cemetery.

So we have to plan ahead for what happens when we go.

Personally, I do not like planning a huge party I won’t be attending. And as with our federal debt, I may just decide to stick my grandchildren with the bill.

You also don’t know how you are going to go. Everyone has the same fantasy: that you are lying in bed, it’s serene and quiet, everyone you love is gathered around you to say good-bye, there is no pain, and you leave this earth with a smile on your face. Except that’s not how people go.

We’re eaten by a giant shark.

Crash into a building while parasailing with a fly-by-night company run by a Mexican drug cartel.

Crushed beyond recognition by a falling boulder.

Burned to a crisp when your car rear-ends a fuel truck.

You eat something bad and get poisoned by
E. coli.

Flesh-eating bacteria eat you.

Shopping at a farmers’ market, you’re run over by a fellow senior citizen who shouldn’t have a license because he’s legally blind.

Reading this book in the bathtub, you doze off and drown.

And those are some of the more pleasant things that can happen.

So although you have no control over how or when you are going to go (though some sadly do), you do have a say about where you spend eternity. I don’t mean in the deeper sense of where the soul will go to rest and whether you should call ahead and get a good table.

This is about what my uncle Danny used to say after every Thanksgiving meal: WHAT DO WE DO WITH THE CARCASS?

My favorite philosopher, Yogi Berra, when asked by his wife, Carmen, where he’d like to be buried, simply said, “Surprise me.”

Janice and I have had lengthy discussions about this because we don’t want to burden the kids with the decision. And judging by the presents they get me for Father’s Day and my birthday, I can’t trust them. So Janice and I keep talking.

“What do you want?”

“What should we do?”

“Where do you want to be?”

We sound like we’re in a scene from that great movie
Marty.

“Where you wanna be when you’re dead, Janice?”

“I dunno, Billy, where you wanna be?”

We’ve talked about getting cremated. I can’t do that because I know my luck. The day after they cremate me, they’ll find a cure for what I had. Once you’re burned up, you have no hope of being put back together again. I’ve lived too long a life to be turned into Tang.

The big question then becomes what to do with the ashes. People are usually scattered in a special place they love. This won’t work for me because that would be in front of the TV in my favorite chair. Then I know what would happen. Janice would come home one day and find our housekeeper, vacuuming.

“¿Dónde está Señor Crystal?”

“OH NO!”

The other problem with cremation is that if you are scattered around, there is no place for the kids to go to feel guilty. Of course you can be cremated and kept in an urn in the living room so you’re still in the middle of the action. The only problem there is that you are in a FUCKING URN.

But I have heard some lovely things about cremation. A good friend of mine, seventy-two years old, lost his wife a few years ago. What she loved more than anything in the world was tending to her roses. After she was cremated, he sprinkled her ashes on her flower bed. The next spring, when the roses bloomed, they were the most beautiful roses he had ever seen—although he swears that late at night he can hear her whisper, “Do you have a sweater? It’s cold out here—would it have killed you to put a blanket over me?”

I explored other options. I researched getting laminated. Seriously. Put me in Plexiglas, lean me against the bar in the rec room with the Yankee game on, and I’ll be very happy. And since the company also does trophy fish and game, why not put a smile on my face and hang me on the wall?

There is also a process where they use heated water and potassium hydroxide to liquefy the body, leaving only bones behind. Coincidentally, this is the way my grandmother made chicken soup. That’s actually kind of comforting. Drop my bones in a big pot of boiling water, add a matzoh ball and an onion, and have me for the Seder. If there are any leftovers, freeze me, because if anyone gets a cold, what’s better than a bowl of me?

That’s a little creepy but no creepier than giving the bones to the family, which is what they recommend. This scares me because Jenny and Mike have a two-hundred-pound English mastiff. If I’m going to be buried, I want to be in a cemetery, not in the backyard.

In Georgia, they have something called Eternal Reefs. They mix your cremated body with concrete and throw you in the ocean, where you become a reef for fish. Didn’t they do this to Jimmy Hoffa? Leave the dead guy, take the cannoli. (And by “they,” I didn’t mean the Mafia.)

Then there’s freezing. The children of Ted Williams arranged to turn him into a “Pop”sicle. They hired a cryonics company that cut off Ted’s head and froze it. What’s the point of that? The amazing thing is, Ted’s frozen head still hit .315!

Related to this is an alternative called Promession, which involves freeze-drying. You are immersed in liquid nitrogen, which makes you really brittle, and then vibrations shake your body. It sounds like a waiter with a severe haircut in a New Age restaurant telling you how you will be prepared: “Chef takes you and immerses you in a liquid nitrogen reduction, then he shakes you apart. The meat falls right off the bone.” But that’s better than what they really do. After they shake you apart, they suck all the fluids out of you, and not in a fun way (could there be a fun way for this to be accomplished?), then turn you into compost. I don’t want to spend the next millennium smelling like doody.

Space burial is the new thing. They shot Scotty from
Star Trek
into outer space. But because of the high cost of space flight, they can’t send all 165 pounds of you. So they cremate you and send three grams of your “cremains” into space. Wait a second—the soul is supposed to weigh twenty-one grams and they’re only sending one-seventh of it into space? That means I’ll have eighteen grams of soul still here on earth. Just about as much as John Boehner.

The Neptune Society will bury you at sea. You know that organization by another name: SEAL Team 6.

None of these options appealed to me or Janice, so we decided to go old dead school: a plot. In a way, it’s a family tradition. Years ago, during World War II, my grandparents bought a family plot for themselves and all of their children and their husbands and wives, so everyone could spend eternity together in New Jersey. Which sounds redundant. I actually like going to the cemetery, as painful as it is. The plot is on a gentle hillside, under beautiful trees. My parents are there and all my aunts and uncles, and it’s very comforting to see everyone in the same position they sat in at the dining room table. The plot is full now. One big happy dead family. So, with that thought in my mind, I went shopping for a plot.

Have you ever spent time with a burial plot salesman? I guess we’re all selling something, but how bad did you fuck up on your SATs so that this is the job your guidance counselor recommends? “You know something, son? Your aptitude tests show you’d be great at selling graves.” Explain that one to your folks. “Mom, Dad, I’m going into real estate. Kinda.”

This burial salesman was far too cheerful.

“Well, somebody looks mahvelous!… And will forever!” He shook my hand a little too hard and laughed way too loud. Then he abruptly changed tones: “How many plots do you need?”

“Just two for now—I still haven’t discussed this with the kids. They may want to be on their own. We’re really just looking.”

“You know, we have a special this year: six plots for the price of five,” he told me, producing a lovely brochure. “They make a lovely Hanukkah gift,” he added.

That will go over well. “Hey, everyone, instead of taking you to Hawaii this year, I bought burial plots.”

The salesman tried to convince me that now was the time to get in.

“You know, Billy, you can buy the plots for yourself and Janice and then give your family what we call ‘eternity gift certificates.’”

He was starting to press me, so I tried to back him off. I’m not good when I’m pressured by a salesman. I have a John Deere tractor, two hip replacements, and a llama farm I didn’t need.

“You know, I’m not dying tomorrow,” I joked, starting to sweat.

“You don’t know that, now, do you, Mr. C?” Mr. C? Suddenly he was a maître d’ in a club I didn’t want to belong to.

At this point I had to get out of the office, so I asked him to take me to see some plots. The first place he brought me to was what he called “Headliners’ Haven.”

“Jack Benny has a plot right there, and you’re only a tombstone’s throw away from Jolson,” he said.

I told him I wasn’t interested. Being around famous people would bring tourists, and who needs that? Isn’t there a quieter place? Maybe where the opening acts are?

He said, “If you can wait a little, we have a brand-new section opening up in 2015. I could be”—he looked me in the eye—“convinced”—
wink wink—“
to hold some plots for you. It’s right by our lake, wonderful view.”

“WHO GIVES A FUCK ABOUT THE VIEW? I’M DEAD!”

“The view isn’t for you, it’s for the mourners—they like the lake.”

“Yeah, well, lakes mean ducks, and ducks mean duck shit, and I don’t want mourners to have duck shit on their shoes when they come to visit. I’ll smell it and start to gag.”

The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to be in the ground. “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out…” I asked about a mausoleum.