The phone in my hotel room rings just before 11 a.m., and the front desk agent on the other end informs me that Maurice awaits my presence. As I scramble down to the lobby, it occurs to me that I have no idea if I’ll recognize Maurice Newman, Esq., whom I haven’t seen since a family trip here for the turn of the millennium. In the lobby, I spot a towering, overweight, graying man sitting alone who appears about the age my father would be if he had flown Continental, and sure enough, it’s Maurice. When I greet him, he says it’s good to see me, then adds, “You look a little bit like your father.”
For the last decade, the few people I’ve seen who knew my father have made some remark about our resemblance, usually in the form of the sentence “You look just like your father.” Personally, I don’t see it—his hair was straighter, he had a mustache, he was in much better shape than I am, and so on—but that’s not what bothers me about the comparison. I think of my father as a fairly handsome man.
Every time someone tells me we look similar, I’m reminded of the relationships my father had with other people, and of the relationship I never had with him. Telling me that I resemble him should be a compliment, but it reminds me that they knew him and I did not.
For some reason, I’m okay with what Maurice says. I can’t stand being told I look just like my father, but, perhaps due to my basic understanding of genetics, being told I look a little bit like him doesn’t bother me.
Neither Maurice nor I have eaten yet, so we decide to grab brunch in the hotel’s restaurant. At the host stand, a pregnant Latina woman asks if it’s just going to be the two of us, but Maurice chats with her in Spanish for a couple of minutes before we get seated. He seems to be flirting with her, and it seems to be working.
While she shows us to our table, he expresses some concern to me over just how helpful he’ll be. Their friendship peaked thirty years ago, and two decades have passed since he—or anyone—last spoke to my father, so Maurice worries that he won’t remember much at all.
Three hours from now, when Maurice leaves for another appointment, I’ll leave here with the impression that he’s only scratched the surface of his tales.
As we get settled, Maurice fidgets with a pair of rubber bands, something that I write off as a nervous habit until he demonstrates otherwise.
Maurice practices law by trade, but magic for fun. Before we get to the topic at hand, he performs a not-quite-impromptu trick, appearing to link and unlink the rubber bands, telling of his passion for performance as he does.
“Magic is my hobby,” he says with what was once a New York accent, faded from decades on the west coast. “I’m fairly well-known in the magic community. A lot of my friends who became lawyers took up drugs and alcohol. I found out that magic was just as expensive as those vices if you do it badly, but it was a lot safer.”
Then, as if sensing an impending question that I was not, in fact, going to ask, he segues perfectly into the topic at hand.
“No, I never did magic when I was with your dad. Your father was much more interesting than magic,” he says as he puts the rubber bands away.
I ask if he remembers how he met my father.
“It was the middle ’70s,” he recalls. “I had met a fellow named John Rashcko, who was your father’s close friend at that time. They went to Northeastern together. They were in the same classes—they were both Chem-Es1.”
At the time, Maurice worked at his father’s insurance and real estate office in South Brunswick, New Jersey, while taking undergraduate classes at NYU.
A friend of Maurice’s named Alan Levy was heading to Cape Cod for the 4th of July, and stopping in Boston along the way. Maurice decided to tag along, so the pair drove up in Maurice’s Chrysler 300. When they arrived at Rashcko’s place on Boston’s Hemenway Street just shy of midnight, Maurice and Alan were greeted by Northeastern students blasting music out of their windows and playing frisbee in the street.
“I decided this was way too much fun just to go see another seashore. Parenthetically, I’ve never been to Cape Cod.”
Rashcko already knew my father well enough to know that the holiday was my grandmother Ethel’s birthday. Maurice, who describes Rashcko as “the cheapest person I ever met in my entire life,” says Rashcko suspected they could get a free dinner if the two of them went up to Wakefield to visit my father, and so they did.
Prior to this conversation, I had never heard of John Rashcko, and by the end of brunch, I’ll know why that’s the case. Maurice describes Rashcko as Catholic, “funny when he wasn’t depressed,” and says that Rashcko’s brother “was gay in a time when it wasn’t okay to be gay.” According to Maurice, when the brothers fought, John would angrily declare “I hope he gets AIDS and dies.”
On that trip up to Wakefield, Maurice first met my father and grandparents. My grandparents were already in their 60s, but despite their age, he insists they were both “loads of fun.”
“Your father was an excellent photographer,” Maurice says. “Your grandfather was maybe, in my mind, a step below Ansel Adams.”
He wasn’t the only one awed by Simon’s talent.
“Every year, your grandfather would win a photography award at the Boston Camera Club, so they asked him not to compete. He said, ‘Okay, I won’t. I’ll let my kid do it, and he’ll still beat you.’ And (Saul) did.”
Meanwhile, my father was dating a girl named Justine, who was, somewhat controversially, not Jewish. Years earlier, my aunt Marcia had converted to Catholicism to marry a man2, and my grandparents disowned her until she gave birth to the first of her three children. My grandparents begrudgingly accepted Justine, but my grandmother still asked Maurice to introduce my father to a nice Jewish girl. Maurice claims he set her straight: “Look, there is no such thing as a nice Jewish girl. It’s an oxymoron.”
“Your dad was backwards socially and afraid to talk to women,” he tells me. “I said, ‘They’re the same as guys. Just talk to them. If you can feign interest, as much as it bores you, you’ll be fine.'”
Maurice regales me with tales of my dad dragging him to bars around Boston, like the Cask ‘n’ Flagon and the Brass Monkey. With a laugh, he recalls one night at the latter after they returned from a canoeing trip down the Delaware River.
“We come back from camping, and the place was wall to wall people. All of a sudden, I’m talking and I’m gesturing, and a woman lands in my arms.”
“I said, ‘It’s been a dull weekend for me. Would you like to go out?'”
“She goes, ‘It’s going to be a rather dull night for you too, isn’t it?’ I thought this was the funniest line I’d ever heard. Your father couldn’t stop laughing.”
“Boston, to me, was a vacation, because I was working and going to college at the same time. I could go up, relax and have fun.”
After my father finished his undergraduate work at Northeastern in 1975, he and Rashcko decided to spend the summer on the road, and bought a van together, which my father named Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s horse. Maurice flew to Los Angeles to join them partway through the trip.
“Rashcko at that time had met this young woman, and he was head over heels for her,” Maurice says. “Wherever we went, he had to stop and make a phone call to her. Finally, I’m looking at your father, and I said, ‘This is bullshit.'”
“He goes, ‘Yeah, what do you want to do?'”
“Back then, there were phone booths. John’s in, so I go, ‘Come on John, the broads are waiting! They’re asking for you again. Let’s get going.’ He closes the door. I looked at your father, your father looked at me, we didn’t say a word. We started to tip over the phone booth.”
“As the phone booth’s laying down on the ground and John’s still talking, he opens the thing and goes, ‘What, do you think this is fun?'”
“Your father says, ‘Look, I didn’t spend $3,000 going cross-country, and buy this vehicle, if I wasn’t going to have fun.’ John shuts the door and keeps talking. I couldn’t believe it, but it was a great line by your dad.”
“They eventually got married. I stood up for him, and your father stood up for him at the wedding.”
Then, with his next sentence, Maurice gets to the heart of why I’ve never heard the name John Rashcko before.
“When your father got married, John was supposed to be in the wedding party, and a week before, backed out. The reason he gave was that he had to help his boss move. Your father got livid. They never talked again. When your dad died, I called Rashcko and he says, ‘Well, it’s too bad, but what do you expect me to do?'”
“I went, ‘You piece of shit.’ I hung up, and that was it. I mean, the fight that you had, you couldn’t put behind you? What kind of son of a bitch are you? So that was just basically it with him. And they were good friends for a long time.”
“Your dad was very special to me,” Maurice states, as though I couldn’t already tell. “I’ll tell you the bad part, for me, was when he died. I was away on vacation with my cousin in San Francisco, and one of my office crew called me to tell me there was some bad news. My father had been ill, and I thought that was the news they were going to give me, so I kind of screamed and yelled at her. She told me what had happened, and that your dad was on the flight. Now, I had heard from your mom that he wasn’t supposed to be on that flight, that he switched with his assistant?”
I tell Maurice what I believe to be true: My father was supposed to take an overnight flight, but received a phone call while in England saying that his office needed him back earlier for a meeting. He changed from his usual Newark-bound Continental flight onto Pan Am Flight 103, due for JFK.
“In retrospect, I found out that beside your dad, one of the people I went to high school with was on that flight,” Maurice says. “A fellow by the name of Steve Butler, from South Brunswick.”
The name Butler rings a bell with me, and I tell Maurice that I might be speaking with a relative of Steve’s later on this trip. Maurice continues talking as I get out my laptop and search my email.
“I knew Steve. He was a good kid from New Jersey. We went to high school together. He was a hippie at the time. 1970, South Brunswick High School.”
Having found the email from Steve’s brother, Brian, I tell Maurice what the message says: Steve was a Peace Corps volunteer stationed in Tunisia, on his way back to home on emergency leave. His sister Michelle had just had a baby, and complications from the delivery had put her in a coma, so Steve was coming home to see her3.
“Butler owned a store in Monmouth Junction or Dayton,” Maurice recalls. “It was a general store, and we’d go over from high school to hang. They were nice people. He was a Jewish kid.”
Then, Maurice returns to my father.
“I remember that it took me an hour and a half to get up the courage to call your mother. I don’t know why I didn’t have the courage. It was more like the enormity of it hit me. I turned on the TV, and then it was like, ‘Oh my God, how do I call? What do I say?'”
“I called her up, and I tried to find the words. There are certain things that people say to you in your life that you’ll never forget. I stammered something like, ‘I don’t, I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say. I wish this hadn’t happened. I’m sorry for what you’re going through.'”
“Your mother said something to me which was one of the warmest things ever said to me in my life: ‘Well, I have people here who can take care of me. He was like a brother to you4. Who’s going to be there to help you?'”
“So am I close with your mom? No. Do I keep in touch with your mom? Yes. For what she said that day, I can never repay her.”
“It bothered me, your father’s death,” Maurice continues. “It really ate at me for a long time. I couldn’t go back to Boston for a few years.”
Some time later, Maurice was invited to a friend’s wedding in Boston, and he finally decided to return. He couldn’t bring himself to visit my father’s grave, but an inexplicable moment in Boston helped him start to come to terms with his loss.
“I’m on the Freedom Trail, by the Old North Church, and there’s a park ranger. I’m looking at him, and I swear to God, it’s the same face as your father. He starts talking, and it’s the same voice. Now, I’m a magician. I don’t believe in this crap. He starts telling a joke, and he’s got the same laugh. I look at him, and he smiles, and he nods to me. There’s no reason for it. And I was like, better? Do you know what I’m saying? It was just very ethereal, to use a good word.”
“The girl who I was with asks me what’s going on. I said, ‘Nothing, I’m just having my own private moment.’ A smile came back to Boston. Until then, I couldn’t set foot in Boston. I went back to see if I could do it.”
“The next time I went back to Boston, it was for Alan Levy’s wedding. Couldn’t bring myself to go to Wakefield. Finally, Alan’s wife’s best friend and I decided to go out. After we got to know each other better, she said, ‘What would you like to do today?'”
“I said, ‘Honestly, I’d like to go to Wakefield.’ I drove around Wakefield, knew that I would find the cemetery some way. Had no idea where it was. So I drove around, went past the lake, found where the Jewish cemetery was. It’s locked. Couldn’t believe that. I jumped the fence, I picked up a stone, as is the custom, and I left one on each—your grandma, your grandfather, your dad. After I left, I had this feeling of, You schmuck. Why didn’t you do this sooner? What was it that was bothering you?“
“Then I realized what it was: It meant to me that I finally understood that they were gone, that I wasn’t going to be able to pick up the phone on a Saturday and say, ‘Hey, Saul. What’s going on?’ It was just, for me, the finality of it.”
Knowing that Maurice and my father were on opposite ends of the country for many years, I ask how frequently they were in touch with each other.
“I saw or spoke to him with some degree of regularity. I would pick up the phone and call for no reason at all, or I would send him a letter or something just to send a joke, but that was less frequent. I remember him telling me he was going to England because they had made him president of the company. They expected the company to fail.”
Once again, Maurice has said something I had never heard before.
“Oh, yeah. It was losing money, losing money. My understanding was that he had turned the company around, that it was now making a profit. They called him to England to tell him that they wanted to recognize that he’d taken it that way, and that if it kept in this vein, that it would make him a wealthy man. There was no envy. I was genuinely thrilled for him.”
“I always felt guilty for not making it back for the funeral,” he segues. “I didn’t have the strength to.”
Despite this, and despite the distance between them, Maurice remained in contact with my mother over the years. It was sporadic at first, but the rise of email and instant messaging made it more frequent.
“Your mom and I were never close, but I kept in touch. So the question is, why? The answer’s simple: If the shoe were on the other foot, your father would do it for me.”
Of course Maurice would look after his close friend’s wife—years earlier, my father helped Maurice try to reclaim his.
Maurice met his first wife, Julie, at a wedding in Illinois, and their courtship was swift. The second time they ever saw each other, she visited Maurice in New Jersey, a trip that ended with the two of them visiting my father in Boston. There, Maurice proposed.
After the wedding, where my father was part of the wedding party, Maurice moved with Julie to Iowa City, where her mother lived. But Maurice didn’t get along with his mother-in-law, and decided to go to law school in California. Things went south from there, and the weekend of my parents’ wedding, in October 1981, Maurice’s marriage reached its breaking point. He tells me the couple had an epic fight that weekend in Memphis, which they hid from my parents so as not to spoil the occasion.
After my parents’ wedding, Julie left Maurice to move to Chicago. There, she started dating again, even though the two were not yet divorced, and Maurice was upset enough to move to Chicago after her, consequences be damned.
“I was really distraught, I wasn’t me. Your father heard something in my voice that he didn’t like, and so he took time off from work to fly out here and ride with me back to Chicago. I said, ‘Why are you doing this?'”
“He said, ‘I know you. You’d drive 24 hours just to get there sooner.'”
As he’s telling this story, I realize Maurice has omitted one key detail: me. My mom was pregnant with me when Maurice decided to go on his trip, and my parents lived in a house in Baton Rouge that my father bought before they married. My dad had no will at the time, and under Louisiana’s Napoleonic Code, my dad’s siblings would receive the house if anything happened to him. My mom insisted my dad couldn’t join Maurice on the road unless he got a will first.
Maurice, already visibly emotional from remembering the trip, can’t believe he didn’t know that.
“It was very sweet that he came. When I took him to the airport, I stuck my hand out to shake his hand. He comes over and he locks me in a hug, and he says, ‘You’re going to be okay.’ Being the sentimental slob that I am, I can still think back and feel that hug.”
Sooner than seems possible, three hours have passed, and Maurice has to head to the Magic Castle, the magicians’ club to which he belongs, for a board meeting. He repeats his previous invitation to join him tonight for a show, and I once again agree. Before he leaves, though, he makes it clear that, while my father left an impression, he left Maurice one other thing as well, something true to character.
“In my office, I have this photo up he shot, and it’s really beautiful, of an oil slick on the water. It’s just magnificent, and I look at it virtually every day. He gave that to me as a wedding gift. It’s the only thing I took from my first marriage that I have.”
Tomorrow, I’m leaving this town, but a little piece of my father will remain.
Ostensibly5, the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, the front for 826LA, can be found about sixteen miles from my hotel. In a typical city, this would involve about sixteen miles of travel, but I am in Los Angeles6. While some cities exist on a grid system, and others abandon any pretense of organization, L.A. appears to be an abominable hybrid of the two. As my GPS guides me through the area, the image of my surroundings on the screen consistently shows what appears to be a grid system, but somehow, going due east requires a multitude of turns that defy logic.
As I make turn after unnecessary turn, the street names recited by my GPS sound familiar: Wilshire, Sunset, La Cienega, and so on. Every boulevard in this city is clogged with people who aspire to be as well-known as the roads they’re on.
Slowly, my surroundings start to feel less like Los Angeles and more like a shorter, sunnier, less pedestrian-friendly version of Brooklyn. I only know Echo Park by reputation, but I feel it closing in on me.
I park on a side street within view of the neighborhood’s titular green space, and backtrack to the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, where I’m greeted by the volunteer behind the counter. Stacy wears thick-rimmed glasses, brown hair with streaks dyed to a near-bleached state, and the kind of sundress that squarely pegs her as hipsteresque. She and I are the only people in the space, which presents itself as a small convenience store, which includes details like a slushie machine covered by a sign reading “Broken—Please Come Back Yesterday.”
I mention that I volunteer at 826 Seattle, and we chat as I shop, comparing and contrasting our 826s and the different kinds of unstable people that the Time Travel Mart and Space Travel Supply Store attract. The problem with both our shops, we conclude, is that their tongue-in-cheek concepts attract many people who enjoy them with the proper sensibilities, as well as a handful of those who do not, and it’s impossible to tell if someone is the latter until you’re several minutes into a conversation that only one of you thought was a joke7.
While Stacy rings up my purchases—a few novelties, a t-shirt for a friend, and a single white glove sold as an Old-Fashioned Duel Starter—she mentions she’s curious to see the Seattle location. I tell her she absolutely should, and bid her farewell after she hands me my loot.
“Perhaps I’ll run into you in Seattle some time,” Stacy says as I’m on my way out.
“Yes,” I reply, remaining on theme. “Maybe I’ll run into you yesterday.”
The next sentence should embarrass me, but I think it’s quite amusing.
I forgot my pants.
I did not forget the pants I’m wearing, nor any of the pants I usually wear—I can account for all of my jeans. The night before I left Seattle, I made a point of packing a dress shirt and a pair of khakis for tonight’s trip to the Magic Castle with Maurice. Somehow, the dress shirt made it into a suitcase, but the khakis did not.
So, I need new pants.
I consult the almighty GPS, asking it to direct me to the nearest Gap, a chain that is to malls as vanilla is to ice cream shops, and it leads me to an outdoor mall in Beverly Hills called the Grove.
As I drive my convertible through Beverly Hills to shop at the Gap, I worry I may have unintentionally become an extra in Clueless.
The Grove lies at the intersection of ridiculous and superfluous8—before I locate a mall directory, my ears are struck by the sound of a live band performing in the courtyard. If this is some sort of special occasion, I don’t know what—today is a Sunday in late March, and Easter is in two weeks.
Ignoring the band as best as possible, I find a directory, which routes me towards the Gap. And so, my traditional dance begins.
As a child, I was almost always the youngest kid in my class, thanks to a mid-September birthday that was just before the age cut-off. While I got mildly lucky in terms of height—I wound up at 5’6″, despite a 5’7″ dad and a 5’1″ mom—I spent most of my childhood as the smallest kid in my class, and had to learn to keep up.
In other words, I long ago got used to walking fast, and I grow frustrated when I’m stuck in a crowd that isn’t moving at the speed I want to, such as the one here at the Grove that’s full of parents taking their kids for a stroll and senior citizens shambling along and teenagers who are, like, way too cool for walking at a reasonable pace. The denizens of Los Angeles appear incapable of or unwilling to operate at the pace which I want to, so I find myself bobbing, weaving and gliding my way towards my destination.
Then, I see it: the Gap. And just beyond that, I see a trolley. A real trolley, on real trolley tracks, proceeding into and presumably through a shopping center that’s a block squared.
I feel my thoughts on Los Angeles have been fairly well-established by now9.
Every Gap I’ve ever visited before—and to be fair, it’s a small sample—has been mostly empty, but there’s a minor crowd in here, so I finess and “excuse me” past people to a pair of khakis and on to the dressing room. Once inside, I try on the pants as swiftly as possible, my desire to ensure a proper fit unable to compete with my desire to get out of whatever corner of Hell I’ve managed to end up in.
Somehow, despite the crowd, the registers have almost no line, and it takes only a minute, two at most, for me to reach the front. When I hand my credit card to the blandly attractive Asian girl at the register, she far-too-perkily asks if I’ve found everything I was looking for. I assure her that I have, but it’s not true until moments later, when I find the exit, pants in hand.
L.A. traffic’s reputation appears overblown, but it still takes longer than I expected to return to my hotel, change clothes, and drive back across town again to the Magic Castle. When I hand my keys to the valet, I’m already running 15 minutes late, and the entry line, which stretches past the door, delays me another 15 more. By the time I’ve spoken the magic word to an owl statuette and stepped through the space where a bookcase was just a moment earlier, I’m worried that I’ve missed whatever show Maurice had in mind for me.
Upstairs, the maitre’d shows me to the Seance Room, where Maurice and nine other people are seated around a large round table for dinner. After Maurice introduces me to everyone, he tells me the room got its name when Harry Houdini’s widow attempted to contact him from beyond the grave—the space is also referred to as the Houdini room, as it houses many of his belongings, including a trunk used in his act and his magic wand.
Throughout dinner, I converse with the people near me. The magician to my left performed in a “Got Milk?” commercial, the woman to my right on the other side of Maurice coordinates publicists for the Oscars’ red carpet, and her boyfriend, to her right, began attending Syracuse University a semester after the school lost 35 students on board Pan Am 103.
The connection would shock me, if I were still capable of being shocked.
After dinner, Maurice rushes me out of the room, and we catch a show in one of the Castle’s performance spaces. I know the secrets to a few of the tricks from TV shows or the magic kit I received for Hanukkah in the third grade, but many of them elude me. I’m mildly impressed, but I know it’s all sleight-of-hand. From there, Maurice leads me on to another act, which he skips.
When the show ends, I find Maurice speaking with a friend of his named Joe Monti, who has performed as a magician for more than two decades. Joe tells me how he returned from a trip to perform in England a week before my father’s death.
Joe flew back on one of the last successful Pan Am Flight 103s ever10.
More than twenty years later, he still remembers details about that flight, including a woman who seemed suspicious trying to cram a bag in the overhead bin. Joe also recalls that he had a friend who worked for Pan Am who frequently got him seat upgrades. That trip, he couldn’t get an upgrade, so the friend instead arranged for Joe to receive a bottle of champagne on board, which was delivered by an incredibly nice flight attendant. When Joe found out that the same flight number went down a week later, he worried that maybe that nice flight attendant had been on board.
He called the tip line number broadcast on the news, hoping to provide information about the suspicious woman or get some about the flight attendant, but wound up placed on hold. After waiting for a while, Joe heard a clicking sound on the line, and worried the authorities were tracing his call, so he hung up.
Joe never found out if that attendant was on board.
After I chat with Joe, Maurice continues the grand tour of the Castle, taking me downstairs to a room where magicians rehearse and refine their acts for upcoming shows. A man performs a medieval-themed routine, complete with period dress and an ocarina, and while I only catch the final trick—one in which he makes a card selected by an audience member appear within a magic walnut—I think he has the whole thing down.
I’m not Maurice, though, who has 25 years of experience here, and caught something I didn’t. Maurice pulls the performer aside and quietly informs him of a possible giveaway.
“I heard the walnut on the ditch,” Maurice tells him. “You need to put something in your pouch to deaden the sound.”
I glance at the pouch wrapped around the magician’s waist, no closer to discovering the secret behind his trick, and offer that I remain clueless. Maurice relates a story to his fellow magician of a conference he went to years ago, where a speaker gave a lecture about how the audience never notices anything while making broad hand gestures the whole time. Maurice wondered why the man was speaking with his hands so much, until the end of the speech, when the speaker removed fake fingertips from each of his hands to emphasize his point about the audience not noticing what’s right there.
The magician thanks Maurice for the help, assuring him that he’ll fix the routine in time for its upstairs debut next week. We circulate for a while longer—Maurice talks Magic Castle board business with one friend, and makes small talk with another—until we decide to go our separate ways.
As I drive back to my hotel on streets whose names I wish I didn’t know, I think about Maurice. He lost his brother, a friend who was like a brother, and suffered through two failed marriages, but he has found a kinship amongst magicians. Some say a man’s house is his Castle, but here, the Castle is Maurice’s home.
- Chemical engineering students.
- Spoiler Alert: They’re still together, 42 years later, and I’m having dinner with them before this story ends.
- For the full story, wait for Chapter 24.
- Maurice’s only brother died while canoeing on the Delaware River in 1979. Their mother objected to him taking the trip, and he called Maurice for advice. “I said, ‘If you think you can handle it, go. If you don’t, don’t,'” Maurice recalls. “He went, and he drowned. That was kind of a toughie thing for me.”
- Read: “According to Google Maps”
- I do not like Los Angeles.
- I once had a woman come in and say that she had previously been abducted by aliens, and that she was stocking up on supplies for when they came back. I assumed she was joking and replied accordingly. She was not joking.
- Or W 3rd St. and Fairfax. Whichever.
- I do not like Los Angeles.
- Airline tradition is that, after a disaster befalls a flight, its number is permanently retired, and that route is renumbered.