Edward Ahern, As Noir As It Gets
excerpt
As Noir As It Gets Publisher: independently published Date: February 8, 2025 Length: 195 pp. ISBN: 979-8306024189 ASIN: B0DSHYZC66 |
Washing Up
He’d been big once. Judging by the bones and ropy muscles dangerously so. Now, of course, he was a husk that I washed three times a week. Just a car with testicles, I told myself, just jointed dishes and glasses to be rinsed.
Carl Willoughby never complained, even when I scrubbed too hard in a sensitive spot. “Gentler, Sam,” was all he’d say. His family often was pecking and clucking around him during my visits, asking Carl the same canned questions about his health. It felt like over-repeated cable TV commercials.
They ignored me of course, not remembering my name and not caring that they didn’t. They wanted slices of the funeral pie, and judging by their hesitations seemed unsure how much if anything they’d get. As much as possible I in turn ignored them, but had to answer their intrusive questions to me about Carl’s health. I always lied. “He’s doing fine, better than I expected.”
Fine for a dying man, I thought. Carl had lots of impairments, and was close to blind, but his hearing was acute, and I was pretty sure he could hear them pumping me in the next room. I never said anything about it to him, nor him to me, but he’d smile broadly at me when I came back into his room.
The work had been as good as I could get at the time. As a junkie four months off heroin with clean urines, it was body washing or landscaping helper, throw away jobs for the ex-addict. It turned out that I had soft hands and gentle bedside manner, and people I was assigned to kept me on until they moved or died. The pay sucked, but the hours were mostly daylight, which let me take on a second gig evenings in a restaurant.
Truth be told, most of my time with Carl was just him talking and me listening, him in a hospital bed, me in an easy chair. He did ask occasionally about my life on the street and in prison, but mostly he rattled on about himself. His life had been sweet.
“So, Sam, after I came back from inspecting the European operations, I filed to divorce my second wife Cheryl. She skinned me pretty thoroughly despite the prenup, using our two sons as leverage. You’ve met them. I love them, but they’re entitled little pricks.”
Listening to Carl for me was like listening to Hans Christian Anderson reading one of his fairy tales, a world I could never know. But I didn’t mind, I liked him and he wasn’t bragging, just telling a bluntly honest story no one else would probably ever hear.
“I never let an engineer run a company. They’re too honest. Nor a marketing guy, they’re too on the left hand, on the right hand. But a sales guy? That was for me. Rapacious, willing to bend facts to fit image. Ignoring or burying inconvenient truth. Paid off, too. Let me have some more water.
“So anyway, after Cheryl I took up with Samantha, who looked like Cheryl fifteen years younger. Her prenup was harsher, I’d already been burned twice and didn’t want to get skinned a third time. And about the time I was getting tired of her she cheated on me with, what was his name, oh yeah, Ira Sarason, a twit of the first order. So she got the minimum when she was paid out.”
Over the year and a half I was with him he told me almost everything about his life, from his first masturbation to those he’d bribed, names included, to what little he thought of most friends and family. One afternoon toward the end he was wheeled out to a clinic for an MRI. Three weeks after that, before I had a chance to bathe him, he asked me to sit.
“Sam, you’ve probably noticed my coughing and shortness of breath. My cancer has gotten worse, and I’m moving to a facility. You need to find another loose-boweled client.”
I’d heard variations of this speech from others and wasn’t surprised. Nobody I took care of got better. “I’m sorry to hear that, Carl.” And I was. Carl was a big-league son-of-a-bitch, but he was straight with me, and bluntly fair. And good company. “I’ll miss you and your stories.”
“Yeah, maybe you won’t. Make me a promise, would you?”
“If I can.”
“Promise you’ll be at the reading of my will. You’ll be notified of the time and place.”
“Ah, sure, if I can.” My first guess was that he would leave me something like his monogramed golf clubs. But hey, they could be resold on line.
Carl didn’t last two months in the facility before he croaked. A month after that I was notified of the will, in person rather than virtual. I sat in the back, children, cousins and business associates crowding the front of the room, as if to cup in their hands the benefits pouring forth.
It was ugly. Carl left most of his money, belongings and real estate to peculiar charities, with token amounts of fifty thousand each to blood relatives. The last item came up.
“To Samual Johnson, my nimble-fingered helper, I bequeath all royalties and proceeds from the sale of my forthcoming autobiography, “A Bastard’s Life” Said book audio recorded while in session with Mr. Johnson and assembled and ghost written by Mr. Peter Alison.
The room went briefly silent while people considered what might have been said about them, then erupted into angry cries for a prereading before publication, and for their entitlement to the proceeds.
But after legal wrangling, the provision was honored, and once the book was published, I got rich. Very rich. Who knew that a robber baron’s unsavory confessional would be so popular? There’s talk of a movie. Carl’s subtitle said it all: A hard-assed memoir from a hard-headed executive.
I quit the restaurant job but still tend to the dying. After the book came out, I was offered boutique rates. And it turns out I’m good at it.
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