Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Mel's Diner

Irina had collapsed in the only comfortable chair I owned within seconds of entering my condo. I was beginning to wonder if the woman had bones.

She and I had sat for a bit in the ballroom after Matt and his two monkeys had left. She sat quietly, looking at her face in one of those compact mirrors. I, on the other hand, was not quiet at all. I cursed Matt, his goons, his parents, his pets and his siblings. After about five minutes of this, I sat down, rubbed my face, and muttered one last expletive. Then I stood up, patted my pockets for my keys and walked out. I was in the parking garage before I noticed she was behind me.
He grunted a bit and kept walking.

"Hey", the denim man said, "I ain't got any more gas than what's in it."

"So?"

You're what?

"Two hundred and six." "That's bullshit." He closed the folder and tilted my kitchen chair back on its hindmost legs. I winced for the chair. He must have been three fifteen, three twenty and that chair wasn't the newest thing in my house. I opened my mouth but decided not to say anything. "Look," he said, "I'm a professional. I see shit like this," he pointed at my check stubs, "and I have to report it. It's against the law. And honestly? It pisses me the hell off. Does Your mother know this is how you support yourself? That you're a scam artist? When your sister asked me to help you and told me you were an entrepreneur, I expected something fishy. I didn't expect this. " I blinked. That made me angry. "Scam artist? It's a four hundred dollar check! I paid into social security for almost seventy years! If I was going to rip somebody off I could do a hell of a lot better than a four hundred dollar check! Look at the damn paperwork, everything you need is in there. I just need it sorted out so I can do my taxes... again... for the hundredth time. And for the record, Mary is not my sister, she's my great, great, great, great, granddaughter. Look at the damn paperwork already! "You're delusional. This is not funny and you need help." "I'm serious. I'm not crazy and yes, I do need help. Help with my taxes, help with my investments. Pretend I'm a normal retired guy who gets a Social Security check and has some extra income. Mary's father used to do this for me. I can't make heads or tails of this anymore. You're part of the family now. You were going to find out sooner or later anyway, so please... help out." He leaned forward and put the chair back on all four legs. I was happy for the chair, it went well with the table. He opened the folder and shuffled the first couple of pages, loose leaf sheets Katherine's husband had put in there in the seventies. He took a breath, "OK then. I'll play.", he cleared his throat and looked me in the eye, " What are you supposed to be, a vampire? Some kind of immortal being? Is some guy with a sword going to come and chop off your head?" I ground me teeth and held my temper. "No. I'm not immortal. I'm not supernatural. I'm not even special. It's a genetic abnormality. There's hundreds of people just like me around the world, there's at least ten of us left in the US. My great-grandmother is still alive, down in Phoenix. She's married to a guy, I swear, looks your age. It's disgusting, really..." "Wait. Stop right there. I don't want to hear about your grandmother, OK? You tell me your story, I'll pretend to believe you. You think you have a disease?" "Not a disease. More like an hereditary trait." "Genetic immortality..." "It's not immortality, but yeah, it's genetic. A guy in France did a study a couple of years ago... Passes down through the female. If I had had a sister, she might have passed it down. I can't. People like me don't have lots of kids. "According to that guy in France, people like me can all trace their maternal family tree back to a couple of families in southern Turkey. There's stories of people living to be seven, hell, eight hundred years old out there, but these days most of us don't live much past three. Accidents. Anger. People like me live a long time, but we can die, and do all the time. Many of us commit suicide. I had no idea I was like this until I was close to thirty years old. My childhood was normal. I just never got sick. But most people I knew as a kid didn't get sick. If they got sick, they died. If I knew you at twenty, you hadn't been sick yet. I really didn't realize I was different than other people until I was close to thirty. My friends were looking older, but I wasn't. At twenty-six I looked twenty. At thirty, I still looked twenty. At forty, I still looked twenty. I still looked twenty at my wife's funeral. It was at my son's funeral I finally started looking like an adult and I was over a hundred years old by that time. "And people thought you were a freak, right? You had to fake your death and steal a new identity to leave your fortune to? I've seen this movie, Tom." "Read the file, jackass. Movies are full of it. There's no reason to fake your death. Just go on living, day in, day out. You become a fixture, no one notices that you don't change, and no one would say anything if they did. Who the hell is going to believe that the guy in the house next door is two hundred years old? "Not me." "I don't really care if you do or don't, just do my damn taxes. The part about getting rich is bullshit too. I spent most of my first hundred and fifty years poor as dirt. Living hand to mouth. If I had known what people today would pay for a table or chair or gun from back then I would have saved something, anything, but the truth is, I had to use the things I had and they wore out. "I was born in 1805 on a farm just south of Philadelphia. My mother was only twenty and died having me. By the time I was old enough to start remembering things, my father had moved us out west, and we spent a couple years moving from town to town down the Ohio River. I was married in 1845 and had one son, Paul, that same year. Paul spent most of his life in the Navy, he signed up during the war, and died in 1911. His son, Michael, I didn't know real well. He died in 1925, but I got close with his son, Thomas. Thomas went west and married a peach of a girl in California. They had twins, Jonathan and Mary. Jonathan was killed in the Pacific in 1944, Thomas never really recovered from that and died early in 1945. His daughter Mary moved back here for work and I followed. She died in 1991. That was Mary Kay's grandmother. Kay was born here in 1951, married he husband Steve in '69 and Mary Kay was born in '71.