Benny came around to collect. We couldn’t believe it. Benny wasn’t really going to profit from this, was he?
“He was on my list,” he said innocently.
We all shouted, Benny! Come on!
“Come on what?” he cried. “He was at the top of my list! Those are the rules.”
He wasn’t wrong. Those were the rules of Celebrity Death Watch. We all paid him his ten bucks.
At Brizz’s funeral we discovered he had some family after all, a brother with a health-club glow. We called him Bizarro Brizz because he had good skin with a good color. Probably never smoked a cigarette in his life. It was as if jowly, ruddy Brizz had taken off a terrible mask. We offered him our condolences. After preparing ourselves in the pews for a while, some of us braved the front. Brizz in the box looked much healthier than Brizz at his desk. Afterward, at the wake, we tried to recall memories of him. We remembered one thing, the time we stood with him at the parking garage waiting for the bow-tied Hispanics to pull up with our cars. We had our single-dollar tips folded in the palms of our hands. God was it freezing. We were out of the way of the wind under the bright light of the garage, but Chicago in February, if you’ll allow an homage to Brizz, was colder than a witch’s tit in an icebox. He still called a refrigerator an icebox. He sat at his desk once and told us of being a kid and having the ice delivered. “That’s how old I am,” he confided to us in a rare moment. “I remember the ice being delivered.” “Did you used to call Australia ‘Tasmania Land’?” asked Benny. “Not that old,” said Brizz. Just then, Joe Pope arrived at Brizz’s doorway and asked him if he had those headlines ready. That’s what we were talking about with Old Brizz as we waited for our cars in the final freezing February of his tenure as one of us, certain aspects of Joe Pope’s character. We couldn’t pin Old Brizz down, though, try as we might. His car was the first to come out. It was a gray Peugeot, a one-time looker, but rusted around the trim now and dented in places high and low. The real story was the interior. Stuff — crap — accumulated junk — how else to put it? — filled the backseat windows to the roof. Paper mostly, but smashed against the glass we also made out a winter hat, a beer cozy, an unopened package of nude hose — things like that. Along the ledge of the doorframe we noticed scattered coins and green plastic houses from the game of Monopoly. “Brizz,” said Benny. “All these extras come from the dealership?” “Have you guys never seen my car before?” Brizz asked with pride. “Is that what this is?” asked Larry Novotny. “A car?” He bent at his knees and resettled his Cubs cap on his thinning hair while peering through the windows at the trash heap inside. The front passenger seat was hardly any better than the back, but there was a nice niche carved out for the driver behind the wheel. We had to wonder — who keeps a car like that? Was he really one of those people? The car-park man got out and turned the car over to Brizz, but Brizz never tipped. That was another thing about Brizz: he usually stayed in and ate his baloney sandwiches, but when he came out to lunch with us, we had to supplement his share of the tip so as not to screw the waitress, which made us hate him momentarily. “I got a tip for you,” he replied, when someone asked him once why he was so cheap. “Never take no wooden nickels.”
We heard that time and again — “Never take no wooden nickels” — until we wanted to clobber him over the head with a mallet. Except for the surprise of his homeless-man’s car, and his half-hour conversation with the building guy on the day he was terminated, Old Brizz was fatiguing in his predictability. He came in, he proofread in a pair of nineteen-fifties eye frames, he left at ten-fifteen for the day’s first smoke break. Good god, we could still see him standing in the winter freeze outside the building in nothing but a ratty sweater vest, jowls like a hound dog’s, pulling on his pointy cigarette. He came back in smelling like fifty butts in an ashtray. He brought out his baloney sandwiches at quarter past noon and chased them down with a Thermos of black coffee that he made at home because he claimed the stuff down the hall was too gourmet for his taste.
One day not long after Brizz’s death, Benny started calling us into his office. Benny’s office had all the cool stuff in it. A gumball machine, remote-controlled cars. He put an anatomical skeleton against the wall just inside the doorway, so it stared back at him at his desk. Everyone asked where he got the skeleton. His answer was always “Some dead guy.” He duct-taped a Buck Rogers gun to the skeleton’s hand and crowned the smooth skull with a cowboy hat.
Benny was uploading a finished ad to the server when Jim walked by. “Jim, get in here. I got news for you.”
Jim came into Benny’s office and sat down.
“I’m uploading,” said Benny.
“That’s your news?”
“Brizz named me a beneficiary in his will. Blattner! Get in here, I got news for you.”
Blattner came in and sat down next to Jim across the desk from Benny.
“Listen to this,” said Benny. “Brizz named me a beneficiary in his will.”
“Get out,” said Blattner. “That’s funny because —”
“Marcia!”
Marcia walked past and then reappeared. She stepped inside the doorway and stood next to Buck, the space cowboy skeleton. “Brizz named Benny a beneficiary in his will,” said Jim, craning his neck so he could see Marcia. She came in and sat down on the barstool.
“That’s funny because it sounds just like this screenplay I’m working on,” said Blattner.
“Genevieve!” said Benny.
Genevieve stopped in the doorway.
“Genevieve,” said Blattner, “remember that screenplay I was telling you about? It happened to Benny in real life.”
“What screenplay?” asked Genevieve.
“Just listen,” said Benny. While his computer uploaded, he told us of receiving a letter from a lawyer on the South Side.
Genevieve had second thoughts. “I’m sorry, Benny, I can’t listen right now,” she said, rattling some revisions in her hand. “I have to get these down to Joe.” She abandoned the doorway.
Hank showed up. “What’s going on?” he asked, adjusting his big black eyeglasses.
“Brizz made Benny a beneficiary in his will,” said Marcia.
“And Blattner stole the idea for a screenplay,” said Jim.
“No,” said Blattner. “No, that’s not —”
“Wait until I tell you what he left me,” said Benny.
“Why should he leave you anything?” asked Karen Woo, who had walked in with Hank. “You benefited financially from his death.”
“Karen,” said Benny, for the thousandth time. “Those are the rules of Celebrity Death Watch. What was I supposed to do?”
Benny arrived at a storefront law office on Cicero Avenue for the reading of the will. Brizz’s brother was the only other person in attendance. Benny and Bizarro Brizz recognized each other from the funeral. After handshakes and offers of coffee, the lawyer took a seat behind his big cherrywood desk. “Frank’s will,” said the lawyer, lifting an envelope. He removed the letter and looked down through his bifocals. Then he looked up and explained that the benefactor had written a few preliminary words.
Life had been very good to him, the letter explained. He had been blessed with loving parents, and growing up he had had a wonderful companion in his younger brother, whom he had loved, even if they had drifted a little once they reached adulthood. He had loved his wife, who had given him a delightful seventeen years. The thing he loved about life the most, Brizz had written, was the day-to-day living of it — the Chicago Sun-Times arriving on his front porch in the morning, a hot cup of black coffee and a good cigarette, and being alone in his warm house in winter.