Page 86 - Vol. VI #3

O.G. (continued from page 15)
corner? Someone just sittin’ there.
Still, while Olivia kept Jedi’s name, she never spoke of him again. This had less to do with her feelings and more to do with the fact that she hated her own family, Orthodox to the core. She never spoke of them either, and began hanging out with lots of underground intellectuals living in New York at the time, riding up and down the coast with caravans of hippies, all younger than she but less financially independent. She smoked a lot of dope. Her sexual exploits were legend. Ru- mor was she funded a few illegal organizations of the extreme leftist variety, one of which was im- plicated in an explosion that resulted in a missing child. When she reemerged in the seventies, she bought as much real estate as she could. Slumlord could very well be one of the many titles ascribed to her when her obituary is finally written. She sold a lot of jewelry in Queens with the residual income—real and faux gold—and spent most
Why are there so many cars? A funeral? Where’s the hearse?
Or a wake? Careful, Ricky, you spillin’ all yer syrup on my fine leather seats.
How come we don’t got a inside man? ~
Olivia takes her second Oxycodone since waking, shooting out her grainy tongue to snatch the pill from her palm and leaning back to gaze at the brochure for the world cruise. The shiny lami- nated pages rattle in her splotchy hands, cor- ners stained long ago by her constant handling. The sound of clapping echoes down the hall.
So, she thinks, the so-called talent show begins. She would go watch but finds the whole affair a shameful farce—especially after all the shows she saw on Broadway. She cannot abide the company of so many wet-faced, nasty kids—and would not even meet with her own so-called grandchildren if she wasn’t getting paid.
of her offtime at strip clubs with her book club whenever they drank too much champagne. Who, in the late eighties, didn’t do a lot of cocaine? No one Olivia knew in the city.
Olivia Goldblatt neé Gechtman never had a natu- ral child, and no grandchildren either. She’d been married only once—during the mid-sixties—but after her husband, Jedi Goldblatt, an investor and paid consultant for several banks, had an affair with his secretary, she divorced him and fleeced him for all he had. Which was a lot. She got the mansion; he kept the yacht. After the settlement she swore she would never marry again, but Jedi married his mistress, a Methodist Midwesterner named Melanie. Olivia might have been able to swallow this insult, but when Jedi left with his new bride on a honeymoon to Venice as soon
Then came the nineties, and her age could no longer be denied: she was beyond fifty. Dating had grown into a wearisome masquerade. She became a vegetarian, bought a Lhasa Apso she named Mama Leone. Several business partners went to prison on embezzlement charges. She herself had a few run-ins with the IRS and some ex-KGB types who’d started making moves on her properties in Brooklyn. They tried to force her to sell cheap, and when she refused they threatened her for protection money. Two of her laundro- mats burned down; two of the Russians’ laundro- mats burned down soon after. An intense season of paranoia followed this brief but vicious turf war, punctuated by multiple rehab tours. Amidst the upheaval, the heat of menopause nearly drove Olivia mad.
as their divorce was finalized, she was livid. She ambled around their old house drinking Scotch for weeks, not once changing out her pajamas. It was a trip she’d planned for Jedi and herself only months prior—and she’d laughed and cried at the same time when her lawyer called to tell her the yacht sank off the coast shortly after leaving the harbor.
Still, by the new millennium, she’d truly thought she’d overcome the worst life had to offer. Only, one day she took Mama Leone for a walk in Park Slope, stopping in her pinstriped pantsuit to buy chocolate ice cream from a vendor. Just as she
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