My father had four brothers so I had an Uncle Henry, an Uncle Irving, an Uncle Seymour and an Uncle Nathan. Nathan was the youngest and he was the one I saw, by far, the most of. Irving and Seymour lived Back East, Henry lived in a city near San Diego called La Mesa…but Nathan lived not far from us in Los Angeles.
He came to our house at least once a week, usually joining us for Sunday Dinner. He took me places like to the racetrack (story here) and he bought me things and he just treated me the way an uncle oughta treat a nephew.
He never married and to our knowledge, never had any kind of personal relationship with anyone, male or female, who could be considered a "date." We never had any indication that this bothered him in any way. He liked being alone most of the time. He liked doing his own laundry and cooking and going places — mainly racetracks — on his own. It was just the way he was.
He made it to the age of 82 — in reasonably good health until near the end. In what turned out to be the last year of his life, he began telling us — my mother and me because his brother (my father) was gone by then — stories of doubtful veracity. I don't mean that he lied. He just seemed to be remembering things that obviously hadn't happened. They usually occurred at a laundromat near his current home, a place he went each week to wash his clothes, towels, sheets and such.
One time, he told us about police surrounding the laundromat and arresting some very-much-wanted criminal who was in the midst of drying his undies. Another time, he told us that he'd seen two women fighting and punching and hitting and ripping out each others' hair over whose wet laundry it was in a certain machine.
He sometimes claimed to have seen famous, mega-celebrities — once, Jack Nicholson — sitting in this laundromat, waiting for their clothes to dry. If you heard him tell any of these tales, you would have believed they never happened but not expressed any doubt to him. You would have then worried about the possible onset of dementia in this very nice older man.
One of the last, if not the last such story he told us went like this: He was in the laundromat doing that week's laundry when a group of people came in. One of them — a man — climbed into one of the large dryers and stuck his head out. The other ones all took photos of him. They took other pictures of that man all around the laundromat. Then the man signed autographs for a few patrons of the laundromat who recognized him — Uncle Nathan didn't — and then they all left. It was, of course, unbelievable.
Uncle Nathan died soon after that. At the time, I was dating a lady named Elaine and I told her about Uncle Nathan and about that incident he claimed to have witnessed in the laundromat. I told it to her just to give her an example of the kind of things Uncle Nathan imagined. A few months later, she called me and asked if I'd seen the latest issue of Rolling Stone. I hadn't. She told me to check it out, especially Page 49. She wouldn't tell me what I would find there.
So the next time I was at a newsstand, I located a copy of the current Rolling Stone. Dana Carvey from Saturday Night Live was on the cover. I turned to Page 49 and there, in the midst of a big article about Mr. Carvey, there was a photo of him in a laundromat. He was in one of those big dryers with his head sticking out and there in the background — staring at him in disbelief — was my Uncle Nathan.
