“You know Ari never had a full-time job.”

“His partner said that a lot of people thought Ari was a rich man.”

“People thought Ari was rich because he was Jewish, and his father owned properties. But his father wasn’t hedge fund manager rich.”

“And his father didn’t leave any money to him. His father left everything to his younger brother.”

“The understanding was that his younger brother, Ben, would send him an allowance, like his parents had been doing.”

“But that wasn’t what transpired.”

“...”

“Ben went full religious. He’d met and quickly married his first real girlfriend. An evangelical Christian lady from Mississippi. This sharp-elbowed, short, pug-nosed lady who wore heaps of make-up and spoke with a gravelly Southern drawl...”

“I met her once ... I can still recall the heavy, noxious odor of her perfume, her crazy long fingernails, and frilly, tacky clothes...”

“Ben met her by Times Square. Guy used to sneak over there to go to the peep shows, Ari’d said...”

“She was with her church group, passing out Bibles or something.”

“...”

“Then Ben became a Jew for Jesus.”

“...”

“Ari really blamed Joan, too, Ben’s wife, for corrupting Ben, polluting his mind with the Jesus stuff.”

“But hey, for some people, religion really benefits them. Ben was a total slacker who went to peep shows and spent all day watching TV. But after he got religious he was a changed man. He went from living with his parents, at 33, to working his way up the corporate ladder at an investment bank. The guy went on to head a division in Mergers and Acquisitions. Even got featured once in the Wall Street Journal.”

“Ben was at _____ ___, right?”

“For 40 years...”

“Jesus...”

“ ... yeah, but Ben hid the Jesus stuff pretty well. He only pushed it on Ari and their parents. He never once talked about it with anyone else in the family...”

“Ben could never bring his brother or their old man to Jesus, but he did ‘convert’ their mother on her death bed.”

“If you wanna call that a conversion ... The lady was a vegetable, gone with dementia, had lost all her marbles...”

“...”

“Okay, sure, it seems superfluous. Their parents leaving the money to the son making 6, 7 figures. But look, think about it, who’s gonna be more responsible? An executive at an investment bank? Or Ari, Matoosh, or whatever, living with a yoga cult, in Death Valley? This dude who never had full-time employment...”

“Matoosh?”

“Ari had changed his name to ‘Matoosh’ for a while, was demanding that everyone address him as ‘Matoosh.’”

“And it was around then that he started wearing his trademark bandannas.”

“Some thought he wore those due to his obsession with the writer David Foster Wallace. But Ari claimed DFW swiped the bandanna thing from him, after they’d met briefly, at a Don DeLillo book signing...”

“It was around the Matoosh time, too, that Ari began wearing those Burmese longyis...”

“And it was around that time that he decided he was gay. Then he started living with something of a new-age yoga cult in Pahrump, Nevada, near Death Valley...”

“I’m sure none of this sat too well with his parents...”

“Matoosh, the longyis and bandannas, being gay, the yoga ... His parents were conservative, second-generation Russian Jews. Ari’s grandfather was a rabbi...”

“It’d caused quite the stir when Ari got up and demonstrated the ‘downward-facing dog’ at a seder.”

“Jesus...”

“I mean he was living in Pahrump, Nevada ... I mean ... Pahrump ... And calling himself ‘Matoosh’...”

“Ari apparently got quite angry too if you didn’t refer to him as ‘Matoosh.’”

“Living in the desert, in Pahrump was a big reason why hardly anyone in the family ever went to visit him. It was just so hot and remote...”

“His parents could have bought him a house in a place that didn’t have ‘death’ in its name and wasn’t hot as a furnace.”

“Or, like, the money could have gone to charity.”

“So Matoosh wasn’t enough of a charity case?”

“...”

“Ari became an avowed pacifist around that time, too. Getting involved and volunteering at lots of hippy, antiwar, anti-violence organizations...”

“...”

“Really everything between Ari and Ben went sideways, though, after their parents died. Their parents were accepting of Ari’s homosexuality, his ‘lifestyle,’ as his father called it...”

“Ari’s parents actually seemed far more uncomfortable with the yoga...”

“...”

“First their father had a deadly, freak accident at the Serenoa Golf Club.”

“The Serenoa?”

“The Serenoa Golf Club.”

“The guy was out golfing alone, early morning. Got attacked by a swarm of wasps and drove his golf cart into a lake. Drowned to death...”

“It was in the papers. Front page of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.”

“Jesus...”

“Then their mother died. And after their mother died, Ben let it rip. Started calling Ari ‘disgusting’ and saying that it was ‘Ari’s fault, Ari’s fault that Ari was gay.’ Then he insisted Ari ditch his partner, stop doing yoga and start taking gay conversion classes.”

“That didn’t happen, and Ari took his younger brother to court, tried to sue for the inheritance.”

“...”

“ ... But Ari’s legal efforts were to no avail. The will was signed, sealed, delivered. Written in plain English. It was airtight. There was nothing in the will for him. No property. Zero dollars. Nothing. And that whole ‘Ben providing Ari an allowance’ or whatevs was only a handshake agreement.”

“Ben’s lawyer had the case thrown out before it got anywhere.”

“After the suit got dismissed, Ari proclaimed that he’d ‘divorced his brother.’ I don’t think they ever spoke again...”

“Ben, Joan and their Jesus clique are quite polarizing ... I don’t think I’ve even seen Ben this century ... I heard through the grapevine that he has this stupid crib in Sanibel Island and that he’s been wintering there and summering in the Hamptons ... And I heard Joan spends part of the year in Iceland ... Their two sons are both bankers at ______ ____, following in their old man’s footsteps...”

“...”

“Why didn’t Ari just get a job? His old man, Ben, anyone could have put him on...”

“ ... pink bandannas, Burmese longyis, spontaneous outbursts of yoga, demanding to be addressed as ‘Matoosh’ ... None of that goes over well on Wall Street...”

“My Pops was always on him, always pushing Ari ‘to do something with his life... ‘“

“For a while Ari tried to make a living as a poet ... He’d done a yoga course in India, too, became a certified yoga instructor. But he never taught yoga as a profession.”

“So he never had a full-time job?”

“Nope. He claimed he couldn’t work because ‘he couldn’t.’”

“...”

“Ari was quite coddled as a kid. He was a child of that post-Holocaust generation. That generation thought of every child as a miracle beyond miracles, treated them like Fabergé eggs ... His mother always cooking him food, picking up after him, letting him do whatever.”

“With parenting like that it shouldn’t have been surprising he had problems working ... Showing up to an office every day. Someone all in his face, telling him what to do...”

“Then at some point Ari started writing new-age, self-help books. Then he tried getting his self-help books published. To no avail.”

“Part of me thought that because he had big teeth and was tall, that he could be the next Tony Robbins...”

“You know, I sorta liked Jacinda Ardern, and I think part of it was because she also has big teeth. There’s something striking and powerful about a person with big teeth...”

“...”

“It’s just ... I didn’t know. I didn’t know Ari was sick. No one knew about his heart condition. No one, aside from his partner.”

“ ... Ari was walking with a cane and confined to his couch, those last couple a’ years. He was bitter too. He hated not being able to do yoga or go teach his yoga classes at the prison. His partner told me Ari was spending most of his time eating hummus, drinking apple juice and watching the Daily Show and Oakland A’s games...”