8

WOULDN’T BE ME WITHOUT U

In a lot of ways—in fact, in almost every way—I was never as close to my father as I was when he was dying.

There is something intimate about death when you see it coming. Something healing. It can rip you to pieces as it makes you whole.

The curious thing about my father’s death was the way it brought us all together. The many branches of the family tree I wrote about earlier had scattered. We were all over the place, making our own music. For years, my father had been a kind of magnet, pulling us into his world, and now here he was, in the summer of 2008, drawing us in once more.

I refused to accept that my father was dying. We all did, I think. To his children, he was this larger-than-life figure: heroic, invincible, electric. He was a survivor, most of all. I don’t think any one of us could have imagined a world without him in it, even as he stood in silent authority over the choices we were making in our dovetailing worlds, the lives we were living, alone and together.

His approval meant the world to me. And I was only just earning it. I was just a year or so removed from my first set at Coachella, starting to make a name for myself as a DJ—my name, his name. There was money coming in, at fucking last. Dim Mak was finally whole. Looking back, all these years later, I tend to race over the ways we struggled at the label. I don’t do this to blow smoke or to bury the truth of how things were, but in my mind our successes counted above all. So, yeah, I’d shout about all the acts we were breaking, the impact we were making, the trends we were helping to shift and shape, and race over the fact that we were piling up debt. The one was lasting. The other was fleeting. We were in the red so damn long at Dim Mak, so damn deep, it almost didn’t register when we were finally in the black. I kept telling myself that in the end it would all shake out to the good, and now that it was I wanted to tell my father about it. That was always a big driver for me, pushing myself to a place that would make him proud.

To this day, my dad almost ten years gone, whenever something good finds me in my career, I want to tell him about it. Whenever I push past some difficulty, I want to tell him about it. I wish more than anything that he could see how I live, what I’ve become. For my brothers and sisters, they might think about how they are as parents, in ways that relate to him. Some of them probably think about the legacies they’re building through his grandchildren, but I’m not there just yet.

For me, for now, I want my father to see how my music brings people together, same way his restaurants brought people together. I want him to know that the choices I made, the choices he didn’t always agree with, amounted to something.

I want him to taste the sweetness I have tasted, the sweetness my siblings have tasted.

I want him to know we’re all okay.

I want him to see the ways I am just like him. I work hard, play hard. I live in the moment. I believe anything is possible.

But, hey, superheroes don’t beat lung cancer, diabetes, hep C, cirrhosis of the liver, pneumonia. It took a couple months for all of that shit to finally slow my father down, and it sucked that just as he was slowing down I was ramping up, but we don’t get to schedule these life-and-death battles. They hit you when they hit you, and when they hit my father we all dropped whatever we were doing and flew to be at his side. Me, I was in Ibiza, mostly. I’d started playing there the year before—a giant step for me. They didn’t always roll out the welcome mat for American DJs in Ibiza, the global pulse of the dance music scene, but I was blessed to land a residency at a nightclub called Space. I was flying in every couple weeks for a weekend of shows, and when my father got sick it sometimes worked out that as soon as I touched down on the island I’d have to double back to the hospital in New York, without even playing a single set.

For months, things went on in this way. It’d look like my father was doing okay and that I could fly to Spain and do my shows, but then I’d get a call from my sister Grace, telling me to come back home.

Always, his kids filled the hospital room. Always, his third wife, Keiko, was a kind of supervising presence, deciding who would get to see him and when. She ran the show. It had been that way for a while, going back to before my father was sick. It used to be she kept me from the house, kept me from seeing my father, kept us from connecting. On the Benihana front, she kept us from the boardroom, from the kitchen, from the front of the house. It felt to me like the only way she could feel secure in her place by his side was to keep the rest of us from his side. But then, in the end, she knew she couldn’t keep us from seeing him. I think she knew what it meant for us kids to have to face the thought of losing our father, what it meant for our father to have to face the thought of losing his kids. So she gave us our space, let us do our thing—only it sometimes felt to me like our grieving couldn’t happen all at once.

There was one night, late, a bunch of us gathered in his hospital room, when Keiko stood abruptly and announced she had to leave to walk her dog Mugi. It took us all by surprise, her standing to leave like that, just then. My father most of all. He wasn’t speaking then, had this little notepad he kept by his bed, and he reached for it. We all stood as he scratched out a message to Keiko: “Don’t go.”

For whatever reason, Keiko had it in her head that she needed to step out for a beat—said, “Your children are here. I need to walk the dog.”

He grabbed the pad again—scrawled, “Stay.”

But she was gone.

We all deal with our sadness in our own way, I guess, and maybe Keiko’s way was to just step away, you know. Or maybe she was giving us all some space, taking her own time to breathe. It was something to notice, that’s all. But she was my father’s wife. He’d chosen her. He knew who she was, and he’d chosen her. And she was free to grieve in her own way, on her own time.

In the very last conversation I had with my father, he told me he wasn’t going to die. He didn’t say he wasn’t prepared to die, didn’t say he was scared to die … nothing like that. No, he just put it out that he flatly refused to die. It’s like the concept of death simply didn’t apply to him. He wasn’t having any of it. He said, “I will get through this. We will get through this.” As if in giving it voice he would make it so.

I could only answer in kind. I said, “You’re a survivor, man. Whatever life throws at you, you find a way to survive.”

But underneath, I knew. Underneath, I had this sick, sad feeling that this was the last conversation we would ever have. When we were done talking, we embraced. Wasn’t a typical thing for us. My father wasn’t the most demonstrative man. But he was weak and I wanted to be strong for both of us, so I leaned over and collected him in a hug. Next thing I knew, I was bawling like a baby. So much for wanting to be strong. I was flat-out sobbing. His pillow was soaked through with my tears.

I’d never cried with my father before. It was cathartic as hell, terrifying as hell. And as I wept, I realized I had never really been alone with him, vulnerable with him, myself with him. It was just the two of us in his room, and it felt alien to me for it to be just the two of us like that. In all our times together, going back as far as I could remember, there was always another sibling around, or someone who worked for him, or one of his friends. There was always something else going on. His life was so damn big he had to fill it with people, and even now, he died as he lived. And yet there we were, father and son, lost in the desperate sadness of his one epic embrace, holding on to whatever it was we’d had, whatever it was I’d wished we had.

I can still remember the last of those distress calls from Grace when I was shuttling back and forth to Ibiza. I was having dinner at a place called Cafe Mambo with MSTRKRFT—Jesse Keeler and Al-P.

I stepped away from the table to take the call.

Grace said, “We don’t know if he’s going to make it this time.”

I hopped the next flight to New York and rushed to my father’s side at NYU Medical Center. It didn’t feel like the last time, as I raced from the airport to the hospital. It was only the next time—one on a long string of many. And yet when I got to the hospital I was struck by all the tubes running into my father’s mouth, his arms. It’s like they had to plug him in to keep him ticking. He was mostly out of it, and I remember thinking how much he’d hated to be drugged, how important it was for him to feel like he was inside the moment, in some sort of control.

We stayed by his bedside in shifts. It was important to us that one of his children be with him at all times, and it just worked out that my turn on the night shift came on the night he passed. I didn’t sleep. I sat in a chair next to his bed, holding his hand. I didn’t read, didn’t listen to music, didn’t do anything but dwell inside that moment where my father used to be.

I didn’t even pray. Not in the typical ways people pray. Not in the ways I might have prayed back in high school, when my acid-fueled epiphany had briefly turned me to religion—you know, the ways that might have placed me on God’s insurance plan. No, whatever prayers I said in my head that night were the prayers of wish fulfillment. I was hoping against hope, that’s all. Holding on for dear life to the one “higher power” who had stood before me like a force of nature from the very first time I went with him to one of his restaurants.

As I squeezed my father’s hand, I imagined he was squeezing back. We sat in this way for five hours … six … seven … I talked to him, asked him questions about his life, about how things were for him in Japan, how things were when he met my mother, and I believed I heard his answers in his grip. In reality, his hand lay limp in mine, but I could have sworn he was holding on, tight, trying to tell me something.

At some point, around sunrise, I noticed a foul smell. It was my father, of course—he’d shit the bed. Like a hopeful idiot, I thought it was a positive sign. I took it to mean that his body was fighting back, trying to break through the tubes and the meds and the sickness, to eliminate the toxins, to get back to the business of living. I dressed it up in my head to mean more than it did, where in reality he wasn’t fighting back so much as shutting down.

When I went to find one of the night nurses to tell her what was going on, she put it to me plain—said, “His organs are failing. It’s only a matter of time.”

I refused to hear her, asked to talk to a doctor. I said, “Yo, my dad’s a fighter. He’ll make it, you’ll see.”

The doctor tried once more to set me straight—said, “I’m surprised he’s made it this far.”

With this, I broke down. My entire body sagged. It’s like all the air was let out of my lungs. I fell back into my chair and cried, and I switched into zombie autopilot mode. I started calling my siblings, told them to get back to Dad’s room, told them it was the end. I wasn’t thinking, just doing. I was drained of all emotion.

I wish I could remember what I said.

I wish I could remember what they said.

Next thing I knew, there they were. There we were. All of us. My father’s fantastically blended family, stuck to him in all these different ways, saying our separate good-byes … together. Devon had taken the time to write her thoughts on a napkin, a scrap of paper, and when my father passed she looked at her notes and said a few words. She looked at him and said, “It’s okay, you can go now. We’re okay, you can go now.”

Her words made my father’s death real. All that “time of death” shit, all that doctor shit, it hadn’t really registered. I knew, but I didn’t know … if that makes any sense. And yet hearing our new truth from the lips of my kid sister, it finally hit me. Full in the chest. Hard. I was like, Holy shit, he’s gone.

Today, I see my father in my siblings. His memory is most alive when we are together … all of us, some of us.

In my brothers and sisters, I see his many moods, his many colors, all these different pieces of his personality.

In my sister Grace I see my father’s selflessness. She’s always thinking about others, trying to set things right for the people in her life. A lot of folks, they hear me attach a word like selfless to my father, they wonder what the hell I’m talking about, but he was in the hospitality business, right? Whatever valves he might have shut off in his personal life, whatever ways he might have struggled with issues of intimacy or fidelity, he opened those spigots wide when it came to his work. He was an incredible host. He was generous, wanted to make people feel comfortable in his presence, and I see these qualities in Grace as well.

In my brother Kevin, I see my father’s work ethic. More than any one of us kids, Kevin is on the grind. It’s in his bones, same way it was with Dad. Me, I’m a hard-charger, but it’s not the same. With me, it’s mostly about being tireless. With Kevin, it’s about being relentless. I’ll fly to the edges of the planet to do a show without even thinking about it, but it’s Kevin who’s out there all day, every day, putting in the steady, meticulous work of getting things done. He’s the operations guy of our crew, making sure the pieces all fit and the engine keeps running. He keeps the lights on for us.

In my sister Echo, I see my father’s heart. Yeah, he could be hard on us kids, and he didn’t always treat the women in his life—our mothers!—with the respect they deserved, but underneath his tough exterior he was a generous soul. He was good to the people who worked for him, good to people in need. Echo’s cut the same way.

In my brother Kyle, I see my father’s sense of humor. Kyle’s the comedian of the family, only he goes at it in a take-no-prisoners sort of way. My father loved to make people laugh, but even more than that he loved to push their buttons, to make a situation so awkward or uncomfortable that you had to really pay attention. Kyle’s like that, in his own way … in my father’s way.

In my sister Devon, I see my father’s mind. She’s the brains of the outfit, smart as hell, always thinking ten steps ahead of everyone else. That was my father. It’s like he was playing chess and everyone else was playing checkers, and with Devon you get the feeling she knows what’s about to happen way before it up and happens. She can read the hell out of a room.

In my sister Jennifer, I see the close-knit family my father seemed to always want for himself but could never quite pull off. He was too distracted, too busy, to stay in any one place for any stretch of time, and so his family relationships suffered. But Jenny’s built this wonderful family dynamic, and she’s super-tight with her husband and kids, and I get the feeling that if my father had ever been able to get his shit together in this department, this would have been his model.

Me, I like to think I’m the DJ of all that Rocky Aoki DNA. I’ve got a little bit of all these character traits running through me. I’ve got all his little bits and pieces running through me, and I try to sample them all. I live each day trying to honor the man he was, the man I hope to become.