David Lazar

by Robert Kalich

  “I’m putting together this idea I have to present Frank Sinatra at Carnegie Hall. Tomorrow, I’m meeting Solomon for brunch at Barney Greengrass. I hope Solomon’s in a good mood. I’m going to ask him for the money to do the concert.”

  I had many friends back in those days. Sometimes creeps like Elizabeth Taylor’s friend, Dennis Stein, would join us.

  “What are you doing, Dave?”

  “I’m trying to write.”

  “How’s your penmanship?”

  Jessica loved going to the Bronx Zoo, talking to me about having our children.

  “We’re going to have five, David,” she’d say. Jessica was sure of that.

  Then, out of nowhere, Leslie Kore telephoned.

  “I have a problem. I must see you.”

  The problem was Leslie’s Harvard man had found her in bed with another man. The way Leslie spoke about her Harvard man made him sound, well, worse than me.

  I met Leslie for a cocktail. We ended up at my place, a neat one-bedroom apartment in a redbricked building near the two great museums on upper Fifth Avenue. Jessica and I both loved exploring those museums. For the next six months, I was a tennis ball. Back ‘n’ forth. It was crazy, it was beyond difficult, it was impossible.

  My mom said it’s only a matter of time before my eyes would open. My father said, “I knew when you stopped going to synagogue that you would end up like this.” I spoke to Noah Weldon. “David, it’s simple. The girl you like holding hands with. The one you feel is your best friend. That’s the one to marry.”

  Noah’s wife, Joya, said, “Damn, Lazar! You’re a fool! Jessica’s a great girl, and Leslie, well...she’s Leslie...”

  Six months later, Leslie and I were caught at the Hotel Wellington by Leslie’s husband, his uncle, and a detective. The three of them managed to force their way into our hotel room, where Leslie and I were clinging to each other under Wellington sheets. We were guilty, more than guilty. We were fucked.

  “You’re a whore!” Leslie’s Harvard man kept shouting at her.

  Harvard’s uncle kept saying, “Let’s everyone just settle down.”

  The detective looked like Dick Cheney. He was taking Polaroids, salivating, ogling Leslie, and Leslie was a treat to ogle.

  “David, it’s time you break off your ridiculous engagement,” Leslie said in a controlled tone. “We must get married when this skirmish is over.” She shook her head and bare shoulders and the rest of her flawlessness and tossed the Wellington sheets.

  “This is the last look at a perfect ten that you’ll ever get!” she told Harvard.

  Her husband was speechless. So was I. Marry Leslie? It was Jessica I loved. This Leslie wasn’t close to the same woman who recited to me the sonnets of the Bard, adored Othello, was passionate about the writings of Jean Rhys. Leslie was forced to leave Cornell because her parents ganged up on her. Insisted she marry a trust-fund heir. Her 165 I.Q.? It didn’t matter. Her ambition to be a surgeon? Irrelevant.

  And I also kept thinking, “What makes me the a-hole I am?”

  Even then I recognized it.

  “I would like it very much if one of you gentlemen poured me a glass of Dom Perignon,” Leslie said. Dick Cheney rushed over and started pouring. I tried to cover Leslie up.

  She flung off the sheets, and shrieked, “Let my husband get a good look! It’s the last one he’ll ever get of me!”

  Not long after, I walked down a hospital corridor to see Jessica. Jessica’s mother and father were guarding the door. I took a deep breath.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “We don’t want you to go into our daughter’s room,” Mrs. Strauss said. “You’ve already caused enough damage, David.”

  “Please, I just want to see Jess. Please let me get by.”

  Jessica’s father, a large burly man who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, stiffened. “You’re not getting in there!”

  “Mr. Strauss, I feel terrible about what’s happened. I love your daughter.”

  Jessica’s parents looked at me as if I were crazy.

  Something inside me took over. I pushed my way through Mr. and Mrs. Strauss. Pale, her wrists bandaged, her eyes bloodshot, Jessica looked small, and Jessica wasn’t a small girl. She was long legs, modest bust, and kindly smiles. She had apple-cheeks and thick, jet-black hair, the face of an ingénue, wholesome enough to be plastered on the cover of Seventeen.

  Wincing, Jessica propped herself up on the bed. Tears began to trickle down her cheeks. “You know I love you, David. Leslie doesn’t. She’s a bad person.” Jessica’s eyes opened wide. “Leslie’s not a good person, David. She has a spell over you. She’ll make you unhappy.”

  I didn’t hear a word. Not in the way you need to hear words. You have to be open to hear words. To listen. To take heed.

  “I’m sorry, Jess,” I said softly. I loved Jessica. She made me feel as if I were a good person. One night in a Brooklyn restaurant, Jess stood up at a gathering of several friends of mine to celebrate my first book being published. These friends had been teasing me for slurping my onion soup.

  “Stop picking on David! You should all be ashamed of yourselves! David is a genius.” Jessica was as uncomplicated as the 1950s. A lovely young woman with a grab bag of good intentions.

  “I can’t fight Leslie, David. She knows everything there is to know about sex. I know nothing but that I love you.”

  Perhaps my unbridled lust for Leslie Kore was the biggest shortcoming of my life. I always had a good feeling whenever Jessica and I were together. The kind of feeling that you can’t buy.

  I stopped pacing my rooftop terrace, walked inside the penthouse, and grabbed a snapshot of Jessica that I had peeled from one of my collages. I sat in front of the fireplace and looked at Jessica standing next to me and laughing. It seemed more like now than yesteryear. At eight in the morning, I called Elizabeth and started to enumerate the kind of dirtbag I was.

  “I don’t know that person. He sounds awful,” she said.

  Sweet-faced Jessica is gone. I destroyed what we had shared. We didn’t remain friends. I never saw Jessica in all the decades that have passed. She disappeared. I’m forcing myself to believe that Jessica Strauss had a decent life, a husband who loved her before her gentle soul left this earth. But if she did, it was no thanks to me.

  Chapter 7

  I married Leslie Kore in 1965 when both of us were in our late twenties. We got hitched at city hall. It wasn’t romantic or a marriage made in clueless heaven, more like the other place. During the five years I was married to Leslie, she complained I didn’t make enough money, she howled about my gambling, she was a shrew. But, she had good cause for the way she was. There’s no photograph in my collages for things that happened in those days, understandably, but I remember them clearly.

  In 1966 Leslie was pregnant. I was working for the Welfare Department, taking home in the neighborhood of two hundred dollars a week. I was desperate to make more money. That doesn’t excuse my degenerate gambling or any of the things that I allowed to happen. I didn’t know there was such a thing as winning, much less how to win at something as arcane as handicapping college basketball. I was the screw-up. The one who got into trouble with outlaws.

  I owed $2,800 to Abe Gold, an old-school Jewish bookmaker, a veteran of the Warsaw Ghetto, a man whose smile could freeze the blood in your veins. He had his office in his home in Hastings-on-Hudson and had planted more than a few people who did not pay him under his acres of lawn. Abe Gold sent two uglies over to my home

  to collect.

  At one in the morning, I was getting ready to take a bath, and Leslie was in our one bedroom at the Regency Towers, which sounded fancy, but we were renting in the sub-basement. Our rent and sticks of furnishing were appropriate for a loser like me. When I heard the knock on the door, I knew who it was. I took a deep breath. I had to open the
door. No good in not doing so. The uglies on the other side would kick the door down if I didn’t. That’s how far it had gone with Abe Gold. He had sent more than three serious ultimatums, and I had stalled and stalled for months. I told Leslie, “Please stay in the bedroom.” She didn’t. I opened the door.

  The two uglies were not in a good mood. The smaller one was by no means little, the kind of Neanderthal with no body fat, who could hold his own with a professional fighter. He carried a baseball bat. The bigger one didn’t have to. Both stared at Leslie. She was in her second month, but her see-through nightgown showed a perfect body. The two uglies started to come on to her. Leslie cursed them out. She threatened to call the police. The ugly with the baseball bat took his cigarette from his mouth and put it out on Leslie’s arm. The huge ugly grabbed her by the hair and slammed her against the

  brick wall.

  I had never seen Leslie look as frightened as she did then. In all the years I had known her, I had never once seen Leslie out of control, vulnerable. She was always in charge, adamant in every assertion. Always in command, smug. Now she was terrified. To me this enhanced her beauty. The fear on her face, that wilted regality, her new, more fragile look, it did something to me. It made me fall in love, in love with Leslie Kore, maybe for the very first time. Wanting not only to sleep with her but to cherish her; not only to flaunt her but to protect her. And in that instant, I hurled myself at the two uglies.

  The six-feet-five and two-hundred-sixty-pound monster started to work me over. The smaller one joined in with his Louisville Slugger. Before they left, the uglies gave me two cents worth of advice. The Slugger said, “We’re letting you off lightly this time. Mr. Gold likes you because you’re Jewish.”

  The monster said, “If I were you, Yid, I would take seriously what my partner is capable of doing. He doesn’t go to Temple every week. Neither does Mr. Gold.”

  I ended up at Lenox Hill Hospital with a fractured jaw and one of my arms in a cast. The following day when Leslie and I returned to the Towers, Leslie poured herself a stiff drink. She didn’t say very much. I telephoned Solomon Lepidus. He was somewhere in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I couldn’t reach him. I telephoned my best friend, Ron Nevins. “Ron, you have to help me! I’m in a lot of trouble! I’m desperate!” Ron, as always, came through.

  The most incredible part of all of this was not that I survived the beating. It was that Leslie didn’t leave me right then and there. She and I had sex that night, even though I could hardly breathe. She remained at my side. She had Heather, our baby girl.

  Heather was our beaming baby girl. At six weeks she died of SIDS. Leslie didn’t lose her grip. Within two months of Heather’s death, Leslie started screaming, “I want a baby! I must have a child!” I wasn’t insensitive, I just knew with our circumstances it was impossible. Leslie obviously was suffering greatly from the loss of Heather. Her need to replace Heather was not only valid, a large part of me thought the same, yet, I forced myself to exclaim that we couldn’t afford a baby. She soon straightened her shoulders, made herself as beautiful as she could. Approaching thirty, she was no longer perfect, yet she went out on “go-sees” way before I stopped wiping Heather tears from my red eyes. Nothing we had experienced in all our years together came close to losing Heather.

  Leslie stayed five years through my begging: banks, finance companies, friends, and relatives. Begging! Begging! “I need your help...” Leslie stayed. Leslie stayed and stayed...Leslie finally had had enough. Enough of my trying to write the Great American Novel. Enough of my views on American racism. Enough of my civil-service employments. Enough of my betting on baseball games, basketball games, football games. Betting...Betting...Betting! Losing and losing! More losing! More gambling. More and more Leslie shrieking, “Get a real job! You gambler! You gambler!!!”

  Leslie was not that bad. She was the woman I loved, intermittently, for seventeen years. And during those seventeen years, no man I’ve ever known, read about in novels, or viewed on the big screen, ever enjoyed fucking a woman more. As much as I may want to blame Leslie Kore, I plainly see what kind of bottom-line asshole I was.

  Chapter 8

  Everything always came down to money. Leslie swept the broom, and I had to move in with my parents. A thirty-three-year-old loser moving back into his “boy’s room.” In those days, I couldn’t afford a Hershey bar. My mother’s health was deteriorating. Seeing her in pain daily was anguish. Despite insulin injections, a heart ailment, arthritic spine, palpitations, oxygen mask, an inability to transport herself without her walker, in and out of ICUs, my mom kept going. Teaching, doing her charity work while beached like that proverbial whale on her bed, Mom kept making a cheerful face. My dad clung to what had been, constantly telling himself and me, “Your mother is going to be okay. She’s taking her medications. Going for rehab. The doctors are the best ones that I could find. They’re helping. Tomorrow my Pearl will be herself again.” And then, invariably, he would pray. I saw the self-deception in this kind of sophistry, the long-term self-denial. The false hopes.

  I told myself, Leslie was gone forever. I stopped mourning the past. I’m not sure if I condemned myself for selfishness or lauded myself for thinking with clarity. Was it a strength of mine or something so much less that turned on the I’ll Show Her mode for me? Or was it just me trying to look after Me! Me! Me!? At thirty-three, I began focusing on finding a new life. I kept trying to change my circumstances. “I’ll show Leslie,” and that meant trying to prepare myself to make a living. I studied all sorts of sports—baseball, football, professional basketball— without seeing how I could make a business of betting on any of them. And then I discovered a flaw in the predications bookies were making for the Vegas line of college basketball. I would calculate my numbers, and I found that out of the 4000 games played in a season, the Las Vegas line has at least 150 games four points or more off from my number. This meant something. It meant everything. Every half-a-point in my favor could mean dollars to me. Damn, every half-a-point (in my opinion) that Vegas was mistaken on was as if I was being resurrected with fresh air. Fresh air to a dying man. Keep breathing! Each half-a-point meant I could breathe. Four points from the Vegas line meant a life! Do you understand what I’m saying? I believed, as strongly as some believe in God, that I had found a way to make a living...I was always tinkering with numbers and developing power ratings to compete against the point spread. In other sports, no luck. Now I was convinced that I could compete against the Vegas line. In my opinion, they were wrong on at least 150 games out of the 4,000 they placed a point spread on from my line. My line was, granted, only mine, but I was confident that it was correct. Yes, that was just my opinion, but I was ultra-sophisticated when it came to basketball. A.S. Barnes had already published my analytics handbook, rating every player and every team in the history of the game. I was far from a novice.

  It was difficult to keep up with studying handicapping while watching my mother die. My absorption in handicapping stole my generosity, my devotion. For the next two years, learning handicapping was my life. I struggled to balance my evolving handicapping skill with living with my dying mother. Was it weakness or strength on my part, or just plain necessity, that I continued to live like that as well as trudge to the Welfare Department five days a week? Without a dollar in my pocket, there was no opportunity to feel, “Fuck you, world! I’m free!” I continued to live in my parent’s home as an adult male without many choices, a man who felt sorrier for himself than for his mother and father.

  I kept studying, researching, and learning, discovering the things I needed to see green dollars, the things that I hoped would set me free, but never for a minute did I believe that anything I was doing was going to change my life. I wasn’t a businessman with a bottom line investment. Or an accountant, who knows that one step leads to another. I was flying on instinct and hope, as stupid as I had always been, only this time I could look forward to possibility rather than be squash
ed by Leslie’s “get a real job” nine-to-five domesticity.

  While living in the boy’s room, I tucked away $250 a nickel, a dime, or a dollar at a time. I started handicapping with a $25 wager. By the end of my first college basketball season, I had a profit of $4,300. The next hoop season, I started with $2,500, and I made $42,000. That’s when I moved out of my parents’ home. The third year that I handicapped, I made $109,000 and that’s when my friend Morty Lefko, The Colonel—as good a peddler and promoter as there ever was—started telling the world that he knew a college basketball handicapper who was making money. Action guys started coming out of the woodwork, just as if I were a smooth-talking hedge fund hustler or a partner at Goldman Sachs.

  To my father’s religion, I had a deaf ear. In other matters, I listened to him.

  “David,” he would thunder after he finished his morning scales. (Dad never stopped preparing, demanding more and more from his voice.) “David! Failing to prepare is preparing to fail!”

  I would work through the night, bleary-eyed, until four, five in the morning, studying who chewed gum. Who didn’t. Everything that might influence a game. Things that were real, farfetched, one in a million, I wrote it all in my loose-leaf binder that I named my “Holy Book.” I wrote my father’s words in bold letters on the front cover.

  “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”

  Money soon became the drug that kept me going. Winning games! Profit! More money! Counting $100 bills as if they were Tootsie Roll wrappers, one after the other. It took me hours to count those Franklins. Eventually, I learned from Nathan Rubin, how to count these freshly minted bills by rifling them close to my ear and listening for the click.

  Once I began to handicap college basketball, my soul became money. Writing novels became secondary. Money was sacrosanct. Stuffing wads of bills into designated packages. Rubber-banding them as if I were a Columbian drug dealer. Placing these stacks of bills into safe deposit boxes at neighborhood banks. Soon I learned about the Cayman Islands and other sly places in the world that gave you a serial number, a safe harbor, a strong box.