David Lazar

by Robert Kalich

  Now, I’m in my study, sweeping the floor with memories as I march into my eighties and trying to figure out what to tell Elizabeth about my life. What an impossible task Debbie Turner had with me. Debbie was a wonderful young woman. And I befriended her. Embraced her. I melted as only a son-of-a-bitch who doesn’t trust his left hand can trust, and I did Debbie Turner wrong. I have to face it.

  Memories keep coming up in the middle of my nights as I toss and turn, adjusting my pillow, thinking of the kind of seducer I was. Never in my entire history of tears and regrets have I felt that I did Debbie Turner anything other than wrong. I must ignore all the cheerful stuff and sentimental crap that I write. I can be as brutal as that

  pig, Weinstein.

  Debbie had a better heart than most, an inner life that glowed with joy, and was engaged to Michael Edison, as decent a young fellow as you would ever want for your son-in-law. And I never stopped seducing her. Never stopped.

  In our final parting, Debbie was direct. “I was in love with you, David. You were the older man all girls fall for. I should have protected my marriage to Michael. I should have realized that what I shared with you was a young woman’s infatuation. Not that young love isn’t wonderful but falling in love with you like I did was foolish. I had something solid with Michael. He was my age. He was responsible. He really loved me. We wanted the same things. I made the biggest mistake a young woman can make. I decided I wanted everything. And that’s when I telephoned you.”

  And now, years later, I still acknowledge her health, my sickness. “You have become Hesse’s Steppenwolf,” she condemned, “leaping from noble to brutal.” I just flinched and stared at Debbie while thinking of how correct she was, as in the forefront of my mind was not the distance between the two, but the closeness.

  Debbie Turner was right to move on with her life. She was the best of the best of a certain kind of woman, someone whom I just loved being with. She was my happiness pill, and then, I screwed up, as I did so often.

  I made the mistake of emailing her. Here is her reply:

  David. This is in response to your email. I was fortunate. I found the strength to leave you. I have two wonderful daughters. A considerate husband. My husband is extremely entrepreneurial. In fact, this week he’s negotiating to buy an NFL franchise. You said you think of me a great deal. My advice to you is stop thinking...

  I think of another woman I mistreated: my mother. It is now over forty years since she passed. Her death was one of the things I never wrote about, kept out of my mind. My dad was at the hospital, beside her every day, during her last week on earth. Most of the time he was sobbing or praying in her hospital room or in the waiting area when the hospital staff worked on her. Those aides, nurses, and physicians provided extraordinary care, the goodness given by strangers. Not family members, but resolute strangers, people that I depended on, people I never saw again. They’re the ones who did the heroic work, were the kindest, the most considerate, the most responsible. I don’t even know their names or remember what they looked like or whatever else there is that should be etched in stone. What good was I?

  The last day I saw my mom alive, she told me, “David, I’ve never felt this bad.” I lived with my parents two of my mother’s last five years, and sixteen times during those years she went to Intensive Care. Each time I thought it was the end, but each time my obese (I called her “Fatty”) mom survived, came home, and moved on with her life.

  The day she died I had a monster bet on a basketball game. During the game, my father called. “Get over here as quickly as possible, David.”

  I didn’t leave the apartment until I had the final score. I knew I wouldn’t get to the hospital in time, and I didn’t.

  When I arrived, I took one long look at my father, Reverend Kalman Lazar, an orthodox cantor. He was praying; that’s what he did his entire life, pray. I have never believed in prayer or wearing the Star of David around my neck. Science is what’s in my gut, sophistries have always caused me to shiver. I believe in mathematics over faith. Percentages over magical thinking. A tenet of the Las Vegas oddsmakers is that you should lose fifty percent of the games played with the numbers they attach to the game at hand. I believe that you start out with heads and tails and work 24/7 to find a statistical advantage. Prayers don’t change a freakin’ thing; pickin’ winners does! But too many people need to say prayers, live with the delusion that prayers will make a difference, have delusion drilled into their psyches.

  I gave my father one of my derisive nonbeliever looks, walked out of the hospital. Never looked back. But all my dismissal of my father’s prayers can’t keep my mother’s voice out of my head. “I never felt this bad before, David.” My suffering mom, who was as loving a mother as any son ever had and who had the bad luck to have me for a son. She deserved better, but that was me, that is me, and today, all these years later, I still hear, “I never felt this bad before. Never!”

  It was the last time I heard “Fatty’s” voice. What do I have to say? I’m still counting $100 bills? What good is that to Mom? I live with it, but that doesn’t absolve me from what I did.

  My love of books came from Mom.

  “David, don’t listen to your father. Read Shakespeare.”

  Mom took my hand and marched me to the public library before I was five. I immediately fell in love with books. The smell. The jackets. At first it was the children’s section. By ten or eleven, I was reading John Tunis, devouring all his baseball novels. I hero-worshipped Tunis’ protagonists. Feel-good men who were as warm hearted and American as apple pie. It was also my mom who took me to Carnegie Hall to experience the great Rubenstein and Horowitz and so many other iconic artists. It was always Mom. Of course, the novels I read now might be more challenging than Tunis. William Gaddis’ Agapē Agape isn’t fodder for everyone.

  When I was growing up, Mom went out with Dad several times

  a week.

  Not once did she ever leave our apartment without first telling me, “Don’t I look gorgeous!” Mom was one of the pear-shaped Jewish women who were high middle class and living on the Upper Westside. They were elitist to an extent and ultra-liberal. My mother had silver foxes, leopard skins, a chinchilla jacket, and a full-length magnificent mink coat. Her closets were full of dead animals. She did look elegant when she was wrapped in these furs. Her clothing was always “cantor” appropriate. Her jewelry tasteful, modest. Mom had a kind face, round and forthcoming. Like mine, her chin was double and, at times, triple. There was never a day people weren’t comfortable with my mom. A godsend to the sick, a take-charge woman for good causes, president or close to it of so many organizations, from City of Hope chapters to B’nai B’rith to UJA, my mother had her pudgy hands and soft heart administering TLC 24/7. On the phone from nine in the morning until dusk. Always with good intentions, and when she wasn’t doing mitzvahs she was taking care of my father, writing his Man of the Year speeches, helping him pick out the right tie, making sure he ate healthy, advising him on his business affairs, his stock portfolio, and she never stopped worrying about her wayward son. That’s how it was while I was growing up. I recall it with a smile. I never received anything but unconditional love from Mom and Dad. As for meals, her cooking was strictly kosher, everything you could want outside of pizza, cola, non-kosher hot dogs, Chinese. We ate strictly by the cantor’s rules. Three substantial meals, and when I was in high school, sandwiches that were lunch enough

  for five.

  My father was a grave man, orthodox but not to a fault, with no woman but my mom from the day they met. I think he met her when she was still a student at Barnard, but I could be wrong; it might just as easily have been when she started teaching at the college. Dad was already a superstar in his cantor’s world. A great catch. Steadfast, honest to a fault, as moral as Arthur Miller, handsome, stunning, more like a Yiddish movie star, but as decent a guy as one could hope to find. He was a chaplain during WWII. He
was a Ten Commandments guy for his entire life and a Joe Louis, Bing Crosby, and Lou Gehrig fan. So why wasn’t I more like him?

  To this day, I do not have an answer.

  But I’m thinking of 1978, when my father was on his last legs and down to sixty-five pounds. The president of his synagogue visited him in his hospital room. In his right hand, he firmly gripped six of my father’s LPs, which he wanted Dad to autograph for Israel. The fellow was in good faith. He always revered my dad. The president was round with an artful mustache. He presented himself with kindly authority. Always wore one of those ancient vest-pocket Howard watches and communicated lukewarm decency to his business associates as well as to his constituency. Shrewdness conjoined with a love of God. Pretty hard to do, I think. President Baum managed to make his restrained words sound as if he was juggling all the answers. He stepped closer to my father’s hospital bed.

  “Kalman,” he said, “Your music will live on forever. I have arranged for these albums of yours to be donated to the great libraries in Israel. They will be part of our heritage for the next thousand years.”

  My dad peered up at President Baum. A flicker of light came to his weary eyes. “Schmuck!” he shouts. “Screw my music! I’m dying!”

  Is that how I will go out?

  Doubtful.

  Chapter 10

  In the extreme lower right corner of collage number one, I see the photograph of Stanley “Duke” Banks in 1942. Duke entered Pubic School 54 that year. From kindergarten through the sixth grade, he was my constant companion. It now seems strange, but neither Duke’s parents nor mine ever discussed Adolph Hitler or the war during those years. Then, both of us went on to P.S. 165. One year later, we were transferred to the brand new, shiny Booker T. Washington Junior High School. From there we went to Lincoln Park High School. Stanley and I were average students. The two of us went on to NYU and four years later, in 1958, graduated without distinction. In those days, it was a nothing accomplishment to get a B.S. degree at NYU. Duke was a great-looking young man. I was fair to middlin’. We always competed for women. Not so with sports. We were both terribly inept in all athletic endeavors. Maybe the very worst on our block. Maybe the entire neighborhood. We were always picked last or next to last. Both of us had our feelings hurt just about all the time. When I was small, I would race home and cry over my athletic inadequacies. Stanley idealized his older brother, Stump, who was working full time at Leventhal’s, a neighborhood deli.

  “Stump is a great athlete, a Latin scholar, a great boxer...a great...” Duke would say.

  Stanley’s dad was a leather goods salesman. His mother a housewife. A chatty affable woman as obese and effusive as my mom. Both women were good friends.

  Duke never had any great ambition. I think he realized from the beginning that his life would always be somewhere in the middle. The way he figured it, having a few bucks in his pocket would help him to be cool with the ladies. Duke had Troy Donahue looks, and he posed a great deal. His blue eyes, long neck, deliberate silences, enigmatic posturing, and squinty gaze always seemed to work with women. At NYU frat parties during our freshman year, Duke and I experienced virginal connections with coeds. On our way home on the A train, Duke would invariably exclaim, “Rack it up for experience.” We always ended up on our street corner with each other.

  Years later, after Leslie, had swept her broom and discarded me, I would mutter to myself in the middle of the night, “I don’t need any more experience.”

  Stanley Banks went on to work for the William Morris Agency and soon represented one super young comic, a dude who, as soon as he hit full stride, left Duke. “I’m sorry, brother, but I feel more comfortable being represented by a Brother.”

  That dude became a superstar. In fact, he ended up in Hollywood making movies, but right after he did, he blew himself up in his kitchen freebasing meth.

  As for Stanley, never again did he find a talent of any significant magnitude. He worked most of his life, voted regularly, never married, didn’t have children, lived from the age of twenty-six in the same rent-controlled apartment on the Upper Westside.

  Recently I ran into him at the Fairway Market.

  “Do you still shop here?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Do you still cook your own meals?

  “Of course.”

  “Do you ever eat out?”

  “Never.”

  “Do you ever take cabs or call for an Uber?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Have you ever gone to Paris?”

  “Why would I want to go there? The Hudson...The Seine—it’s all just water.”

  Duke’s thick wavy hair is all gone. His face is bruised by age spots. His skin is violated by tags, furrows, and creases. Duke saved most of his pennies. He was always frugal. “I’m going to leave what I have to my brother’s children. That comes to around a hundred and forty large.”

  It’s unreal the way Duke and I went from kindergarten to eighty in such different ways. Rotten though I’ve been, I’m glad my life wasn’t like his.

  I’m thinking back to my days learning to handicap. One of the things that kept me going, besides Debbie Turner, was my life as Broadway Dave, rubbing elbows with movers and shakers, celebrities. January 4, 1973 we were at Solomon’s steakhouse. Shecky Greene and Totie Fields had left the table with Solomon’s wife. Spacey Shirley MacLaine was talking about living in another century. Stickers was there, too, trying to convince two suits to invest in an outdoor concert he wanted to produce. As usual, the soft-spoken Stickers was telling one bald-faced fib after another. Stickers wasn’t unconscionable, but he was without symmetry. What did he have going for him? He was lovable. More so than just about anyone. How could you dislike Stickers? All he wanted was to take his 300 pounds of jelly and parade over to the Stage Deli. “I can give you two fellows thirty percent of the entire production...”

  Joe DiMaggio sat with us. “What’s doin’, Joey boy?” Solomon Lepidus bellowed. A second later he said, “Can you imagine that, Joey boy? I’m willin’ to put up eight million in real dollars to buy the Yankees and Paley turned me down. That Steinbrenner! The shipping guy from Ohio! CBS is selling the New York Yankees to him!”

  “Solomon,” I said. “You were turned down because The Times exposed how you were laundering money for organized crime figures.”

  “Them dirty whores! Let them try to prove it!”

  Stickers was over ninety when he passed. At one time, he was a giant in the music business. In 1964, Stickers brought The Beatles to Carnegie Hall, and in August 1965, he brought those four English lads back and created history by presenting them at Shea Stadium. Yet Stickers’ real story was the second part of his life when he went from fantasy, fame, and triumph to the real.

  Stickers was a close friend of Sinatra. Frank had told him, “Nicky DeFrancis is the greatest piano bar singer I’ve ever heard.” Stickers waddled over to Jilly’s one night and was soon making it his business to frequent the saloon weekly to hear DeFrancis’ extraordinary versions of “Foggy Day in London Town” and “That’s Why the Lady is a Tramp.” One night at Jilly’s, Stickers met a hatcheck girl, Sally Baldwin, a twenty-one-year-old from Eugene, Oregon. For the forty-three-year-old Stickers, it was love at first sight. He was too shy to speak to Sally.

  Then Solomon Lepidus took charge. “Stickers, I invited Sally to my steakhouse. You get your fat ass over there. You’ll have your shot.” Sally and Stickers had several children, whom Stickers adored. It was fun and games for the entire family for a while. Then, Stickers’ successes dried up. Debt became a way of life. Stickers was oblivious to the humiliations his wife suffered, his children’s struggles, the price the entire family paid for his dreamer’s lifestyle.

  “I’m going to make it bigger and better, Solomon,” he would say each Sunday when we met for bagels and lox. At forty, Sally looked haggard, more be
aten down than Stickers. Their children...Benjamin, the youngest, hoarded nickels and dimes, stuttered, rolled his eyes, gritted his teeth, kissed his father less and less. Brian, the middle son, raced to his room every time I visited with groceries. The boy would lock his door and refuse to come out until I had left the premises. Stickers’ daughter, Melissa Joy, hugged her father all the time. “My dad’s the greatest pop in the entire world!” she would tell me. Melissa Joy had anorexia by the time she was fifteen. Stickers was oblivious to the damage he caused. Maybe I was just as guilty. Never once did I ever confront Stickers with any of this. Like all our gang, I went along with Stickers’ delusional, “I’m going to make it again, bigger and better, fellas!”

  Stickers never raised his voice and never took a drug. His bad faith was always covered up by his obesity. His impenetrable blubber, charm, and presentation were all that he had to offer.

  “I’ve been speaking to Senator Bill Bradley. I told the senator that I’m going to need his help, that I’m on the verge of breaking through one more time and when I do, I’m going to produce an outdoor concert to promote peace and brotherhood worldwide.”

  Being broke is no way to live. The real always catches up with you. Like Elizabeth asking about Evan Strome, about my life.

  Or like when Solomon Lepidus asked me to take him on as a partner in my handicapping. After I moved out of my parents’ apartment, I took a four-hundred-square-foot studio. I worked the basketball season that year. I walked away with real money. After that, the phone didn’t stop ringing. I was thirty-seven years old.

  “I hear you took in a few partners, Davey boy,” Solomon said on the phone. “I’m going to give you an opportunity, Davey boy. You’ll have access to my sources, my outs, my money! Davey boy, be at my office at 1:00 P.M.”