David Lazar

by Robert Kalich

  Champ walked beside me like he was a Rottweiler. We started west to Park Avenue. As we reached the cutout under the Metro-North tracks, Champ spotted two men walking toward us. Champ immediately reached for his Glock and pushed me flush against the tunnel’s brick wall.

  Our two adversaries had on unflattering jeans and wore dark gray sweatshirts. They weren’t V-necks or turtlenecks or the kind of Polo sweaters that cost me a fortune when I went to Ralph Lauren.

  These Mafioso didn’t wait to start shooting. Their first round hit Champ in the leg. He kept firing. The Mafioso also had Glocks. I took out my more primitive Smith & Wesson revolver and joined the fray.

  Gunshots as noisy as a motorcycle’s rumbling filled the territory. Only this wasn’t a motorcycle driver’s powerful engine—it was two animals on one side and two animals on the other trying to destroy each other. I thought of the bullets and the mud and the blood and the cause of this conflict: the wads of rubber-banded Franklins stuffed in my socks.

  These two animals wore mackinaws over their sweatshirts because the weather was awful. Their boots were scuffed and black. One of them had stringy yellow laces on his unpolished boots. I put down the bearded animal who wore the yellow laces. He staggered before he fell. The other guy lay bleeding on the ground.

  A minute later I was grabbing for Champ’s wrist.

  He, too, had been badly wounded. His thigh was oozing blood; so were his neck and arm. It was me who was dragging him, foot-by-foot down the Harlem stones from the middle of 117th Street and Park Avenue to the safer and more protected cover inside the Metro-North railroad tracks.

  The entire encounter from its beginning to its very end took no more than three minutes. I clearly remember the dragging part. I’m eighty, and I still remember that day. It happened too many years ago for me to be answerable or take responsibility for it, but it happened, it counts. It’s one day in a million in one’s life’s experiences, but this one was more real, more remembered than most others that I have lived through.

  I wasn’t sure if the two men were dead or alive. And I never found out if it was a set up by Angelo Ferrari or something these two did on their own.

  “It had to be Ferrari, Davey boy,” Solomon told me. “He’s pissed that you’ve been collecting all season. What the hell, Davey boy. You don’t have to know the rest of it. It doesn’t help to know too much.”

  I want to think more about it, but I can’t. For some reason, my mind, like my quill pen, is blotting, it’s blurring my memory, the stain is obvious—it won’t come out. It never disappears.

  I have to confess, at least to myself if not to Liam, not to Elizabeth, that a chunk of me doesn’t think it a despicable thing that I was in barbarous shootouts with the men I opposed. Maybe a large chunk doesn’t consider my behavior despicable. I was no better than they were. I was probably a whole lot worse considering the advantages with which I had started out. But how many of us went off to war without blinking or thinking? Killed better men than we were?

  Leaving those two men on the Harlem pavement is not the only thing I’ve kept from Elizabeth and Liam. So many times Solomon said, “Let me take care of this problem, Davey boy.” And I let him. There were countless problems that Solomon Lepidus took care of for me.

  “I’ve got to get to the Waldorf tonight, Davey boy. I’m giving a speech to raise money for AIDS research.” And two seconds later, Solomon was reaching for one of his “special phones” and deciding on someone’s life. I was there. I was part of it. I was as responsible as he was. I had choices, too.

  “Good” or “dollars”?

  There were times I chose “good.” There were times I chose “dollars.” There were many times I told Solomon Lepidus, “I have to think about it,” when he asked me my opinion on how to resolve a problem.

  Did I think about it? Not always. Sometimes it was just a way to avoid a decision and let Solomon take care of it for me without my telling him to.

  Chapter 14

  One of the reasons there was so much stress in my handicapping life, maybe the main reason, was one that I never told anyone. Not even Amy Cho, and Amy was with me during five of those Hell years, I didn’t even mention it to that Peter Lorre double, the cardiologist doc who gave me a final notice if I didn’t start to follow his instructions. Much of my stress was caused by Evan Strome.

  I met Evan Strome at the Currency Club on 79th Street between Madison and Fifth. It was a private club for card-playing Caucasians and lesser numbers of males of other denominations. It was mainly for men with expensive hardware on their wrists and fingers and Franklins in their pockets, businessmen with hard-bellied and soft-edged skills with which to earn good livings. Nathan Rubin and The Colonel, Morty Lefko, were members. Three things about The Colonel: he had a huge belly, a Havana cigar, and a voice as warm and friendly as your childhood memories of your Uncle Tommy. Nathan Rubin was not. Besides them, I knew other club members: Oscar Strome, Isaac Pizer, Judge Elmer Russo, “Big” Ed Litt, who was five foot one and the club’s current president, “Little” John Flynn, who was six foot six and a retired commissioner of something or other, and on

  and on.

  Evan’s father, Oscar, was the superstar at the Currency Club. He was a card-playing shark almost on par with Nathan Rubin. Nathan Rubin rarely had dinner at the club and never, to my knowledge, played cards there. Ditto Solomon Lepidus. The Colonel did. Many nights I had dinner at the Currency Club with The Colonel and his wife, Sylvia. As for Oscar Strome, he was a bookmaker who had three clients with whom I was familiar: Lepidus, The Colonel, and Rubin. I, too, had called in bets to Oscar Strome, not at his home in Scarsdale or at his office on Jane Street, but only at the club.

  Oscar was always there, from two in the afternoon through dinnertime. When he wasn’t playing cards, he was fielding bets. As for Strome’s card playing, it was not a hobby; it was his vocation. What he didn’t earn as a bookmaker, he earned as a card player.

  On the occasion I first met Evan Strome, I was at the club to collect some money that Oscar Strome owed me. While I was there, an incident that seemed of little consequence at the time took place.

  “Hi, Oscar. I can only stay for a minute,” I said. “You have a package for me?”

  “I do, kid,” Strome answered unpleasantly.

  From his jacket pocket, he took a bulging envelope.

  As Strome handed me the envelope, The Colonel took his Havana out of his mouth and said, “I can’t find my cigarette lighter. My wife is going to murder me. She just got it for me. It’s from Harry Winston’s. Has my initials on it and everything!”

  The Colonel bent down with great effort. Looked under the table. It wasn’t there. He started moving drinks, ashtrays, chips, and cash around on the card table. Still, nowhere was his lighter to

  be found.

  “I’m dead meat when I get home,” The Colonel muttered.

  Evan Strome, Oscar’s son, was at the table. I engaged Evan in conversation as The Colonel continued making a fuss over his missing cigarette lighter.

  “I hear you’re going to Michigan State in the fall. Congratulations. I always wanted to go to a Big Ten school.”

  Evan Strome, a rail-thin drink of not-so-clean water with pointy teeth, grinned at me. He said he was looking forward to going to school in East Lansing and that Nathan Rubin had a great deal to do with paying his tuition. “I worked like a slave to achieve the necessary grades and like a serf for Nathan Rubin,” he said.

  “What are you going to major in?” I asked.

  “I’m thinking of going into sports management. I want to represent basketball players who turn pro. There’s a whole lot of money in baskets, with TV and marketing coming into their own. I think player salaries will be sky-rocketing by the time I graduate.”

  “Do you know any players right now?” I asked.

  “Yes, I do.” Evan spat out the names o
f four very solid New York City basketball players, players certainly good enough to have marginal careers either in the NBA or in Europe.

  “How come you know these guys?”

  “I played high school ball at Stuyvesant. I also played in the Rucker tournament in Harlem for the past two years, and I was on an AAU team last summer. I also know several coaches. I think that gives me a head’s up to get somewhere in the business.”

  The Colonel sneezed.

  “Gesundheit! God bless you,” I uttered.

  Ash from The Colonel’s cigar dropped on the card table. He took his stubby hand and wiped it off.

  “Let’s stay in touch, Evan. Take care, and please do return Mr. Lefko’s lighter to him.”

  I left shortly after that.

  Evan Strome became one of my beards. He was great at the job. If I was a good handicapper, Evan Strome was just as good at bearding. We were on the same team. I counted on him for information. I relied on him for getting me down with bookmakers at the best numbers. I depended on him. My business grew because of Evan Strome. My bankroll multiplied. The bottom line is that because of Evan Strome, I made money. But...

  I heard a New York cardinal talking today, the chubby one who wears a white robe with the red-and-gold trim and who has all the answers. He was with an old friend of my cantor dad, a distinguished rabbi with a beard and a black coat and who also had all the answers. They were discussing something like divinity, and the conversation took a left turn into their views on good and evil. They continued to make facile points, using their own words and their indoctrinated brains, and, as they did, I kept thinking, “There ain’t no hope, man. There ain’t no hope.”

  To this day, my friend The Colonel says, “A woman’s voice should never be heard above a whisper. It’s offensive to a man’s ear.”

  I have a woman friend who had been married for twenty-six years and was going through a vicious divorce, negotiating the settlement, children, house, resources, money. Before they finished, the husband had a stroke. He was raced to a hospital. Two hours later, I received a telephone call from the woman. “Thank God my husband died. Now I get everything.”

  My mind jumps to the family that was grieving over their five-year-old boy, who got run over by a Ford. The family had gotten together to console one another: mother, father, grandparents, cousins, nephews, friends. “We’ll see Joey in heaven” was the consensus. “Eventually we’ll be together again.” Is this innocence or psychosis? This is the world I live in. I think of who I am. My life, my activities, my experiences, my take, and you know what, I tell myself I ain’t half bad.

  Separate lives enter the picture. I hold on to Elizabeth One. Elizabeth Two. Elizabeth Three. My wife evolves into this complete person. This beautiful person. This kind and generous and self-sacrificing person. But the Elizabeth I started out with is gone. The Elizabeth that needed me desperately was Elizabeth One. This Elizabeth I now call Elizabeth Three. She’s independent, capable of taking care of me. This Elizabeth is so together I feel as if I’m on my own. She does not need to be rescued. I would like to say that this Elizabeth is my moral equivalent, but can I say that being me? I take a deep breath and try to pick some winners. Like the old days, I can still pick winners. And Elizabeth and her new life and Liam with his have become what any dad and husband would want for them. Yes it is. So I endure and admire it and become a grandstand manager. That’s a term you have to be a baseball junkie to know. It means you have an opinion. It’s loud and it’s silent, but it is a voice in an empty room. I live each day with friends of a lifetime who no longer call. They’re gone! Everything is disappearing, and yet Elizabeth and I are still holding hands and evolving for the better. And now I have this perfect wife who has gone from Elizabeth One to Elizabeth Perfect. She’s beautiful, cosmopolitan, talented, productive. Functioning like the brilliant woman that was beneath the surface pain of that first connection. From Kafkaesque to worldly femme. From crawling to leaping. From being all mine to being all here. To being a whole person. A complete person. With generosity, shortcomings, strivings, good days and bad days, and always caring days. And still a great mom and partner and friend and everything I want her to continue to be. A whole person. Amen! Elizabeth One did it. She grew up just fine. I love you, Elizabeth. I love you.

  I telephone Elizabeth from our New York residence at four in the morning.

  “David, obviously, this getting up at four in the morning to work on your book isn’t working. You’re disoriented. Maybe you’re having a senior moment. Liam never said you were a jerk. Right now, he’s having his own issues. He’s cramming for American history, chemistry, and math tests. He has to prepare for a robotics competition. He’s upset, but not with you, with himself. He wants a girlfriend, and he doesn’t have one. He feels terrible about himself. Don’t you remember what it is to be a teenager?”

  Elizabeth is correct. I must get more sleep. The main thing is my Squirt doesn’t think I’m a jerk.

  But he would think “jerk” and a whole lot worse if he knew.

  Today, New York is in the middle of a monster blizzard. The snow is piling up. Looks like it’s going to be anywhere from fifteen to eighteen inches. Sanitation trucks and plows are doing their best, but the city is at a standstill. I go down to the lobby. Barry English is our evening concierge; Gerardo Camacho is the night porter. Both live in Mott Haven. No buses or trains running to or from the Bronx. Conditions are terrible. I’m going to tell these men that Elizabeth is at our house in North Salem. Liam is in Wallingford. They can sleep here. I have plenty of space. Then, I’m going to take one of Elizabeth’s Eszopiclone sleeping pills and get a good night’s sleep.

  I stare at my collages. They are unwieldy, ambiguous, not a crime mystery with cause and effect and plenty of clues. I’m looking at another piece of the puzzle. I use these words loosely, as life is heedless, free spirited, and reeking with mean-spirited absurdity. So why should my collages, within their boundaries, not have imprecise highlights, profligate darkness? They do! I do! Life does!

  When I finished the draft of what would be my only bestseller, I was exhausted. Still relatively young, I felt The Handicapper was a good book. Somewhat smart, somewhat ready to be read by a sharp eyed editor. I had lunch with Debbie Turner before traveling on the A train down to Urizen Books, in the West Village. It was a small, independent press with a prestigious list of elegant if not mainstream authors. Michael Roloff, the publisher, was a friend of a chum of mine, Susan Braudy, a senior editor at Ms. magazine. Roloff was somewhat neurotic. Susan had warned me that he had been unduly intrigued by her tall tales of my gangster connections. Roloff bought into my handicapping mythology as if he were reading The Godfather. He was convinced that he could take my 623 pages and pull off a Mario Puzo.

  “I can cut your novel down to 350 pages,” he said. “We’ll work together. Listen to me—I can take this manuscript and...Don’t worry, I can come over to your place. We’ll work out a time frame that you can live with.”

  When Roloff came over, he inhaled the blooms on my landscaped terrace. He also must have had a whiff of my novel’s potential because he sat down at my desk and for the next five months, slaved with me to accomplish his objective.

  “If Urizen thinks your book is that commercial, Davey boy,” Solomon told me, “why don’t you sell it to one of the mainstream publishers? They have the machinery to do something for you. With Urizen, you have no chance. Tell you what, Davey boy, run with it. If any of the heavyweights bite, buy the book back from Roloff. Whatever he wants will be peanuts. His independent house isn’t worth three dinners at my steakhouse—no offense, Davey boy.”

  Novelists of pedigree by rule never make a dollar, and Michael Roloff’s list was saturated with authors of that esoteric ilk. I listened to Solomon. I raced all over the city. I gave eleven estimable publishing houses the same ultimatum. “You have one week to make a decision—that’s it! If you don’
t give me what I’m asking, I’m having Urizen publish my book.”

  I made a once-in-a-lifetime deal. Ended up with a bestseller. I’m not ashamed. Who doesn’t chase the almighty dollar? Deals didn’t start with our current president. Guys like me might not know one bottle of French wine from another, but all of America knows that they’d rather read James Patterson than Peter Handke.

  But, of course, I would rather Liam know me as a literary artist than as that author of The Handicapper. And the money that pays for Choate didn’t come from writing that bestseller.

  Lately, I’ve been having this dream. A cleaning lady with a wet mop and a broom enters my living room. She knows her job. Does not need instructions. The room has wet spots on the floor. Dust pools and debris. The cleaning lady’s function is to make sure that by the time she leaves, this living space is as squeaky clean as an operating theatre. She vigorously attacks every cobwebbed corner. Mops up all the slush. When she finishes, there is nothing left outside of a shiny immaculately wax-polished parquet floor. She inspects her work. Nods in approval. Makes the sign of the cross. Bends over and takes a semiautomatic weapon from her shopping bag.

  This is where the dream ends. I awake and begin my day.

  Not long before Elizabeth asked me about Evan Strome, I awoke with the intention of confessing to her, deed by deed, exactly what transpired during my handicapping years. I was ready to disclose my own brutality, without cowardly deflecting my acts to Solomon Lepidus’ primordial behavior. It had seemed like forever in the past, but I had remained mute as to how I had seared my own soul to

  make money.

  Money! That’s all it was. I did odious things to make lucre. I not only delegated others to the killing fields, but I personally did heinous things to people, to families, when you extend the harm.