David Lazar

by Robert Kalich

  On that winter morning, when Elizabeth opened her eyes and smiled innocently at me, I began to confess. “I’m not even close to the man who you think I am.”

  I stopped, and the cowardly person inside me took over. I reverted to the craven individual I am. I smoothly moved on to half-truths and tales of lesser villainy.

  Elizabeth stared at me. Remained silent. Then she responded in a voice that was almost cheerful. “David. I’ve never once asked you to confess things concerning your difficult past. The truth is that I don’t want you to spell it out to me or to Liam. For me, it’s enough that you have an aching heart and carry inside yourself the kind of weighted awareness that knows the difference between the man you are and the man you were. Liam also understands that you are haunted by your past. He too doesn’t need for you to spell any of it out. I’ve spoken about this with him at length. Told him that you have punished yourself for years and years and years.” She paused. “Liam understands that you’re not perfect. Just yesterday, he told me, ‘My Ba is a perfectly imperfect person.’” Elizabeth smiled. “It doesn’t detract from either of us loving you.” She paused again. “I think since Liam was nine or ten, he’s been acutely aware that you aren’t anyone’s role model. He loves you, David. Yet he has never once said to me that he wants to live his life as you’ve lived yours.”

  * * *

  Many times, I rationalize away my inexcusable transgressions by convincing myself that my past was lived by someone a great deal less prepared for life than the man I am today. Sometimes I am more philosophical, and I try to reinforce my self-worth by telling myself, “There aren’t good people and bad people. There are shades of this and that.” But I know this much. At this moment, I’m absorbing Elizabeth and Liam’s pure-hearted souls. Breathing a whole lot less laboriously than I ever have before.

  I don’t want to lose them.

  I must write to Liam.

  Liam Dunn Lazar

  Choate Rosemary Hall

  336 Christian Street

  Wallingford, CT 06492-3800

  Hi Liam:

  I just want to tell you that you are not me. You’re so much better. You’re what I want you to be. I don’t know if I’m making any sense right now but inside of me, I’m feeling a whole lot cleaner because of you. So, thank you, Liam. I love you Squirt.

  All these years, I’ve carried a dark secret from those closest to me. Ironically, according to many, my life is glamorous, romantic, adventurous, exciting. It isn’t! I was the one who killed a man under the railroad tracks at 117th and Park in the shootout with Champ Holden. I never knew the man’s name until the day I ran into Solomon Lepidus’ former head of security, Joe Bruno, at Porterhouse in the Time Warner building. He recognized me at once. I didn’t know him from the cowboy steak I was chewing.

  “I just want to shake your hand,” Joe Bruno said. “Not because of all that money you screwed Angelo Ferrari out of. To me, you must’ve been a genius to be able to pull that off but because of what you did to Frankie Zarilla. I wanted to kill that Guinea prick myself!” Bruno vigorously shook my hand.

  I invited him to sit down at our table to have a drink. I was with two retired friends who had been academics at Columbia. They gave me a look like Liam gives me when I start pontificating about my gambling career. When Bruno left, I told my friends that Frankie Zarilla had worked with me, adding “color” to a film script I wrote years ago. Both professors accepted my deceit. Of course, they did. Who in his right mind would believe that Elizabeth’s husband, Liam’s father, a family man living in the rolling hills of North Salem, could ever have lived the life that I lived? Sometimes even I don’t. It’s so far-fetched, so over the top, that many times I believe it’s better as pretense than it is as a true-life story.

  I’m thinking how elated I was a couple of months ago when Liam was going to visit his mother and me for a weekend. He texted, asking if it was all right if he brought a friend. I texted him back,

  “No problem.”

  And now that memory is tainted because those were the same words Joe Bruno used when he told me that Frankie Zarilla was dead.

  Chapter 15

  A new day. I’m at Equinox trying to keep limber when this young woman comes up to me.

  “I want to introduce myself. I live in your building. Moved in with my husband last month.”

  We speak for a while, and then I say, “Why don’t you knock on my door? I’m in the penthouse. My rooftop garden is one of a kind.”

  I’m bragging. My garden overlooks Central Park and is three thousand square feet of plants, shrubs, trees and spring, summer, and fall flowers. It’s almost as if you were spending the day at the New York Botanical Gardens.

  When the young woman arrives, it doesn’t take her long to sit down and tell me that she wanted to meet me because she’s an English major and is attempting to write a novel.

  Within minutes, I’m the proverbial old man telling her stories from my life.

  “I did have my Maxwell Perkins. Michael Roloff. He was the publisher of Urizen Books and a damned good editor. A Peter Handke scholar and a translator, too. He had been responsible for translating several Herman Hesse novels for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roloff’s list at Urizen was awesome to me. From Sam Shepard to Jean-Paul Sartre. And now he was giving me a contract. My novel went from a 623-page literary disaster to a marketable 372-page book during his watch. I bought the book back from Urizen and sold it two weeks later to Crown. Herb Michaelman, the editor-in-chief at Crown, along with Nat Wartels, the chairman of the Crown Publishing Empire, coerced me into refining the book even further. I ended up with a Book of the Month Club bestseller.”

  I don’t give the young woman the detail that Debbie Turner and I went our separate ways during this time or that when I was on the obligatory twelve-city book tour, TV, media coverage, book signings at what seemed like every bookstore in the country, Debbie wasn’t there. What the hell does it all mean when the woman you love

  isn’t there?

  My novel made noise. I became a someone. I found myself on Page Six. Of course, over my lifetime, the important money I made came from wagering on college basketball games. Picking winners. FUCK YOU, WORLD! I’M FREE!

  I guess I’m sounding as smug as the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al Thani, the natural gas billionaire’s billionaire, but I’m not.

  “FUCK YOU, WORLD! I’M FREE!” I shout to the skies and to the earth and even as I scream this exhilarating cleansing, there is a quiver inside me, more than a tremor. I know that I am not free, that the tumor, this earth, shows us rather quickly that we are commanded by private and public abominations, political, social, metaphysical afflictions that dominate us from birth to death, that there isn’t such a thing as freedom, only respite and illusion, our lives are momentary and fragile, that the nonsense that I went through with Leslie Kore was nothing compared to the obscenities I experienced once I chose the world to which I was committed, a world where fifty-three percent in victories was necessary to avoid destruction, that forty-seven percent meant obliteration, that the responsibility I took on would tighten my grip on certitude, the skinny belief that I would not give in to the pitfalls of obsession, distraction, compulsion, recklessness, or emotion. And that’s why I now have a more lenient opinion of Leslie Kore and no longer believe she was all wrong, all odious, all unethical, all immoral, as unprincipled as I said she was, that she was just another human being caught up as I was in the ether, and that’s where I remain in thought and soul each time I gaze out at Central Park and upper Manhattan, a northern view that during summer nights has a lighted halo around the rim of Yankee Stadium, Central Park West, Fifth Avenue, and during the greenless winter, naked trees in the Great Park, snow dripping out onto Manhattan sidewalks, dented, sun-faded taxicabs, soiled black, brown, yellow and Caucasian people walking dogs, jogging, killing one another, small children scurrying, old peo
ple shuffling, younger people going to offices or to some ephemeral everywhere, each one just breathing and dying, and there I would be day after day, on my Manhattan rooftop terrace saying something as inane as FUCK YOU, WORLD! I’M FREE!

  * * *

  How do I explain what attracted me to men like Solomon Lepidus? To a life that was an about face to the one in which I was weaned. My parents were sober, intelligent people. My mother, warm and bright. She was as decent as—to use my own favorite word—dawn. My father was terrified of his own shadow. As inflexible as a Roman Catholic. He had a soft belly, spindly legs, a pink crown atop his head. He came home every night to his “Pearl.” If he saw a woman that he was attracted to, I guarantee you, he averted his eyes, took a deep breath, and started praying. One time, Leslie and I were together in my dad’s study. Leslie was sitting on the piano bench in front of my father’s Steinway. Leslie was perfect in those days. All allure. Her long, shapely legs were crossed. She started in her deliberate, cruel way to flirt with my father. The cantor’s erotic longings were evoked. His erection was obvious. Leslie smiled at my dad. Continued flirting. Finally, my father walked unsteadily out of the room. Went somewhere where he could pray. My mom saw Leslie for who she was. Remained quiet, knowing full well that I was already hooked. Once you’re under the spell of that kind of woman, it is what it is. You only extinguish it through disillusionment, pain, or the progression of time. I was hooked for seventeen years. Through Leslie’s first two marriages, through our own marriage—in the bathroom, in the shower, in Madison Square Garden, in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where we started kissing but told to leave before things warmed up. At the Metropolitan Opera House—wherever we were. From Checker cabs to the last row of the bleachers at Yankee Stadium, I just never got enough of Leslie Kore. Seventeen years of that woman, and I would’ve signed up for another seventeen! Thank someone that she screamed, “Get out! Get out! You gambler! You...” and all the other invective she threw at me. Of course, Leslie was mostly correct. I was the screw up, not Leslie. She had her truths. I had mine. I also had a whole lot less. Let’s call less an accursed muscle that needs to take off and express itself from the inside out. Curse the artistic muscle. It’s romantic nonsense in this world of ours. Try makin’ a living auditioning for Lear, playin’ a horn, bangin’ away at a keyboard, or slappin’ some paint on a canvas. Just try it. It’s a million to one against you! That’s one of the reasons I’m always buying winter coats for friends who are trying to make it as actors. Maybe the main reason I’m a helper is that I’ve never forgotten how brutal it is out there. How impossible.

  But back to what made me have such an affinity for Solomon Lepidus.

  Solomon Lepidus lived an exciting life. Did things, as Sinatra sang, “My Way.” Which of course, was “Solomon’s Way.” He didn’t cower. Didn’t buckle. Didn’t pray or question. He was nefarious, to be sure. Lethal, callous, brutal, dehumanized for damned sure. But he was also a rejoinder-magnet to a boy who was yearning to break out. Who was looking for something more. Who wanted adventure. An exciting life. Much more than a bar mitzvah or a nine-to-five existence. I’ve seen too many people genuflecting in synagogues, churches, and mosques, people who were always struggling to support someone else’s life. I didn’t want that. I never thought about it in those terms, but I knew that I wanted to feel alive. Be alive. Live alive. Love alive. And if it wasn’t going to be by making a buck pounding a typewriter and sleeping with Leslie, then well, it might as well be by entering a world of danger. And I think without actually thinking about it, my attraction to an exhilarating, perfidious existence was as much in me as catching a fly ball on the run was to Willie Mays, hitting a baseball was to Ted Williams, or shooting a basketball was to Jerry West, and that’s as much as I can figure about why I gravitated to, lived with, yes, went to bed with a man and men on whom most people wouldn’t even puke.

  I would work through the night, bleary-eyed, until four or five in the morning. Papers spread out all over my desk, on the floor. The information would be classified: records, rosters, match-ups, coaches, scores, stats, tendencies, referees. Everything I could think of was placed and categorized into my “Holy Book.” It resulted in me having a winning percentage from 1971 through 2006 of just over sixty-two percent. Only one year did I not win important money.

  I know that I am self-aggrandizing. Glorifying my own introspections. Going inside oneself reveals self-absorption excess: ego! In canvassing these years of my life, I glimpse so much of it that has been spent on nothingness rather than on meaningful endeavors. Frequently, I ask how much of me has been used to help make real change. Significant moments are as sporadic as brown leaves in the middle of July. Cigarette butts squashed out in ceramic ashtrays offer more evidence of a sense of intrepid purpose. My own unsettling forays to find dignity and authenticity were and are weak and inadvertent. Am I any different from so many of my contemporaries? Is this the best I can do? I know the answer. It’s in my belly. It does not comfort me to realize that people are doing the same right now. So many of us screw up. Waste so much of our lives. Whenever I visit my son’s privileged school, talk to his teachers about how he is doing with his math, chemistry, or French, or his dalliances with mime or robotics, I always think to myself that Choate should be teaching something more than what is being taught. Something more to African Americans being shot. Police officers being killed. Women being raped. Muslims being Hitlerized. I’ve disappointed myself. Failed myself. Today is a bad day. I’m biting my lower lip. Blood is oozing. There was a death. Someone extremely close to me has died. Robin Wicks Romano.

  Robin passed last month. I volunteered to give a eulogy at Campbell Brothers Funeral Home on Madison Avenue. It was heartfelt. Everything I said—from the first night we met at the Spindletop in 1958—I truly meant. I did leave out one thing that always annoyed me about Robin: whenever I invited her to dinner, she’d say, “Let me text my daughter. She gets out of work about now. Maybe she can join us.”

  Invariably, Robin took advantage of me like that. That wouldn’t have been so bad. I liked Robin’s daughter. But what I didn’t appreciate was that her daughter always made sure to order two of everything. “My husband’s going to love this food.”

  I look at my two collages. More X’d out friends than ever before! Who’s left for me to have dinner with? To go to ballgames with? Watch football with on Sundays? Debate about who was the best—Michael, LeBron, Kobe, Magic, or The Big O? All gone. And who has replaced them? What has replaced them? The president’s brand of nationalism—hard-edged nationalism with its gut level cultural appraisals and hardline stances on trade and immigration. A nation reeling over sexual misconduct. What happened to me? I once marched in Selma. Wrote a book on the black/white problems in America. Today—would I be worrying about Latoya Earl or her son, Tommy? I don’t think so. I don’t mean because of my age. I mean, today, I probably would be taking an entry-level position on Wall Street or using my family’s contacts to get into some insatiable hedge fund or high-tech start-up or some scarlet white-shoe law firm...or even worse than that—giving in or giving up the fight. Today, people are either bland or extreme. I am bland. I am extreme. I am filled with myself ME...ME...ME...ME. Are greed and Amazon and Apple and Microsoft and Facebook and the other mushrooming mega-companies and one percenter electronic visions of free market capitalism while giving up our inner life, grievances, and consciences all that we have left? I’m spewing thoughts that have been waiting to be puked out for far too many years. Maybe it’s because of a lifetime of about-facing, wrong-doing. That book that I wrote when I was married to Leslie—American Racism, the one over which she hissed, “Nigger lover!” at me whenever she peeked over my shoulder. The major conflict that we had, that started me on those hate-fucks. Is that who I am? Anal leakage. Ineluctable truths.

  I’m remembering a donnybrook I had with Elizabeth. “You’re not LBJ,” she said. “You might be complex. You might even be contradictory but t
hat doesn’t make you LBJ!”

  We had been discussing different presidents, and I said that Lyndon Johnson might be my all-time MVP.

  “It was Johnson, Liz, who signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

  “It was President Johnson, David, who earlier in his career spoke against civil rights.”

  “It was Johnson who declared unconditional war against poverty.”

  “David,” Elizabeth countered, “it was President Johnson who escalated the war in Vietnam.”

  I was trying to make a point with Elizabeth that even American presidents are complex and contradictory. Not just me.

  Solomon Lepidus, too, was complex, conflicted, blood soaked; a maze, like so many of us. He was my closest friend, never my enemy. I learned from him. Things that I didn’t—couldn’t—learn in books. Things like staking hundreds of people to holiday turkeys, start-up money. I try to do things like that too, but I’m no match for Solomon. He liked people. Helped as many as twenty-five a day. That’s about how many people with money problems would call his office each day. And Solomon would listen.

  “Don’t worry, Allie boy. That’s not a problem at all. The only problem I can’t help you with is the one that’s terminal.” He’d end each of his conversations with, “Just keep me even,” or “Take it easy.”

  One of his most exciting ventures was producing the first million-dollar musical on Broadway, and Solomon Lepidus knew as much about theater as Forrest Gump! Yet, when his musical went down, he walked through the stage door, planted himself on the main stage, gathered all the actors and the crew around him, and said, “I just want to thank you. Never had so much fun in all my life. All of you are invited to my restaurant whenever you want, and if any of you have trouble finding jobs, don’t hesitate to call my office.”