David Lazar

by Robert Kalich

  “Ba, I’m aware that civil rights were a giant issue in 1963, but are you aware that economic justice and civil rights go together? White working-class people and civil rights will only become one when we trust our president. What we need is a president who stops talking to his donors and starts talking to the people. Ba, why are you looking at me like that? What’s wrong?

  “Nothing, Liam, nothing at all.”

  The only complaint that I have about Liam is generational. He doesn’t read enough. As a teen, I read voraciously, but I never did a tenth of the good deeds that Squirt does. I know it’s only a father talking, yet, in my opinion, Liam is perfect, both inside and out. He’s an all-around decent kid. I repeat this often, but sometimes the best thing in your life needs repeating.

  When Liam was five, I’d race him every morning to the 92nd Street Y preschool.

  “Don’t cheat, Ba. I’d rather lose than have you fake it so that I win.”

  At fourteen and a half, I had to give Liam up.

  Elizabeth said, “Liam has a choice. He got into Dalton, Horace Mann, Collegiate and several of the other Manhattan private schools. But Choate is a great school, and I think it’s important that he become more independent.”

  Liam said, “I don’t want to go to school in the city, Ba. I loved Choate when we visited.”

  It broke my heart.

  Liam is the purest love of my life.

  It’s three in the morning. I have sand in my eyes. My cataract surgery was successful, but both my eyes have been itching since then. There are so many things you just learn to live with when you get older. I got up because I had to pee. I try going back to sleep but all I do is toss and turn. I dwell on an argument I had with Elizabeth earlier

  this evening.

  “I’m guilty, Liz,” I tell her. “I am not any different from Solomon Lepidus and all the other guys that I rubbed shoulders with. I fired my own gun when I had to. It was a war. I didn’t go to Canada. I wasn’t a conscientious objector. I didn’t surrender my arms. But Evan Strome got away with his larceny just like I got away with mine. I estimate that he buried at least sixteen extra-large industrial trash bags filled to their bloated brims with $100 Franklins.” I stop and stare

  at Elizabeth.

  “Go back to sleep, David. I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I say and close my eyes.

  Early the next morning while my coffee was brewing, I placed a brief epistle under Elizabeth’s pillow:

  Without you, Elizabeth, my days, months, and years would be as unrealized as my life would be without words or ideas or books, it all goes together for me.

  Of course, that won’t answer Elizabeth’s question about Evan Strome or about the others, but it reminds me of the terrible cost should I decide to be honest with her. And if lying will further corrode my soul, is that a price I must pay for staying together? A price I’m willing to pay?

  Liam is home for the weekend. I take advantage of that to tell him some truth.

  “Liam, the dollars I made handicapping never came close to the contented and fully alive feeling that working on a novel brings me.”

  “Ba, you’re just saying that because you don’t want me to make those kinds of mistakes.”

  “Liam, you’re smart, serious. You care about people. You’ll never make those kinds of mistakes. More and more, you’re evolving into the man I want you to be.” I gaze at my son. He’s almost as tall as me now. His face still had acne blemishes, but it doesn’t blind me from seeing what a good-looking boy he is. His intelligence, too, is visible. In his eyes. On his brow. Like his mother’s.

  “Liam, you’ll be in college in a few years. Once you step onto your college’s campus, I promise that you won’t have to listen to any more overbearing rhetoric from me. But for now, trust me when I tell you that you’re perfect. I’m not just throwing out kudos. I’m proud of you. Of course, I’m aware that you can make just about every important decision on your own. But let me at least believe a little longer that I still have something to contribute. I still need to feel needed.”

  I walk over to my desk and take out an old scrapbook in which I had listed special moments in Liam’s life. Losing his first tooth. A multitude of teacher comments all the way back to pre-kindergarten. A photograph of him receiving a prestigious Brotherhood Award in the eighth grade at Cathedral. Laudatory comments from current Choate preceptors. Pictures from birth to now. His sonogram. A thousand other memories stuffed into this scrapbook. I slowly look through them. Peel away one page after another. Slowly read my notations.

  Liam sits next to me. Places his arm around my shoulder. “I love you, Ba.”

  How much truth do I dare to tell him?

  For of all my carrying on about Liam’s many strong points, I still have my fatherly worries and concerns. Liam has never had a sip of beer. His friends have. He’s just so damn straight. Forget about taking drugs. That will never happen. He’s always the first one back in his room after a dance, and he’s never once caused grief to any of the people in charge. In all my son’s years, not once has he ever given his mother or me a single thing to worry about.

  And that I’m worried about.

  Everything goes two ways or three or four. With Liam, junior year has been rough. Liam’s perfect because there’s nothing he doesn’t have. The best thing about Liam is he never stops trying. He’s aiming for MIT or Georgia Tech or one of those other engineer universities. I know, they’re challenging universities, but Liam has been programmed for that. The thing is I didn’t give him street fiber, the ability to kick ass out of defeat. He got a sixty-seven on a math test this week and he’s freakin’ out. I told him, “Liam, if you tried your hardest and that’s the best that you can do, then it’s okay. I’m on your side, son, and if you don’t get into an engineering school, that’s okay, too. There are one or two hundred other schools out there that all have great campuses, top professors, and pretty women.”

  “You don’t understand, Ba!” Liam screamed at me. “I’m Liam Dunn Lazar! I can’t get a sixty-seven on a math exam. I can’t go to some crappy school! I just can’t!”

  I don’t give a fuck if Liam goes to Harvard or Yale or if he ends up at a community college. What I want is what I told him.

  “Liam, lighten up. All I ever wanted for you was to be happy and healthy, to like yourself and to always do the best that you can. The rest of it is B.S. Reach down deep inside yourself. Fight like hell. If you want to join the Sanitation Department, that’s okay, too. Whatever your gut and brain tell you to do is good enough for me. I’m on your side. I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you. So, get your ass back to your desk! Talk to your math teacher. Maybe to Dana Brown as well.” Dana Brown’s the student advisor at Choate. She’s the kind of person who sees things for what they are.

  Elizabeth is exhausted by all this drama. Me? From now on, I’m going to dig in and listen more carefully to Liam. My take is that not everyone’s destined to be an Einstein on every exam. These privileged kids at Choate and all those other one percent of one percenter schools, what do these schools actually do for you? As soon as you have to reach down deep inside, when you hit rock bottom, where are they then?

  “It’s up to you, son. I’ll always be here for you, but it’s up to you and what you have inside of you. And that doesn’t mean that you have to be number one or number one thousand and one. Just reach down deep inside and figure out what you can and can’t do. Start out with a $25 bet and try to build on that.”

  “Ba, you don’t understand!” Liam’s exasperation with me resonates in his tone. “Ba, that was your generation—it’s different today.” He shrugs. “Oh, forget it! That’s just not how the world is anymore!”

  Elizabeth is still fast asleep. I don’t want to disturb her, so I tiptoe into the den. I want to say something profound to Liam. Something all-knowing about life. I can’t come up with
anything at all. For some reason, I keep turning over in my mind the first day I met Noah Weldon, when we were fourteen and starting out at Commerce High School, and then Leslie Kore flashes in front of me. I can see Leslie at the NYU frat party standing in the middle of the dance floor wearing a powder blue sweater, a navy-blue skirt, a pearl-colored blouse with a heart-shaped pendant around her long neck. Leslie’s cheeks were apple red, her hair chestnut, her long legs enticing, and she was flirting with at least a half dozen feverish fraternity boys. I stood in a dark corner ogling her, yet I felt we were destined to meet. Of course, Leslie was incredibly beautiful, but there was much more to her than that. Leslie Kore was everything I had ever dreamed a woman

  could be.

  Enough of this. It’s not helping me with, “What can I tell my son?” All I can think of is what every joker always says, “Life goes too fast.” With all the things I’ve done, all the outlaws I’ve known, all the books I’ve read, all the illicit adventures I’ve experienced, none of it seems to mean very much. Who hasn’t had a sliver of a proper/improper life? What does it really mean? We all end up gone. I’ve now crossed out thirty-eight of the forty-one people that have been good-to-great friends of mine. There are only three left. I had to X out Leslie Kore and Amy Cho this month. Leslie’s death was expected. She’d been struggling mightily with Parkinson’s for the past two years. Amy Cho was going over her wedding plans at her kitchen table when she toppled off the chair. She was dead before she hit the floor.

  Amy was only fifty-five.

  One month later, still reeling from funerals, I lost another old friend. I received a phone call from Annette Stiloski. “Big John” had passed.

  I’m remembering that night when Elizabeth confronted me about “my women.” We had grown close, and it was scaring her. I knew by looking at Elizabeth’s face that it was coming. She was more conventional than she let on. Her values were not “old school” but they weren’t

  digital either.

  “Why have you failed miserably in every relationship you’ve had?” Liz named the women. “Do you have a clue as to what you did wrong? Have you grown since then?”

  “It’s easy to say that I’ve changed. But something always gets in the way.”

  “I’m not judging you. I’m only asking. It’s troubling me. I’m frightened. You’ve lived a reckless life. A self-indulgent life. I’m half your age. You seem to have little capacity for settling down.”

  “I can tell you that I’ve changed, Elizabeth. In some ways, I have matured. I’m more self-contained. My body has slowed down. I want different things today than I did in the past. I want someone to share my life with, not only because I have a yen for her but because I’m more capable of long-term thinking. I don’t want adventure. I no longer need to be a workaholic. I don’t hunger for More! More! More! I’m not empty inside, I’m full. I want to experience what we have to share. I want to enjoy my life with you as a partner I believe in. Who I know isn’t going to leave. Someone who can be with me and independent of me. What I’m trying to tell you is you’re the woman I want to share the rest of my life with.”

  I stood there, my hands hanging at my sides. Elizabeth looked at me. Squinted. Then stood up straight and slowly walked into my arms. And then, I think, we were pretty close to one.

  Chapter 20

  I’m not “the man I use’ta be...” No, I’m a whole lot better in most ways. At least I think I am. Being an ex-newspaper guy, I should stick to the facts. Like this one: each day I get more domesticated, weaker, and stronger. Still, I’ll never be as good in this role as I was at handicapping college basketball, but I certainly love this job a whole lot more. Just the other day I scooped up two dozen African bracelets made of colorful beads from a Nigerian woman peddling them at Columbus Circle. For the most part, all I did for the past two days was hand them out. Many of them, right now, are at The Smith being worn by Becky and Monica and Kyle and Cameron and Nicky Azzara. I’ve also given one of these bracelets to Albert Rolon, my building’s top-gun handyman, and I’ve given these colorful bracelets to several of our doormen, and Barry English, our deskman, and Jenny Kelly, one of the building’s administrative assistants, and Gerry Welsh, our tenant manager, also to three of our porters. You can see them on Tim Brown’s wrist, the grey eagle, at the Porterhouse Steakhouse and Jennifer from Kingston, Jamaica, who works at the Duane Reade and Jose Lopez, the La Mode Cleaners’ delivery guy.

  The third day I went over my checklist for the people I wanted to give bracelets to. After all, there are thirty-one men that work for my building, of those thirty-one there are at least twenty-four that I’m more than familiar with. They’re more like distant relatives or high-school buddies, men from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, China, Cuba, Brazil, Senegal, Poland...Let’s say these men are a melting pot of people who work terribly hard to earn a small salary and survive from one paycheck to the next. On this checklist is Hector Cabrera, a decent guy, speaks limited English, hard-working, always willing to do special chores for me on my rooftop, from planting trees and bushes to pushing monster planters over the three thousand feet of rooftop space I have. Yes, it’s quite a park I have and I couldn’t maintain it without men like Hector. Hector’s a high-character guy, loyal, more than loyal, the kind of fellow who if you treat right, to use Solomon Lepidus’ lingo, will take a bullet for you. One hour later, I discover that the Dominican porter has a problem. In broken English, Hector struggles to tell me: “They’ve taken blood tests, Mr. Lazar. Doctor tells me I got something called Crohn’s disease. I have to receive chemo treatment, I won’t be able to work.”

  “How are you going to pay your rent?” I ask. Cabrera has four young children, supports the woman he resides with. His take-home salary is twenty-seven-hundred-a-month.

  “I don’t know,” he says shakily, almost embarrassed, as he tries to explain his predicament.

  “Are you going to be collecting Disability Insurance?”

  “I think so. Management helped me fill out some papers. Miss Welsh said she thinks I should be getting $691-a-month.”

  I thought about it for a second or two. “I’m going to do this Hector. I’ll make up the difference between your disability benefit and your lost salary for the time you can’t work.”

  Hector Cabrera remains silent. Then utters a sob: “You’re better to me than my father ever was, Mr. Lazar. My father never helped me like you do.”

  I glance at two medium-sized photographs on my wall. The one I’m looking at right now is of several mature men. These guys are laughing, telling tall-tales, eating like gluttons. For years, Stickers, The Colonel, Rodney Parker, Solomon, Amy Cho (during the time she lived with me) religiously attended my Sunday brunches. We all marched onto my rooftop and shared our fellowship from 11:00 A.M. until approximately three in the afternoon. Then, the women in these men’s lives would start pestering them with phone calls or some professional obligation would jump into the mainstream, and we’d lose each other until the following Sunday. Those fun gatherings took place, a rough guess would be from the time I was thirty-seven until I was fifty-two. That’s about right because Amy Cho broke my heart when I was fifty-one, and when I was fifty-two, Solomon Lepidus died. Without Solomon Lepidus around, our brunches lost a whole lot of zest. When Solomon would show up, he’d march into the kitchen, unwrap the salmon, whitefish, herring, and whatever else he’d purchased at Barney Greengrass or Murray’s or Zabar’s, and he’d go straight to work. Nothing made Solomon happier than scrambling eggs and having all of us compliment him on how great they were. We were real bonhomie friends. We liked each other. No mean-spirited Blondies in this gang. No envy or anger or betrayals toward any of the things we did apart from each other nor did we pay much attention to each other’s accomplishments or putdowns and, believe me, there were many of each. Our group was made up of self-made, earthy New Yorkers, men who did something with their lives. Most times shady; so
metimes sunny. Many times, Solomon would invite an outsider who was just as much a bona fide New Yorker as we all were. There were times Nathan Rubin joined us, rarely his son, who was at the time in charge of Nathan’s cable company.

  Nathan Rubin, like Solomon Lepidus, had several unlawful businesses, and once I shook hands with those two moguls, I became connected.

  Stickers was not one of them in that way. But he was in other ways. Stickers was opinionated, dissimulating, and always promoting. Many times, he brought over one of his new discoveries or veteran artists.

  Rodney Parker would also bring over some of his friends, NBA basketball players or scheming coaches looking for high school players and willing to come up with the necessary cash to get them. Some of these guys were household names. Don’t let me leave out the original material girl. Madonna came over once when she was a young woman breaking into the business. Surprisingly, when it came to men, Madge, at least to me, seemed clueless.

  “I haven’t met a man who piqued my interest since I left Michigan, David...That’s the truth! Not one!”

  “I don’t want to sound rude or crude, Madge, but did you ever think that if you dressed less flamboyantly it would make a world of difference? Don’t take this the wrong way, you’re really good-looking, and it’s obvious you’re extremely intelligent. But as far as presentation goes, well, most men in Manhattan, I mean the kind that you should be dating, are looking for, well, again, I’m not trying to be rude, but they’re looking for someone less intimidating. And with the way that you present yourself, like some hippy who doesn’t take baths, it would turn most guys off before you had a chance to turn them on.”