Bob Goes to Jail

by Rob Sedgwick

  We were all from the same family: the New York City family. We hit each other, mugged each other, yelled at everyone in our vicinity, cursed and resented the world, shit on ourselves and our neighbor, were terrified of each other—but we were all basically on the same side, and if you needed a hand and asked for help, you usually got it. Often there was an outright and authentic respect.

  The pot means that he’s safe as far as getting high is concerned, but the racial part is so out of bounds that I gather he doesn’t realize how out of bounds it is. He says it so casually I don’t know if he actually means it. There is no virulence in his tone, no judgment, no malice, no fear. He just appears off. Way off. A tippling dandy from an era long ago casually tossing around whatever floats through his mind, operating on a different and much looser plane than the rest of us, someone for whom wholly inappropriate language is probably genuinely benign.

  “Sure. But let’s please stay away from the racial stuff.”

  “Of course, man, of course. Never again. I dooo apologize.” Then, to punctuate the moment, as if we had corrected any kind of misperception or miscommunication, “Marvellissimo, man! Marvellissimo!”

  His room in the basement is a den of God knows what, only steps away from the wine cellar, and he has the combination. His liquor cabinet, with its shelves of bottles in all their brown, indigo, and burgundy splendor, is the fine stained glass of the Church of Booze. Recumbent Titian Venuses, along with Linus’s own copies of Giorgiones, Rembrandts, and other Renaissance types, deck the walls.

  They look like the real thing.

  His record collection is peerless, an extensive snooty classical section in addition to all the rock and roll you could think of: Lee Dorsey, the Troggs, all the old Stones, Beatles, the Kinks, Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks.

  He’s so accomplished on the recorder that classicist Ben Heller himself sits enamored when Linus plays under the great apple tree in East Hampton at summer dusk. The notes of Linus’s recorder lull us all into the dreamy pastoral of a Constable painting.

  Linus’s dancing could have taught all the boys at Stonewall the meaning of lurid. During our drinking sessions, which become daily, he sometimes fucks a chair to demonstrate to us his overpowering sexual technique. He would often say during our civilized afternoon cocktail hour, Bugs Bunny on the TV:

  “Rob, dear boy, I find myself so attracted to you and love you so much and wouldn’t want this to infringe on our friendship, but could I offer you, could the house offer you, as it were, a complimentary blowjob?”

  “Aw, Linus, that’s sweet of you, but why not another cocktail, as it were.”

  “Ah, well, too bad.” Then, drunkenly grousing, “Oh Rob, you’re such a TURK!”

  That year I graduate high school. My yearbook picture—which is a staged photo—shows me in a tuxedo, no shoes, holding a cigarette in a cigarette holder, sitting in a Louis XIV wingback chair, by my side the African sculpture rudely staring straight ahead, not into the camera. Nikko is in the foreground in diapers, his pacifier hovering over lines of coke. Linus, wearing a troubadour hat and a noticeably phony mustache, holds a gun to my head. Milo Goldstein holds a magnum of champagne, atop his head a velvet hat Hank made while he was in jail. Milo, in his bar mitzvah tuxedo, looks into the camera hopelessly confused, like he’s about to shit himself and doesn’t know why. My dear sister, in a vintage something-or-other, holds a glass of champagne like she’s studying to be an actress, very focused and determined. The caption underneath the picture, in Linus’s grand calligraphy, reads:

  ROB SEDGWICK STARRING IN:

  A TURKISH AFTERNOON.

  It is the greatest yearbook picture in history.

  16

  Ron Montano ran the meeting. Ron Montano ran the firm. He was new money, a no-fucking-around Italian. I told him everything, soup to nuts, top to bottom, everything I could think of, everything I couldn’t think of. I was Bugs Bunny when the Edward G. Robinson character pulls a gun on him and says, “Talk, rabbit!” I emptied my soul to my confessors, priests in lawyer outfits. I gave emotional renderings of the people involved. I talked about Seth and his unique speech impediment and what a lovely guy he was, about how Jordan didn’t mean any harm. I talked to Ron and Warren like they were intimate friends, like they were family, all of which they said they would become.

  “We can do one of two things,” Ron said. “We can play He-man and go to trial—and we’re the best in the business, but chances are we’ll lose. They have you dead to rights on this one, and with the present laws, there’s a mandatory minimum. The judge could be your brother, but if you’re convicted, you’d go away for a minimum of five years.”

  I was hoping there would be a happier, more welcoming door number two.

  “Or we can cooperate with the DA. That means we sign an agreement with them to tell them everything you know. Everything. If they’re satisfied with your testimony, the judge is released from the sentencing guidelines and is free to bestow whatever punishment he sees fit. Like the old days. But if we make this deal—which is the thing to do, as far as I’m concerned—you’ll have to tell them everything. It’s not like you can be a little bit pregnant. Everything you know.”

  Everything. Christ.

  Again my mind was with Bugs. And Bugs being Bugs, his back is turned to Elmer Fudd who has a rifle pointed at him, and Bugs being Bugs says, “Only a rat would shoot a guy in the back.” Fudd’s finger trembles on the trigger. “I repeat, only a big fat rat would shoot a guy in the back.”

  Fudd can’t take it. The gun explodes.

  A cloud of smoke.

  Fudd looks directly to the camera and frumps, “So I’m a big fat rat.”

  Through the smoke, Bugs slithers like a genie, holding a huge wedge of cheese and whisks it into Fudd’s mouth. Fudd’s head elasticizes, becoming the shape of the wedged cheese, and Bugs says in some absurd accent, “Ahhh…have some cheese, rrrrrrrrrrrrrat!”

  I would become a cheese-eater of the first order.

  In a fit of rage, Yosemite Sam says to Bugs, “I’m the rootinest, tootinest, the Edward Everett Horton-est shot south of the Rio Grande. And I ain’t no namby-pamby!”

  But I would be a namby-pamby. And who wants to be a namby-pamby?

  Edward Everett Horton, one the great actors of yesteryear, has no problem embracing his inner namby-pamby. Whether in Top Hat with Fred Astaire or Holiday with Cary Grant, he embraces the confused, the baffled, and the flummoxed with such aplomb that he is the dearest man. And he does it with such infinite kindness and such a generosity of spirit, with such grace and whimsy and such an easy, loving humor, that one cannot help but love this man. At what he did, he had no peer.

  Would that I had embraced my own inner Edward Everett Horton instead of being such a schmuck. But here I was, in one of the top criminal law offices in New York, getting prepped for my defense. Where schmucks ended up.

  “What’s on West Eighteenth Street?” A voice from the ether.

  The rat shaken from his reverie: “What do you mean?”

  “What is on West Eighteenth Street?” asked Warren Levi, mild and clear.

  “What do you mean? My brother lives on West Eighteenth, that’s all I know.”

  I was hardwired to protect my brother.

  “Is he involved in this?” asked Ron.

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  Pause. The hardened lawyers eyed each other.

  “Get his ass in here,” said Warren.

  Martyrdom awakened, crybaby-rat defendant rose to take the hit for someone other than his pimply-white ass in the Superman underwear with a hole in it. “If it’s me or my brother going to jail, it’s going to be me!”

  I said this in a very dramatic, “Orson Welles at the prow of a ship” kind of way.

  “That’s very nice,” said Ron. “Now get his ass in here.”

  “Okay.”r />
  I really wanted to do something big, to be something big in my life, to sing “Smokestack Lightnin’” like the great Howlin’ Wolf, to protect my brother. But this was getting into the ring with Joe Louis, so I figured it was better to throw in the towel.

  Nikko. My loving brother. The only guy I knew in the world who was possibly as stupid as I was. He always made the same stupid jokes; his observations were always naïve, full of sentiment, and things like geography, taxes, and health insurance were always anathema to him. These things bothered me enormously. But then I realized they all bothered me so much because I shared in the same sublime stupidity. We had no idea what was going on with pretty much everything, but we formed thunderously powerful opinions.

  He was also the handsomest on the planet. When he was in college, everyone pegged him as a dead ringer for Marlon Brando. Utterly comfortable in his own skin. Someone even wrote a song about him and how Zen he was. Totally loyal to his friends, to Jordan and Seth both, he was also skad full of the anxieties and doubts that plague all fine artists, which he was in spades.

  And so he sauntered all swagger and hips into the Montano and Primo law office. He might as well have been snapping his fingers to some private bebop beat. He gave me the “What, me worry?” Alfred E. Neuman gesture, ambled handsomely into the office with Warren and Ron, and the door shut.

  What seemed like an eternity later, the door opened.

  Nikko looked confounded to learn that the Earth was round.

  The lawyers shook their heads in disbelief, and then corralled my stepfather.

  “Nikko is going to need his own lawyer,” said Ron.

  “What? Nikko is not involved in this. He does not need a lawyer. Christ!” yelled Ben.

  “What he has done, and the information he has, makes him even more culpable than his brother. He needs his own lawyer.”

  The smart money, Ron Montano, had spoken.

  About two years earlier, before Jordan and I had become partners, I had come over to visit Nikko on West Eighteenth, and Jordan was there with a huge shopping bag filled to the brim with cash. Jordan smiled his sitting-on-top-of-the world smile and said, “I’m spending a hundred and fifty grand on a Nikko Sedgwick. I figure this way I’ll jack up his prices on the open market.” They both looked so in cahoots, and I felt so out of cahoots. But I also knew immediately there was something in their cahoots-ness that I wasn’t supposed to know.

  Nikko and I hugged, dopes on parade. He was sworn to total secrecy, even from his brother: what he knew might hinder my, and now his, legal prospects in our case.

  Ben was befuddled, something one didn’t see too often.

  We all said goodnight.

  There would be major reconvening in the morning.

  I got home to West Eighty-Fifth Street.

  The narc doorman was on that night. “Everything okay?” he asked, ever the busybody. He had the beadiest eyes—a frog in a doorman suit.

  The suit was even green.

  “Yeah, everything’s fine, big mistake,” I said in a voice that almost made me believe it. I hustled down the vast corridor, got on the elevator with its big sign—

  NO MORE THAN FIVE PEOPLE ON THE ELEVATOR AT ONE TIME,

  —got out on my floor, and opened the door to 10A. Tybalt was at Kyra and Kevin’s, so I ignored my reflex to kiss him and went straight to the cupboard. I got the biggest tumbler I could find, opened the fridge, saw my beloved vodka in the freezer, threw ice cubes in the tumbler, poured a ridiculous amount of the loving vodka and some thimblefuls of orange juice. I switched on Letterman, sat back, guzzled and tasted sweet victory—at least for now.

  It had to be the most important vodka and orange juice in history.

  17

  My mother’s parents are vibrant, percolating, New York City all the way: the New York of martinis, the 21 Club, Bonwit Teller, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Christmas windows on Fifth Avenue. Their apartment—the one I would besmirch—is a cocktail table on wheels always raring to go. The kitchen is painted an antiseptic green, and the white, shaggy carpeted living room is where my grandfather holds court. He is crazy as a loon. When he talks at you—because he is never interested in what you have to say, only in what he has to say next—his eyes dance, and he’s almost always smiling, because he constantly amuses himself and knows he’s right. About everything. Near the end of his life, when I become closer to him, the great lesson he teaches me is to not spend too much money.

  “Keep your overhead low. If you get mad, don’t buy a Ferrari—go out to dinner.”

  He always sings, “Ev-er-y body’s cr-a-zy/ All ex-cep-ting me.”

  As a child, my grandfather, James Benno Rosenwald, has his own valet to lay out his clothes for him, dress him just so, and whisk him to his mother for her continuing rejection. She can’t stand him.

  At seventeen, learning to drive, my grandfather backs his car over an unsuspecting child and kills him instantly. There are headlines but no legal ramifications; it’s an accident. True to character, James’s mother decides this is the perfect time for her to take a European jaunt, leaving her devastated and guilty son behind. Of the thirty-two steamer trunks she takes on the trip, three of them are entirely filled with Sophie of Saks hats.

  My grandfather grows up to become a whiz in the Japanese stock market, making everyone rich. Everyone except himself. He gets a nice salary but refuses to take commissions. He sees the future in other ways. When my mother is a little girl, he brings home a handful of soybeans. “This will be the future,” he says.

  He buys six hundred acres of property in the remote, jungly part of an obscure island called Tobago. There he rebuilds a working cocoa plantation, giving the native workers stake in the company and living there six months out of the year. He calls the Tobagonians “mister” and “sir” and treats them as equal partners in business and in life, not a common practice in the mid-fifties.

  The other whites on the island think he’s crazy and vehemently advise against this, saying the native Tobagonians will “rob you blind.” Everlastingly of his own mind, my grandfather pooh-poohs this notion and says he has no choice because he knows nothing about running a cocoa plantation and they do. They come to him with requests for schooling and medicine. They become his family. As early as I can remember, there is a deep and profound respect that is palpable in all my grandfather’s interactions with the Tobagonians. They love him and he them.

  At one point, a very serious black power march in Trinidad spills over onto Tobago to become an angry looting mob. Kylo, the deeply beloved man in charge of my grandfather’s island business and a man of serious reputation, goes straight down to the end of the driveway to stem the angry tide.

  “What’s going on?”

  “We are marching in the name of black power! This is the revolution!”

  Kylo points to the ground where the gravel meets the road. In his lullaby island lilt, he says, “The revolution stops here.”

  My grandfather marries a New Jersey beauty queen. It’s rumored that he strays. My earliest recollection of my grandmother is of her wrapped in an elegant sleeping robe with a forever-tinkling lowball of scotch on the rocks in her bony hand. The sound is lovely, civilized, and it produces soothing vibrations in my later life. But she never asks me questions about myself or wants to have “conversation.” She always brays at me about what not to do and makes faces that tell me I am disappointing her.

  Grandmommy always wants to take me to Brooks Brothers. Even at three, I hate Brooks Brothers. As I hate Brearley.

  When she is near death and almost completely gaga, I visit her. She looks at me. “Who are you?” she asks.

  “I’m Robbie, your grandson,” I say through a fake smile. I’m twenty-seven years old and soaked in booze. My cologne is eau de Tabac, and I am lost in essentially every phase of my life except my accomplished alcoholism and penchant for bad choices
.

  She looks at me, her brow furrowed deeply, something she always forbade because it causes wrinkles.

  “You’re a cripple,” she says.

  So near death and so wise. She might be gaga at this point, but she hit the nail on the head.

  I want to take the pillow and smother her. She is deteriorated from lying in bed. Her bones, frail to begin with, are now just twigs.

  It would be easy and quick, I tell myself.

  My mom, Patsy Rosenwald, is Brearley born and Brearley bred, and when she dies, she will be Brearley dead. At five-two, one hundred pounds, she could blow up the Oakland Raider offensive line of Gene Upshaw and Art Shell in one fell swoop, no problem. Once, in the early seventies—when it takes balls to live in New York City—she’s mugged at gunpoint.

  She laughs at her assailant. “You have got to be kidding me!”

  He walks away.

  When my mother attends “The” Brearley—yes, THE Brearley is its proper name—one of her classmates tells my mother she won’t be coming back the next year.

  “They let Jews in here!”

  Horrified, Patsy rushes home to tell her parents. “Did you know that Brearley lets in Jews?”

  “Pat,” my grandfather breaks the news to her, “we’re Jewish.”

  This revelation doesn’t stop my mother from regularly attending mass with her Catholic nanny or celebrating Christmas with a gentile’s devotion.

  When she marries my stepfather, this kinship with Christianity both puzzles and repels him. An old-school New York Jew, he thinks Christmas is a load of horseshit. When Mom digs her heels in, however, empires have been known to crumble. Christmas, together with a traditional all-the-trimmings Christmas Eve party, will be celebrated in the Heller household for years to come.