Sometimes he would get on one of these jags while we were exercising in the park. He would jog very slowly and I would pretend to jog as well, even though I could easily have walked and kept pace. For the most part we kept to the East Side, but when the weather was nice he couldn’t be nudged away from cutting through to the West Side, where we would inevitably come within sight of Strawberry Fields, the memorial for John Lennon across the street from the Dakota, where he was murdered by Mark David Chapman.
“I remember Chapman; I’d probably remember him even if he hadn’t done what he did. I was shocked when he got the same tattoo that John had gotten. I was afraid that John would be mad. I was afraid that John would think this meant I was a fraud and was making fun of him. Oh, John. That was the closest I ever came to smashing the machine. But John would have wanted me to keep going. He told me that the epiphany machine was capable of doing more good for humanity than anything else that actually existed in the world, apart from his music.”
I doubted that Lennon had actually said any of this, but it didn’t matter. There was something incredibly beautiful about this old man gliding down the path, passed every few seconds by younger, fitter bodies, contemplating whether his life’s work had been, on the whole, good or bad.
Like many teenagers, I was certain that the biggest questions were the most important ones, and that I was going to answer them. I thought about my future, enriched by the testimonials I was recording, the thoughts on life and how to live it that I had the rare privilege of listening to, and it seemed to me that I would make fewer mistakes than most people.
I suppose I have to mention Si Strauss. The heir to a real-estate fortune, Si was the reason that Adam was able to run a business out of his apartment that would have been illegal even if he had run it out of a storefront. (Though there was little to no enforcement, tattooing was illegal in New York City from 1961 to 1997, due to a hepatitis B scare.) Strauss—through an organization he called Friends of the Epiphany Machine—paid the bills for Adam’s many legal troubles, and for much else. Adam’s defense for the zoning issue—that those who used the machine were his guests rather than his customers, and that the fee was a voluntary donation to defray costs—wasn’t exactly untrue. Indifferent to the concept of “inflation,” he never charged more than a hundred dollars for the use of the machine, even though there were many who would have paid thousands, and he never refused service to anyone who did not pay. But most people wanted to give him some money before he put a needle in their arm; most people wanted it to feel at least a little like a business transaction. How Adam evaded the illegality of tattooing remained a mystery to me, partially because tattooing had already been legalized by my first visit; I suspect it was largely due to the many high-ranking city officials who were rumored to have received tattoos and, of course, to the influence of Strauss.
For the most part, Strauss was quiet and never talked to anyone. He did not wear short-sleeved shirts; in fact, I never saw him not wearing a suit, even on days in August when Adam’s air conditioner was broken. One night, after I had been coming for nearly a year, I managed to cajole him into giving me a testimonial. When Adam found out about this, he insisted that I destroy the tape in front of him. But this one I had already transcribed.
TESTIMONIAL #55
NAME: Si Strauss
DATE OF BIRTH: 01/25/1935
DATE OF EPIPHANY MACHINE USE: 05/02/1966
DATE OF INTERVIEW BY VENTER LOWOOD: 03/10/1999
When I’m here and somebody who just used the machine is crying and screaming their head off that they’re going to sue, I’m not too concerned. Even the ones who actually start legal proceedings, most of them drop their cases after a few weeks. If I weren’t intimately familiar with Adam’s supply chain, I would say that there’s something magic in the ink itself. Something that in a robust teenager such as yourself reaches the heart almost immediately, but takes longer to work its way through old blood. Young people absorb what the machine tells them faster because young people absorb everything faster. That’s why I have my baseball charity; I love to watch young boys as they learn. Their eyes get so intent and focused, and you can see what they’re learning go through their entire bodies. When older people use the machine, you can almost see them trying to block the path their epiphanies are taking from their arms to their brains. But just as blood keeps circulating until you’re dead, no matter how old you are, your epiphany gets to every part of you eventually.
Growing up, I wanted to be a center fielder, and through high school I was just good enough to keep that fantasy going. Sometimes I would stay out practicing until my hands bled, and when I got home my father would tell me I was lazy for not working in his office after school to learn the family business. I was spoiled, he said, lost like a typical self-indulgent American to the pursuit of a pastime, rather than to the cultivation of buildings, where people would live and work. Often he would yell at me for an hour. By college, it became clear that I’d never make the big leagues, but I still wanted to work in baseball. My father, one of the biggest guys in New York City real estate, could have bought a team for me if he had wanted to. But he definitely did not want to. He told me that there were men built for baseball and men built for buildings, and I was the latter. I agreed to go to work for his firm, telling myself that I wasn’t doing it because my father forced me to, but because I was going to be a slugger one way or another, and if I couldn’t use baseball bats I was going to use skyscrapers.
To get to the top of those skyscrapers, I started out low man on the totem pole, even though in practice everyone knew that I was the boss’s son and was extremely deferential. Almost immediately I missed baseball. I made a habit of getting drunk and smashing parking meters with baseball bats. Twice I got arrested; both times the charges mysteriously got dropped as soon as somebody saw my name, and I was back at my office the next morning.
Mostly my job was making sure that tenants were paying on time, and kicking out anybody who wasn’t paying market rate. Obviously Adam stuck out as an easy target. Not only was he running an illegal business, he was illegally running it out of his apartment. I had my lawyer send him an eviction notice and figured that would be the end of it. A couple of weeks later Adam mails me a photograph of my lawyer, who’s holding up this letter that, if you squint, you can see is a resignation letter. But it took a while to notice the letter, because I was more focused on the tattoo on my lawyer’s arm, which he had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and jacket to display: NEEDS TO STOP SPEAKING FOR OTHERS.
Pretty obvious, to me anyway, that the tattoo was intended for me even more than for my father. I don’t think this term existed at the time, but I had what today would be called “anger management issues.” This lawyer was smart and hardworking, but he was generally inclined to be easier on tenants who didn’t belong in our buildings than I was, settling for getting them out in two years rather than fighting to get them out in two months. He had gotten used to doing things his way. I yelled at him. I yelled at him a lot, I guess. My father was always firm but gentle and soft-spoken with the people who worked for him, reserving his yelling for me. And I knew my father would take his anger at the lawyer’s resignation out on me, particularly given the circumstances.
I put the photograph down and walked to my window. The floor I was working on was still low enough that I could make out the outlines of the people. I remember I saw a few little kids pass by wearing Yankees caps, the hats of their heroes. Those kids, their faces, the way they moved, that’s what life was about, and I would never have that life again. I picked up a baseball bat signed by Willie Mays that I kept in my office, told my secretary to cancel my afternoon meetings, and drove straight to see Adam.
When I buzzed number 7, Adam asked who it was, so I told him who it was and I told him to meet me outside so he could act like a man. He asked why he should act like a man when, like everybody else, he was doing his best to become a god. I tol
d him to just fucking come downstairs, and he stopped answering. I had forgotten my keys to the building, so I smashed the glass door. Yeah, I definitely had anger management issues. I cut my hand up, but I was still prepared to break down the door to Adam’s apartment, and probably would have if he hadn’t left it open for me.
I entered slowly, thinking maybe he had a gun or something. Instead, he was holding a drink, and he kind of smiled at my bloody hand before gesturing to his ice bucket and asking me if I needed some ice.
I looked at his missing tooth for a while before answering.
“Not only are you running an illegal tattoo parlor, but you’re selling liquor without a license?”
“I’m not selling the liquor,” he said. “Or the tattoos. My guests are my guests.”
“Nelson is a good lawyer,” I said. “He wouldn’t have gotten that tattoo if you hadn’t brainwashed him.”
“Maybe he wouldn’t have worked for your family all these years if your father hadn’t brainwashed him. Your father sounds like a son of a bitch.”
I agreed with him about my father, but that didn’t stop me from smashing a bottle of Scotch with the bat. It broke the bottle and drove a tiny shard of glass deeper into my palm.
“That was good Scotch,” Adam said. Without asking permission, he plucked the shard from my palm, and then offered me a rag to use as a bandage. I hesitated, but took it.
“This building belongs to my family,” I said.
“And so do you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I think you know,” he said, “but just to make sure you don’t forget, let’s get it in writing.”
And that was it. A little more wrangling back and forth, and I agreed to use the machine. Everyone says that the machine hurts, and maybe the only reason I didn’t notice the pain is that I was already in so much pain, but honestly I think I was just completely relieved. Relieved and awed. All the wisdom in the universe was being shrunk down to a scale model of itself that would fit in my forearm. I don’t want to say that the actual tattoo was a disappointment, exactly, because it definitely wasn’t. BURNS WITH DESIRE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE immediately felt right, felt true. What was important to me was to make a difference in the lives of kids like the ones who had passed underneath my office, not necessarily to work in the sport they enjoyed.
When I was leaving the building, an elderly tenant was standing in the doorway, weeping over the broken glass.
“Those animals are taking over this city.”
I wasn’t under any illusions about what she meant by this. She was just an old racist. But she was right about what a handful of rich families, including my own, were doing to the city, had been doing for a long time. And you know who serves his family and doesn’t care about anyone else? An animal.
“Not if I can help it, ma’am,” I said, a bit grandly, of course, but I was really excited about the prospect of helping people. The first thing I did when I got back to my office was to call somebody to install a new door in Adam’s building. The second thing was to quit. By the end of the year, I had used much of my share of the family money to start Friends of the Epiphany Machine.
Supporting and defending Adam has easily been the best thing I could have possibly done with my life. There were some other things I sort of wanted to do—every once in a while I feel the urge to cash out Friends of the Epiphany Machine and buy a baseball team, and I still wake up from dreams where I’m a ballplayer wondering what might have happened if I had practiced even harder, or if I hadn’t given up in college. I look at what I’ve done with myself instead of playing baseball and I see that I’ve essentially been the pitching coach for the greatest metaphysical pitcher who ever lived. Or maybe I am the team owner after all. Pick your own damn metaphor, as Adam says sometimes. I also started a charity to help inner-city youths get involved in baseball, and that’s enough baseball for me. Seeing those kids slide through the dirt, my God. Those kids. The point is that I’ve made a difference, through Adam and my charity, and that’s the best life anybody can hope for.
CHAPTER
13
Si’s tattoo probably should have made me suspicious, since nobody gets a tattoo that good. But it didn’t.
There’s somebody else I have to mention at this point. One guy who often came to hang out was thirtyish, with boxy glasses, an untraceable European accent, and, quite noticeably, no tattoo. Usually, Adam would sidle up to quiet, untattooed people on their second visit; if they weren’t tattooed by their fourth, he would shut them out of conversations. This guy got to stick around, tattoolessly chatting with Adam at salon after salon. He didn’t say much, and didn’t register much emotion either, except when Adam called him “Douglavich,” which would make him briefly narrow his eyes and turn his nose away as though he had smelled something bad. He never talked to me until one day he did.
“It’s impressive that Adam Lyons likes you so much,” he said. “A lot of people want his attention, but you’re the only one who seems to have it. Everybody else is just a customer.”
“I don’t know if that’s true.” I was pretty sure it wasn’t true, and yet I wanted it to be true so badly that hearing it out of someone else’s mouth seemed to magically make it true. “And we call them guests.”
He smiled at this term to let me know it was dumb. “How would you like to help me bring the epiphany machine, a device that you and I both believe helps everyone who uses it, to people who can’t afford a trip to New York?”
“What, like a tour?”
“No. I don’t want to move the machine. I want to make new machines. Mass production.”
“How can you do that when not even Adam knows who built it or how it works?”
“Of course he knows who built it. He built it. And of course he knows how it works. He makes it work by making people think it works.”
“So you’re just a skeptic.”
“A skeptic is the last thing I am. The epiphanies aren’t magic, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real.”
“So you want to put random tattoos on people to guide their behavior?”
“It seems just as likely to make the world a better place as anything else that’s been tried.”
“Why would you need Adam Lyons to do this?”
“Because because because because becauuuuse . . . because of the wonderful things he does.” I thought that his accent enhanced that song’s most sinister qualities, and then I chided myself for being influenced by bad Hollywood movies with vaguely European villains. “He’s why people think the machine works.”
“In that case, what would be the point in mass-producing it? Not everyone could meet him.”
“And not everybody who buys Nikes can meet Michael Jordan. But every Nike customer feels Michael Jordan on his feet.”
“So you want to stock the machine in Walmart and put Adam’s face on the box?”
“Not exactly. But Adam’s endorsement would be helpful.”
“And you think I can get that for you.”
“I think you might be able to get that for me.”
“I believe in the machine,” I said. “Not just in Adam.”
“You believe it’s supernatural. You believe that there’s a literal god-in-the-machine who is guiding the tattoos.”
Put this way, it sounded silly. But by this point I was coming to realize that I was so impressionable that I could be convinced of anything, and therefore I might as well continue believing what I currently believed. So I just said: “Yes.”
“Not even my father was quite that stupid.”
“Excuse me?”
He put up his hands as though he were surrendering to my idiocy. “I should get going. Nice chatting with you.”
As soon as he was out the door, I found Adam near the bathroom. A skinny bald guy who was there a lot was leaning over to tell the story of h
is life, and Adam was nodding along.
“I need to talk to you in private,” I said to Adam.
The skinny bald guy looked up at me. “I was just in the middle of something.”
“Oh, please,” I said. “I’m sorry for interrupting you while you tell Adam for the thousandth time about how sorry you are about being someone who CHOOSES GLAMOUR OVER CHILDREN. Maybe you can address that issue by actually going home and hanging out with your kids.”
This made Adam laugh, maybe not only because I was quoting verbatim from something he had said a few weeks earlier to a guy with an identical tattoo. The bald guy had that crestfallen look that people get in the few seconds before their personality decides for them whether they’re going to get sad or angry. He looked like he was tilting toward sad, so Adam took a puff on his cigar and slapped the man’s back.
“The epiphany machine is worthless to people who can’t take advice,” he said. “So my advice is not to be one of those people. Now go home to your kids.”
“Can I explain why I don’t think that’s a good idea after you talk with Venter?”
Adam did not hide the rolling of his eyes. “Fine.”
As soon as we were alone, Adam said to me: “That was good, man. Keep talking to people that way. Ward off other people’s opinions with your own.”
“The guy who was just here,” I said. “Be careful around him. He wants to mass-produce the machine.”
“Oh, you mean Douglavich? He talks that nonsense all the time. He’s harmless.”
How could you have been so stupid, Venter? “I should have realized that. He was pretty obviously just a crazy guy who could never have anything like that kind of money.”
“No, he has a lot of money. A lot. He could buy and sell me. He could buy and sell Si Strauss. His name is Vladimir Harrican. You should read about him; he’s an interesting guy. But don’t worry, we’re not selling out.”
The Epiphany Machine Page 11