The Rich Man's Table

by Scott Spencer

  I’ve been with thousands of women

  Can’t remember their names

  The jingle-jangle of their bracelets

  The circus smell of their perfume

  It all seems so distant

  It all seems so sad

  Pathetic, absurd

  Can it really have happened?

  —“It Takes a Man to Crawl,”

  recorded 1982

  Even when Luke was Stuart Kramer he wildly appealed to women—and, really, when you see those early photos you have to wonder why. He was skinny, unkempt, with teeth like a crumbling stone wall. His fingernails were long, each one a terrarium. With his hair short, combed with a part on the side, he looked geeky, outpatientish, and you could see that his head was wider on the bottom than on the top, like a buoy. He was a motherless child, with the emotional cunning necessary to meet his own needs. He knew how to make girls care about him, and feel powerful and protective around him.

  Luke’s powers of seduction were not of the big-man-on- campus variety, nor of the brooding bronzed Adonis, nor of the hissing snake in the tree of knowledge. And to say he got women into bed, got them to take off their clothes, peel off their undergarments, open their thighs and offer their sacred darkness, their unprotected, unprotectable softness—really, quite a remarkable thing, under any circumstances—by dint of his sheer neediness is to practice reality reduction to such a degree that it surpasses miniaturization and becomes sheer distortion. That long, long string of women who loved Luke did not go to bed with him out of pity or even concern. They wanted him. Why? He was on his own, he was often in trouble, and he was a troublemaker. He was the virtual prototype of the boy parents warned their daughters against. When Luke was young, fucking him was like running away from home, or maybe even joining the circus. He was wild, he was strange, the smell of freedom was all over him, that mixture of smoke and wind and cheap wine, as redolent as peanuts, sawdust, and elephants.

  Yet it was not only freedom he offered; it was acceptance, too. He did not care if you were a little heavy, or if you were skinny, or if your breasts were small, or if your pubic hair percolated straight up to your belly button, or if you had a little shadow of mustache over your lip, or a hooked nose, or wore glasses, or if your hands were manly, your feet immense, or any of the other ten thousand things that young girls worry themselves sick over. He did not care if you were black or white or brown or yellow. And if there was something strange in you, that was fine; there was something strange in him, too. He talked about piss and shit and pimples, his own bad breath, his b.o. There was nothing you could do to turn him off, and he let you know it—and that was tremendously effective for him, back then, when he was just a runaway teen living in the storerooms of St. Louis record shops.

  And let’s not forget the other important ingredient that allowed him to rack up such a staggering number of lovers in those pre-sexual-revolution days in the late fifties and early sixties—he was a bulldog of desire, never letting it rest until he had what he wanted. And he was a despot of cool. If you did not follow him wherever he wanted you to, he made you feel narrow-minded. If you did not do things his way, he made you feel awkward, pathetic, frightened. Though functionally an orphan, never having known his mother, his pale, sunken-eyed and suicidal father in and out of hospitals, shock treatment, Luke concentrated on middle-class girls from Ozzie-and- Harrietsville, girls whose breath he could literally take away with the danger and cunning of his own life and whose occasional words of demurral he would not hesitate to assign to bourgeois cowardice. “Don’t go bourgeois on me, baby,” he’d say.

  He knew where all the best parties were; he knew about the Douglas Bake Shop, which gave you free samples of warm bread if you were there when they took them out of the oven at five in the morning. (Listen to “Free Samples,” recorded 1963: “St. Louis morning like a sky full of biscuits. …”) He was forever off on an adventure, and that was part of the deal, too. If you slept with Stuart Kramer, you not only got the best sex he could give you (in those days he was ardent, animalistic) but you got to share in the drama and ramble of his life as well. And he did make the helter-skelter of his days—in and out of school, no real address, more days on friends—sofas or even park benches than in the little narrow bed in his own room—seem daring and desirable. He was Tom Sawyer (another Missouri kid) painting the fence of his own life, whistling, making up songs, making it all seem so irresistible.

  By the time Stuart became Luke, he had slept with about two hundred girls—Dad’s own bragging is the helium that has filled this Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float of a number, but the estimate turns out to be reasonably accurate. Which, naturally, raised in me the inevitable question: putting aside my half-brotherhood to Felix and Tess, how many other demi- sibs have I got out there? (And if they have married and bred, then how many demi-nieces and -nephews?) And this speculation always brings me to the oft-broached yet nevertheless eternally sensitive subject of Luke’s undescended testicle and his low, low, low sperm count. Even if we accept his inflated rhymes about his genitalia (“It took fifty firemen to unfurl the hose,” “Come on mama climb the Eiffel Tower,” etc., etc.), there is no question but that as long and thick as it may (or may not) have been, it was, on a simply reproductive level, a wan thing. If semen were orange juice, then his was made from concentrate: seedless. If semen were cream, then what he was putting out was not even milk, it was not even two-percent, it was skim, it was lactose-free, watery bluish-gray, practically transparent. Et cetera. Thirsty little devil, he drank significant amounts of beer, wine, Coke, water, and his ejaculations, no matter how frequent, were large and wet: but it was a river without fish. In all probability, his low sperm count was the result of his one-ballishness. His right ball was a kiwi, but the apartment next door was vacant, a little shrivel of sac, a droopy hirsute fringe. I always thought of this absent friend as “undescended,” which was how the biographers would have it, but really it was only Luke’s assumption that the right nut was somewhere up there, hiding out in the maze of guts like an outlaw in the badlands.

  Through the fog in the plaza in the heart of Barcelona

  Blows a one-way ticket to Never Can Be

  I wander this world in boots of illusion

  The lie of generation … oh, it ends with me

  Christ on His cross left no sons behind him

  Buddha was childless, Mohammed lived free

  Ten million soiled souls cry out for salvation

  The crime of generation … ah, it ends with me

  The earth is a vault that the robbers have plundered

  New York dumps its dead into the sea

  The orchards are deserts, the fountain is empty

  The sin of generation ends with me.

  —“Cancel My Reservation,” recorded 1985

  Not only was Luke resigned to his sperm’s lack of motility, but in fact he made it a virtue. He came to view, or at least portray, himself as somehow too spiritual to breed (see “Recreational Model”) and his dick itself too magical to be confused with mere mortal members (see “Hunt for the Unicorn”). The inability to breed was evidence of having advanced to an elevated rung on the evolutionary ladder, like not getting your wisdom teeth, it meant delicacy, airiness, and gentility—a word that is next-door neighbor to “gentile”: while the ethnics bred like bunnies, the Wasps were like pandas. If we take Luke at his word—and there were a number of medical reports to back him up—then my conception could be viewed as something of a miracle. For years, for practically a decade (so we’re talking here at least twenty-five hundred nights of ejaculations), Luke used no form of contraception, and he encouraged in his legions of lovers the same attitude—though clearly there was nothing he could do about it if any of his many one-night stands was taking birth-control pills or sported an IUD. But a condom was out of the question (“Puts a hood on his Johnson, like he’s in the KKK”—“Naturally,” recorded 1970), and he would not tolerate the gels and delays of a diaphragm
, and foam was a turn-off, too, like spraying insulation in there, and he wasn’t going to lie to you and tell you he’d pull out before he came because he wasn’t going to do that, he wasn’t going to puddle himself on your stomach. “With me, you don’t have to worry,” he’d say, and apparently he’d say it the same way each time: winking, raising his forefinger, tilting his head to the right, as if he might be trying to lighten up something intrinsically sad, confessing to a deformity but not making you uncomfortable, heading your pity off at the pass. And in the words of Derek Arthur, the portly, stammering, tobacco- stained British Lukologist whose bloodless, doe-eyed child bride hiked up her miniskirt and let Dad screw her in an (attended!) elevator at Brown’s, “He was bloody well believed—not just by the Sluts and the Plaster-Casters and the Pathetic Groupies and the Drugged-Out Skanks, but by women of some quality who ought to have known better.”

  I always assumed my mother would have made it into Arthur’s category of Women Who Ought to Have Known Better (though his own wife was relegated to Pathetic Groupies, in his book’s British hardcover edition, and then to Drugged-Out Skanks, in the American paperback), but I think the fact was that Esther half believed Luke when he told her that he would not and could not make her pregnant, and she also half desired a child, though emotions as conflicted as these don’t generally divide themselves neatly in half—perhaps only twenty percent of my mother wanted a child, or maybe it was even ten, but it was enough for her to go along with months and months of contraception-less sex, wild, practically compulsive couplings that took them in and out of bedrooms all over New York—in her old bedroom in her parents—house, on her nubby, nunnish little bedspread, in the Albert Hotel, with the sounds of Chuck Berry singing “Roll Over Beethoven” and another copulating couple echoing in the air shaft, further uptown at the Warwick, with the smell of room-service roast beef sandwiches in the cool air, in Chelsea, in Harlem, on the Lower East Side, and straight across America, while Luke toured to larger and larger and wilder and wilder crowds and I, unborn, hung pinioned on radiant spears of starlight waiting for the moment when one of Dad’s lackadaisical little sperm proceeded from his one working ball, squiggled to the epididymus, and then with an I think I can I think I can somehow figured the way to Esther’s ovum.

  It, I, was a miracle—but a miracle no one particularly wanted, with the ambivalent exception of my mother. Even her parents wanted her to get an abortion, though abortions were then illegal and both my grandparents, as a reaction to McCarthyism and the execution of the Rosenbergs, were terrified by the idea of breaking the law, any law—they even paid full price for me at the movies when it could have easily been said that I was eleven. When I asked Esther what Luke’s feelings were when she told him she was pregnant—and I came to ask her often—she never said much more than “He wasn’t there for me.” He wasn’t there for you? Then where was he? But my mother did talk to Neil Schwartz—and here I may as well take the opportunity to admit (to myself) that Mom and Neil almost certainly were lovers—and I have it on his authority that when she realized she was pregnant she immediately went to the Port Authority and with her customary frugality took a bus to La Guardia Airport, and then (flying standby) caught American Airlines flight 44 to Chicago, where Luke was at the end of a three-night engagement at a toney North Side club called the Gate of Horn.

  The following, then, comes from Neil’s most recent, and perhaps final, piece of Lukology, a massive work called The Gospel According to Luke:

  By the time Esther finally tracked Luke down, it was already evening. Luke had moved out of the Conrad Hilton, where he had been made to feel unwanted, and was staying with so-called “sick comedian” Lenny Bruce, in an apartment of a drug-dealing friend of Bruce’s, on Rush Street, an easy walk to the Gate of Horn. By the time Esther arrived, she was exhausted and beginning to doubt the wisdom of having made the journey. “I kept on thinking that maybe I just should have called him with the news or waited till he got back from his tour,” Esther said, years later. “But I was pretty freaked out and I really wanted to see him.”

  When Esther knocked on the door to Apartment 7G, she was met by Lenny Bruce, whose pale swollen corpus was covered by nothing but a bath towel and a pair of calf-high black socks. Bruce had been expecting a drug delivery and was struck with surprise when he threw the door open to the elegant, dark Miss Rothschild.

  “Who the hell are you?” Bruce asked, clutching his towel.

  Esther was well aware of who Bruce was. In the late Fifties and early Sixties, Lenny Bruce was one of the most well-known comics in America, and to the hip set he was the only stand-up comedian worth listening to. Luke had two of Bruce’s early records (The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce and I’m Not a Nut—Elect Me) and he often played them for Esther, frowning at her when she failed to laugh. Her taste in humor went toward the menschier grooves of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, with their jokes about Jewish cavemen and nectarines, and she found Bruce’s rat-a-tat riffs about hookers and airplane glue abrasive, and even a little depressing.

  Still, her reaction to seeing Bruce was a feeling of happiness for Luke. She knew Luke admired the middle-aged comic and that Luke liked nothing more than the chance to actually meet someone whose work he admired. (In fact, Rothschild recalls seeing a master list of the people whom Luke wanted to meet—Jacqueline Kennedy, Thelonious Monk, Willie Mays, Tuesday Weld, and Jean-Paul Sartre were some of the names, and Bruce’s name was on there, too. When the celebrity was finally met, Luke put a check next to his or her name.)

  “Is Luke here?” Esther asked, but before Bruce could answer, Esther heard Luke’s laughter coming from the front room of the disheveled, odoriferous apartment. Bruce must have known what was going to happen next, because he did his best to impede Esther’s progress—taking her gently by the arm and fixing her with a soulful stare. (A few years later, when Bruce died of an overdose, Esther attended his funeral services, a lone black-clad figure standing off to the side in the rain.)

  Luke was sitting on the floor of the airless, fantastically disheveled bedroom, sharing a joint with jazz guitarist Roland Dougherty, Luke’s own backup guitarist “Boona” Baker, and folk diva Wendy Crabtree. In folkie circles, Luke and Wendy had been linked for several months. They had played several festivals together, and Wendy had recently recorded several Fairchild songs along with her usual program of English, Irish, and French-Canadian ballads. But this was the first time the usually sanguine and sexually self-confident Esther had seen them together—in fact, Luke and Wendy had just become lovers—and the sight shook her to the core. Wendy sat with her back to the unmade bed and her long bare legs stretched out before her. She wore a buckskin dress and a sleeveless blouse; her skin was very dark and her black hair was long enough for her to sit on. Esther stared at this woman who was suddenly her rival and Wendy, despite her reputation for fearlessness, lowered her eyes in embarrassment.

  “What are you doing here, Essie?” asked Luke. Bluish marijuana smoke came out of his nostrils as he spoke. He didn’t seem particularly upset and not even all that surprised. “No one told me you were here.”

  Whatever possible answers to Luke’s question flickered through Esther’s mind, all she could say was the plain unvarnished truth. “I came here to tell you I’m having a baby,” she said.

  It’s interesting to note her choice of words. She did not say “I’m in trouble,” or “I missed my period,” or even “I’m pregnant.” She said “I’m having a baby,” which clearly revealed her intention to bear this child, and Luke, whose very personal brand of empathy generally allowed him to hear everything that a speaker intended and often a great deal which the speaker wished to conceal, understood from this moment on that the woman who was, to that point, the love of his life and who was, arguably, the love of his entire life, was about to take a step into a realm which every fiber in Luke’s being forbade him from entering himself.

  He was silent for a few moments. “I remember waiting for him to say something,” Esther r
ecalled, years later. “I remember the pot smell mixed with the come smell and the dirty laundry in that room, and I remember Mr. Bruce standing behind me just touching me lightly on the small of my back because I think he was worried I might pass out, and I remember poor Boona jiggling his knees, he was so nervous. But most of all I remember Wendy Crabtree’s black eyes darting little looks at me and this mysterious little smile on her face. I remember wanting to kick her, which was nothing I had ever felt about a human being before, or even a stray cat.”

  Luke finally took Esther to a nearby Chinese restaurant near Sixty-third and Stony Island Boulevard, a little storefront joint beneath the timbers and iron of the overhead El tracks. Esther was content with a pot of tea but Luke, who ate with huge, though infrequent bursts of appetite, ordered egg rolls, wonton soup, sweet and sour shrimp, and several other items from the menu, asking that they all be brought out at the same time. The table was laid as if for a feast for ten people; Luke gave no sign of noticing that his girlfriend wasn’t eating a bite.

  Luke ate ravenously. His chin, which was sporting the beginnings of what even at its full flower would be a wispy beard, shone with grease. All his life, Luke had tried to control his environment by making certain his reactions to events were offbeat. Just as he dissolved into a fit of hysterical laughter when he learned of his father’s suicide, or stuck a penknife into the meat of his thumb when he learned that his second album for Epoch had sold one hundred thousand copies in its first week on the market, now Luke reacted to the news of Esther’s pregnancy with a display of gluttony that would have embarrassed King Henry VIII.