Lot Six

by David Adjmi

  Dedication

  This book is for my mother.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Book I: Gimme Fiction

  White Like a Ghost

  The Great Black Pit

  Not While I’m Around

  Somebody’s Watching Me

  It’s a Sin

  Lot Six

  Book II: A New Past

  Eurotrash

  Frames Within Frames

  The Long Con

  Save Us, Superman!

  Book III: At Sea

  L’Hommelette

  Galaxy

  Book IV: The Future, Again

  Twin

  In Dreams

  The Champ

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  THIS IS A work of nonfiction. That said, memoir is not documentary realism, and subjective impressions are, well, subjective (and filtered through one’s own biases, both conscious and not). I have, in the writing of this book, tried to give the most accurate, good-faith accounts of the events of my life as I experienced them or as they were told to me by people who were present. In some instances, I compressed timelines or altered the chronology of events for the sake of economy or to help with narrative flow. Some dialogue is verbatim, but other conversations were reconstructed. I wrote dialogue not for historical, recordable accuracy but rather to distill the essence of relationships or events as I perceived them.

  Most character names and some identifying characteristics have been changed in order to protect the privacy of individuals involved. In some cases, composite characters have been created. The names of my family members, childhood friends, and classmates and teachers from my yeshiva have all been changed. The names of my shrinks and people from my undergraduate and graduate-degree programs have been changed as well. While I have confirmed the details of events with many of the people who experienced them with me, this is my story, and reflects my feelings and memories.

  Book I

  Gimme Fiction

  White Like a Ghost

  I WAS FROZEN SOLID in the bucket seat of my mother’s Impala. It was summer, a Wednesday afternoon in the year 1979, and I was eight years old.

  “What the hell is wrong with this drivah?”

  My mother honked her horn. She was short and had to rig her seat so she was practically bumping up against the steering wheel. She honked the horn again. “Come on, jerk!”

  We were driving down the Prospect Expressway toward The City to see a play called Sweeney Todd. I’d seen the commercial on television—thirty wildly persuasive seconds of Angela Lansbury jouncing around with a funny hairdo and a bunch of people screaming for pie—and begged her to take me. She’d taken me to my first Broadway musical for my fifth birthday, and after that it became a regular thing. We’d get discount tickets at the TKTS booth for whatever was on that day—usually tourist-baiting stuff, people tap-dancing and singing about chasing the blues away or doing the hanky-panky. I loved seeing Gregory Hines tap dance, and Ann Miller canter across the stage of the Mark Hellinger Theatre in a cherry-red-spangled girdle. I loved the booming sounds of the orchestras. I sobbed uncontrollably at the ending of The Wiz. I was enamored of intensity and greatness, and I ached to be in Manhattan.

  I cracked the window open a peek.

  “Roll that window back. Aren’t you hot?”

  “No, I’m freezing!”

  “It’s so muggy out.” My mother held her cigarette limply with the tips of her fingers so it tilted slightly downward. Every so often she would flick it into the ashtray. She’d spent the whole morning blow-drying her hair into a series of au courant flips and folds that were now dismantled by the blast of air conditioning, but she still looked beautiful. She was forty-three but looked a decade younger. “I can’t take this heat,” she said before taking a drag.

  When I was small, my mother was my ambassador to the outside world. She tried to bring me up as cultured—even if she didn’t know what culture was, exactly. In some respect, she liked the idea of culture the more she was deprived of it: attrition lent it a mystique. She dropped out of high school at sixteen to marry my father and have kids, but always felt a lingering sense she’d missed out on something, some vital part of the world. She called this thing Culture, and it became a North Star for her, a guiding notion for what life could offer.

  My father didn’t care for her formless acquisitions of culture and art. He resented her for wanting to eat at nice restaurants, ceremonies he thought absurd. “You can’t eat atmosphere,” he’d admonish. “I can,” she’d rejoin, momentarily possessed by a sudden imperial calm.

  I took after my mother in this way. I was strangely epicurean from a young age: I could eat atmosphere. My father never took me on his fishing trips from Sheepshead Bay with my older brothers but I was glad. I hated the green murk and stink of oceans. Nature affronted me; I wanted culture. But I had the same problem as my mother: I didn’t know what culture was, and I never sought clarification. Asking questions felt like a breach of etiquette and I wanted to have good manners.

  Together, we wandered the halls of museums, the lobbies of fancy hotels. With her last pennies my mother took me to voguish restaurants uptown, places like Sign of the Dove and the Quilted Giraffe. As we sat in beautiful straw-backed chairs sharing a meager pasta dish (she couldn’t afford two entrées) I felt lifted above my station, away from the hoi polloi, a citizen of the world. Other times, culture bestowed a different sort of gift. Near the entrance to the Met was a statue of Perseus displaying the beige disembodied head of Medusa, writhing with snakes. Seeing it for the first time—I was no older than six or seven—I felt something stir awake in me, something that felt like a soul or a spirit. The statue was strange and frightening, but I knew it meant something. I knew there was a reason it was being displayed in this magisterial palace of art, even if my powers of discernment were too puny to figure out why. Why did people paint these paintings, and sculpt statues from beige blocks of marble? Were they depicting something about life and the world? Was it a kind of reality? An escape from reality? “Medusa,” said my mother somewhat approvingly after checking the title. “From mythology.” I knew mythology was a kind of history, a momentous doctrine—was that history mine? She took my hand and ushered me through atriums lit with skylights leading to rooms and tranquil hallways that led to adjoining rooms and tranquil hallways. We glided from marvel to marvel, past pagan images of gods and thunderbolts, cherubim and angels weeping for humanity. As a child I had a tendency toward the occult—I believed museums were repositories of sacred holy things. I developed an almost worshipful craving for anything urban, which I associated with God.

  Each time my mother drove us down the Prospect Expressway I could feel my tiny fishbowl existence begin to open and expand. My excitement manifested as sickness: a queasy feeling of dread, like my insides were being spun through a centrifuge. Impressed by my sensitivity, my mother broadcast aloud her affirmation at each phase of my mounting anxiety, charting it as if monitoring an EKG: “Your face is all flushed.” “You’re excited, huh.” “You love The City, don’t you!” If my anxiety was pitched too high she’d warn that I was getting “overstimulated,” a word she used a lot. I couldn’t tell if being overstimulated was a good or a bad thing, just as I couldn’t distinguish between excitement and dread: I was still learning to map physical sensations. Everything was foreign to me, even my own intimate life.

  My mother parked the car at a lot on Forty-Fifth Street, and we walked next door to a hole-in-the-wall named Mackey’s where we picked up our tickets. She was right, it was muggy. We waded
in the steaming heat up Broadway toward the Uris Theatre—past the Paramount Plaza and the Winter Garden Theatre and the foreboding-sounding Zum Zum. Past giant marquees of women shimmying in towels, and storefronts bearing porno placards of nude people with fig-leaf pasties. Streets billowed exhaust from steel grates, litter flapped and flew in small vortexes. There was garbage everywhere. A putrid stench rose from sidewalks. But it all felt exalted. Even in the grime there was a sensuous brilliance and life. I couldn’t help but measure myself against the grandeur of Midtown. In Brooklyn I felt hidden—even on the vast colonnades of Ocean Parkway I felt camouflaged—but in The City things pulsed almost too intensely with life. I felt my own sickly pallor against bright orange scaffoldings. I felt my tininess against its monuments and massive architecture. I saw myself reflected in the blind gaze of buildings, the unforgiving blank stare of glimmering black glass: I was a faded spirit, barely a person.

  Inside the theatre, the usher led us to our orchestra seats and I could tell right away something was off. Instead of the usual big brassy overture, creepy organ music played. Instead of a curtain hung a giant burlap map that, with the earsplitting shriek of a factory whistle, came crashing to the ground. In the sudden blackout human specters emerged. My heart jumped. I felt dizzy, like I might faint. The specters sang a song about a man named Sweeney Todd who was a homicidal maniac. Was this the right play? Where was the pie lady from the commercial?

  When the specters finished their terrifying song I started to calm down. The story began to unfold. We learn that Sweeney was a man set up by a corrupt judge. The judge trumped up charges that would get him imprisoned for life, giving the judge free rein to rape his wife. The wife then killed herself, and the judge made their infant daughter his ward while Sweeney languished in prison. But now Sweeney is out of prison. He rents a barbershop above Mrs. Lovett’s floundering pie shop (the part from the commercial, I was in heaven) that hasn’t been rented in ages, not since the past tenant, Benjamin Barker.

  We find out Sweeney is Benjamin Barker: he’s given himself a new identity. If Benjamin was a victim of cruel uncaring humanity, Sweeney will dispatch revenge. He finds his old razors and gets Mrs. Lovett to help him murder the evil judge by luring him to the upstairs room for “a shave”—but the plan gets botched, and when it does, Sweeney starts to splinter with rage and anguish.

  In a song called “Epiphany,” he sings about a hole in the world—he describes it as “a great black pit.” The pit is filled with “people who are filled with shit.” And in the song, he proceeds to eviscerate in a single sweeping gesture all of humanity—insisting that human beings are “vermin” and “full of shit” and that every single person in the world deserves to die. I didn’t know what I was watching exactly, but I was mesmerized. I watched Sweeney inveigh against humanity, tracing the shifting contour of his emotions with the same EKG precision my mother used to chart my own: rage morphing to anguish and then grief, feelings lapping and bleeding imperceptibly into one another like waves in a violent storm. One second he was shrieking about killing everyone, the next he was practically sobbing in despair. The music kept changing, the tempo kept slowing and speeding up, like he was running frantically toward and away from something at the same time. It was a dirge, a death march, a nervous breakdown. The whiplash shifts in it reflected Sweeney’s brokenness—but who could blame him? It was stressful to be imprisoned on false charges, and to know that your wife was raped and then committed suicide. It was stressful to know that the rapist who caused all this was an incommensurably powerful judge who was holding your increasingly nubile daughter prisoner in a small room.

  Midway through “Epiphany,” Sweeney began to swagger down the length of the proscenium. He brandished his razor and started mocking all the people who’d paid good money to see this play: Did we want a shave too? Because we could have one and he’d give it to us gratis! But he wasn’t saying it as a favor, he was screaming it derangedly: the cords in his neck were popping as he called us names like “bleeders” and screamed, “WELCOME TO THE GRAVE!” Even as the giant razor glinted and his breaking of the fourth wall violated and scared me I was able to extend myself in some wordless salvo of sympathy. Sweeney threatened to slash my throat, he made sickeningly inappropriate eye contact with me, but it was because his dignity was tarnished. He was hurt—hurt and emasculated by a corrupt, uncaring, morally bankrupt world. I knew that from how he sang “Epiphany,” from how the booming insistence in his voice melted into strains of raw grief and desperation, from the alabaster mask of his face, bled white and seared with pain. The world had broken its compact with this man. The world deformed him with its blatant injustice. But just as I found myself sympathizing with Sweeney, he’d lash out again with violent rage and my heart would pound with terror.

  By intermission the vomit was rising in my throat. “I don’t feel good,” I said. My mother felt my perspiring forehead to check for a fever and her face became engorged with panic: “You’re white like a ghost!” She proceeded to hector me for the next several minutes about leaving. “I don’t want you watching this thing,” she said. “It’s too intense for a child!” But as sickened and terrified as I was, I couldn’t bear to miss any of the second act. I grabbed inveterately onto the guardrail and threw a tantrum until she relented.

  After the intermission things got darker and crazier. Judges whipped themselves in frenzied obbligatos of self-disgust, people were made into beggars and sadists and whores and lunatics, and everyone ended up insane or shoved in an oven. When it was all over my mother dragged me out of the theatre and down Broadway by my elbow.

  In the car ride home she was uncharacteristically silent. She lit a Kent 100 and the car filled with gray smoke. The play did not tender for her the pleasure, the escape she seemed to want, and I was hurt that she was incapable of seeing what was good in it. “I loved it,” I said, clenching defensively onto my as-yet-unformed aesthetics. “Good for you,” said my mother in a staccato voice, puffing on her cigarette. It was the first hairline crack in our airtight relationship. Sweeney Todd made me physically sick, but somehow the ugliness in it was exquisite. It was like a magic trick: the ugliness was made into something achingly beautiful.

  I wanted that beauty in my life. I wanted to keep the experience of the play alive inside me. I carefully held my playbill on my lap with just the very tips of my fingers, anxious to keep my only artifact unsullied and unwrinkled. But as we crossed the bridge back to Brooklyn the golden spell cast by The City wore off—I could feel it fading, I felt it in me like a death. My temporary bond with culture could be severed in an instant. I belonged to something that didn’t belong to me. When I looked out at the dissolving skyline it was like a gate slamming shut—a kind of exile.

  In some way, exile was my native state. Exile was embedded in my very name. The word adjmi derives from the Arabic ajam, which loosely translates to “outsider” or, more specifically, “exile from Persia.”* Before that exile my ancestors had been exiled from Spain during the Inquisition, at which point we threaded ourselves through the Middle East—Persia, but also Syria, Turkey, Lebanon—and then we were exiled from those places too. My ancestry is muddled by these multiple exiles. I could never quite grasp where I was from, what I was, and no one in my family bothered to explain my own provenance to me.

  From eavesdropping I learned I was something called SY and that S and Y were the first two letters of the word “Syrian.” I inferred that SY had something to do with being from Syria, but it was a sort of mongrel identity (because they were Jews and also Arabs and also Spanish, sort of) and I knew that none of the SYs lived in Syria presently: that the SYs only became SYs once they got to America, when they were deposited on the concrete shoals of Ocean Parkway between Avenues I and V—concourses on which, over the course of the twentieth century, they built a tiny but potent subculture.

  The SYs were geniuses of retail. With this genius they built small empires of electronics and textiles that grew into bigger empires: C
razy Eddie, Guess jeans, Duane Reade. The empires made them very rich, and, with the money they made, they built million-dollar mansions. They had an enclave of summer homes in a glamorous part of New Jersey called Deal. They ferried themselves in Jaguars and Bentleys and Ferraris. They developed their own slang—a combination of pig latin, Arabic, and Brooklynese. They anointed themselves The Community. I knew at a very young age that The Community was a kind of terrible royalty, one with which we all had to curry favor. The rules for inclusion were tightly circumscribed. You had to dress and act a certain way. You had to consort with the right people. There was always the threat of exile: if you didn’t adhere to the rules you’d be Out of The Community—which to me seemed a fate worse than hell.

  My family was part of this community but we existed in the wafting margins. We weren’t Out of The Community exactly, we were on a cusp—but we couldn’t afford Jaguars and Ray-Ban sunglasses. We couldn’t afford holidays to Acapulco. My parents owned their own home, but the paint was chipped and the shingles were rusted and it was piled from ugly red brick. My neighborhood, Midwood, was the main hub for SYs, but we lived in an unfashionable part, on a side street near a sad-looking nursing home, and just behind our back fence was a bizarre abandoned railroad that seemed to go nowhere. Before I was old enough to grasp things like status I knew we were considered poor, and I knew our poverty was a source of shame. I’d catch glimpses of well-off Syrians in diners beaming with gold and silver; I’d spot them driving down Ocean Parkway in Porsches with slicked-back hair and sunglasses, decked out in Armani and Prada, and feel I was a barbarian, devoid of even basic humanity.

  My family had once been rich. I knew the lore from overhearing snippets of conversations. In the fifties, once they were married, my parents relocated from Brooklyn to Nashville. Dad partnered with his brother Joe to open a Walmart-type store across from the Grand Old Opry. The store was an instant hit. My father was a wealthy man. There was so much money he was swimming in it—piles of uncounted money spilled from drawers all over the house. My parents had three kids in rapid succession, my older siblings, and raised them as upwardly mobile Jewish Southerners. Fifteen years later, Dad wanted his kids to be part of The Community so he left the idyll of Nashville, moved to Brooklyn, and opened a new store in the Bronx. It was in an “up and coming” area called Fort Apache. But Fort Apache turned out to be not merely a bad neighborhood—it was the most crime-infested area in the entire country. In the late seventies it became infamous for its degeneracy; it was the subject of big-budget Hollywood movies, national news stories.