Lot Six

by David Adjmi

  Therapy, said Dr. Weinberger, was predicated on my openness and trust, neither of which I was prepared to offer up, so I resigned myself to clocking in and out, like it was some grunt job. After a few sessions, though, something changed and I felt a shift in my attitude. I began to look forward to going to therapy. I liked his grand home in Ditmas Park. I liked being asked to talk about myself. I came to see how rare a thing in life this was, for someone to devote himself entirely to you, to your problems, your thoughts and concerns. And though I still didn’t trust Weinberger and saw him as an emissary of the yeshiva, the project of analysis became interesting to me. It was an opportunity, the kind of opportunity that hadn’t ever presented itself to me before, and I wanted to avail myself of it.

  Over the course of several weeks, my silence in the therapy gave way to long winding soliloquies that sometimes took bizarre turns, leading me in directions that pointed to terrain that was utterly foreign: the terra incognita of the self. I found that I didn’t exactly know what I thought or felt about things, and, moreover, that I was curious about these aspects of myself. Who was this person speaking through me? I didn’t recognize him. The unconscious began to fascinate me—it took the place of what I formerly believed was a soul.

  I started to trust Weinberger. I realized I liked him. He was the first adult I’d ever known who didn’t seem damaged or enraged or disturbed, who spoke to me in measured tones, and didn’t shout back if I said something deliberately inflammatory, or baited him with some dumb remark that smacked of arrogance or insult or mawkish exhibitionism. He could deal with me because he was a grown-up—he didn’t feint at some notion of being a grown-up; he didn’t require my obedience to feel strong. He was the first person I knew whom I could maybe even respect—whose love, should I garner it, would mean something. Because unlike my parents or teachers, this man seemed to know something about life. He knew about literature and art and esoteric films. He had access to echelons of culture that eluded me—and now I wanted culture again. I needed something to take the place of religion, the heritage I’d rejected.

  Weinberger was part of that generation for whom going to art films represented something about who you were, who felt an anthropologic duty, practically, to watch Japanese films and Godard and to read Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris. Art films were art because they were outside the mainstream current; they were deeper and more mysterious—just like Weinberger was deeper than the people from my school or in my family.

  He was particularly obsessed with a film called Woman in the Dunes. When I told him I never heard of it, he faked stupefaction: “You never heard of Woman in the Dunes? It’s one of the great films!” I went to Avenue J Video to rent Woman in the Dunes, but they had no idea what it was. The rarity and specialness of it made the film seem like manna from heaven.

  Little by little, our relationship began to satisfyingly deepen. I felt myself becoming Weinberger’s protégé. I became infatuated with how he spoke, how he thought and acted. I got attached to his tics and quirks of behavior the way one does with a lover. His expressions never ceased to be of interest to me: sometimes he was lost in a rhapsody of tender contemplation, other times his features cinched in a sort of scientific inquiry. When he got excited about something his face widened as if it were a piece of Silly Putty. He’d taunt me with his knowledge, speak in discursive registers. He wanted to impress upon me the fact that a world existed outside of the tiny bubble of the yeshiva, and that that world was compelling and interesting. Weinberger was pressing me ever forward, pushing me to apply to colleges, to plan for my future. I never believed I could have a future. Previously, when I looked ahead I only saw a gaping featureless void, but now I started to make concrete plans. I decided to reject the path laid out by my father. I didn’t want to be a businessman or own a house in Deal—I didn’t want to be In The Community, period. I wanted a life of meaning.

  I thought I might go to NYU to study film, but Weinberger kept pushing for UCLA or USC. “The film industry is in Los Angeles,” he insisted. I was annoyed that he was coercing me to actualize a fantasy; maybe I didn’t fully believe I could make the fantasy real. And there was the issue of my execrable school record: I failed nearly all my classes for two semesters in a row. But Weinberger gave me incentive to succeed.

  “Get your grades up,” he said, “so you can get the fuck out of here.”

  The following semester I got straight As. I didn’t have to work hard to do it, I just memorized things they said to memorize and regurgitated those things on tests. The Dumb Class was still a stain on my academic life, though. I’d never have the same status as Howie—who’d been asked to join Mrs. Foxman’s Masterpiece Theatre program, in which a select group of students were invited to see Broadway plays for free. He did end up taking Brenda to see La Cage for her birthday that night, and she loved it, just as he imagined. She never found out about our abortive trip to Bloomingdale’s. Ellen Kaplowitz must’ve consulted a halachic text and found some arcane, mitzvah-bearing support for keeping her mouth shut. We never again discussed that afternoon, but my anxieties from the subway ride home lingered.

  Then one day, Weinberger, in the middle of a session, started asking me about sex.

  “Do you have particular fantasies?” he said.

  I felt the blood drain from the top half of my body.

  “No,” I replied. “I do not.”

  I’d so enjoyed the minutiae of psychotherapy that I’d forgotten all about the guard I meant to maintain. Now his agenda was surfacing. He’d just been patient, like a spider planning its predation—like the Theresa Russell character in the movie Black Widow who plans a whole elaborate seduction of Debra Winger as a prelude to killing her. But, in truth, I didn’t think Weinberger was trying to harm me. I believed, despite Howie’s situation with his crappy therapist, that Weinberger was trying to help me. I hadn’t ever trusted anyone enough to let them help me; it seemed impossible. I’d only known congenial diversions, pleasant escapes, but help—real, actual, tangible help—seemed so far beyond my grasp that it wasn’t ever a consideration. Weinberger was offering that help. I felt tempted to accept it, but I knew that despite my temptation, despite my need to trust another human being and Weinberger’s good intentions, I would never confess. If I spoke the words aloud, I’d be undoing the pact I made with myself when I was eight, when I swore to never become a Lot Six.

  I later learned the origin for that term from my brothers. It came from SY businesses. Lot numbers were the numbers affixed with little stickers to the backs of cameras and Walkmans—they gave salesmen a coded system, a quick way to negotiate prices with customers. Lot numbers were double the wholesale price, so Lot Six was code for three, an odd number—odd, as in queer. It wasn’t just an epithet for a gay person—it was a price tag, a declaration of value. And a Lot Six had no value. The identity, if I ever claimed it, would render me worthless. A confession to Weinberger would be an act of hideous violence against myself, like ripping open my stomach with my fingers and pulling out my own entrails.

  But he was determined to force my confession. He sat patiently, month by month, session after interminable session while I evaded his questions. I could be very skillful; I knew how to divert him, how to make him laugh. At times it seemed I’d gotten him to forget, the way everyone in my family seemed to forget when I was small. But Weinberger was nothing like the people in my family, and he had no intention of forgetting. The momentary lapses were a tactic: he wasn’t going to budge. He was going to make me say the thing that was so unbearable, the thing that would sully our enlightening conversations about foreign films and great books.

  I grew more and more silent. The more he wanted me to talk about sex, the less I wanted to talk about anything. Near the end of one unusually fruitless session, Weinberger produced a hand puppet. He asked if I would have the puppet talk to him, if perhaps it wouldn’t be easier to speak through a puppet than as myself. It wasn’t a terribly thrilling prospect but I wanted to please him. I cro
uched behind an armchair and managed, in my puppet voice, to eke out that I was attracted to men—because that was all I really knew or understood about my condition. I spoke the words he required of me and then it was done. Weinberger said he was proud of me, that it was hard to admit what I admitted and not to worry, it would all be okay.

  “How?” I asked him. Because I didn’t see how it would ever be okay. I would be ostracized from society. I would be alone for the rest of my life.

  “Well,” said Weinberger, “there are ways, that, with therapy, you can be made into a functioning bisexual. You’ll still feel your attraction for men, that won’t go away. But you’ll be able to get married.”

  “I will?”

  “Yes,” he said with a gentle smile. “You can have a family and you’ll be able to live a normal life.” His smile showed me that my anguish about being a homosexual was almost charming—because of course it would be okay. It was his smile that tendered just a little bit of the relief I craved, and I didn’t know how intensely I craved it until that moment. I’d resolved to live in darkness but now there was a little sliver of light: I could be a functioning bisexual! It sounded so elevated. And the way he spoke about it, there were multitudes of us, not just me. People could transform themselves, and it wasn’t a fantasy, and I wouldn’t have to hide or skulk or lie.

  At the beginning of junior year I was sparklingly restored, the prize student of the Dumb Class. Now that I was rehabilitated my teachers all loved me. I had a near-perfect GPA. I sent away for applications to film schools. It was all going swimmingly when, in the middle of chemistry class one afternoon, there was a knock on the door. Lonny peeked his head in. “David Adjmi?” he said. “Come out to the hallway, please.”

  I was genuinely surprised it was me he wanted.

  “And bring your books,” he added, stoically ambiguous.

  I packed my stuff and toted my backpack out into the hallway where Lonny was waiting for me. His shirt sleeves were carefully rolled up; his arms and skin had a depilated-seeming softness. His hair was longer than I remembered, it fanned out at the edges like a lion’s mane. “What’s going on?” I asked, in the same honeyed tone I used asking police officers for directions—for I always half expected to be arrested because of some arcane statute. I hadn’t done anything wrong but I was shaking.

  “You have a whole bunch of unexcused absences for swimming,” he said. “Do you have notes for these?”

  “I have an excused absence for the semester,” I told him. It was the truth. I had some medical excuse that got me out of swimming—fake, but at least I’d taken the trouble to procure it.

  “Yes,” he said, his shivering upper lip curling slightly, “but you still need to be on the bleachers.”

  “I have a doctor’s note.”

  “That exempts you from having to swim, but you still need to be at every class.”

  “But the smell of chlorine makes me sick.”

  “I don’t care,” he shot back.

  I felt blindsided. No one ever said anything to me about sitting in the bleachers. For a brief moment I considered arguing my case, but within seconds I could feel myself relax into the familiar dynamic. I was punished so frequently in those days, and for such trivial offenses, that my recidivism was practically mandatory—how else could I receive the new punishment? For my truancy, he said, I would receive a two-week in-house suspension. I didn’t know how this was meant to punish me. I had thirteen classes to keep up with, I’d just turned a roster of failing grades into a 4.0 GPA—was this really the time to unearth my wanton neglect of swimming? Was there no fungible alternative? I asked if I couldn’t be punished in some other way but Lonny wouldn’t hear of it. The suspension was to take place effective immediately.

  The school library, where I was to spend the next two weeks, was an airless tomb decorated with Republican-leaning periodicals and Zionist manifestos and some books. The librarian was an Israeli woman named Mrs. Wyzkowski who was a sort of jack-of-all-trades at the yeshiva. She was a substitute teacher, she organized Zionist campaigns, and did a little bit of everything. I had her as a substitute for a month when our math teacher had a baby, and found her extremely high-strung, even for the yeshiva. I thought it was odd she’d been made a librarian, as she was extremely loud. As a substitute teacher she bellowed instructions to us in her broken English as though she were at a naval base; every syllable was so exaggerated and guttural and fraught with earsplitting shrillness that, after a while, the words themselves dissolved into an abstract jumble of sounds or chords. In her role as librarian, though, Mrs. Wyzkowski assumed a surprising air of relaxed quietude. She kept busy organizing catalogues and listening to Country 97 at soft volume on her transistor radio. She sipped coffee from a Touro College mug, flipping through pages of Ladies’ Home Journal, clipping articles that held her interest and humming softly to Kenny Rogers. I found her fascinating to watch. When she walked to the card catalogue or to refill her coffee mug her hips seemed to land up near her shoulders, so their amplitude affected her movement—she didn’t walk so much as swivel, like John Wayne at high noon. The creaky torsion of her movement made her seem weirdly slow and out of synch with the world. I imagined her living on a frontier or as the heroine of a Western, making coffee, swiveling her tall hips, cranking her machine parts.

  The idea of a bewigged Israeli woman living out a frontier life appealed to me, but the appeal was not inexhaustible, and by the second day of the suspension I was feeling antsy. The school days were nearly eleven hours—a long time to be stuck in a room—and the anxiety I felt at missing my classes made my boredom all the more excruciating. I had to keep up my GPA if I wanted to get into a decent college, and though the Dumb Class wasn’t that challenging, it would still be a feat to make up two weeks’ worth of school.

  Lunchtime came but I wasn’t, as per the dictates of my punishment, allowed to leave the library, so I picked at a tuna sandwich I packed that morning. People from the Dumb Class showed up with doleful expressions and kind words about how they missed me in class. Lunch ended, and I sat in my chair and looked around at the Zionist books. Quite suddenly, the idiocy of my predicament filled me with rage. My punishment was insufferably stupid. The people running the school were stupid. They were sabotaging me, sabotaging my academic progress—my future—and for what? Sitting there in the tomblike library with its deathly shadows, as I watched Mrs. Wyzkowski and her matted ash-blond wig, I felt some ugliness in me start to get roiled up. I felt a nihilistic urge to destroy my life—it was blurred with my healthy urge to transform my life, to make it better, but now I wanted both at the same time. I wasn’t feeling logical. I was coming out of my skin. I threw my half-eaten tuna fish sandwich in the trash, and marched into my English class down the hall. They were discussing The Scarlet Letter (which, upon reading, I instantly appropriated as a cri de coeur and symbol of my own martyrdom). I knew Lonny would come for me, but I surrendered to the moment. Mrs. Mandel read passages from the book aloud and I luxuriated in the sublime prose. I laughed along with my classmates as we parsed the heresy and sprightliness of Hester Prynne’s bizarre daughter Pearl.

  Not twenty minutes into the class, Lonny was at the door with his rolled-up shirt sleeves and pinched face—but it was more pinched than usual. “Get your books!” he said, scowling, but before I could get my bearings, his hand was on the collar of my shirt and I was being half dragged toward the stairwell. “You’ve really screwed it up for yourself, Mr. Adjmi.”

  Lonny tugged me by the collar all the way down the stairs. I could feel his knuckles banging against my clavicle. It felt like a personal hatred. When we got to the bottom of the stairwell, I screwed up the nerve to ask him why he hated me so intensely, but it came out an ugly recreant cry: “Why are you doing this to me!?”

  “Because,” replied Lonny, his mouth puckered in an awful, sour-lemon expression, “you don’t follow the rules.”

  My mother was there within the half hour to meet with Mr. Winkler in his
office while Lonny stood nearby, his collar-tugging bravado from the stairwell now covered over with a sexless administrative judiciousness. He made his fingers into a steeple to project provident concern. Winkler dug up my school record, everything from kindergarten on, and commenced the prosecution, serially recounting the long history of all my torrential failings, my many and varied infractions from the age of six.

  The stereoscopic breadth of their inquiry was impressive: I cut school, I didn’t pray enough. I ate unkosher, hated sports, had bad grades. I was a delinquent—I was anathema. Winkler had the deportment of a barrister with a powdered wig or some Puritan bemoaning the iniquity of Hester Prynne. His long litany was tinged with a kind of regret, a spurious mix of sanctimony, rue, and caring—as if to say that yes, principals had moral obligations to care about students, and it was unfortunate that I was too besotted with Evil to be helped and cared for. His tone was so familiar; I recognized in it the passionless biblical instruction from my classes. Morality was something to be executed, like a gymnast sticking a landing. As Winkler inveighed, Lonny stood by him in his curled vulpine stance, head bowed, fingers still mated, nodding with his eyes squeezed shut like he was participating in an exorcism. I could feel him silently averring yes, yes to each one of Winkler’s towering assertions about my bad character. They could see I was worthless and wanted to be rid of me. They could see into my future, and the crystal ball was black and empty.

  I’d anticipated my mother getting all worked up by their vitriol, saying that they were right, that I was shameful and hideous—but to my shock she fought back. She began to petition them. “Why are you holding all of these things from the past against him?” she said. “What about the good he’s done? Why aren’t you bringing any of that up?” I hadn’t ever seen my mother stand up for me like this. And she wasn’t even annoying—she was sensible, persuasive! “No,” she went on, rimless glasses plastered to her nose, “you’re just condemning him!” Her face was glowing, almost burning. There was a new vitality in her limbs, her carriage, as if any minute she’d jump up from her seat and they’d need to restrain her. This was my mother! It was as if the woman I’d known all these years withdrew and vanished, then suddenly reappeared in this new strange form. As though I’d been drowning, and like Neptune or some creature from mythology she dove in and pulled me up from the bottom of the sea.