Lot Six

by David Adjmi

  Before I left for school, Richie, in particular, maligned me endlessly for my new elocutionary speech, and my stupidly expensive outfits. He was like Stanley Kowalski badgering Blanche: he thought I was vain and phony, he caviled nonstop behind my back (though someone, usually my sister, always spilled the beans about it) that I was “spoiled” and “thought I was all it” and better than everyone.

  Now I worried he would intercept my still-unformed self-creation. I didn’t want my new roommates to hear Richie’s Brooklyn accent. I didn’t want them to see his wardrobe that consisted almost exclusively of parachute pants and Hard Rock Cafe T-shirts—it would be like some vulgar part of me leaking out; it would thwart the impression I was trying to make.

  Mike and Leslie couldn’t have been more oblivious to my anxieties. They were like two small children waiting for Santa Claus: “Is Richie coming soon?” “We can’t wait to meet Richie, Dread.” I found their enthusiasm slightly bizarre. I didn’t know what prompted their excitement to meet my brother and didn’t know how to prepare them for their inevitable disappointment, so I said nothing and smiled, thinking they’d figure it out for themselves soon enough.

  The day of his arrival I waited outside my building and Richie pulled up in the Honda. It was a silvery metallic color. I touched the glittering hull, which was burning hot. He lowered the window and poked his head out. “Nice car, brother Dave!” He was smiling broadly.

  “How was the drive?”

  “My back is killing me. Hop in!”

  I opened the gate with the remote and got in on the passenger’s side. “I thought the interior was supposed to be leathah,” I said, slipping involuntarily into my Brooklyn accent like it was a worn glove. “You don’t need leathah,” he said, lightly castigating. “Be grateful you have a car.”

  Richie showed me some of the car’s features (automatic seatbelts!) and once we parked it in the lot I gave him a quick tour of the complex. Now that he was ambulatory he began to perk up—he seemed to bounce when he walked. “So, ya workin hard or hardly workin?”

  “I start summer school in two weeks.”

  “You look mahvelous,” he said, referencing some skit from television.

  “Thanks.”

  “You took that shit outta ya hair.” He was talking about the dreadlocks I’d managed to reverse. He peeked over the guardrail, down to the atrium on the first floor. “Wow, you got a pool? Very arp-shay, brother Dave!”

  I cringed at his Syrian use of pig latin. I hoped to God he wouldn’t speak it in front of Leslie and Mike, who were waiting for us up in the apartment. To celebrate his arrival, Mike cooked Richie some kind of creole gumbo thing he found in a recipe book, and Richie regaled them with stories from his trip—the crazy lady from the Greyhound bus, the tow truck driver who wanted to break his face. I cringed every time he spoke—“Tawk,” “cawl”—but his Brooklyn accent didn’t repel Mike or Leslie. They seemed utterly taken with him, even with his unfurling hyperactivity and pent-up energy from the long drive. They didn’t mind that he ate his food too quickly and spoke with his mouth full. They didn’t mind his frenetic assemblage of vignettes from Saturday Night Live or that he peppered every other sentence with some Rodney Dangerfield quote. We finished off a bottle of Chianti and Richie went to take a shower. “Dread,” beamed Leslie, “we love Richie!”

  “You do?”

  “I wish Richie lived with us,” chimed Mike.

  “I wish Richie were my brother.”

  “Yeah, he’s so giving and unselfish.”

  “Dread, he took two weeks out of his life to get you your car. That’s a great brother.”

  Mike and Leslie were evaluating Richie along the lines of some criteria that remained invisible to me, but now the scales were falling from my eyes. Why didn’t I see all the great things about Richie these two strangers could see? Why didn’t I appreciate him? He was a great brother. He did ride all the way across the country on that shitty bus to get my car. Why was I so snobbish and status-mongering? Why did I feel the need to distance myself from him?

  Los Angeles agreed with my brother. I’d never seen him so relaxed, so open. He seemed to love bunking with me in my downtown digs. I got him a little blow-up mattress and we stayed up late, talking and laughing. In the mornings he hung out by the pool. He went surfing with Mike. We all played volleyball at Venice Beach, then drove out to Malibu and watched the sun set. I felt a new intimacy with my brother. For most of my life I’d known him as someone very depressed and angry, but now he was almost childlike. He was so wide-eyed and in love with everything, like the world was brand-new. I realized I’d never taken the initiative to know him.

  I’d never thought about Richie as a person, not in a deep way; he was just my moody angry brother. When I was little he barricaded himself in his room for hours practicing chord progressions in Led Zeppelin and “Smoke on the Water,” cathecting the prison of his room with his own black magic. The wallpaper was diagrammed with maddening squares and diagonals, brown and black and white—their oppressive recurrence lent the room a perspectival chaos; it made your head hurt. If my sister’s room was florid and hysterical with its curlicued oranges and yellows, its overripe fruits and flora melting and grading unstoppably, Richie’s was marked by a masculine linearity and lucidity; the lucidity was its own oppression tipped too far, metastasizing into notes that spilled out of his Cerwin-Vega speakers, vibrating in waves throughout the house. I could feel the treble pulsing through my heart, my own biorhythms substituted with this other alien pulse as I lay night after night in sleepless agitation. I could only know my brother through the remote din of that music. I didn’t know how to get close to him. He was so angry. He hated his job; he hadn’t had a real relationship. Anytime he showed interest in some girl, my father would insist she was trashy and unworthy and a “whooah” until Richie’s confidence in his own taste was sufficiently shaken and he eventually stopped dating altogether. The resultant loneliness made him more sulky and tense than ever. He developed a distasteful brooding air that made people avoid and reject him, and the repeated rejections caused him to retreat from humanity. He bought a goldfish and became a vegetarian. He resigned himself to a monastic, joyless existence. When I started high school he bought a condo in Sheepshead Bay just up the street from Randazzo’s Clam Bar, and the El Greco Diner, and the erstwhile Lundy’s that was turned into an ill-attended, depressing weekend flea market where they sold clown paintings and scented candles and sweatshirts with phrases written in thick bubble script like Life Sucks and Then You Die! and Where’s the Beef? He bought new accoutrements for his fish tank, glowing fronds and colored pebbles. He curdled into the acceptance that life was to be hated, that it was loathsome. When I’d come to visit him in the condo, the force of his negativity was so overwhelming it left me sacked for days.

  But in Los Angeles I saw another side to my brother—and though every so often I’d find myself battered by his weirdly sudden chastisements (usually about my bad driving and inability to parallel-park), in general I was surprised by how pleasurable it was being with him. He could live vicariously through me, and if some of the vicariousness was fringed with slight resentment he could swallow those feelings for the time being and enjoy days at the beach and dinners in West Hollywood. He could marvel at the hills and canyons and sumptuous panoramas of Los Angeles. He was having fun. And it was fun being with him. And before I knew it I could feel myself sliding into the familiarity of the past—but not the ugly parts, the parts I liked; when I believed (because I did, at times) that there was a place for me in the world.

  I toured him around the USC campus one afternoon—which had mostly emptied out, but summer classes were in session. “The G’s here are unreal,” he said, as we passed two blond sorority girls sipping smoothies and wearing short shorts. He had a big silly smile plastered across his face. I showed him the Century dorm, and the film school, and the building Steven Spielberg donated that from an aerial height reputedly looked like a grand piano. As
I toured him through esplanades and manicured gardens, Romanesque buildings spilling with ivy and bougainvillea, I could feel my brother sinking into an Eden of repressed wishes. His excitement wound down. He got noticeably quiet. He seemed bombarded, crushed by all the beauty and possibility. He seemed sort of shrunken and lost, the way I used to feel when my mother took me to The City as a child. I could feel him pining for all the blond sorority girls he would never sleep with, the books he’d never read, the treasures life contained that would never be his. “You’re so lucky,” he said, his voice barely a whisper, his words filtered through a haze of unregistered disappointments and losses. He didn’t seem jealous, just sad, like his life was dissolving in front of his very eyes. “I never should have dropped out of school. That was so stupid.”

  “What school?” I asked—probably a little too bluntly, so that I broke the strange trance he’d fallen into.

  “David,” he said, “I went to Brooklyn College for a semester.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  He cocked his head, and his jaw slackened slightly.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, you were just a little kid then.”

  He said that in the middle of his first semester my father convinced him he didn’t need an education. My father told him colleges were like finishing schools and made you effeminate and that he needed to get a real job. Through his connections, Dad found Richie a job at a typical SY tourist trap: that once ubiquitous but now semi-obsolete camera joint that flanked the streets of midtown Manhattan. The salesmen worked grueling hours; there was no minimum wage; everyone worked on commission and got paid under the table. The salesmen were adjured like foot soldiers not to let customers leave the store until they were “milked for every penny.” Richie told me his boss trained him to con and scam. He’d never been so frank with me about his job, but everything about our relationship was suddenly different; he was being open with me—and not in an angry or sad way, he was just telling me the facts, like a journalist or anthropologist. He broke down for me the outlandish scams and rackets the SYs taught him—and not just the garden-variety sort like bait and switch, but other scams with little nicknames like “koshering a sale” and “building a sale.” Richie did everything he was told to do, for it was obedience that was demanded of him repeatedly. The obedience his boss demanded was a diamond-hard reflection of the obedience my father demanded; everything in his life was spindled around that core subservience. The obedience and the demand for it came with the tacit promise for love—but the promise never materialized, it hung suspended like a single quivering droplet.

  I felt sorry for my brother, but mainly I prided myself on being able to outsmart my father. After swearing up and down for years that he was sending me to college, he had a sudden change of heart when I got my acceptance letter. He said college was too expensive, he didn’t have the money for it. “You’ll figure something out,” he told me, but there was nothing to figure out: my financial aid was dependent on his income.

  My mother was, as ever, a bellwether for Dad’s shifting perspectives and opinions. She knew this was coming. She warned me to steel myself against his endless promises, but I wouldn’t listen.

  One night she sat me down in the kitchen. “I want to have a talk with you,” she said, pulling a cigarette from the case. My mother wasn’t particularly communicative—she never taught me life lessons, we never had family talks or meetings, so I found it odd she wanted to have one now.

  “About what?”

  “Your father has money.” She held the cigarette so it was flush with her mouth; gray smoke wafted in sharply vibrating diagonals. The smoke gave her the air of necromancy. “He can pay for your school.”

  “He said he doesn’t have it.”

  “He’s lying.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Just call him.”

  “And tell him what?”

  “That he needs to pay for your school.”

  Her expression was lacquered and cold, and the directness of her gaze unnerved me. The idea of commanding my father to do something for me, as she suggested, was an utterly foreign one. I had no sense of my own worth, and no sense of what role, if any, my father should play in my life. “It’s not his problem,” I told her.

  “Bullshit. A father is supposed to educate his children. That’s his job.” As she took a sharp drag off her cigarette, I noticed her hand shaking.

  “But what if he doesn’t have the money?”

  “He has it,” she said with defiant certainty. “He doesn’t want you to know what he has because he’s a con artist.” Her lips curled into an embittered smile. “Don’t you know that? Do you have any idea what I’ve been through with this man?”

  My mother liked to impress upon me the suffering she endured over the course of her life, but I never knew when she was being accurate or drawing impressionistically from a well of her own deep hurt. I knew the hurt could stain everything, warp the facts; sometimes I found her cynicism overdone. “Can’t you talk to him?” I asked.

  “He won’t listen to me. You have to do it yourself.” Her eyes gleamed with a tense, aggrieved worry. “You have to be selfish, honey,” she said. “Use him! Manipulate him!” Her voice was stern and coarse, like a steely naval commander, but she had to be that way, had to take the emotion out of it, bark orders—and she was giving an order, she was doing it for my own good; this was a lesson, a horrible lesson but one she nevertheless needed to teach, a lesson in vice.* “Be selfish,” she hectored again and again, though I knew she herself couldn’t really be selfish—it was more like she harbored a wish to become selfish, as if selfishness was a kind of justice she could mechanically enact, a very stubborn crank she could wind. She was just like those characters Barbara Stanwyck played in movies I devoured after watching The Lady Eve—women who were tough and hard-boiled, because the world was brutal, and they had to fight tooth and nail just to survive.* But under the tough veneers and iron determination the women were in extraordinary pain. “Don’t be stupid the way I was stupid,” said my mother, and for a moment all her coldness melted away. Her lips pursed, her eyes got glassy and red. “Don’t let him ruin your life,” she said, in a voice that was soft and thin like tissue. I knew in that moment she wasn’t just fighting for me, she was fighting for herself, fighting for all the failed battles that came before me. Her demand was so intense I felt myself meld with it, I felt my boundaries involuntarily relax. I wanted her to know I identified with her, that I could protect her from my father’s mendacity by seeing him the way she saw him.

  The night I called him I used the phone in my mother’s room, while she waited in the kitchen downstairs. I was terrified but I thought to use my terror to my advantage. I dialed, and when he answered I eked out in my shuddering voice a barely audible “Daddy?” as though I’d emerged from the smoke-dredged aftermath of an air strike. I made myself sound physically tiny, small and cowed. I exaggerated all my feelings of terror and anxiety and supercharged them, in improvisatory fits and starts, with a kind of derangement I suspected I always had in me but was now ripening into a kind of genius.

  The conversation involved, on my end, a great deal of heaving, and crepitations of spit against the insides of my cheek, and choking endlessly on a slurry of tears and snot. It wasn’t altogether a performance: I was the broken, hysterical man-child I was pretending to be. But I was able to use my despair for a strategic transactional purpose: I traded in my psychic pain for college tuition money.

  As I spoke and cried and pleaded and choked—exploiting my father’s idea that I was pure and therefore incapable of deceit—I imagined my mother listening in on the telephone line in the kitchen: I could see her in my mind’s eye smoking and worrying, her worrying eyes lit like braziers as I worked the tat* from the master bedroom, absorbing her lesson, my education. She symbolically stood over me, head crowned with cigarette smoke that sputtered in irregular ovals. She was there in the room with me, even if only in my mind’s eye as a pleading,
soundless omnipresence in her pink cotton robe and slippers. As I continued my weeping, extracting and extruding whatever weakness and pitiable feelings I could for my performance, I sensed there was something in my father that enjoyed the spectacle of my intense anguish. Maybe I exposed some broken part of himself he couldn’t access but through me. Maybe I made suffering seem rarefied and beautiful—the pain consecrated by the vividness of its rendering, like those paintings of Saint Sebastian pierced with arrows. I was pure because I was a tormented emotional wreck. If I was sick and broken enough, he would rescue me—if I could heighten things to the level of tragedy, my father would sweep in as the deus ex machina. And then he did. He made a sudden volte-face. “Okay, honey,” he said obligingly. “Don’t worry about nuthin. Daddy’ll take of everything.”

  “Thank you, Daddy,” I said, in my saddest, tiniest, most regressed voice.

  “Who does everything for you?”

  “You do,” I said, equal parts gratitude and opprobrium.

  “Who takes care of you?”

  “You take care of me,” I pledged. I hung up the phone, thrilled by my own mendacity and brilliance. With no real expertise to draw on and only vague instruction from my mother, I managed to con my own father. Now I knew I could make my way in the world. I was building a ladder to live a more refined and artistic life; my father was a rung in that ladder. I used him to escape him, to climb up and out of my life so I would never have to see him again. As far as I was concerned my logic expiated me. I never again had to think about the matter.