David Lazar

by Robert Kalich

  I’m looking at my collages and thinking how I was never turned on by legitimate business. I loved writing. Not that I ever made any real money at it. I spot the book jacket of the bestseller I wrote in 1981, based on my life, but even that book didn’t earn what I’d make in four weeks of handicapping. (When gambling beats art, something is certainly fucked up in this world.) I never wanted to own a company. Solomon Lepidus did. He was a man of many parts. Solomon would arrange for the Carnegie Deli to deliver three hundred turkey dinners to homeless people every year. I loved the guy. He became the biggest investor in my handicapping ventures. Unfortunately, he was a compulsive gambler. He was once so flush that he tried to buy the New York Yankees. For twenty-five years, the two of us shared laughs. Then things changed. There were only sixteen people at his memorial service, for a man who at one time could’ve run for mayor and won in a landslide. People like people on top. We’re all messed up in so many ways. Many are decent for a long while, but then, one day, even they have to look in the mirror.

  That’s what I’m doing.

  During those hard years living with my parents, I was without a clue as to how I was going to make it. I’m glad I had Solomon Lepidus as a friend. He would tell me the biggest mistake is overthinking the past and underthinking the future. Back then it sounded like gibberish, but now I understand what he meant. Don’t dwell, move forward is part of it, but more than that, he meant find a purpose, go to work, do something with the time you have. Before you catch your breath, it’s all over.

  This champion amongst men, Solomon Lepidus, introduced me to celebrities, politicians, federal and state judges, and everyone else who came into his steakhouse. Many times, I had dinner with “The prime minister”—Frank Costello, the American mafia gangster and crime boss. Once I was at the restaurant when Solomon was at another table having drinks with Matty The Horse Ianniello. I remember that night because Solomon had tears in his eyes. He had been told that Frank Costello had died.

  Everyone’s best friend, Solomon Lepidus, was larger than his criminal lifestyle. Four years after the prime minister died, Solomon was at his restaurant with president Jimmy Carter and Leon Charney, an authority on the Middle East. They were discussing and planning the early stages of the Camp David accords. My best friend was a whole lot more than lifestyle. I’m the kind of male who was immersed in gambling and problematic relationships. Solomon Lepidus was always immersed in much larger issues.

  And he was always making a point.

  “Davey boy, when you shake somebody’s hand and give your word, you’ve got to honor it—or else! And Davey boy, a word to the wise, never admitting to a lie is necessary for a whole lot of pants as well as skirts. Catch what I’m sayin’?”

  * * *

  Nathan Rubin is in my collage, as well he should be. Not only was he one of my limited partners, he was more than that. Month after month, at my studio apartment or his Park Avenue triplex, he mentored me in handicapping college basketball. He talked; I listened.

  Rubin started out an orphan. When I knew him, he was seventy-six, cold, white-haired, dapper, and had done just about everything there was to do. He had accumulated dollars to fulfill the American greed dream, but in Rubin’s veins was an insatiable need for more. Always more dollars.

  Nathan Rubin worked with Meyer Lansky, the mob’s accountant, and, back in the day, came up with scamming race tracks by past posting through wire services. Past posting means placing a bet after the game or race has started. The dynamics have changed. I have an edge and I take advantage of it (past post). It can get you killed. But beyond tampering with wire services and past posting, Rubin was the king of the card counters. By the time he was real cold, he had already been banned from casinos from Las Vegas to Monte Carlo, so he started hiring and tutoring young men who had attended MIT, Harvard, Princeton—people like John Talbot and Tobias Roth—how to count cards to improve their odds at winning blackjack. When Las Vegas went to two decks for blackjack, Nathan Rubin still figured out ways for his people to gain an edge.

  “Davey Boy,” Solomon Lepidus told me more than once. “There’s no one like Nathan Rubin. He’s the best card player and proposition man in the gambling world, and let me warn you right now, Davey Boy, he’ll screw you out of your first dollar and your last.”

  Solomon and Rubin were rivals, friends, great enemies, but Rubin considered Solomon a sucker. In all the years I knew them, not once did Solomon ever win a proposition bet from Nathan Rubin.

  Nathan Rubin would drill into me day by day, hour after hour, what to look for in handicapping college basketball: senior backcourts, conservative game plans, no playground players, revenge games. A team that doesn’t turn the ball over. A fan base that goes crazy.

  “Everyone’s a sucker, Sonny. That’s the main thing to know. In New York, suckers like to bet the games played at the Garden. They’d rather bet on St. John’s against Syracuse or Georgetown than Miami of Ohio against Central Michigan or Kent State against Bowling Green. That’s wrong thinking, Sonny. You should always look for the conferences that people don’t have exposure to. You want an example? Well, here’s one. The Mid-American Conference. The players are three stars, sometimes two. No five-star McDonald’s All-Americans playin’ for Bowling Green or Toledo or Eastern Michigan. Sixteen schools in the Mid-American. You should study and learn as much as you can about both the east and west divisions. That’s a lot of schools and games without much exposure, and even more importantly, these kinds of teams do not have the athletes to run up scores that go into the eighties or the nineties. These colleges are lucky if they reach sixty-five or seventy points in a game. And that’s what you want. You want scores that are as low as possible. Rather than Duke or North Carolina or Kentucky or Kansas that score in the nineties and win by twenty, you want teams that score in the sixties and seventies and win by five. You grab the short in those games, Sonny. Take your seven, eight, nine, or eleven points, and you stick with the short for a lifetime. You can’t go wrong. Get what I’m sayin’, Sonny? You want great coaches with mediocre players. Coaches who make sure that their players know the fundamentals. Play the game basket to basket. Don’t turn the ball over. That’s why you always want a junior or senior backcourt. Give me a four-year senior over a freshman hotshot every time. And let me tell you something else. You find a wide-bodied, big assed, six-five center who takes up space, has a touch, is hungry to rebound and who anchors his team, and you’re getting a whole lot more value than some seven-foot drink of water who’s coming out of high school with the reputation of being the next Wilt or Jabbar or Russell.

  “There might not be any bandboxes left, Sonny, but the students attending the games make a large difference. Home courts, Sonny. Home courts with points in a ‘revenge game’ and you got a live short. Always look to take the points, Sonny.”

  Nathan Rubin was always mentoring me. Sometimes trying to steal from me but all the time fascinating me. Several times, when I was at his Park Avenue triplex, he would be on the phone, negotiating a deal that I couldn’t even dream of doing. In the middle of one those negotiations, with his britches off, his spindly legs bare, his knee socks and candy-striped boxer shorts all there was between him and embarrassment, Margaret, his housekeeper, walked into the room.

  Rubin took the telephone from his ear.

  “Margaret, how much did you pay for the Mop & Glo, the Mr. Clean, and that can of Ajax? Do you have receipts?”

  Rubin studied the receipts.

  “That’s way too much money!” he screeched. “I told you, Margaret, don’t shop at Gracious Home! You should have gone to that bodega on 1st Avenue. They’re at least ten percent cheaper!”

  He then stamped his feet on the parquet floor and glared at his housekeeper.

  “Margaret, you know I’m going to have to take the $1.72 difference out of your paycheck.”

  Then Nathan Rubin calmly returned to his phone call.


  He lived in high society as well as the low. He was the CEO of Metropolitan Cable, owned a chain of funeral parlors, a fleet of sanitation trucks. I think he was connected to The Horse in his DEUCE prostitution business. It’s possible that Solomon was, too. During the early seventies, Solomon even offered me a piece of The Peppermint, as sleazy a bar as Violette Leduc could ever have conceived. Rubin also owned parking lots, which decades later were converted into seventy-

  story office towers. He had his port-wine-stained forearms in much more stuff. This cantor’s son was traumatized at the age of eight when he accidently murdered a pigeon with a clothes hanger in Strauss Park. Even more traumatized at the age of eleven, when a window washer lost his footing and splattered in front of me, but ironically, instead of feeling horrified by Nathan Rubin and Solomon Lepidus, I remained enamored with them for far too long.

  Though they were both deceased by the time I met Elizabeth, she has told me more than once that I should stop idealizing them.

  CHAPTER 9

  From the beginning with Debbie Turner, whom I met in my second stint at Welfare, it was as if I had found just what I was looking for after Leslie: the closeness, the true friendship, the feeling that every minute not shared was a minute not worth living. Every weekday morning, I woke up in a rush to brush my teeth, splash my face with cold water, slap on some deodorant, hurry uptown so that before the day started, the case histories and pendings began to pile up on my desk, the drug addicts started depressing me, the infirmed started to take their toll so that I would have those ten to fifteen perfect minutes with Debbie Turner. She was as much a pick-me-up as a five-hundred-foot homerun by Mickey Mantle had been during my teenage years. From 7:45 A.M. to 8:00 A.M., it was Debbie Turner time. Deb was always hitting one out of the park and in those days, months, and for those first two or three years, she was—in capital letters—MY HAPPINESS PILL. I breathed her in. Gulped her down. Listened to her cackle. Gazed at her open face. Just Debbie saying “hi” to me was a joy.

  Debbie Turner was a radical change of pace from everything else in my life. As far away from my tribulations as Central Park in June is from Central Park in January. Debbie Turner was needed.

  “Debbie, here’s all you’ve got to know about my marriage to Leslie: she and I went down to City Hall. We got hitched. We left the building. Leslie wanted Japanese. I wanted Chinese. We got into a fight. Leslie got in one cab. I got into another. We didn’t see each other for two weeks. That was as close as we ever got to marital bliss.”

  Debbie’s supervisor, Boris Tuttle, your typical civil servant broke in. “I hate interrupting your conversation with Mr. Lazar, Ms. Turner, but one of your pendings is in in-take and needs your immediate attention.”

  “I’ll walk with you, Debbie.”

  I didn’t spell it out to Deb, but the reason I accompanied her wasn’t only that I wanted to be with her. The in-take section was in the basement, an isolated area where drug addicts out of Rikers prison were hanging out. Several violent incidents had taken place there

  that month.

  “You must understand, Debbie,” I said. “Pending cases are impossibly difficult. Some people who apply for assistance are desperate. Don’t waste time asking recipients a lot of policy questions. Just find out how you can help. And help.”

  “Oh, my God!” Debbie gasped. I turned around. Twenty feet from us was a woman lying on the floor, having a seizure. Several clients were milling around her and staring. Two senior caseworkers were standing there chatting. Not doing a damned thing. I raced over. Grabbed my wallet out of my back pocket. Shoved it into the woman’s mouth. When she continued having difficulty with her breathing, I started to give her mouth-to-mouth. Didn’t know exactly what else to do. I conjectured it was either an epileptic seizure or a heart attack. I guessed an epileptic convulsion.

  Thirty minutes later, Debbie said, “That was amazing, David! You were fantastic! I’ve never seen anyone do anything like that before!” Debbie gazed at me. I never forgot her gaga look.

  When I was with Debbie, I was happy. What made me sad was her leaving the office on Friday afternoons. Those long weekends when I wouldn’t see her. Remembering those gaga moments until the following Monday.

  How stupid I was. I felt that our Mondays through Fridays would never end. We’d go for Chinese on 86th Street and Lexington.

  “Here’s a story on Solomon Lepidus, Debbie. This happened the first time we had dinner together. He said, ‘Davey Boy, you’re always carrying a book.’”

  That one was a philosophy book with in-depth looks at Heidegger, Nietzsche, Beckett, Camus, Kierkegaard, and others I revered. “Solomon grabbed the book from my hand, read the jacket cover, looked up. ‘You think these guys can teach you something that I can’t?’ I just stared at him, Debbie. What could I say?”

  We would thrill each other just by being together—no touching, no nothing, just talking. Debbie would talk effusively about her fiancé, Michael Edison. “Michael and I spent the weekend at his married sister’s house. We read, discussed the books we were reading, and I did a New York Times crossword puzzle while Michael read the Science section. We did a little cooking and after dinner, Michael discussed with his sister their plans for their annual summer getaway. You know what I loved the most during the entire weekend? Getting on the floor and playing with Alice’s children.”

  Once Debbie started talking, she couldn’t be stopped. For me it was relaxing, something about her nasal voice, her conversations, invariably put me close to sleep. What awakened me was when I looked across the table, and my eyes traveled to Debbie’s bosom.

  Three years later, I attended her wedding on her parents’ front lawn in Bethesda, Maryland. She and Michael moved out of New York. Nine months later, she called me.

  “I can’t live with Michael any longer. I think of you all the time.”

  Debbie Turner moved in with me. I remember our first kiss as if it was yesterday. It took place on my rooftop. We were no longer

  just friends.

  Soon after, what we shared began to disappear, not all at once, of course, but a scintilla at a time. How sad when that happens. I began to feel more alone than I had before it all had happened. I felt as if I would have been better off if it had never happened. Debbie Turner was my happiness pill, but once Debbie’s friends started to show up in New York, those women from Bethesda and Silver Spring and all those other hamlets with white picket fences and families of brats, that’s when I lost it. Debbie would plan for baby showers and gossip with her friends about girl–boy relationships for hours at a time. That was her life. It wasn’t mine. Her friends would want to go on vacation with us. In the middle of winter, I would be freezing my nuts off out on my rooftop with my nine phones, getting lines and making bets.

  “Debbie, I can’t take a vacation. I’m working. You think I’m going to leave the city to go on some freakin’ ski trip in Aspen?”

  I wanted to work. When you go to war, you don’t take a vacation.

  And then one day, Debbie said, “I don’t deserve the way you’re treating me, David. I’ve acted in good faith, but I can no longer take the way you are. It’s not that you’re difficult. I can take difficult. It’s that you’re pathological.”

  With that, Debbie Turner diagnosed my illness the way a

  twentieth-century clinical therapist would. One frontal assault espoused. One after another. Each candid gripe cutting me to the core. And she was correct about everything that she said. There wasn’t a foul tip that I disagreed with. What could I say? I kicked in our Zenith television set when I lost a Wichita State basketball game in the final seconds. I cursed out Debbie’s best friend, Randy Rich, when she entered my man cave while I was holding my breath, clutching my silver dollar, waiting for a final score. I stopped making love to Debbie when I lost a big game. Sometimes for a whole week. Sometimes for a whole lot longer. I felt dead inside. There was nothing to make
love with. And there wasn’t a reason to hold Debbie’s hand either when my heart was ice.

  Things didn’t get better.

  “Maxine, tell Solomon I have to talk to him. It’s important.”

  “How you doin’, Davey boy?”

  “Solomon, Debbie and me are havin’ a terrible time! She’s threatening to move out. You gotta talk to her!”

  “I’ll schedule her in for Thursday for lunch...Oh, before you go, Davey boy, how we doin’ on the games?”

  I called Solomon again on Tuesday.

  “I told you. Thursday I’ll have lunch with Debbie. Don’t worry. Oh, Davey boy, you got anything special for tonight?”

  I called again on Wednesday.

  “Are you nuts, Davey boy? Stop worrying.”

  On Thursday Solomon called me. “Davey boy, I forgot all about it! Today I’m having lunch with President Jimmy Carter. I can’t see your girlfriend. I can’t see her tonight either. I’m having a problem with my factory in Puerto Rico. I must get there tonight. Oh, before I go. Got anything special coming up?”

  Three days later, I heard from Solomon.

  “I just returned from Puerto Rico, Davey boy. What’s doin’?”

  “Debbie’s moved into the Franconia Hotel.”

  “That’s too bad. How we doin’? Keep pickin’ winners, Davey boy. Take it easy.”

  After Debbie moved into the Franconia Hotel, I stood on the icy street outside of the crummy building every weekend night that winter, waiting to see what time she got home or if not home, to see where she was going, who she was snuggling up with, and when I found out, I acted like the barbarians I worked with. I threatened the fellow’s life! I was as bad as that. I’m not going to give myself the benefit of the doubt. I was an animal. I was as sick as any of my mobster friends. “Pathological!” That’s what Debbie called me.