The Rich Man's Table

by Scott Spencer

  Ken made the introductions; if Sergei was a Fairchild fan, he gave no initial indication. “Ken wants me to get you back in shape, because you look terrible,” was all he said.

  “Oh, thank you, Sergei,” said Ken, “that’s so fucking diplomatic. And it just makes my job so much easier.”

  Sergei grabbed Luke, felt his spongy upper arms, poked the clouds along the horizon of his waist.

  “This is rock and roll?” said Sergei, frowning dramatically, shaking his anvil-shaped head. “Rock and roll is very simple business. You play your music and the youth want you to sex them up. If they are girls they want you to lick their pussies or stick your fingers inside them or take them in a car to the seaside with the top down and the moon up high and pull down their panties and spread their legs—”

  Luke started to laugh.

  “—and then hammer yourself into them, maybe to split them in half. You smile. Yes? But you know, you know. And even the boys in the auditorium—”

  “Oh my God, Ken,” said Luke, still laughing, “you didn’t tell him about the boys!”

  “Da! Even the boys must want you to fuck them, or to bring them to girls who they can sex in, or to teach them the best way. I have studied this. It’s the same in weightlifting.” Sergei lifted his shirt and showed his corrugated stomach, and thumped his hand on it as if sounding out the ripeness of a melon. “They don’t want to hear from some fat peasant with tits like a woman. They want a man of steel.”

  “Like Superman,” said Luke, trying for a straight face. “Superman in a porn flick.”

  Three days after the party, Sergei began working for Luke as a part-time security specialist, but primarily as a coach: Luke wanted to increase his endurance, in preparation for another world tour. He wanted to go back to the beginning, wherever that was—he couldn’t quite remember. His sense of his own origins was obscured by a thousand faces, a thousand beds, truckloads of money, shouts, spotlights; his ass had been kissed so passionately he sometimes forgot its function. More had happened than he could retain. The biochemical structure that enables us to hold on to our own experiences had been altered by the deluge of incident and information, and he was staggering around inside his own life like a man lost in a blizzard.

  After three months with Sergei, Luke was hard and lean. The veins and tendons of his neck were ropey, powerful; the rate of his heartbeat had decreased twenty-five percent. He was sleeping only four or five hours a night, living on seltzer, raw vegetables, unsalted cashews, and after a relatively flaccid few months at the conclusion of his Christian period, he was now sleeping with a bushy-browed waitress who worked in a nearby health food restaurant, a Nordic, neurotic marketing VP at Epoch, and a breathtaking six-foot Tanzanian model calling herself Orchid.

  I left the chapel

  Got hard as a rock

  See you later Saint Augustine

  That’s all folks. What’s up, Doc?

  Go Johnny go to the back of the class

  Taking Russian history and practical math …

  —“Back of the Class,” recorded 1987

  Luke and Sergei were practically in love, though there was nothing overtly sexual between them. They jogged, played paddleball, pumped iron. They went to plays, movies, and even braved a downtown dance club, where Luke was slipped in through a back entrance wearing denim overalls and a straw hat, and Sergei danced for an hour with Brooke Shields, until he ended up tearing the sleeve of her linen shirt when she tried to escape him. Luke cavorted so wildly that he wrenched his back and had to go with Sergei the next day down to the Lower East Side, for physical therapy in a turn-of-the-century Russian-style steam bath.

  Luke hadn’t realized there were so many Russians in New York. Sergei seemed to know them all—priests, shop girls, busboys, big punched-up-looking guys with broken noses and scarred eyebrows who were running scams in contraband furs, cheap watches, escort services. It was years before the disbanding of the Soviet Union, but suddenly it seemed the Russians were everywhere. Jewish organizations in New York sponsored quite a few of them. Some bought their way over; others seemed to have shadowy connections to domestic intelligence and law enforcement agencies. They were a lively bunch, to say the least. They didn’t waste any time, and they didn’t relax, or nap. In fact they barely slept. Their faces were as white as yogurt, their eyes were radioactive blackberries, their gestures were wild. They loved to party. No matter how hard their day’s work was, there was energy left for the night. They were mad about intercourse. Sex—the act of it, the search for it—was a constant topic among both the Russian men and the women. Relationships began and ended, often in a matter of weeks, or even a night. Women were slapped in front of dance clubs; husbands were crudely denounced by their wives with such pitiless accuracy that the dinner guests banged their fists on the table and cheered.

  It was into this atmosphere of expatriate acquisitiveness, caffeine, vodka, sex, and hilarity that Sergei’s beautiful wife, Katarina Gorky (a great-grandniece of the writer), arrived from Moscow that winter. Katarina was beautiful, petite. She had jet hair; pale, sun-starved skin; a few touching birthmarks; large, secretive eyes; nicotine-stained fingers. She was a physician, on tour with other Soviet doctors, meeting sympathetic doctors in New York, inspecting ghetto emergency rooms, spending her meager savings on presents for relatives and friends back home.

  A week into her tour she was found dead, bludgeoned to death in her room at the Hotel Iroquois in midtown Manhattan. Her roommate, not strictly a doctor herself, but a professor of chemistry who had finagled her way onto the junket, had just come back from a visit to the New York Stock Exchange. She found Katarina, unclothed, raped, drenched in her own blood. It was in all the newspapers, the national TV news, it was worldwide; and a day later Sergei, who had been identified by several hotel employees who said they saw him leaving Katarina’s room, was arrested and charged with murder.

  He was dragged out of Luke’s house on Washington Square with his sneakers untied, a Yankees jacket pulled over his head, like a mobster. Someone had tipped off the press. Cameras were everywhere. Strobe lights flashed in the townhouse windows, the grillwork of the parked cars. “Sergei! Sergei!” the reporters howled, as if Sergei knew them, as if he might hear their voices and uncover his face. They crowded close to him as the cops hurried him into the squad car. They were shoving cameras and microphones into his face. They were lucky he was cuffed; he could have broken any of them in half. The cops pushed his head down, ostensibly to keep him from cracking his skull as he got into the car. He was sobbing without restraint. The reporters could hear his cries from beneath the jacket. The streetlights came on, illuminating little swirling squalls of snow.

  The police, the courts, and the press were seeing eye to eye. Bail was denied because Sergei was liable to flee—not only the state, but the country. The Times ran a two-part profile of Sergei and Katarina: she the hard-line Brezhnev-style Communist, content in her cramped, cold-water life in a Moscow suburb; he the musclebound, skirt-chasing playboy, half- Ukrainian, his father shown in a grainy old photo waving a Nazi flag from a belfry of a village church as the Germans rolled through.

  Luke visited Sergei in Rikers Island, where he was being held while the DA prepared his case for the grand jury. Luke slipped in a side entrance and was allowed to meet with Sergei at an off-hour.

  Not even the bars could stop the slant of the sun

  Not the searches or seizures or hassles

  The fear in the air, the wasted lives

  Where justice is a whore dressed in tassels …

  —“Rikers Island,” recorded 1985

  Sergei was dazed, frightened, his spirit doused like a cigar dropped into a toilet. He could barely look Luke in the eyes. He kept glancing at the grim, mustachioed Puerto Rican guard, as if to ask if the time was up.

  “I need a lawyer, a very good lawyer,” said Sergei. His eyes were like those of a dying animal, full of uncomprehending fear.

  “Tell me what happened.
”

  “They want to send me back to Moscow. Do you know what will happen to me then? There is no fair trial for me in Moscow.”

  “Tell me. Tell me what happened.”

  Sadly, Sergei shook his head, his eyes filled with tears. “Somebody killed my wife, they killed my Katarina.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was it you, Sergei?” By now, Luke was whispering so low, the guard leaned forward.

  “No! I swear to the most holy God in Heaven and to all the saints, no. I would never do such a thing. Never.” He bowed his head against the Plexiglas divider; a tuft of his hair poked through the airholes.

  “Then who?” asked Luke.

  Sergei looked up, his eyes suddenly furious. “The Soviets, that’s who. The KGB. What do you think? Don’t you see the nose on your face?” Sergei’s spittle flecked the Plexiglas. “I am a diplomatic embarrassment to them. The most famous athlete in all of the Soviet empire and now I choose to defect. So?” He held his hands out, as if the rest were self-evident, an open- and-shut case. “They have no choice. They must discredit me. And spilling the blood of the innocent Katarina—what do they care?”

  And soon after that came American Shakedown. Six out of eight songs about Sergei. It was rushed through production and shipped into the stores—fifteen weeks in all. It was the first time Luke had tried to enter history with a song since the late sixties and, naturally, interest was keen. Lukologists who had fallen by the wayside during his twists and turns through psychedelia, irony, cynicism, bitterness, wealth, country music, Christianity, and silence were once again churning out articles, spewing out appreciation—he was back! the real Luke! (Which meant that their own youth might boomerang back as well.) Critics and acolytes were so impressed that once again Luke was trying to move mountains with his small, pleading voice, no one spent quite enough time questioning whether the object of Luke’s rekindled passions was someone who really ought to go free.

  He could move the weight of the world

  With his hands and his back

  A samovar Samson

  Whoa mama, that’s a natural fact

  Like Samson he tore down the unholy temple

  And the kings of the empire wanted to make him an example.

  Sergei, oh Sergei they’ve accused you of a murderous crime.

  But the blood’s not on your hands and I won’t have it on mine …

  —“Sergei,” recorded 1985

  Venerable Philip Adams, who had produced Luke’s first albums, and who had been locked out of the Luke business since the Steinberg era, was with Luke in the studio on West Fifty-fourth Street. Here’s what he told a writer for the little quarterly calling itself FIG (Fairchild Is God):

  I was there to keep track of costs for the Epoch brass, but everything else was in Luke’s control. It was Luke’s idea having me there. Maybe he was sending a message to Steinberg, maybe he just wanted someone he trusted. I was glad to do it, glad to work with the kid again.

  It was really his show, though. I can’t take credit for what I did not do. Lukey hired the musicians, chose the order of the songs, he just ran everything. He wanted some violins, he’d be on the phone. I had no idea where he was getting these names, but he seemed to know every musician in New York. He needed six cellos, six cellists were there within the hour.

  I must say, it brought a tear to an old man’s eye. No kidding. I couldn’t stop thinking what it was like being with Luke when we made that first album, when he was the darling of all the folk music people down in the Village. You know, don’t you, I was the one who discovered him when he was hanging out in Chicago with an old soul artist named Little Joe Washington?

  Yeah, well I guess that story’s been told enough.

  Anyhow, just in case you haven’t heard it, there was Luke, twenty years old, or some ridiculous age like that, and we’re in the old Epoch studios on West 43rd Street—the place is a shelter for runaway teens now, by the way, which is fitting—and, anyhow, none of the Epoch brass wanted me to sign him, so when they finally gave in—and oh how I begged—they only gave us one measly little day to make a record. Quite a difference from what it is now, when these kids can take over a year to get ten songs down on tape. One day, and if it goes over that then it comes out of my pocket. Ouch! I may have a wealthy father but once I got into the music business Dad never gave me fifteen cents. Well, Luke was as nervous as a one-eyed cat peeking in the seafood store. And he didn’t know shit from Shinola when it came to making a record, back then. He didn’t know where to stand, he didn’t know what a microphone did to your voice, he didn’t know how to put his personality into a song without any audience there—let’s face it, he was used to playing for meals, a place to crash, and for the heart of whatever comely young thing happened to be in the room. But he had a will to succeed. A will to survive. That’s what the kids did back then, they sang to save their own lives.

  But what I’m trying to say here is on American Shakedown it was all Luke. He was running the musicians, he was running the engineers. At one point, I realized I was reading the same newspaper for the third time through and I said to Luke, Luke I could always split you know, there’s really nothing for me to do here. And he looks at me and says Do you think Sergei is innocent. Bam. Just like that, out of nowhere. And I said, Sure, I think he’s innocent, though really I had no idea. Then stay, says Luke, and puts his hand on my shoulder and I realized it was the first time he touched me in over twenty years.

  So I stayed and Luke produced the album. This whole Sergei thing didn’t mean a thing to me, but the record was a beauty—as time will eventually confirm. Mazurkas, Russian folk songs, klezmer music, a little Rimsky-Korsakov. Would it be all right if I mentioned here how when these guys want to record efficiently they seem to have no trouble at all getting the job done? No? Fine. Sorry. Then let’s just say that by the time the record was made, Luke had wound his way back through two centuries of Russian music, East European music, sonatas, Slavic dances, rondos, rhapsodies, you name it. He burrowed his way into the heart of a whole musical culture and even back into his own Jewishness—those fiddles, and Andy Goldfarb’s brilliant clarinet. It’s all there. Eat your big fat cancerous heart out Ken Steinberg, I was thinking. I sat up in the control boom, next to Keith Gladstone, who was the engineer Luke wanted, and every now and then we’d just look at each other and shake our heads, we were so blown away at what Luke was putting down. Finally, Gladdy asked me, Are you okay? And I said Sure, why do you ask? And he touched his face and I touched mine and I noticed my cheeks were soaked. I was bawling like a goddamn baby, is what I was doing. That’s how much I loved the music. After all these years. You see, I still had the spark! Not bad for an old man, right? Is that what you’re thinking?

  BY THE TIME Luke took the stage in his comeback concert under the stars, the distant smell of salt and seaweed and beach roses had been replaced by the more urgent aromas of pot, body heat, fast food, and shit. I feared for my life; my weakened heart, in its long convalescence, had developed its own means of communication, a language entirely composed of warnings—I need air, I need blood, I need silence, peace, love. No, the irony of actually dropping dead the moment my father took the stage did not escape me, but it was an irony without consolation, assuming ironies ever can console.

  The sunset was a bright orange crack in the dark blue bowl of sky. I’d been there for twenty hours, so I was close to the stage—in fact, I’d watched the squadron of hirsute hammer- jockeys putting the thing together, and I’d been there as well for the sound checks, the lighting checks, all of the techy tedium that precedes a concert. Luckily for me, I’d inherited some errant height gene—from my mother’s maternal great- uncle, a veritable water tower in a family of rain barrels, though perhaps I’d been given a bit of extra altitude by some tall Kramer, which was Dad’s name before he changed it to Fairchild. Kramer. Stuart Kramer—Stuart Melvin Kramer, to be exact. And so I had a good view of Luke when he came
ambling onto the stage, looking completely engrossed in tuning his guitar, giving the impression of having forgotten he was about to perform. He was dressed in black jeans, no shirt, a black leather vest. The Sergei-induced muscles had gone slack. There was a hitch in his stride, tension in his shoulders. He turned away from us and checked on his musicians—once twenty years ago his backup guitarist didn’t show up for a concert, and since then Luke always took attendance.

  Danny Manning was on drums. Danny courted my mother after Luke was (officially) out of the picture, yet even then he had to endure the fabled Fairchildian wrath. But that was now all forgotten, and as Luke leaned back toward Danny and said something under the noise of the ecstatic crowd, the two of them seemed to share a laugh. Mike Silverman was on lap guitar, fiddle, accordion, and marimba. Dutch Conners, Ken Yoshiba, and Graham Ross rounded out the group, and all of them stood like statues of sidemen in some rock and roll wax museum while the crowd went wild. Everyone around me was screaming, shouting, yelling, ululating, whistling, whooping, weeping. This was more than show business; this was religion. Luke had come back to teach us how to live, how to talk and gesture, how to see through the game, how to face down death; he had come to anoint us. History coursed through him like an electric current, and when he grabbed you the power passed from his hand into yours, and it made your hair rise, too. Every now and then, Luke made a gesture as if to begin playing, but like a swimmer pushed back to shore by a tumult of waves, he gave up each time. Every now and then, I softly said to myself, That’s my father up there, but the thought made my heart race in a way that felt absolutely dangerous. What a way to die! Slumped onto the slimy ground, trampled to death by my father’s fans.