Lot Six

by David Adjmi

  “I’m sick of being poor,” he said, picking at a plate of spareribs with his fingers. We were at a kosher Chinese restaurant on Avenue J eating off styrofoam plates. “My mother said I could work for her but she only wants to pay five dollars an hour.”

  “I make eight an hour at Jazz, and I get commission.”

  “So get me a job there!”

  “I can’t. Lee just finished hiring a whole bunch of new people.”

  “Ert!” He dramatically threw down a half-eaten rib and pushed his plate away. “These spareribs are making me nauseous!” His lips were curled in an exaggerated snarl, a tic he probably picked up from Brenda. He sucked sparerib sauce off his fingers, making deliberately loud sucking noises to drive me nuts.

  “Could you not do that, please?”

  “But what am I supposta do, Daaaave,” he said, doing his camp imitation of my mother. Our conversations had by this point become whirligig pastiches, bursting at the seams with catchphrases from television shows and SY slang and flashes of things our mothers said. He pulled a napkin from the dispenser and wiped his hands clean. “How much do you think I could make at Bloomingdale’s? I could be one of those people who sprays perfume samples.”

  I had no idea how one got a job at Bloomingdale’s, but it sounded daunting. “Aren’t those, like, really hard jobs to get?”

  “What are you talking about? Any dibeh* can spray perfume!”

  “Yeah, but they’re not gonna hire a teenage boy.”

  “I could lie about my age,” he said. “I could type up a fake résumé—my mother could be a reference.”

  “Howie, you’re fifteen. You look fifteen.”

  “What if I dressed as a woman? I could make myself look older that way.”

  “You want to dress as a woman to get a job spraying perfume samples?”

  His eyes lit up suddenly, as if he were struck by lightning. “I know they would hire me,” he said. “I could do it part-time. I’d be so good at it, and you make a ton of money in the city!”

  “Howie!” I said, now breaking up with laughter. “Just get a job at a record store!”

  “I know Bloomingdale’s would hire me, David!”

  By the time we were done eating, Howie had convinced himself that the only part-time job he could ever get was spraying perfume samples at Bloomingdale’s dressed as a woman. The inanity of the premise began to stoke my enthusiasm and I pledged to help him. After all, I’d seen this scenario play out with varying degrees of success in movies and television shows, things like Tootsie and Bosom Buddies. And, like that, we were back in our shared bubble of reality.

  When my mother was safely out of the house the following week, I sneaked Howie up to her room, where he unpacked the contents of a small backpack. He produced a pair of white stirrup pants, an oversized powder-pink sweater, and a bra—all of which he’d filched from his mother’s closet—and quickly dressed. The sweater hung past his thighs and was augmented with huge, severe shoulder pads. He looked a little like a linebacker. He sat at my mother’s makeup mirror and started applying makeup. Immediately, it became clear, as I watched him, that he’d done this before—probably more than once. He knew about mascara. He knew about liquid foundation. He knew about contouring sponges (Claudia Terzi’s raison) and eyelash-curling implements. He knew tricks to create the illusion of angled cheekbones. I watched closely as he applied eyeliner and lipstick with painted-egg precision. I had never seen him so focused, so serious. Watching him, I felt myself recess slightly, a deferential instinct. I sensed this wasn’t merely a means to an end for him, that the procession in itself had a great deal of meaning. When he was done we rifled through my mother’s jewelry box. He cadged a bracelet, a pair of meretricious clip-on earrings. He unpacked the Lee Press-On Nails he brought with him and pasted them on. I lent him my mother’s wig from the sixties, the one she kept in her closet on a tiny styrofoam stand. It was brown with little mod ringlets. As I saw his look begin to come together, it was hard not to compare him to his mother—after all, he was made up as her, sort of. They were both lantern-jawed and angular. But her femininity stood out in hard relief in comparison with his strong aquiline nose and bulging brow and fleshy lineaments. When he was done he examined himself in the full-length mirror on the inside of my mother’s closet. He stood stiffly, but I could see the rippling emotion in his eyes.

  “What do you think?” he said, his voice trembling with fragile expectation.

  “You look good,” I said, which wasn’t exactly a lie. He was transformed, even if everything seemed slightly off. All the pink and white layers gave him a patina of virgin provinciality, but the long red nails seemed louche and mismatched. His breasts, shaped from molded toilet paper, were oddly pointy, like funnels. Mounds of eyeshadow gave him a kabuki garishness. All the lashings of gloss and color formed a kind of thick crust over him, like a shell you could crack. Inside that shell was a fifteen-year-old boy, liquid and oozing like the white of an egg.

  On our way to the subway station I was worried someone might attack or kill us. Howie’s coniferous breasts were too big and bounced lifelessly as he walked—their absence of fleshy suppleness a dead giveaway. Once we got on the train, though, we seemed to blend in. This provisional success made me perk up. On instinct, I began to operate as a sort of drag triage: if his makeup got smudged I’d tell him and he could fix it, or he could straighten one of his false eyelashes or reposition his wig. Though I silently determined his outfit wasn’t really appropriate for a job interview at Bloomingdale’s, I discovered a new part of myself that afternoon, a part that was loving and generous. I traded my punishing obsessive perfectionism for kindness. I sensed my role was to embolden and cheer him. “You can do this!” I told him. I could see he felt buoyed by my help, and by his victory on the F train. I could see him counting in his mind the thickly packed wads of cash he’d doubtlessly earn as a perfume sample person. His mood lifted. When we hit midtown, instead of transferring to the green line, we took a detour at Forty-Seventh Street and taxied over to the Palace Theatre, where La Cage aux Folles was playing. It was Brenda’s birthday that night—he’d already made dinner plans for them at the Marriott Marquis (some restaurant that revolved while you ate) but now Howie impulsively decided he had to take Brenda to see La Cage that night. We’d seen it together back in seventh grade, and since then Howie had been to see it twice more—he even bought the soundtrack at the Sam Goody in Kings Plaza. When his parents were out, he practiced dancing like a Cagelle in his room. He put on shows for me, gliding and posing and bouncing off his bed to my ecstatic enjoyment. Now he wanted to share his love for that play with Brenda.

  With his giant shoulder pads and perfectly positioned wig, Howie approached the man at the ticket counter to query for availability, only slightly torqueing his voice to make it sound womanlier. To his delight, there was a cancellation: two prime seats in the center of the orchestra. It was as if the providential, the celestial courses of heaven were guiding him to this very moment in time—so uncanny, so perfect was this confluence of omens. We exited the theatre and crossed Broadway, weaving through the crowd of tourists toward the N, which would deposit us on Fifty-Ninth Street at the very lip of Bloomingdale’s, that Valhalla of perfume samples and makeup and prospective employment.

  As we gabbed about how great his seats were I noticed, in the pinging traffic of Times Square, about thirty feet in the distance, a woman with blunt Semitic features and short frizzy hair, frozen in place on the sidewalk, glaring at us. Her glare was unremitting—eyes stabbing us, practically—her expression an unsettling combination of horror, disbelief, and disgust. I assumed she was simply a very observant woman who could see what was plain, that a teenage boy was walking around wearing women’s clothing in the middle of Times Square. But something about this woman felt distressingly familiar, and though Jewish women of her ilk all had an archetypal aesthetic sameness, I felt I knew her. And then, in a nightmarishly swift escalation over the course of the next twentyish
seconds, I realized who it was: Ellen Kaplowitz—a girl from the yeshiva, a junior; she was in Brenda’s homeroom. I tried to warn Howie, who was painfully, woefully oblivious to subtle cues. Even as I dug my fingers into the sleeve of his mother’s cotton sweater—so tightly the threads of it practically disintegrated in my grasp—and whispered Ellen Kaplowitz! again and again, he just bounced along in his stirrup pants, loudly replying HUH? and WHAT?

  As we drew nearer, Ellen Kaplowitz’s fiery outrage, the murderous expression on her face, came more and more alive and I felt time slow down. I heard a sharp cry escape her lips; it was like the squeal of a braking car moments before a fatal crash. Her voice dropped to a brittle scrape, the morphology of her mouth twisted—its shapes conforming to loose syllables spaced at impossibly long intervals—until the agglomeration of sounds and scrapes and high-pitched noises condensed into a single word, the way individual notes of music develop into a chord, and that word was his name. She said it not as a form of salutation but as an indictment. She said his name again and again. HOWIE. HOWIE. As if the repeated utterance was itself a form of punishment—as if his very name would annihilate him, would shame and destroy him. She was attracting the attention of pedestrians but Howie remained oblivious until, when we were just inches from her face, so close you could count the pores in her nose, Ellen said her final and most damning HOWIE!, stopping him dead in his tracks. Once she was certain he’d heard her, and they were face-to-face, she shook her head slowly, as if to say Shame, shame. The emotion drained instantly from his face, the joy from his eyes. His makeup suddenly looked like it weighed fifty pounds, he looked tired and old. He stood for a moment framed by the flimsy vinyl banners of the TKTS booth—and then, as if remembering some forgotten errand or appointment, clutched his mother’s purse with its patchwork of sparkling fabrics, and marched resolutely past Ellen Kaplowitz and into the oncoming traffic of Forty-Seventh Street.

  We never made it to Bloomingdale’s. The train back to Brooklyn was choked with passengers. I tried to laugh off the encounter but Howie was panicked: what if Ellen Kaplowitz told Brenda? What if she went to the principal? She could lodge a complaint, they’d tell our parents. I’d have to admit to lending him my mother’s wig; he’d have the more onerous task of copping to wearing his mother’s stirrup pants—her bra! This anxiety, coupled with the overall emotional expenditure of the day, caused him to unravel somewhat in the subway car. His makeup needed refreshing, his face was clammy with anxiety, and you could see the scuff of his beard. His wig was tilted at an infelicitous angle; some of his nails dropped off or were loose and he had to keep pressing them back on. He seemed defoliated, like a dying houseplant. He was collapsed against the window of the subway car, a human emblem of defeat.

  We’d fooled them earlier, but now people shot nasty looks or shook their heads in disgust. The farther into Brooklyn we got, the more vicious the stares and mute gestures. I tried to make him laugh at the absurdity of the situation, but by then he’d lost all sense of fun. It was horrible to witness his humiliation. I’d never seen him so defeated. Seeing him this way, I felt a surge of intense loyalty, an unbreakable solidarity with my friend. If they stared him down, I would bear with him the hate in those stares. I would diffuse the hate somehow by sharing it with him. But as I sat alongside him, warding off the hate, I myself felt blasted with it. A creeping terror began to surge inside of me, a terror I hadn’t felt since I was small, when my brothers imitated those Flip Wilson skits and I made the compact with myself to never become the Lot Six. I would never allow my brothers to see me—the way Ellen Kaplowitz saw Howie when she shook her head at him, when she spat his name like it was a repulsive curse word. She saw into him, like an X-ray; she saw right into his very insides. But what did that really mean? Was Howie a woman inside? Was he a Lot Six?

  The whole La Cage scenario seemed a bellwether of something, but I wasn’t sure what. Maybe it was a phase,* and he’d eventually tire of wearing his mother’s outfits, and stealing issues of Honcho, and dancing flamboyantly to the Pet Shop Boys’ 12-inch remix of “It’s a Sin.” Maybe he just liked being in touch with his female side, or he believed (as Dustin Hoffman’s character in Tootsie learns) that a man could become more manly by becoming a woman.

  Or maybe he felt that by dressing as a woman you could be who you were inside, as the George Hearn character declaims in the “I Am What I Am” number in La Cage, when he strips off his wig and makes a passionate case for being accepted as himself. But even that was confusing, because if he was “who he was,” why did George Hearn have to dress as someone else to be that? If you changed clothes and pretended to be someone else, was your identity changed? Did a new self actually emerge?

  How far could a fantasy about one’s life be pushed to make it reality?

  My friendship with Howie had always been a gateway to fantasy. Through him I came to believe that fiction and reality could blend harmoniously, that reality could be heightened and ecstatic. But that day was a turning point. Howie’s defeat made clear to me that even if you were a charismatic, brilliant person there were rules, and if you broke the rules you would be punished. His failed experiment showed me there was only so far one could take a fantasy; that afternoon I had a terrible premonition reality would one day crush me.

  By the end of sophomore year my grades dropped precipitously. I failed all my Hebrew classes and got straight Ds in English. My self-esteem was nonexistent. I was in a near-suicidal depression. The fury that burned so brightly when I marched through Midwood with the Benetton sweater had dwindled to a burnt wick, and now just getting through a single day was a drudging effort. Because of my dismal grades I was put on probation at the yeshiva. As a condition of my readmittance, and against my wishes, I had to see a psychotherapist.

  I’d never been to a therapist, but Howie was forced to see one back in eighth grade—his grades were abysmal, he was cutting school all the time. By the third or fourth session, he began to suspect that the therapist was leaking private details from their sessions to people at the yeshiva—there were things he’d told the therapist that no one else knew, no one, and those things had gotten back to him. When I heard that, I decided psychotherapy was simply a way to extract information to be used against you. Howie told me he overheard his parents talking about us. He heard them say the principals at the yeshiva were convinced we were homosexual lovers—that that was the real reason he was forced to see a therapist, not his bad grades. At the end of eighth grade, Rabbi Bressler actually forbade Howie and me from having any contact—ostensibly a punishment for cutting school together. We had to remain a minimum of fifty feet away from each other, even outside school hours. School faculty were deputized to enforce our separation. Teachers stood in forbidding syndicates at the end of hallways during breaks, and when I passed them I’d catch the incremental nudge and giggle, the slight eye roll. Because of this prior history, I felt, when the school mandated it, that my being made to see a therapist was not about grades. The therapist would force an admission from me. Once it was secured, they’d kick me out of the Syrian Community and the yeshiva and Judaism and I’d be left with nothing.

  In light of these unsavory possibilities I decided I would lie to the therapist. I’d dodge his questions and probings so he’d have nothing of substance to offer the people at school. If I refused to confess, he’d be powerless to hurt me.

  Dr. Weinberger’s office was off on a side entrance of a large, impressive Victorian mansion in Ditmas Park. The entrance led to a small wooden flight of stairs that opened into a basement office. It felt like a sealed-off tank; it was airless and well appointed. I thought it was terrible to have an encounter with a stranger in a windowless basement. Even with my disregard for protocol and boundaries I was uncomfortable and felt the grating unnaturalness of the situation. Upon sitting, he said absolutely nothing. Apparently, he was waiting for me to voice some concern, as though I hadn’t been forced to see him, or had some concrete understanding of what psychotherapy could
offer me.

  Eventually, he made an opening gambit: “So why do you think you’re here?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, determined to bring zero valence to my every utterance.

  “Well,” he said, “there’s some concern about your grades.”

  I said nothing.

  “What do you think it was that prompted the slip in your grades?”

  I shrugged. I shifted in the armchair. I replied “I don’t know” to nearly everything he said, or merely shrugged or looked away. It seemed presumptuous of him to expect me to start telling him intimate things—you didn’t just walk into a room with some stranger and spill your guts. His entitlement rankled me. I didn’t know much about therapists but I wasn’t impressed—and he didn’t look like much. He had a thick reddish mustache and wore large, ugly spectacles. His hair was too curly and balding at the temples, and he wore a lot of brown.