Lot Six

by David Adjmi

  That night I spent hours taping myself saying words with hard Rs: “car” and “star” and “part.” And I continued work on my vowels: “coffee” and “small” and “call.” When I recorded myself speaking into the mic it didn’t sound so bad, but when I played the tape back I sounded like a cretin: “CAWFEE. STAHH. HAHPAH.” I erased it and started over. I kept trying, but every word I spoke felt alien. It hurt my mouth to talk. I’d already come to hate my body—its lurching postures and slumping scoliotic slants—and now I hated the sounds it emitted, sounds I couldn’t control. I had to produce the sounds, it was the only way I had of reaching out to the world, but they came out of some broken, ugly, unfixable place in me. The sounds were echoes referring to some inner core of hideousness I had to either fix or kill. I had to reshape myself from the outside in, like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. I had to mentor myself—I had to do it out of the shapeless void of my inexperience.

  I made an impulsive, breathless vow to myself to put things on my walls—a kind of stand I felt compelled to take against my own formlessness as a person. I bought a bunch of magazines, found models who looked interesting, zealously cut out pictures of them with scissors, and taped the pictures up on my bedroom walls in a makeshift collage. The models in the photographs weren’t just people—they existed outside time, unchained to the past. They floated like planets in a magnificent constellation, sidereal and empty and omnipresent.

  There was a series in Rolling Stone’s spring fashion issue, with Keanu Reeves wearing an ascot. I positioned that directly over my bed the way people kept icons of the Virgin Mary. There were two photo sets as well: the first was a series with Stephanie Seymour on a plain somewhere—probably Africa—alone and wearing a bra. Her hair was wet and blowing in a sirocco, eyes ringed in weary confusion. Another set had Linda Evangelista and Cindy Crawford wearing identical pixie haircuts with severe bangs that came to the very tips of their eyebrows. Cindy was more down-to-earth (which I already knew from seeing her interview on David Letterman, in which she talked about studying engineering at Northwestern) and Linda was deliberately artificial. Her poses were appealingly stagey, her eyes tinted a gemlike violet. She emanated splendor. I wanted that splendor for myself, but didn’t know how to acquire it. I didn’t know how to bring the objects I so desired close to me. I stared at the images for hours. They hung on my walls like emblems, symbols of an unimpeachable beauty I wanted to extract, absorb by the osmosis of simply looking.

  The encounter with Harper Goldfarb traumatized me, and for those first weeks of school I worried that a black cloud of calumny had somehow followed me from the yeshiva, but it wasn’t true. The initial excitement about me among the student body died down fairly rapidly but I was well liked. I avoided making any faux pas, and I was thriving academically.

  I loved the secular curriculum at York. For my arts elective—they offered such things at non-Jewish schools—I took a drama class. The teacher was a woman named Barbara, who was an actress; she reminded me a little of the actress who played JR’s secretary on Dallas. She had straw-blond hair and wore pearl earrings and ruffled blouses buttoned to the neck. The first play she had us read was A Streetcar Named Desire, which I’d read once before in seventh grade. Then, it seemed like one of those etiolated classics, but this time around I felt the opposite: it was too alive, almost painful to read.

  Blanche DuBois reminded me a little of people in my family: high-strung, neurotic. She’s unbearably fragile. When she’s exposed to a naked lightbulb she screams like her flesh is being incinerated. At the same time she thinks of herself as cultured; she refers to herself as a “cultivated woman” and “a woman of intelligence and breeding.” Her brother-in-law, Stanley, thinks Blanche is a phony and a snob. He wants to expose her as a liar—but I didn’t see her as a liar. Yes, she was dramatic and slightly annoying, but she was also like me, sensitive and poetic and desperate to re-create herself.

  Blanche has an idea that she will marry a wealthy man named Shep Huntleigh, and wear furs, and live the good life, the life she wanted—but not just wanted, the life that was in some way most logically and appropriately hers. But that future never materializes. Shep Huntleigh never arrives to save Blanche. Instead, she falls in love with a bland man named Mitch whom she believes is a respite from sickening reality, “a cleft in the rock of the world to hide in.” But Mitch finds out about Blanche’s past: that her husband (who was, from what I could gather, a Lot Six) killed himself and Blanche became what the SYs called a meshnooneh* and moved to a sleazy hotel called the Flamingo Arms and began sleeping with lots of strange men. Mitch says she isn’t “clean” enough to introduce to his mother and breaks off their relationship. Then Stanley rapes Blanche, and the pile-on of traumas causes her to lose her grip on reality, and she is sent to a mental institution. I sobbed when the doctor from the institution arrives and Stella screams “My baby sister!” (which made me think about my own sister and how she too was fragile like Blanche, and how much I worried about her, that she might kill herself one day or lose her mind), and when Stella’s friend Eunice consoles Stella by saying “Don’t look!” as if by denying Blanche’s existence the whole experience would cease to be real. In a way, that was what Blanche was doing too—and what everyone I knew was doing. We were all trying to collage together a reality we could stand to inhabit.

  When Mitch calls Blanche a liar, Blanche replies that she never lied to him, never “in my heart.” I teared up reading that line. The real world was phony, but the world in Blanche’s heart was real. I felt myself claim Blanche as almost a spiritual totem: she was like me, an outsider, a sensitive person crushed by reality—just as her husband was crushed by it, the husband who killed himself for being a Lot Six. But the play brought out my anxieties. Would I shoot myself like Blanche’s husband? Would I die or go insane? What made some realities stick, and others not? I had no idea.

  The days at York Prep were extremely short in comparison with the relentless, all-day double curriculum at the yeshiva, and since our classes ended relatively early, Vivian and I would sometimes take off in the metallic-blue BMW her parents bought her. We’d go cruising around the city, speeding up and down highways, listening to the Cocteau Twins and the Sugarcubes and singing along at the top of our lungs. If I could hear myself sliding into my Brooklyn accent when we sang along to “Lips Like Sugar” it was too much fun to care.

  My love of art was revived around this time. I felt an excitement about culture that took me back to my childhood, and the trips with my mother. Together, Vivian and I retraced the old haunts: we went to the Met and to MoMA, and to the Guggenheim, with its spiral interior that seemed to portend something holy and transcendent.

  Soho still had an arty cachet back in the late eighties; the galleries were all there. We’d saunter in and out of them, then go shopping and look at clothes we couldn’t afford. There was a store on West Broadway we liked called If, and a shoe store called Tootsi Plohound. Barneys was still in Chelsea; we’d trek up on foot, make our ritual stops on the different floors, then have lunch afterward in the chic downstairs atrium where we’d conduct bull sessions about our classmates. We’d laugh about “Harperrr” and her Rs so round they were practically compass drawn. We’d discuss our affection for the brooding Michael Veltin, and Michael’s on-again-off-again girlfriend Deb, a straight-edge skinhead who wore Doc Martens and listened constantly to Salt-N-Pepa on her Walkman, and Deb’s best friend, Allison, an aspiring model who’d just come out of rehab. Everyone got drunk on weekends and talked about their pot dealers. There was a ragtag, somewhat lurid feel to the student body—which consisted mainly of wealthy Army brats or people kicked out of better schools like Trinity or Horace Mann for disciplinary problems, taking drugs. One recent graduate strangled his girlfriend* and went to prison and it was on the front pages of all the newspapers. And a few weeks into the semester a congenial blond boy went to Phoenix House† and we never saw him again. A couple of months after that, a teacher was fired for havi
ng sex with one of his students on a class trip. I had no idea if any of this was normal. I just assumed secular schools were thronging with privileged attractive teenagers going to jail, having sex with their teachers, taking drugs. I decided I would acclimate to whatever set of norms presented themselves. Vivian, however, maintained a cautious distance from the other students. Their predilection for drugs and drinking and sex intrigued her, but she viewed the whole experience as a kind of tourism or noncommittal moonlighting. Vivian couldn’t relinquish her Syrian friends from the yeshiva—they felt native and familiar, and she wanted to straddle both worlds.

  Though I dreaded their inclusion, her friends sometimes joined us on our downtown rovings: carpetbaggers like Lou Cohen and Gladys Abadi. Lou was a grade younger than me, and I knew Gladys from the Dumb Class. Though we’d seen movies together and shared car service rides to disco parties, she now emblemized everything I hated about Syrians. She was needy and crass and wildly temperamental. Her reductio ad absurdum arguments obviated any possibility of having a normal conversation. On our jaunts through Soho she dragged herself gracelessly from one shop to another, making small scraping sounds when she walked like her shoes were tacked with sandpaper. She spoke in long soliloquies about losing five pounds and how her contact lenses were hurting. She drove me absolutely nuts.

  One afternoon, Vivian brought up her plans for college when, out of nowhere, Gladys violently stomped her foot against the sidewalk and shrieked YA MAKING ME NERVOUS! and then burst into tears. She sobbed hysterically as pedestrians squeezed by us, but I did nothing to comfort Gladys. I stared coldly at her pinched pink face as she wept and shivered. Vivian was more patient. She made circular movements on Gladys’s back with her hand the way you did to newborn babies. She said “Are you okay?” again and again in a soft voice, and later plied Gladys with frozen yogurt and sugarless gum. Vivian fulfilled some maternal function for Gladys, and Gladys gave Vivian some sense of familial closeness, of family—but this closeness is precisely what repelled me. Gladys was me, she was a version of how my life could play out. And the version wasn’t remote and distant, it was standing right in front of me in an oversized Donna Karan sweater. I knew Gladys cried because she was trapped. I knew she would spend her life eating carrot sticks until her hands turned orange. I knew she would marry some guy she didn’t like because her mother pressured her, and live in a two-family home near Kings Highway and shout at her kids and shout at the maid. She had no choices, it was all chosen for her, but I felt no sympathy for her. I hated Gladys. I hated how easy it was to be with her. I hated how naturally I was able to contour myself to her crazy tantrums and neuroses, how desperately I wanted to sit across from her in a diner and eat endless plates of disco fries. It would be so easy for me to slip back into that life: as simple as toggling a little mental switch in my head. The ease of it terrified me. There was a sick part of me that wanted to be stuck in the past, because the past was the repository of my so-called heritage and tradition and family, things that felt familiar. My intense aversion to Gladys was really an attraction, but I had to resist that attraction. I knew my desires were all contaminated, that my yearning for the past was a form of weakness in me I had to kill.

  In the late eighties New York nightlife was still happening; there was a sense of a secret underworld that, if one were resourceful and hip enough, one could penetrate. Vivian scoured Stephen Saban’s columns in Details, she read Paper. She did recon on what clubs were hot, and would take me to them—usually small off-the-beaten-path places with cheeky names like Jackie 60 or Million Dollar Bar (that one was on a boat) or Lift Up Your Skirt and Fly. Vivian and I wanted to immerse ourselves in this glamour as if in the waters of a baptism. We were stepping into a world where no one knew us and we could be anyone. We had passing encounters with semifamous club kids like the It Twins. We saw drag queens (completely new to me outside of La Cage) lip-synching to old disco songs. There were Eurotrash types everywhere, chic people who wore a lot of black and were habitués of restaurants like Indochine and Canal Bar. Usually the Eurotrash were maître d’s in restaurants or models manning the phones. They were kind of moribund and sexy at the same time, like Venus flytraps. They represented a kind of glamour that seemed utterly unattainable. I was fascinated by them, just as I’d been fascinated with the images of fashion models I’d collaged onto my bedroom walls. With their clothes and hairstyles, the Eurotrash were able to project a story about life—a story of glamour and restaurants and parties. I wanted that life, and fashion could help me acquire it. Fashion created a narrative, and fashion made you a character in that narrative. Fashion accomplished what the images in those cubist paintings at MoMA did. It changed reality by showing the world a version of reality that couldn’t be refuted: seeing was believing.

  My wardrobe reeked of Lester’s and Z Cavaricci. I threw that stuff out. I bought a bunch of black clothes—monochromes felt European. At Vivian’s urging, I bought a velour harlequin shirt at If, a pair of bright red wool crepe Yohji Yamamoto pants, a black cotton shirt with a looped ascot at the neck. I bought Stephane Kélian shoes that emblazoned a silk screen of a cowboy on a horse—those cost four hundred dollars, but everything was ruinously expensive, I wasn’t going to be cheap: I wasn’t going to scrimp the way my mother did at Lester’s, with her “fit you in the tushy” criterion for buying me pants. I wanted the best of everything. I blew whatever savings I had. My mother hated my taste and wasn’t afraid to tell me how bad I looked. She said I looked impoverished, I looked horrible. I studded a denim jacket with safety pins like the one I saw in a Stephen Sprouse layout in Interview. She threw that in the trash. Then I tore rips in my jeans—rips were just starting to become a thing—and she threw those in the trash. I bought Dirk Bikkemberg shoes that had thick horizontal metal strips banding the toes. My mother told me they looked like polio shoes. “You think that’s fashion?” she said. “You think that looks good?!” Every time I walked down the stairs in some new outfit she’d say “What now?!” and subject me to her eye rolls and enervated sighs. But all this made me terribly happy: I’d banished myself from the Syrian Community, now I needed to inject myself with a dye that would change me forever.

  I was enamored of Michael Hutchence so I bought a Fiorucci cropped denim jacket like he had in one of his videos, and started to grow my hair—it was curly, like his—down to my shoulders. But my British headmaster, Mr. Stewart, chided me one morning for it. I tried explaining that long hair wasn’t merely a whim, it was a way of ingraining my new deep beliefs about being human. I tried to make Mr. Stewart see that my fashion statement was a matter of personal ethos and moral urgency—but there was nothing he could do, he said. Rules were rules. I started to weep right in front of Mr. Stewart. I didn’t want to, but my response was cumulative: I was tired of being forced, I was sick of rules. In my lugubrious state I went to see Randi, my hairdresser at Bumble and Bumble. “Don’t worry,” said Randi, “I have an idea.” She started cutting, forming my head into a kind of cantilever. She kept the front long but styled it so that it blew upward, as if by electric shock. To balance it, she let the back jut out a little and tapered it at the neck. She left the sideburns long, almost down to my chin. When she was done Randi handed me a shiny plastic canister. “This is wax,” she instructed. “You take a tiny bit in your palm and you rub it back and forth like this.” She illustrated by squeezing her palms together. “And you dress the hair like this,” she said. She brushed back my hair with her hands. The wax was viscid and heavy like glue or cement: it made my hair shiny and kind of goopy. The curls matted in frozen gleaming clumps, each ringlet sculpted as if by hand—my head looked like an edifice, like those steel-rimmed glass buildings that fringed the Manhattan skyline. I was able to stay in Mr. Stewart’s rigid framework avant la lettre but the spirit was subversive.

  I was transforming in leaps and giant bounds. My siblings were furious I’d abandoned my Brooklyn accent, they kept shouting at me to tawk normal!, but I saw them as victims of a sad
atavism, a noose I’d sneaked out of before it could snap my neck. I started going to foreign films at Lincoln Plaza and the Angelika, European movies with subtitles: Camille Claudel and Law of Desire. Vivian and I loved the bleak and funny The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. After watching it, I read up on Jean Paul Gaultier, who did the costumes. I learned about other French designers, and French filmmakers and artists, and in all this effluvia of Europe and France I started to become more enamored of the French contingent at York—especially Paul Hamilton, a charming, attractive boy in my homeroom class. Even though I repressed all my feelings, I was slightly in love with Paul, and I think Vivian was too. He wasn’t that handsome, but he was striking with his putty face and big guileless puppy-dog eyes. Paul’s father was a diplomat and he lived in a giant penthouse on Park Avenue—but Paul was unpretentious. He was always bopping along to house music on his yellow Walkman, and every so often bleated a stupid phrase out of nowhere like invisible lined music in a cartoon: “HOUSE MUSIC ALL NIGHT LONG SAY WHAAA??” His French accent made everything sound poetic and elevated. I viewed the accent as a possible acquisition, like an expensive watch or rare book. I began to consciously affect Paul’s accent outside of school. I’d buy my coffee in the morning with a French accent. I purchased subway tokens with a French accent. I was desperate to be something new—why not French? Of course, it didn’t occur to me to actually learn French, just to affect the accent—which I did by augmenting my ordinary speech with a lot of groggy “ehhh”s and “uhh”s, and giving myself a sensuous and vaguely psychological air. I thought if I continued to speak in a French accent it might take root in me in some unexpected permanent way, like seeds that blindly scatter into lush growths. I quit my job at Jazz and I applied for a job at Emilio Cavallini, a high-end retail shop on Madison Avenue. I used my fake French accent at the interview and it won me the job.