Lot Six

by David Adjmi

  As we drove to Half Moon Bay, we sat in awkward silence, and our cabdriver—who was genial and felt bad (it seemed) that I was called a faggot by the other cabdriver—tried to regale us with stories about the island, but I was too riled up to properly pay attention, or if I did I affected a bunch of grunts and low-octave manly responses like “huh” and “no kiddin’.” I was stung, but I had to conceal my hurt, and that effort curtailed my ability to address the hurt, so it continued to burn and sting. I felt inept at hiding the pain I felt for being humiliated in front of my mother and sister. My illusions of gallantry were ruined. I didn’t expect a consoling word or a hug; I knew that we were all netted in this feeling of shame, that everyone was bound by the shame I brought upon us.

  For the remainder of the cab ride my mother prattled nervously about the landscapes and how pretty everything was. The driver let us off at the hotel—which it turned out had been shuttered, probably for a decade or longer. The walkways were abraded with splinters, the wood mulchy and moldering under our feet. There was just a desolate beach, a gray-white granular crescent. By the time we figured it out, we were stuck; the driver was gone and wouldn’t be back for hours. We had the beach to ourselves, though, and my mother found that prospect relaxing; she always fantasized about owning her own private beach. She talked at length about the sound of the waves and if we found them relaxing.

  The beach was bordered by short grassy hills that came up to our necks. Down by the water were little cave-like formations of dark rocks that glittered in the light. There were reefs teeming with tiny hermit crabs, and in the water, schools of translucent fish swam at hard angles. The restaurant in the hotel was closed but we managed to find a small concessions area stocked with soda and candy. We made a lunch out of that. An hour or so later, we spotted an interloping couple on the opposite side of the crescent. The presence of the couple marred the proprietary fantasy my mother had of owning her private beach, mitigating against the relaxing properties she was determined to attribute to it, but she was so calmed it didn’t matter. She reapplied sunscreen and zinc and propped herself on a towel.

  I was surprised by the nothingness of beaches. I hadn’t really ever liked them but I assumed that had to do with age, and that when I got older I would feel more serene on them and they might tender gentle epiphanies. But after the initial overture of turquoise water and clay-white sand they all seemed apocalyptic and eventless. I wondered if I had the capacity for apprehending beauty. I wondered if there was something deficient in my constitution.

  Arlene had taken a meaningful-looking private walk along the shore and seemed to be contemplating deep things. I watched her trace the contour of the shore and it reminded me of that spiritual poem “Footsteps” my mother had on her dresser near her perfumes. It was the one about God carrying the beleaguered suffering person on the beach—which explained to him, the vaguely querulous speaker in the poem, why there was only one set of footsteps on the beach instead of two—thereby affirming the presence of God to the speaker and, I assume, my mother. She kept the laminated poem upright against a mirror on her dresser.

  Years later, I noticed it was gone.

  I joined my mother, who was basting on her towel, asleep. Not having brought a towel myself (I defied her warnings) I lay next to her on the bare sand. I looked at my hands, and a dense jam of sweat and dirt had congealed under my fingernails. I looked at my mother’s fingers, stained with nicotine. I looked at her plump face, then down at the creased and crumpled flesh of her legs and thighs as she lay asleep on her towel, perfectly content, a priestess in the shrine.

  We’d been at the beach for hours; I didn’t have a watch but it felt too long. The combined effect of the heat and the planetary vastness of the beach and the hypnotic lull of the waves made me lightheaded. I felt hungry but also slightly queasy. After a while I started to feel restless and sat up again. I forgot my sunglasses and felt almost blinded. Colors were bleached and shapes were vague. I squinted and looked to see where my sister had gone. I could make out a tiny figure on the other side of the crescent, far away, at the edge of the water. I could feel myself in this pocket of stillness. I felt a sense of entrenched permanence, as if we would never leave this beach and had never been anywhere else. As if my mother, my sister, and I were lifted from earth and had become our own planet, and were at the same time the sole inhabitants of this planet. The water crested up the shore, slipping and ebbing. The sand gleamed in the unscattered light, it looked soaked with crushed diamonds. I heard a soft voice, almost a whisper: “Isn’t this so relaxing?”

  My mother was awake again. Her tone conveyed both affliction and its easement; now that she’d found peace, traces of her prior distresses stood out in relief. She lay propped on two elbows, staring at the water. Soon she would fall back to sleep, lulled again by the siren call of the waves. Her imperial cravings were sated. The sea was her glittering prize.

  Book IV

  The Future, Again

  Twin

  I WAS EATING PANCAKES at a tungsten-lit Perkins directly across from a video arcade, where, minutes earlier, I was spooning with a strange man in a darkened booth. “I really have to go,” I told the man, who wore a wedding ring and seemed desperate for an intimacy I couldn’t offer. “I just love to hold you,” he said in a woozy voice. Porn clips flickered over our faces from a tiny screen-like light from a stained glass window. The video arcade had the overchlorinated odor of a swimming pool that hadn’t been cleaned, and there was a mortuary odor too, like the chemical smell that pervaded hospital corridors. “Sorry,” I said, before disentangling myself. “Nice meeting you.” I slipped out of the booth and into the open air, where it was thirty degrees in the middle of October. It didn’t feel odd transitioning from the dark cavities of sex clubs to pancake houses, it was simply part of my new Iowa lifestyle.

  “Pass that boysenberry syrup,” said Kendra. She had on denim overalls and wore her hair in cute springy braids—she looked about fifteen years old. The syrup was a flashy violet color in the jar but when she poured it onto her pancakes it brightened into something slightly reddish, like Robitussin. Her plate was drenched in it.

  “That looks so disgusting, yuck.”

  “Mmmm,” she cooed, taking giant overstated bites.

  The mortuary smell of the sex shop was in the Perkins, too. It combined as if alchemically with the taste of the pancakes, so that the pancakes tasted like hospital, and the sex club reminded me of the pancakes, and everything resonated with everything else.

  “How was your sex club?” Kendra was chirpy and positive, the default style for all the playwrights in the program.

  “Good,” I said, disgorging pats of butter from plastic mini tubs.

  Her eyes widened with encouragement. “Oh that’s good.”

  The incommensurate robustness of her responses tickled me. Kendra was from New England and was raised to be intensely polite, even in circumstances that strained her to the breaking point. Racist people, clueless yobs—she treated everyone with the same genial interest. I took a perverse enjoyment watching her suck in her lips like a goldfish and nervously chew the insides of her cheeks to keep from breaking up when someone in the program brought some wildly inappropriate play to class—like Enzo, who wrote a play about a gay Jew (clearly based on me) who gets eaten by a mountain lion; or Sharon Bell, a progressive white woman who wrote Afro-womynist collages patterned on the work of Ntozake Shange, and always cast Kendra (the only black woman in the program) as “Witchgrass” or “Calendula” or something you could get at an apothecary.

  Not all the plays were bad—there were some good writers in the program. But I came to find that all playwrights were essentially crazy people. Playwrights were people who walked around talking to themselves, or barely spoke, or prattled in chirpy near-hysteria to avoid falling apart. We were screwed up and psychodevelopmentally wounded. Most, if not all the people in my program, had been abused and were in various stages of post-traumatic stress from parents wh
o strangled or molested them, or burned them with cigarettes, or threw them down the stairs. Most were children of alcoholics: three weeks into our first semester Caitlyn’s mother (who drank so much, she’d been hospitalized three times in a single year) developed a blood clot in her brain and died. A few months later, Julie’s father had an alcoholism-related stroke and then he died. We were all on the verge of going sort of nuts, and different people had different ways of concealing it. Julie erupted in squeals of chirpy affirmation, Melissa went into strange spacey fugue states. Sharon Bell was prone to having emotional breakdowns in the middle of writing exercises. Ten or fifteen minutes in, she’d excuse herself and slump toward the door in grief-stricken slow motion—a Hummel figurine broken and reglued and crumbling in tiny fractures with every step.

  Even though the playwrights were eccentric and troubled, I seemed to fit in with them—but my peers were elusive. Sometimes they agreed to hang out, but they were all either in relationships, or neurotically private, or protective of their time because they needed to write. By default, Kendra and I (both fairly social as far as writers went) spent nearly all our free time together. On weekend nights we sat on a bench across from a bar on the main drag gossiping about people in the program. We walked from one end of the mall to the other and watched all the straw-haired Christian teenagers going on dates, chewing on lobes of Auntie Anne’s pretzels and slurping Orange Julius. We observed the little tweens ice-skating indoors and gamboling around, their tiny pink fingers sticky with Cinnabon icing. We ate weird disgusting renditions of ethnic foods: Pad thai that was brown and tasted like vulcanized rubber, cylinders of tuna maki piped with a grayish-lavender stuffing. (“All tuna is gray,” the waiter informed me, careful not to put too fine a point on it.) On Sunday mornings we held our noses to escape the gastric stench of vomit-streaked sidewalks as we made our way to some brunch spot—usually a diner betraying a link to Swedish ancestry, or one of those living rooms in Victorian houses midwestern people made into restaurants. During tornado warnings we hunkered in our respective clawfoot bathtubs talking on cordless phones until the batteries ran out. I adored Kendra—I thought she was the most pleasant human being I’d ever met in my life. But my attachment to her was slightly unhealthy.

  When we finished up our pancakes, I didn’t want the night to end. “What should we do now?” I asked with a vague sense of doom, for I knew what was coming.

  Kendra’s eyes widened in sympathy. “Oh my,” she said. “I think I have to go home.”

  “Already?”

  “We just sat in a Perkins for two hours!”

  “But, Kendra, I’m so bored.”

  “Go work on your play!”

  “It’s Saturday night!” I said with zealous insistence, as if I were a person who had to stay out late on weekends.

  “But I have to work,” said Kendra. “My reading is in three weeks.”

  “I thought you already finished that play.”

  “The second act is a mess, I need to rewrite it.”

  Kendra was intensely disciplined. In the past year she’d written three full-length plays and was now working on a fourth—a Gothic horror she was planning to submit for Playwrights Festival. That was the year-end culmination of everything we’d done. It was our debutante’s ball: agents and producers came to offer critiques, but also to scout for talent and build relationships with young writers. It was a chance to get to the “next level” (whatever that was, no one really knew) but we all felt the rapacious drive to “make it in the industry.” Every writer was represented in the festival, but a handful of plays were selected for full productions, and those were (for obvious reasons) better positioned than plays selected for readings, though the administration tried to play down the competitive aspect.

  I was certain Kendra would get a full production—I envied her discipline. She wasn’t afraid of writing, but I had practically a phobia of it. At Iowa we were instilled with the notion that to write a good play you had to risk something, you had to be honest. And though I wanted to be honest, and my favorite plays and films and books were all excoriating and true, the prospect of writing my truth terrified me.

  I couldn’t have admitted this back then. I told myself I was deep, and sensitive (I cried easily! I liked Rilke!) but I was terrified of being exposed—and not just to other people, to myself. I was a Lot Six: a freak and an oddity. Who would want my truth? No one.

  I wanted to please people with my writing. I tried writing comedies with clever dialogue. If the comedies got too honest, I backed away. When the anxiety around writing became too much, I avoided it altogether. Festival submissions were due in early December and I had nothing—I hadn’t written a word in months. I gave feedback in workshops and did all the assigned reading and that was the extent of my participation in the program. I suspected I might be kicked out, but for some reason my teachers were all weirdly patient with me. Each week I came without pages to Naomi Iizuka’s class (she was the visiting instructor) and each week she pretended not to notice.

  Tom Hauser—the man who ran the program—was the same way.

  The writers all adored Tom, even if he was beleaguered by some kind of adult social anxiety and would sometimes go out of his way to avoid us—or, at other times, linger a little too long with us and talk a little too much until it became awkward for everyone. His bumbling insecurity endeared him to us. He was a typical midwestern specimen: padded in his wool sweaters, waistline ballooning in baggy corduroy pants. He was doe-eyed and chinless, unrugged and soft-voiced. On cold days his nose turned bright red. When he made one of his bizarre jokes about Maeterlinck or Meryl Streep’s character in A Cry in the Dark, he blushed scalding pink. Sometimes he could be very heady. My first week of school, he sat me down in his office. He said, “What is Adjmi-esque?” I found this to be an absolutely terrifying question. Tom was pushing me to look at myself, and I wanted to bury my head in the sand.

  I was, without question, the least productive writer in that program, but I was not alone in my anxieties. We were all dealing with all the bleak uncertainties of a future in the theatre.

  One afternoon, Kendra and I ran into Jean Endicott getting soused in an Italian restaurant in Coralville. Jean was single, in her early forties, and lived with her grandmother in Cedar Rapids. She’d graduated from the program in the 1980s and still wrote plays but worked as a physical therapist in Quad Cities for her day job. “Hello there, Jean!” said Kendra, who was in a chipper mood.

  “Did you hear the news?” said Jean. She smiled, but her face flashed an almost citric distaste.

  “What news is that?” I asked.

  “Oh, you didn’t hear?” There was a sudden tooth-decaying sweetness in her voice, but her bulbous nostrils flared contrastingly with what seemed like rage. “Ellen Nadler on Broadway,” she said a little too loudly. “Isn’t it great?”

  Ellen Nadler was Jean’s former classmate, and that morning Jean saw online that Ellen’s new play was going to open on Broadway in the spring. Jean was not having a terribly easy time with this, and it was understandable. Unlike Ellen, who went on to have a successful career in England, and won a Genius Grant, Jean wasn’t famous, not by the most generous stretch. “Maybe they’ll let me be a popcorn girl!” she said, taking tiny aggressive bites of her chicken Caesar salad. “Oh—no. I could usher! Do you think they’ll let me usher? Ha ha ha.”

  Kendra and I drove back to Iowa City that afternoon in a silence undergirded with the acute awareness that either of us could turn into Jean Endicott—in fact, it wouldn’t take much. Playwrighting didn’t pay, and it was nearly impossible to achieve any sort of success doing it. We could go mad and be eaten with jealousy and petty rivalries and become consumed by our own failures. I didn’t want to fail—but I didn’t want to tempt fate by trying to succeed, either. I just wanted to snuggle into a delightful little limbo, one with no responsibilities or consequences, where reality couldn’t get at me. The future, previously my sole font of hope, was now a kind of boog
eyman: it was coming for me—and the closer it got, the more my fraudulence and ineptitude would be revealed, so even as I moved toward it, I kept pushing it away.

  I searched for new ways to procrastinate. I went to bookstores and cafes by myself. I drove around under skies striated by thin-branched trees. By November it was too cold to fuck—the closeted men all seemed to go into hibernation, chatlines were dead, video arcades across from the Perkinses conspicuously vacant—so I jerked off compulsively to slow-loading dial-up porn. I’d trudge from freezing street to dead-grassed plain, past hay bales and wind turbines and tall poles pleached with black wires. It was all so empty and American and I loved it. I loved the Hamburg Inn and the goopy cheese sauces they slathered on everything. I loved the drugstore down the street from me where they served milkshakes at the counter. I’d been dreading the move to Iowa, I didn’t think I’d survive it; stripped of all the predicates of leisure-class existence, without decent sushi options and luxe gym chains, who would I be? But the truth was, the banality of the Midwest suited me. I felt no pressure to look good. My body became some vestigial organ, I didn’t care what happened to it. My hair fell out. I stopped exercising. I stopped dating. I gained twenty pounds I had no intention of losing. I subsisted on a diet of Auntie Anne’s pretzels and Cinnabons and cheese sauce. I shopped at discount outlets at the mall, and wore a uniform of sweatshirts and khaki pants that bunched unattractively at my thighs and calves. When I started going bald, I bought a jar of Dippity-do for three bucks, scrunched up whatever was left of my hair with it, and walked around like a crazy person, my gluey flaps of hair cracking stiffly in the frozen air.

  I felt free and unburdened of expectations, but it was lonely. The other writers had spouses or were preoccupied with writing—the whole point of being in Iowa, obviously—but I did everything I could to avoid my work.