“What You See” by Susan Daitch, page 6

        Turning down movie deals and large advances for another book, Lazarus retreated to his storefront on Henry Street to avoid the dwindling number of his admirers who, over the years, would occasionally turn up on his doorstep. Despite his former wealth and fame, his last days were spent in poverty and obscurity. When I met him he was saving napkins from the Bonafide II Deli where he got coffee to go.
        The lengths he would go to save money were extraordinary. Perhaps saving is the wrong word to use. He couldn't save money because he didn't have any. On one visit he gave Nissim a sticker which read I'm Too Poor to Vote Republican. My son, innocent of the meaning of the words, slapped it on his scooter, but the sticker was so old, it soon peeled off. Lenny had found a box of these bumper stickers and sliced them to ribbons to use as tape. He would have preferred to desecrate I Heart Jesus stickers, but he said, "I have to settle for what I get."
        He was violently opposed to the war in Vietnam and had a deep personal hatred of Richard Nixon whom he remembered from the McCarthy era. Nixon, then a senator, had been one of those politicians the mention of whose name would send his father into Tourette-like speech saying, "it's a racket," over and over. Lenny had a collection of Nixon buttons and other memorabilia including a pair of Nixon/Agnew socks. "Under one's feet, that's where those alter kahkers belong."
        At this point I should add that Lenny was not a nice old man nor was he easy to like. One day he asked me out of the blue how my parents felt about my having a half Mexican kid. The question had an unpleasant edge to it, odd coming from someone who had passed as Mexican himself and loved every minute of it. "His father was Indian," I said, "and my parents are dead." That was the last conversation I had with a fully alert and conscious Lazarus, and I'm sorry to say it ended on a bad note. Before I left he gave me a copy of What You See. I'd been asking to read it for months, and he parted with it reluctantly fearing any copy let out of his hands would turn into a monster, as it had been when first published. He didn't want me to think he wrote trash, and since it had been cast as such, some defenseless part of him suspected that's what the book actually was, despite all his profound intentions. Comparing the long out of print book to a once beloved child that grew up and returned as someone he didn't recognize he handed me a thick book with a torn dust jacket. Under the title and his name was a drawing of a target and a woman in a mini-skirt.
        I read it over a period of several days, as consumed as possible by that very monster he feared and loved. I couldn't wait to talk to Lazarus about the book. After dropping Nissim off at school I picked up Lenny's usual breakfast, coffee and an egg sandwich, and hurried across the street to his storefront. The door was ajar. I pushed it open to find him lying on his bed shouting.
        "Pinochet in Chile was returning the copper industry to the Guggenheims, the Graces, and the Morgans. What is copper used for? Nuclear weapons. And Barbie was there advising the generals along with Nixon, and Kissinger, Ford and Colby. I could have stopped them in their tracks, but I did nothing. I sat at a desk scribbling, guarding their property."
        Some of his cataract of words may not have been far from wrong, but it was clear he'd suffered another stroke. I sat and listened all morning. After a while he sounded like a talking version of XYZ. If the brain is like a filing cabinet in which all content is neatly ordered in appropriate folders, when it has an accident and topples, as say his did, and records spill, you hope that somehow everything will be realigned and put back in order. Unfortunately Lenny's files were never righted; all those memories and all that information remained entirely and hopelessly scrambled. It was obvious he could no longer live on his own, but he did manage to tell me that his daughter, a producer of soap operas in Mexico City, was coming to look after him. Whether this was true or not I don't know. Since he'd last told me she was a court translator in Los Angeles I would later call information in both cities, trying to find a Mili Goldberg, but neither had a listing for her. Although he had no telephone, Ruthie's number was written on the wall, and I rang her from a pay phone down the street. The woman who had been one of the models for Stella had a tired, smoker's voice, and as curious as I was to meet her, she could only come late at night. I hung up the phone feeling confident that he would be well taken care of. Why I had that false confidence I don't know.
        Depending on the damage and part of the brain involved, stroke victims have little time to realign the filing cabinet before memory suffers irrevocable losses. I waited too long to check on him, ironically delayed by reading What You See. I would never be able to talk to Lenny about the book or what he had written in the years since its publication. The weekend came and went. I was occupied with taking my son to an exhibit about the body where children slid down slides on colored pillows which represented various bodily fluids: red blood cells, snot. My false confidence in the body's resilience and immune system was only reinforced by the exhibit's simple descriptions of friendly cells and invading but always defeated germs.
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