“What You See” by Susan Daitch, page 7
Monday morning when I returned to the storefront it was padlocked. I ran to the Bonafide Deli to see if anyone knew what had happened. The tiny place had its morning regulars, non commuters, who drank coffee standing up or sitting outside. Something had overturned behind the counter, and the owner, bent over a mop, was not happy about it.
"Do you know what happened to the storefront down the street?" I asked.
"It's not my day," the woman said, shrugging as she mopped, letting me know she had no idea.
"Every day is not my day until I retire." A customer answered. "The old guy died. His sister came right away, but not quick enough. The landlord threw everything in the place into a dumpster. He was anxious to get rid of the old man because he hardly ever paid rent. The new tenants will pay top dollar."
"There goes the neighborhood," said the woman behind the counter. She wasn't joking.
**
There must be very few copies of What You See left in the world. I found one copy on the shelves of the main library in Brooklyn that hadn't been checked out in over twenty years. All copies of XYZ and any writings Lazarus may have produced since 1974 have vanished from the face of the earth as far as I have been able to determine. The University of Iowa in Iowa City has an excellent archive of the works of Surrealist and Dadaist artists and writers, from Ernst to Oppenheim, but no Lazarus. I'm hoping someone in Mexico City has a carton of XYZs somewhere or Mili Lazarus wherever she is, has a few inscrutable but treasured copies.
Tom Bissell in the April 2000 issue of "The Boston Review of Books" wrote, "What determines a work's longevity is in many cases an accumulation of unliterary accidents in the lives of individuals years and sometimes even decades after the writer has gone to the White Creator." This is certainly true in the case of L.J. Lazarus. If it weren't for a one-eyed Batman backpack, I might never have met the author of What You See. I can only hope someone else would have, but given the time he had left on earth and the isolation of his storefront in Brooklyn the odds of anyone finding him before all his books were consigned to a city dumpster are small.
If Lenny's 1974 thriller were to be republished, L.J. Lazarus would join the pantheon of writers like Melville, Dickinson, and Dawn Powell who posthumously received the attention that eluded them in life. The publicity which would follow might no more be to his liking than it was decades ago, but as Lenny would be the first to say, "Alter Kahkers rule." Although I would add, they can take many forms.
What You See is not only revealing about the early 1970s, crystallizing the style of a moment with its dial phones, big cars with slant six engines, and low tech illegal wiretapping, but Lazarus' work is seminal in its prediction of the way military projects appropriate culture and revise history. Initially suckered in by quick paced urban suspense the reader soon finds a tangled path of global intrigue. So what is the book about? What do you see in What You See?
**
Lenny foists his masks on a lot of people. Stella is Ruthie/Babette/and finally Lenny himself. All kinds of theft appears in What You See: cultural piracy, robbery of identity real and manufactured. Lenny felt the book itself, what he meant to say, meant us to see, was stolen from him. Whether we'll get it right this time remains to be seen. Lenny's storefront, The Golden City, and Let's Pet have been combined and turned into a Starbucks, although this isn't really the kind of busy neighborhood that can sustain one. The Bonafide looks warily down the street, regulars incredulous that someone would spend so much money on a cup of coffee. I find myself looking for clues of Lenny that might have been overlooked by the eager landlord: one of his Agnew buttons, a shred of a bumper sticker, a picture of Julie Christie with an x marked across it, but apart from the book you now hold in your hands all clues to the life of Leonard Jerome Lazarus have been erased.
In writing about this book I don't want to use the expression of frustration Lenny often did when criticizing various governmental boondoggles, Klop dem kopp en vahnt. (You can hit your head against the wall.) If the quest for the republication of What You See turns out to be an exercise in hitting my head against the wall, I can only hope the few copies remaining unchecked out on library shelves, stored in basements, or unbid on as they dwell in cyberauctions will somehow find a few readers. Chance often works slowly, but if those readers tell others, I hope with nineteenth century optimism that the number of Lazarus' admirers may snowball. And, who knows, if What You See were to receive the attention it deserves, someone might want to unearth XYZ as well.
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