Fraud (2 page)

He leaves fairly early in the evening. I hope he has somewhere to go. Then again, I think, I don’t have anywhere to go, why am I so concerned with the imagined loneliness of a total stranger? Then again
again,
I actually am somewhere. I am sitting in a bar of a New England inn on Christmas Eve. I am the Writer, eating a steak, drinking alone, talking to the bartender. And even though I loathe animals, I lazily toss bits of popcorn to Blue as he sits at the foot of my barstool.

It’s just me and the bartender and my faithful dawg. Plus my date the largemouth bass, whom I’ve been ignoring. I fairly drip with authenticity now. I have let go of my paranoia. I feel completely comfortable. So comfortable, in fact that, inexplicably, I find myself asking the bartender if there’s either a synagogue or a gay bar in Jaffrey. I clearly feel the need to out myself to her in every possible way. Why stop there, I wonder, and not just go ahead and ask if there’s a Canadian consulate nearby?

She keeps refilling my wineglass as we talk. She cuts me an enormous piece of baklava. More popcorn for the dog. I have a mountain to climb in the morning, dammit.

My reverie is undone by the strange series of glottal kecks and surds coming from below. I look down to Blue, whose neck is arching forward and back in an ominously regular, reverse peristaltic fashion. I find the words, as my voice Dopplers up to a fairly effeminate and vaguely hysterical pitch: “I think this dog might be getting sick. . . . This dog is getting sick. The dogissick. . . . OHMIGODTHEDOGISSICK!!!”

Blue vomits out a small, viscous puddle for which, from my quick and queasy perusal, I am largely responsible. The bartender cleans it up without a second glance. Thoroughly unmasked, I settle up for dinner and take myself upstairs to sleep. And to all a good night.

The logic underlying the truism that one should always travel on a plane with a book is also precisely why bed-and-breakfast culture is to be avoided if at all possible. Namely, you might have to talk to someone. Talking to someone is not always a bad thing—a great deal of viable human contact demands it—but if, for example, one were getting ready to climb a mountain of a drizzly, gray Christmas morning, with a fine mist of freezing rain falling, and no one has really either set up a breakfast table or made it clear where the cups were stored, conversation might not be at the forefront of one’s mind. Rather, conversation that doesn’t begin with the amusing gambit “Where’s the fucking coffee?” might not be at the forefront of one’s mind.

There are two women, mother and daughter, seated at the only table that has any semblance of being set. There is also an older fellow in a flannel shirt with suspenders. His hair is as white as the china. If he is related to the mother and daughter, it is not by blood. More likely he’s a peripheral member of their group, someone else’s father-in-law, because his ceaseless joking would not be tolerated by someone who knew him better. (And it is ceaseless. Moreover, it’s the kind of joking that stops all conversation stone cold dead: “Good morning.” “Now, are you sure about that? That it’s a good morning? Maybe it’s only a fair morning.” His eyes dancing with what he clearly thinks is merry, elfin delight. After a slight pause, and a small, diplomatic smile, the mother says, “Oh, now. You’re just a joker, aren’t you?” like a weary waitress being relentlessly flirted with by a mildly annoying, but ultimately paying, customer.)

The mother is in her mid- to late forties. It is evident even now that she was once Beauty Pageant beautiful and is not unattractive now, but a mild Parkinsonian shuddering has rendered her tremulous and self-conscious. Her daughter is twenty and, to give her her due, well spoken and quite cute—her pores are tiny—but she is intoxicated by her own allure. And, unlike her mother, she doesn’t have the bone structure to carry off that whole Mitford girl thing she has going on: all high spirits, pluck, and verbiage. When she hears what I’m about to do, she says, “Why, I was in a bar in St. Albans, Vermont, just the other night, and the subject of the Man Who Climbs the Mountain Every Day came up. All the way up in St. Albans. Imagine that.” She says “bar in St. Albans, Vermont,” as if she were saying “Les Deux Magots.”

The floor of Larry Davis’s car is deep with litter. Bottles, cans, wrappers. The kind of garbage accumulated by the very crazy. I am relieved to learn that it’s detritus he’s picked up meticulously from the trails of the mountain. When he gets a chance, he’ll take it to the dump. Davis isn’t all that strange a man, as it turns out, unfortunately for the magazine story, I think regretfully. Every smoking gun of possible derangement turns out to be as benign as the trash in the car. A man who tells you he is “a bit of an extremist” and, as proof, tells you of the day he and a friend tried every brand of beer they could find makes for somewhat monotonous copy, albeit decidedly better company, say, than the man who, making the same assertion, shows you multiple cigarette burns on his forearms and the human feces he has lovingly smeared into his hair and clothing.

I realize I have a child’s concept of mountains. I assume they just rise up suddenly out of the flat ground, like breasts. (I also happen to have a child’s concept of breasts.) It seems we drive for an eternity after we pass the sign at the entrance to Monadnock State Park, and I thrill briefly with the thought that we might just drive all the way, although I know for a fact that there is no road up the mountain.

We are climbing this Christmas Day with two of Larry’s friends. It is three men and a baby. The climb begins easily enough, although I am somewhat alarmed to find myself sweating profusely after only fifteen minutes. I am hot and my clothes are starting to feel heavy and moist. Before we begin the earnest ascent of our trip, some
1
,
900
feet straight up within the next half mile, we stop at a spring to fill our canteens and take a short break. The water is fresh and exceedingly cold. I am asked no fewer than three times if I’ve ever had better water than this. I allow as probably not, certainly never colder water. Yes, that water is good. Very good. Boy, that is some good water, you betcha. But it is still, for want of a better term, water. Unless you spend your life drinking disease-ridden bilge directly from the Ganges or you live beside some strip mine’s trace metals dumping site, extended discussions of water are a little bit like that annoying New York foodie habit of ascribing a “subtle, nutty flavor” to things with very little taste.

The guys are shooting the shit. “I gave Mona her Christmas present last night,” one of them says, referring to a girlfriend. “My tongue still hurts.”

A lot of the talk focuses on “
1028
s.” (“Think we’ll see any
1028
s?” “That was a real good
1028
day.” “All we need is some
1028
s to make this a perfect Christmas.”) Apparently, “
1028
” is code for babes.

I try to join in by asking them if they know the term
23
skidoo
. They do not. “Well,” I begin, “it’s from the twenties in New York, and the Flatiron Building at
23
rd Street creates this wind tunnel that, I guess, used to blow pretty young girls’ skirts up, and the cops would signal one another that they could see the thighs of some lovely young thing by saying . . . uh . . . ‘
23
skidoo’ . . . it was part of the slang . . . you know, like, uhm, like
1028
.”
Flowers for you, Miss Garbo!

Later, Larry asks us: “Hey, what’s the difference between oral sex and anal sex? Oral sex’ll make your whole day and anal sex’ll make your whole week.”

I am amazed. This is not really much of a joke at all, more of an observation, I think, and I find its relaxed, surprisingly positive attitude toward anal penetration a complete eye-opener.

“I don’t get it,” says one friend.

“It’ll make your hole weak. Your H-O-L-E W-E-A-K. Get it?”

Oh. Good thing I didn’t call forth a hearty “I’ll say it will!”

The storm picks up rapidly as we ascend, rain and sleet falling and freezing immediately. The usual foursquare dimensions of evergreens, all staunch angles, needles, and propriety, are rendered Mae West voluptuous by a two-inch-thick coating of rime ice. Above the treeline, the last third of the climb, the temperature drops yet further by a good fifteen degrees, and the bare rock is glazed and dangerously slippery. My footing is becoming ever more precarious, and despite the crampons in our backpacks, Larry makes no motion toward stopping to put them on. He is testing my manhood, and also my temper. I say nothing and continue to climb. I am starting to get cranky. We finally make summit, its bare, wind-carved rock undulating: silver, pale, lunar, and glamorous. Shrouded in fog, we cannot see more than thirty feet in any direction. It lends a false sense of enclosure to everything, like a diorama from the Museum of Natural History.

And, no, I don’t feel somehow better that we got to the top without the crampons, although I tell Larry otherwise as I take a long pull off a Sierra Nevada. I find nothing particularly ennobling about what we’ve just done. I’m not sporting any added tumescence; I have no sense that I’ve stared down anything significant. I find life itself provides ample and sufficient tests of my valor and mettle: illness; betrayal; fruitless searches for love; working for the abusive, the insane, and the despotic. All challenges easily as thrilling to me as scrambling over icy rock in a pair of barely adequate boots.

As a natural finale, the clouds begin to dissipate and a shaft of extraordinary late afternoon sunlight pours through and gilds a stretch of piney mountainside. Dusk is turning the rest of the sky into an indigo expanse pierced with hundreds of stars. The air is as clear and cold as vodka. Unexpectedly and with the speed and force of a freight train, I find myself quietly, desperately sad. I think, If I can only hear some traffic or if only the mist would part to reveal a parking lot—oh God, a beautiful, beautiful parking lot—down at the base of the mountain, I will get through this.

A hot shower and two drinks brightens my mood considerably. I am warm and feeling kinder, grooving, even, on my experience. I have invited Larry and a friend of his to supper at the inn. The Daughter from Breakfast comes up to our table. She asks about the day’s climb. She is appropriately confident, clearly used to the attention of men. Larry and his friend are no exceptions; they smile and lean forward, laugh too loudly at what she says. She talks to Larry about his daily climb. “And how do you finance this
interesting
life with these daily climbs of yours?” she asks, her voice curling in on itself with playfulness. She is leaning on one arm on the back of my chair, her hips canted forward; her shirt rides up, showing a chevron of sleek tummy, a demure ring at the navel.

“I work,” says Larry, suddenly cool. After a day spent talking about women—their absence on the mountain, their possible arrival on the mountain, the hypothetical projected excellence said arrival might embody—it is bracing and heartening to see that Larry knows when he’s being high-hatted, no matter how unintentionally. Looking across the table at him, I see nothing but a surpassingly decent guy. Through the familiar blush of drink, I feel the familiar guilt of journalistic cannibalism, ashamed of my jaundiced scrutiny. He didn’t begin his climbs five years previously in the hopes that a magazine writer might one day visit. By contrast, the mini test of my manhood notwithstanding, he was nothing but kind all day long. Everything about me, my inappropriate footwear, my effete lexicon, my unfamiliarity with such natural phenomena as trees, rock, and ice, have all been met with great equanimity and good grace. Larry and his pals are friendly. It becomes quite clear to me that the only one casting strange glances of disapproval my way is me.

At the summit I had pulled out the disposable camera I bought in the Boston airport. I made Larry take my picture a number of times. When the film comes back, I will look at the photos of myself, scanning them for evidence. Looking for the face of an adult. The face of a man who climbs mountains. The face of a Dave.

ARISE, YE WRETCHED
OF THE EARTH

Friday nights of childhood and early adolescence in Toronto were spent at the weekly gathering of the socialist youth movement of which my brother, sister, and I were members. Meetings were spent having earnest discussions of Marx and the great Labor Zionist thinkers like Theodor Herzl and A. D. Gordon; “bull sessions” about who in the group had hurt whose feelings; and air guitar contests to “Come Sail Away” by Styx. Occasionally the more dogmatic among us might even rise from one of the oily seat-sprung sofas and, with right index finger shaking and pointing heavenward, intone like Mayakovsky, “On Yom Kippur, we must go to a restaurant, sit in the front window, and eat pork!” A public
treyf
chow-down that would send an appropriate fuck you to the soporific comfort of our middle-class friends and families.

We never actually went through with anything remotely like this, of course, but in such teapot tempests are burgeoning political consciousnesses formed. We became deeply committed young socialists, ready at the age of fifteen for the ultimate prize the movement could bestow—a summer living and working on a kibbutz, one of the collective farms that were a central part of settling the Jewish state. We had been drilled in all the facts: the kibbutz was the last bastion of left-wing Israeli idealism; children lived in group houses away from their parents, a scenario of autonomous high jinks reminiscent of
Pippi Longstocking;
kibbutz was the Great Experiment in Action.

Once there, we would meet other members of the movement from all over the world and spend many a happy hour engaged in honest labor—laughingly baling sheaves of wheat, picking olives, oranges, peaches, grapes, the sweat on our brows a shining reminder of the nobility of collective farming. In the evenings we would gather together and dance around the fire while singing Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young songs and, if one’s older siblings were any indication, lose our virginity. Years later we would renounce our bourgeois upbringings and return to Israel, making lives of simple agrarian bliss.

The kibbutz I was assigned to was one of the oldest in Israel, settled in
1928
by Jews from Russia, Poland, and Germany. For the most part, our arrival was met with little to no notice. We were just another group of volunteers, no different from the countless Europeans and Australians just passing through, taking time out to pick fruit, work on their tans, and contract cystitis from their rampant and unchecked coitus.

But we were different; we were members of the movement! I thought that our political ardor would be immediately apparent. I had visions of our bus being greeted by garlanded folk-dancing youth, so happy to have us there to share in their lives. I had been raised on a fairly steady diet of just such socialist utopian Ziegfeld numbers: songs, film strips, and oral histories that all attested to just this scenario. Trees weren’t simply trees, they were jungle gyms of plenty with smiling children clambering over their branches; a field was somewhere you brought your guitar, so that your comrades could dance down the rows after the day’s work was over.

I was assigned to pick pears. Work would begin at four
A
.
M
. and finish sometime midmorning, before the heat had set in. How filled with fervor I was that first day, the light barely dawning as I headed out in the back of the truck, wearing my simple work shirt, a pair of shorts, and the traditional sunhat worn by so many pioneers who had come before me to make the desert bloom. (I should point out that we actually said things like “Make the Desert Bloom” all the time. In fact, the most mundane activities were habitually accorded classical, romantic, politicized descriptions: “Breaking Bread with Your Brothers and Sisters”; “Drinking Deeply of the Sweet Water”; “Harvesting the Fruits of Your Labor,” and so on.)

I know I sound like the Central Casting New Yorker I’ve turned myself into with single-minded determination when I say this, but the main problem with working in the fields is that the sun is just always shining. Dyed-in-the-wool northerner that I am, it became apparent after about two days that I was completely unsuited to working outside, and I was moved around among the kibbutz’s various interior jobs: the furniture factory, the metal irrigation parts factory, and the kitchen, assured all the while by the group leader that there was nothing emasculating or jack socialist in being moved inside. After all, each according to his needs, each according to his abilities. My abilities seemed to lie in passing out from heat stroke after a scant two hours in an orchard.

This continued for weeks. It was a somewhat idyllic, if not a mite monotonous, existence. Until the dreams of my socialist future came to a crashing halt. Brought on, not surprisingly, by an uncomfortable brush against the harsh realities of nature. The Long Night of the Chickens.

The boys of our group were gathered and told in the hushed tones reserved for trying to avert impending disaster that we would forgo our regular work details and spend that night from midnight until dawn packing truckloads of poultry. Why this needed to be done with such urgent secrecy, under cover of night, and why the girls were excused was never explained to us. And we didn’t ask. We greeted the news with that respectful Hemingway Silence of the Y Chromosome. No dopey girls allowed. It was all imbued with nocturnal, testicular melodrama, like some summer stock production of
Das Boot.
We slept that evening from nine to eleven—what I would come to know years later, in a far different context, as a Disco Nap. We rose and drank of some tea. The girls sprayed perfume into handkerchiefs for us to wear around our noses and mouths, and we were off in trucks to do battle with the insurgent chickens. The scene had everything but the diner waitress standing in the road watching us go, worriedly wiping her hands on her gingham apron.

The chicken coop of the kibbutz was a one-storied structure of corrugated iron, about half the size of a football field. It emitted a low rumbling, a vague buzz that you could hear from far away. And of course, from even farther away, there was the smell. A smell of such head-kicking intensity as to make a perfume-sprayed handkerchief almost adorable in its valiant naiveté; Wile E. Coyote warding off a falling boulder with his paper parasol. And the combination of floral scent and dung merely increased the vileness.

Chicken shit is horrible stuff. Unlike cow manure, which, according to David Foster Wallace, smells “warm and herbal and blameless,” chicken shit is an olfactory insult: a snarling, saw-toothed, ammoniac, cheesy smell. Needlessly, gratuitously disgusting; a stench of such assaultive tenacity that it burns your eyes. Even the light inside the coop was smudged and grimy through the haze. Rather than making you never want to eat a chicken again, it simply makes you angry. It makes you hold a grudge. You’ll eat chicken again, by God, and you’ll chew really, really hard.

One of the barrel-chested Israelis shows us what to do: pick up four chickens in each hand. This is done by grabbing hold of the birds by one leg. “If the leg snaps,” he says, “it doesn’t matter, just to get four in each hand,
b’seder?
” he says. “Okay?”

He faces us holding the requisite eight, four in each hand, living masses of writhing feathers, looking like some German expressionist cheerleader, his pom-poms alive, convulsing, filthy.
Who will see their dreams fall away into the abyss and eventually succumb to the crushing sadness and meaninglessness of it all? We will! And what does that spell? Madness! Louder! I can’t hear you!

He crams the chickens roughly into a blue plastic crate smeared with wet guano. “And you close the lid, and
tchick tchack,
” he tells us, clapping his hands with “that’s that” finality.

Before I even try, I know that I will not be able to do this. It is midnight, and we will be here until dawn or until the truck is piled to capacity with crated birds. I walk out into the sea of chickens. I reach down to grab one, its leg a slightly thicker, segmented chopstick. I recoil and stand up. I take a fetid breath, regroup, and bend down with new resolve, grab the chicken by its body with both hands, thinking somehow this might be preferable, although how I think I’m going to get eight of them this way, I’m not sure. Its ribs expand and contract under my fingers. A dirty, warm, live umbrella. I drop the bird as if it were boiling hot.

My friends are all grabbing handfuls of poultry and shoving them into crates, unmindful of splayed wings, attempted pecking of their forearms, and the horrible premorbid squawking of birds on their way to slaughter. My sensibilities are not offended by the processing of animals for food. I don’t care about the chickens. I fairly define anthropocentric. I’m crazy about the food chain and love being at the top of it. But like the making of sausages, federal legislation, and the film work of Robin Williams, there are some things I would just rather not witness firsthand.

I leave the coop and go out to the trucks. Hoisting myself up on the flatbed, I start to help with the stacking of the full crates. I know that my unilateral decision to change my task is met with displeasure on the part of the men who run the coop, but I do not care. Their muttered comments are predicated on a direct poultry-penile relationship. I might as well have spurned the stag party whore, gone to the wood shop, and fashioned myself a sign that said “fag.”

“Ma ito?”
“What’s the matter with him?” the head of the work detail asks when he sees me on the truck.

“Ha g’veret lo ohevet ha tarnegolot.”
His friend has answered using the female pronoun when referring to me. “The lady doesn’t like the chickens.”

It would be years before I was referred to as “she” again. And then very rarely and only as a joke by friends. Calling each other “she” is not quite the mainstay of the lexicon of the urban homosexual as people think. It is not our “Make the Desert Bloom.”

I turn around to look at the men, making it quite clear to them that I understand what they are saying. The man who called me “she” avoids my eyes and busies himself with straightening a pile of crates and tightening the tarpaulin on the side of the truck.

“You’re right,” I tell him in Hebrew. “
She
doesn’t like the chickens.”

Have you ever had one of those moments when you know that you are being visited by your own future? They come so rarely and with so little fanfare, those moments. They are not particularly photogenic, there is no breach in the clouds to reveal the shining city on a hill, no folk-dancing children outside your bus, no production values to speak of. Just a glimpse of such quotidian, incontrovertible truth that, after the initial shock at the supreme weirdness of it all, a kind of calm sets in. So this is to be my life.

At that very moment I saw that I would never live on a kibbutz. I would not lose my virginity that summer to any of the girls from the group. Indeed, I would not care to do so. I am grateful to that macho blowhard. He made me consciously realize what I had always known but been somehow unable to say to myself: He’s right, I don’t like chickens . . . I like men.

Now I live in the city that might best be described as the un-kibbutz. Where nobody would dream of touching a live chicken. Where whatever spirit of collectivist altruism people might have had dried up long ago, and where the words
Karl
and
Marx
generally bring up associations of Lagerfeld and Groucho.

At socialist summer camp in northern Ontario, I and the other children of affluent professionals would gather under the trees every day to sing before going in to lunch. One of the songs was always “The Internationale,” that worldwide hymn of the proletariat. One summer we were even taught to sing it with our left fists raised. We were, none of us, by any stretch of the imagination what could be described as prisoners of starvation or enthralled slaves, admittedly, both catchier metaphors and easier to scan than “Arise, ye children of psychiatrists.” But they had little to nothing to do with us personally. Yet for those few moments when we were singing, those words seemed so true. How can I describe to you that eleven-year-old’s sense of purpose? Like the patrons of Rick’s bar in
Casablanca
who manage to drown out the Germans with the “Marseillaise,” I was overcome by the thrill of belonging to some larger purpose, something outside of my own body. The sheer heart-stopping beauty of a world of justice and perfection, rising on new foundations. And that one line, “We have been naught. We shall be all.” Naught. What a wonderful word to describe my insignificance. It spoke as much about my wish to be delivered from this preadolescent self as it did to any consciousness of liberating the masses, but it held such promise of what I might hope for that even now, as I write this, I can still call up that old fervor. It still makes my breath catch in my throat.