I Am Max Lamm (8 page)

Everything else that Lamm owned in London remained at his mouldy flat in Golders Green. Where for a year termites had devoured the rotting mantelpiece in the living room, spiralling from their pinprick holes to fascinate him when he awoke at 3 p.m. on a wine-stained mattress. The last bottle of cheap red empty, translucent dribble speckling the oily pillow because that month’s roommate had charitably rotated Lamm’s head so he wouldn’t choke on his own vomit. If the police had identified the suspect, they’d be watching that address.

The newspapers reported that the investigation was ‘making rapid progress’, but Scotland Yard hadn’t matched a name to the faceless culprit in the surveillance footage. So Max Lamm’s personal notoriety, if he was to be remembered by anybody for anything, remained in his youth as a tennis champ. Before London, before the East River, Lamm was notable for his adolescence as a tennis prodigy, his native athleticism, his squandered ambition, his remarkable tenacity on the tennis court, in the art studio and the classroom . . . though like most people who are good at everything, ultimately he excelled at nothing.

His extended family, schoolteachers, classmates, the sniping parents of teenage tennis rivals, for years they talked up the same thing: Max Lamm’s
potential
. Celebrated on the way up, notorious on the way down. Only after the fall did those people really enjoy discussing Lamm, the vanquished hotshot. The tennis champ, captain of the soccer team, A-grade essayist, gifted painter, best speaker in the debating club, who was reassuringly revealed as an oversexed degenerate whoremonger. A fool depraved beyond his years, who judging from the two-minute video clip that got the search engines chugging in March 2003, felt most alive fucking a Salvadorian call-girl in an illegal whorehouse on Second Avenue. A bag of contraband white powder visible on the bedside table.

The warm buzz of
schadenfreude
! To see a talented young man climb the precarious rope up to something stupendous, then snatch away the safety net as he falls. And don’t forget, the critics added, that Max Lamm’s a hater of women! A spectacular misogynist, Norman Mailer without the unquenchable literary fire and the ex-wife stabbed. Lamm who hates people as a species, who hates love, laughter, decency, celebration and solid unspectacular achievement. The chauvinist pig Lamm who hates hugs, kisses and family values, who hates walks on the beach, picnics in the park, baby photos in the wallet,
shabbos
dinner with his parents. Ultimately, his critics agreed, the ghoul hates himself.

‘Your boy hates what we love.
That’s
what he loves,’ Lou Schiff, the esteemed plastic surgeon and president of Mizrachi synagogue, told Lamm’s father at the kosher bakery the week the scandal broke.

‘The kid loves to hate. But really he hates himself.’

Schiff walked away to untie his schnauzer, without saying goodbye. The kid’s like that for a reason, they all agreed. It’s the parents’ fault too.

Lamm’s spring of talent, once irrepressibly bubbling at his core, dried over in the summer of 2004. When
everybody
– hairdressers in Sydney, cod fisherman in Newfoundland, forklift drivers in rural Ohio – learnt about the girl from El Salvador and the video that she ‘accidentally’ left in the lobby of the Howard Johnson’s Hotel on Second Avenue. The sex tape she swore that she never knew existed.

A half-page exclusive in the
New York Post
, a two-minute story at the end of the ESPN sports bulletin, and within a day, Lamm made the network news. Followed by his meltdown in the first round of the US Open, near-suicide in the East River;
everything.
In the
New York Times
sports section for three days straight, on the front pages in Australia. The silver lining: across three continents, Max Lamm inspired responsible parents to lecture their cumstruck adolescents about how not to sabotage their life’s prospects.

By August, Lamm was popular not only among the porno search engines, but in the ‘Jews in Sports’ database of Jew-Watch.com, the popular anti-Semitic bulletin board run by a crank Aryan-supremacist librarian from Missouri. A venal website, ranked number one on Google’s search results for ‘Jew’, that claims that the blood of Christian children softens the Passover matzah; that denies the pogroms, ghettos and gas chambers; that portrays the Nazi hatemonger Julius Streicher as a blameless victim of Zionist bloodlust at Nuremburg.

‘Max Lamm,’ somebody called Panzer72 wrote on the bulletin board, ‘demonstrates the dishonesty and depravity that is second nature to the Jew.’ Unbound on the internet, Lamm’s mistake became a vicious tearaway beast, like the savage Alsatian that Issl Koch, the camp commandant’s monster of a wife at Buchenwald, let loose on terrified Jewish children.

And not just the anonymous anti-Semites on the Jew-Watch chatroom. United in their zealous multitudes were evangelicals against Max Lamm; America’s creepily polite family values fanatics who, like the Saudi terrorists they despise even more than the Clintons, value fanaticism over family. The loyal evangelicals, fifty million strong from Alabama to Anchorage, who bombarded Reebok’s headquarters with approximately seventeen thousand emails and four thousand phone messages demanding that Lamm, the amoral libidinous disgrace, disappear from the firm’s endorsement program or else America’s conservative Christians would unanimously choose another brand of running shoe.

How these evangelicals abhorred the fallen champ and his ilk! Because decadent Jews like Max Lamm, the beneficiaries of a global financial conspiracy led by Soros, Geffen, Spielberg, Art Garfunkle and the other wealthy Jewish liberals, diluted the megachurches’ illusionary re-creation of Eisenhower’s golden age. Making their mark that election year, Falwell’s followers yearned for the vanquished era of safe segregated streets, of creationism in science classrooms, of white churchgoing values unshattered by
Roe v Wade
or the
Brown
decision, of incorruptible small government and priests who never fall for the temptation of the altar boy’s flesh, of an apple-pie America that never existed anyway outside of Frank Capra movies and Norman Rockwell paintings on the cover of the
Saturday Evening Post.

The family values lobby successfully petitioned the Association of Tennis Professionals to suspend Max Lamm from future tournaments. His career – fourteen years of training, six hours a day – dissolved by the conservative coalition of fat cat Falwell, the megalomaniacal psychologist James Dobson of Focus on the Family, and right-wing titan Ralph Reed (a few months before he was exposed for helping the crooked lobbyist Jack Abramoff fleece $82 million from a Native American tribe in Mississippi).

So ignore the so-called news in that leftist cumrag the
New York Times
! Ignore Bin Laden and his lieutenants brainstorming in a cave in northern Pakistan, or the Jordanian kid in a suicide belt who killed thirty people yesterday at a fruit market in the Sunni Triangle. Ignore the glaciers melting into slurpee slush, ignore all the news since Satan stuck a cigar up his intern, because finally, here was something for the evangelicals to really get worked up about!

Max Lamm’s sex-tape spectacle was a red rag to those who pray for the resurrected reign of Ronald the Great Communicator; the millions of Americans with flagpoles stuck in their yard and up their spine, who yearn for the early 1980s when the president was hewn from Mount Rushmore’s craggy rock, thought like a rock, and unlike the shadowy terrorists arriving on student visas from Saudi Arabia, the USA’s most dangerous enemy was big, red and smack bang in the middle of the world map. Back when the enemy was like us and didn’t want to die.

For a week the born-agains overloaded the switchboards at Reebok and the Association of Tennis Professionals. They phoned the Midwestern newsrooms of NBC, ABC, CBS. ‘Get that disgusting sex freak and his Mexican prostitute
off
my TV set!’ Not enough to change the channel, the drug-addled whoremonger of a tennis champ must
disappear.
Rush Limbaugh’s soccer-mom storm troopers hadn’t been as disgusted by a sports story since Janet Jackson flashed her pierced nipple at the Superbowl and revealed to America’s children that tits exist. Lamm was disappointed that when the newspapers featured images from his video, the prostitute’s spectacular natural breasts were blurred by pixelated circles. They show Saddam hanging on a rope, but a nipple – the most divine you’ve ever sucked – is too abhorrent? The kids should read about you in the Swedish papers.

For America’s stressed-out mums at the grocery checkout, Lamm was ten minutes’ diversion from the exhausting world. On the rack alongside M&Ms and Snickers, besmirched in the
National Enquirer
, he was a welcome distraction from their defaulting home loan, rocketing petrol prices, the body bags back from Baghdad or Kabul, this month’s corporate fat cat scandal with ten thousand jobs axed, another misfit shooting his classmates at junior high in Arkansas, the three little monsters in the back seat screaming they want McDonald’s . . .

Meet Max Lamm’s downtrodden jury. They condemned him at hairdressers and truckstop diners, at train stations, bus stops and hospital waiting rooms where they waited for a diagnosis too expensive to cure. In a hundred thousand supermarket checkout lines in a thousand dead-end towns in a hundred depressed counties where the manufacturing machines were unbolted from the factory floor and shipped to China, Max Lamm’s sex scandal helped ordinary Americans to feel good about themselves. Their indispensible consolation: at least I’m not
that
stupid.

September 2004: While Kelly Wesson cut the letters KMD (Kelly Must Die) into her left arm in a Washington mansion, Lamm planned his own death. The desire-not-to-exist, the timeless escape that feels natural as bleeding to a victim of the insurmountable. Now go drown in the East River. The closing act of your descent. The descent set in motion by your thirst for transgression – for
her
, the whorehouse’s otherworldly new girl fresh off the bus from El Salvador – that ripples through your marrow.

Yes, Max Lamm knew Goya’s naked human impulses:
fight
,
flee
,
fuck
. They’d engorged him, overpowered his better judgement, but until then London never killed anyone. Never provoked a race riot or a prime minister’s condemnation.

So, Lamm realized on his first morning beneath Hyde Park, despite the dissolution of all he’d ever worked for, despite the undiluted catastrophe of his life, he had, nevertheless, progressed at something. At fucking up. His preponderance for disaster was effortless, inartificial, irreducible. Who’d put it there? Why? Incomprehensible. Incomprehensible as nine months of hell in the National Guard seemed to Kelly Wesson.

One day you wake up and all you know is incoherence.

Aaron Krickstein. An unwieldy name, brandishing its Jewishness like an oversized racquet. Krickstein, the Michigan-born tennis pro who, at the 1995 Australian Open, shocked the pundits by reaching the semifinals to challenge Andre Agassi. Their showdown took four hours on an afternoon freakishly wet even for a climate intemperate as Melbourne’s. Beneath the arena a water main burst, stopping play for ninety minutes as ball boys dried the court with hand pumps and squeegee mops. Aaron Krickstein was a rare Jewish specimen of beefy athletic prowess (reassuringly encumbered by a big nose and a Chassidic rabbi’s eyebrows) whose grand-slam heroics inspired sixteen-year-old Max Lamm. At the Maccabi tennis club he trained every day except Saturday when, owing to rabbinical pressure, the Caulfield Park courts were rented instead to a
goyische
booking from the local Girl Guides chapter.

Lamm never yearned for grand-slam victories, his likeness on billboards, a swollen Swiss bank account . . . the fairytale prayed for by obsessed tennis parents in tracksuits, themselves champs twenty years ago behind the Iron Curtain, who sat courtside at junior tournaments to cheer their prepubescent progeny – Sacha, Yevgeny, Mirko, Radovan, et al – and hurl abuse at the opponent’s parents. When ethnic grievances were present – a Serbian kid playing a Croatian, or a Macedonian against a Greek – sometimes a brawl erupted on court, the parents hurling chairs and yelling insults in a language their children barely understood.

Yet Lamm cared for nothing but the endorphin rush, the happy ache in his muscles regardless of whether he won or lost. The satisfaction endowed by this sport that he was strangely, naturally good at. Three hours’ training today, three hours tomorrow, an under 16s tournament on Sunday, and he enjoyed it, even the morning drill –
jog right
,
left
,
right
,
left
,
forehand
,
backhand
– that afterwards bestowed a blanket of relaxation rivalled only by his other two favourite pastimes: reading dusty books that he recovered from an old cabinet in the basement, the classic adventure novels his father had read as a boy –
The Sword in the Stone
,
My Glorious Brothers
,
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
,
Journey to the Center of the Earth
– and the brief post-ejaculatory calm before Lamm wondered if, despite the car’s absence from the driveway, his father had been watching through the skylight or the heating grill and knew where his son hid the pirated porno videos that he purchased at school for ten dollars a pop from the notorious Marty Weinberg.