Fraud Read online

  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 “1028s.” (“Think we’ll see any 1028s?” “That was a real good 1028 day.” “All we need is some 1028s 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 23rd 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 amon
g 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.