Authors: Raphael Brous
Of Max Lamm’s innate qualities – the aptitude for tennis, his ability with a paintbrush, his natural appreciation for art, his uncompromising empathy for animals, his tendency to see the heart of a matter (and to ignore it) – the most exceptional was his preponderance for catastrophe.
No one’s good at everything
,
no one’s good at nothing
. A saying of his mother’s, before the lymphoma stole her, when out shopping they’d see a busker drumming an upturned garbage bin with two plastic forks, or watch a performance artist (the hairy creative type in hessian pantaloons) balancing a bowling pin on his forehead. The kind lady that she was, Ruth Lamm threw the street performers a dollar or three.
‘Bravo. Don’t knock your teeth out,’ she’d yell at unicyclists, contortionists, acrobats doing circus tricks on Bourke Street Mall. ‘Max, don’t
ever
try that yourself.’
Who did she hurt?
The question tiny cousin Sarah, twelve years old with a Hollywood lisp, asked Rabbi Gurwitz at the funeral. Like the rabbi was a Supreme Court judge who might reverse the untimely passing. Eleven years ago, Lamm’s mother was sick for nineteen months. Beginning in the marrow, her immune system ate itself.
It took Malik Massawi a second.
Before you realized it.
Before he realized it.
How long did your backhand volley take?
A half-second? Fifth of a second?
Your backhand volley with a beer bottle
.
The horrific thing, perpetrated by someone whose predisposition for disaster is insatiable.
That fatal beer bottle. Where is it now?
Probably in a forensics lab. It could have picked up a trace of your DNA.
Forget it. You’re safe here.
Sleep!
Now!
He couldn’t. You try not to think of a pink elephant and one thing comes to mind.
7.24 a.m. The Pakistani boy died three hours ago.
How did the kid materialize like that? From where?
The street was empty. Then there’s the dead boy when he wasn’t dead. In Camden the muggers step out of thin air.
A big boy for fifteen. He’ll need a big coffin.
What do Muslims call their coffins? Or do they cremate their dead?
Lamm remembered watching a BBC programme about the Zoroastrians of Iran. An ancient sect, pre-dating Islam, who expose their dead atop a sacred hill south of Tehran. The corpses uncovered between life and death, consumed by vultures.
The empty beer bottle awaited you like the sword in the stone.
The boy flicked his knife.
Your wallet. Now!
He would have stabbed you. He had a knife.
He had a knife?
He did or he didn’t.
Lamm remembered reading about that black guy killed in New York a few years ago. Amadou Diallo, dead on the cover of
Time
magazine. Shot in the chest by the NYPD because his wallet looked like a gun.
You made the same mistake.
The boy had a knife!
Maybe. You should’ve checked. He fell down so fucking fast.
Why did your bottle do that?
Because of the thousands of glass bottles wielded by drunks around the world that morning in April 2005, Lamm’s prenaturally, freakishly, hit the sweet spot. Slightly above the ear, at the coronal suture of the frontal and parietal bones. Lamm watched the kid collapsing, that millisecond of astonishment when you trip, you fall over and in mid-air you realize:
I will bleed.
Lamm never aimed the bottle; it was a perfect volley skimming the baseline. The severe, unthought wrist movement that he practised daily for fourteen years; the shot would have been a winner.
Thwack.
Years ago that reflex made him a wunderkind, almost a success, and in a deserted Camden street it took him down.
Astonishing. Lamm couldn’t fool himself, not in a space so oppressive – so very much like a coffin – as beneath this barbeque. He exhaled, bemoaning what was intolerable: not only that he killed a Pakistani teenager, the despair, the hunger, the darkness, the claustrophobic hideout beneath a barbeque grease trap and the best efforts of the Metropolitan Police. It was New York too. The twelve minutes of emotionless resolve, a little over two years ago, when he walked into the East River. 9th April, 2003. The night Baghdad fell, although at 3 a.m. when Lamm marched into the frigid filthy current, the Pentagon hadn’t yet announced their Pyrrhic victory. The East River so cold that Lamm bit his tongue, tasting blood’s iron tang amid the icy blackness. He trudged farther, deeper in, dragged by the current and not fighting it.
But in that freezing dirty water, Lamm felt the warm salty waves he rode as a boy every summer at Jan Juc beach. His translucent swell, where the temperate surf pulled him down unfailingly, reassuringly, until he got dumped on the shore, ears full of sand, fingertips pickled like baby onions, while his mother sunbaked and gazed into the shy pinprick eyes of sand crabs. No matter how far out he swam, the waves of Bass Strait brought him in; those failsafe foaming lifeguards, their salty embrace stinging Lamm’s chapped lips, that eighteen years later in the East River metamorphosed into cold beasts promising death.
Submerged to his ribs, Lamm took a final glance at the panorama of midtown Manhattan. Panorama of metropolitan panoramas! Manhattan, the sparkling modern-day conjunction of Rome under Caesar and a thousand steel skyscrapers of Babel, alight with its nocturnal glare outshining anything imagined by the ancient sun worshippers of Helios and Apollo. The Williamsburg Bridge glowing its orange trail of tail-lights, the airy floodlit cavity of Ground Zero there like the left lung ripped from Tribeca’s fluorescent chest, and on Battery Park’s foreshore, hundreds of apartment windows illuminated the passionless blue of TV screens. The residents in those living rooms, staying up late to watch Baghdad burning on CNN, were, of course, oblivious to a hopeless figure sinking into the East River far below their balcony bonsai.
Still, among those apartment windows, Lamm expected – hoped! – to see the silhouette of a face contorted in horror.
Call 911! A man’s drowning!
Screams, shrieks, sirens. Then strong hands yanking him to safety; he’d be waterlogged, hypoxic, hypothermic yet breathing. The trouble was, in their living rooms Lamm’s potential saviours couldn’t hear the gurgled cries of a drowning delinquent above Tom Brokaw’s good-gollys blaring from twenty TVs on the same floor. The night owls were too engrossed by the televised shocking and awing of Baghdad, too hypnotized by the green night-vision bombardment of that miserable bulls-eye on the Tigris, to hear Max Lamm screaming through a mouthful of dirty water.
Do you really want to die?
The current tugged him down – so cold! – as toxic mud crumbled underfoot. Lamm was choking, drowning, swept by the backwash of a trash barge chugging two hundred metres downriver.
Go with it. The end.
Spalding Gray did. January 2004: Acclaimed writer, actor Spalding Gray commits suicide by jumping off the Staten Island ferry. His corpse drifted undiscovered for two months. A substantial, respectful obituary in the
New York Times.
In the same body of water, the same time of year. The cruel difference, Lamm instantly recognized, being that until his fatal depression, Spalding Gray was a success. Whereas in a town like New York, the watery demise of a scandalous whoremonger like yourself – a fallen idol known best for your precocious depravity, whose lasting legacy is your disservice to the Jewish people, the war on drugs, American tennis and sportsmanship in general – is unlikely to inspire a dignified obit like Spalding Gray’s.
Another reason for killing yourself!
Or a reason against it?
Despite the unchallengeable reasons – the necessity! – for sinking, for swallowing putrid water, for letting go, for letting it happen, Lamm’s hands waved above the surface. Should’ve tied them behind your back. Worse, when his head bobbed up a peculiar sound hollered from his lips. A gargle
and
a scream, unmistakably opposed to his deathly intentions.
Arghhhhh! He-e-lp!
Now somebody else – the sly agent of self-preservation buried within us, appointed to our lives like a judge – was controlling Lamm’s limbs the way a hijacker commandeers an aircraft. Unlike the suicidal Saudis responsible for the hole in the skyline nearby, Lamm’s hijacker
prevented
the untimely demise. His eyes floated ahead, a ghostly buoy of awareness, and he watched himself screaming, fighting the current, sucking air against the frigid swell. What he could do to stay alive.
Disgraced, decrepit Lamm! How infuriating that liberation in death might be thwarted by some natural impulse, or by fear, or his stubborn stupid attachment to life. But he wasn’t surprised. Like Kelly Wesson that week in her Georgetown mansion, staring at Daddy’s gun every afternoon yet unable to swallow the barrel and pull her trigger finger, the suicidal resolve was less than concrete.
Is this your survival instinct?
Is it God?
Blurry figures approached on the Battery Park boardwalk.
‘
He’s drowning!
’
Shouts, screams, splashes. Amid the glowing apartment blocks, had a silhouette turned off the TV, heard Lamm’s cries and called 911? Or a Tribeca yuppie, walking his labradoodle after a late night cooking spreadsheets at Morgan Stanley, had noticed the young outcast drowning a hundred yards off the Battery Park boardwalk? You should’ve jumped off a thirty-storey ledge. Swan-dived from the deck of the
New York Times
tower. Intentional Death of an Anarchist.
But you want to be rescued.
Putrid mud squashed underfoot, Lamm’s head submerged in the East River’s chilled thickshake of seawater, stormwater, wastewater and the bubbles of carbon dioxide exiting his blue lips.
It’s not too late. Die.
Fragments of shouts piercing the deadly swell. But whoever it was, they took too long and Lamm kept drowning, perhaps dead already by a coroner’s criteria. Down, down, down beneath the warm clear waves that stung his fifteen-year-old nostrils when the swell pitched him into the seabed on Jan Juc beach. His mother on the hot dunes, watching over the rim of a
Harper’s Bazaar
, upon her beach towel the wet trove of cockles that he’d combed up from the foam. Deeper, further he’d swim for shells, feeling his creased fingertips along the Bass Strait sandbank, never afraid of biting crabs nor poisonous jellyfish, nor the waves breaking thunderously above, because the beach was a friendly place.
His
place, where the Southern Ocean’s translucent wash swept him to shore. Back to his mother, where she sunbaked under the good umbrella she reserved for vacations. Among the phantoms of long-gone summer days, Lamm was dying in Manhattan’s moat, cold and grey as a morgue.
He drowned until he was bitten. Not by the small gummy sharks that occasionally spooked Jan Juc’s swimmers, nor an errant sea lion if a school of mullet swam uncommonly close to shore. In the East River, it was a fish of five fingers, painfully strong, that chomped his shoulders and pulled him up. Back to the pontoon on the Battery Park foreshore. Lamm’s lungs, full of black muck, recoiled as hands compressed his chest.
‘
Can you hear me? Breathe!
’
An excruciating force crushing his sternum. Lips – a man’s lips – sealing his own. Musty air down his throat.
‘
Two . . . four . . . six . . . eight.
’
The weight compressing Lamm’s chest. Cold goo hurtling up his trachea. An unendurable pain in his skull.
‘
Can you hear me? Wake up!
’
Blackness.
The ambulance roof. Fluorescent tubes buzzing on, off, on. White glare piercing his hypoxic skull. The pain in Lamm’s temples! A serrated throb slightly above his ear, at the coronal suture where the frontal and parietal bones fuse. The exact spot where, two years later in London, a beer bottle smashed into a Pakistani teenager’s skull.
Hot jagged needles replaced the follicles on Lamm’s scalp. A bright white room. Voices, the precise monotone of professional agreement. ‘
Maintain intubated oxygen . . . note that severe laryngospasm has occurred
. . .’ Electronic beeping, a penlight in his pupils, the vital slipperiness of latex fingers invading his throat.
Four days in the coma.
Breakdown.
Endgame. In New York, Lamm threw himself beneath disorder’s brakeless train and got dismembered on the tracks. He’d be sodden buried bones, weren’t it for a beefcake of a bonds trader with a blonde fashion publicist of a wife, a young Mr and Ms Manhattan, who at 3 a.m. were strolling back to their love nest loft on the Battery Park boardwalk.
The hero – his name was Scott Greer, fresh at Goldman Sachs via Stanford Business School – leapt into the river and freestyled three hundred yards to the drowning stranger. Leapt into the newspapers too; Scott Greer, first the
New York Post
’s man of the week, then interviewed by Barbara Walters under her sugary lights.
Tell me Scott
,
what does it feel like to be a hero? Are you bothered that you saved a person like Max Lamm?
Later, Greer reappeared on the
Post
’s front page when he received a bravery award from the mayor.
Not to say that Scott Greer, the gallant dreamboat bearing striking resemblance to a young Jimmy Stewart, didn’t deserve the adulation. He was New York’s newest public hero, whose courage was refreshingly unrelated to the twin towers. The rookie stockbroker who lunged fully clothed into a dark, dangerous current to save a stranger’s life. And how ironic, how Kafkaesque – as noted by fossilized columnists in the
New York Times
magazine, by Hitchens bleary-eyed on the talk show circuit and Larry King straight down the barrel – that Greer, a genuine hero, had rescued a genuine disgrace.
Scott Greer, thirty-four – brains and brawn who served as a young Marine in Kosovo, who wore a flagpin on his lapel, who had, according to rumour, already been approached by aides to Mayor Giuliani – had rescued from the East River the infamous former tennis champ whose primary anaesthetic was the bottle and the cock. The disgraced degenerate who, seven months earlier, had received his own half-page in the
New York Post
sports section for behaviour that, were his punishment meted out by the US Marine Corps and not the Association of Tennis Professionals, would have seen him court-martialled and sentenced to ten years of peeling potatoes in a Navy brig. Possession of illegal narcotics. Solicitation of illegal prostitution. The secretly filmed sex tape that, a week after Lamm’s scandal broke, had already logged 805, 000 plays on
www.pornotube.com
and had since hit three million. You’re ejaculating on her tits 115, 000 times a day; no wonder you feel tired. Lamm remained in fourth place on the website’s ‘most viewed’ list: