Lot Six by David Adjmi

Author:David Adjmi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-04-27T16:00:00+00:00

The Long Con

I WAS NOT LOOKING particularly forward to my brother’s visit. As part of the larger project to erase my past I’d deliberately cut him out of my life—we hadn’t seen each other or spoken in over a year—but now (for reasons that were, to my mind, incredibly stupid) his visit had become unavoidable. I’d moved into a new complex at the juncture of the 110 and the 101, not really within walking distance of anything, so my dad agreed to get me a car. I’d have been happy with some used piece of shit, but for some reason he’d become incredibly cosseting and over the top and told me he wanted ONLY THE BEST FOR HIS SON and I would have BRAND-NEW EVERYTHING and AUTOMATIC EVERYTHING. But rather than get the “brand-new everything” car in California, he got it, for reasons I couldn’t ascertain, in New Jersey—in retrospect I’m sure it was hot, the product of some informal peculation or threat or handshake, something to make it worth his while to have it shipped across coasts. Except he scrimped on the shipping—and despite his grandiloquent speeches about “the best, the best” used some two-bit towing company, and my Honda was held hostage on a tow truck in Arizona for two months. “Don’t worry about nuthin,” said my father, who quickly conscripted Richie to take a bus to Arizona, confront and haggle with the towing company people, and then drive the Honda to Los Angeles, whereupon he would crash with me and Leslie and Mike and make a little vacation of it.

Leslie and Mike were a couple I’d met in my film history class. They’d found the apartment and needed someone to rent the spare room. We clicked as roommates right away—and we weren’t just roommates, it was deeper than that; we’d become a family. We cooked for one another and went to movies and drank wine and had long talks. I was scared of showing Leslie and Mike that I had a vulgar and spiritually ill brother. Not that I’d necessarily lied to them about who I was (I’d given up trying to pass myself off as an erstwhile model for Paul Smith and Gucci) but I’d faked, certainly, in small indefinable ways, a past, one that gleamed in the luminous shadow of my vague descriptors and ambiguous phrasing.

Mike didn’t give a shit about status: he came from a bluntly lower-middle-class family in Camarillo, infamous, he said, for its disproportionately high concentration of mental hospitals. Leslie, on the other hand, was from tony Brentwood, and was the adopted daughter of a famous television producer. I found her slightly intimidating. She was from Los Angeles but seemed like a New Yorker. She wore a lot of black and looked like she’d be good at hailing cabs. She wasn’t tanned or blond—she was whey-faced, with red hair and freckles, and she spoke with a slight lisp. The parts in isolation were pitiable but the gestalt gave her an impression of glamour.

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