Unfortunate Son

The following article contains references to sexual assault. 

Last week Larry Lambert was found dead in the bathroom of a state pen in South Florida, hanged from a shower head, a rubber hose around his neck. As far as anyone knew, and to the extent that anyone cared, Larry was a suicide. His death started me thinking about my father, whose own death occurred almost two years ago, and whose relationship with Larry I am still trying to understand.

 

My father was blind in one eye, and I mean that in two ways. He lost his left eye in the Korean War while stationed at an internment camp; he always called it that, never a prison camp, and perhaps there’s a difference, but more likely my father could not accept his part in the imprisonment of others. At the camp, he befriended a North Korean prisoner, or should I say intern, who could fashion a tin can into any number of useful items with a pair of snips and a ball peen hammer. The intern made my father a spring-loaded cigarette case from a single can of Schlitz beer.

When my father went to reload the case while off-duty one December day in 1951, the tin spring sent a fleck of metal into his eye. The eye swelled shut and never reopened. My father always laughed softly and opened his good eye wide when he recounted the mishap. He never complained about his dead eye, and its loss had little effect on how he lived his life, except that, when backing down our driveway, he had to open the door and stick his head out to negotiate the inside curve. Judging by the way he treated me and my little brothers, my father could not have been much of a soldier: He never hit us, he rarely raised his voice, and he would not allow us to own or play with guns; I sometimes marvel that the Army was able to teach him to use one. He returned from Korea with his own set of ivory chopsticks, scrolls of calligraphy, and a love of blossoming cherry trees, two of which he planted in our front yard. From the young boy who had cleaned his hut, my father learned a Korean lullaby, which he sang to me and my brothers years later in a raspy baritone.

The war also taught him how to smoke, a lesson he practiced three times a day with the cigarettes that came in each C-ration. He graduated to a pack a day when he returned to the states. Thirty-five years later, a Smoke Enders program helped him quit. But the cigarettes had done their work. The following year, he died of lung cancer.

The second way my father was blind in one eye was that he could forgive things in people, especially in young people — and particularly in Larry Lambert — that others could not overlook. A few weeks after he died, my mother showed me a sympathy card that she received from Larry.

 

Dear Mrs. Simonetti, 1 was so sorry to hear about the passing of Mr. Simonetti. Your husband was a kind man with a patient ear and an understanding heart. He was always there for me and I will miss him.

In sorrow,

Larry Lambert

0623117

 

It was certainly the only sympathy card my mother received from a prison.

 

I saw none of this coming the day the Lamberts moved into the neighborhood from a State Department post in Thailand. Larry was a bright, loquacious boy, rather fat (my father would say portly), and with such pale skin that he had the mottled look of sausage pressed against its casing. He carried most of his weight in his hips, which gave him a pear shape; even his Levi’s looked like jodhpurs. Larry had been stuffed full of information by his father, who wanted Larry to go to Harvard, as had both he and his own father, the former Senator and noted wine connoisseur Benjamin Lambert.

Larry had also learned a considerable amount on his own. He could recognize virtually any military or commercial aircraft from its silhouette; many he knew from the sound of their engines. He knew almost every record in the Guinness Book of World Records and could quote even the most trivial as if he had the page in front of him. He had memorized pi out to 120 digits and could multiply two three-digit numbers together in his head and arrive at an answer within seconds. He routed us in chess the summer Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky brought the game to our attention.

But chess never counted for much in our neighborhood. Nothing Larry knew changed the fact that he couldn’t run ten yards before the weight of his rear dragged him to the ground. He was unable even to impress himself. “Of course, it’s no big deal how many unshelled whelks somebody ate,” he said once after quoting a record. “Don’t listen to me, anyway, I might have it wrong. I don’t know why I know these things.”

Coming home from a Boy Scout meeting at the elementary school one afternoon, Larry’s father — who hadn’t said a word since we’d gotten in the station wagon — announced to us: “Larry’s going to learn 400 new vocabulary words this winter.” I can still see the look of resignation in Larry’s face. Mr. Lambert had big plans for Larry, but, because he was almost never home, it fell on Larry’s mother to execute them. She kept Larry in his room for an hour each day after school, so that he could study his vocabulary words, which Mr. Lambert had penned in a memo pad that Larry carried in his back pocket.

When Larry finished studying, he could go out and play or invite over a friend — but only one at a time. The one-friend rule placed Larry in the position of having to choose whom among the pack of neighborhood boys he would invite inside. None of us could stand Larry’s banter, nor the smell of his room (he wet his bed), but we all wanted to be picked because we liked his method of maintaining a captive audience. He had inherited an heirloom collection of baseball cards from his Uncle Pete. “Stay ten more minutes,” he would say as you started to leave, “and I’ll give you a baseball card.” I knew how to work this scam for an hour at a time. It’s how I got my 1951 Mickey Mantle.

Larry’s father came home at 6:00 sharp and told whoever was in the room to “beat it,” except on some spring and summer nights, when he stopped before coming inside and sat down on the front lawn to pull crabgrass and dandelions. On such nights, he sat for a half hour in his starched white oxford shirt and still fastened tie, plucking weeds by hand from a square yard or two. Mr. Lambert groomed his lawn as meticulously as he cared for his flat top, which he reshaped once a week before turning his shears on Larry.

It was after a particularly unfortunate haircut (he wound up looking like Eddie Munster) that Larry took a liking to my father. My father, who worked Saturdays and spent Sundays sipping espresso and reading The Washington Post, had joined our Boy Scout troop on what was to be his first and only backpacking excursion. Larry, as usual, had to be driven up the trail with a switch, each of the fathers who accompanied our scoutmaster serving in turn as swineherd. Larry marched ahead a few hundred feet, then crawled under some brush or hid behind a rock and waited to be dragged out by his boots. Instead of prodding Larry up the trail with a stick, my father encouraged him with kind words. Larry slept beside my father in his tent that night, rather than join the rest of us around the fire, a decision that resulted in him being hailed out of his sleeping bag in the morning to have his balls larded.

Some Larry was smoking marijuana—all of us were. When Larry was fourteen, his father, quite without knowing it, landed him in the steadiest job he would ever have by encouraging him to become the pen pal of the son of the State Department official who had replaced him in Bangkok. The kid had access to an unlimited supply of Thai sticks, little wooden skewers of marijuana, cannabis popsicles. He sent Larry a supply each month in an official shipment of State Department mail that was never searched, and, better yet, was paid for by the government. Larry sold the Thai sticks at school and sent a portion of the proceeds to his Bangkok connection, also at the government’s expense.

 

The demands Mr. Lambert placed on Larry grew more stringent when we entered high school. Larry was to get an A in every subject except gym (since an A in gym, given the size of his rear, was impossible). He was to score 750 or above on both the math and verbal portions of the SAT. He would be accepted by Harvard early decision, complete graduate school, and enter into a life of public service, preferably with the State Department.

I found Larry in the woods behind our house, one night, clutching a paper bag I knew was full of Thai sticks.

“My dad kicked me out of the house,” he announced. He took a drag on his cigarette. ‘“Course I’m such a fucking prick, I deserve it.”

“How’s that?”

“I got a C+ on the Advanced Chemistry exam.”

“And he kicked you out of the house?”

“No, but he yelled at me,” Larry said. “And so I threw a hatchet at him.”

“You what?”

“He closed the door before it reached him,” Larry said. He belched some acrid smoke and what sounded like a quart of mucus. “I knew all along I was too uncoordinated to hit him.” He was sitting on a large rock. He moved over and offered me a seat, which, for reasons that still escape me, I took. Neither of us said a word for ten minutes. He stared at the ground, worked his boot from side to side, finished his True Blue. Then he reached into the cargo pocket of his quilted army jacket and pulled out a bamboo water pipe, one of the Thai artifacts that adorned the family room wall at his house.

He produced a Thai stick from the paper bag and held it between the tips of his thumb and finger. “What say we get shish-kabobbed?” he said. He told me that this latest shipment included some sticks that had been dipped in opium, but that he couldn’t tell by looking whether the one he held was dipped or not. He crumbled a little dried leaf into the bowl of the water pipe and lit it. After my fourth long draw, I felt lightheaded; my body begged to be horizontal.

I think this one’s been dipped,” I said. Oh yeah,” Larry said. “It’s dipped, all right. I’m dipped, you’re dipped, the whole world is dipped.” We both fell off the rock and tumbled downhill through the leaves until we came to rest at the base of what Larry identified as Quercus Coccinea, a scarlet oak. I lay half on top of Larry, who smelled as though he hadn’t bathed in weeks, my arm across his shoulder.

Eventually we untangled ourselves and sat up against the tree. That’s when Larry realized that the contents of his jacket pockets had spilled out during our roll. I helped him gather up his things, which included — in addition to the bag of Thai sticks, the bamboo bong, two lighters, rolling papers, and a condom — three small carving knives and a couple of miniature wooden Buddha statues in various stages of completion.

“Did you make this?” I said, picking up a little wooden Buddha.

“Sure,” Larry said. “I learned how from an old man who lived down the street from us in Bangkok.” He shined his penlight on the statue. I had no idea he knew how to carve so well; I’d never seen him with a knife before, not even on Boy Scout camping trips.

“How come you’ve never shown these to anyone?” I asked.

“Why should I?” he said.

“Because they’re beautiful,” I said, rubbing my fingers over the blond wood. “I love this little guy.”

 

“Keep it,” Larry said, “he’s yours.” I put the Buddha in my pocket, and for a hazy hour or two, I sat side by side with Larry Lambert, in awe of his handiwork. But when the opium wore off a few hours later, I crawled home, fearing that, despite the dark, someone might have seen me with my arm around him.

Larry failed his next chemistry exam on purpose. He failed a European history exam and then failed even to attend a calculus exam. He rolled joints in his room instead of studying his vocabulary words. Mr. Lambert was kicking Larry out of the house almost every night now, and in the mornings, when my brother or I opened the door to get the paper for my father, we found Larry curled up on the front porch, sleeping in the warmth of the sun like a dog. My father never let Larry’s disheveled looks or his pungent odor affect the way he treated him. “Come in, Sir Lawrence,” he said, “and join us for croissants.”

 

After the night we shared the opiated Thai stick, Larry took me for a better friend than I could ever be to him. He tagged along with me at school, which was easy because we were both in the advanced classes, and even followed me into the bathroom. He walked two paces behind me, bow-legged because of the herpes he contracted after sleeping with aptly named Allison Slutter, who traded sex for Thai sticks. I almost never said a word to him, and one day, when a gang of football players shoved Larry’s head in a toilet and gave him a swirly, I watched without saying or doing anything on his behalf. Larry laughed when they finally dropped him on the floor. “No hard feelings, guys,” he said, shaking his wet hair. “Hey, I deserved it. I’m a fuckup. A dickhead. A genuine Class A prick. I should have given myself one long ago.”

Probably because I felt so bad after the swirly incident, I agreed to accompany Larry to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert at RFK Stadium — if he would pay for my ticket, which he gladly did. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, because by this time he was clearing well over $400 a week with his Thai stick business. It was an Aerosmith concert, actually, with Lynyrd Skynyrd opening for Stevie Tyler and his band, but Skynyrd stole the show with a long, lazy rendition of “Freebird” that built to a fever pitch and ended with a crescendo that seemed to last all afternoon.

When the song was over, the woman sitting in front of us turned around and handed Larry a smoldering joint. Larry took a few puffs, but I declined because I was stuffing my face with a ballpark frank. “This is some smooth shit,” Larry said to her. “What is it?” She smiled luridly and said, “Angel dust.”

Larry showed no signs of being on PCP when we later entered the men’s room. The floor was an inch deep in piss, and guys were urinating in the sinks and against the walls, and this huge biker was standing in the corner and saying, like a mantra, “LSD: Don’t be shy, it’ll get you high.” In one of the stalls, Larry found a woman who was offering blow jobs for three dollars. He hadn’t been in the stall two minutes when I heard the woman scream and a body thud against the metal stall divider (all because, as Larry told me later, the dust had made him try to screw her). The woman turned out to be the biker’s old lady. The biker opened the stall door, pulled Larry out by his half-lowered pants, and kicked him across the room with the biggest black boot I have ever seen, then went back to saying, “LSD: Don’t be shy, it’ll get you high.”

When we returned home late that evening, Larry’s father was sitting on the lawn pulling weeds. He had a pile two feet high and must have spent most of the afternoon scooting around the yard on his rear end. His face was pinched in a tight-lipped scowl and he looked as though it pained him to breath. What we didn’t know at the moment was that Larry’s SAT scores had come in, and that the results of his experiment — he had filled in his answer sheet in the design of the symbols on Led Zeppelin’s “Zofo” album — were not encouraging. In fact, he had virtually eliminated all hope of attending Harvard. Larry and I steered clear of Mr. Lambert and went inside, where we found his mother in the kitchen preparing dinner. Larry must have still been a little high, because he managed with one deft hop to land on the kitchen counter.

“What’s for dinner?” he asked his mother.

“Pepper steak,” she said.

“All right!” Larry shouted. By now his father was in the room, standing behind me. He pushed me aside, and I must have still been stoned, too, because I recall saying, “Easy, dude,” and pushing him back.

“What are you so happy about?” he said to Larry.

“No big deal,” Larry said. “I’m just hungry.”

“Well, keep your voice down, you’re no longer competing with a rock band.” He glowered at him. “And for Christ sake, get off the counter.”

“Make me,” Larry said.

“I said get down.”

“No.”

“Down.”

“No fucking way.”

“If you don’t get down off the counter by the time I count to three,” his father said, “I’m going to call the police.” Larry refused to budge. So his father called the cops. A squad car showed up fifteen minutes later, and two officers stepped into the kitchen, seeming too big for the room. One of them sniffed at me and shook his head. They spent ten minutes talking Larry down from the counter while his father ranted about the SAT scores and his mother cried, but never stopped fixing dinner. When it was over, Mr. Lambert walked up to me, grabbed me by the collar, and said, “You Goddamn swarthy little twerp, get out of my house.” He turned me around and shoved me down the back steps.

Early the next morning, before the rest of the family was up and the traffic got heavy on River Road, my father and I answered the doorbell and found Larry on the front steps: shirtless, shoeless, beltless, wearing nothing but a pair of blue jeans. We had been reading the Sunday paper.

“Good morning, Mr. Simonetti,” Larry said.

“And a fine morning it is, Sir Lawrence,” my father said. “How can I help you?”

“I think you’d better call the pigs. I just committed statutory rape.”

“Larry,” my father said, losing his jocularity, “I think you’d better step inside.”

“Yep, it’s true,” Larry said. “Screwed a 14-year-old bitch in the back seat of my father’s Benz. I know I shouldn’t have done it. Didn’t do a thing for me. God, she was ugly. Ugliest girl I’ve ever seen. Boy, am I a prick. What a fucking prick I am.”

My father put his arm around Larry and walked him back to our kitchen. He fixed him a cup of espresso and gave him one of his blue Brooks Brothers shirts, which Larry kept and wore often after that. As it turned out, the girl was almost seventeen, and willing, and Larry was not yet eighteen, and so could not be guilty of statutory rape. Besides, the girl had punched him in the nose before he’d gotten into her, and he ended up jerking off into the back seat of the car. And so, in some sense, the story I told my friends at school the next day was true: Larry had fucked his father’s Mercedes.

 

By the time senior year was over, Larry had totaled the Mercedes and twice pulled the fire alarm at school and been caught smoking hash oil in a neighbor’s stolen car. These misdeeds and more he confessed to my father in the most self-deprecating language imaginable. He was lucky to be accepted by, as my mother referred to it, a “small Midwestern college.” I wound up going to Princeton to study architecture, which disturbed Mr. Lambert, who stopped waving to members of our family. The reconciliation came only after my father died, when Mr. and Mrs. Lambert offered to set up and serve brunch at our house while everyone else was at the funeral.

After five years at Princeton, I moved back to Washington to begin my apprenticeship as an intern architect. I decided to live at home, so I could save money and travel to Rome in the summers. Larry had long since been kicked out of school for setting his dorm room on fire. He had then entered and swiftly exited a string of menial jobs, each time showing up at our house and announcing to my father, almost with glee: “Fucked up again, Mr. Simonetti. Call me Larry-the-Fuckup. You won’t believe what I did this time. . . .” My father, who was retired now, never tired of saying, “Come in Sir Lawrence, and join me for espresso,” or something to that effect. One such afternoon, I found the two of them in the living room, smoking True Blues and talking about life and jet engines.

We hadn’t heard from Larry in several months and knew only that he was bumming a room at the Y.I.P. House on K Street when two policemen showed up at our door wanting to question my father about Larry. My father showed them to the living room and brought them iced coffees; I listened from the kitchen. At one point, my father went upstairs and returned with three of Larry’s carved Buddhas, which he showed the policemen and commented on with the enthusiasm he reserved for things Asian. I had no idea my father knew about the Buddhas, much less that Larry had given him not one but three. I went upstairs to look for the Buddha Larry had given me, but I couldn’t find it; I still don’t know what became of it.

The next night my father walked into my bedroom, where I was drafting, his face ashen. “I just received a call from Larry Lambert,” he said. “He’s in the D.C. jail for selling cocaine to an undercover policeman.”

“He’s not your problem,” I said.

My father pulled hard on his cigarette and shook his head. He looked down at the floor. “I thought about my lawyer,” he said, ignoring my advice, “but I think I’m going to go myself and bail him out.” He returned with Larry four hours later, at three in the morning. I was still working on a project that was due the next day. Larry stumbled into my room while my father was talking with my mother in their bedroom. He had let his hair grow down to his shoulders and hadn’t shaved in days. On his arm was a tattoo of a marijuana leaf and the motto: “When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws are free.” He smelled of beer and had apparently spilled or puked a considerable amount of it on the front of his black T-shirt. His eyes were pinpoints.

“Anthony,” he said, his words slurred together, “long time no see.”

He held onto my drafting table to keep from falling over.

Larry,” I said, “how are you?” A pained and distant expression came over his face. “Hey,” I said, “do you still carve those little Buddhas?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t do Buddhas, anymore.” My father’s voice echoed down the hall.

“Must be nice,” Larry said, nodding toward the hall.

“He’s all right,” I said.

“Must be nice,” Larry said again. My father entered the room and helped him back downstairs, where he had fixed him a bed on the living room sofa. I stayed up drafting all night, and all night, Larry lay on the couch, belching and farting and insulting himself. My father stayed with him. I said goodbye to them in the morning on my way out to work.

 

That was the last I saw of Larry Lambert. He was convicted and sentenced to two years in jail. My father visited him on Sundays, while my mother was at church, and brought him croissants. He always asked if I wanted to join him, and I always said, “I guess not.” When Larry got out after a year and a half, my father convinced him to join the Marines. Larry wrote him a few letters from Parris Island, then abruptly broke off contact. My father died a year later, never to learn that Larry had killed a man in Miami and was in jail again, for good this time.

On the way home yesterday, I ran into Mr. Lambert, whom I hadn’t seen in months. He seemed much shorter and thinner than I remembered him. I offered to serve brunch at their house so that family and friends would be free to attend the funeral. He accepted my offer with a nod, then noted that the funeral would be a small, simple affair. I told him that, no matter what size the funeral, I wanted to repay the generosity that he and Mrs. Lambert had shown our family after my father died. But it was more than that; I wanted to do something for Larry. And I wanted to undertake an act of kindness in memory of my father, who, unlike me, knew no other way.