I Am Max Lamm (9 page)

At the Maccabi tennis club, Lamm’s talent – his
potential
– was unmistakable. An unexpected, generous force, reinforced every time this gangly libidinous rake trounced another opponent in straight sets. His talent in full bloom on 28 January, 1995. The day Lamm’s father, Mel, ran from his Caulfield chiropractic office despite a half-full waiting room, drove six blocks to the courts and interrupted afternoon training. In front of the other boys – Friedman with the lisp and a one hundred and eighty kilometres per hour serve, Millstein the developer’s son with a backyard court and always the new equipment, Blashki who once took an ace in the groin and had to see a dick doctor – Mel Lamm shook his son like a dud ball.

‘Max! Did you hear the news? He did it! Krickstein’s playing Agassi in the semis!’

The under-16s threw their racquets skywards, cheering not for the political symbolism of a Jewish underdog challenging the Las Vegan superstar of Iranian heritage, but for the rare spectacle of a Jew succeeding at
any
sport. Krickstein, who’d beaten Stefan Edberg days before, was only two matches away from winning a grand slam tournament – he could be the first Jewish player to do so – without assistance from the usual Yiddish brigade of lawyers, doctors, accountants and haberdashers. Later at the clubhouse, the coach and some of the parents treated the boys to kosher pizza and ice cream as they watched Krickstein’s big match live on TV.

According to the
Australian Jewish News
, that night similar gatherings occurred in Jewish neighbourhoods from Bondi Junction to Williamsburg, Monsey to Beverly Hills, London’s Golders Green to kibbutzes with satellite dishes, as Jews worldwide came together to cheer their man. It was a bizarre showdown, unforgettable for when the arena’s drainage system malfunctioned and a geyser erupted on court. Nevertheless, Krickstein returned to his Jewish roots and lost the match 4-6, 4-6, 0-3, defaulting with an injured hamstring.

Adam Millstein’s father screamed at the TV screen.

‘Krickstein could have won the first set! The hopeless schmuck should’ve stayed in college!’

The following night at the kitchen table. Lamplight reflected off Mel Lamm’s bald scalp. Silence. The father stared into his son’s eyes.

‘Max, somebody
brilliant
sent this to me.’

A glossy brochure lay unfolded on the linoleum tabletop. But after a tiring four hours’ training, Lamm’s interest wasn’t forthcoming.

‘See the guy in the photo?’ Lamm’s father pushed the brochure across the table. ‘That’s Aaron Krickstein’s coach. Krickstein’s
personal
coach.

‘His name’s Sid Einfeld, and he’s helped twenty-three players break the top ten. He’s among the best coaches in the United States. Arguably
the
best.’

The brochure’s centrepiece, in soft focus like an advertisement for cheap jewellery, was a brownstone clubhouse flying the Stars and Stripes above eight hard courts on a fine spring day.

‘Sid Einfeld’s got a tennis academy up near Albany in New York State. It’s a reasonable train ride from my cousin in Williamsburg. Remember Leo Chrapot?’

Atop the coach’s photo, his title in golden block letters:

Expert Trainer, Motivator and Biomechanical Therapist, Sid J Einfeld
.

The Strategic Mastermind Behind Twelve Grand Slam Titles. Sid Einfeld is
– here the letters swelled into sixteen-point font –
THE MAN WHO COACHES THE COACHES
.

Einfeld’s toothy grin said
look what I’ve done!
and
let me do it for you!
A tanned rake, about sixty but fitter than most men half his age, distinctive for the white shag sprouting like alfalfa from his tennis shirt and an uncanny resemblance to Tony Bennett.

‘Son, I have wonderful news. Sid was down here with Krickstein and he scouted at the juniors. Last week he saw you beat that Swedish kid. Today he called me. He’s gonna wait until you grow a little taller, then he wants to work with you!’

Three days after his eighteenth birthday, when Lamm relocated to his cousin’s house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he had won another four junior tournaments, signed a sponsorship deal with Reebok and bade his relatives farewell during dinner at Sophia’s, an aircraft hangar of an Italian bistro specializing in sentimental marathons of duplicated presents and shrieking babies. For three hours that Thursday evening, his extended family – the Lamms, the Chrapots, the Snyders – unanimously proclaimed that their young hotshot Max was destined for something stupendous. His father toasted a
l’chaim
, predicting that his boy’s achievements would confer
nachas
not only upon their clan, nor the Maccabi tennis club that nourished his talent, but upon the Jewish people as the chosen nation.

The messianic expectations for his new coach yet to be confirmed, three days later Lamm arrived at Penn station. Leo Chrapot was waiting by the baggage carousel and immediately Lamm warmed to his cousin, a computer analyst of characteristic girth, who stuffed the suitcases into his Hyundai mini, said to hell with the traffic and went for a scenic drive over the Brooklyn Bridge, for burgers on Bedford Avenue and finally to Lamm’s basement bedroom beneath their Williamsburg brownstone.

Four days a week Lamm rode the Amtrak up to Sid Einfeld’s academy. His maiden semester of relentless drills, militaristic coaching, gifted hitting partners and, most satisfyingly, improvement in his game. After two months, he beat a Belarusian kid ranked in the ATP Top 100. Max Lamm possessed the same brash talent that, Coach Einfeld remarked, he’d noticed thirty years earlier in a cocksure rookie named John McEnroe. For the next five years, Lamm stayed at the academy for three months every year and New York City – for a hundred and fifty years the world’s premier maternity ward for outrageous dreams – suggested that Lamm’s father was right. Everything would work out. It
had
to.

After Lamm’s initial excursions to the gargantuan galleries in the city, he came to know Williamsburg; the best and worst of Bedford Avenue’s junk shops, bookstores, bagelries, art spaces, $5 barbers. An internet café-cum-laundromat run by a Lubavitcher in a black hat, long beard and
payes
, who turned a blind eye to the thirteen-year-old kids in the corner gawking at playboy.com. The dull clack of the L train, the frigid grey lap of the East River chilling Lamm’s basement window when the wind turned. Atlantic Avenue crowded at lunchtime with hungry clerks from City Hall, black kids in gigantic white T-shirts milling outside the movie theatre, Korean street sweepers in lime-green overalls, Puerto Rican grocers yelling through mouthfuls of plantains, art school students wearing Ray-Bans, black jeans and Cuban heels, arguing the merits of
Mapplethorpe v Basquiat
as they walked to their how-to-rip-off-Warhol class at Brooklyn Art College. It became thuddingly familiar as the midtown skyline lost its postcard novelty. You can leave Manhattan for the tourists and the rats.

Yet, though invariably denied by the parents of a talented child, expectations for success never rest on sturdy ground. As Lamm recalled a year later beneath a barbeque, during the summer of 2003 his predisposition for catastrophe – that talent more irrepressible, more
him
, than the dexterity with a racquet or paintbrush – finally concluded its terrible gestation. His force of self-destruction, emerging like a maladaptive butterfly from a poisoned cocoon. It began on the Saturday evening that should have been a celebration, because Lamm had won a wildcard singles entry into the US Open.

For Lamm’s envious doubles partner, that weekend became a different, reprehensible kind of celebration. He was Gray Pierce III, the Ohio State college champ who accrued sour satisfaction from taking Lamm to the beginning of the end. The freckled scion of a Cleveland military dynasty, his father ashamed that their firstborn had ditched the Marines for an effeminate pursuit like tennis, Gray Pierce was jealous of Lamm’s US Open berth. A six-foot-four goliath with a killer forehand and an ironing board’s posture, Pierce was convinced that his partner was stealing the credit for their five straight victories. As Lamm discovered, Gray Pierce’s stiff back concealed a sharp stake way, way up his arse; a stake that the sunburnt Midwestern Judas used to crucify his doubles partner that weekend in Manhattan.

That Saturday evening, fifteen of the Matchpoint Academy’s recruits visited the city to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of Josip Zelic, a Croatian who was runner-up at the junior French Open. At Lit, a labyrinthine bar beneath Second Avenue, they guzzled Belgian beer, vodka and donuts in lieu of a birthday cake. As midnight tolled, Gray Pierce stumbled outside to find a cash machine. He staggered drunk down the street and, by undeserved serendipity for the carrot-topped snitch, spied his doubles partner outside the Howard Johnson’s Hotel at East Eighth Street.

There was Max Lamm, discretely passing $200 cash to the girl from El Salvador. Her chocolate silhouette unmistakable in a red stretch dress and scarlet stilettos to her knees. The girl’s businesslike nonchalance, her obliviousness to Lamm’s artless kiss goodbye, indicated her venerable profession more explicitly than the outfit. Uncannily, she resembled Gabriela Sabatini, the retired Argentine bombshell of tennis who has a pink rose named in her honour. Naturally for a natural son of a bitch, Gray Pierce filmed the encounter on his camera phone, that product of Japan offering the kind of peer-to-peer surveillance that would have made J Edgar Hoover hard beneath his silk panties.

Lamm’s descent begins.

Lagaya. He never remembered her full name, only its length (a three-worder long even for Spanish) requiring the throaty ‘
chhh
’
sound (splattering phlegm during correct pronunciation) that’s essential to the language. If she’d grown up in the USA, not in a slum in a dictatorship best known for bananas and death squads, Lagaya would have likely graced Manhattan’s catwalks as a clotheshorse. Her gangly trunk, humankind’s closest incarnation to the gazelle, hadn’t thickened in the four years since she was sixteen years old. Small-breasted for the girls at 738 Second Avenue, yet, owing to her face – naturally shiny like Aragonese Spanish honey, perfectly symmetrical, a radiant never-seen muse for Manhattan’s dead gay aficionados of beauty like Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe – she was the second-most requested hooker at the whorehouse, behind Rosanna whose watermelon-sized double-D cups would, had the surgery occurred in the US and not Tijuana, cost four-thousand dollars a tit.

The pimp, Carlos, was surprised that old-fashioned beauty ran a close second in demand to Manhattan’s tightest tit-fuck. But no mystery to her men. Lagaya was hypnotic, beguiling for the languid, unforced grace that her clients didn’t deserve. Her captivating glow – the bewitching vitality animating the angular chin, shadowy cheekbones, cascading brown locks – had yet to be drained by wayward kids, domestic violence, street drugs, psychopathic clients, forced eviction, abusive pimps . . . the usual hindrances plaguing women forced into her profession. Her cherubic radiance – a genetic trait observed in the glossy scarlet-cheeked faces of native Central Americans like her father back in San Salvador – belied the dull beige featurelessness of her prison, a third-floor hotel suite, where she was made to fuck five nights a week.

If Lagaya only knew it, her cheekbones would have landed her a gig at a classy no-name joint uptown, an establishment servicing Wall Street brokers, big-shot CEOs, stressed surgeons; the high-tipping clientele who tell their wives they’re working late, drink a martini at the Council on Foreign Relations, then take their girl to a room at the Hilton booked under a fake name. But the pimp, a brutal Dominican named Carlos Brenes, never mentioned the money that Lagaya was missing. Nobody did; not the other Latin girls just as uninformed about the Manhattan marketplace, not her cumhappy clients enjoying the bargain. Lagaya was too young, too poor, too exquisitely chiselled, too easily deceived owing to her illiteracy in English, for Midtown’s foremost illegal whorehouse to squander. Of the thirty-seven Salvadoran, Honduran or Guatemalan women enslaved there, it was she that Carlos – himself a once-penniless illegal immigrant who’d mastered the cruel pragmatism essential for success in America’s blackmarket – guarded most closely.

One appointment, Lamm too was hooked. Exceptional pleasure stripped of its exceptional attachments. His first time as a payer (and only his fifth time ever), he was nervous, half-ashamed, ravenous. In his father’s old books in the basement – the dusty leather-bound editions of Bernard Shaw, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, or George Orwell’s accounts of skid row in pre-war Paris and London – the prostitutes came in two types: unfortunate victims of happenstance who get rehabilitated by gentlemen widowers, or canny strumpets for whom the emotionless monotony of fucking long ago sapped any humanlike impulse. Lagaya was neither. She was addictively
real.

Amid her physical poise, Lamm noticed the solitary blemish; a serpentine birthmark, curved like a scythe, blackening the coffee base of her spine until it disappeared into her minature arse. Like a dotless question mark, oscillating as Lamm went at her from behind. Not an unconcealable juggernaut like Gorbachev’s – hers merely a dark streak the length of a few matchsticks – but that birthmark mocked Lamm, jeered at his irresponsible libidinous excesses, just as they and he were coming to fruition. By introducing the hint of imperfection into their trysts – the hint, therefore, of reality and his exploitative recklessness – that birthmark marred his pleasure. But she was too good to give up.

Hopeless, horny Lamm! Sometimes couldn’t find his rhythm, couldn’t finish up, until he gazed not at Lagaya’s golden hips and that birthmark, but her neck glistening with sweat, sticky with tangled hair, as she moaned convincingly into the pillow.

‘You’re a good one,’ she cooed afterwards. Had the bastard of a pimp taught her to say that? Then she gulped a shot of decent Scotch whisky, a gift from a periodontist client who, she recounted, was so paranoid about hygiene that he’d jerk off wearing a condom to keep his hands from getting dirty.