As Needed for Pain Read online

  The moment passed.

  I knelt down as if I was tying my shoes and snatched up the three Vicodin from under the urinal. Everything smelled of piss. I walked over to one of the sinks, which the attendant had turned on for me, put the pills in my mouth, and leaned in to take a sip of water from the faucet. Down they went. The attendant handed me a paper towel. While wiping my mouth I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.

  I quickly looked away.

  Brut

  The first real power broker I ever saw wasn’t wearing a tuxedo. He wasn’t wearing anything. He was completely naked.

  I was eight years old.

  He was just standing there talking baseball with a couple of other guys as if it was no big deal. He wasn’t crouching over or turned to the side or rushing to get his undies on like I did when I had to change in front of the other kids at camp. He didn’t have a care in the world, except whether or not the Orioles were going to make it to the play-offs.

  And if his nakedness wasn’t enough to completely mesmerize me, he also cursed. A lot.

  “Weaver doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing,” he said, rubbing his tanned belly. “And Murray needs to swing that bat a lot fucking harder if we’re going to have a chance.”

  The locker room smelled the way men should smell—like Brut deodorant. The smell was always there, as much a part of the room as the long wooden benches that separated rows of polished oak lockers or the dark red carpeting, which according to a sign hanging above the towel hamper, you couldn’t walk across wearing golf shoes. The big green Brut aerosol can stood tall on a silver tray next to a line of five sinks. Beside it were a bottle of mouthwash and small Dixie cups, Pinaud Clubman aftershave, and a container of black combs floating in a mysterious blue liquid.

  The naked guy was one of the early morning swimmers. They were in their late sixties and arrived at the Bonnie View Country Club in Pikesville—the small, predominantly Jewish suburb in Baltimore where I grew up—before eight a.m., when the pool was designated for laps. In they went, every morning, punching at the water like exhausted prizefighters as they slowly made their way down and back.

  I was there to play tennis with my grandmother and would usually have a quick swim before she took me home. Because I was eight years old, it was no longer okay for her to take me into the women’s locker room. This was a relief. Grandma’s friends were already frightening enough when they were fully clothed. They were squeezers and pinchers and kissers. I’d stand there frozen as they swooped in, lipstick smeared across the teeth, for an unwanted smooch. This was the stuff of nightmares. I hardly needed to see their pendulous breasts ever again. For the better part of my childhood, I thought a woman’s nipples were meant to line up with her belly button like some sort of an anatomical ellipsis across the stomach.

  The men, however, paid no attention to me. I just stood there staring at their weathered dicks and droopy old-man asses and listening to them go on about overpaid ballplayers. These were the Pikesville power brokers. The first-generation hustlers who came from nothing, turning small businesses—retail, electronics, real estate—into millions. They wore white terry cloth polo shirts and ate salami sandwiches for lunch. They played cards all afternoon. And they seemed to always smoke cigars—a chewed-up nub of a Macanudo permanently stuck between their second and third fingers. It was there when they drove their Cadillacs and swung their nine irons. It was there when they walked through the clubhouse to meet their wives for drinks. And it was there in the naked guy’s hand as he talked shop.

  How did an eight-year-old boy become a man? Nothing seemed more mystifying. Even then I felt like there was a handbook that explained all the rules for boys and girls, men and women, and that everyone had been given one except me. But these guys had figured it out. They had earned great livings and bought winter homes in Miami Beach. They had earned the respect of their families and the community. They were men among men who knew who they were, who’d earned the right to stand naked and had the confidence to do it. I wanted what they had.

  I liked this locker room. Being there made me feel like one of the guys. So much so, in fact, that before heading out to the pool that morning, I hit each armpit with a quick spray of Brut.

  It burned for days.

  Tawny

  “Here’s a slick young man. Feeling lucky? Come on, give it a shot.”

  Despite the fact that there was no one else in the room, it took me a second to realize that the dealer was talking to me. No one had ever called me slick.

  The makeshift casino was set up in the bar across from the Bonnie View Country Club’s main dining room, which tonight was covered with hundreds of red and silver balloons for Stephanie Bernstein’s bat mitzvah.

  I wasn’t much of a gambler at thirteen, but I was desperate to get my hands on one of those poker chips. I’d been practicing coin vanishes and was struggling to find something that I could conceal undetected in my right hand. The Tarbell Course in Magic, volume 1—a must-read for any aspiring magician—specifically said that when doing the Classic Palm, the hand should look “completely natural” and your fingers should be able to move freely without dropping the hidden coin. The poker chips appeared to be the perfect size for my hands, and I wasn’t leaving the party without one.

  We’d gathered at Temple Beth El earlier that day to watch as Stephanie read from the Torah and gave a sobbing speech about a grandfather whom she was certain was “smiling down on me from heaven.”

  Touching though it was, the real highlight of the morning had little to do with Stephanie and everything to do with the debut of her older sister Dara’s brand-new nose. Nose jobs were as common in Pikesville as BMWs. It was as if Oprah burst into the high school cafeteria one day and walked around shouting, “You get a nose. And you get a nose. And you get a nose.”

  Oprah failed to mention that they’d all be getting the exact same nose. It seemed like every plastic surgeon sourced parts from the same aftermarket distributor. It didn’t matter if the patient came in with a Streisand or a Streep—when they left, they had a Ski Jump. Every time. Without fail.

  The Ski Jump ran narrow from the bridge to the tip, as if pinched, finally forming a small rounded button, which turned slightly upward. There wasn’t an edge or bump in sight. Moms and daughters would sometimes go in together for a package deal. The absolute worst was when one of the boys had it done. While this was obviously a one-size-fits-all unisex nose, it looked especially fake on a guy’s face.

  I got very used to seeing Ski Jumps around Pikesville. They were as easy to spot as the bad toupees my grandfather took great pleasure in pointing out when he’d see one at the country club. “Take a look at that rug over there,” he’d say. “Who the hell does he think he’s fooling?”

  It was bar mitzvah season in Pikesville—the nine months every year when each weekend saw another batch of gawky thirteen-year-olds ascend toward adulthood with some over-the-top celebration. We took summers off for sleepaway camp, naturally.

  Pikesville was the Jewish ghetto of the Baltimore suburbs—if ghettos had houses with three-car garages. The parties were meticulously planned and seemed to cost as much as weddings. There were fights over venues and deejays and caterers. Decades-old friendships were put to the test. And God forbid you had two invites for the same night.

  For us kids, it wasn’t as big of a deal, but for the parents this was serious business . . . and they kept score. Who was invited where? How much did each couple eat and drink? And how big was the gift that was handed over—Goodfellas style—in an envelope on the night of the celebration?

  The highlight of my own bar mitzvah party wasn’t being hoisted up in a chair as the bandleader, a black man in his forties, sang “Hava Nagila,” or even holding hands with Marci Feldman as we danced to the band’s rendition of Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” though that was definitely a milestone. No, it was when I got home and tallied up the checks. I’d been given close to $10,000.

&
nbsp; The gifts were mainly $100 to $200, except for one whopper—$1,500 from the Westons, a wealthy couple who were clients of my stepfather’s law practice and lived in Maryland horse country about an hour away. “You should have invited more gentiles,” my grandfather told me when I showed him their check.

  The Westons stood out for another reason, too. Mr. Weston wore a tuxedo while all of the other men were wearing suits. And Mrs. Weston looked like Linda Evans from Dynasty, her shoulder-length frosted blond hair something of an anomaly amidst the sea of black curls that were fairly standard in Pikesville.

  But there were always some surprises at these parties, particularly when it came to outfits. Jeremy Kleiner’s dad once showed up wearing a cropped fur coat and clutching what can only be described as a clutch. Someone’s stepmom once wore a silky jumpsuit that was so formfitting that she became the talk of the party and was single-handedly responsible for introducing the term camel toe into the lexicon of an army of pubescent young men. For the most part, though, the moms kept it simple with sequins or chiffon and the dads wore dark suits.

  The boys also wore suits and ties for the parties that called for “formal attire.” The girls put on dresses and walked awkwardly in their first heels, like baby giraffes on the verge of tipping over. Their spangled dresses took away all the mystery about the size and shape of their breasts, something that generally required a fair amount of guesswork with their usual shirts and sweaters.

  Boobs had become a major preoccupation. My best friend, Adam Gold, had actually touched a pair over the bra at my bar mitzvah party, which was also held in Bonnie View’s grand dining room a few months earlier. I had a ten-piece band and a giant ice sculpture that spelled danny.

  “They were definitely Bs,” he told me. “But she could be a full C by next summer.” I nodded knowingly.

  The working theory within my group of friends was that the bigger the boobs, the more willing the girl was to fool around. This had mainly gone untested, but seemed to make sense. My voice hadn’t even changed and I barely had any hair on my body, so what did I know?

  As waiters cleared away the dinner plates, the deejay called Stephanie to the center of the dance floor, where her cake sat on a lone table. There were thirteen long white candles, each lit by a family member she invited up after thanking them for being a part of her life. There were more tears as she lit the final candle in honor of the dead grandfather.

  And just like that, the cake was gone and the instantly recognizable opening licks of Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” blared from the speakers. The dance floor was flooded and I quickly retreated in search of Adam, who had left the table forty-five minutes earlier as the entrées were just being served.

  “It’s easy, slick. You just put one of these chips on a number and I spin the wheel. If the ball lands on your number—boom, you’re a winner.”

  I had on the navy blue suit I wore at my own bar mitzvah—my first ever—and I liked that this guy kept calling me slick. I felt like James Bond.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said after scanning the bar for Adam. The dealer was wearing a white suit jacket and had on a black derby hat, which I discovered was plastic as I stepped closer. This room was much darker than the dining room and was virtually empty. The music was loud in the background.

  There’s a party going on right here.

  The chips were a touch smaller than a Kennedy half-dollar, with a smooth face and ridged edges. Red, blue, and yellow stacks sat on the green felt-covered table just in front of where he was standing. He slid about a dozen of the red ones over to me and gave the wheel a spin.

  A celebration to last throughout the year.

  I scattered the chips around on the numbered squares in front of me without much thought. I held one back in my right hand, casually placing it in my pocket as the dealer dropped the small white ball onto the spinning wheel. It didn’t matter that I didn’t win.

  There wasn’t much privacy for me to take a closer look at my new prize. The dining room was a full-blown disco by this point and the bar was starting to fill up with the adults who weren’t interested in sharing the dance floor with a bunch of newly minted teens.

  I certainly wasn’t about to expose the stolen chip in front of the dealer, so I ducked out. I couldn’t go back into the ballroom. There was absolutely no way I was going to show my friends. My obsession with magic wasn’t going to do me any favors with these guys. I was already something of an outlier because I hadn’t yet made out with a girl and I wasn’t terribly athletic. Confessing a love of magic would have made me about as cool as Doug Henning. It would have been social suicide.

  I knew just where to go.

  I made my way down the main corridor. Portraits of the club’s past presidents lined the walls, brass name plates fixed to the bottom of each gilded frame. Rosenblatt. Goldberg. Samuelson. Cohen. Cohen. Cohen. It was either a dynasty or proof that Cohen is the Smith of the Hebrews. Ask any Jewish man if he knows Steven Cohen, and he’ll tell you he knows at least five.

  By the time I walked into the men’s locker room downstairs, the noise from the party was nothing more than a distant vibration. I found a row of switches on the wall and flipped a couple until the lights above the sinks twitched to life. Standing in front of the mirror, I took the poker chip from my pocket and got to work. The familiar smell of Brut hung in the air.

  “Watch carefully as I place the coin in my hand,” I said to an invisible audience. I lightly gripped the chip between the muscles in my right palm, holding it in place as I pretended to drop it into the other hand. “And just like that . . . Presto, it’s gone,” I said as I slowly opened the fingers of my left hand, revealing it was empty.

  This type of “performance” had become routine for me. I would often spend hours practicing in my own basement—after school and on weekends—surrounded by magic books, coins, and decks of Bicycle playing cards. “Was this your card?” I’d say to no one as I dramatically turned over the ace of spades.

  “Who are you talking to?” my mother would shout from upstairs.

  “Just playing,” I’d yell.

  This night was different, though. I was wearing a suit like a professional magician would. I felt like a real performer—like David Copperfield in the autographed photo I had of him elegantly levitating a beautiful woman.

  I idolized Copperfield. He was graceful and funny and he had great hair. He wasn’t goofy like Doug Henning with his tie-dyed shirts and porn-star mustache. Copperfield was polished. Plus, I’d heard he was Jewish. I would often sit in my basement carefully studying the VHS recordings I’d made of his television specials, stopping, rewinding, and desperately trying to figure out how he walked through the Great Wall of China or made the Statue of Liberty disappear.

  Magic was the perfect escape from reality, because in the end, that is exactly what it’s designed to do—defy reality. When I was performing a card trick, I stood up straighter and spoke louder and more slowly. Magic gave people a reason to look at me without actually looking at me. Still, it didn’t matter, as I rarely performed tricks for anyone other than myself.

  “Watch carefully,” I said, studying myself in the locker-room mirror as I held the poker chip at the tips of my fingers. That’s when I heard the giggling. I quickly pocketed the red chip. Through the corner of my eye I saw someone dash out of the locker-room attendant’s office and run out the door. The lights weren’t on over there and I couldn’t tell who it was. All I could see was that it was a girl and she was holding her shoes.

  “What’s going on out here?” asked Adam, emerging from the same small office. He walked over to the bank of sinks where I was standing, picked up the Scope mouthwash that was on the counter, and sipped some right out of the bottle. He swished it around in his mouth before spitting into one of the sinks.

  “Who just booked it out of here?” I asked.

  “That was Jodi. Don’t tell anyone, but I totally just felt her tits,” he said. “She took off her bra. She took it off. Hol
y shit!”

  Adam was the cool kid from the ABC Afterschool Special. The one who was good looking and could charm his way in or out of anything. It was effortless for Adam. Girls tripped over themselves to get close to him. Everyone loved him. And now Jodi Weinstein had just let him play with her gigantic boobs. Some guys had all the luck.

  “Who were you talking to out here?” he asked.

  “No one,” I said.

  “We heard voices.”

  “All right,” I said, “I’ll tell you, but you have to swear you won’t say anything.”

  “I swear.”

  “I was with Stephanie’s cousin, Tawny. The older one from out of town. We were fooling around. I got to second.”

  Tawny? What was I thinking? Jewish people didn’t name their daughters Tawny. I panicked, and it was the first thing that came to mind. I must have seen Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” video a thousand times and was obsessed with Tawny Kitaen doing splits on the hood of a Jaguar.

  “Nice,” said Adam. I’m pretty sure he didn’t believe me, but he never called me out.

  “Jodi definitely had Ds,” he said. “How about the cousin?”

  I put my hands in my pockets and looked down for a moment at my shiny penny loafers as they kicked at something that wasn’t there.

  “Same,” I said. “Ds are my favorite.”

  MAGNUM Opus

  By sixteen, while I was desperately praying for my first hand job like some horny Make-A-Wish kid, Adam was fast becoming the Jewish Wilt Chamberlin. Having sex with him became something of a bucket-list achievement for Pikesville girls in the late eighties.

  Meanwhile, everything I knew about sex came from porn. My friends and I traded pornos like baseball cards. Need it. Need it. Got it. I studied these movies like they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. I knew every scene. Every plotline. It turned out that a lot of job interviews led to sex right there on the desk. I couldn’t wait to join the workforce.