October 5, 2023 • 41 mins
Lenny was Jonathan's childhood best friend, but they drifted apart as they grew into adulthood. Now, Lenny is dying and needs a friend. So Jonathan makes the call.
Credits
Heavyweight is hosted and produced by Jonathan Goldstein.
This episode was produced by supervising producer Stevie Lane, along with Phoebe Flanigan. The senior producer is Kalila Holt.
Production assistance by Mohini Madgavkar. Editorial guidance from Emily Condon.
Special thanks to Lauren Silverman, Neil Drumming, and Jackie Cohen.
The show was mixed by Bobby Lord.
Music by Christine Fellows, John K Samson, Blue Dot Sessions, Katie Condon, Paper Rabbit, Boxwood Orchestra, Principle, and Bobby Lord. Our theme song is by The Weakerthans courtesy of Epitaph Records.
Heavyweight is a Spotify Original Podcast.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Do you wear shoes with shoelaces? You or you wear Velcrow?
Speaker 3 (00:11):
Did you come up with these questions by yourself?
Speaker 2 (00:13):
No, I have a writer's room. No, I'm just curious.
I remember you used to like Velcrow. You said that
anybody who is foolish enough to have to stoop down
and tie their shoelaces deserves what they get. That shoelaces
get covered in urine and bile, and that velcro is
the fabric of the future. That's what you'd always say.
You have shoes with shoelaces, right, shoes shoelaces?
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Do you always double not them? No?
Speaker 3 (00:38):
You don't any other compelling questions, Johnny, that you have.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
If you showed up to a bowling alley with a watermelon,
you think they'd let you bowl. I'm Jonathan Goldstein and
this is Heavyweight Today's episode, Lenny, right after the break.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Back.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
When I was a kid, I often carried around a
tape recorder and outstretched mic created a buffer between me
and the world. Recording was my way of managing life,
and so I recorded everything, my parents' arguments, their phone calls,
(01:42):
and I'm telling you thro fish my mom pretending to
audition for soap operas Amanda Darling, how are you today?
Mostly though I recorded myself, I made radio plays.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
Rich Stone Productions present the Adventures of Nedley with no
one to share in my love for a medium do
o way since the Truman administration.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
I put on the plays alone, all the voices performed
by me for an audience of zero. Our story opens.
Speaker 5 (02:25):
Up where Nedley is about to get off.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Oh what a lousy day. That's our Nedley. Nedley was
an eleven year old spitfire who did as he pleased.
Since I myself was an eleven year old rule following
nerd Nedley was my id.
Speaker 5 (02:43):
Here comes boom boom, She's my dream.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
High Needy Hi he boom boom bom, and the whole
psychodrama played out as one man show.
Speaker 5 (03:01):
This movie was directed by Jonathan Goldstein, screenplay by Jonathan Wilsey.
All voices in it are done by Jonathan Goldstein. This
is a Jonathan Goldstein production whom.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
It was all just me and my microphone until the
day Lenny came along. I was twelve years old when
we were first introduced at a birthday party. Immediately Lennie
asked me what blood type I was oh, I said, uncertainly,
(03:35):
me too, he shouted, genuinely excited to find some small
thing we shared. I was an aloof kid, but was
quickly won over by Lenny's goodness and the fact our
mothers were already best friends made our best friendship feel faded.
Plus that Lenny proved as obsessive about recording as I
(03:55):
was sealed the deal. The weekends revolved around our recording
radio plays. Lenny and I would sleep in the same
foold out in his parents' den. His dad, Izzy, a
large man with a thick Polish accent, would make us
breakfast in just his underwear, his undershirt tucked into his
jockeys like it was some style imported from the Old Country.
(04:17):
One time, trying to explain to Izzy how I liked
my eggs and having no success with Fried, I described
two sons and a Cloud. Lenny loved that so much
that he started ordering his eggs that way too, Two
Sons and a Cloud. After breakfast, we'd head to Lenny's bedroom,
(04:41):
shut the door, and record all morning. We were a
gang of two Golden Lennox presents. The Lennox was from Lennie,
the gold from Goldstein for the first time, I no
longer felt alone. Together. Lenny and I recorded prank phone
(05:01):
calls our parents' dinner parties, and we made radio play
after radio play, creating characters like Flip and Will, two
burned out radio DJs. We take you to Flip.
Speaker 4 (05:12):
Flip is going to introduce you, Slip is taking you
to Will. Okay Will, No Will is taking you to Slip.
No Beck, you will.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
As a part of the Flip and Will radio show,
we did live phone outs to our quote unquote listeners.
In the eighties, dialing a phone was so arduous it's
surprising people even bothered. But without driver's licenses or money,
Lenny and I made the effort. The phone brought us
(05:45):
a sense of freedom and adventure.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Okay you three?
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Three?
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Hello?
Speaker 6 (05:58):
What would you do if you had to move a
television survey?
Speaker 7 (06:04):
Why?
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Thank you think you need it?
Speaker 8 (06:08):
Why the Cold War is not over? It never was?
Speaker 2 (06:21):
This is Lenny now, age fifty two.
Speaker 8 (06:24):
John, What is not understandable about this?
Speaker 9 (06:28):
Because I'm getting frustrated.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Now I'm in Minnesota and Lenny is in Canada. We
haven't spoken in nine years, and at the moment, for
some reason, we're discussing Russia's role in Ukraine well.
Speaker 8 (06:43):
Still there.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
In our late teens, Lenny and I began to have
less and less in common and we drifted apart. Our
first conversation in almost a decade is not going well.
I mean, I'm not sure that I fully get it.
You mean that, I mean it's not that complicated.
Speaker 7 (07:00):
Yeah, we destroyed communism using their communism.
Speaker 8 (07:03):
Now they destroyed capitalism using our capitalists.
Speaker 9 (07:07):
I guess about your subject.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
The last time I saw Lenny was back home in Canada.
Our mothers, who were still best friends, thought it'd be
nice for the families to get together. Lenny showed up
at the restaurant with a shaved head and thin chin
strap beard. With the way he kept his arms crossed
and his posture erect that evening, Lenny had something of
the dictator about him. He was living in the bachelor's
(07:30):
apartment and his parents' basement in Chamity Laval, the suburb
we grew up in just outside of Montreal. Lenny drove
a school bus for Orthodox Jews and said the Hasidim
had nicknamed him the Surgeon because of how he zipped
through narrow streets with such precision. At the end of
the meal, Lenny asked if I wanted to go outside
and smoke a joint, a for ole times sake kind
(07:53):
of thing. The idea of smoking a joint outside a
suburban strip mall restaurant while our aged parents waited in
side was unappealing, so I said no, at least stand
outside with me, Lenny said, and keep me company. But
I dug my heels in and Lenny grew angry. We
parted on bad terms that evening, almost ten years ago,
(08:16):
and that was the last time I saw Lennie or
thought too hard about him until now. The reason Lenny
and I are speaking right now is because he has
only months to live. Lenny is dying of pancreatic cancer
and his undergoing chemotherapy and radiation. He's recently gone through
(08:39):
eleven hours of surgery to keep the cancer from spreading,
but it was no use. Even though that first conversation
went poorly, I continue to spend my evenings talking to
Lennie because somewhere in the back of my mind is
the memory of the kid from my childhood, the kid
who stayed by my side tending to my adult sized
depression in the darkest hour hours of my teens. I
(09:01):
remember days and nights spent in Lenny's bedroom, just lying
in his bed under the black bulb of his light fixture,
listening to Pink Floyd and Iron Maiden. Too scared to
face the world. Back then, Lennie would reassure me, telling
me to think all the bad thoughts I could, to
get them out of my system, to exhaust them so
that eventually I'd only be left with the good ones.
(09:24):
Being with Lennie was one of the few places where
I felt safe, and so I call him again and again. Hey, Lenny,
how are you doing?
Speaker 1 (09:37):
H S shit?
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Yeah. Our conversations usually occur at night, with Lenny still
in his parents' basement, the same basement where we spent
our childhoods, and me wandering the silent streets of my
midwestern neighborhood. During these phone chats, I never know what
to say. I struggle to find common ground, but always
come up short. When I bring up old mutual friends,
(10:01):
Lenny speaks of them resentfully. With jobs, it's the same
the idiots at the trucking firm, the anti semites at
the refrigeration company. On the rare occasion, I raise something
personal about myself, it gets no traction when I tell
him how I'm now a father of a five year
old Lennie, a bachelor, says that people who have kids
(10:22):
only do it for ego reasons. Mostly we stick to
the subject of Lenny's pain, which is brutal. He can't
eat without pain, stand or even lie down without pain.
Sometimes he'll put the phone down and I'll listen to
him as he howls from the bathroom. There are drugs,
some prescribed and some not, but no matter, there's always pain,
(10:45):
and anger at the pain, and anger at what seems
like me. On most nights, after a typical conversation, I
come home and say to my wife Emily, that maybe
this is a bad idea. We drifted apart for a reason.
I say, we're strangers, and yet even though Lenny doesn't
(11:05):
seem to even want to talk to me, we continue
to talk night after night. I'm beginning to get the
impression that maybe he has no one else. No no, no,
of course not.
Speaker 9 (11:18):
Well, wish me luck.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Lenny says he wants to leave something behind, and so
we record, just like we did when we were kids.
Back then, we perform different characters. Now, Ostensibly we're just ourselves.
Speaker 9 (11:33):
I really did my shouffle to rice, lemon, lime, garlic,
and pepper.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Oh nice, nothing complicated and it is gorgeous.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Great? And how's your sleeping?
Speaker 9 (11:49):
I sleep like shit? What do you think I have
to think?
Speaker 2 (11:51):
I met every two hours?
Speaker 9 (11:56):
The horrible life when you spend your life, society of
the universe punish you all the anger, all the hatred.
What do you think you could get away with it?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Lenny is no longer the sweet, lonely kid who told
me not to squat the house fly in his bedroom
because he was his pet, The boy with whom I'd
been so close that I'd run my hands through his
thick black hair as though it were my own, smoohing
it up into the air. I pretended I'd invented the
latest in men's hairstyles. The Beethoven that Lenny seems to
(12:33):
be long gone. Even though Lenny and I weren't in
touch over the years, when I'd ask after him, my
mother would always say the same thing. Lenny and his
parents were fighting like cats and dogs. Lenny's father died
about a year ago. Now it's just him and his mom.
(12:55):
Do you see you see your mother every day?
Speaker 9 (13:01):
Unfortunately, I make an attempt to treat her like a
human being, and every day she disappoints me. She's a
gross mind. My father too, he was gross, too gross.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
You loved him, you loved your dad, Yeah, I did.
Speaker 9 (13:17):
But he was a gross man who did everything that
makes his life easier in my life harder.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Lenny's parents had had another son before him, but because
of profound mental and physical disabilities, he was institutionalized. After that,
they adopted Lenny. Both Lenny and I were raised by
parents who saw screaming and hitting as the solution to
all of life's child rearing dilemmas. But from Lenny's perspective,
worse than that was the neglect. Lenny's dad worked a lot,
(13:48):
and his mom always seemed to have more time for
her friends than for him. It's something Lenny still can't
let go of.
Speaker 9 (13:55):
It's called normal responsibility, you know what I mean? My
friends got it? How come I didn't?
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Yeah?
Speaker 9 (14:04):
Well, what's so unspecial about me that I get the
shitty fucking neglect? You know, I did my best. That's
my favorite line.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
I did my best.
Speaker 9 (14:13):
You know, if that's the best, maybe you should the boss. Yeah,
that's your best way I'll tell you the truth. I'm
looking forward having that one last week, knowing that it's
finally done, that I could just like yes, because it's
been a bitch. This life has been a bitch, and
it's most because people have been pitched and they remained bitches.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
What does one owe a childhood friend, especially when that
friend seems to have changed so much over the course
of our phone calls. The question that keeps kicking around
in the back of my mind is whether all of
Lenny's anger has somehow eaten up the goodness. I continue
to phone Lenny over the next couple of months in
hopes of seeing it, feeling that goodness again, and so
(15:00):
we talk about the sex ed books at the Yamha Library,
watching The Love Boat on Saturday nights when his parents
were out with my parents, raiding his mom's freezer for
TV dinners, while playing Calleco vision. Mostly though, I just
listen and try to be there, and over time Lenny
grows softer with me, and I grow less afraid of
(15:21):
offending him, afraid of offending a dying man. And then
one night I receive a message. Listening to it now,
I'm struck by how much Lenny's voice had mellowed since
our first conversations. Instead of Jonathan or John, Lenny calls
(15:43):
me Johnny, just like he did when we were kids,
like he did when we were best friends.
Speaker 10 (15:49):
Hi, I'm sorry to call you directly like this, without
signaling or anything, but in a development and I needed
to talk to.
Speaker 9 (15:57):
You as soon as you can.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Mhm mhmm, Yeah, John, is it too late? No?
Speaker 2 (16:08):
No, No, it's okay. How are you.
Speaker 9 (16:11):
Not well?
Speaker 1 (16:12):
John? You know it's hard to tell you anything else.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
I'm sorry, what's going on.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
I'm just I'm weak. I'm gonna go into palliative care.
Speaker 7 (16:24):
Okay, there's no other recourse.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Yeah, it's getting harder and harder to function at home.
Speaker 7 (16:33):
Yeah, because I'm not too good with pain.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Johns Well, you've been dealing with so much of it.
Speaker 7 (16:42):
No, I mean my whole life. I've never been good
with me. I'm a wider wis. I'm just a big words.
It's funny through everything, the pain's still there. Pain never ends,
even with drives.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Yeah, that's not bad.
Speaker 4 (17:03):
Job.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
I don't foresee getting better.
Speaker 7 (17:11):
If I suddenly disappeared or you know, I can't talk
to you.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
No, I'm probably like you know gone. I had my
last drive yesterday. I travel around the the valve. Yeah,
just like one last highway ride.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
It's not a huge deal.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
I've done a lot of driving my time. I play.
Need to remember I'm dying anyway.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
Bigger things to think about?
Speaker 3 (17:46):
What?
Speaker 2 (17:46):
What did? What do you find yourself thinking about?
Speaker 1 (17:52):
I thing I lived?
Speaker 7 (17:53):
I lived as well as I could in my capacity.
I had good experiences at least. Yeah, it wasn't the
best life well lived, but wasn't the worst either.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Could have been worse. That's the legacy of my life.
Could have been worse.
Speaker 9 (18:18):
Just gonna.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
I just want to enjoy looking at the sky, looking
at things new.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah, reveling and be alive.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
I remember the last lady, she was scary.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Who's this the last lady?
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Which she has a little pudgy remember.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Lenny would sometimes drift into delusions, imaginary flights that would
weave throughout our conversation, But other times the delusions were
mixed up with childhood memories, like time had collapsed and
Lenny was all ages at once dying, but also back
to an age when his parents and drove us to
the mall and they're cut less supreme.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
So if you want the front Seaco grabbit.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Now, the delusions were tender and vulnerable, and observing them
was like standing over his bed watching him dream they
should just go home.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
I'm dead tired for some reason. We're at the Why
taking a course.
Speaker 7 (19:25):
We're at the Why.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
We're at the hym Tree taking a course.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
No, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. I'll tell you
if I can't follow.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Well, that's so weird, though, that I would have such
a delusion.
Speaker 7 (19:39):
Maybe it's a subconscious desire to visit.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
With you in a normal way, in a normal setting.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Yeah, we're visiting for holidays, normal, everything's normal. So or
when was it when we're going to see each.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Other in a couple of weeks. The plan is for
me to see Lenny during a visit back home, my
first since COVID that long.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Yeah, No, I'm serious. I'm not being facetious.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yeah, yeah, say it's.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Down to the wire. Maybe the last few weeks of things.
Mm hmm. Maybe I don't know.
Speaker 9 (20:34):
I don't get.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Depressed or anything.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Lenny wasn't just saying I don't want to bum you out.
He was one of the few people who knew how
fragile I could be even now he was trying to
protect me, even as he was dying.
Speaker 7 (20:49):
It's hard to say that I wish you were here.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Yeah. Recently my therapist recommended ketamine to me, a drug
sometimes prescribed for untreatable depression. In my case, she thought
it might help shift my perspective, which still tends towards darkness.
A day after Lenny and I had this conversation, while
taking several hits for my ketamine Inhaler and about to
(21:18):
go for a Saturday morning run, I was suddenly overcome
with sobbing and a feeling of unreality. As a man
in newer to epiphanies, I was shaken. Like most, I
don't often see my existence on Earth approximating anything close
to a quote unquote arc. Instead, things come in flashes.
(21:38):
I'm four years old, eating a chocolate bar at my
aunt Tilly's house, taking such tiny bites that Tilly calls
me the mousey. My theory is that if the bites
are small enough, it will last forever. I'm six, regretting
having told my father about my kindergarten crush, because he's
just told a table full of relatives about it. I
(22:00):
will never trust this man again. I think I'm fifteen
and seeing a breast for the very first time. European
sunbathers are at the same beach as me. The image
will clod's way into my thoughts over and over for
the next ten years. I'm sixteen getting turned down to
prom on a city bus. Lorraine Kaufman is telling me
(22:22):
that only I would ask someone to prom on a
city bus. Then, for some reason, I'm fifty and moving
to Minnesota. While waiting at JFK for the flight that
will take me and Emily and our then two year
old son Aggi to our new life. Oggi walks up
to a stranger and hugs his legs, and I burst
into tears. A smell a meal, a day at the beach,
(22:46):
and so goes a life without the record button pressed down.
Life is fragmented and fast and nearly impossible to make
sense of. It helps me to shed light, but always
in retrospect. With the ketamine coursing through me, though, I
(23:06):
saw the dots illuminate and connect, each handing off with purpose,
one to the other, like a succession of dominoes, tracing
the seemingly useless years that got me to where I
was with the wife, the child, the job. It all
felt so precarious, like I was standing on a narrow
column of shoe boxes. It filled me with vertigo to
(23:28):
the question of what one owes a childhood friend. In
my case, I owed Lenny everything. It was through knowing
him in those early years that the base of the
tower was formed. It was in making tapes together in
his bedroom that I discovered a feeling i'd pursue towards
a career. Suddenly I could see how everything counted, that
Lenny counted, that my love for Lenny counted. I wanted
(23:52):
Lenny to know this. I wanted him to know that
while our personalities might have driven us apart, a deep
rooted love brought us back together. But later that day
I got a call from my mother informing me that
Lennie had died. In the months after Lenny's death, I'm
(24:20):
unable to let go of how I wasn't there for
him in his last days. I obsess over what his
final moments might have been like. I begin accidentally calling
my son by Lenny's name. I do this so often
that eventually my son begins to ask, who in the
world is Lenny I try to answer him, but never
know quite how. We were best friends when I wasn't
(24:42):
much older than you, I say, and then I get
COVID and I isolate in my basement. I watch all
the old movies. Lenny and I used to watch Animal House,
Monty Python, any Hall, but instead of laughing after each punchline,
I cry. Lennie had an older cousin named Betsy, who
(25:04):
had taken on the task of cleaning up Lenny's basement.
I reached out to see if Betsy could set aside
some of Lenny's art or photos for me, but she
said that wasn't something I should pursue.
Speaker 5 (25:15):
It's not a situation where I don't think he'd want
any of his coveted items.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
That place was a hoarder's paradise. It was filthy.
Speaker 10 (25:24):
That place has not been cleaned in forty years easily,
and there was vermin.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
It probably could have been condemned. Betsy says that Lenny
had taken the baseboards off the walls with an eye
towards renovation, but then he let the project go and
never put them back, which allowed mice into the house,
and the mice got into everything. My dad had stopped
by to do an errand for Lenny's mom and had
the same kind of report. It was like going into
(25:51):
a dark, subterranean world, he said. My father described Lenny's
room as cluttered with books and DVDs from floor to ceiling,
the windows blocked out so the son couldn't get in.
How could anyone live under those circumstances, my father said,
How could anyone, and especially how could Lenny. I keep
(26:12):
thinking about how when we were kids, winding up in
our parents' basements would have been our worst nightmare. How
could Lenny have ended up living out his last days
in the very place he despised most.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
That was always this thing that he never wanted to happen.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
This is Lenny's ex girlfriend, Louise. Lenny and Louise dated
in their twenties. I first met her at a bar
one night, after having not seen Lenny in years. They
were coming from a kiss concert and both Lenny and
Louise's faces were painted, Louise as Peter Chris and Lenny
as Ace Freely. They both wanted to go as Ace,
but Lenny said that would have been ridiculous.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
I think I was eighteen years old when I met him. Oh,
I remember. He just there was this death about him
that I recognized immediately, and it just automatically attracted me
to him. I remember being on the back of his
reorcycle and being scared shitless every time, holding on to
(27:14):
him so tight. I remember his dog, Max and how
much he loved that dog. Yeah, I mean to know
that he did. He finished there in the basement.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Why not only did Lenny hate the basement, he hated
the whole suburb of Shamedy. We both did. We attended
Charmedy High, nicknamed Comedy High because it was so bad
it was laughable, pipe bombs in the bathrooms, a geography
teacher who was a flat earther, and a music teacher
who married a student. I eventually left Chomedy, but Lenny
(27:49):
never did, never even left his childhood home. How could
our lives have diverred?
Speaker 10 (27:55):
So he was very unhappy.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
This is Dimitri, high school acquaintance who Lenny reconnected with
on Facebook in the last year of his life. Dmitri
was the person Lenny saw most during his illness. He
works at a local Greek restaurant and would bring Lenny
salads at the end of his shift.
Speaker 10 (28:13):
He was lonely. I used to talk about how it
would have been nice if you had a girlfriend and
some kids, or if he had a kids, it would
have been nice. She was always alone. I never saw
him with anybody ever. Would like She would ask me
(28:33):
to hug him a lot. When he was sick. He
would always ask me to hug him. I think Leonard
didn't feel really much love in his life.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Man Dmitri also knew that Lenny didn't want the basement
for his home, let alone his final home. When I
tell him how I've been trying to make sense of
how it happened. He has a.
Speaker 10 (28:55):
Theory drugs, drugs.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
When you say drugs, you into a pot.
Speaker 10 (29:01):
Pot, mushrooms, LSB. Leonard used to like to take acid,
a lot of acid and just a trip out in
his room in the dark. I'm a tall look for
whatever works, for whatever gets the demons away there. But
that's a little fucked up.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Ending up in the basement solely because of drugs doesn't
ring true to me. Well, the drugs might have helped
with the demons, they didn't create the demons. Plenty of
people smoke pot, take LSD and still leave the house,
travel the world, kill You. Among my childhood cassettes is
another of my mother's performances, But this one wasn't a
(29:42):
soap opera audition. It's of my mother pretending to be
her best friend Lenny's mom, Hannah kill you. During those
last conversations, Lenny confessed to not only feelings of resentment
towards his own mother, but towards my mother too, for
taking up so much of his mother's time, time she
(30:02):
could have spent on him. As for his dad, Lenny
saw Izzy as a constant threat. This is from another
flip and will tape o kij lines a rouping now.
In the play, I performed the part of Lenny's father,
who crashes straight into the flip and will show, oh.
Speaker 4 (30:25):
Watch it what knock it up?
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Izzy would get physical on occasion, but our parents weren't
so different. My father favored the belt, while Izzy delivered
what he called patchka's or slaps. And in terms of
our mothers, if Hannah had been so often absent because
of her friendship with my mother, that it meant my
mother was absent too. So is Lennie just more sensitive
than I was? Or was he dealing with more than
(30:57):
I knew? Okay?
Speaker 3 (31:03):
You just jogged in memory.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
This is Louise again, Lenny's ex girlfriend, with another theory.
Louise recalls a day in college when she stumbled upon
what felt like a key, A key that predates the
drugs me and Lenny's friendship. It even predates the upbringing
he received from his parents.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
It was my class for developmental biology, okay, and we
were studying the brains of children at that point between
zero and twelve months, and we were looking at separation anxiety,
and we were studying that, and I remember being appalled.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
When I learned.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
That at seven months that is when a child's separation
anxiety develops. That's when they know what their mother's face
looks like, and that's when they start crying when you're
handed to another person. And I remembered being appalled because
I remember Lenny telling me that he was adopted when
(32:10):
he was like six months old, and that his mom
told him that all he ever did was cry. And
I remember coming home that day after school and going, oh,
my god, no wonder you cried all the time because
you knew that this wasn't your mom.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
To heal from the loss of his biological mother, to
help him deal with just being a sensitive kid. Lenny
could have used extra support, but instead he got last.
Speaker 6 (32:40):
Just before his mother was kicked out of the convent,
he was christened Bandy aass felt.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Just as I had created the alter ego of Nedley
to feed my id, Lenny created an alter ego named
Andy that fed Lenny with something I could never put
my finger on. But re listening to the news handy
tapes we recorded all these years later, Andy feels like
an expression of Lenny's vulnerability, his desperate need for more
love from a parent.
Speaker 6 (33:09):
Through the years he was raised with fellow orphans. He
never knew the meaning of mother or father. Well, he
knew the meaning was of hate. All the kids when
nicknamed him, name him.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
You're a bastard. You have none.
Speaker 6 (33:30):
Andy was the only four year old child in the
orphanage who every day would sit down in his bed
and contemplate suicide.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Oh no one loves me. Everyone hates me. What did
I do? I've gotta wave.
Speaker 8 (33:48):
I gotta get.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Out of it.
Speaker 9 (33:52):
I gotta get out of here. Somehow, well, I knew
by ah I was in trouble. I knew by age
twelve that life's going to be a little harder than
I thought. And I knew by the time I was
eighteen nineteen that I got to get out of here
and then stay out, and just you know, I'd already
(34:13):
learned helplessness.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
So I guess I've always wanted to write a book,
Lenny said during one of our late night conversations, where
everything the hero does is wrong. I think a lot
of books are like that, I said. A lot of
lives are like that. You don't understand, Lenny said, And
maybe I didn't. Perhaps a lot of what we take
(34:38):
as a life choice is already encoded in us at
a very young age, younger than we can even remember.
And by then it's already too late. The moments are
already handing off one to the other, like those dominoes
that cannot be stopped. Supposedly, Lenny's biological mother was a
fifteen year old girl who eventually came to realize she
(34:59):
couldn't raise him on her own. Who knows what those
first six months were like for Lenny and how they
dictated the life to come. Maybe Lenny was wrong, Maybe
his paralysis, his inability to leave the nest, wasn't, as
he said, learned helplessness. But innate, helplessness, the kind of
baby feels. Maybe for Lenny, the feeling just never faded away.
Speaker 10 (35:23):
I was with him all the way to the end.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
This is Dimitri again.
Speaker 10 (35:27):
I remember the lats of day. There she goes to me,
he calls me up, he goes, and he goes. Look,
he goes, can you come over and be with me tonight?
He goes, because I'm going to die. She said it
as a shut up my life, where you're gonna die.
He goes, No, he goes, I'm gonna die. He goes,
I'm going to die night. He goes, Can he just
come and be with me? He goes, I don't want
to be alone, you know. I'm like, yeah, you know,
(35:48):
of course I'm And I stayed with him and we
smoked a couple of joints together, had a couple of drinks,
a couple of it's a whiskey I did, and I
was just telling him, you know, Leonard, I go, it's okay,
you know, you can, you can go if you want,
you know, don't worry about it, you know, just she
(36:10):
need to go.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
Just go. Because I never made it to Shamani before
Lenny died, because I wasn't there to hug him or
to just hold his hand. I'm left with a terrible
sense of loss. Of the many questions I have about
Lenny's last days, the one that weighs on me most
heavily is about Lenny's anger and whether it ever subsided.
Do you do you remember what his state of mind
(36:34):
was on that last day when you went there? Did
he Oh?
Speaker 10 (36:37):
Yeah, yeah, he was completely at peace. He wasn't worried
or scared at all. I think he had accepted his faith.
I think he was just honestly, I think he was
just tired. I think he wanted to just go. She
seemed to really okay, though he wasn't nervous, he was
just quite. I have a video of his last words,
Oh wow, I go. What message do you want to
(36:58):
share with everybody? Girl about you're at the end?
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Dmitri sends me the video he took, and when I
hit play, I gasp. I knew how sick Lenny had been,
but I guess irrationally, I've been imagining him on the
other end of the phone line, looking more like the
last time i'd seen him at the restaurant with his parents.
In the video, though Lenny looks cadaverous.
Speaker 10 (37:23):
If you have one message for the world, what would
that be? And he sat for about Ben Saxons. He
thought a bit, and he.
Speaker 7 (37:30):
Goes love more, fight less, fighting desiccation.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
For love more. Fight less. Fighting doesn't get you far,
nor does anger. In one of our last phone calls
in the final days of his life, Lenny said that
he was so weak he could hardly lift himself from
(37:58):
the toilet without his mother's aid. I asked if, in
general his mother was being helpful.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
She's trying, She really is trying. Oh well, how to
hear she's succeeding too. She's the only help I got
I need her.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
It was the first I'd ever heard Lenny acknowledge his
mother's effort, which is to say, it's the closest I'd
ever heard Lenny come to forgiving her. I knew Lenny
in the beginning and can only speculate about the middle.
But I do see that in the end, in spite
of the pain and the delusions, he allowed his sweetness
(38:36):
to shine through. Well. I may never know where Lenny's
anger came from, I do know where it went. He
laid it down at long last to rest.
Speaker 4 (39:26):
Now that the fernentures returning to its.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Goodwill home.
Speaker 5 (39:36):
Now that the last month's rent is scheming with.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
The damage to post, take this moment to the solve.
Speaker 9 (39:47):
If we meant it, if we.
Speaker 5 (39:48):
Tried, never felt around for far too.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
From things that accidentally tal This episode of Heavyweight was
produced by me Jonathan Goldstein and supervising producer Stevie Lane,
along with Phoebe Flanagan. Our senior producer is Khalila Holt.
Production assistance by Moheiney mcgauker. Special thanks to Lauren Silverman
(40:16):
and Neil Drumming. Editorial guidance from Emily Condon. Bobby Lord
mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson,
Blue Dot Sessions, Katie Condon, and Bobby Lord. Additional music
credits can be found on our website, Gimbletmedia dot com
slash Heavyweight. Our theme song is by The Weaker Bands,
courtesy of Epitaph Records. Heavyweight is a Spotify original podcast.
(40:38):
Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight, on Instagram at Heavyweight Podcast,
or email us at Heavyweight at gimbletmedia dot com. You
can also follow our show on Spotify and tap the
bell to receive notifications when new episodes drop. We'll be
back next week with a new episode. It don't st
Huh.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Do you wear shoes with shoelaces? You or you wear Velcrow?
Speaker 3 (00:11):
Did you come up with these questions by yourself?
Speaker 2 (00:13):
No, I have a writer's room. No, I'm just curious.
I remember you used to like Velcrow. You said that
anybody who is foolish enough to have to stoop down
and tie their shoelaces deserves what they get. That shoelaces
get covered in urine and bile, and that velcro is
the fabric of the future. That's what you'd always say.
You have shoes with shoelaces, right, shoes shoelaces?
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Do you always double not them? No?
Speaker 3 (00:38):
You don't any other compelling questions, Johnny, that you have.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
If you showed up to a bowling alley with a watermelon,
you think they'd let you bowl. I'm Jonathan Goldstein and
this is Heavyweight Today's episode, Lenny, right after the break.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Back.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
When I was a kid, I often carried around a
tape recorder and outstretched mic created a buffer between me
and the world. Recording was my way of managing life,
and so I recorded everything, my parents' arguments, their phone calls,
(01:42):
and I'm telling you thro fish my mom pretending to
audition for soap operas Amanda Darling, how are you today?
Mostly though I recorded myself, I made radio plays.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
Rich Stone Productions present the Adventures of Nedley with no
one to share in my love for a medium do
o way since the Truman administration.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
I put on the plays alone, all the voices performed
by me for an audience of zero. Our story opens.
Speaker 5 (02:25):
Up where Nedley is about to get off.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Oh what a lousy day. That's our Nedley. Nedley was
an eleven year old spitfire who did as he pleased.
Since I myself was an eleven year old rule following
nerd Nedley was my id.
Speaker 5 (02:43):
Here comes boom boom, She's my dream.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
High Needy Hi he boom boom bom, and the whole
psychodrama played out as one man show.
Speaker 5 (03:01):
This movie was directed by Jonathan Goldstein, screenplay by Jonathan Wilsey.
All voices in it are done by Jonathan Goldstein. This
is a Jonathan Goldstein production whom.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
It was all just me and my microphone until the
day Lenny came along. I was twelve years old when
we were first introduced at a birthday party. Immediately Lennie
asked me what blood type I was oh, I said, uncertainly,
(03:35):
me too, he shouted, genuinely excited to find some small
thing we shared. I was an aloof kid, but was
quickly won over by Lenny's goodness and the fact our
mothers were already best friends made our best friendship feel faded.
Plus that Lenny proved as obsessive about recording as I
(03:55):
was sealed the deal. The weekends revolved around our recording
radio plays. Lenny and I would sleep in the same
foold out in his parents' den. His dad, Izzy, a
large man with a thick Polish accent, would make us
breakfast in just his underwear, his undershirt tucked into his
jockeys like it was some style imported from the Old Country.
(04:17):
One time, trying to explain to Izzy how I liked
my eggs and having no success with Fried, I described
two sons and a Cloud. Lenny loved that so much
that he started ordering his eggs that way too, Two
Sons and a Cloud. After breakfast, we'd head to Lenny's bedroom,
(04:41):
shut the door, and record all morning. We were a
gang of two Golden Lennox presents. The Lennox was from Lennie,
the gold from Goldstein for the first time, I no
longer felt alone. Together. Lenny and I recorded prank phone
(05:01):
calls our parents' dinner parties, and we made radio play
after radio play, creating characters like Flip and Will, two
burned out radio DJs. We take you to Flip.
Speaker 4 (05:12):
Flip is going to introduce you, Slip is taking you
to Will. Okay Will, No Will is taking you to Slip.
No Beck, you will.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
As a part of the Flip and Will radio show,
we did live phone outs to our quote unquote listeners.
In the eighties, dialing a phone was so arduous it's
surprising people even bothered. But without driver's licenses or money,
Lenny and I made the effort. The phone brought us
(05:45):
a sense of freedom and adventure.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Okay you three?
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Three?
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Hello?
Speaker 6 (05:58):
What would you do if you had to move a
television survey?
Speaker 7 (06:04):
Why?
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Thank you think you need it?
Speaker 8 (06:08):
Why the Cold War is not over? It never was?
Speaker 2 (06:21):
This is Lenny now, age fifty two.
Speaker 8 (06:24):
John, What is not understandable about this?
Speaker 9 (06:28):
Because I'm getting frustrated.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Now I'm in Minnesota and Lenny is in Canada. We
haven't spoken in nine years, and at the moment, for
some reason, we're discussing Russia's role in Ukraine well.
Speaker 8 (06:43):
Still there.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
In our late teens, Lenny and I began to have
less and less in common and we drifted apart. Our
first conversation in almost a decade is not going well.
I mean, I'm not sure that I fully get it.
You mean that, I mean it's not that complicated.
Speaker 7 (07:00):
Yeah, we destroyed communism using their communism.
Speaker 8 (07:03):
Now they destroyed capitalism using our capitalists.
Speaker 9 (07:07):
I guess about your subject.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
The last time I saw Lenny was back home in Canada.
Our mothers, who were still best friends, thought it'd be
nice for the families to get together. Lenny showed up
at the restaurant with a shaved head and thin chin
strap beard. With the way he kept his arms crossed
and his posture erect that evening, Lenny had something of
the dictator about him. He was living in the bachelor's
(07:30):
apartment and his parents' basement in Chamity Laval, the suburb
we grew up in just outside of Montreal. Lenny drove
a school bus for Orthodox Jews and said the Hasidim
had nicknamed him the Surgeon because of how he zipped
through narrow streets with such precision. At the end of
the meal, Lenny asked if I wanted to go outside
and smoke a joint, a for ole times sake kind
(07:53):
of thing. The idea of smoking a joint outside a
suburban strip mall restaurant while our aged parents waited in
side was unappealing, so I said no, at least stand
outside with me, Lenny said, and keep me company. But
I dug my heels in and Lenny grew angry. We
parted on bad terms that evening, almost ten years ago,
(08:16):
and that was the last time I saw Lennie or
thought too hard about him until now. The reason Lenny
and I are speaking right now is because he has
only months to live. Lenny is dying of pancreatic cancer
and his undergoing chemotherapy and radiation. He's recently gone through
(08:39):
eleven hours of surgery to keep the cancer from spreading,
but it was no use. Even though that first conversation
went poorly, I continue to spend my evenings talking to
Lennie because somewhere in the back of my mind is
the memory of the kid from my childhood, the kid
who stayed by my side tending to my adult sized
depression in the darkest hour hours of my teens. I
(09:01):
remember days and nights spent in Lenny's bedroom, just lying
in his bed under the black bulb of his light fixture,
listening to Pink Floyd and Iron Maiden. Too scared to
face the world. Back then, Lennie would reassure me, telling
me to think all the bad thoughts I could, to
get them out of my system, to exhaust them so
that eventually I'd only be left with the good ones.
(09:24):
Being with Lennie was one of the few places where
I felt safe, and so I call him again and again. Hey, Lenny,
how are you doing?
Speaker 1 (09:37):
H S shit?
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Yeah. Our conversations usually occur at night, with Lenny still
in his parents' basement, the same basement where we spent
our childhoods, and me wandering the silent streets of my
midwestern neighborhood. During these phone chats, I never know what
to say. I struggle to find common ground, but always
come up short. When I bring up old mutual friends,
(10:01):
Lenny speaks of them resentfully. With jobs, it's the same
the idiots at the trucking firm, the anti semites at
the refrigeration company. On the rare occasion, I raise something
personal about myself, it gets no traction when I tell
him how I'm now a father of a five year
old Lennie, a bachelor, says that people who have kids
(10:22):
only do it for ego reasons. Mostly we stick to
the subject of Lenny's pain, which is brutal. He can't
eat without pain, stand or even lie down without pain.
Sometimes he'll put the phone down and I'll listen to
him as he howls from the bathroom. There are drugs,
some prescribed and some not, but no matter, there's always pain,
(10:45):
and anger at the pain, and anger at what seems
like me. On most nights, after a typical conversation, I
come home and say to my wife Emily, that maybe
this is a bad idea. We drifted apart for a reason.
I say, we're strangers, and yet even though Lenny doesn't
(11:05):
seem to even want to talk to me, we continue
to talk night after night. I'm beginning to get the
impression that maybe he has no one else. No no, no,
of course not.
Speaker 9 (11:18):
Well, wish me luck.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Lenny says he wants to leave something behind, and so
we record, just like we did when we were kids.
Back then, we perform different characters. Now, Ostensibly we're just ourselves.
Speaker 9 (11:33):
I really did my shouffle to rice, lemon, lime, garlic,
and pepper.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Oh nice, nothing complicated and it is gorgeous.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Great? And how's your sleeping?
Speaker 9 (11:49):
I sleep like shit? What do you think I have
to think?
Speaker 2 (11:51):
I met every two hours?
Speaker 9 (11:56):
The horrible life when you spend your life, society of
the universe punish you all the anger, all the hatred.
What do you think you could get away with it?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Lenny is no longer the sweet, lonely kid who told
me not to squat the house fly in his bedroom
because he was his pet, The boy with whom I'd
been so close that I'd run my hands through his
thick black hair as though it were my own, smoohing
it up into the air. I pretended I'd invented the
latest in men's hairstyles. The Beethoven that Lenny seems to
(12:33):
be long gone. Even though Lenny and I weren't in
touch over the years, when I'd ask after him, my
mother would always say the same thing. Lenny and his
parents were fighting like cats and dogs. Lenny's father died
about a year ago. Now it's just him and his mom.
(12:55):
Do you see you see your mother every day?
Speaker 9 (13:01):
Unfortunately, I make an attempt to treat her like a
human being, and every day she disappoints me. She's a
gross mind. My father too, he was gross, too gross.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
You loved him, you loved your dad, Yeah, I did.
Speaker 9 (13:17):
But he was a gross man who did everything that
makes his life easier in my life harder.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Lenny's parents had had another son before him, but because
of profound mental and physical disabilities, he was institutionalized. After that,
they adopted Lenny. Both Lenny and I were raised by
parents who saw screaming and hitting as the solution to
all of life's child rearing dilemmas. But from Lenny's perspective,
worse than that was the neglect. Lenny's dad worked a lot,
(13:48):
and his mom always seemed to have more time for
her friends than for him. It's something Lenny still can't
let go of.
Speaker 9 (13:55):
It's called normal responsibility, you know what I mean? My
friends got it? How come I didn't?
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Yeah?
Speaker 9 (14:04):
Well, what's so unspecial about me that I get the
shitty fucking neglect? You know, I did my best. That's
my favorite line.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
I did my best.
Speaker 9 (14:13):
You know, if that's the best, maybe you should the boss. Yeah,
that's your best way I'll tell you the truth. I'm
looking forward having that one last week, knowing that it's
finally done, that I could just like yes, because it's
been a bitch. This life has been a bitch, and
it's most because people have been pitched and they remained bitches.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
What does one owe a childhood friend, especially when that
friend seems to have changed so much over the course
of our phone calls. The question that keeps kicking around
in the back of my mind is whether all of
Lenny's anger has somehow eaten up the goodness. I continue
to phone Lenny over the next couple of months in
hopes of seeing it, feeling that goodness again, and so
(15:00):
we talk about the sex ed books at the Yamha Library,
watching The Love Boat on Saturday nights when his parents
were out with my parents, raiding his mom's freezer for
TV dinners, while playing Calleco vision. Mostly though, I just
listen and try to be there, and over time Lenny
grows softer with me, and I grow less afraid of
(15:21):
offending him, afraid of offending a dying man. And then
one night I receive a message. Listening to it now,
I'm struck by how much Lenny's voice had mellowed since
our first conversations. Instead of Jonathan or John, Lenny calls
(15:43):
me Johnny, just like he did when we were kids,
like he did when we were best friends.
Speaker 10 (15:49):
Hi, I'm sorry to call you directly like this, without
signaling or anything, but in a development and I needed
to talk to.
Speaker 9 (15:57):
You as soon as you can.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Mhm mhmm, Yeah, John, is it too late? No?
Speaker 2 (16:08):
No, No, it's okay. How are you.
Speaker 9 (16:11):
Not well?
Speaker 1 (16:12):
John? You know it's hard to tell you anything else.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
I'm sorry, what's going on.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
I'm just I'm weak. I'm gonna go into palliative care.
Speaker 7 (16:24):
Okay, there's no other recourse.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Yeah, it's getting harder and harder to function at home.
Speaker 7 (16:33):
Yeah, because I'm not too good with pain.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Johns Well, you've been dealing with so much of it.
Speaker 7 (16:42):
No, I mean my whole life. I've never been good
with me. I'm a wider wis. I'm just a big words.
It's funny through everything, the pain's still there. Pain never ends,
even with drives.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Yeah, that's not bad.
Speaker 4 (17:03):
Job.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
I don't foresee getting better.
Speaker 7 (17:11):
If I suddenly disappeared or you know, I can't talk
to you.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
No, I'm probably like you know gone. I had my
last drive yesterday. I travel around the the valve. Yeah,
just like one last highway ride.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
It's not a huge deal.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
I've done a lot of driving my time. I play.
Need to remember I'm dying anyway.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
Bigger things to think about?
Speaker 3 (17:46):
What?
Speaker 2 (17:46):
What did? What do you find yourself thinking about?
Speaker 1 (17:52):
I thing I lived?
Speaker 7 (17:53):
I lived as well as I could in my capacity.
I had good experiences at least. Yeah, it wasn't the
best life well lived, but wasn't the worst either.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Could have been worse. That's the legacy of my life.
Could have been worse.
Speaker 9 (18:18):
Just gonna.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
I just want to enjoy looking at the sky, looking
at things new.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah, reveling and be alive.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
I remember the last lady, she was scary.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Who's this the last lady?
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Which she has a little pudgy remember.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Lenny would sometimes drift into delusions, imaginary flights that would
weave throughout our conversation, But other times the delusions were
mixed up with childhood memories, like time had collapsed and
Lenny was all ages at once dying, but also back
to an age when his parents and drove us to
the mall and they're cut less supreme.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
So if you want the front Seaco grabbit.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Now, the delusions were tender and vulnerable, and observing them
was like standing over his bed watching him dream they
should just go home.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
I'm dead tired for some reason. We're at the Why
taking a course.
Speaker 7 (19:25):
We're at the Why.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
We're at the hym Tree taking a course.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
No, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. I'll tell you
if I can't follow.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Well, that's so weird, though, that I would have such
a delusion.
Speaker 7 (19:39):
Maybe it's a subconscious desire to visit.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
With you in a normal way, in a normal setting.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Yeah, we're visiting for holidays, normal, everything's normal. So or
when was it when we're going to see each.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Other in a couple of weeks. The plan is for
me to see Lenny during a visit back home, my
first since COVID that long.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Yeah, No, I'm serious. I'm not being facetious.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yeah, yeah, say it's.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Down to the wire. Maybe the last few weeks of things.
Mm hmm. Maybe I don't know.
Speaker 9 (20:34):
I don't get.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Depressed or anything.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Lenny wasn't just saying I don't want to bum you out.
He was one of the few people who knew how
fragile I could be even now he was trying to
protect me, even as he was dying.
Speaker 7 (20:49):
It's hard to say that I wish you were here.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Yeah. Recently my therapist recommended ketamine to me, a drug
sometimes prescribed for untreatable depression. In my case, she thought
it might help shift my perspective, which still tends towards darkness.
A day after Lenny and I had this conversation, while
taking several hits for my ketamine Inhaler and about to
(21:18):
go for a Saturday morning run, I was suddenly overcome
with sobbing and a feeling of unreality. As a man
in newer to epiphanies, I was shaken. Like most, I
don't often see my existence on Earth approximating anything close
to a quote unquote arc. Instead, things come in flashes.
(21:38):
I'm four years old, eating a chocolate bar at my
aunt Tilly's house, taking such tiny bites that Tilly calls
me the mousey. My theory is that if the bites
are small enough, it will last forever. I'm six, regretting
having told my father about my kindergarten crush, because he's
just told a table full of relatives about it. I
(22:00):
will never trust this man again. I think I'm fifteen
and seeing a breast for the very first time. European
sunbathers are at the same beach as me. The image
will clod's way into my thoughts over and over for
the next ten years. I'm sixteen getting turned down to
prom on a city bus. Lorraine Kaufman is telling me
(22:22):
that only I would ask someone to prom on a
city bus. Then, for some reason, I'm fifty and moving
to Minnesota. While waiting at JFK for the flight that
will take me and Emily and our then two year
old son Aggi to our new life. Oggi walks up
to a stranger and hugs his legs, and I burst
into tears. A smell a meal, a day at the beach,
(22:46):
and so goes a life without the record button pressed down.
Life is fragmented and fast and nearly impossible to make
sense of. It helps me to shed light, but always
in retrospect. With the ketamine coursing through me, though, I
(23:06):
saw the dots illuminate and connect, each handing off with purpose,
one to the other, like a succession of dominoes, tracing
the seemingly useless years that got me to where I
was with the wife, the child, the job. It all
felt so precarious, like I was standing on a narrow
column of shoe boxes. It filled me with vertigo to
(23:28):
the question of what one owes a childhood friend. In
my case, I owed Lenny everything. It was through knowing
him in those early years that the base of the
tower was formed. It was in making tapes together in
his bedroom that I discovered a feeling i'd pursue towards
a career. Suddenly I could see how everything counted, that
Lenny counted, that my love for Lenny counted. I wanted
(23:52):
Lenny to know this. I wanted him to know that
while our personalities might have driven us apart, a deep
rooted love brought us back together. But later that day
I got a call from my mother informing me that
Lennie had died. In the months after Lenny's death, I'm
(24:20):
unable to let go of how I wasn't there for
him in his last days. I obsess over what his
final moments might have been like. I begin accidentally calling
my son by Lenny's name. I do this so often
that eventually my son begins to ask, who in the
world is Lenny I try to answer him, but never
know quite how. We were best friends when I wasn't
(24:42):
much older than you, I say, and then I get
COVID and I isolate in my basement. I watch all
the old movies. Lenny and I used to watch Animal House,
Monty Python, any Hall, but instead of laughing after each punchline,
I cry. Lennie had an older cousin named Betsy, who
(25:04):
had taken on the task of cleaning up Lenny's basement.
I reached out to see if Betsy could set aside
some of Lenny's art or photos for me, but she
said that wasn't something I should pursue.
Speaker 5 (25:15):
It's not a situation where I don't think he'd want
any of his coveted items.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
That place was a hoarder's paradise. It was filthy.
Speaker 10 (25:24):
That place has not been cleaned in forty years easily,
and there was vermin.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
It probably could have been condemned. Betsy says that Lenny
had taken the baseboards off the walls with an eye
towards renovation, but then he let the project go and
never put them back, which allowed mice into the house,
and the mice got into everything. My dad had stopped
by to do an errand for Lenny's mom and had
the same kind of report. It was like going into
(25:51):
a dark, subterranean world, he said. My father described Lenny's
room as cluttered with books and DVDs from floor to ceiling,
the windows blocked out so the son couldn't get in.
How could anyone live under those circumstances, my father said,
How could anyone, and especially how could Lenny. I keep
(26:12):
thinking about how when we were kids, winding up in
our parents' basements would have been our worst nightmare. How
could Lenny have ended up living out his last days
in the very place he despised most.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
That was always this thing that he never wanted to happen.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
This is Lenny's ex girlfriend, Louise. Lenny and Louise dated
in their twenties. I first met her at a bar
one night, after having not seen Lenny in years. They
were coming from a kiss concert and both Lenny and
Louise's faces were painted, Louise as Peter Chris and Lenny
as Ace Freely. They both wanted to go as Ace,
but Lenny said that would have been ridiculous.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
I think I was eighteen years old when I met him. Oh,
I remember. He just there was this death about him
that I recognized immediately, and it just automatically attracted me
to him. I remember being on the back of his
reorcycle and being scared shitless every time, holding on to
(27:14):
him so tight. I remember his dog, Max and how
much he loved that dog. Yeah, I mean to know
that he did. He finished there in the basement.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Why not only did Lenny hate the basement, he hated
the whole suburb of Shamedy. We both did. We attended
Charmedy High, nicknamed Comedy High because it was so bad
it was laughable, pipe bombs in the bathrooms, a geography
teacher who was a flat earther, and a music teacher
who married a student. I eventually left Chomedy, but Lenny
(27:49):
never did, never even left his childhood home. How could
our lives have diverred?
Speaker 10 (27:55):
So he was very unhappy.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
This is Dimitri, high school acquaintance who Lenny reconnected with
on Facebook in the last year of his life. Dmitri
was the person Lenny saw most during his illness. He
works at a local Greek restaurant and would bring Lenny
salads at the end of his shift.
Speaker 10 (28:13):
He was lonely. I used to talk about how it
would have been nice if you had a girlfriend and
some kids, or if he had a kids, it would
have been nice. She was always alone. I never saw
him with anybody ever. Would like She would ask me
(28:33):
to hug him a lot. When he was sick. He
would always ask me to hug him. I think Leonard
didn't feel really much love in his life.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Man Dmitri also knew that Lenny didn't want the basement
for his home, let alone his final home. When I
tell him how I've been trying to make sense of
how it happened. He has a.
Speaker 10 (28:55):
Theory drugs, drugs.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
When you say drugs, you into a pot.
Speaker 10 (29:01):
Pot, mushrooms, LSB. Leonard used to like to take acid,
a lot of acid and just a trip out in
his room in the dark. I'm a tall look for
whatever works, for whatever gets the demons away there. But
that's a little fucked up.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Ending up in the basement solely because of drugs doesn't
ring true to me. Well, the drugs might have helped
with the demons, they didn't create the demons. Plenty of
people smoke pot, take LSD and still leave the house,
travel the world, kill You. Among my childhood cassettes is
another of my mother's performances, But this one wasn't a
(29:42):
soap opera audition. It's of my mother pretending to be
her best friend Lenny's mom, Hannah kill you. During those
last conversations, Lenny confessed to not only feelings of resentment
towards his own mother, but towards my mother too, for
taking up so much of his mother's time, time she
(30:02):
could have spent on him. As for his dad, Lenny
saw Izzy as a constant threat. This is from another
flip and will tape o kij lines a rouping now.
In the play, I performed the part of Lenny's father,
who crashes straight into the flip and will show, oh.
Speaker 4 (30:25):
Watch it what knock it up?
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Izzy would get physical on occasion, but our parents weren't
so different. My father favored the belt, while Izzy delivered
what he called patchka's or slaps. And in terms of
our mothers, if Hannah had been so often absent because
of her friendship with my mother, that it meant my
mother was absent too. So is Lennie just more sensitive
than I was? Or was he dealing with more than
(30:57):
I knew? Okay?
Speaker 3 (31:03):
You just jogged in memory.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
This is Louise again, Lenny's ex girlfriend, with another theory.
Louise recalls a day in college when she stumbled upon
what felt like a key, A key that predates the
drugs me and Lenny's friendship. It even predates the upbringing
he received from his parents.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
It was my class for developmental biology, okay, and we
were studying the brains of children at that point between
zero and twelve months, and we were looking at separation anxiety,
and we were studying that, and I remember being appalled.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
When I learned.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
That at seven months that is when a child's separation
anxiety develops. That's when they know what their mother's face
looks like, and that's when they start crying when you're
handed to another person. And I remembered being appalled because
I remember Lenny telling me that he was adopted when
(32:10):
he was like six months old, and that his mom
told him that all he ever did was cry. And
I remember coming home that day after school and going, oh,
my god, no wonder you cried all the time because
you knew that this wasn't your mom.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
To heal from the loss of his biological mother, to
help him deal with just being a sensitive kid. Lenny
could have used extra support, but instead he got last.
Speaker 6 (32:40):
Just before his mother was kicked out of the convent,
he was christened Bandy aass felt.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Just as I had created the alter ego of Nedley
to feed my id, Lenny created an alter ego named
Andy that fed Lenny with something I could never put
my finger on. But re listening to the news handy
tapes we recorded all these years later, Andy feels like
an expression of Lenny's vulnerability, his desperate need for more
love from a parent.
Speaker 6 (33:09):
Through the years he was raised with fellow orphans. He
never knew the meaning of mother or father. Well, he
knew the meaning was of hate. All the kids when
nicknamed him, name him.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
You're a bastard. You have none.
Speaker 6 (33:30):
Andy was the only four year old child in the
orphanage who every day would sit down in his bed
and contemplate suicide.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Oh no one loves me. Everyone hates me. What did
I do? I've gotta wave.
Speaker 8 (33:48):
I gotta get.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Out of it.
Speaker 9 (33:52):
I gotta get out of here. Somehow, well, I knew
by ah I was in trouble. I knew by age
twelve that life's going to be a little harder than
I thought. And I knew by the time I was
eighteen nineteen that I got to get out of here
and then stay out, and just you know, I'd already
(34:13):
learned helplessness.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
So I guess I've always wanted to write a book,
Lenny said during one of our late night conversations, where
everything the hero does is wrong. I think a lot
of books are like that, I said. A lot of
lives are like that. You don't understand, Lenny said, And
maybe I didn't. Perhaps a lot of what we take
(34:38):
as a life choice is already encoded in us at
a very young age, younger than we can even remember.
And by then it's already too late. The moments are
already handing off one to the other, like those dominoes
that cannot be stopped. Supposedly, Lenny's biological mother was a
fifteen year old girl who eventually came to realize she
(34:59):
couldn't raise him on her own. Who knows what those
first six months were like for Lenny and how they
dictated the life to come. Maybe Lenny was wrong, Maybe
his paralysis, his inability to leave the nest, wasn't, as
he said, learned helplessness. But innate, helplessness, the kind of
baby feels. Maybe for Lenny, the feeling just never faded away.
Speaker 10 (35:23):
I was with him all the way to the end.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
This is Dimitri again.
Speaker 10 (35:27):
I remember the lats of day. There she goes to me,
he calls me up, he goes, and he goes. Look,
he goes, can you come over and be with me tonight?
He goes, because I'm going to die. She said it
as a shut up my life, where you're gonna die.
He goes, No, he goes, I'm gonna die. He goes,
I'm going to die night. He goes, Can he just
come and be with me? He goes, I don't want
to be alone, you know. I'm like, yeah, you know,
(35:48):
of course I'm And I stayed with him and we
smoked a couple of joints together, had a couple of drinks,
a couple of it's a whiskey I did, and I
was just telling him, you know, Leonard, I go, it's okay,
you know, you can, you can go if you want,
you know, don't worry about it, you know, just she
(36:10):
need to go.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
Just go. Because I never made it to Shamani before
Lenny died, because I wasn't there to hug him or
to just hold his hand. I'm left with a terrible
sense of loss. Of the many questions I have about
Lenny's last days, the one that weighs on me most
heavily is about Lenny's anger and whether it ever subsided.
Do you do you remember what his state of mind
(36:34):
was on that last day when you went there? Did
he Oh?
Speaker 10 (36:37):
Yeah, yeah, he was completely at peace. He wasn't worried
or scared at all. I think he had accepted his faith.
I think he was just honestly, I think he was
just tired. I think he wanted to just go. She
seemed to really okay, though he wasn't nervous, he was
just quite. I have a video of his last words,
Oh wow, I go. What message do you want to
(36:58):
share with everybody? Girl about you're at the end?
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Dmitri sends me the video he took, and when I
hit play, I gasp. I knew how sick Lenny had been,
but I guess irrationally, I've been imagining him on the
other end of the phone line, looking more like the
last time i'd seen him at the restaurant with his parents.
In the video, though Lenny looks cadaverous.
Speaker 10 (37:23):
If you have one message for the world, what would
that be? And he sat for about Ben Saxons. He
thought a bit, and he.
Speaker 7 (37:30):
Goes love more, fight less, fighting desiccation.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
For love more. Fight less. Fighting doesn't get you far,
nor does anger. In one of our last phone calls
in the final days of his life, Lenny said that
he was so weak he could hardly lift himself from
(37:58):
the toilet without his mother's aid. I asked if, in
general his mother was being helpful.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
She's trying, She really is trying. Oh well, how to
hear she's succeeding too. She's the only help I got
I need her.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
It was the first I'd ever heard Lenny acknowledge his
mother's effort, which is to say, it's the closest I'd
ever heard Lenny come to forgiving her. I knew Lenny
in the beginning and can only speculate about the middle.
But I do see that in the end, in spite
of the pain and the delusions, he allowed his sweetness
(38:36):
to shine through. Well. I may never know where Lenny's
anger came from, I do know where it went. He
laid it down at long last to rest.
Speaker 4 (39:26):
Now that the fernentures returning to its.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Goodwill home.
Speaker 5 (39:36):
Now that the last month's rent is scheming with.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
The damage to post, take this moment to the solve.
Speaker 9 (39:47):
If we meant it, if we.
Speaker 5 (39:48):
Tried, never felt around for far too.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
From things that accidentally tal This episode of Heavyweight was
produced by me Jonathan Goldstein and supervising producer Stevie Lane,
along with Phoebe Flanagan. Our senior producer is Khalila Holt.
Production assistance by Moheiney mcgauker. Special thanks to Lauren Silverman
(40:16):
and Neil Drumming. Editorial guidance from Emily Condon. Bobby Lord
mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson,
Blue Dot Sessions, Katie Condon, and Bobby Lord. Additional music
credits can be found on our website, Gimbletmedia dot com
slash Heavyweight. Our theme song is by The Weaker Bands,
courtesy of Epitaph Records. Heavyweight is a Spotify original podcast.
(40:38):
Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight, on Instagram at Heavyweight Podcast,
or email us at Heavyweight at gimbletmedia dot com. You
can also follow our show on Spotify and tap the
bell to receive notifications when new episodes drop. We'll be
back next week with a new episode. It don't st
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