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