Daniel Rose - Larry's Kidney, Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China

Who knows, maybe it was what kept the guy alive all those years. Maybe Sam, too.

Primitive business, this vengeance thing. People took their restitution seriously back in the shtetl.

Larry’s watching me, an enigmatic smile playing on his lips. He looks more like Mona Lisa than the original Mona Lisa does, so that I understand something about Leonardo’s model that I didn’t understand before. She’s more than enigmatic. She’s a schemer. Behind that famously mysterious smile, she’s plotting to violate her cousin. And make another cousin an unwitting accessory.

“So come to think of it, Dan, you’re doing a twofer too, just like me,” he says.

“How’s that?”

“You thought you were coming to China just to save one cousin. But if you save me, you save Burton, too, at least for the time being. Two for the price of one…”

Even a hare will bite when it is cornered.

Sept. 19. Dear Florida Power & Light:

It has come to my attention that despite my entreaties you still have not turned my power back on in my condo, due to you thought I had not paid my bill. The check is in the mail. Please reinstate the above stated relief henceforth. Sincerely, Larry Feldman.

Five days have passed. I’m at a new stage of grief-stupefaction-after Larry’s announcement, trying to fathom how I managed to land myself in an episode of The Sopranos in Asia. (This week’s episode: Is Dan saving the life of a monster?) Larry’s dominion over me is total: I’ve been horrified into a state of submission. Between the bombshell that he hasn’t rescinded his fatwa and the realization that I’m now for all intents and purposes an accessory, my mental state is disabled; I’m good for nothing more than being Larry’s manservant. He dictates, I type:

Sept. 19. Dear Mary:

Here I am in the hospital with nothing to do but wait. Feel like a prisoner, but even more painful is not being able to communicate with you. Is there any chance of your coming back to me fairly soon? Of course I will pay all your expenses and then some. Please let me know how much money you need and I will have Dan dispatch it. All my love, Larry.

One thing’s clear: Larry’s in his element, reigning supreme. Divulging his fatwa seems to have freed his creative energies, which are further fueled by infusions of imitation Do-Si-Do peanut butter sandwich cookies I managed to find in a local grocery store. His blood pressure is down to 190 over 120 and his mood bullish, his body weak but his drive ascendant. In his box-turtle shades and Businessman’s Running Shoes, conducting business through me from atop his thin-as-silk hospital sheets, he’s the ayatollah of the ninth floor. Since he ordered the A/C to be shut down, I’m wilting in the heat of central China ’s late-September furnace, so disenfranchised I’m not even allowed to correct his grammar.

Sept. 20. Dear Netflix:

You must have me mixed up with another Larry Feldman. I sent back all boxed sets of “Dirty Harry” eight or ten months ago. If you insist on charging me for someone else’s blunder, I will have no choice but to desist being a customer of yours and/or institute legal recrimination with no ado.

Sept. 21. Dear Nuvention Clearing House:

Thank you for your encouraging words. I do in fact have a new invention and one I think you can market to great advantage. Enclosed you will find the business plan for my latest proposal, as well as a personal check to cover the cost of registration. It is my belief that Fortune Rubbers, novelty condoms printed with Chinese cookie-style fortunes, could really strike pay dirt with the gay demographic as well as normal people.

Sometimes I can’t even tell which letters I’m writing for him and which I’m inventing, for sanity’s sake. Other times I forget where I am, sweating in the room where I’ve again risked life and limb to jury-rig extra sheets in the windows against the glare of smogshine that hurts his eyes. In the dim light punctuated by the Arabic gutturals from Al Jazeera that susurrate night and day, I muddle my Middle East geography and half think I’m hiding out with the Taliban in some Afghani cave. Only the periodic flocking of Chinese nurse-groupies relieves the desert mirage. (“Lar-ry! Lar-ry!” they chant when he makes an appearance in the hallway to hobble to the weight scale. He flashes them a V like Winston Churchill in his dotage.) That and the regular appearance of the KFC man, who has a double row of teeth like the keyboard of a harpsichord and who performs a high five with the patient each time he delivers a catered meal of Double Crunch with Honey BBQ sauce.

Artie to Larry: “Professor, look, both you same size now!”

Larry to Artie: “Yes, and that’s for the first time since my bar mitzvah, I believe. Look at Dan, he’s so skinny his shorts are falling off his hips.”

Or did I make that up? Daydreaming has become my only escape, a life-saving pressure valve that allows my brain to, among other things, revert to a time when the whole clan got along: Sam passing out silver dollars, Little Larry showing off his collection of switchblades, Burton patting him on the head, saying, “Aww, isn’t that cute.”

Sept. 23. Dear Florida Power & Light:

Know by these presents that I had 45 pounds of expensive beluga caviar in my freezer. If even one ounce of it is ruined due to you shut off the juice, this is to inform that I intend to seek financial relief in the amount of no less than $85,000.

Meanwhile the personal fusion between us, master and man, no longer even frightens me. I just accept it. That we’re indistinguishable from each other, one creature with borderline psychopathic tendencies, is accepted without qualm by the cashier’s office downstairs whenever I go to make a deposit of Larry’s money into his ever-ravenous account. When I borrow his camera’s memory card to back up his pictures into my camera, as he instructs, it feels like I’m being force-fed a brain implant. Entering his e-mail account to do his correspondence, I feel like I’m leaping into Larry’s body, like Patrick Swayze using Whoopi’s in Ghost. Is the merger almost done? Huwwo, have I really adopted his speech impediment as my own? I’m his lackey, what he might inexcusably call his personal coolie, captive to the mini-sagas that I can no longer orchestrate and which are more than ever like papal bulls, standing fully formed on their own outside the normal rules of discourse.

LARRY ON HIS OWN ETHNIC GROUP

Rarely met a Jew I didn’t respect. I didn’t say like, I said respect. Certain family members excepted. Oh, and except in Vegas, which is populated mostly by irrespectable Jews and irrespectable Italians, bofe wearing Hawaiian shirts.

LARRY ON SOLVING THE MIDDLE EAST CRISIS

While we’re on the subject, I may as well give you my suggestion for achieving peace in the Middle East. If I were the negotiator, first thing I’d do would be greatly expand the city of Jerusalem. Ninety percent of the old city goes to the Jews. Ninety percent of the new city goes to the Palestinians. The new stuff can be a pile of dirt, they just need to claim some land, and the Israelis should be responsible for developing it for them. They want a homeland, let’s create it for them. It’s called Enlarging the Pie.

LARRY ON PRIVATELY TUTORING HIS STUDENTS

Just because I take my teaching seriously, does that mean I don’t avail myself of the opportunities that present themselves to Privately Tutor my students? I anticipated your curiosity on this point. And the answer is: I’m not beneath it. I mean, I don’t make a practice of it, but on occasion, especially with ones from Puerto Rico. For some reason they’re the ones who always come up to you after the first class to invite you to their rooms for extra help. The five roommates, each one cuter than the last, they know to clear out.