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Episode: #52 Lenny

Author: Spotify Studios
Duration: 00:44:14

Episode Shownotes

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

Full Transcript

00:00:06 Speaker_01
Do you wear shoes with shoelaces? Or you wear Velcro? Do you come up with these questions by yourself? No, I have a writer's room. No, I'm just curious. I remember you used to like Velcro.

00:00:17 Speaker_01
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.

00:00:32 Speaker_01
You have shoes with shoelaces, right? I have shoes with shoelaces, yes. Do you always double knot them? No. You don't?

00:00:38 Speaker_00
Any other compelling questions, Johnny, that you have?

00:00:43 Speaker_01
If you showed up to a bowling alley with a watermelon, you think they'd let you bowl with it?

00:00:48 Speaker_04
Goodbye.

00:00:56 Speaker_01
I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and this is Heavyweight. Today's episode, Lenny. Right after the break. Back when I was a kid, I often carried around a tape recorder. An outstretched mic created a buffer between me and the world.

00:01:30 Speaker_01
Recording was my way of managing life, and so I recorded everything. My parents' arguments.

00:01:37 Speaker_03
She's good-natured. There's a difference between stupid and good-natured.

00:01:40 Speaker_01
Their phone calls.

00:01:41 Speaker_03
Anna, I'm telling you, it's rotten fish. It's stuck.

00:01:45 Speaker_01
My mom pretending to audition for soap operas.

00:01:48 Speaker_03
Amanda, darling, how are you today?

00:01:51 Speaker_01
Mostly, though, I recorded myself. I made radio plays.

00:01:55 Speaker_03
Fritzstein Productions present The Adventures of Nedley.

00:02:12 Speaker_01
With no one to share in my love for a medium DOA since the Truman administration, I put on the plays alone, all the voices performed by me for an audience of zero.

00:02:23 Speaker_05
Our story opens up where Nedley is about to get up.

00:02:28 Speaker_06
Oh, what a lousy day. That's our Nedley.

00:02:34 Speaker_01
Nedley was an 11-year-old spitfire who did as he pleased. Since I myself was an 11-year-old rule-following nerd, Nedley was my id.

00:02:43 Speaker_06
Here comes Boom Boom. She's my dream girl. Hi, Nedley. Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, boom, boom, boom.

00:02:57 Speaker_01
And the whole psychodrama played out as a one-man show.

00:03:01 Speaker_05
This movie was directed by Jonathan Goldstein. Screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein. All voices in it are done by Jonathan Goldstein. This is a Jonathan Goldstein production.

00:03:13 Speaker_01
It was all just me and my microphone. Until the day Lenny came along. I was 12 years old when we were first introduced at a birthday party. Immediately, Lenny asked me what blood type I was. Oh, I said uncertainly.

00:03:34 Speaker_01
Me too, he shouted, genuinely excited to find some small thing we shared. I was an aloof kid. And the fact our mothers were already best friends made our best friendship feel faded.

00:03:51 Speaker_01
Plus, that Lenny proved as obsessive about recording as I was sealed the deal. The weekends revolved around our recording radio plays. Lenny and I would sleep in the same foldout in his parents' den.

00:04:04 Speaker_01
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.

00:04:17 Speaker_01
One time, trying to explain to Izzy how I liked my eggs and having no success with fried, I described two suns in a cloud. Lenny loved that so much that he started ordering his eggs that way too. Two suns in a cloud.

00:04:39 Speaker_01
After breakfast, we'd head to Lenny's bedroom, shut the door, and record all morning. We were a gang of two.

00:04:47 Speaker_10
Golden Lennox presents...

00:04:52 Speaker_01
The Lennox was from Lenny, the Gould from Gouldstein. For the first time, I no longer felt alone.

00:04:59 Speaker_01
Together, Lenny and I recorded prank phone calls, our parents' dinner parties, and we made radio play after radio play, creating characters like Flip and Will, two burned-out radio DJs.

00:05:10 Speaker_03
We take you to Flip. Flip is going to introduce you. No, Flip is taking you to Will, okay? Will. No, Will is taking you to Flip.

00:05:18 Speaker_06
No, back to you, Will.

00:05:24 Speaker_01
As a part of the Flip and Will radio show, we did live phone outs to our quote-unquote listeners. In the 80s, 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.

00:05:44 Speaker_01
The phone brought us a sense of freedom and adventure.

00:05:47 Speaker_06
Okay, it's ringing.

00:05:52 Speaker_03
It's ringing. Hello, what would you do if you had a million dollars? This is a television survey. Get it off now. Why, thank you. This station needs it. Bye. Bye.

00:06:18 Speaker_02
The Cold War is not over. It never was.

00:06:21 Speaker_01
This is Lenny now, age 52.

00:06:24 Speaker_02
John, what is not understandable about this? Because I'm getting frustrated now.

00:06:31 Speaker_01
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.

00:06:40 Speaker_14
Hello? Still there?

00:06:44 Speaker_01
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.

00:06:57 Speaker_14
You mean that- It's really simple. I mean, it's not that complicated. It's not.

00:07:00 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:07:01 Speaker_14
We destroyed communism using their communism. Now they're destroying capitalism using our capitalism. Okay, I'm sorry, John. I guess it's not your subject.

00:07:09 Speaker_01
The last time I saw Lenny was back home in Canada. Our mothers, who are 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 chinstrap beard.

00:07:22 Speaker_01
With the way he kept his arms crossed and his posture erect, that evening Lenny had something of the dictator about him.

00:07:29 Speaker_01
He was living in the bachelor's apartment in his parents' basement in Chamity Laval, a suburb we grew up in just outside of Montreal.

00:07:37 Speaker_01
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.

00:07:47 Speaker_01
At the end of the meal, Lenny asked if I wanted to go outside and smoke a joint, a for old times' sake kind of thing.

00:07:54 Speaker_01
The idea of smoking a joint outside a suburban strip mall restaurant while our aged parents waited inside 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.

00:08:12 Speaker_01
We parted on bad terms that evening, almost 10 years ago. And that was the last time I saw Lenny 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.

00:08:32 Speaker_01
Lenny is dying of pancreatic cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy and radiation. He's recently gone through 11 hours of surgery to keep the cancer from spreading, but it was no use.

00:08:45 Speaker_01
Even though that first conversation went poorly, I continued to spend my evenings talking to Lenny, 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.

00:08:59 Speaker_01
In the darkest hours of my teens, I 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.

00:09:12 Speaker_01
Back then, Lenny 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. Being with Lenny was one of the few places where I felt safe.

00:09:31 Speaker_01
And so, I call him again and again.

00:09:34 Speaker_12
Hey John.

00:09:35 Speaker_01
Hey Lenny, how are you doing?

00:09:37 Speaker_12
Uh, same shit.

00:09:39 Speaker_01
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.

00:09:52 Speaker_01
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, Lenny speaks of them resentfully. With jobs, it's the same.

00:10:05 Speaker_01
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.

00:10:16 Speaker_01
When I tell him how I'm now a father of a five-year-old, Lenny, a bachelor, says that people who have kids only do it for ego reasons. Mostly, we stick to the subject of Lenny's pain, which is brutal.

00:10:30 Speaker_01
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.

00:10:45 Speaker_01
An anger at the pain. An 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.

00:11:03 Speaker_01
And yet, even though Lenny doesn't 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.

00:11:15 Speaker_02
No, no, no, of course not.

00:11:19 Speaker_01
Lenny says he wants to leave something behind, and so we record, just like we did when we were kids. Back then, we performed different characters. Now, ostensibly, we're just ourselves.

00:11:33 Speaker_02
I really outdid myself with the rice. Lemon, lime, garlic, and pepper. Nothing complicated. And it is gorgeous. I sleep like shit. What do you think? I have to take a med every two hours. A horrible life. And you spend your life vainly. Punish you.

00:12:06 Speaker_02
All the anger, all the hatred. What do you think? We can get away with it?

00:12:11 Speaker_01
Lenny is no longer the sweet, lonely kid who told me not to swat the housefly 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.

00:12:25 Speaker_01
Smooshing it up into the air, I pretended I'd invented the latest in men's hairstyles, the Beethoven. That Lenny seems to be long gone.

00:12:40 Speaker_01
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.

00:12:55 Speaker_01
Do you see your mother every day?

00:13:01 Speaker_02
Unfortunately, I make an attempt to treat her like a human being, and every day she disappoints me. She's a gross woman. My father, too, he was gross.

00:13:13 Speaker_01
Two gross people. Yeah, but you loved him. You loved your dad.

00:13:16 Speaker_02
Yeah, I did, but he was a gross man. He always did everything that made his life easier. Made my life harder.

00:13:26 Speaker_01
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.

00:13:36 Speaker_01
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.

00:13:47 Speaker_01
Lenny's dad worked a lot, 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.

00:13:55 Speaker_02
It's called normal responsibility. You know what I mean? All my friends got it. How come I didn't? Well, what's so unspecial about me that I get to shitty fucking neglect? I did my best. That's my favorite line, I did my best.

00:14:13 Speaker_02
You know, if that's the best, maybe you shouldn't have bothered. That's your best. I'll tell you the truth, I'm looking forward to having that one last shoot knowing that it's finally done. And I can just, like, rest. Because it's been a bitch.

00:14:31 Speaker_02
This life has been a bitch, and it's mostly because these people have been a bitch. And they remain bitches.

00:14:38 Speaker_01
What does one owe a childhood friend, especially when that friend seems to have changed so much?

00:14:44 Speaker_01
Over the course of our phone calls, a question that keeps kicking around in the back of my mind is whether all of Lenny's anger has somehow eaten up the goodness.

00:14:53 Speaker_01
I continue to phone Lenny over the next couple months in hopes of seeing it, feeling that goodness again.

00:15:00 Speaker_01
And so we talk about the sex ed books at the YMHA 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 ColecoVision.

00:15:13 Speaker_01
Mostly though, I just listen and try to be there. And over time, Lenny grows softer with me and I grow less afraid of offending him, afraid of offending a dying man. And then one night I receive a message.

00:15:35 Speaker_01
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 me Johnny, just like he did when we were kids, like he did when we were best friends.

00:15:49 Speaker_13
Hi, John. I'm sorry to call you directly like this without signaling or anything, but it's been a development and I needed to talk to you as soon as you can.

00:16:06 Speaker_12
Hey, John, is it too late?

00:16:08 Speaker_01
No, no, no, it's okay. How are you?

00:16:11 Speaker_12
Not well, John. It's hard to tell you anything else.

00:16:15 Speaker_01
I'm sorry. What's going on?

00:16:19 Speaker_12
I'm just, I'm weak. I'm going to go into palliative care.

00:16:24 Speaker_01
Okay.

00:16:27 Speaker_12
There's no other recourse.

00:16:29 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:16:29 Speaker_12
It's getting harder and harder to function at home. Yeah. I'm not too good with pain, John.

00:16:39 Speaker_01
Well, you've been dealing with so much of it.

00:16:42 Speaker_12
No, I mean my whole life I've never been good with pain. I'm a whiner. I'm a wuss. I'm just a big wuss. It's funny, through everything the pain's still there. The pain never ends. Even with the drugs, yeah. It's not bad, John.

00:17:06 Speaker_12
I don't foresee getting better, yeah. If I suddenly disappear or, you know, I can't talk to you, you know, I'm probably like, you know, gone. I had my last drive yesterday. I drove around the Laval. Yeah, just like one last highway ride.

00:17:34 Speaker_12
It's not a huge deal. I did a lot of driving in my time. I have plenty to remember. I'm dying anyway.

00:17:42 Speaker_01
I have bigger things to think about. What do you find yourself thinking about?

00:17:49 Speaker_12
Nothing. I lived as well as I could in my capacity. I had good experiences at least. It wasn't the best life I've ever lived, but it wasn't the worst either. It could have been worse. That's the legacy of my life. Could have been worse.

00:18:13 Speaker_12
I just want to enjoy looking at the sky, looking at things.

00:18:22 Speaker_07
Yeah.

00:18:24 Speaker_12
Revealing and being alive. I remember the last lady, she was scary.

00:18:34 Speaker_01
Who's this?

00:18:38 Speaker_12
The last lady, which, she was a little pudgy. Remember?

00:18:44 Speaker_01
Lenny would sometimes drift into delusions, imaginary flights that would weave throughout our conversation.

00:18:50 Speaker_01
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 drove us to the mall in their Cutlass Supreme.

00:19:02 Speaker_12
So if you want the front seat, go grab it now.

00:19:06 Speaker_01
The delusions were tender and vulnerable, and observing them was like standing over his bed, watching him dream.

00:19:12 Speaker_12
Maybe I should just go home. I'm dead tired. For some reason, we're at the Y taking a course. We're at the Y. We're at the YMHA taking a course. Fuck, I'm really delusional.

00:19:30 Speaker_01
No, it's okay. It's okay. It's okay. I'll tell you if I can't follow.

00:19:36 Speaker_12
It's so weird, though, that I would have such a delusion. Maybe it's a subconscious desire to visit with you in a normal way, in a normal setting.

00:19:46 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah.

00:19:47 Speaker_12
You know, we're visiting for holidays, normal, everything's normal. So, um, when was it, when were we gonna see each other?

00:20:05 Speaker_01
In a couple weeks, the plan is for me to see Lenny during a visit back home, my first since COVID.

00:20:12 Speaker_12
Hope I last that long. Yeah. No, I'm serious. I'm not being facetious.

00:20:21 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah.

00:20:23 Speaker_12
It's down to the wire. Maybe the last few weeks of things. I mean, maybe, I don't know. Don't get depressed or anything.

00:20:38 Speaker_01
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.

00:20:49 Speaker_11
It's hard to say that. I wish you were here. Yeah.

00:21:00 Speaker_01
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.

00:21:13 Speaker_01
A day after Lenny and I had this conversation, while taking several hits from my ketamine inhaler and about to go for a Saturday morning run, I was suddenly overcome with sobbing and a feeling of unreality. As a man inured to epiphanies, I was shaken.

00:21:29 Speaker_01
Like most, I don't often see my existence on Earth approximating anything close to a quote-unquote arc. Instead, things come in flashes.

00:21:38 Speaker_01
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.

00:21:52 Speaker_01
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 will never trust this man again, I think. I'm 15 and seeing a breast for the very first time.

00:22:07 Speaker_01
European sunbathers are at the same beach as me. The image will claw its way into my thoughts over and over for the next 10 years. I'm 16, getting turned down to prom on a city bus.

00:22:20 Speaker_01
Lorraine Kaufman is telling me that only I would ask someone to prom on a city bus. Then, for some reason, I'm 50 and moving to Minnesota.

00:22:31 Speaker_01
While waiting at JFK for the flight that will take me and Emily and our then two-year-old son, Augie, to our new life, Augie walks up to a stranger and hugs his legs and I burst into tears. a smell, a meal, a day at the beach, and so goes a life.

00:22:52 Speaker_01
Without the record button pressed down, life is fragmented and fast and nearly impossible to make sense of. Narrating it helps me to shed light, but always in retrospect.

00:23:04 Speaker_01
With the ketamine coursing through me, though, I saw the dots illuminate and connect, each handing off with purpose, one to the other like a succession of dominoes.

00:23:14 Speaker_01
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 shoeboxes. It filled me with vertigo.

00:23:28 Speaker_01
To 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.

00:23:39 Speaker_01
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 Lenny to know this.

00:23:53 Speaker_01
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 Lenny had died.

00:24:18 Speaker_01
In the months after Lenny's death, I'm 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.

00:24:30 Speaker_01
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 much older than you, I say. And then I get COVID and I isolate in my basement.

00:24:48 Speaker_01
I watch all the old movies Lenny and I used to watch, Animal House, Monty Python, Annie Hall. But instead of laughing, after each punchline, I cry. Lenny had an older cousin named Betsy who'd taken on the task of cleaning up Lenny's basement.

00:25:08 Speaker_01
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.

00:25:15 Speaker_00
It's not a situation where I don't think you'd want any of his coveted items. That place was a hoarder's paradise. It was filthy. That place has not been cleaned in 40 years, easily. And there was vermin. It probably could have been condemned.

00:25:32 Speaker_01
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.

00:25:45 Speaker_01
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 a dark subterranean world, he said.

00:25:54 Speaker_01
My father described Lenny's room as cluttered with books and DVDs from floor to ceiling, the windows blocked out so the sun couldn't get in. How could anyone live under those circumstances, my father said.

00:26:08 Speaker_01
How could anyone, and especially how could Lenny? I keep thinking about how when we were kids, winding up in our parents' basements would have been our worst nightmare.

00:26:18 Speaker_01
How could Lenny have ended up living out his last days in the very place he despised most?

00:26:23 Speaker_08
That was always the thing that he never wanted to happen.

00:26:28 Speaker_01
This is Lenny's ex-girlfriend, Louise. Lenny and Louise dated in their 20s. 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.

00:26:42 Speaker_01
Louise as Peter Criss and Lenny as Ace Frehley. They both wanted to go as Ace, but Lenny said that would have been ridiculous.

00:26:50 Speaker_09
I think I was 18 years old when I met him. Oh, I remember he just, there was this, about him that I recognized immediately. And it just automatically attracted me to him.

00:27:08 Speaker_09
I remember being on the back of his motorcycle and being scared shitless every time. Holding on to him so tight. I remember his dog, Max, and how much he loved that dog. I mean, to know that he finished there in the basement. Why?

00:27:27 Speaker_01
Not only did Lenny hate the basement, he hated the whole suburb of Chamedy. We both did. We attended Chamedy High, nicknamed Comedy High, because it was so bad it was laughable.

00:27:39 Speaker_01
Pipe bombs in the bathrooms, a geography teacher who was a flat earther, and a music teacher who married a student. I eventually left Chamedy, but Lenny never did, never even left his childhood home. How could our lives have diverged so?

00:27:56 Speaker_07
He was very unhappy.

00:27:58 Speaker_01
This is Dimitri, a high school acquaintance who Lenny reconnected with on Facebook in the last year of his life. Dimitri was the person Lenny saw most during his illness.

00:28:08 Speaker_01
He works at a local Greek restaurant and would bring Lenny salads at the end of his shift.

00:28:13 Speaker_07
He was lonely. He used to talk about how it would have been nice if he had had a girlfriend and some kids or if he had a kid. It would have been nice. She was always alone. I never saw him with anybody, ever.

00:28:30 Speaker_07
He would ask me 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, man.

00:28:46 Speaker_01
Dimitri 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 theory. Drugs. Drugs. When you say drugs, you mean pot?

00:29:01 Speaker_07
Pot, mushrooms, LSD. Leonard used to like to take acid, a lot of acid, and just trip out in his room in the dark. Whatever works, bro. Whatever keeps the demons away there, but that's a little fucked up.

00:29:20 Speaker_01
Ending up in the basement solely because of drugs doesn't ring true to me. While 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.

00:29:34 Speaker_03
Let me kill you!

00:29:37 Speaker_01
Among my childhood cassettes is another of my mother's performances, but this one wasn't a soap opera audition. It's of my mother pretending to be her best friend, Lenny's mom, Hannah.

00:29:48 Speaker_03
I'll kill you. I'll take that blade and I'll kill you.

00:29:52 Speaker_01
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 could have spent on him.

00:30:05 Speaker_01
As for his dad, Lenny saw Izzy as a constant threat. This is from another Flippin' Will tape.

00:30:11 Speaker_06
Okay, the lines are open now.

00:30:17 Speaker_01
In the play, I perform the part of Lenny's father, who crashes straight into the Flippin' Will show. Izzy would get physical on occasion, but our parents weren't so different.

00:30:39 Speaker_01
My father favored the belt, while Izzy delivered what he called pachkas, or slaps. And in terms of our mothers, if Hannah had been so often absent because of her friendship with my mother, then it meant my mother was absent too.

00:30:53 Speaker_01
So is Lenny just more sensitive than I was, or was he dealing with more than I knew?

00:30:57 Speaker_09
Okay. You just jogged in memory.

00:31:05 Speaker_01
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.

00:31:18 Speaker_01
It even predates the upbringing he received from his parents.

00:31:21 Speaker_09
It was my class for developmental biology.

00:31:24 Speaker_01
Okay.

00:31:26 Speaker_09
And we were studying the brains of children at that point between zero and 12 months. and we were looking at separation anxiety, and we were studying that.

00:31:39 Speaker_09
And I remember being appalled when I learned 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.

00:32:04 Speaker_09
And I remember being appalled because I remember Lenny telling me that he was adopted when he was like six months old. And that his mom told him that all he ever did was cry.

00:32:20 Speaker_09
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.

00:32:29 Speaker_01
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 less.

00:32:40 Speaker_04
Just before his mother was kicked out of the convent, he was christened Andy Basfeldt.

00:32:48 Speaker_01
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.

00:32:58 Speaker_01
But re-listening to the numerous Andy 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. Through the years, he was raised with fellow orphans

00:33:13 Speaker_04
He never knew the meaning of mother or father. All he knew the meaning was of hate. All the kids would nickname him. You're a bastard. You have none.

00:33:30 Speaker_04
Andy was the only four-year-old child in the orphanage who every day would sit down in his bed and contemplate suicide.

00:33:42 Speaker_10
Oh, no one loves me. Everyone hates me. What did I do? I've got to leave. I've got to get out of here.

00:33:52 Speaker_02
I got to get out of here somehow, you know? I knew by age six I was in trouble. I knew by age 12 that life's going to be a little harder than I thought. And I knew by the time I was 18, 19 that I got to get out of here. I'd stay out.

00:34:12 Speaker_02
I'd already learned helplessness, I guess.

00:34:16 Speaker_01
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.

00:34:30 Speaker_01
And maybe I didn't. Perhaps a lot of what we take 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.

00:34:47 Speaker_01
The moments are already handing off one to the other like those dominoes that cannot be stopped. Supposedly, Lenny's biological mother was a 15-year-old girl who eventually came to realize she couldn't raise him on her own.

00:35:01 Speaker_01
Who knows what those first six months were like for Lenny and how they dictated the life to come. Baby Lenny was wrong.

00:35:08 Speaker_01
Baby's paralysis, his inability to leave the nest, wasn't, as he said, learned helplessness, but innate helplessness, the kind a baby feels. Maybe for Lenny, the feeling just never faded away. I was with him all the way to the end.

00:35:25 Speaker_01
This is Dimitri again.

00:35:26 Speaker_07
I remember the last day there. He goes to me, he calls me up, he goes, he goes, look, he goes, can you come over and be with me tonight? He goes, because I'm going to die. He said it. I said, shut up. I'm not like you're going to die.

00:35:40 Speaker_07
He goes, no, he goes, I'm going to die. He goes, I'm going to die. He goes, can you just come and be with me? He goes, I don't want to be alone, you know. I'm like, yeah, yeah, of course.

00:35:49 Speaker_07
Then I stayed with him and, um, we smoked a couple of joints together. Um, had a couple of drinks, a couple of shots of whiskey I did. And, um, I was just telling him, you know, Leonard, I go, it's okay.

00:36:05 Speaker_07
You know, you can, you can go if you want, you know, don't worry about it. You know, just if you need to go, just go.

00:36:13 Speaker_01
Because I never made it to Shamadi 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.

00:36:22 Speaker_01
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 remember what his state of mind was on that last day when you went there?

00:36:36 Speaker_07
Did he... Oh yeah, yeah, he was completely at peace. He wasn't worried or scared at all. I think he had accepted his fate. I think he was just, honestly, I think he was just tired. I think he wanted to just go. He seemed really okay, though.

00:36:51 Speaker_07
He wasn't nervous. He was just quiet. I have a video of his last words. What message do you want to share with everybody now that you're at the end?

00:37:04 Speaker_01
Dimitri sends me the video he took, and when I hit play, I gasp.

00:37:09 Speaker_01
I knew how sick Lenny had been, but I guess, irrationally, I'd 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.

00:37:36 Speaker_12
fighting doesn't get you far.

00:37:40 Speaker_01
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 the toilet without his mother's aid.

00:38:01 Speaker_01
I asked if, in general, his mother was being helpful.

00:38:04 Speaker_12
She's trying. She really is trying. I have to get her out. She's succeeding too. She's the only help I got. I need her.

00:38:14 Speaker_01
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.

00:38:27 Speaker_01
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 to shine through.

00:38:37 Speaker_01
While 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.

00:39:29 Speaker_10
is returning to its goodwill home. Now that the last month's rent is scheming with the damage deposit, take this moment to decide if we meant it, if we tried.

00:40:02 Speaker_01
This episode of Heavyweight was produced by me, Jonathan Goldstein, and supervising producer Stevie Lane, along with Phoebe Flanagan. Our senior producer is Khalilah Holt. Production assistance by Mohini Madgaukar.

00:40:14 Speaker_01
Special thanks to Lauren Silverman 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.

00:40:27 Speaker_01
Additional music credits can be found on our website, gimletmedia.com slash heavyweight. Our theme song is by The Weaker Thans, courtesy of Epitaph Records. Heavyweight is a Spotify original podcast.

00:40:38 Speaker_01
Follow us on Twitter at heavyweight, on Instagram at heavyweightpodcast, or email us at heavyweight at gimletmedia.com. You can also follow our show on Spotify and tap the bell to receive notifications when new episodes drop.

00:40:53 Speaker_01
We'll be back next week with a new episode.