CHAPTER

12

Talking to Catherine did not change everything for me. The biggest challenge with trying to get testimonials at salon nights, I discovered, was that even though the announced intention of salon nights was for people to come in and discuss their experiences, in practice, people talked about what people always talk about: serious matters like gossip, trivial matters like the fate of the planet. They also wanted very much to talk about and to Adam.

Something that nobody who knew Adam could deny: he was an unparalleled conversationalist. After his standard introduction (“Madam, I’m Adam”), he would often begin talking about something inappropriate, not infrequently his enthusiasm for breastfucking, which he considered the supreme form of heterosexual sex, as it carried no possibility of impregnation, was substantially easier to execute than anal sex, and, unlike oral sex, made possible mid-coital conversation. Guests would be so disarmed by his candor—and so eager to point out that nobody actually wants to talk in the middle of sex, or that breastfucking is no fun at all for the woman—that they would feel a little bit less worried about divulging whatever was most repellent in them. When I write this down it sounds offensive; somehow, said in his warm, blustery manner, it wasn’t. I have never met anyone with more infectious openness than Adam Lyons. Adam was quite amenable to being kidded—“Only on our arms,” I remember one obviously adoring acolyte saying, “is history written by a loser.” Even Adam’s own epiphany, FIRST MAN TO LIE ON, could be read as a product of his openness; even those who regarded him as a giant fraud had to give him credit for not letting the theory that he was a giant fraud become an elephant in the room. He loved to explain that his tattoo meant that his purpose was to provide his guests with someone to lie on. “I am the great bed of humanity,” he liked to say. “You can sleep on me when you need to recharge, or even better you can toss the coats of your self-delusion and shame onto me while you go join the party.” Over the course of any given salon night, Adam might tell a story about a late-night pizza run with John Lennon in 1978, pitch the machine to a first-time visitor, list a few reasons why Steven Merdula was a terrible writer who didn’t understand the first thing about the epiphany machine, then tell a story about procuring cocaine for a famous photographer whose name he wouldn’t mention so that the photographer could snort the cocaine off the arm of the machine while she was receiving her tattoo.

Prying one of Adam’s fans away from all this to tell his or her life story to a teenager was difficult, and I never really did figure out how to do it. Eventually, Adam started pointing to people and telling them that it was their turn to give me a testimonial. Almost every one of them complied, although in many cases they were too drunk or stoned for their testimonials to be usable. Either that, or their problems and solutions bored me—maybe they were too clogged with op-ed-style pontification or irrelevant detail for me to find any essence to distill, or maybe I couldn’t relate to a given speaker—and I would procrastinate on transcription until I had lost their tapes.

In theory, my hours were from six p.m. until midnight; in practice, I worked from six p.m. to six a.m. One night shortly after the school year ended, I passed out on the floor next to Adam’s bed, and by the time I woke up, a little before one in the afternoon, Adam was already seeing guests, so I took a shower and helped out. We didn’t discuss it, but I basically lived there for the rest of the summer. (My father didn’t care that I was gone.) Adam had a huge collection of videotapes of old movies, not that different from my grandmother’s, and sometimes when there were no guests we’d watch My Man Godfrey or Bringing Up Baby. We would have long chats, wherein he would defend himself and the epiphany machine.

“Sometimes people say, the first Rebecca Hart, that was understandable, but the second Rebecca Hart, you should have known better. How was I supposed to know that there would be two batshit-crazy women named Rebecca Hart? What was I supposed to do, prevent anyone named Rebecca Hart from using the machine? Wouldn’t that be discrimination? I mean, now I don’t let anyone named Rebecca Hart use the machine, but that’s only to keep people off my back. Basically, I’m just being a coward. But at least I’m not enough of a coward to deny the machine to people who aren’t named Rebecca Hart. Really, any doubts that anyone had about the machine should have been completely laid to rest after the machine accurately predicted that those two women would kill their kids. Some people are convinced I’m a fraud but still want me to share epiphanies with law enforcement, as though that position makes any sense.”

Sometimes he would get on one of these jags while we were exercising in the park. He would jog very slowly and I would pretend to jog as well, even though I could easily have walked and kept pace. For the most part we kept to the East Side, but when the weather was nice he couldn’t be nudged away from cutting through to the West Side, where we would inevitably come within sight of Strawberry Fields, the memorial for John Lennon across the street from the Dakota, where he was murdered by Mark David Chapman.

“I remember Chapman; I’d probably remember him even if he hadn’t done what he did. I was shocked when he got the same tattoo that John had gotten. I was afraid that John would be mad. I was afraid that John would think this meant I was a fraud and was making fun of him. Oh, John. That was the closest I ever came to smashing the machine. But John would have wanted me to keep going. He told me that the epiphany machine was capable of doing more good for humanity than anything else that actually existed in the world, apart from his music.”

I doubted that Lennon had actually said any of this, but it didn’t matter. There was something incredibly beautiful about this old man gliding down the path, passed every few seconds by younger, fitter bodies, contemplating whether his life’s work had been, on the whole, good or bad.

Like many teenagers, I was certain that the biggest questions were the most important ones, and that I was going to answer them. I thought about my future, enriched by the testimonials I was recording, the thoughts on life and how to live it that I had the rare privilege of listening to, and it seemed to me that I would make fewer mistakes than most people.

I suppose I have to mention Si Strauss. The heir to a real-estate fortune, Si was the reason that Adam was able to run a business out of his apartment that would have been illegal even if he had run it out of a storefront. (Though there was little to no enforcement, tattooing was illegal in New York City from 1961 to 1997, due to a hepatitis B scare.) Strauss—through an organization he called Friends of the Epiphany Machine—paid the bills for Adam’s many legal troubles, and for much else. Adam’s defense for the zoning issue—that those who used the machine were his guests rather than his customers, and that the fee was a voluntary donation to defray costs—wasn’t exactly untrue. Indifferent to the concept of “inflation,” he never charged more than a hundred dollars for the use of the machine, even though there were many who would have paid thousands, and he never refused service to anyone who did not pay. But most people wanted to give him some money before he put a needle in their arm; most people wanted it to feel at least a little like a business transaction. How Adam evaded the illegality of tattooing remained a mystery to me, partially because tattooing had already been legalized by my first visit; I suspect it was largely due to the many high-ranking city officials who were rumored to have received tattoos and, of course, to the influence of Strauss.

For the most part, Strauss was quiet and never talked to anyone. He did not wear short-sleeved shirts; in fact, I never saw him not wearing a suit, even on days in August when Adam’s air conditioner was broken. One night, after I had been coming for nearly a year, I managed to cajole him into giving me a testimonial. When Adam found out about this, he insisted that I destroy the tape in front of him. But this one I had already transcribed.