TZAIMS & GENE

 The Story of Tzaims  and Gene

It only seems timely to explain the relationship between Tzaims and Gene since there are so many confused people in the world whose minds grab what ever they hear, read, or think, believing it to be the truth.  

Of course trying to tell them the truth is like pulling hen's teeth.  

I will write this in the first person since it is a personal story.

I was about 24 years old when my mother explained something hidden from me until then, but I had already served 4 years active in tbe US Navy and it was about a year after my father died on our dairy farm, Cedar Meadows.  We had sold the farm in Wakefield, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania after he died and I found a nice house that I bought and signed a mortgage for my mother in Philadelphia so I must have been 24, years old since she told this to me in the living room of that house.

In 1931 my mother convinced my father to have a second child.  Raymond, first born in May 1923 was almost 10 years old.  She wanted a girl but on 1st of January 1932 I was born instead.  

Due to the great depression, living had its difficulties economically.  My father lost his fortune in the 1929 stock market crash but didn't jump out of a sky scraper but got a factory job and supported his wife and son.  

I might have been adopted out at birth since I wasn't a girl but my father decided to keep me. My mother decided to educate me in the arts, music, dance, theatre, acrobatics, gymnastics, fencing and tennis, so I wasn't ever a sports team jock.

Again She begged my father to try for a girl in 1934 buf he insisted on a proviso, if born a boy he would be put up for adoption at birth

John James Junior was born.  The terms for adopting was the couple had to be wealthy, give him a name him John or similar name, and be a Methodist Christian family, living far away from Chicago, Illinois.

 So this one day, possibly at Christmas 1956 or 1957, my mother draws me aside and tells me I have a younger brother somewhere in the world but no clue of his name, location or family but I should search for him.  She insisted on this as she seemed stressed about him not knowing his real family.

How?  Where?  Impossible, with all records privately sealed for over 21 years.  Unfortunately it hung in my mind like a hugh unmovable rock but I tried to put it out of my mind.  The only clue she could give me was tbat he was born on the 28th of September, 1935 which I. wrote down on something important for me to save and forgot it.

In 1966, February, I was now a famous fabric and fashion designer in New York City and I was staying with a good friend Paul Smith, the director of the Museum of Contempory Crafts, for the weekend, reading the New York Times art and theatre sections on a Sunday afternoon.  I found in the theatre section mention of an Experimental Film Society in tbe East Village advertising a Midnight showing of two controversal films by two different avante guarde film makers so I decided to go since it was a one time showing for only that night.  The Magazine section had a big cover story introducing Bob Dylen and his musical style and poetic verse construction.

I arrived at the Bridge Theatre on 8th Street early and was the first to start a line about an hour before the box office opened.  Many people filled the lobby but I didn't pay much attsntion to tbem.  Wby I looked bak at the door entrance at this one moment I cannot explain but a very mysterious thin, lean young man entered alone and stood at the open door.  He was wearing a weathered surplus US Army fatigue jacket and worn blue genes, gaunt, remote, serious, with sunken dark ringed eyes looking weary as though he went tbrough a great mental and physical suffering.  He was at least 25 feet away but our eyes met and locked briefly and there was suddenly an instant flash of lightning that struck mentally between us.  Startled by it I managed to look away.

The moment was then disturbed as the box office opened and we went into the theatre.  I always sat middle center which in this almost empty theatre I was quite surrounded by empty seats.  Suddenly this same young man came and sat down in the seat on my right beside me.  Strange but although I tried to ignor it I felt comforted by his doing so.  We were the only two in the middle of the theatre.   We were dressed like the Prince and the Pauper.

We didn't speak to one another or even acknowledge tbe presence of one another through both films.  When it was over he said.  Would you like to go and talk, have a beer and a cheeseburger at a West Village Pub?.  I said. Yes.

We walked down 8th Street to Bleeker Street but though I was familiar with the Expresso cafes he took me to a big beautiful and elegant pub in a historic building built on a trianglular island called The Riviera.  We both ordered dark beer and the cheeseburgers, were the best and juciest I ever had on toasted seseme seed buns.  We both liked dark beer, STOUT and PORTER 

He had a BA In English Literature from the University of Maryland so we talked about English writers and poets, He could recite whole passages from Shakespeare, Dickens, but his favorite was Thomas Mann.

His name was Gene, Gene Lott, actually Gene Vestel Lott and he was originally from the Pan Handle of Texas.  Odd though, because he had no Texas drawl but spoke English as one would if having lived in Chicago.  I say this because Chicago broadcasting speak is considered the perfect American (US) English.

His father was named Vestel Hervey Lott, so that gave him his middle name.  He was about 3 years younger than me in 1966.  His family had the largest ranch in Texas.  No, not the King ranch,

Though larger than the King Ranch territorilly it was not famous for its grandeure but adequate for its needs.  Vestel and his family members all shared equally in ownership but not all actually lived or worked on the ranch.  

The Lott family was large and spread out across Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi.  Made up of judges, lawyers, and various occupations only a few actually ran the cattle operation, started by Hervey Lott, Vestel's father in the 1800s. Vestel was the publisher of the Amarillo and Pecas Newspapers as well as chief editor and correspondent.  

At some point in Gene's youth his father left Texas selling his newspapers and became a journalist at the New York Times so Gene was moved to Jamaica, New York.  

The family had demanded Vestel give up his share of the ranch when he left Texas but Gene never knew why.  Many decades later at Vestels death, it was because Vestel had adopted a birl and a boy,  Not being family, they could not inherit into the ranch.

Vestel soon moved on and became one of Edward R. Morrow's Boys and created the Office of War Information in Washington, DC, moving to Arlington, Virgina.  Gene finished high school there and entered the University of Maryland.  

Soon after Edward R Mottow and Vestel Lott founded the Voice of America and Vestel became Program Chairman for the rest of his life broadcasting with Eleanor Roosevely in Moscow, Russia during WWII.

After college Gene went to Mexico and lived in Mexico City, learned how to make the best tacos any where.  He planned becoming a writer but not a newspaper reporter journalist.  He loved books and read excessively.  

Because he had a collapsed lung that was cured he was rejected from the US Army military draft during the Korean Conflict so he remained in Mexico for the duratation then moved to New York City.  He found a job at Marlboro Books on  8th Street and a small apartment on 9th Strret in the East Village near Tompkins Square Park, very near where Bod Dylan played, so he knew Bob Dylan, at a bar and club that Gene frequented.

Dexpite his urge to write he never did, claiming he really had nothing to write about.  He had been working at Marlboro Books for 8 years when we met.

He was very intelligent and kind, very generous, giving, and helping young people that took advantage of him who invaded his apartment as if they owned it.  9th Street was notable for its Hippy youth but Gene was not a Hippy.  He was a Methodist and had inclinations of becoming a Monk in a Monastery.

He was obviously exhausted by people hanging on to him but giving him nothing in return but instad of anger he becaume gaunt and desparate for a human exchange with someone similarly knowledgable in classical literature to discuss deeply in it.  He was wasting away and near physical and mental collapse from loneliness.

We struck up a stimulating conversation in classical literature as soon as we arrived at the Riviera pub, since I was a Mythologist having read all the Greats at Oxford and Athens, Greece.  We became bonded that night.  I too was seeking similar human companionship but my being thrust into fabric and fashion design, unexpectedly, I had a full plate to keep up with.  I was kept poor by my financiers but managed to live in New York City on $75.00 a week and run a couture atelier on 7th Avenue and a textile mill in Vermont.  I couldn't afford an apartment but had been loaned a small one on Upper Lexington Avenue for a few weeks.

That night I stayed with Gene at his $40.00 a month place on 9th Street.  We instantly became inseparable and from that moment in the Bridge Theatre never left one another's side for 48 years .

He was a Libra, born on 28 September 1935.

We didn't exchange birth dates until months of dark beers and cheeseburgers at the Riviera, McSorley's Ales and cheddar, mustard and onions on crackers at an all male Old Original McSorley's Pub on 4th Street off the Bowrey and similar at the Cedar Bar and Max's Kansas City.  He was Libra and I was Capricorne and looking it up I found our signs were highly compatable.  His birth date didn't register anything in my mind for quite some time.

Years later, after he quit Marlboro when after promising him the manager's position the two gay owners gave it to a newly employed man of little intelligence that they became enamored with.   Gene felt very betrayed and I said he should quit and come live in my 35 room mansion in Vermont where he could concentrate on a writing and poetry career.  He did in 1968.

 Much had changed in my career by then and though I kept my rent controlled apartment on West 56th Street I was living now and working internationally in fabric design in Old Bennington.  

Digging through old files, since I kept every scrap of paper on file, I found the paper I wrote the birth date of my lost younger brother my mother gave me.  The shock in seeing it left me almost paralized, speechless, frozen.  Could I tell Gene?  No!  I couldn't tell Gene.  What trama would it cause him if there was a possibility he djdn't know the Lott family wasn't his own but he was the son of a Russian Imperial Prince and a mother connected to the Royal families of the England, Wales, Scotland, France, UK and Europe, and my younger brother of three sons?

No.  j will remain silent.  Wait for more things revealed.  He already realized he couldn't write and instead was creating unique fabric designs for me.  Little sketches that I developed and appeared in fashion magazines in full colour.  He wouldn't take credit claiming they were only doodles he scrjbbled naturally not having studied art as I had.

I was now for three years making money, bought Buckthorne Hall in 1968 and took Gene around Europe and North Africa for three months, winter stays after completing my work in new couture fabrics now for the haute couture in Paris and Rome as well as New York.

In 1971 and 1972 we trekked the Himalayas in Nepal but first I must go back to 1969 and the cataclismic Woodstock Festival and the great changes promised for the United States that the white house shot down imprisoning young men who had been liberated from the slavery of low paying factory confinement and poisoning the youth with Paraquot and releasing Qualudes into the sea of youth!  Let us never forget this and Nepalm made bt Alliad Chemical Corp in Viet Nam.

To be continued.