III. VACATVM·ISSEM
Samuel Adam
import today are such artifacts past lives and their follies. For by
these words, I bear witness to those essential facts through which I
have come to know one certain Sam Schwartz: A man who is my father,
my eternal friend, and a man against whom all the world be shamed
incomparably.
Mr. Samuel Schwartz was not always my father in life, just as by Adam
I was not so always known. When some years ago Mr. Schwartz happened
upon me, I was working part-time as a cashier-slash-stockboy in a
local liquor store. I made pay in such environs not for any
particular love of booze, but because a grocery chain and two
different sandwich shops had rejected me for prospective employment.
And even in the part-time non-career of taking orders from drunks and
putting bottles on shelves—for a whopping $6.00 per hour, later raised
to $7.50—I was ultimately unsuccessful, with my such gainful
employment quite soon ceasing.
Prior to my brief stint of trading beer cans for petty change across a
filthy well-trod countertop, my background was equally unimpressive—or
shall I say, the very antipode of all things impressive. When Judge
Harriet E. Derman inquired as to my education on the August 1, 2008
Somerset County, New Jersey Chancery record (T9-1 et seq.), I averred
briefly as to my lack of credentials but for a high school diploma.
What went unsaid thereby is that I obtained that bit of paper on a
technicality; as an unlawful truant from age 14, I did not actually
attend school past the eighth grade. Although I years later enrolled
in a few classes at a local community college, that brief experiment
is whimsically immaterial in terms of actual education: I pulled “F”
for failure in the single class I took my second semester, and never
thereafter returned. Uneducated rube as thus I am, although I
evidently somehow divined the names and addresses for all 11 board
members of a certain large enterprise, I seem blissfully unaware that
their company’s stock symbol lacks a concluding C.
Whilst working in the liquor store, I inquired to Mr. Samuel Schwartz
for a position as a part-time secretary; the work was to mostly
involve taking his dictation and reading aloud to him due to his
disability. As someone who, before the 1992–’95 tragedy which
destroyed his life, did run successful businesses and keep high
standards therefor, Mr. Schwartz found in me no more employable
qualities than had been seen by the supermarket and the burger joint.
Notwithstanding that, he kept me around—initially from his charitable
heart, but later and more importantly, for a single redeeming
characteristic: I never cheated him for a penny. I had ample means
and opportunity to thieve from him—plus what for most would be the
considerable motive of my being consistently flat broke, and him
owning a multimillion-dollar commercial building; yet I kept and keep
his trust as sacred, always and evermore. For that one loyalty, he
exercised an enduring patience against my patent unreliability, social
awkwardness, clumsiness, messiness, and disgusting lack of personal
hygiene.
We soon reached an equilibrium whereby I did his letters when I felt
like it, and he set about instilling in me the character, work ethic,
and principled morality of which he is an irreproachable paragon, but
which I at the time lacked entirely. It was a hefty task, and remains
on some points his ongoing endeavor. Meanwhile, he poured into me a
massive quantity of food, in vain hope of revitalizing me from the
pathetic frailty I have suffered since early childhood; he gave me
better clothes when he saw me shivering; and he left me the door of
his home always open to me.
It took a few years of my crashing on his couch and strewing my latest
unfinished symphony about his office before he finally gave up,
realized he was stuck with me, and provisioned me my own bed (or as I
keep it: chaotic-jumble-of-sheets-and-blankets) and my own desk—which
unlike his, is covered in coffee stains, cigarette ash, and a rat’s
nest of wires which aren’t even plugged into anything. Eventually, he
deemed it wiser to simply sign over the whole house to me—partly
because he loves me, and partly because notwithstanding my skeletal
hundred-pound body, it is an elementary law of physics that I expand
to fill the container in which I am placed.
As the years passed, what started as a charitable mentorship
eventually took a familial nature and quality. He’s about of an age
to be my father; when he found me, I had all the self-discipline and
emotional formedness of a five-year-old child; he fed me, schooled me,
and lectured me sternly when I went astray. Thus, all of my (few)
virtues are to his credit, and each of my (many) vices his long-
suffering disappointment. He taught me all the things I’d never
learnt (and found quite challenging), including such mundane tasks as
preparing for myself boiled eggs, caring for the family dogs, and
laundering and folding my own clothes. He even found the secret for
remediating my adult acne—the product of all-around awful genetics—
which does subside when I am not too lazy to tend my skin as he told
me to. Considering me as an overgrown five-year-old who was
transplanted beneath the wing of a man who already has sons, but also
has a hobby of repairing rusty machines rather than junking them, the
convergence between Mr. Schwartz and his klutzy charge became
ineffable as a law of nature.
Ultimately I came to call him my father in fact, and he to call me his
son; and he gave me my name, Samuel Adam. His reasoning for my name
remains a mystery. I myself still don’t know whether my namesake is
the famous founding patriot—my father being a great lover of liberty—
or the modern beer, my father being (a) a man of good taste, who
(b) enjoys summertime family barbecues and (c) has several sons of
lawful drinking age. Or perhaps it is something besides the obvious.
I also still can’t quite say whether “Adam” was intended as a middle
name, and something besides an S got misplaced amidst the chaos of the
time.
I do not exaggerate when I say my father gave me life, by saving my
life. I’d have died in a gutter somewhere years ago, were it not for
Mr. Samuel Schwartz. As he saved my life and made me who I am, I must
both in love and principle honor him with a special loyalty. For
example, ’though I’d readily lay down my own life for my principles,
to save him, I would if required compromise right for wrong, publicly
humiliate myself, kneel to my enemies, profess worship of graven
images, and sign a pact with the Devil himself. If (God forbid) a
street hoodlum put a gun to his head and so demanded, I would kiss his
hand and loudly declare him my king; were he taken hostage by
terrorists, I’d change my religion on a dime; God would understand.
This last—bearing in mind that I have carefully memorized vulgarities
in a certain Mideastern tongue, for one and only one purpose: If I am
ever captured {alone} by terrorists, I must needs know how to
verbalize my judgment of them, their mothers, their sisters, and their
asinine cause—all in words readily understood by violent brutes of
substandard intelligence. Mostly because my father’s birthday is
9/11, and he’s got a big soft heart, and they ruined his mood on his
special day in some recent year or another. Those who have dealt
adversely with me can attest that I would by character so act if so
situate. Thus when I acknowledge that to save my father’s life, I’d
swear up and down that some seventh-century psychopathic pedophile is
God’s last and greatest prophet, such attests the magnitude of
coercive force exerted on me by the threat he may imminently die.
His name is Mr. Samuel M. Schwartz, and I am blessed that he calls me
his son. For his life and fortune, my own “sacred honor” (such as it
is) ’twould be but a humble sacrifice. In witness upon my soul, by
Lex Lucis Natura, I testify the foregoing facts as true unto the Light
of Nature and Nature’s God.
• LUCI·SUM: •
Samuel Adam <http://certifound.com/>
763 Montgomery Road
Hillsborough, New Jersey (08844-1304)
United States
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