Free I Am Max Lamm by Raphael Brous

really enjoy discussing Lamm, the vanquished hotshot. The tennis champ, captain of the soccer team, A-grade essayist, gifted painter, best speaker in the debating club, who was reassuringly revealed as an oversexed degenerate whoremonger. A fool depraved beyond his years, who judging from the two-minute video clip that got the search engines chugging in March 2003, felt most alive fucking a Salvadorian call-girl in an illegal whorehouse on Second Avenue. A bag of contraband white powder visible on the bedside table.
    The warm buzz of
schadenfreude
! To see a talented young man climb the precarious rope up to something stupendous, then snatch away the safety net as he falls. And don’t forget, the critics added, that Max Lamm’s a hater of women! A spectacular misogynist, Norman Mailer without the unquenchable literary fire and the ex-wife stabbed. Lamm who hates people as a species, who hates love, laughter, decency, celebration and solid unspectacular achievement. The chauvinist pig Lamm who hates hugs, kisses and family values, who hates walks on the beach, picnics in the park, baby photos in the wallet,
shabbos
dinner with his parents. Ultimately, his critics agreed, the ghoul hates himself.
    ‘Your boy hates what we love.
That’s
what he loves,’ Lou Schiff, the esteemed plastic surgeon and president of Mizrachi synagogue, told Lamm’s father at the kosher bakery the week the scandal broke.
    ‘The kid loves to hate. But really he hates himself.’
    Schiff walked away to untie his schnauzer, without saying goodbye. The kid’s like that for a reason, they all agreed. It’s the parents’ fault too.
    Lamm’s spring of talent, once irrepressibly bubbling at his core, dried over in the summer of 2004. When
everybody
– hairdressers in Sydney, cod fisherman in Newfoundland, forklift drivers in rural Ohio – learnt about the girl from El Salvador and the video that she ‘accidentally’ left in the lobby of the Howard Johnson’s Hotel on Second Avenue. The sex tape she swore that she never knew existed.
    A half-page exclusive in the
New York Post
, a two-minute story at the end of the ESPN sports bulletin, and within a day, Lamm made the network news. Followed by his meltdown in the first round of the US Open, near-suicide in the East River;
everything.
In the
New York Times
sports section for three days straight, on the front pages in Australia. The silver lining: across three continents, Max Lamm inspired responsible parents to lecture their cumstruck adolescents about how not to sabotage their life’s prospects.
    By August, Lamm was popular not only among the porno search engines, but in the ‘Jews in Sports’ database of Jew-Watch.com, the popular anti-Semitic bulletin board run by a crank Aryan-supremacist librarian from Missouri. A venal website, ranked number one on Google’s search results for ‘Jew’, that claims that the blood of Christian children softens the Passover matzah; that denies the pogroms, ghettos and gas chambers; that portrays the Nazi hatemonger Julius Streicher as a blameless victim of Zionist bloodlust at Nuremburg.
    ‘Max Lamm,’ somebody called Panzer72 wrote on the bulletin board, ‘demonstrates the dishonesty and depravity that is second nature to the Jew.’ Unbound on the internet, Lamm’s mistake became a vicious tearaway beast, like the savage Alsatian that Issl Koch, the camp commandant’s monster of a wife at Buchenwald, let loose on terrified Jewish children.
    And not just the anonymous anti-Semites on the Jew-Watch chatroom. United in their zealous multitudes were evangelicals against Max Lamm; America’s creepily polite family values fanatics who, like the Saudi terrorists they despise even more than the Clintons, value fanaticism over family. The loyal evangelicals, fifty million strong from Alabama to Anchorage, who bombarded Reebok’s headquarters with approximately seventeen thousand emails and four thousand phone messages demanding that Lamm, the amoral