Lake Effect

by Rich Cohen

  Tom grinned and asked, “What is Bucko doing now?”

  My father thought a moment, then said, “Last time I saw Bucko, he had a gun and was guarding a junkyard and listening to calls on his police radio.”

  One afternoon, as I was moping through another bleak winter day, Tom looked at me with his earnest drive-in stare and said, “You ever meet Jamie Drew?”

  “Who?”

  “Drew-licious. C’mon, you’ll get a kick out of the kid. He’s absolutely crazy.”

  Actually, I had already heard of Jamie. He had moved to Glencoe from one of those working class towns west of the city, a ragged collection of liquor stores and laser-straight streets tucked behind the slaughter yards. His name was Jamie Drew, but in the seventh grade the girls started calling him Drew-licious. He was preceded by a legend. He was the kid you see late at night, walking the streets of a town, shadowed by police cars. When he was eleven, he had been arrested for breaking into cigarette machines.

  Tom led me to a homeroom on the far side of the school. We looked in the door. A teacher was sitting at a desk reading a newspaper. Some kids were in front doing homework. The rest of the class was in back, gathered around someone at a desk. This was Jamie. As he talked, the kids in front stopped doing their homework and the teacher put down his newspaper. Jamie had recently read Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck and so spoke in the mock-heroic manner of the characters, an errant knight of King Arthur’s court. Rubbing his belly, he laughed and said, “Surely our friend will not begrudge us a single beer, for he is our friend and must certainly know that without beer we will not have the strength to fight evil.”

  Tom waved and said, “Drew-licious.”

  Jamie waited until the teacher was looking the other way, then ducked out of class. He put his arm around Tom and said, “Hey, buddy.” We were just sixteen, but already you could see how handsome Jamie was going to be. He had high cheekbones and a long nose and his eyes were dark and restless; his hair fell to his shoulders in curls, and his skin was smooth and coppery. There was a tireless energy about him, an inquisitiveness that made him fill in the border of each scene. Before listening to a story, he had to know dozens of irrelevant details. “Where did it happen? How did you get there? Did you hitch? What did she look like? Does she have a sister? Cousins? A brother? How much can that dude bench? Who’s from Waukegan?” If he was excited, he slapped his knee. If he was very excited, he slapped your knee.

  Jamie looked at me and said, “So what’s up?”

  Tom introduced us. Jamie narrowed his eyes and said, “Yeah, I know you. You’re from the Bluffs.” He did not say how he knew me. It did not matter. We were already friends. Tom, having made the connection, now drifted into the back of the scene. And so began my adventure with Drew-licious, and with it a new stage in my life.

  I began spending most of my days with Jamie. We met each morning outside the school rotunda, where hippie kids played hackey-sack. I told him stories about my house, things my father said, how my mother reacted, or else about the letters I received from my brother, who was then in his cool phase, which blew through our lives as brief and refreshing as a tropical wind. That fall my brother had entered New York University, where he hung around the Cedar Tavern, let his hair grow into a dizzying ’fro, rarely shaved, drank Jim Beam, and read Jack Kerouac. He sent pictures. Before first bell, Jamie would examine each shot, studying the facades of Greenwich Village. “How can you beat that,” he would say. “Fucking New York!”

  We often met during school, in front of the office of the student paper, the New Trier News, where I was a beat reporter. The room was filled with long tables where the newspaper was laid out, and the walls were lined with cubbyholes where, each Monday, I received my assignment. The assignments were made by Doc Tangier, the faculty sponsor, a strange old queen with a long face, pale skin, eyebrows shaped like boomerangs, and a goatee years before the return of the goatee. I was also in his English class, a seminar where, every morning, another classic (The Secret Sharer, All the King’s Men) was picked apart to reveal its secret homoerotic theme. One day Doc Tangier asked us, “Do you still use the word ‘tool’ when referring to an erect penis?”

  A football player said, “No, we use the word ‘lilyrod.’ ”

  Doc Tangier, who knew and approved of my sister years before, took an instant disliking to me. He selected me to cover the Ham Radio Club. When Jamie read my article about the uses of ham radio, including communication in the event of a nuclear apocalypse, he said, “So if Armageddon comes, the only remains of the human race will be these guys talking to each other?” On one occasion, I was suspended from the paper, punished for my story about a New Trier football game, during which the Glenbrook North marching band had been driven from the field by a hail of pennies. I defended the rowdy crowd on grounds that the marching band was wearing painfully funny hats. Doc Tangier fixed me in a cold stare and said, “Mr. Cohen, you are not the smartest person in the world, but then again you don’t pretend to be.”

  Jamie would sit in the newspaper office, looking over my shoulder, saying, “No, man, compare the ham radio kids to visionaries trying to raise God by computer.”

  Doc Tangier did not mind having Jamie around, and I often caught the Doctor looking at him. “Your friend is not unlike one of those pained heroes of Greek literature, ” he told me. “One of those wondrous young boys who reach their potential only after a terrible fall from grace.”

  Sometimes, Doc Tangier gave us permission to walk the halls, to roam with the freedom of my press pass. The classrooms flashed by, rows of boys in oxford shirts, girls in stone-washed jeans, teachers who stepped into the hall and said, “Back to class, Drew-licious.” Jamie talked mostly about sex, some new revelation, how he got a girl’s shirt off. He was still smarting from his breakup with a senior, a girl with a car, a beautiful girl in jeans and lip gloss, who one day, as inexplicably as a change in the weather, went punk, turning up for school in a green Mohawk and black lipstick. Kids who envied Jamie the day before shook their heads and said, “Poor bastard.” For my part, I envied Jamie even his pain. So what? He loved and lost. I had never even taken love out for a soda. Once, as we were crossing the parking lot behind school, a girl walking the other way smiled at Jamie and Jamie smiled back, and she flipped up her skirt and I could see her legs and her underwear and it was really something to see. Jamie grabbed my arm and said, “Don’t worry, friend, you’ll get in the game.”

  During free periods, I met Jamie in a basement common room, where you could buy doughnuts and soda. The walls were covered with murals painted by students during the Bicentennial—snare drums, flags, and flutes. At each table, kids chewed tobacco and spit into soda cans. When a kid, reaching for his Coke, grabbed the wrong can, a howling filled the room. There were also narcs on the prowl. A paraprofessional would sit at your table, rub his eyes, and say, “Fuck, man, I am harshed! Do you know where I can score some weed?”

  For the most part, the talk was of sports, with betting pools on every game, or of girls. A kid named Randy Klein told a crowd how, anxious to lose his virginity, he had visited a prostitute in Chicago. Before Randy had sex, the prostitute asked if he wanted to do anything else. He said he wanted to “try that sixty-nine thing.” As a result, Randy had to rush home, feeling ill and still very much a virgin.

  Jamie and I sat at a table in back, where we were joined by Tom Pistone or Ronnie. Letting his gaze drift across the room, Jamie would give a name to each type of kid. He did this in the manner of Adam in the Garden of Eden naming God’s animals. This gave us a sense of strength, of mastery over the school; by naming, we took possession of what we had named. There were, of course, the Football Players and the Cheerleaders and the Honor Students, but, according to Jamie, there were also the Big Dumb Guys, the Little Dumb Guys, the Girls of the Big Dumb Guys, and the Speed Walkers, who, with their minds fixed on college, did everything extremely fast. “Dig that,” said Jamie. “Never a wasted move.”

  Then there
were our friends, who also fell into categories. I had played hockey since I was young, so there were the kids I met on the ice in Squirt or Pee Wee. These friends liked to watch the Chicago Blackhawks on cable television or the video of Slap Shot, the Paul Newman movie about minor league hockey. They looked at Jamie with suspicion, a slickster never tested on the boards or on the field—Jamie had no talent for sports. As I came out of the locker room after a game, hair wet from the shower, carrying my bag and my sticks, Jamie was waiting, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. He would shrug and say, “Let’s get away from these clowns.”

  Through Pistone, we were also friends with the gearheads, who smoked cigarettes which they tossed away with a flick, lifted weights, and haunted the low-slung garages of West Wilmette. Leaning over engines, they would raise a hand and say, “Now really wind her out.” These kids were strangely war-haunted. They wore fatigues to school and dog tags and talked about fighting Charley. A kid named Glenn Christian, who later joined the Marines, told me he was the reincarnation of an American who died in Khe Sanh. I laughed. The next day, he came to school with the death certificate of a soldier killed on August 15, 1968. “The day before I was born,” said Christian darkly.

  “Why the day before?” I asked. “Why not the same day?”

  “Don’t be an ass,” said Christian. “Reincarnation takes at least a day.”

  In movies about high school, there is always the shadow of something ahead, the Vietnam War or the threat of adulthood, but in our lives there was nothing but clear water into the distance.

  And there were the girls from Glencoe, a pack roaming in the streets of town. Jannie Ruffan, who had blond hair, a freckled nose, and a laugh that climbed your spine like fingers; Carrie Sharp, a cute redhead who appeared in a touring company of the musical Once Upon a Mattress; Haley Seewall, whose mother thought I was a hoodlum and who, for no apparent reason, insisted on calling me “Deacon.” These were our girls, who, like a free space in bingo, we did not have to work for or luck into or worry about. As a result, we came to see them as off limits to the general population—off limits even to each other. These were good girls, whose chastity, unbeknownst to them, we had vowed to protect.

  Around this time, one of the football players, a squat mean-faced kid named Motu, met a man in a bar downtown, a man named Rizzo, who invited the football player to bring five boys and five girls to his house for a game, “Rizzo’s Game.” A week later, five football players took five girls down to Rizzo’s, where they undressed, sprayed each other with whipped cream, rolled around on the floor, ate bananas, showered, and went home. The story of Rizzo’s house spread through school. At the end of the month, the same five football players asked Haley Seewall, one of our girls, to play Rizzo’s Game. Jamie begged Haley not to play. “If you go,” he said, “I will never talk to you again.”

  Haley went to Rizzo’s, and the school was soon filled with stories of the dirty things she had done. When Haley tried to talk to Jamie, he waved her away. A few days later, he told me there was too much talk in general. “What is all this chatter?” he asked. “I sit in class and listen and listen, and then a teacher asks me a question that she damn well knows the answer to and I gotta spit it back? I say no.”

  “You say what?”

  “I say up to this point yes, beyond this point no.”

  The next morning, when I met Jamie outside the rotunda, he would not talk to me. I was offended until I realized he would not talk to anyone. For one week in March, Jamie did not say a word to his family, or friends, or teachers in school. When called on in class, the kid at the next desk would say, “To cleanse his system of the modern world, Drew-licious will not speak for five days.” Even the teachers came to respect Jamie. When at last he opened his mouth, his voice was clear as a bell. “So this is how I sound,” he said with wonder.

  Haley ran over and hugged Jamie. He turned away. That was fifteen years ago and he has still not said a word to her.

  A few months after I first met Jamie, he invited me to his house. As usual, we hitchhiked from school, getting off at Green Bay Road and cutting through town. In college, far from the Midwest, I would draw maps of Glencoe, each avenue and throughway. Looking at those maps, I would imagine Jamie and me walking that winter afternoon along the lake bluffs, the sailboats pulled up onto the sand. It was very cold. Following the advice of parents everywhere, I was dressed in layers. Jamie wore only a T-shirt and a cloth jacket. He said it was important to look cool, even if it meant freezing to death—an ethic he brought with him from beyond the slaughter yards. Jamie was a lower-middle-class kid living in an upper-middle-class town. This made him seem authentic and interesting. In him, I found a vitality and an excitement that my family’s relative affluence had sealed me from. In me, he found the stability missing from his own life. He also found an audience. Shivering in the wind, he clapped his hands and said, “In my mind, I’m on a beach in the Azores.”

  Jamie lived within sight of town in a trim, two-story wood house in a neighborhood of brick behemoths. It was white with green shutters, and there was a backyard with flowers and shade trees and a garage, where, a few nights a week, Jamie and Pistone pieced together an old Mustang convertible. Jamie lived on the porch, an extension built under the trees—an arrangement that allowed him incredible freedom. Late at night, if he was restless, Jamie would climb out his window and into the street, where Pistone was waiting in his GTO with the lights switched off. Dropping the car into gear, Tom would coast off to a college party or a double date or to Big Twist and the Mellow Fellows, a band who played at Biddy Mulligan’s, a bar on the North Side of Chicago. As the sun came up, Jamie was back in bed, drifting off to the whistle of the commuter train.

  In Jamie’s room, there was a desk covered with pictures. In one, Jamie was dressed as a priest. He had his pants pulled down and a beautiful Chinese girl was spanking him with a rubber chicken. Jamie looked at the picture and said, “Someday I’ll tell you the story.” Another picture showed a handsome man with powerful shoulders in jeans and a leather jacket and a cowboy hat pulled low. The sky behind him was filled with mountains. I assumed this was Jamie’s father but did not ask. I have always found it difficult to bring up any subject that might make anyone, especially a friend, unhappy. As a result, I come to know people only over the course of time, and only by seeing their personalities played out in a dozen tiny incidents.

  Jamie took the photo out of my hand and set it back down on his desk. He crossed the room and opened his closet. The shelves were like something from a downtown boutique, with shirts arranged by color, earth-tone to pastel, and button-downs in perfect rows. He bought these clothes in secondhand stores—silk shirts decorated with stripes or teardrops or painted designs. As we spoke, he stripped off his T-shirt, folded it neatly, and, for a moment, stood bare-chested, scanning the shelves. He was at ease with his body, which was as well formed as the hull of a ship. I became conscious of my own torso, which, in comparison, seemed to me a failed prototype. He smiled as he carefully took down a black shirt patterned with red dice. It draped smoothly across his shoulders. “My Dean Martin look,” he said. “Brings me luck.”

  “Is there a reason you need luck?”

  “Well, for one thing you’re about to meet my grandma.”

  Since his mother worked downtown and his sister was never around, Jamie was often alone with his grandmother, Violet, a willful old lady with a puckered face and sharp blue eyes. Years before, Violet had moved to Illinois from a small town in Nebraska. To her, Jamie was a boy with too much spirit. To Jamie, Violet was big government, whose laws are best read as suggestions. “Yes, I love her, but she drives me nuts,” he would say. “She has to have her hand in everything.”

  We sat at the kitchen table, where Violet set out pound cake and orange soda. In school, we studied Mikhail Gorbachev and the Russians and the nuclear stalemate we knew would go on forever. Jamie was one of the few kids who took none of it seriously. As I chewed, he leaned over and sai
d, “Want to see a real Cold War?”

  Jamie sipped his soda and set down the glass. Violet moved the glass an inch closer to the center of the table. Jamie took another sip, and again Violet moved his glass. Jamie winked at me and said, “Violet, I am now going to take a drink and return my glass to the spot which you have chosen. To prove you love me, do not move my glass.”

  “Why would I move your glass?”

  Jamie took a swallow and set down his glass. I looked at Violet. I could see the battle she was fighting within herself. When Jamie looked the other way, she moved the glass. “Aha,” said Jamie. “I have seen you. Why can’t you just leave well enough alone?”

  In a whispery voice that was like music, Violet said, “I don’t know.”

  It was clear that Jamie was locked in a comic struggle with his grandma, a struggle that reached its apex years later, when Violet mistakenly believed she had won the Illinois State Lottery. Over the course of a summer day, she and Jamie, closed up in the house, traveled the spectrum of emotions from devotion to complete distrust. When I showed up, Jamie told me, “Though I am not ready to kill Violet for the money, I am prepared to convince her that it should be transferred to my name for tax purposes.”

  A few hours before dinner, Violet hid the ticket, saying, “No one will ever find it.”