Lake Effect

by Rich Cohen

  “You are an old lady,” said Jamie. “What if you die? Then no one will ever get that ticket. Did you think of that?”

  Violet looked at Jamie and said, “I don’t know.”

  Whenever I think back on Jamie and the life of his house, it is Violet’s voice I hear, a lyrical plea that pursued Jamie through the halls. “Jamie? Where are you, Jamie? Have you forgotten your grandma? Jamie.” It was this voice that chased Jamie into the streets, in and out of a dozen stores, and through the spring slush to my house, where he began spending more and more time. You entered my house through the kitchen, where you might find my father in beetle boots and reading glasses, eating ribs or stone crabs or ice cream. When I brought Jamie home for the first time, the door opened on a strange scene: my mother in a neck brace, which she wore when suffering from one of a dozen mysterious ailments. Without a word of hello, she said, “Have you seen your father?”

  “No,” I told her. “I just got in.”

  She walked out, and a moment later my father came in, opened the fridge, and asked, “Is your mother looking for me?”

  Before I could answer, he left with a chicken leg. Then my mother was back without the neck brace. She went to the freezer, took out a bottle of vodka, poured three fingers, tossed it off, and walked out. My father came in, smiling, sharing a joke with himself. He looked at Jamie and said, “Who is the new kid?”

  “This is my friend Jamie.”

  “Richie has always had real trouble keeping friends,” said my father. “I don’t know why. But for God sakes, son, be careful.”

  Then my father went out and my mom came back in, wearing the neck brace. “Is your father looking for me?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she left the room.

  Jamie said, “Is it like this every time?”

  I said, “It gets worse.”

  Ducking out of the kitchen, we made our way through the house, from the dining room to the living room, which had finally been furnished with chairs and tables that went out of style the moment they were delivered; to the library, filled with law books and plays by Eugene O’Neill; to the family room, that staple of suburban life, which had once been my bedroom but was now filled with couches and video games and an Apple II computer on which my father did not balance accounts, my mother did not store recipes, and I did not write term papers; through the red room which, before college, had been my brother’s, and the pink room which, before college, had been my sister’s—rooms as empty and forlorn as once-vibrant immigrant neighborhoods abandoned for better streets in the suburbs; through Dolmi’s room, the live-in housekeeper from Ecuador, who had dressed up her wall with a tremendous crucifix, an exotic presence in our otherwise secular home; at last we made our way to my room in the attic, that wild terrain north of the second floor.

  In my house, the attic had always been the frontier, the country where a man went in search of freedom. There was a couch, a television, a stereo, two single beds, and a window that opened onto a flat roof. In the summer, we would climb onto the roof, smoke cigarettes, and blow smoke over the gables and dormers of the Bluffs, the dark lawns and rusting basketball hoops, blue light flashing in windows where parents flipped from The Tonight Show to M*A*S*H. “This is the real Glencoe,” Jamie would say. “And when I am old, this is how I want to live.”

  Since the situation at Jamie’s house was less than ideal, he was soon sleeping at our house three or four times a week, in the single bed a few feet from my own. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he would wake me up to talk about a dream or a girl he could not stop thinking of. Or else he would speak of his childhood, the years before his father died, long long days around the house, like they were some kind of Eden. He spoke too of the state trooper arriving with the tragic news, and of his sudden consciousness of the sadness of the world, which he called his own personal fall from grace, as tormented and anguished as the fall of Adam. “You see, every man inherits the Fall but every man relives it too,” he told me. “Every man passes through all stages of man, as the embryo of a baby—and this is something doctors can actually see— passes again through all the stages of evolution.”

  One night, when Jamie excused himself from the dinner table, my father, home from a business trip and too tired to care much about anything, said, “It seems like that Drew-licious kid is here a lot.”

  My mother said, “Jamie lives here.”

  My mom began to treat Jamie like a member of the family, asking after his schoolwork, making sure he was home early on weeknights. We worked side by side in the attic, dashing off papers, clowning, and chewing tobacco. Now and then, after he had been around for several days, Jamie would simply disappear, meaning he had hooked up with a girl or stumbled upon some adventure. He might be gone for two or three days, but he always came back, in a clean shirt, smiling, telling stories. On those occasions, I was jealous of Jamie, of the places he went without me. My own existence, compared to his, seemed half lived. Often I greeted him with silence or cursed him for leaving me behind. “Oh, c’mon,” he would say. “Your time will come.”

  “When?”

  “When you’re ready.”

  But I could not stay angry at Jamie and was soon laughing at his jokes or asking him to repeat some off-kilter observation. “When you watch an old movie and you see a dog, did you ever stop and think that every one of those dogs is dead?”

  Finally, the last day of junior year, as kids tore up their textbooks and lit fireworks in the hallways at school, Jamie said, “Tell your mom you’re sleeping at my house. I’m taking you out and getting you drunk for the first time. That way, even when you are an old man, you will still think of me.”

  After school, I showered and put on a blue shirt with yellow stripes. Looking in the mirror, I asked myself, “Will Jamie like this shirt?” I said good-bye to my mom and went outside. At seven o’clock, I heard Ronnie say good-bye to his mom, start his car, and then he was at my house.

  A few years before, tired of taking schoolyard abuse, Ronnie had put himself on a strict weight-lifting program. Bit by bit, he had turned into a stocky, slow-moving monstrosity. He wore T-shirts that hugged his biceps and spoke mostly of cars, of turning radius and zero-to-sixty. When he got his license, he told us, he would soon be driving his mom’s vintage Porsche Spyder. His father, a serious Christian, instead gave him a car that had once belonged to his church group, a roomy blue Plymouth with yellow vinyl seats. Rather than complain, Ronnie put a happy face on this development and spoke of the size of his engine block. To prove his point, he jammed the accelerator and sent the car flying. Driving with Ronnie was harrowing. In his car, people actually fought to not sit up front. Once, riding shotgun with Ronnie, I struggled to fasten my seat belt and did get it fastened the moment before we hit a tree. Walking around the smoking ruin, he said, “It is not nearly as bad as I thought.” Jamie had asked Ronnie to drive only so we did not have to worry about drinking. In those days, Ronnie would do anything for Jamie. Like everyone else, he wanted to remake himself in the image of Drew-licious.

  “What about this shirt?” Ronnie asked me. “Will Jamie like it?”

  We drove through town to Jamie’s house. When Ronnie hit the horn, I said, “Sounds like my grandma’s horn.”

  Ronnie said, “Want to take a look at the engine block?”

  After a while, he turned off the car and we went in. Violet was standing in the doorway. She asked Ronnie to sit down and then walked around him like he was a tree. “I cannot believe it,” she said. “How did you get so big?”

  Ronnie did a sort of aw shucks thing, then said, “The gym.”

  Violet put her hand to her mouth and said, “You mean you did this to yourself on purpose?”

  As I walked upstairs, I could hear Ronnie ask for something to eat and Violet say, “You’ve had enough.”

  I found Jamie in the bathroom, sitting before a steamy mirror, brushing his hair. His reflection looked back through a porthole cleared in the mist. He was wet from the
shower and his body glistened; he wore white boxer shorts covered with dollar signs. “What do you think,” he asked. “Too boastful?”

  I sat on the edge of the bathtub and watched as he ran a razor under his chin. He had no hair on his legs and his chest was smooth. He opened a bottle of cologne, smelled it, made a sour face, closed the top, and said, “I prefer my own smell.”

  He pulled on a pair of cloth pants and a shirt that was the orange of the sky at sunset. He took a last look in the mirror and ran downstairs, where Violet was wide-eyed, head in hand, listening to Ronnie. “I do twenty reps of flies,” he was saying. “Then squats, then bench. And I gotta find a spotter, ’cause the weight I lift is heavy duty. So you know what I do?”

  “No,” said Violet.

  “I carbo-load.”

  Jamie grabbed Ronnie and a moment later we were in the Pontiac, heading south on Green Bay Road. We picked up Tom Pistone, whom we found in the garage behind his house, working on an engine with his father, who was young and blond-haired and handsome and wore a one-piece jumpsuit. Compared to my own parents, he was a strange comic-book creature.

  Wiping grease from his hands, Mr. Pistone cleared his throat and said, “Boys, I know you’re taking Tommy out for a big night, and why not? I also know that boys your age get hopped and blow your cool and, if a girl is present, maybe go off too soon, sometimes in your pants, to your shame and to the girl’s endless frustration. What I am saying, boys, is: For Chrissakes, have patience!”

  He reached into his jumpsuit and pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette.

  “So to help you, I invite you to share this joint, a hit or two of which will keep you calm and loaded for bear.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s the finest creeper weed, boy. Take a drag, and twenty minutes from now it sneaks up on you and pow! Takes you where you want to be.”

  Tom said, “Dad, I asked you to stop pushing that shit on my friends.”

  Tom’s father shrugged, lit up, and ducked under the hood, vanishing in a cloud of smoke.

  And we were back on the road, heading east, flying by cookie-cutter houses and overgrown parks, by kids walking home from Little League, cleats clattering on the pavement, or else entire teams, in jerseys marked with the names of sponsors—Marcus Opticians, Olsky Jewelers, Bressler’s 33 Flavors—celebrating a victory with two scoops. We rolled down the windows and a breeze blew off the lake, and it was sweet and filled with the summer ahead. Ronnie turned on the radio. We argued over the station. Tom wanted to listen to the oldies, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers. His favorite song was “Let’s Live for Today,” by The Grass Roots. Sometimes I caught him singing the words under his breath: “Sha na na na na, live for today. And don’t worry ’bout tomorrow, hey, hey!” I liked WLUP, the Loop, which played music that made you feel good about being born in Middle America— Springsteen, Petty, Cougar. Jamie wanted WXRT, which was New Wave and Punk. Ronnie liked the Beach Boys, but Ronnie did not have a vote.

  After a while, Jamie put his head out the window and looked at the sky. The stars were out. “Late enough,” he said. “Let’s go to McDonald’s.”

  McDonald’s was in the town just south of Glencoe; it had opened a few years before, amid much protest. The more staid elements of the community feared the fast food chain would upset the bucolic mood of the north suburbs. There were mass mailings, protests, meetings. In the end, the restaurant won approval in a referendum. To the kids it was VE Day, cheers and low-fives, uninvited kisses in high school hallways. In the first flush of victory, the owners of the restaurant agreed to build in the manner of the local architecture, with no golden arches and no big sign, the building as modest as a Swiss chalet. We called it Mickey’s or McDick’s or Mickey D’s—a frequent stop on our aimless nocturnal rambles.

  On weekend nights, kids from the shore turned up at the restaurant. They stood in the parking lot or sat on car hoods or crowded in front of the cash registers. There was endless conversation—what happened at school or what happened out front, a fight that had changed the social hierarchy. Mostly, there was talk of parties. You went to McDick’s when you wanted to find out whose parents were out of town. Standing in the parking lot, you heard about a party, drove over, drank until the cops broke it up, and then headed back to McDick’s.

  “Let me do the scoping,” Jamie said as we walked in. “I’m gonna move around and be careful and not hit on any party that is too soon to be overrun or that has been sniffed out by the McPig.”

  The McPig was Chico Ronga, an off-duty cop that McDonald’s hired to manage the weekend crowds. Chico carried a blackjack and a walkie-talkie, wore polyester pants and a mustard yellow windbreaker, and greased his hair back. He had a skinny waist and a tremendous gut, which he carried like a pot of gold, saying, “Out of my way, you little fuckers, or I’ll pulverize ya!” Chico was a working-class guy from the west suburbs. He hated the rich kids on the shore; he hated their manner, their clothes, their foreign cars; he hated their parents; mostly he hated that they called him the McPig. Each night he would eavesdrop. If he heard of a party, he called it in to the Winnetka police.

  Chico liked Pistone because they raced their hot rods on the same track. As Jamie walked through the crowd, Chico threw his arm around Tom and said, “Tommy, boy, ain’t seen you and your old man out at the course.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Tom. “When we come, we’ll come heavy.”

  Chico laughed. “I’ll pulverize ya!”

  Jamie walked over.

  “What about it?” asked Tom. “Any parties?”

  Jamie looked at Chico and said, “Let’s get something to eat.”

  Chico said, “The kid ain’t talking in front of the McPig.”

  We took a booth. Jamie said there was a party in West Wilmette at a kid named Jake’s house. “Good kid,” said Jamie. “And he has some kind of home-fermented shit we can try.”

  Ronnie said, “I can’t drink. It inhibits muscle mass.”

  As we were talking, Terry Montback came over with a tray of McNuggets. Montback was a forty-year-old guidance counselor from school; it was his job to talk to kids, listen, gather information. Sliding into our booth, he said, “How’s it hanging, Drew-licious?”

  “What’s going on, Mr. Montback?”

  “Just thought I could take a chow with you guys.”

  Like so many adults, Montback admired Jamie, the kid he could never be. He asked about our final exams and about our families, then moved on to his only real subject—the difference between his generation and our generation. “Just look at almost anyone under twenty,” he said. “What do they care about? In my time, we marched on Washington and protested Vietnam. Kids today care about nothing.”

  Jamie frowned and said, “It is not that young people now care less than young people then. We’re just not as stupid.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “In your time, you believed in your government, that it was good, that it would serve you,” said Jamie. “So when you became adults and saw that the world is corrupt, you took it as a personal insult. You thought, ‘My God! The world is corrupt! I must cure the world!’ So now, when you look back and see people like me who have no interest in being shocked or in curing the world, which, as you yourself learned, cannot be cured, you think we are lazy. But we’re not lazy. We’re smart. We know that the world is corrupt, that it always has been, and that it always will be.”

  “So you’ll do nothing?”

  “Well, I won’t become hysterical,” said Jamie. “I won’t convince myself that my personal discoveries are like the discoveries of Columbus. I won’t insult a generation of strangers by calling them lazy.”

  Montback got up and walked away.

  A few minutes later, we were back in the car, driving into the flat, featureless towns west of the lake. We sped through open fields, the soft wind whispering in the cat-tails. As we crossed the highway, looking south we could see Chicago on the horizon like a thunderhead. The west face
s of the tallest buildings glowed in the sunset. When we reached Wilmette, Jamie guided Ronnie, saying, “Left. Past the gas station. Cut through the cemetery. Think of the dead lying in the ground. Watch for the speed trap.”

  So the cops would not be tipped off by a street filled with cars, we parked a few blocks from the party, walked through backyards, and made our way to a wood house, as simple and insubstantial as a drawing in crayon. We knocked. For a time, we stood looking at each other in the porch light. A girl opened the door and said, “Drew-licious!” She led us down a hall to a room filled with music and conversation, boys holding bottles of beer by the neck, girls angling glasses to cut down on foam. It was like stepping into a speakeasy. I felt the excitement of being away from my parents, with new friends, far from the pettiness and humiliations of my past. Jamie said, “I’m gonna find Jake.”

  Tom wandered off, and for a time, I was left alone with Ronnie. He pretended to talk (brake pads), and I pretended to listen, but both of us were really watching Jamie. The party had broken up into smaller parties, groups of people in the kitchen and in the living room, gearheads around a car in the garage—the engine racing, falling silent, racing. Jamie danced from crowd to crowd, welcome in every group, too restless for any single conversation. We were still years away from cocaine, and yet, as he ran through the rooms, he looked like a speed freak, determined to let nothing pass him by. He wanted it all and he wanted it now.

  He found Jake in the garage and brought him over to me, saying, “This is Jake. This is Jake’s house. In the basement of Jake’s house is a bottle of home-brewed whiskey fermented by Jake’s brother, who is off in the city with the big kids. Jake has invited us to drink this poison together with him.”

  Ronnie said, “Is it safe?”

  “Nothing is safe,” said Jamie. “That’s why we do it.”

  Ronnie said, “My body is my temple.”

  Jake said, “It won’t kill you.”

  Jake wore overalls with nothing underneath and greasy hair pushed back and no shoes. His front tooth was chipped. He struck me as a sort of suburban Huck Finn, fiddling under the hoods of abandoned cars, sleeping on the beach. To him, everything was comical, and he laughed at the slightest suggestion of a joke. That night, he made me feel like the funniest kid alive, guffawing at my observations on the suburbs, house parties, the nature of man. Jamie said, “OK, funny boy, are you ready to drink this hooch?”