by Rich Cohen
In the bottom of the ninth inning, two Cubs reached base. The wind picked up. Trash blew along the ground. A hot-dog wrapper danced out of my fingers and onto the field. It blew through the legs of the outfielder and was kicked away by the shortstop. The lights blinked on in the press box. The left fielder looked at the sky. A raindrop fell. It stained the dirt on the warning track. Spectators headed for the tunnels. The ground crew stood at the edge of the field. Jody Davis, a Cub with big freckled arms, came to the plate, watched two pitches go by, plucked at his jersey. The next pitch was inside. Jody swung. A flashbulb went off and the moment was frozen in the light: this big kid swinging from his heels, the catcher rising out of his crouch, the sky a moment before the cloudburst. The ball landed a few rows behind us in the bleachers. A guy with a huge gut held it aloft. Jamie said this guy would no doubt open a restaurant and call it The Guy Who Caught the Ball’s Place. “People will come in and ask, ‘Is the guy who caught the ball here?’ And the hostess will say, ‘Sorry, he only comes in on weekends.’ ”
The Cubs spilled out of the dugout and stood around home plate waiting for Jody Davis—just a kid living one of those moments that sports can deliver, a tiny epic, like a feat from a storybook. When Jody reached home plate, he vanished into a shower of back slaps, and the sky opened and it started to rain.
Jamie and I followed the crowd through the tunnels and into the rain. People were cheering and high-fiving. I asked Jamie what happened to the girls. He shrugged. To me, situations like that never mean anything unless they lead to other situations. Jamie said that no other situations were necessary—those girls had already been as much fun as they were ever going to be. As he said this, we were following a sea of wet backs across Addison Avenue to the El. Water ran in channels along the curb. Jamie threw his head back. His shirt was soaked and it clung to the folds of his body, each as carefully drawn as the shadings on a blueprint. I shook the water from my hair and slicked it back. I saw my reflection in the glass of the station door. I felt sinister. Jamie said I looked like a gangster. In the distance, I could hear a roll of thunder. A train was waiting. We piled on and tottered off into the storm. The windows were steamy, and through the glass the passing yards were lush and green. We sped by the wall that almost took off Jamie’s head. When I pointed it out, he said, “Are you crazy? Nothing can kill me.” With each stop, some more people got off, until the train was just us and a few old-timers heading to the suburbs in the rain.
Jamie and I got off the train in Evanston and stood in front of a liquor store until a guy in the parking lot agreed to go in and buy us beer. He came out with a six-pack of Budweiser. I offered him an extra five bucks, but he refused it. Walking down Green Bay Road, we took turns holding the bag. Cars had on their headlights. Jamie stuck out his thumb. A Volvo stopped and we ran to the car, each with our own fantasies about some lonely housewife, but inside were two girls from school, a year younger than us and cute.
We drove through the little towns along the shore. Jamie talked about the summer and the summer parties and told the girls we had a six-pack and wanted to be dropped off at the Glencoe beach. He asked if they wanted to come along.
One of them said, “In the rain?”
When the girls dropped us off, we could see patches of blue sky. The girls said they would try to come by later.
We walked to the gate where on most afternoons a life-guard checked beach tags, but the rain had closed the beach and the gate was locked. No one was around. We climbed over the fence and followed a steep road down to the water, walking between the thick oak trees, the leaves dripping with rain. Between the trunks I could see the stormy surface of the lake.
We left our shoes on the road and went across the beach. It was damp and firm. The sand was cool between my toes. In the distance, there was a group of those Midwestern kids who think of themselves as surfers, even though they live a thousand miles from a decent wave. These kids were dreamers, listening to the Ventures and Dick Dale, reading surf magazines, driving around in station wagons loaded with surfboards, and hoping for even a modest storm that might generate a chop. Just now, they were in wetsuits, paddling out into the water. We went the other way, past closed-up food concessions and boats that had been pulled up onto the sand. Jamie went out onto Ming Lee, lay on his stomach, and looked into the water. It was very clear. He dropped the beer and it fell to the bottom, sending up a plume of sand. A gull wheeled far above. The lake smelled fresh and clean.
We walked along the beach. Jamie left his pants and shirt on the sand. His body was like carved wood, with broad shoulders and a slender waist. He was tan. I followed him out into the water. The rain started, drops jumping off the surface. I dove under the water and swam along the sandy bottom. It was quiet and cool. When I came up, Jamie was far ahead, swimming against the current. A few minutes later, I climbed onto the raft, wooden planks with a diving board. Jamie was stretched out on the raft in the rain. It drummed against his body.
The rain let up and I sat on the edge of the raft, my feet in the water. The sun shone through the clouds and beams of light went far down into the lake. I could see mossy rocks on the bottom. On the surface, the water was as smooth as glass. Fish jumped. Looking north, I could see the shore and the houses built into the ravine, white houses with black roofs, and the wet road with traffic going along it. Far away, I could see the haze over the city. In that moment, the lake seemed to me a great ocean, rimmed by cities and towns, Chicago and Milwaukee on its western shore, the colleges of Michigan on its eastern shore, the industrial wastes of Gary and Hammond, Indiana, on its southern shore, and, on its northern shore, the blue-black forests of the Upper Peninsula, with its sawmills and ragged docks. I thought of the ships sunk deep in its canyons, skeletons in the galleys.
Jamie sat up and said, “Over there.”
Far up the beach, holding a shopping bag, were the two girls who had dropped us off. Jamie called out to them, waved, and went off the diving board. I could see his body knife through the water, sharp and clear, gliding along the bottom. He came up once, took a breath, and dived back down. The next time he came up holding the beer, which by now was cold. He walked along the shore, hugging himself. He called to the girls. I slid off the raft and swam to the beach.
And those strange overcast afternoons that would come in the middle of the summer, in the very hottest part of the season, as a respite or a remission, with the lake churned up and a cold wind, so much colder for being out of place and unexpected, blowing in from some far-off north country. The kids would wander through town in sweatshirts and long pants and flip-flops, huddling in the diners and the record shops; or stand on the beach in the damp wind, the kind of wind that has always made me certain there is no God or, in another mood, that there is a God; or wade into the surf—yes, in the Midwest, we call it surf—which on those cold days always felt so wonderfully warm. It was those afternoons that made you see the summer as fragile and precious and transient, and compared to them the hot days were a mindless idyll.
One evening, as I was driving home, coming up the rise that climbs into the Bluffs, moving into the thicket of houses, each with its own story and its own parents and its own kids—and at this stage in my life I considered it my job to know every one of those stories—I forgot, for one strange moment, just who I was. I am not suggesting that my mind failed, or that I suffered from some kind of amnesia; it was only that, for a moment, coming into this lane of familiar houses, the things of my life—my name, my parents, my siblings, my sports, my friends, my pastimes—became detached from me; it was as if I could see them at a distance. It was a wonderful moment. I thought to myself, If I am not those things, what am I? And I knew at once that I was the one who was driving this car, and that I was the one thinking these thoughts—that I was something more than the sum of my parts. For that moment, I was afraid of nothing, because I knew I would survive even when the details of my life had faded away.
By the time I reached the house, with the lights
in the windows and my father in the garden, my life had already reclaimed me.
In September, the nights were cool and the leaves on the trees began to turn color. At school, it was talk of exams and college visits to the Big Ten. (On a trip to the University of Illinois, I slept in a frat house, saw strippers, watched college football, and vomited.) Every Saturday morning, I went to a prep class for the SATs, a big play late in the game to make up for years of bad grades. The class, in a humdrum brick house in Northfield, was taught by a high school English teacher who had retired to tend to the needs of her husband, Ernie. Two hours into each session, we would hear a yawn and a belch. A moment later, the man himself would emerge in his bathrobe.
He would say, “You kids getting any smarter?”
We took a break while our teacher cooked some eggs for Ernie.
The class was taught around the dining room table, and after the break we made room for Ernie, who, as he ate, watched us as you watch a TV game show, calling out the answers. He argued over the meaning of antonyms and synonyms, shouting, “Bullshit! I call bullshit!”
Jamie met me after each class, or else he was waiting back at my house, watching my father watch football. We would then head to the attic, where we listened to music and he asked what I had learned in class. For the first time, I began to feel a strain between Jamie and myself. It was as if our futures were taking hold of us. He did not have the grades or the money for the colleges where most of our friends would apply. He had only himself. I, on the other hand, had a father and a mother who were busily charting and scheming my next step. On occasion, I felt like one of those trees my father planted in his garden, a fragile tree, like the pink flowering dogwood, that the books said would not survive the northern wind; a tree that, by sheer force of will, my father had brought to bloom.
When I asked my father why he was going to such trouble, he spoke of the world and how it is organized into tracks, inside and outside. Get on the inside track, he said, and there’s less distance to travel. On the inside track, you will find jobs and homes and upward mobility. On the outside track, you will cover more ground but still not get as far. My father was not one of those fathers who spoke of hard work as its own reward. History and his own experience had taught him that the world is often run on connections and that, in such a world, the best you can do is be on the inside of those connections. Jamie had no such sense of the world and no one to teach him. So side by side we walked into meetings with halfwit guidance counselors, but we carried ourselves quite differently. I was looking to the years ahead with trepidation but also hope. Jamie did not talk of the future, or of college, though he said he would find somewhere to go. He was simply enjoying his last months of high school, untouched by the ups and downs and heartbreaks of his own past, living in a pocket cut by his style and gestures. If questioned, he would say, “I’m taking it, little brother, one heartbeat at a time.”
We took the SATs on a Saturday in October. “This test will be the end of me,” said Jamie. In a room on the second floor of our school, I checked the tips of my pencils. Very sharp. In that moment, I had a vision of kids all across America crowding into high schools, sitting at desks, checking pencil points, passing back exams, and waiting for the proctor to say, “Ready, begin!” And then the heart-pounding moment when you turn over the sheet and spot that forest of empty circles. I recognized myself as part of a generation, a nationwide collection of kids, each the product of the same songs and jokes, each facing something like the same future. We were the kids who grew up after disco, which taught us, even more than communism, to fear big ideas.
I could hear the pencil scratches of students getting ahead. Boys and girls at desks, heads down. In a flash, I glimpsed the Reaper moving among them, cutting down the chaff, saving many for lives of quiet desperation, selecting a precious few for summer homes and private jets. I thought, These bastards are out to get me! Take my spot, go to my college, be loved by my parents. I believed I was at last seeing the real world. But just then I spotted Jamie, dark-eyed and grinning as he filled in the boxes. He looked up at me and shrugged. I smiled, read the first question, and in a moment was just another kid at another desk in America.
After the exam, a bunch of us drove to Sloppy Ed’s. The hamburger stand stood at the end of a damp street, the windows steamed over. Inside, the air was humid and warm. Ed was behind the counter, his thick hands buried in his apron. He had a tough old-world face. Whenever I saw him, I heard accordions. “You took that test today,” he said. “So I’m feeding you for free.”
I asked why.
He said, “Oh, because I hate crap like that.”
We ate at the counter as Sloppy Ed told us lies about his days in the navy, fighting in ’Nam, and his stint as a circus strongman, about alligator wrestling and how to tell a real blond from a fake: “Look at the mother.” Then we went outside to watch the sunset. In Illinois, night comes on slowly, the sun dying into the fields, light on the horizon separating like the contents of an unstirred cocktail. Jamie said, “See it now, because when it goes, it’s gone.”
Weeks went by, each day shorter than the day before. Our tests were off wherever ungraded tests go. For the moment, the future left us to settle back into our old lives. In November came the first mornings of frost, each blade of grass glistening with ice and casting a shadow. One day, the sky filled with clouds and gusts rattled the windows and the first flakes of snow fell onto the fields. Everything looked strange in the snow, the branches of the big trees weighted down, front yards as crusty as birthday cakes. After school, we stood in the road, fishing for rides. Creeping up behind an idling car, we would take hold of a bumper, bend our knees and skitch off through the slush. A well-chosen truck might carry you for over a mile. It was like flying. When we got home, our faces were wind-burned and we drank hot chocolate or stole sips from the whiskey bottles my parents received as gifts but hardly ever drank. Sometimes we ducked into the shed behind the house and smoked a joint, the acrid smoke hanging in the cold air. Then, filled with profound thoughts, we stretched out before the living room fireplace and watched our shadows dance. Jamie said, “This summer, after school, I think I’ll just take off. We live in this great big country, so why settle for this flat little corner of it?”
The winter went that way. I do not remember much else about the days except that they were very cold and we had to wear many layers of clothes and sometimes my hair froze stiffly on my head. By March, the snow turned gray along the roads, and walking in the fields your boots broke through the crusts of ice, and at night the windows filled up with your own reflection, pale and sickly in the dead months of static electricity and random shocks. Winter in Chicago is dark and lonely, and we survived it by going to house parties and studying calendars, imagining the solstice swinging toward us in the night. Then one day it was not so cold, and the next day was even warmer, and the snow turned soupy by afternoon and we were certain that spring was coming. As we walked in the streets of town, the sound of snow melt was everywhere. Jamie said, “With my help, you will now find a girlfriend.”
Over the next several weeks, Jamie set up double dates with every kind of girl at school—smart girls and not-so-smart girls, stoned-out girls and girls bound for Harvard or Yale, marching-band girls and girls with nothing much going at all—a plethora, a poo-poo platter, a buffet of nights that began with Jamie racing from his house in some new outfit: linen pants, leather jacket, a cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled, leather shoes, a fisherman’s cap, pointy black cowboy boots. And then we were off to Highwood or Lake Forest, girls peeking out from a living room window.
In a sense, it was the same night again and again, with only a change in backdrop—Beinlich’s on the highway, where we ate cheeseburgers and apple pie; the second-run dollar-a-pop movie theater in Highland Park, where we watched Lost in America, three times; Sam and Hy’s in Skokie, dreary old Jewish Skokie, for my all-time favorite, a root-beer float, a scoop of vanilla ice cream melting into its own foam
; or just flying through those sleepy little towns that spill down to the dark water of the lake. In the rearview, Jamie whispered to his girl as the split-levels and convenience stores tumbled by.
And later, walking the girl to her door, or along the shore of the secret beach, and the strange sensation of a hand resting in my own, sometimes dry, sometimes damp, the perfume, kissing or being kissed. (It was a great surprise that a girl would let me kiss her, as it would later be an even greater surprise that a girl would let me sleep with her. I still believe it’s only convention that convinces a girl to sleep with a boy. After making love, or what on The Newlywed Game they used to call whoopee—“Where is the strangest place you and your wife ever made whoopee?”—I would sometimes hug a girl and say, “Thank you, thank you. That is the nicest thing anyone has ever let me do!”) Then the drive home, tipsy and reeling. If I was stoned, Jamie would set the cruise control to prevent me from slowing to a crawl. Halfway down my street, I would flick off the headlights and drift into the driveway. We would then sneak up to the attic, climb into the twin beds, and go over the night scene by scene, Jamie giving advice.
Here is what he told me: Greet girls with a broad smile; be engaged at the beginning, indifferent at the end; never be too nice to the parents; talk sometimes about poetry, sometimes about fights; be friendly to the loneliest kid in school because the loneliest kid in school needs friends; now and then, when you are out having fun, ask yourself, “What is Ronnie doing tonight?” Be humble in the knowledge that Ronnie is doing nothing, or else he is in his basement lifting weights, which Jamie called “heavy things in no need of lifting.” One night, Jamie, reaching across the space between the beds, touched my arm and said, “Here is the most important thing—do not work too hard. Sit back and let people paint themselves onto you. Don’t fight it. Let them see in you whatever they want to see. Let them do the work.”
