by Rich Cohen
The future wanted to define Jamie too—people could not look at him without seeing that empty space next to his name—but he would not let it. To him, the coming years were a trap he would find his way out of. He walked the halls with confidence, a plain sentence in fancy script, a bird puffed up with air. He wanted only a life free of other people’s dreams, open to the sensations of a greater world.
One afternoon, as I sat in Earth Science, a class everyone called Rocks for Jocks, and I looked at Ronnie—who, due to the mockeries of fate, shared my lab table—Jamie appeared in the doorway in jeans and the sort of colorful shirt Sammy Davis Jr. wore in his prime. When the teacher turned to the blackboard, I ducked into the hall, and Ronnie followed.
Blues Fest was being held downtown at Grant Park. Jamie unfolded a schedule of the festival and said, “Melvin Taylor is playing. Let’s go.”
“How can we just go?” asked Ronnie.
“Easy,” said Jamie. “We drive.”
We met Pistone in the commons and ducked out the back door. There was a shaggy-haired school official in the parking lot, a narc in a Members Only jacket, and as we climbed into Tom’s car he shouted at us, but Jamie turned up the radio and gunned the engine out onto the main road. We followed the lake past the big coast mansions. It was a thrill driving away from school, the red-brick behemoth fading in the rearview mirror.
Tom put the top down. The sun beat on my arms. Jamie smiled at me and said, “We must all do as the Buddhists do and live in the now—in the great glorious here and now.” For Jamie, this was, of course, a joke. He was making fun of all that New Age garbage we watched on late-night TV, but doing so in a way that said, Hold on, maybe there is something of use here. However, realizing that, since our minds were always racing ahead, it was impossible for people like us to actually live in the now (“For one thing,” he said, “not one of us has the right clothes”), he decided we should instead be satisfied to live in the five-minutes-from-now. “Keep your mind tuned to the moment just beyond this moment,” he said, smiling, “and that is where you will live, and that is where I will look for you.”
When we reached Chicago, it was windswept and golden. We stood at the foot of the John Hancock tower. It is almost a hundred stories tall. It goes up and up. If you look up too long, it makes you dizzy.
When we got to Grant Park, Tom, using his fake ID, bought drinks. We walked from stage to stage, sipping foam. The city, following the curve of the shore, rose and fell like the notes on a music staff. The water stretched to the horizon, as cool and clean as a sheet of marble.
Melvin Taylor came on at 3 p.m. We stood in the crowd, watching his fingers move up and down the neck of his guitar. Jamie was at my side. “This is my music,” he said. “It makes me feel like swaggering.” Then he was gone. A moment later, he was up on the stage—I still don’t know how this happened—dancing with one of the backup singers.
Tom said, “He’s not bad.”
Later on, we stood under the trees, thumping Jamie on the back, saying, “Fuck college, just dance.”
It was getting to be late afternoon, and behind us someone set off a bottle rocket. It climbed into the sky and then it sputtered and fell into the lake. We stood at the edge of the crowd, listening to horns and guitars, the cries of a singer. It was sad and not sad. In daylight, you always have a much sharper sense of what you are leaving behind.
I graduated from high school on a Wednesday night in June. The boys wore tuxedo pants and white dinner jackets and moved with the grace of lounge singers. Since there were a thousand kids in my class, the ceremony was divided into two sessions. Heading into the gym for the late session, I ran into Jamie, who was coming from the early session. He had already graduated and was being fussed over by his mother and grandmother. Isn’t it funny how people still make such a big deal out of a high school graduation? Pulling me aside, he said, “See how it works? With all your plans and even that acceptance letter riding in your pocket, it is me who graduates first. If the world ends right now—and don’t laugh, because the Bible is full of shit like that—I get the degree and you get nothing!”
He opened his jacket and showed me the flask tucked inside. “When you’re out, grab Molly and meet me down at Ming Lee.”
A few hours later, when we got to the lake, Jamie was on the shore, a bottle in his hand, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Smoke hung in his wake and he had an arm around Allison Drake, a girl he had been dating for maybe two weeks. He shook my hand. Allison laughed. Allison laughed all the time, but really she had one of the saddest faces I have ever seen—a long upper lip, high cheekbones, murky green eyes. Her brother was a few years older than us, owned a hearse, and drove it around with the windows open, blasting The Dead Kennedys. One night, Allison borrowed the hearse and parked it behind her church. She and Jamie had sex in back where they put the coffins. In the morning, when the Methodists of Winnetka turned up in their Sunday clothes to pray, Jamie was exhilarated. “So you know what I did,” he said. “I went in and I prayed right along with them—only I was different. God was up there winking at me, saying, ‘There you go, boy, go forth and multiply!’ ”
We built a fire on the beach and passed around a bottle of cheap wine. The night turned cold and there were whitecaps on the dark water. I do not remember what Jamie and I talked about, but I think we were very happy and spoke of our friendship and how it would go on and on. This was the age of irony, and people dared not show genuine affection. Between expressions of love, we would dismiss it all with a wave of the hand or say something like “Don’t go fag on me.” Now and then, I looked across the fire at Molly. We had been running downhill since I did not ask her to that big dance. I had decided to break up with her in the morning. And I missed her already. When I told Jamie, he said, “Ever notice how, whichever direction you walk, you’re walking away?”
An incident later that night delayed my plans. As Molly and I settled on a blanket near the fire, a strange warmth climbed up my legs. I felt sleepy and started to doze off, but Molly shouted, “You’re on fire! You’re on fire!” I jumped. The blanket was in flames and so were the cheap pants of my rented tuxedo. I danced down the beach hollering like Richard Pryor. Jamie coughed out the stink of burning polyester. Then, just as I accepted my long future in the burn ward, Molly knocked me down and buried me in sand. In other words, she put me out. How can you break up with a girl who has put you out? So instead we just kept on dating until it was clear to both of us that our fling had lost its flavor; it had been chewed out like gum. A few years later, I heard that Molly had fallen in with the football players and had even gone downtown to Rizzo’s to play the game. But by then I no longer cared.
Just before dawn, Jamie and I went for a swim. It is exhilarating to go swimming in the dark with the moon on the water. Past the pier, we turned and looked back at the shore. Jamie said, “You want to hear my plan? I call it Reach the Beach. I’ll hitchhike west, not stopping until the road ends, and I’ll swim in the ocean, which I’ve never seen, and the salt water will wash me clean. And on the way I’ll see some of America, and to tell you the truth I’m thinking of it as a kind of baptism, a second baptism, but this one I’ll give to myself.”
He then explained how, growing up in Illinois, we were buffeted, in every direction, by a thousand miles of rest stops. “It’s a part of our identity,” he said, “being the kids in the middle—in the middle of the country, in the middle of the road, in the middle of nothing.” By swimming in the sea, he hoped to return, in time for the last big summer parties, as a man of western sunsets and western skies. That is what he told me, anyway, and I admired him for it.
A few days later, I went to Jamie’s house and watched him pack. Shirts and pants stuffed in a duffel bag. Every few minutes, his grandmother poked her face in the door and said, “Why, Jamie?”
On our way out, his mother said, “You do not know the first thing about it, and you have no idea of the coldness you will meet.”
In the car,
I asked Jamie what his mother had been talking about.
He said, “Not even she knows.”
I drove out to the expressway and dropped him near the on-ramp. He promised to call and write, keeping me informed of every adventure. Then I watched him scramble down the embankment onto the shoulder of the road. He was wearing jeans and a faded work shirt. He stuck out his thumb, and in a few minutes an eighteen-wheeler pulled over. Jamie threw his bag on his shoulder and ran for it, climbing into the cab, and a moment later he was gone.
That summer, while Jamie was away, some friends and I organized a softball team to play in the local gasoline league. As the name suggests, many of the teams were sponsored by filling stations—Jean’s 76 was a dynasty— and were fleshed out by rough boys who spent their days under the hoods of cars. These were big fellas from the west suburbs, several years older than us, with greasy fingers and thick torsos. My friends and I were still smooth-faced, slender-hipped boys. Since the games could get rough, we only recruited kids we knew could play—high school athletes in search of a summer fling. We practiced on a field behind our old junior high, a rocky expanse a few blocks from town. Sometimes a group of girls would watch us practice. After driving a ball or making a highlight-film grab, you would turn and smile at the girls.
In my mind I can still run down the roster of our team, just as many Chicagoans can name the entire ’69 Cubs. At first base was Reed Cole, a big bear of a kid with a wide back and an ambling, doe-dee-doe-here-I-go walk. At second base was Tyler White, who later became a commercial prop pilot out of a regional airport that was described to me as “The O’Hare of northern Wisconsin.” At shortstop was Jordie McQuaid, who, when buying a pair of running shoes, told the saleslady, “I don’t care about all that shit, just tell me, Do they look cool?” On the bench during a hockey game, McQuaid once said, “After that goal, I could’ve had any girl in the stands, including the mothers.” At third base was Tom Pistone, who played in a daredevil style that featured many head-first slides. I played left field. In center field was Chick Young, whose face was as neatly cut as a copper penny. Rink Anderson was in right field. Our pitcher was a wannabe fire spotter who actually pulled off a pickoff play that requires the first baseman to hide the ball under his shirt. The catcher was whoever we could pick up at the last minute. On the bench to fill out the roster was Ronnie Flowers.
We called our team the North Shore Screen Doors. To us, the screen door was a lyrical symbol of summer. We had jerseys made up that showed a screen door with wide eyes and a spooky smile. On the backs were our nicknames. For myself I chose the nickname Desoto Andujar, which sounded (to me) like a Dominican prospect not quite good enough for the major leagues. This was the year of the Super Bowl Shuffle, so we even wrote up a little song to make clear our intentions: “We ain’t out there just to get a tan,/we’re out there doin’ the screen door slam!” On a schedule, however, the name read like just another one of the industrial concerns that played in the league: Wilmette Tread & Tire, Gary’s Sunoco, North Shore Screen Doors. As a result, upon first spotting us, opposition players always burst out laughing: “Look at these pretty boys from the North Shore! We’ll slaughter ’em!” Most of the games were played after dinner on a field at the edge of Glencoe under floodlights that could be seen across town. On a good night, a few hundred people packed into the rickety bleachers and followed the action on the hand-turned scoreboard. Beyond the lights was a stretch of oak trees. Train tracks ran through the trees, and now and then you could hear the whistle and see the light of the engine playing across the trunks.
Before games, as we took batting practice, Tom and I talked about Drew-licious. He had promised to write long description-filled letters, but I had heard almost nothing from him. One night, he had telephoned—a collect call from a bar, dead drunk, proclaiming the beauty of everything. Another time, he called collect and said he was in Las Vegas and a cocktail waitress was hot for him but he was too drunk to know how to proceed. I told him to write his room number on a napkin. It seemed like something Wayne Newton might do. Jamie said, “Yeah, yeah,” and hung up. Tom showed up to one game with a postcard, a few salutations scribbled on the back of a picture of Dinosaur Park. And that was it.
“Where do you think he is right now?” I asked.
“I bet he is walking down the road with his pack,” said Tom. “I bet it is hot as hell and he is parched and hoping for a ride.”
“Does he get one?”
“Hell, yes, here comes a pickup truck loaded with girls.”
The Screen Doors had gotten off to a rabbit start, winning four games in the first three weeks. It was a real pleasure to beat up on these big brawlers from behind the pumps. I still have a clear memory of Jordie McQuaid fielding a ball with a neat stutter step and flipping it to first base with a sidearm; of Tom Pistone tearing around third and diving into home plate in a cloud of dirt; of Ronnie Flowers reaching for a water bottle and spilling Gatorade across his gut. After each game we went out celebrating.
The summer before college was a summer of parties, cars parked up and down side streets, kids passed out in back lawns, sneaking with girls into locked master bedrooms, swiping booze from locked liquor cabinets, getting stoned in basements finished and unfinished, climbing chain-link fences, pool hopping, splashy cannonballs, and cops. Beer was a constant at these parties, sloshing in kegs, foaming in cups, turning the heads of beautiful girls who went dancing off into the lake. Beer, whatever we could get, Mickey’s or Pabst or Schlitz, pervaded each night like a dirty wind. The big song on the radio, much to our national shame, was “Wang Chung,” with the endlessly recurring chorus: “Everyone have fun tonight! Everyone Wang Chung tonight!” Before I took a slug, a friend would warn, “If you plan to Wang Chung tonight, please don’t drive!” Staggering to his feet, raising his cup, Pistone said, “Toast with me. To our friend Drew-licious, who at this moment is stepping across the Continental Divide.”
In July, the Screen Doors began to lose, sometimes in back-and-forth down-to-the-wire nail-biters, sometimes in blowouts. On occasion, the slaughter rule had to be invoked. I was the captain of the team. I responded by juggling the lineup, bringing beer to practice, banning beer from practice. Nothing worked. As we lost to filling stations from up and down the turnpike, as the wind carried each ball over our heads, as squalls from the east stalled each rally, I felt like the Fisher King of myth, suffering through a season of drought. To lose like this, week after week, seemed the worst kind of bad luck. When all else failed, I spoke to my father, who knew everything about baseball. He promised to come to our next practice.
He walked over from town, cigar in his mouth. He leaned against the backstop and watched us field and hit. His eyes followed the play. He made notes on a yellow legal pad. At the end of practice, he told me we were undisciplined, stupid, reckless. “Can I help you?” he said. “Yes, I can. But you must do exactly as I say. I will not have two coaches of this team.”
In those days, my father looked a great deal like Walter Matthau, a fact often commented on by minor acquaintances and strangers. For these people, my father was touched by the mystery of that minor deity, the celebrity look-alike. On a flight to Roanoke, West Virginia, he overheard a couple arguing across the aisle, the woman saying, “No, it’s not him.”
“It certainly is him,” said the man.
“Then why is he flying coach?”
“How should I know? Maybe he’s researching a role.”
To prove his point, the man then shouted, “Walter! Walter! Walter!”
It was this resemblance—the same jowls, fleshy face, high forehead, grand nose, humorous eyes—that convinced my friends to accept my father as their leader. Since Walter Matthau made such an excellent coach in The Bad News Bears, a movie we had grown up with and still loved, it was decided that Herbie could lead the Screen Doors back to glory. Before his first game, we gave him a jersey that said BOILERMAKER, Matthau’s nickname in the film. Of course, it was a kind of joke, but my father
took it quite seriously. At the next practice, he made us run wind sprints. “It’s all about conditioning,” he explained. “Late in the game, when those other guys are sucking air, you’ll have your legs.” There were double-play drills and triple-play drills, and we had to practice hitting to the opposite field. For the most part, my friends just shrugged off these drills. The only person who would do just as my father said was Ronnie Flowers. So my father worked with Ronnie, hitting fungoes, shouting out words of encouragement. “Thatta boy, Ronnie! Now throw, damn you, throw!” When I told my father he was wasting time, that Ronnie would never play in a game, he said, “We will see.”
And still, we kept losing. I could tell it was bothering my father. When, after an especially poor performance, he saw some of our players clowning in the parking lot, he said, “Of course they are Cub fans, nobody told them there is nothing good about being bad.” My father took a special interest in Tom Pistone, who he said was the best pure athlete on the Screen Doors. By helping Tom was he trying to turn back the clock? Was he trying to save his old pal Bucko? Tom was forever swinging for the fences, driving the ball hundreds of feet, where it died harmlessly in the glove of an outfielder. “So look what you have,” my father would say. “You have a long out.” He urged Tom to hit the ball on the ground, saying, “You will beat it out every time.” Tom followed this advice for a few weeks, smacking balls all over the infield, recording dozens of singles. In the end, however, swayed by the girls in the stands, Tom went back to the long ball. “That is the problem with your generation,” said my father. “You each want to do it alone by yourselves, and so you will each fail alone by yourselves.”
“Yes,” said Jordie McQuaid. “But we will look cool doing it.”
My father reached his breaking point at the end of July. He had flown home early from a business trip to make our game against Jean’s 76. He dropped his bags at the house and walked over to the field in his business suit and loafers. It was a blustery summer night. The floodlights cut a neat piece of green out of the darkness. Beyond the lights, trees strained in the breeze. Beyond the trees were streets lined with houses. The field was soft and moist, and there was the wonderful smell of cut grass. Now and then, the wind blew dust across the ground. Pistone, at third base, was yelling, “A little pepper, boys! A little pepper!” The bleachers were filled with people from town, some in shorts, some in khakis, and our girls were there, and so were some of the kids we knew from school. Ronnie’s father, Bob Flowers, was there and so was Sloppy Ed and the Korean guy who owned Ray’s Sports Shop, who shouted, “No shoes? You really need new shoes, huh?”
