Lake Effect

by Rich Cohen

  We decided that we should make a movie of this day as seen through our eyes and call it Two Dudes at Mardi Gras.

  We decided we should go downtown to Zulu, one of the great parades of Mardi Gras. Congo’s car was still parked behind Fat Harry’s. I told Jamie he should drive.

  Jamie said, “Do you realize how fucked up I am?”

  I said, “So is everyone.”

  He said, “Yeah, well, here is something I never told you. My father died in a drunk-driving wreck. He just had a couple of beers, but it was enough to send him across two lanes of traffic into a speeding truck. They had to pry him out of the wreckage.”

  Jamie had tears in his eyes. I started to cry too, and I hugged my friend. I told him I was sorry, to forget it, we would find some other way. After a long moment, he said, “You know what just happened? Two dudes at Mardi Gras just became two responsible dudes at Mardi Gras.”

  We congratulated each other and went outside to hitch. The bar had emptied out and there were no cars. We stood out there forever.

  Jamie said, “Fuck it, I’ll drive.”

  As he got behind the wheel, he said, “Two responsible dudes at Mardi Gras just realized Mardi Gras is no place to be two responsible dudes at Mardi Gras.”

  He buckled his seat belt, checked the mirrors, and started the engine. As we pulled out, a car stopped directly in front of us. It was a cab. It was empty. Jamie said, “See what just happened here? Two dudes at Mardi Gras just had responsibility thrust upon them.”

  The taxi sped us along Magazine Street, the shops twinkling like cheap jewelry. I stuck my head out the window and lapped at the wind like a collie. The cab turned sharply, and for a moment my face seemed to hang over the street like an effect in a Saturday morning cartoon— my eyes bugged out, smoke came from my ears, and then my head snapped back.

  Jamie said, “Easy, boy.”

  We got dropped off on Canal Street, where the few tall buildings of the city gather in conference. At Mardi Gras, the towers look as uncomfortable as men on the beach in business suits. Some of the buildings were covered in mirror glass, and you could see the sky reflected, the clouds as sluggish as wet cotton. I stood under a tree that must have been two hundred years old; the limbs were twisted like rope. I was amazed at the beautifully effortless way it climbed into the sky. The leaves shifted on the breeze, and with each gust they filled up like sails. The leaves were so green and so soft they looked like fur. I said to myself, “Whatever else happens to me, I will always have this tree.”

  “Here it comes,” said Jamie.

  In the distance, I could see the tall floats of Zulu. We fought our way to the front of the crowd. The men and women on the floats were dressed like storybook versions of old Africans, in war paint and elaborate headpieces, earrings, and nose bones. They shouted and danced and moaned. The parade began years ago as a put-on, the black community’s response to the all-white Crewes of Mardi Gras. In addition to beads, the marchers tossed out spears with rubber tips and coconuts. Every year, a few dozen people were brained by a coconut. In the economy of Mardi Gras, where beads can be traded for goods and services, mostly sexual, there is nothing more valuable than a spear from Zulu.

  Midway through the parade, Jamie grabbed a spear. It was like watching him take a bolt of lightning from a stormy sky. The crowd cheered. Across the street, a beautiful girl motioned to him. He said, “I am just going over to see what it is about, and I will be right back.” I told him not to go. “It’s too hard to cross. You will never find your way back. We have to stay together.” But there was so much chaos and noise, I don’t even think he heard me. He just said, “I will be right back.”

  Two feet from the curb, it was as if he were swallowed under the surface of a great river. A cop yelled at him. He vanished and a moment later surfaced on the other side of the street. I saw him talking to the girl, and he turned around and turned around again and then was lost. The sun glittered off the trumpets. The drums pounded. His spear disappeared in the crowd. For the next few days I encountered him only in stories, the battlefield reports of friends, or the friends of friends, who had seen Jamie on the street, in a bar, at a parade. He was moving through the city like a dervish, a step ahead of the crowd, of the cops.

  In New Orleans, during Mardi Gras, a black bus with black windows ghosts through the streets. If a cop sees something he doesn’t like—maybe it’s a fight, or someone pissing on a curb, or someone smoking a joint, or maybe it is nothing at all—he calls for the black bus, which is never beyond the next corner. And so here it comes, bounding through the evening smoke, with a tangle of stunned girlfriends and angry mothers in its wake. And out of the bus come a half dozen officers in riot gear, each face a smear behind its plastic shield, and billy clubs waving. And, just like that, it is over, another sucker loaded on the black bus. When the bus is full, it drives to Central Lockup, the city jail, where holding tanks overflow with the thousands of players who have lost at the game of Mardi Gras. If, after two days, no one comes to claim a prisoner, he is moved to Tent City, a fenced-in field on the outskirts, an echo of the Great Depression, a Hooverville of prisoners sharing cigarettes and telling hard luck stories. “Aw, man, this motherfucker got me coming out of Fat’s with a fistful of pills.”

  Many times that week, with the hours drifting by and no mention of Jamie, I feared he had been taken away by the black bus. But always, just before I went to bail him out, some bright-faced girl would race up and say, “I just saw your friend Jamie. He was over on Rampart Place. He was marching behind a band and shouting Payday! ” Or “Jamie is over on Freret Street, up on a float, dancing a shimmy.” Or “Jamie bought a round of drinks at Frankie and Johnny’s and vanished before the bill came. Even the bartender got a kick out of him.” When discussing Jamie, people spoke in three tenses: he was so fucked up, he is so fucked up, he is going to get so fucked up. Each time I raced off in search of my friend—to Rampart, to Freret, to Frankie and Johnny’s, where I paid the bill—he had always left just a few minutes before. “No, man, he’s gone. And too bad. He’s wild.” At one point, I actually caught sight of Jamie in the distance, on a wrought-iron balcony on the third floor of one of those old French houses on a back street in the Quarter. His eyes were closed, his arms were moving, and the sun cast shadows on his face. I shouted and waved but he didn’t hear me. There was a bouncer at the door, and though I pleaded he would not let me in. And then Jamie was gone, on with his batlike flittings across the city.

  On Fat Tuesday, I was in the French Quarter, standing amid the strip joints and tacky bars, squeezed by the clown-car crush of the crowd. The street was a tunnel of balconies twisting out of sight. The sky was filled with garbage and ash, and pieces of ash settled on my hands and stained my face. And then, exactly when it seemed there would be no end to this day, it got very quiet—the kind of quiet only a crowd can make. And before I knew it the crowd was being pushed, jostled, driven down the street. Up ahead, I could see a blue wall of cops. Within a few minutes, we had been forced into the drab, empty blocks of the business district. I was suddenly aware of the sun. We had been pushed from nighttime back into the day. In the distance, the police stood around talking. Behind them, municipal employees went to work with hoses and trash cans and brooms. Mardi Gras was over.

  I took the streetcar to Napoleon Avenue and walked through the Garden District: boulevards deserted, houses dark, cars snug in their carports. Here and there, a shop owner was sweeping a sidewalk; cabs ghosted by. Otherwise the city was asleep, drifting through its collective dream, each breeze carrying soft snores and zzzzzz’s rising like smoke from the chimneys. In the dorm, many of the doors were open and I could see the boys tucked into their beds, still wearing souvenir caps and beads. When I opened my door, I saw Jamie in my bed, stripped to the waist. The blinds were down, the slats filled with light. I touched his shoulder. He sat up, rubbed his eyes, and told me, as best he could remember, what he had been doing over the last several hours. And then he hesitate
d, and stammered, and shut up. It was as if he had suddenly realized that his stories, no matter how well told, would not keep, that their essence would not survive in the everyday world. So instead—and he would do this more and more as he got older—he just stopped talking. I suppose he had decided instead to keep his adventures in his mind, where they would lose none of their strangeness.

  I lay down on the other bed and was asleep before I untied my shoes. It was 4 p.m. I slept through the afternoon and the night and did not wake up until the next morning. I could hear voices in the street, and trucks and cars, and I knew that the strange city of the Mardi Gras was already gone. My shoes and clothes had been taken off and were stacked neatly on a chair. I found a note on the desk:

  Gotta get back. See you in Chi.

  ——Jamie.

  After finals, I packed my bags, went to the airport, and caught a flight home. From the window of the plane, Chicago, that great smoky town, rose out of the tablelands as clean and colorful as rock candy. Ronnie met me at the airport. He was driving a low rider with tinted windows and Little Feat on the tape deck.

  In just one year of college, Ronnie had executed a complete identity change. He went from clean-cut would-be jock and proud member of the hundred-pound club— Ronnie, at two hundred pounds, could safely bench-press three hundred pounds—to groovy drugged-out stoner, aviator glasses to hide his bloodshot eyes. He had begun the year at the University of Iowa, where he was a dashing frat boy; had gone, after a semester of failing grades, to Carl Sandburg College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he was a lost youth; and ended the year at the University of Miami, where he bought a gun, smoked his first joint, and killed targets at a shooting range. As we merged onto the tollway, he said, “If you want to score some dope, I got a man in Kingston. And don’t worry ’bout customs. He packs the shit in coffee beans.”

  In those weeks, I did not know what to do with myself. In many ways, I felt I had left this town behind and was now a man of the world. On occasion, I even called a movie a film or referred to a famous writer by a nickname. “So anyway, I was out in the woods, but of course I took old Doc Percy along.” And yet here I was, back in Glencoe, no place better to be. So I just wandered around, amazed at how tame and lifeless and sleepy and bland and empty and small everything seemed to me. Each afternoon, Tom Pistone came by in his GTO. He wore T-shirts and jeans, sat with boots on the lawn, pulled at the grass. Tom had cut his hair short and, as in the story from the Bible, had lost some part of his strength. Once the toughest kid in school, he had now become just another guy on the sidewalk. His friends still treated him with the greatest respect, though, as you will continue to call a president “Mr. President” even after he has been voted out of office.

  Jamie had taken a job painting houses. It was his own business, set up with some of the local boys. Kansas was cheap but not free, and Jamie needed the money for rent and tuition. For him, it was truly a summer of hard work. I would see him only at the end of a long day, wiped out but trying, with that deep, rough workingman’s tan, his boots dusty and speckled with primer, and his chest swelling from his trips up and down the ladder. He said he dug the view from the scaffolds: the geometry of low houses, porches and shrubs, front yard, pool in back, a girl sunbathing.

  If it rained, he would show up at my house in the early afternoon. If my father happened to be home, they would crash side by side in the family room, watching my father’s favorite movie, Gunga Din. By the second or third scene—Cary Grant fighting off a band of howling fanatics, killing for the love of Kali—they were both dead asleep to the classic summertime sound of rifle shots and tribal whoops coming from a beat-up TV. Otherwise, if Jamie got off late, we went down the street to get high with Ronnie and to watch him eat. Jamie said Ronnie had become a stoner because dope heightened his most acute passion—food. When Ronnie was stoned, his eating habits were indiscriminate. He ate jelly beans with ketchup, bananas in pickle juice, dry packs of instant oatmeal. One night, I opened a tub of butter in his refrigerator and saw where he had scooped a hunk, his finger marks as well preserved as prehistoric vertebrae in amber—the remnants of a lost civilization. “No more aesthetic concerns,” said Jamie. “Ronnie is now down to the guts of the matter.”

  I suppose this is the place in the story where I should say something about my father and how we began to fight, calling each other names, and how these fights turned violent because he did not understand me and would not let me grow up, because he was old and I was young. Maybe, for drama, I should say that Jamie, who had no father, moved in to fill the void, becoming closer than I was to my own dad. After all, I spent my first conscious years in the 1970s, when the notion of the generation gap, of sons against fathers, of a necessary patricide, became a social religion. Our after-school specials were full of it, as were our Movies of the Week. But the truth is, there never was anything like that between my father and me. Maybe each of us just believed too strongly in the comedy of everyday life, or maybe we just liked each other too much, or maybe, more realistic and less bothered than my older siblings, I was just not shocked to discover that my parents did not know everything. Don’t forget: I grew up after all those wars and hearings and scandals. I knew the world had fallen. If the world has fallen, everyone in the world has fallen too. Even my father. (But still I had Caddyshack and Bill Murray to say “Gunga, ga-lunga, gunga.”) So instead, in a very natural way, I began to drift beyond the old man’s jurisdiction.

  My mother was angry at me that summer—for doing nothing, for coming and going, for “using the house like a hotel.” At last, for my own protection, I began to look for a job. And that is when my real summer began, what I call the Summer of Bad Jobs. I spent most of June walking in and out of offices, cinder-block buildings, mall restaurants. I was questioned, looked over, filed, and rejected. At the end of the month, I was offered a job at Danny’s, a day camp for rich kids out in what my friends and I used to call Comanche Territory, the prairies in southwest McHenry County, where once, at a festival called the Taste of McHenry, I sampled fifteen different kinds of custard. Danny, a pot-bellied, buck-toothed rah-rah-rah suburban dad who often said, “We are about the we and not the I here at Danny’s,” fired me just three days into my second week, for, according to him, forming, among the seven-year-olds, a “cult of personality.” In his office, he spooked me by saying, “You are not the same Rich Cohen we hired.”

  Who is this other Rich Cohen, I wondered, and will we ever meet?

  A few days later, I was, in essence, picked up from waivers, hired on by Poppa George of Poppa George’s Pizzeria. The first night I was put in charge of something called the Beef Bar, where we served spaghetti cooked in what Poppa George called the “North Shore style”—a fistful of noodles held under a lukewarm tap. This was, said Poppa George, “our little secret.” At the end of my first shift, Poppa George, who was a foul-tempered old man, ran a finger across a plate I had not rinsed properly and said, “Boy, I’m disappointed in you.”

  I said, “You’ve known me for less than five hours, Poppa George. If you are disappointed in me, you’re a fool.”

  Poppa George slapped me and I quit.

  Then, in the strangest twist of the summer, I was hired, irresponsibly, as a counselor for mentally and physically handicapped adults. (My first New York résumés still carried this job, a ghost of some forgotten existence, listing my duties as “Supervising field trips, driving the handicapped van, dispensing medication.”) My charges were schizophrenics and other crazies. When I got home, my father would say, “Let’s hear it,” meaning the many surreal things that happened to me every day on that job. An old female mental patient told me she had found a penis in the trash, “a darling little penis.” At the bowling alley, a schizo, lip-smacking from a megadose of L-dopa, heaved a ball down the carpet into a Coke machine. A young woman who had no disability other than sheer meanness greeted me by saying, “Good morning, motherfucker. And I bet that’s what you do: fuck your mother.” On my birthday, she
gave me a card that said, You’re my favorite counselor, you little bastard. There was a tremendously fat patient named Wilbur who told me I looked like a young Jose Ferrer. Another patient, given the wrong pill (by me, by accident), recited a haiku and then passed out. One rainy day, for kicks, I brought Jamie along—the mean lady called him a shithead and Wilbur said he looked like Prince Charming, not in the film but in the illustrated books.

  By the beginning of August, having burned out, I was working on a road crew and as a part-time janitor for the Winnetka park district. It was as much responsibility as I could handle. We built playgrounds and cleared dead trees, and after storms we shoveled roadkill into the back of the park district truck. Most of the other members of the crew were drunk drivers sentenced to community service. Our bosses were the same lifetime custodians whose secret world of mop closets and playground cigarette breaks I used to wonder about in grade school. So now here I was, one of the boys, exchanging banter and shirking duties, taking the landscaping truck out on personal business. I spent most of my time with Santiago, a hardworking immigrant who wore overalls and floppy hats and had the dark, handsome face of a figure on a Mexican mural. Sometimes, a few of the convicts and I went off to get stoned—we hid in a scaled-down student-built replica of Abe Lincoln’s log cabin—but Santiago always found us. Creeping past the butter churn, he would shout, “You must produce!”