The reason it came to Gina’s phone was due to my own stubborn refusal to use a cell phone. I intended to become the last person in America without one. With each passing year, I was certain I could attain this goal. Gina, having grown frustrated with this resistance, had bought me one for Christmas, a slim black Samsung Intensity II “messaging phone.” For months I refused to turn it on or learn how to use it. These are the types of goals I set, stubborn matters of self-created principle. (This is the kind of person who resolves to build his own coffin, out of spite.)
This trip to New York was Gina’s and my second one that spring, an unusual amount of travel for us, a couple of perpetually broke Ohio homebodies. In March, just before that birthday party of my dad’s, we’d spent my forty-seventh birthday in Greenwich Village, along with John and his girlfriend, Chelsea. Other than Gina, John had been my closest friend since college, and he had always made a particular ritual out of celebrating my birthday, which falls on St. Patrick’s Day and therefore is very easy to celebrate in a particularly ritualistic way. Not long before my fortieth, he announced at my kitchen table one evening before we departed for a concert that he was taking me to New York, the city we both loved, to roam around the Village and have lunch at Great Jones Café on the Bowery and window-shop for sneakers in SoHo and see Black 47 play at BB King’s in Times Square. He’d already bought the tickets and booked the hotel. When I protested that it was too generous, he responded with characteristic flatness: “Life is short.”
John was not particularly expressive, but he was adept with catchphrases and could make even that seemingly empty cliché meaningful. John’s life had been dramatic enough for him to have earned the sorts of one-liners usually reserved for B-movie loners and Groucho Marx. We often joked that I could never write his life story because it would come off like bad Loretta Lynn. Years before, for example, in an ultimately futile attempt to save their failing marriage, John and his wife built a dream house in a bucolic village outside Akron. Immediately, it was struck by lightning. When he rushed home from work to address the damage, he spotted his dog on the roadside, dead.
He would recount these stories, cock his head, and intone, “It’s a hard-knock life.”
In our younger days, we were what might have been called wingmen, though it’s a term we would have used only ironically. We were born the same year, graduated from the same high school, became best friends in college, sharing almost every interest. He studied art; I studied writing. We married a year apart, groomsmen for each other. Gina and I bought an old house in Akron, then John and his wife did the same a few streets away. They had a son, then we had a son. They had another son; we had a daughter. We each put down permanent roots in our hometown. John settled into a successful career at Roadway Express, one of Akron’s iconic homegrown companies; I found my place at the Akron Beacon Journal, the local newspaper.
By middle age, John had become my one friend who still wanted to go to see bands play, who was willing to take road trips to Pittsburgh or Cleveland, who took me to new galleries, and who I knew would read the books I loaned him. I kept writing and he kept reading what I wrote, and he kept painting and I kept looking at what he painted. He was divorced and single, with shared custody of his two teenage sons, a corporate job that had him traveling around the world, and a carnivalesque series of girlfriends. I was married and stable. We struck a good balance: he helped keep me interesting; I helped keep him grounded.
New York never lost its luster for us. Maybe because it represented a kind of shared history; maybe because it represented possibility, something even more precious the longer life goes on. As teenagers in the early eighties, we began exploring underground music and culture together, which wasn’t easy to access in pre-Internet Akron. On his suitcase-size VCR, John faithfully recorded episodes of Night Flight on the USA Network. In his parents’ basement, we watched Eraserhead and the Clash film Rude Boy. It was an education, the pursuit as exciting as the discovery. We were acutely aware that New York City was only a day trip away. Manhattan, especially then, was such a different place from our city, dangling the trashy exotica of CBGB’s, the Chelsea Hotel, Bleecker Bob’s, and Afrika Bambaataa—all within reach. Like Ohio boys since the Jazz Age, we romanticized a New York City that probably doesn’t exist, save for the Ohio boys like us who create it.
Our senior year in high school, the spring musical was My Sister Eileen, about two artistically minded sisters relocated from Ohio to Greenwich Village, seeking their dreams. It was not lost on me that the play was based on autobiographical vignettes written by Ruth McKenney, who herself had migrated from Akron to New York.
Nor was it lost on John—an avid auteur of jumpy eight-millimeter short films—that much more recently, Jim Jarmusch had left his hometown of Akron for New York and become an underground icon. His film Stranger Than Paradise—with key locations on both the Lower East Side of Manhattan and in nearby Cleveland—offered visual, almost mappable, evidence of the juxtaposition that was possible for any of us. It made the romance of New York seem not so very far away. As an art student at the University of Akron, John took a class field trip to the city and returned brimming with excitement and stories, an advance scout of sorts who’d discovered early hip-hop and graffiti and giant slices of pizza with vegetables on top.
* * *
The upside of traveling with John was that he took care of everything. The downside of traveling with John was that he took care of everything. It might be unfair to call him a control freak, but he was certainly a control aficionado. If it was a car trip, he drove and knew all the directions and potential detours. If it was a concert, he had preordered the tickets and distributed them as we stood in line. When the dinner check came, he had already slipped his credit card to the server. On our trips to New York, where he visited frequently, he knew in advance which restaurants we would eat at and which museums we would visit. He had made the reservations. He knew where the Joe Strummer mural was in Alphabet City and that he would have me pose there for a birthday photo. He knew where to get Tex-Mex at three in the morning. He knew the best place to watch the St. Patrick’s Day parade, which turned out to be on the television in an Irish bar a few blocks away from the actual event, where he could flirt with the red-haired bartender.
For this most recent visit, he’d made arrangements for his frequent-guest discount rate at the Washington Square Hotel; he and the doorman, a charismatic man in a long heavy coat, had a long history together. Knowing that John was coming, the doorman had brought him a gift—a bottle of his homemade hot pepper sauce, which he presented to John as we checked in. John had also obtained four tickets for a St. Patrick’s–night Pogues concert at Terminal 5, and had somehow learned about and gained access to a preparty somewhere in Grand Central Station. (Do people go to parties in Grand Central Station? Such things were unknowable to me.) He had plotted the plausibility of getting into Sunday brunch at Prune, a restaurant in the East Village that was the emergent buzz spot for Sunday brunch. The owner, Gabrielle Hamilton, had just released her memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter, which would debut that very Sunday on the New York Times Best Seller list. There is no logical reason that a middle-aged man from Akron, Ohio, would know that Prune was the place to be on that particular morning, nor that he would know what to say (and I still do not know what it is that he said) to the hostess that got us a table while a sidewalk full of elaborately bearded East Village hipsters idled astride their one-speed bicycles, waiting in vain.
He never did this because he was desperate to be relevant. In fact, he was intentionally invisible most of the time, much more facilitator than agitator. He didn’t like attention. It was just this curiosity that he had, a sincere, hungry interest in certain parts of life.
And so we found ourselves in a little bottom-floor corner that Sunday morning at Prune, John and Chelsea and me and Gina. We were served Bloody Marys, and these Bloody Marys were transcendent, they were glorious, they took off the tops of our heads. If Walt Whitman
had written Bloody Marys, he would have written these. The swizzle stick was made of beef jerky, with a fat glob of wasabi on the end.
The night before, around one A.M., we’d been walking up Twelfth Street, and just past the Strand bookstore, we were confronted by a moon the likes of which we’d never seen. From behind a drifting cloud, it appeared: a moon as close and bright as an enormous cup of milk. And then, when we got back together the next morning, the first day of spring, and were sipping these Bloody Marys, John, who always knew everything first, informed us that we’d just seen our first supermoon.
* * *
Now, three months later, Gina and I were back in New York, at the farthest tip of Long Island, sitting in the sunshine sharing a plate of french fries as the seashore whooshed gently a block away from us. Gina read the text to me. “Why would John want us to call?”
I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know.
I dialed John’s number. It took me to voicemail. “Hey, John. I got your message. We’re in New York. Call me back?”
There was no return call.
When we arrived home two days later, another message was waiting. John had cancer. Esophageal. He hadn’t told anybody. He’d been in surgery all day, the day after he’d called. They took out his esophagus. His two-word text—“Call me”—had represented a last-minute lapse in his usual stoicism, something I’d seen only a few times before. He hadn’t been planning to tell anyone. But then, just for a moment, he’d wanted to allow me in.
* * *
Gina and I entered the hospital room that afternoon. John’s parents and his brother and sister were there, as well as his two sons and his ex-wife.
With no preparation, I was confronted with a version of my friend I never could have imagined—washed out and bruised-looking, a confusion of tubes and wires, uneasy in half-recline, this man, whom I thought of as a young man, who was my exact age, with whom I had shared so many of life’s trivialities and indulgences, never with any consideration of ultimate outcomes, with whom I had specific plans to drink absinthe—I had no idea what to say. The words came out on their own: “What the fuck?”
He started to laugh, and all I could do was laugh back.
I was mad at him for keeping this a secret, and confused by his laugh because it was so familiar and unchanged despite everything else. When he laughed, he was himself. As if none of this had happened. We sat for a while, uneasily. Soon everyone decided it was time to let him rest, and when we walked out together, John’s ex-wife told me that was the first time he’d smiled since all this began. And in a way that had never been so clear, I knew that he and I needed each other.
* * *
So that became the cancer summer. My dad was diagnosed with his throat cancer just a couple of weeks before John. He began a regimen of trips to the Cleveland Clinic, where he’d been fitted for a contraption that looked like Alexandre Dumas’s iron mask, a harness that held his head immobile while radiation was fired into his throat. John was undergoing chemotherapy simultaneously. They ran into each other on occasion in the clinic’s cancer wing, greeting each other, part of a private club. Some days I drove my dad to his appointment, and sometimes on the highway we talked about this coffin idea, partly as a distraction but also as a way to somehow address the general notion of mortality that was so unavoidable that summer. It was taking on a new meaning, but one that I couldn’t fully get my head around.
* * *
One afternoon, after returning from the hospital, I sat with my parents in the screened porch, and we got onto the question of the difference between the words “casket” and “coffin.”
My mother loved word games. She may in fact be the only civilian in the entire Great Lakes region ever to have owned a complete set of The Oxford English Dictionary, an impressive regiment of twenty tall, thick blue spines that covered nearly four feet of shelf space and contained the history of every word in the English language. Because her crossword addiction required a steady supply of reference books, my mother for years had goaded my father to buy her a full set of the OED for her birthday. My dad (correctly) thought this was impractical and extravagant and, at upward of a thousand dollars, unreasonable. But my mother, who was crazy the way everyone’s mother is crazy—in her own sweet way—used his resistance as fuel for her utter certainty that she needed the OED, she deserved the OED, and finally, he, having endured a lifetime of this kind of persistence, relented.
He called me one day and put me on the task of researching where and how one might obtain the comprehensive lexical resource, presuming, I guess, that a degree in English somehow qualified me for the job. I eventually connected with a friend who managed a bookstore, and we ordered a set, which was delivered to my house in several heavy crates.
Not far into this acquisition process, I began to indulge a secret, slightly morbid, yet unavoidable calculation. At some point my mother would die, and this unwieldy set of books would become a family liability. My mother’s survivors would be looking for a place to dump it. And I almost certainly would be the obvious beneficiary, and how awesome would I be then, with the complete, unabridged Oxford English Dictionary on my shelves. Seriously—there are libraries that don’t even have a set.
Which I suppose is to say that my mother was crazy in the same way everyone’s mother is crazy: in a way that is uncomfortably close to how I am.
* * *
casket ('ka:skit, -ae-), Also 6 caskytt, 7 cascate, 9 casqued. [Of uncertain etymology: the form suggests a dim of CASK; but casket in fact occurs earlier than cask, and is without precedent as to meaning in Fr. or other lang.
1.a. A small box or chest for jewels, letters, or other things of value, itself often of valuable material and richly ornamented.
When I first looked up that word in Vol. III of the blue-spined books on my parents’ shelf, my mother was easing out of her own cancer cycle. After a rough recovery from throat cancer, she had just passed the five-year all-clear designation from her oncologist: the chemo and radiation that had so ravaged her had done its dirty work. Not that she was cured, exactly, but she could proceed with confidence. And so could I and the rest of our family. In some ways, despite the terror and the grind of that experience, her ordeal hadn’t triggered the full notion of mortality in me. I’d paid attention to the doctors as I listened in on her consultations, and I’d researched the science as much as possible, and for all the ways that one could—and does—reconcile such hard truths, I’d chosen to settle on this: that she was very lucky to have gotten cancer in the time and place that she did, at the turn of the twenty-first century, with all its advanced treatment, and thirty miles from the Cleveland Clinic, which employs some of the best doctors in the world.
My mother’s cancer didn’t prompt me to start thinking about death. It prompted me to start thinking more directly about the extension of life. In the midst of her radiation treatments, I quit smoking cold turkey, a ten-year, pack-and-a-half-a-day habit gone. Immediately, I felt healthier, more vital. At the same time, I marveled at my mom’s slow but promising recovery.
The experience tricked me into thinking the way a young man thinks: that I had all the time in the world, that possibility is infinite, that I would feel this way forever.
* * *
My dad finished his treatments and so did John, and each took remarkable charge of recovery, following all the doctors’ orders, eating right, respecting their bodies.
By the Fourth of July, both were well enough to attend a barbecue at our house, though John could only sit quietly in the living room. He was really just there to prove that he could be. He showed me his scar, an ugly purple jag down the front of his now bony torso. He asked me for some books to read. He said he’d been reading a lot about New Orleans. So I ran upstairs and grabbed A Confederacy of Dunces, plus Patti Smith’s Just Kids, a New York book I wanted to share with him, and I returned his copy of A Moveable Feast, which he’d loaned me shortly after taking a trip to France with one of his girlfriends.
&nb
sp; I’d come to learn that our recent New York weekend was the point when he realized something was wrong. Our morning Bloody Marys and afternoon Camparis and the general overabundance of food and late nights had been blamed for the relentless heartburn he was suffering. But soon after, John went to see his doctor and learned the truth.
He and I talked quietly in the afternoon shadows of the living room. He couldn’t do much. Our friend Kevin had moved in with him for the summer, to take care of the house and help out. He was there, John’s attendant, and the three of us made small talk. John told me he’d radically changed his diet. No alcohol. A single cup of coffee a day. He’d tossed out an entire shelf of little hot sauce bottles, a longtime collection of souvenirs from his travels. Even the bottle from the Washington Square Hotel doorman was gone. John was focused and resolute. He would get better.
6: THE CASKET ROOM
* * *
I wasn’t sure how to dress for the funeral home. I mean, this was a casual visit, and one doesn’t generally make casual visits to funeral homes. I was just going there to talk, to ask some questions, to tour the casket room with Paul Hummel, the son of one of my dad’s lifelong friends, a fourth-generation funeral director, a guy John and I had gone to the same Catholic high school with, though he was a few years behind us. Casual visit; fact-finding mission. Nonetheless, the idea of wearing jeans to a place that has “parlor” in its nomenclature seemed improper, so I chose gray chinos instead.
Dad and I had roughed out a plan. We had thought about dimensions and hinge configurations and the kinds of wood we might use. For some reason, he kept reverting stubbornly to cedar or white oak, specifically because of their resistance to rot.
Furnishing Eternity Page 4
