The Magical Stranger

by Stephen Rodrick

  Mom and I were so giddy at the prospect of getting rid of each other that we didn’t fight at all, tenderly stepping around each other for the last twenty-four hours, like soldiers checking our watches, waiting for a midnight armistice. We moved my belongings into the dorm and then said our good-byes on a busy street. We stared at each other with wonderment, both not knowing how we had made it through without killing each other. She gave me a peck on the cheek before climbing into the car. The light turned green. Maybe it was the tough merge, maybe it was nerves, but Mom and Aunt Nancy seemed to burn rubber pulling away from me. I wasn’t offended.

  But she was never far from my thoughts, largely because I’d merely replaced pacifying her with pacifying my girl, who promptly announced we were back together a week after I arrived in Chicago. She was a typical seventeen-year-old—one moment thinking it was cool to have a boyfriend in Chicago, the next deciding she couldn’t do long distance for another day. I learned to keep her happy and smiling, apologizing for things I hadn’t done wrong, coddling her to keep the peace.

  Most of my classmates lived in the Chicago area and retreated home on the weekends. So did I, just further, trying to keep things going with my girlfriend. I’d ride a bus five hours to see her for a day and then head back. It drove Mom insane. I’d agitated to get out of her sphere of influence for years, and now I was coming back every chance I could.

  We parked anywhere we could. One night, we drove the Chevette to the far side of an elementary school near her house, but I ran down the battery listening to Steve Garvey win game four of the 1984 National League Championship Series. We pushed the car back into the front of the school, but we still had to tell our parents. Mom was not pleased.

  “Keep going, push your luck with the man upstairs.”

  I had profound separation anxiety every time I left. My girlfriend’s parents drove me to Detroit one Sunday to catch a flight back to Chicago. At the gate, I wept and hyperventilated, barely able to get on my flight. Christine had it too. I’d come home and she would throw her arms around me, clinging like an octopus. When I left, she threw herself on the floor, crying inconsolably until she passed out from exhaustion. It was something Dad bequeathed to us all.

  Loyola was a relatively liberal place, but I remained in the throes of harsh Catholic guilt, a theological residue from Dad. I believed anything that went wrong in my life was direct retribution from God for my laziness, low manners, and generally shifty personality. There was a pregnancy scare during my freshman year. After she told me she was late, I prayed hard and often, promising God I’d never have premarital sex again if he’d spared me this one time. She got her period and I kept my word, flushing a half-dozen condoms down the nuclear-powered toilet system in my dorm. We never had sex again.

  Somehow, once I had the freedom to go or not go to class, I started doing well. I opened my first report card at our dinner table over winter break. Mom saw the three As and two Bs and nearly entered a state of shock. After a minute or two passed, she placed the paper on the same dining room table where she once threw forks at me.

  “I’ll be damned. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

  And just like that, our war was over.

  I had some friends at college, but the city was my best friend. I took the L to watch Cubs games and sat high in the bleachers, a silly smile on my face for hours. There were bands at the Cabaret Metro, Hamlet with Aidan Quinn, and Truffaut double features at the Music Box Theatre. My second summer I stayed in the city and got a job at Water Tower Place working in a gadget store that sold $1,400 massage chairs, gold-plated eyebrow clippers, and a thousand other things that suggested the American tax rate was far too low.

  Next door was a Victoria’s Secret where I ran into Jamie, a friend of a classmate. She was home for the summer from Boston University. It was a fortuitous meeting because Jamie ran through jobs with alacrity: this was her second and last day selling lingerie. We went to Gino’s on Rush Street for dinner one night. She announced halfway into our pizza that she was Jewish, an incomprehensible level of exotica for me. I was twenty and had never had a conversation with a Jewish woman in my life.

  She talked of losing her virginity to her horse trainer on a pile of hay after an equestrian event. I blushed. After dinner, we walked down Michigan Avenue onto Lake Shore Drive. I asked if she wanted to take the train back north with me. I explained I was subletting a place on the North Side where one of the spare bedrooms was accompanied solely by grow lights and neat rows of marijuana. She said that wouldn’t do. She took me by the hand and led me up the steps of a high-rise building that seemed oddly familiar. Then I remembered. It was the building from the August before, the one I had passed on Lake Shore Drive.

  An elderly black man doffed his cap and held the door. The elevator raced up sixteen floors. We stepped off and there was an old woman dressed in Saks Fifth Avenue and Bonwit Teller, a layer of makeup artfully spread across her face like expensive frosting. She was Jamie’s nana. Her husband was long dead and so were many of her friends.

  “Watch this,” said Jamie with a smile. “Nana, how’s Rose Noodleman?”

  Nana gravely turned her head and looked us in the eye.

  “Dead, Rose Noodleman is dead.”

  Jamie honked a laugh. Before long, Jamie exiled Nana from her own bedroom to a daybed in the sewing room. We had sex in one of the twin beds left over from Nana’s marriage. Jamie kept eye contact with me through the whole endeavor, an unnerving concept for a Catholic boy. Afterward, Jamie got dressed and went into the kitchen to do her weekly discarding of outdated food from Nana’s cupboard. I stumbled out onto the balcony, overwhelmed by the sex, the view, and a Coast Guard helicopter peering a spotlight down onto Lake Michigan. The pink light of the Drake Hotel beckoned in the distance. This was where I wanted to be.

  I wandered into the bathroom and smiled at myself in the mirror. Something caught my eye. The bathroom had two toilets, a regular one and one that had no seat but featured a spigot. I stared at it for a few minutes. I got down on my knees and examined the contraption. There was a knob on the side. I turned it on and water shot into my face and onto the marble floor. I turned off the switch and mopped up the water with monogrammed towels. It was months before I realized it was a bidet.

  The summer was a happy blur. We’d eat takeout pizza with Nana as she shushed us during Wheel of Fortune. She had a hard time remembering my name, so she just started calling me The Nice Boy. It wasn’t exactly accurate—Jamie’s sister once observed, “The funny thing about The Nice Boy, he’s actually not always nice”—but it made me feel wanted.

  We headed out on the train to her parents’ house in Barrington Hills on the weekends. The walls were lined with modern art. I didn’t know any of the artists, but in the study there was a giant, garish painting of a giant heart with an actual hammer embedded in the picture. I stared at it for hours on my first visit and her dad caught me ogling it.

  “Do you like Jim Dine?”

  “Uh, absolutely. He’s one of my favorites.”

  I had no idea who the hell Jim Dine was. I suspect he knew that, but he let me babble. Steve Harrison was an ophthalmologist who after years of button-downed life was now letting his freak flag fly. He wore leather pants and let his hair grow down his back. Sometimes he liked to slip a bit of the tongue when greeting Jamie’s friends. But her mom was a complete gem. Kathy cooked gourmet meals and kept all the kooks in the family on schedule. Her face lit up when I walked off the train: I don’t think there has ever been another person on this earth who seemed happier to see me.

  The Harrisons reveled in my goyness. They asked me about Wonder Bread as if it was caviar. Out by their pool, they would beg me to “Do Jesus on the raft.” I’d jump on a raft, thrust out my arms Christlike, suck in my scrawny ribs, and say “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” They would laugh and laugh. The whole family spoke in shorthand and used made-
up words that only they understood. They were weird and I loved them for it. Here was the family I always wanted! I didn’t feel like an alien around them. I felt like I was home.

  Jamie and I broke up a year later, but her parents didn’t care. I vacationed with them in Longboat Key in Florida almost every year for decades. They started calling me son. Not that there weren’t problems. Dad’s absences and death left emotional scars, but it also left yawning gaps in my practical knowledge. One winter, I was house-sitting out in Barrington. The Harrisons were in LA visiting their daughters while I was sticking around for a day before heading to Iowa on a story.

  Before leaving, Steve gave me a checklist of things to do. I watered their houseplants and took out the garbage. Upon returning from taking out the trash, I noticed one of their flowerpots was leaking water onto the floor. I grabbed some paper towels, cleaned up the mess, and—having already taken out the trash—flushed eight paper towels down the toilet.

  We both returned to Barrington a week later on a Sunday morning. Kathy made some french toast with challah bread—my new favorite—and then loaded the dishwater. A few moments later, the sound of cascading water rumbled through the ceiling. A pipe burst and water gushed onto the Norwegian wood of their living room.

  At first, I was a hero. I grabbed towels and called plumbers. The next day I headed downtown to Nana’s condo to write while the plumbers came to survey the damage. That night, I received a call from Steve. There had been $30,000 worth of damage to their house.

  “It’s the damnedest thing,” Steve told me. “The plumber says there was a clog of paper towels. We’re going to have to fire the housekeeper—not because she did it but because she won’t own up to it. It’s too bad because she’s an off-the-grid type, no Social Security number.”

  I hung up the phone and paced the floors for twenty minutes. Could I let the maid take the fall? I could not. I called Steve back and blubbered about how much their family had done for me and I paid them back by acting like a special-needs child. I told him I was sorry.

  He forgave me. I wondered if Mom would have done the same.

  Driving into Chicago from Flint on the Dan Ryan Expressway past the Robert Taylor Homes and the desperate South Side poverty purged me of my Buckley conservatism. I swung far to the other side, voting for Jesse Jackson in 1984. I worked out my dad issues at work. My boyhood fantasy of being a politician lingered, and I started working in Chicago politics while an undergrad. The men I worked for were memorable for all the wrong reasons.

  I started as an intern in the Chicago office of Alan J. Dixon, a U.S. senator. Dixon was nicknamed “Al the Pal.” He had a wicked comb-over and a politician’s thousand-yard stare, looking right through you on his way to someone more important. His ideology was simple: take both sides of every issue. A rusty Irishman ran the state for him. Emmet O’Neill was an old ad exec who enjoyed the five-martini lunch and sometimes wore a yarmulke so his bald spot wouldn’t burn in the Chicago sun. Before a meeting with a suitor, he’d growl, “Who’s his Chinaman?” Chicagoese for “Does he have a powerful sponsor?”

  He eventually hired me as a part-time aide. I performed momentous tasks like trying to get influential friends better postal service. Emmet fired me more than once via phone on his drunken drive home to Winnetka, forgetting all about it by the morning, more perplexed with why there was a bucket of fried chicken in the backseat of his Lincoln.

  He called me into his office one afternoon and told me he was farming me out to work on the campaign of a congressional challenger. I’m pretty sure this was illegal for a government employee and, more important, a violation of the Chicago code of conduct because the guy was running against an incumbent.

  But that didn’t stop me from falling in love with the guy. Mel Reynolds was black and eight years younger than Dad, but I worshipped him in the same way. The only problem was he was flesh and blood, not a man in a photograph. Reynolds was a buck-toothed Rhodes scholar running against the appropriately named Gus Savage, a racist black congressman on Chicago’s far South Side. A few days a week, I took the commuter rail to 103rd Street and walked into a storefront campaign office that was a galaxy away from my own small world. Volunteers stamped letters and made signs while subsisting on day-old doughnuts and takeout chicken. Gunfire could be heard on occasion. I loved it.

  Mel was the son of sharecroppers, and his travels from Mississippi to Oxford to Chicago were catnip to a newly minted white Chicago liberal like myself. I now realize that I saw Dad in his Horatio Alger story. The incumbent was an old-school creep best known for fondling a Peace Corps worker and giving his son a no-show job. He was easy to hate. I wrote press releases and op-eds late into the night and watched Reynolds draw close in the polls a few days before the primary.

  People were already talking about me being his twenty-four-year-old press secretary. But then Savage took to the pulpit of a South Side church on the Sunday before the primary. He read off the Jewish-sounding names of the contributors to Reynolds’ campaign. In Chicago, this was known as rallying the base. Reynolds lost by a few points and I was crushed. I didn’t understand. Were people really that stupid? Reynolds swore he’d try again in two years and I swore I’d be there for him.

  But in the interim, I got a rude education. I moved to Washington in 1991 to work as Dixon’s deputy press secretary. A few months later, Dixon was one of eleven Democrats to vote for Clarence Thomas’s confirmation. He was up for reelection the next year, and he thought the vote would protect him from a Republican challenger. I played a minor role in drafting his floor statement praising Thomas and I felt like a whore. In the end, Dixon was defeated from the left in the Democratic primary, and I secretly rejoiced.

  I kept in touch with Reynolds. He called me one evening for a favor. He told me he’d done all the coursework for his master’s at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, but just needed some help with his thesis. Lots of help. Reynolds asked casually if I’d like to write the entire thing for $2,500. I stuttered a bit, half out of ethical outrage and half because Reynolds was already known as a debt dodger. A friend was still owed three months’ back pay from the campaign. I knew I’d never see the cash. I begged off, blaming my own graduate classes, and got off the phone.

  I saw Reynolds again a few months later when we shared a ride back from a speech at the Chicago Hilton. He elbowed me in the ribs as we drove down Michigan Avenue and pointed at two schoolgirls in plaid uniforms. He arched his eyebrows in the universal sign of creepiness.

  “Steve, what do you think?”

  My toes curled up in my loafers. True to his word, Reynolds won the next time out. The turning point was when Reynolds was assaulted while hanging campaign signs in his own neighborhood. This gained him great sympathy and favorable media coverage. My Spidey sense told me Reynolds faked the attack. After the election, he approached me about becoming his press secretary and I turned him down. It was a lucky choice since Reynolds was indicted for campaign embezzlement and statutory rape two years later. I watched Reynolds on Larry King trying to wriggle himself out of his corner, sweat beading on his forehead as he blamed his downfall on a conspiracy of white politicians. I clicked off the television. He was definitely not my father.

  Chapter Twenty

  I’d been on board the USS Nimitz once before as a ten-year-old holding my daddy’s hand. He did his department head stint on the carrier’s maiden cruise in 1976 and gave our family a tour while the carrier was in port in Norfolk, Virginia. I don’t remember much about that day except the infinite ladders going down, down into the bowels of the ship.

  Now I was going back on my own. I flew onto the carrier from Okinawa for the last month of the Black Ravens’ deployment. CODs usually land on a carrier from a straight-in approach, passing the boat at a leisurely pace and then lining up eight to ten miles behind the boat. But the pilots had heard from the Black Rav
ens about Dad and told me they wanted to bring their COD in on a break and show me what it felt like.

  I said sure. Ninety minutes later, I saw the Nimitz outside one of the plane’s tiny windows, and then the COD tilted downward and to the left, pressing me back against my seat with a meager two Gs, about three less than a Prowler. We dropped our hook and caught the number two wire, my head slamming back against the seat.

  Tupper was flying, so he sent a posse of Black Ravens to meet me: Beav, Shibaz, Chicken, and Jeff “Stoli” Stodola, a young pilot. Beav was concerned.

  “Did that COD come in on a break? I’ve never seen that before. Didn’t really look that safe.”

  I told him I was glad that I didn’t know that twenty minutes ago. The guys grabbed my bag and led me back across the Nimitz through a dimly lit labyrinth of halls and then down ladders past CAG’s office and on to the Ravens’ ready room.

  Tupper had set me up in a four-man room with Stoli and two ECMOs just down the hallway from the ready room. Stoli showed me where the head was and then pushed open the door to our room. The space was a perfect imitation of a shared cell at a minimum-security prison. There was a tiny living area dominated by a giant television and lined with a gray metal locker for each of the men. Playing Call of Duty with headphones on was Lieutenant Devon “the Wolf” Benbow. Next to him sweating from the gym was Lieutenant Chris “Lil Chris” Sutherland. Stoli started apologizing.

  “It’s small, but if you go see the enlisted men’s quarters, they’d have eight guys in this space.”

  A blue sheet separated the living area from the sleeping quarters, which were two rows of bunks and some more lockers. Stoli pointed to my bunk and then dramatically pulled back the curtain that afforded a modicum of privacy.