by Rob Sedgwick
To have a friend like Milo is to be a rich man. Milo is kind to a fault; if you have a problem with Milo, it’s your problem. He has many tics: squinting, unusual finger movements as if communicating with aliens. He snaps them so loud and true it sounds like Babe Ruth hitting a baseball. He has a honker that could be a small peak in Utah and a diamond twinkle in his eye. He’s completely oblivious to the fact that he misses the bowl every time he pisses, and I have to go in and clean up after him. He tucks his shirt in tight and pulls his pants well above his midsection.
When cell phones start to become common, he calls me whenever we’re to rendezvous at a given location; he’s still talking on the phone two inches from my nose when we meet. He’s still talking as we walk down the street, dine at a restaurant, dance at the Copa, until he’s satisfied he’s thwarted and confused everyone in our vicinity. Milo is a very silly man. I am a very silly man. In the company of Milo, my silliness is given free rein, can reach Olympian heights: singing, bad accents, general nonsense. I am never judged.
On this night, we are doing shots of 151-proof rum. Milo is not a great taker of risks, but on this evening he tries to be. He has done about six shots. He is having the time of his life. He is smiling. He is laughing. He is wearing an authentic-looking Renaissance velvet hat that Linus’s brother Hank made in prison. We are all having the best time, encouraging Milo in his damn-the-torpedoes behavior and going at it with a joie de vivre that even Linus admires.
It is young. It is frivolous. It is sweet.
Finally, it is the toilet and vomiting.
Milo passes out in the bathroom.
We all want to go out, but we can’t leave Milo. Linus volunteers to stay behind and take care of him. The rest of us leave en masse, teenagers without a care.
Months later, Nikko tells me that Milo is withdrawing into himself: his tics have increased; his shyness has become more severe. When Linus and I hang out, he always boasts of lusting for my brother and fucking Milo. I don’t believe either are true, I think this is just booze talking. But I am seventeen, bigger than everyone else, and think I should just make sure.
“Did Linus ever do anything to you?” I ask Milo.
“No,” Milo says. He tries to say this with definitive heft, but there’s no heft behind it. His tone tries to be firm but still has wiggles in it. His twitches start twitching, his eyes wince.
I press the question again. “When we were drinking Bacardi that night you passed out and you stayed with Linus, did anything happen?”
Milo snaps his fingers, the go-to nervous tic, and insists he is fine. I don’t believe him. The snap of his fingers sounds even more like a Ruthian crack of a bat than usual. His eyes are telling me to stop. I want to keep going, but there is something in the twitching of his head, the wriggling of his nose, the confluence of all his bodily tics ticking at the same time, that tells me he doesn’t want to talk about this anymore.
At all. Ever again.
I see an invisible nimbus shroud of shame all around him. Then he says in an almost silent rasp of a whisper, “I know it’s weird, but I feel somehow that it was my fault.” He could barely push out the air to form the words. His eyes stay on the ground.
My mind jumps to what must have happened. And what do I do? I love Milo. He is the greatest person I know. He wants me to stop. To keep things as they are. That is what he wants. The need to say the thing out loud and protect him is shaking in my chest, but his need for me not to is greater. I love Milo. This is what he wants. The silence between us must go on for miles. Finally, I let the matter drop with the tacit promise that I will never bring it up again and that, by itself, it will dissipate and vaporize over time.
I then go to my brother. “Is everything okay?” I ask Nikko. He is fifteen. “Has Linus been bothering you?”
“No,” he says. His voice is slicker, more practiced than Milo’s and almost believable. But it’s not. His eyes meet mine too much. There’s too much of-course-everything-is-fine in his voice and in the shrugging of his shoulders. To press him further is useless.
“Want to get high?” he asks. “We could call Milo and meet by the bandshell.” So we all meet by the bandshell in Central Park to get high. We play Frisbee. We get high enough that everything is ridiculous and funny once again. We all keep a secret from each other that we all know, but we never talk about it and never say its name out loud.
23
My father and I are waiting for a table in the Mansion diner at Eighty-Sixth and York. We live a block away. I am three years old and in my Superman costume.
When Superman was on TV, I would bounce on my parents’ bed, bounce off the walls, about to explode! I could beat Bullet Bob Hayes in a hundred-yard sprint. I could leap tall buildings in a single bound. And this wasn’t any of those other bullshit Supermen, but the Adventures of Superman from the fifties, George Reeves, the real deal: he had the smooth muscle of someone who did heavy chores. I loved his thick flowing drape of a cape, and he seemed deeply intelligent. Powerful in mind and body.
My grandparents give me my first Superman costume in the townhouse we live at in Yorkville when I’m three. I grab it like it’s not real, that it will disappear if I don’t hurry. I run upstairs to Nikko’s and my room and don’t come down for ages; my mother is worried I’ll try to fly.
I look at the box with the clear plastic top. The costume is folded perfectly so you can see the big S. It’s real magic I can touch. I lift it out of the box. To hold this costume is all I have lived for. It smells of beautiful super plastic.
I want to chew the big S. I can’t believe this is mine.
It’s all too much. I start crying.
I wear it always: in school, at the beach, winter and summer, until it is in tatters. Then I get a new one.
Dad comes into Nikko’s and my room because I can’t sleep. The door is open and the light is on. I am scared of the dark. He comes into the room giantly. Everything is a dollhouse next to him. He seems annoyed because he wants to sleep, but then he squats infinitely down to sit on my bed and read Winnie-the-Pooh to me.
He seems to be too big to be reading it, but he chooses the section on “Eeyore’s Birthday.” He starts off just reading, but after a few sentences his tone becomes full, deep. No one has remembered it is Eeyore’s birthday. To this Eeyore says, desolately, “We can’t all, and some of us don’t. That’s all there is to it.” There is an aching sense of loss when my father reads this. It is from a place that is far away in him. I think he is sad about Eeyore, but he seems to be reading to himself when he was my age. There is so much bewilderment in my father’s voice. After he is done, he is silent and still for a while. He’s thinking about something huge and still very far away. “Poor Eeyore,” he says. “How awful.”
My father is running for district leader. I have no idea what that is except that he says hello to everyone he sees and drives all over the neighborhood yakking about stuff through a megaphone. Mom says that his Democratic Club has told Dad he can’t run because it’s not his turn. Mom says Dad told them to stick it in their ear. Mom also says that Eleanor Roosevelt likes Dad and is going to “stump” for him. “Adlai Stevenson too!” Mrs. Roosevelt writes about my dad in her daily column, “My Day.”
“It’s big doings,” says Mom.
I don’t know who Adlai Stevenson is, but I have heard of Eleanor Roosevelt.
A year earlier, Dad marched on Washington and sat on the stage as Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. In the tiny vestibule of the diner, we are surrounded. I am being smothered amongst hips and asses and have to look straight up to see what’s going on because my father is always the tallest person around and, as usual, he is saying hello to everyone: black people, yellow people, purple people, green people, white people, all kinds of people. Everyone is smiling and saying hello to him. He beams back. A huge crowd stands around a station wagon that is being u
sed as a stage. It’s some sort of political rally for my father.
I am not in my Superman costume.
Someone is not there who’s supposed to be there. To buy time, my father lifts me onto the station wagon and asks me to say something. There is an endless number of people, people as far as my eyes can see. I get acute stage fright. My mouth goes dry; I don’t know what to say. I can’t breathe. All those people watching, waiting for me to say something smart. All I can do is get up to the microphone and push out the words, “Vote for my dad.”
I’m sure I’ve tanked.
Just as I finish my address, the guest speaker, Robert Kennedy, shows up and takes over for me. “Hi, Bobby, glad you could make it,” says my father.
“Sorry, Duke,” Kennedy responds, “Duke” being my father’s nickname at Harvard, before diving in. He has really big front teeth and looks so confident. He does much better than me.
Dad wins the election, beating the Puerto Rican incumbent who has ruled the district for thirty-two years.
“He has more power in the top of his little pinky than everyone else has in their whole body,” says Mom.
“The Superman Show,” is just about to start and it’s the tail end of the introduction, my favorite part. The music swells to its crescendo, with Superman imposed on the screen, looking like Superman, and the announcer’s rousing, magnificent finish: “Fights a never-ending battle for truth! Justice! And the American Way!”
24
On the seventh floor at 26 Federal Plaza, a flag bore the words “The American Way.” My pretrial PO George Durst came out to call me from my seat in the federal probation area waiting room.
First, a urine analysis test. He watched me take my penis out in the stall of the men’s room.
The floodgates were closed tight. No soap.
He ventured to the bathroom’s entrance. Still nothing.
He turned on a sink tap to help me piss. I was hoping it would sound like a Tobagonian waterfall. Nope. I focused, trying to think of something else. I tried a song. For some reason that brought back the song of the Porcellian Club (my father’s private, all-men’s final club at Harvard), which is the dumbest song ever conceived:
Oh a student once was sitting, all in his private room
A-smoking a cigar by the light of the moon
A-smoking a cigar by the light of the moon
And it’s why shouldn’t every man enjoy his own room?
Room boys! Room boys, by the light of the moon!
And it’s why shouldn’t every man enjoy his own room!
I giggled to myself, thinking how aghast the song would be if it knew it was being sung within the common chambers of 26 Federal Plaza—in the bathroom, no less, with me and my dick in my hand next to a “lowly” probation officer.
But Mr. Durst was anything but lowly.
He was a bear of a man, and I respected him instantly. His office was spare and his desk was clear save for some papers arranged in two little neat piles near a spray can that had an outline of a jackass on it and the label “Bullshit Repellent.” His big floppy-lidded eyes looked bored, but he knew everything that was going on. If I had tried to pull a fast one—not that I had anything to pull—he’d have known it.
The first time we met at his office, he sat down looking at his papers, his face rubbery, thick. He mumbled, beyond laconic, “Okay, Sedgwick, so basically you come in here every two weeks, you fill out this work form once every month, you keep your nose clean, and we got no problems.”
My initial inclination was to call him Lord, then maybe Your Lordship, but then remembering we were in America, I knew the deepest I could grovel was mister so, wishing I could say “Your Lordship,” I said:
“Yes, thank you, Mr. Durst.”
“Call me Mr. Durst.”
“Yes, Mr. Durst. And if I would want to maybe go away for the weekend, to, say, Connecticut or East Hampton, is that possible?”
“You let me know before and that should be fine. How are you doing on work?”
“Excuse me?”
“Work. How do you eat?”
“I’m working in a bar now.”
“As?”
“As a bartender. Is that a problem?”
“No. Did I say it was a problem?”
“No.”
“If something’s a problem, I’ll say it’s a problem.”
“All right, thank you so much, Mr. Durst.”
“Yeah. We’re done. See you in two.”
I fluttered out on the wings of excitement, tittering, happy that my first meeting with Mr. Durst had gone well and that we had made a connection deeper than most POs and felons. Making my way into the hall, I saw Jordan at the water fountain waiting to meet with his PO. No longer slick and defiant, he looked more than ever like the petrified Ichabod Crane who had just seen the Headless Horseman.
He slipped me a piece of paper. “Call this number. The guy’s name is Garth Kennedy, and he’s one of the best lawyers around. If we all pool in with this guy together, we can probably beat this.”
“I don’t think—”
“Just meet with him and see what he says. You haven’t had any accidental run-ins with any Mexicans recently, am I right?”
“No.”
“Am I right?”
“Yeah.”
“So give him a call. I’ll see you at the bar this week. By the way, I’m nuts about you.” He unzipped his fly and pulled out his scrotum for visual emphasis. This was a little funny of his and had always been source of amusement for both of us. It was also a great icebreaker at parties.
—
“We should do what Jordan says,” Nikko trilled. I still had no idea what Nikko’s involvement was, and we weren’t supposed to talk about the case together, absurdly enough, even though I saw him practically every other day. My own attorneys seemed pleased with the course of defense they had thus far set: community service, trying to get a job, keeping my nose sparkly clean. But Nikko was adamant. “We have to go visit Garth Kennedy.”
So, naïve fools prone to any suggestion that might be in the wind, off we went.
Garth Kennedy’s office was high baroque; I felt as if I were back at the colossal townhouse in the Louis-the-Whatever chairs. We sat beside impossibly tiny tables that looked as if they might accommodate one teacup each.
Kennedy was blond and wore glasses.
Where did these guys get their suits? They were so sharp you could cut yourself.
“All these guys have is bullshit,” he said. “We could beat this easily. Their evidence is circumstantial, at best, and they know it.” He was speaking to me in such a way that was supposed to make me feel as if he was on my side, but I wasn’t comfortable. I knew we should have told Ben we were talking to these guys, but we kept it a secret in hopes that we could help Jordan. Nikko and I were loyal to the point of blind and immense stupidity.
“How much do you charge?”
“Eighty thousand for a retainer.”
Yikes! Two and a half times the retainer fee of Montano and Primo.
“But Nikko and I already have lawyers. And we’ve begun cooperating.”
“So you recant, you come over here, we regroup and tell the DA to go piss up a rope.”
How would one piss up a rope, I wondered.
“You mean we could go back and actually beat this thing? We wouldn’t have to cooperate against Jordan anymore?” Nikko asked brightly.
“Absolutely! And everything would be hunky-dory. Like the Bowie album.”
“This gives us a lot to consider,” my brother said briskly, imagining he sounded intelligent.
We shook hands, promising to get back in touch soon.
Leaving, I noticed something I hadn’t seen going in. The front door of the office was clearly marked “Garth Kennedy, Dmitri Fisher, Attorney
s.”
Dmitri Fisher was Jordan’s lawyer. Obviously, this was a scam by Jordan’s attorney to get us to stop cooperating against Jordan. But we had already started cooperating. Isn’t it too late? I thought. If we joined forces with Jordan, now wouldn’t that help Jordan and put us in serious jeopardy?
My Spidey sense jangled, but Nikko and I both felt awful for giving up Jordan, so we went straight to Ben to ask if we could switch horses to Kennedy.
Ben looked incredulous before he left the room to call the lawyers for a couple of minutes, leaving Nikko and me alone. We spoke hopefully. Then Ben came back in, sputtering, his fury monumental. “Are you the stupidest two people on the face of the Earth? I just called Ron Montano. Garth Kennedy and Dimitri Fisher share an office.”
“But that doesn’t mean they necessarily work together on the same cases,” Nikko offered softly, hope springing eternal.
“You both are the biggest marks I have ever seen in my fucking life! Your stupidity is beyond my comprehension, or anyone else’s comprehension for that matter. It is certainly beyond your lawyer’s comprehension. If you pull any shit like this again, I’m pulling my money and you’re on your own.”
Nikko and I sprouted ears, buckteeth, and tails like the jackass on the can on Mr. Durst’s desk. Apologizing, we skulked out of Ben’s house. For the duration of the case, we stayed the course our lawyers had outlined for us.
25
We are living in Croton, and “Penny Lane” is always on the radio. The trumpet part always gives me goose pimples. It makes me think of something vaguely old and chivalrous. I stand up straighter when I hear it and am suddenly filled with what I imagine nobility to be.