by Erik Tarloff
And make no mistake, Steve returned the favor. At first he tried to pretend he liked the kid, tried to josh him, brought him a few pieces of athletic equipment, as if Chance would care about athletic equipment, took him fishing on a couple of Saturdays, but it felt phony all along, and it didn’t last. Steve just found Chance a pest. An annoyance. Him and Sally had just gotten hitched, she was expecting, he didn’t want a souvenir from her previous marriage in his hair all the time. He wanted to go out and have fun, he wanted to make whoopee at home.
And then Dorothy came along, and that was the final nail in the coffin. Steve was nuts about Dot. I’m not sure he was thrilled when Sally got in the family way, I don’t think that was part of his game plan when they started spending time together, but once she brought Dot home, he just fell head over heels in love. And of course Chance could see that, and feel hurt by it. And Steve no longer wanted to give Chance the time of day. He had a kid of his own now, not somebody else’s he was saddled with. He was short with Chance, took the belt to him more than once, complained to Sally about him. “Your kid” is how he’d refer to him. “What’s the matter with your kid? Why’s he so soft? How come he don’t like sports? Why’s he so rude to me?” That kind of thing. Poor Sally didn’t know how to handle it. She was well and truly caught. And what with Dot in the picture…well, you can imagine who’s going to come up tails in that kind of predicament. A husband and baby daughter on one side, a kind of sullen, resentful growing boy on the other. Sally did her best, but her best was none too good.
Which is why Chance finally came to live with Earl and me. I don’t guess anyone was too happy with the arrangement, not at first anyway, but things were coming to a head and something had to give. And we were childless and we had an extra room. So me and Earl, we talked it over, and I have to say Earl was good about it. Chance was no blood kin of Earl’s, and not an easy kid to get along with, but Earl said, “Hey, it’s the Christian thing to do.” Earl was like that when he had to talk himself into doing the right thing, he had to bring up Jesus. Add Jesus’s voice to the discussion, give Him an opportunity to weigh in. But that’s fine. Whatever it took. At least he did what was right more often than not. And whether he liked it or not.
Joel Weingott (boyhood friend)
Chance and me, we became friends the summer we were at camp together. No way we could have met anywhere else. We came from totally different worlds. Different universes. We were thirteen or fourteen at the time. I had my fourteenth birthday that summer, in fact. At camp. Not much of a celebration. The previous one had been a big deal, though—big ritual, big party, lots of presents, more horah than you can shake a stick at, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.
The camp was a dude ranch type thing out in Wyoming. I was a New York kid, my background was about as far from a dude ranch as you can get. I guess my parents thought hanging out in the country would be good for me. Or maybe…see, I have this weird notion that what gave them the idea was that I was a big fan of cowboy movies when I was younger. There were a lot of them back then. Singing cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, tough guy cowboys like Johnny Mack Brown and John Wayne, and also real actors, serious dramatic actors, who occasionally took cowboy roles, like Henry Fonda and James Stewart. And I liked them all. Well, not the singing cowboys so much, even then they struck me as kind of ridiculous, but most of the others. My mom used to drop me off at those Saturday matinées, you’d be there all day, there would often be two full-length feature films and a dopey newsreel and a cartoon and a serial, all for a dime, what a deal, but I only wanted to go if they were showing at least one western. And so, in addition to probably thinking a radical change of scene would be good for me, just on general principle, getting out of the city into a whole new environment, fresh air and allergens, my folks must have also thought, because I liked movies about cowboys and horses and the open prairie so much, I’d enjoy the reality too.
Ha!
Of course I hated it from the start. Jesus, I was a city kid. Manhattan was my natural habitat. I could navigate New York with ease, buses and subways held no terrors for me, but anywhere else I was a lost soul. Central Park was a breeze, but mountains and valleys were hostile territory. Horses were nice to look at, but we had nothing to say to one another. Plus I hated sharing a bunkhouse with all these boys I didn’t know. Most of them farm kids from other parts of the country who sneered at the whole idea of New York, and therefore sneered at me. They mostly seemed to have a hick sense of humor, too, which was off-putting; joking around was what made kids like me friends with other kids. It could be the entire basis of a friendship, finding the same things funny. Well, no chance of that. A lot of them had notions about Jews, too. Most of them had never met a member of the tribe before, but that didn’t slow them down. They had their prejudices and they were convinced these were fact-based. I don’t mean to suggest it was like Hitlerjugend or anything, it wasn’t some sort of hate-fest, but I definitely felt isolated and disregarded and casually disliked. Tolerated at best. The butt of mean jokes at worst. There were a lot of mean jokes. A lot of feeling around my head trying to find my horns, that sort of stuff.
Or maybe they weren’t even kidding.
And the thing is, Chance hated the place too. That was what first brought us together. That was our initial bond. He later told me his stepfather had arranged for him to go. “He wanted to get me out of his hair for a while,” is how he put it. And then he added, “And he doesn’t even have any!” That made me laugh. But he was obviously pissed about the whole thing. He said his stepdad wanted to send him to boarding school too. That’s where his mom drew the line. But she didn’t put up a fuss about summer camp since it was supposed to be a treat for him. She could pretend they were doing him a favor. And even though he told her he didn’t want to go, that carried no weight whatsoever. Boy, did I recognize that particular dynamic. Accents aside, it was identical to the conversation I had with my mom. Chance’s mom just blithely assured him he was wrong, he really did want to go—typical parent bullshit—and anyway, once he got there, he’d love it.
Ha!
Now, to be clear, Chance was…well, he wasn’t exactly a farm kid, but he did come from a rural area, from a small town surrounded by farmland. A lot of the kids he went to school with were farmers’ kids. So he wasn’t as obviously out of his element as me. But camp life definitely was not his cup of tea. Like me, he disliked the regimentation, he disliked the chores, and he really hated the communality. He hated that aspect even more than I did, possibly. He was a loner by temperament. A private person. I think he liked the horses a lot, that’s one way we differed, he seemed to have a real feeling for them, but he didn’t want to be told when he could ride and when he couldn’t. And he didn’t want to be in a group when he did it, he wanted a personal communion between himself and the horse. He’d sometimes sneak into the stables and just hang out. He let me come with him a couple of times, a meaningful gesture coming from someone like Chance, and it was almost uncanny, the emotional way he connected with those animals.
See, the essence of his personality, at least as I understood it, was his need for privacy. He wanted to be able to go off by himself when he felt like it, just go for a walk or sit under a tree and daydream. And they wouldn’t let him do that. Everything had to be done according to a set schedule and as part of a group. Maybe it was because of their insurance policy, maybe they had to have the kids under their charge at all times, or maybe they were just those kind of people. But it sure didn’t sit well with Chance.
And then, toward the end of the first week, Chance and I were both given KP duty. That’s work in the kitchen if you don’t know. It was punishment. KP was supposed to be punishment because it was considered girlie. As far as I was concerned, other chores, like mucking out the stables, were much worse, but mine was a minority view. And speaking of minority views, that’s how come Chance and I were being punished. Every night after supper there was a camp meet
ing where we sung those dumb camp songs like “Bill Hogan’s Goat,” and then there’d be a little lecture by the head counselor, one Mr. Monty MacBride, whose official title was “Foreman.” Of course it was. And then there’d be a prayer to Jesus, which got all the other kids to stare at me and see what I’d do at the “Amen” part. I kept my head down and my mouth shut. Some battles just aren’t worth fighting, although I think if my parents knew about that part they’d have been outraged. Might have even pulled me out of camp. Hey, maybe I should have told them! But it’s funny, because I bet I knew more about the New Testament than those kids who were lording it over me. [laughs] Lording it over me! I didn’t mean it that way. Anyhow, to them it was just a matter of rooting for the home team, their captain was Jesus, and it didn’t matter so much what He stood for, they rooted for their team and their captain and wanted the other teams to lose and that was that.
But we also got that regularly scheduled sermon from the Foreman, and it was usually obnoxious and ill-informed. And one night it was about…jeez, it’s hard to remember whether this was the warning about the mortal dangers of masturbation or the heads-up about Communism, but it was something deeply stupid, and Chance and I both laughed at the same moment. That was apparently a big no-no. So we were punished by being assigned KP for the next week. Now, I didn’t mind nearly as much as I was supposed to, although I acted upset so Monty wouldn’t change his mind. KP was about as close to solitude as you could get in that hellhole. It was almost a relief.
I’d been vaguely aware of Chance already because he was so quiet. That probably sounds like a paradox, but it was a really raucous group of boys there at the camp, so someone who hung back, who didn’t holler and laugh really loud at things that weren’t funny, he kind of attracted my attention. But I didn’t know anything about him, and certainly didn’t feel particularly drawn to him. There was nothing inviting about him. His whole manner seemed to say, “Keep your distance.” And the other guys did keep their distance. Unlike me, he didn’t have anything obvious to pick on, so they just left him alone, by and large.
But this one morning we were in the kitchen together washing the breakfast dishes. The camp didn’t have a dishwasher, God forbid there should be any modern conveniences, that would have violated the whole camp aesthetic. He was washing and I was drying and stacking and we weren’t saying anything, just each doing the chore and sulking in silence. Which wasn’t my usual way, sulking out loud was how I generally handled it, but I’d come to realize this was a place where I’d be better off keeping my trap shut, no one wanted to hear from me, and they certainly didn’t want to hear any complaints from me. I’d been confronted with the phrase “whiney Jew” more than once already. So I’d learned that lesson.
And then, out of the blue, as he handed me a wet plate, Chance said, “Tell me something, Joel. Do you hate this place as much as I do?”
It was downright startling. He’d barely said a word up to then. I needed a second to process the question, and then I said, “At least.”
Chance nodded and granted me that small twisted smile I came to know well. And a few years later, the whole world came to know it just as well, a sort of Chance Hardwick trademark, a significant aspect of what was said to make him such an icon of cool. A wordless, mordantly amused acknowledgment of the world’s crappiness. He was quiet for a few seconds after that, and then he said, “All the other guys seem to love it. Is there something wrong with us, do you reckon?”
“Uh huh,” I said. “There absolutely is. It’s a serious problem. We’re not idiots.”
Which got a rare laugh out of him. “Do you ever wish you were?”
“An idiot? Can’t say I do.”
“No? I do. All the time. Well, maybe not an idiot, but I wish I could fit in better. Not just here. Everywhere.”
“You don’t fit in at home either? ”
“Hell no.” He snorted his incredulity at the notion. Then he extended his wet hand and introduced himself. We shook. As Rick Blaine would say, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Dorothy Goren Mckenzie (sister)
I didn’t see that much of Chance growing up. He was living with Uncle Earl and Aunt Mary, and he’d come by once a week or so for dinner and he’d babysit me now and then or take me to a movie matinée on a Saturday afternoon, or sometimes let me come to one of his play rehearsals if I promised to be quiet. I mean, he was nice enough to me, but he acted more like an uncle than a brother, maybe. ’Cause of the age difference, I guess. And because we weren’t living in the same house.
But he didn’t treat me like an enemy, which I guess he could’ve, seeing as how my dad and him were usually fighting like cats and dogs. I hated that, by the way. It was always tense when those two were together. And listen, it’s not like anyone ever made me choose sides or anything, but I felt like I was caught in the middle all the same. Looking back, I can’t honestly tell you who was right and who was wrong. Probably both were right and both were wrong. But at the time, I looked up to my dad, as little girls do, and I also looked up to my big brother, which is also what little girls do. So I hated that they were always fighting when they were together. It made me sick to my stomach. Literally sick to my stomach. It must’ve had the same effect on my mom, although she didn’t say so. Not to me, anyway. And you know, when I was little, like I said, I looked up to my dad, but later, when I was a teenager, we had lots of problems, him and me. Lots. Finally we were like almost completely estranged. We barely spoke at all after a certain point, and it pretty much stayed like that till the day he died. I’m not saying he was a bad man, exactly, but he wasn’t an easy person. And he probably wasn’t what you’d call a good man either. He could be awful mean. This wasn’t something I felt I could talk to my mom about. She had her own problems.
I would have loved to have been able to confide in Chance during my high school years, he’s the one I would have naturally turned to, and I have no doubt he would’ve been sympathetic, would’ve understood better than anyone else. But he was already gone. We were in touch in one way and another, and he definitely was aware I was having problems at home, but he was in college and then he was living in New York and then LA, and long-distance phone calls were kind of a production, so I can’t say he was really there for me. He was sympathetic, he was willing to listen when he was within range, but it wasn’t possible for him to be some sort of mainstay. I had to deal with my dad on my own.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, the fact that Steve Goren was my dad—my biological dad—could have been enough to make Chance dislike me when we were growing up, but it didn’t. Plus he could have resented how I’d kind of taken his place in our mom’s affections, or even pushed him out of the house. You know, new husband, new baby, there wasn’t as much time for him as there used to be. And my dad made no secret of who he cared about more. Chance became a kind of afterthought at best. If he thought about him at all. But Chance didn’t seem to blame any of that on me. He was even affectionate in his own way. I wouldn’t say he was good at it or anything—[laughs]—but he made an effort. He did more than he had to. It’s my impression he cared about me all along, and cared for me. In his own way.
And I adored him. My beautiful big brother. He was a total mystery to me, same way I guess he was to practically everybody, but I idolized him.
We became something like friends later, but even when he was kind of a distant figure to me, I worshiped him. From the start.
Helen Campbell (junior high school drama coach)
Chance signed up for the Drama Club in the ninth grade. He later—much later, when he was back in town visiting his mom and his aunt for Christmas—he told me he did it only because it was offered as an alternative to Phys Ed. In the seventh and eighth grades all the kids had to go to gym, but their last year they had a choice. Not many boys took advantage—they all loved sports, or thought they had to pretend to love ’em to prove they weren’t, you know,
sissies. Effeminate. But Chance didn’t care about that stuff, and he really detested competitive games. He had no burning interest in theater, I don’t believe, not at the time. He just wanted to avoid playing sports. Which is interesting, since he was actually a terrific natural athlete. And he moved beautifully on stage. He just didn’t like all the macho stuff, the braggadocio and the physical violence that seem an unavoidable aspect of adolescent athletics.
But that put him in a pretty good position in terms of casting. When it came to good male roles, he didn’t have a heck of a lot of competition. A handful of doughy nerds and one Greek god. I mean, who would you cast?
Still, before he was admitted into the class, he had to audition. We used to make all the kids audition. The audition was more an initiation ritual than a real audition, of course. I can’t remember ever turning anyone down, even when they were awful. But we pretended it was a test, and the kids sometimes got a little nervous about having to perform. Partly because they apparently believed their participation might really hang in the balance, but also because performing in front of a group of people is always intimidating. I used to ask the kids to do a little wordless mime. Of their own devising. They could choose what it would consist of.
Chance didn’t seem at all nervous before he did his little bit. Maybe he was too confident to be worried, or more likely he just didn’t care that much. He rarely seemed to care much about anything. That shrugging teenage disengagement was part of his affect no matter what was really going on inside him. Anyway, when it was his turn, he chose to do something very simple. Just pretended to eat a dish of ice cream. That’s all. He sat at an empty table at the front of the classroom and mimed eating a dish of ice cream. And it was totally riveting. We could all see the dish, his left hand steadying it. We could all see the ice cream. We could feel its icy resistance to his imaginary spoon. We could feel how cold it was when it went into his mouth, hurting his teeth, and then taste how delicious it was. His use of sense memory was completely intuitive and technically perfect. So it was obvious to me from the start that this kid had astonishing talent.