by Rich Cohen
In that moment I understood, for the first time, that Jamie and I had come together on a quest. I suppose we were searching for grittier terrain, a world more real to us than the suburbs, a place where the paint and paper had stripped away. Jamie was my guide on this search, for his life seemed more genuine than my own, more genuine and more interesting.
Melvin Taylor finished his set, went behind the bar, and poured himself a drink. Jamie walked outside and came back with the car. We drove to the Edens Expressway and headed north. The morning fog was rolling in. The buildings of the city were lost in the fog, and I could see the tops of the towers suspended. Jamie’s eyes glazed over, but when I nudged him he said, “I’m just fine.” And soon we were back in Glencoe, on empty roads, street-lights shining in the fog.
That summer we had no jobs and no desire to find jobs and did nothing but try to impress each other. It was our work. Hours, days, weeks went by with nothing but a perfect sense of stillness. There would always be time—time to wander, time to waste. Most days, we slept late, walked to town, met at the counter of Sloppy Ed’s, filled up on hamburgers, and then went to the lake.
There was a pier called Ming Lee’s, a broken-down dock with boards missing and, at the end, a steel structure that must have once been a house. I was never sure why it was called Ming Lee’s, but some kids spoke of a crazy old Chinaman who had been seen emerging from the water stone dry. We would sit at the end of the dock smoking or drinking. Kids climbed the ruined house and dove off into the lake.
One afternoon, Darren Faulkner, one of nine brothers, the red-haired bullies of our town, made the climb. It seemed that there was a Faulkner for every grade and a brother was assigned to you along with a homeroom. Mr. Evans is your advisor, Kyle will be beating you up. There was Kyle and Kit and Tim and Buddy, who formed a club called “The Committee to Derail the Train” and who actually went to work on the problem. We always half-hoped something terrible would happen to the Faulkners, and that afternoon Darren jumped into the water and did not come back up. He hit a pole hidden beneath the surface. It broke his neck. The accident cursed Ming Lee’s and made it into one of the mystical places along the shore.
A few hundred yards down the beach, we had a favorite spot, a spit of land that ran out into the clear water. Stretching a towel on the sand, Jamie would watch girls go by and talk about Ronnie Flowers. Jamie had a talent for studying people, picking apart their behavior. It was as if, by studying other people, he hoped to find clues to his own life. He might discuss the tribulations of Ronnie, or his chances of future success, or his prospects of love. Jamie’s favorite subject was the destruction of the old Flowers house, which had burned down years before—a fire spotted by my brother, who noticed, on a hot summer day, smoke coming from the Flowerses’ incinerator chimney. My father rushed over to the house, rang the bell, banged on the doors, and then, trying to get inside but also because it must have been fun, tossed a heavy piece of lawn furniture through a picture window.
Within a few hours, while the Flowerses, at the Ice Capades, watched a Smurf turn a double axel, their house was consumed. In its place, the family built a behemoth, a New Age shoe box of a house set amid gardens of bad sculpture.
“I have a theory, controversial, so bear with me,” said Jamie. “I think Ronnie’s father, Bob, Bob Flowers—I think Bob set that fire. Think about it. The Flowerses were in their forties, shackled to a very tired routine. Life was behind them. Then their house burns down. Heirlooms, antiques, photographs—all of it, the whole past with its cargo of failure and disappointment—gone. They are free! So what do they do? The dumb bastards, they build another house, another trap, and they think they can finesse it by building a house that is absolutely modern, up to the minute and all that. So now they are stuck with a new life that was new in 1976.
“It must have been tough for that kid,” Jamie went on. “It must have been like growing up on the set of Kojak. Never allowed to touch anything. I’ve probably been in that house five times, and never once have I seen Bob Flowers. I mean, I’ve heard his voice: ‘Ronnie, tell your friends it’s time to go home!’ When Bob drew up the plans he must have engineered it acoustically so that, while lying in bed, he could yell at Ronnie no matter where he was in the house.”
In the afternoons, we piled into Jamie’s car and just drove around. Sometimes we went to one of the underground record stores we discovered in that gray area where the city shades into the suburbs: Round Records or Vintage Vinyl or Wax Tracks, dingy head shops with hookahs and water pipes and know-it-all clerks. There was always a good record on the stereo, but you were too proud to ask for its name. Jamie went straight to the racks of funk and blues, too cool for his own time. Standing over the records, hair falling below his eyes, he would say, “Reverend Davis! Man, that’s it! The true gen!”
I searched for imports by the Kinks or the Rolling Stones or the Who. In this, I was pretty typical. I also liked Bruce Springsteen and was forever on the lookout for bootlegs of his legendary shows at the Bottom Line in New York or at the Roxy in San Francisco. On those records, you could hear the voices of people in the audience, and it was not hard to imagine the smoky clubs. I liked it when Springsteen drifted in and out of a song, telling the boardwalk stories of his boyhood on the Jersey shore. I believed he was singing about the life we were living—the summer life.
We went back to my house, sat around the attic, and listened to our records. In the summer, the floor creaked and the wind blew. Sometimes, as Jamie talked about the meaning of some obscure verse, I would record him on video tape. (I had borrowed the camera from C. C. Durst, a tough fireplug of a kid, and returned it years later when it broke.) Onscreen, Jamie looked like a second-tier movie star, the vehicle of a late night mystery. I featured him in a movie called The Humiliator, in which he played a white-collar bully. In the course of the action, I am paid to humiliate him and do so with nothing but a cup of lukewarm water and impeccable timing. I used Jamie in Cross Now, based on Apocalypse Now, in which Jamie, once a promising young crossing guard, has gone wild in the forest, giving people bad directions and crossing them into the very teeth of traffic. In the last scene, I terminate Jamie’s command. And then The Embarrasser, a sequel to The Humiliator, in which Jamie and I humiliate the Embarrasser. I am especially proud of the training sequence.
When Ronnie went on a vacation, we filmed Ronnie Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, in which several people reminisce about Ronnie, including a postal worker, who says, “I hardly knew him. Sometimes I saw him playing basketball. Do I miss him? It would be unfair to say, but I do wish he were here.” When Ronnie returned from his vacation, we filmed I’m Sorry, in which Ronnie apologizes over fifty times: to his parents, to his friends, to his teachers (“It was my fault I couldn’t learn; I’m sorry”) to his neighbors, to himself, to his cousin (“You should’ve been born first, anyone can see that; I’m sorry”), to a toll booth attendant, to a man on the street, to a guy on a road crew (“It’s not the jackhammer, it’s me, I’m a light sleeper; I’m sorry”). In each movie, I tried to capture a true piece of my world and to show the laymen, if the laymen were interested, what it is like to grow up down the street from a kid like Ronnie.
When it was too hot for the beach, we went to the city to see the Cubs. This was more me than Jamie; he was not really a fan. The notion of being an observer, of sitting and rooting for someone else—well, that was just not Jamie. To him, spectator sports were a kind of mass hysteria during which regular people turn themselves into a crowd. “There is nothing worse than a crowd,” he said. “Everything bad that happens happens in a crowd.” I told him there is a lot to learn from a crowd. It always seemed to me that you got closest to the real Chicago in the stands of its stadiums. After a Bears game in January, a playoff that the Bears lost, which therefore marked the onset of true winter, I was in a crowd of fans crossing Lake Shore Drive in gloomy end-of-the-season silence. The mood lifted only when, out of nowhere, a gruff cop with a tremendous mustache said,
“Get your heads up. Tomorrow’s another fucking day.”
One afternoon at the end of the summer, I took Jamie to see the Cubs play the St. Louis Cardinals. We met in town, caught a bus to Evanston, and stood on the platform waiting for the train. Jamie handed me a silver flask, which he had tucked into his pants. It was dinged up with impressions left by fingers and marked with the initials J. D. “It was my father’s,” said Jamie. “It was his before the tragically unfair accident that ended his promising young life.” Whenever Jamie spoke of his father, it was in a kind of heroic tone that often struck me as a put-on.
There was whiskey in the flask. When the train came, we sat in the last car getting drunk. At each stop, more fans crowded aboard with pennants and spongy WE’RE NUMBER ONE fingers. Heading south, the train threaded its way through a private world of red brick and fire escapes, curving in and out of apartment houses with quick glimpses of kitchens and living rooms. Jamie opened a window—you could do that on the El—and stuck his head out. Behind him, the images of the city spun past: street signs, billboards, aerials. He closed his eyes. I asked a question. He ignored me. I asked again. He ignored me. I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him inside. An instant later, a brick wall dashed by the window, not two inches away.
Jamie turned pale. It took him several seconds to find his voice. He said, “I would have been cut in two. Right now, my head would be bouncing around somebody’s yard. You saved my life.” He was quiet for the rest of the trip, looking out the window. When the doors opened, we followed the crowd.
Wrigley Field is at the intersection of Addison and Sheffield avenues on the North Side of Chicago. It is a tight configuration of brick and wood, an heirloom of the last century. It was first home to the Chicago Whales, of the old Federal League. I told Jamie about the great athletes who, over the years, had played in the stadium. Mike Kelly was a hard-drinking Irishman from the South Side, the first catcher to think of communicating with his pitcher in a code of often comical hand signals. Cap Anson, a true racist, described a minority hire in his autobiography as “A little darkey that I met in Philadelphia, a singer and a dancer of no mean ability, and a little coon whose skill in handling the baton would have put to blush many a bandmaster of national reputation. I togged him out in a suit of navy blue with brass buttons, at my own expense, and engaged him as a mascot.” Grover Cleveland Alexander, a once-great pitcher, came back from the trenches of the First World War shell-shocked and broken. A heavy drinker, Alexander fell into seizures on the mound. On such occasions, the infielders shielded him from view and made certain he did not choke on his own tongue. In the bio pic, Alexander was played by Ronald Reagan.
My favorite old-timer was Hack Wilson, a squat alcoholic power hitter who still holds many offensive records. After a storied career, Hack Wilson became a drifter, wandering from job to job until his death in 1948. His body went unclaimed for three days. Years before, in 1929, when the Cubs lost the World Series, he had told a train terminal of reporters, “Let me alone now, fellows, I haven’t anything to say except that I am heartbroken and that we did get some awful breaks.”
Jamie and I bought bleacher tickets. The sun beat down. There were shouts from the concessionaires. In the distance, the empty train rumbled off to the city. We stepped into the shadowy depths of the stadium, a postcard view—grass, dirt, players—at the mouth of each tunnel. Jamie laughed. I suppose he was happy to be alive.
The bleachers are home to the most belligerent fans in Chicago, a mob seated directly above the action. In the course of a game, the hecklers shout and curse. It’s a signal achievement to so incense an enemy outfielder that he climbs the ivy—scrambling up the vines that pad the outfield wall to reach the heckler. I was at a game in which Omar Moreno, of the Pittsburgh Pirates, started up the trellis only to be pummeled and covered in beer. One minute he was on his way up; the next minute he was flat on his back. After a game in which the home team was heckled, the Cubs manager, Lee Elia, blew up in a press conference, calling the bleachers “a playground for the cocksuckers.” There was even a theatrical production set entirely in the bleachers called Bleacher Bums, a play co-written by the actor Joe Mantegna in which, in the course of nine innings, a man falls in love, a kid learns the meaning of life, a bully gets his comeuppance, and the Cubs lose.
Jamie and I found a spot on a bench in left field. The fans in the right-field bleachers were shouting, “Left field sucks!” I could see the broad back of Gary Matthews, the Cubs left fielder whom everyone called “The Sarge,” a pot-bellied, pigeon-toed veteran. He was warming up, playing catch with the center fielder, releasing the ball in an easy motion that sent it across the field on a tight line. I watched dozens of games that summer, some on television, some in person; in the course of the season, the Cubs lived a lifetime. I saw blown leads, comebacks, seesaw battles. What I did not read in the Chicago Tribune I learned from Harry Caray, who announced the games on TV and radio for WGN.
Harry Caray had waxy white hair and a pink face with a high plastic shine. His heavy black glasses were a trademark, and he slurred in a way that made you think, The old boy has had one too many. His most famous exclamation, “Holy cow!” was used on home runs and double-plays but also on strange and wonderful sightings around the ballpark. Spotting the right sort of woman in the right sort of bikini, he would interrupt himself to shout, “Holy cow!” Or, on another occasion: “Check out the kid in the sombrero! Holy cow!” At times, he seemed to ignore the game altogether and instead talked about a favorite bar or restaurant or a sausage that had set his stomach ablaze. Between anecdotes, he might make brief mention of a spectacular development: “So anyway, this joint, it has a great jalapeño burger—there’s a triple play—but, Cub fans, this thing will repeat on you. Holy cow!”
In the mid-eighties, when the Cubs seemed sure to win their first World Series since 1908 (they blew it), it was Harry Caray who created my sense of the team. He spoke of their all-animal infield. “It’s a zoo out there,” he would say. “Leon ‘the Bull’ Durham at first base, Ryne Sandberg, ‘the Ryno,’ at second base, Larry Bowa ‘Constrictor’ over at shortstop, and Ron Cey, ‘the Penguin,’ at third.” He said this was not only the most competent infield in the game but also the best-looking. “Sandberg, classical good looks. Bowa: scrappy, sinewy, sexy. Ron Cey: just look at that guy! Bull Durham: what woman would not want to make love to Bull Durham?”
Jamie ordered two beers and struck up a conversation with the girls in the seats next to us. These girls were from one of the towns out near Santa’s Village, a stark nowhere by the airport. They wore tight shirts, denim skirts, and white boots—outfits that triggered certain socioeconomic half-truths that I could not put into words. Here is what Jamie was saying: “On the way up here, I almost died. My head, the very head you see sitting atop my shoulders, this one talking to you, it was almost sheared clean off. For all I know, it was sheared clean off and this is just a crazy postlude for my brain, which is too dumb to know it is sitting in the bushes in some backyard.”
“What are you saying?”
“I might be dead.”
“You think you are dead?”
“Can you prove to me otherwise?”
I was irritated. Jamie was letting his attention be drawn from the game. He was mixing up sex with the sacred. I took a slug of beer and reached for his hand. I held it tight. I spoke of my father and how he had told me again and again not to be a fan of the Cubs. He hoped I would instead follow the New York Yankees or the Los Angeles Dodgers, teams he had loved as a kid. He worried that, in following the Cubs, who almost never won, I would come to accept failure as the natural condition. The better the Cubs look, he told me, the bigger the heartbreak.
“So you see what this means,” I told Jamie. “If the Cubbies win, I will at last emerge from the old man’s shadow.”
But Jamie had already drifted back to the girls, who were rubbing his neck and head, assuring him that he was still very much alive. He made a joke and they sipped hi
s beer. One of the girls climbed on his lap. Jamie had a hole in the crotch of his jeans. The girl stuck her finger in the hole and Jamie said, “Be careful, you could get shocked.” In this manner, the game drifted by, fly balls carried on the wind, clearing the wall, landing on Waveland Avenue, where a passerby would look up and shout, “Ours or theirs?” If the ball had been hit by the Cardinals it would be thrown into the bleachers, from where it was tossed back onto the field.
In the seventh inning, Harry Caray stuck his head out of the press box and sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Though he had performed this ritual at thousands of games, he mangled the words, singing, “Buy some peanuts and popcorn too!” It did not matter. It was still terrific.
By the top of the ninth inning, dark clouds had rolled in and we could see flashes of lightning. The city glowering in the distance looked like something from a painting by El Greco. With two outs, the Cardinals, who were ahead by a run, loaded the bases. The third baseman came to the plate, banged the mud off his cleats, and waved his bat. It got quiet. You could hear the flags snapping on the flagpoles. The pitcher went through his windup, the batter swung, the ball jumped. The Cubs center fielder, Bob Dernier, standing a few feet behind the infield, ran with the swing. At the end of his run he dove, reached out, and caught the ball. He waved to the kids in the bleachers. From that moment, Bob Dernier was my favorite player, this wiry dude with curly blond hair spilling out from under his hat. He was not an icon. No one will remember his name. He was just one of the boys who flashes for a summer and then drifts back to his shit-kicker town to work in an office by the highway, coach Little League, and grow paunchy. “So I could see this, ” said Jamie. “That is why I did not die on the train.”