Lake Effect

by Rich Cohen

  I found myself slipping into a new vocabulary, which I spoke with a clubby ease: Jamie and I talked of prospects, scores, dry spells, long stretches in which you could not find a date, nothing on the plate, nothing on the horizon. Once, when Jamie was in the midst of such a dry spell, he told me he had had a wet dream, which he called a rain dance; he said a rain dance is brought by the rain god, the sweetest and most charitable god of all. Jamie was teaching me a way of life, a habit of moving from girl to girl, never leaving the old girl without a new girl in the wings—each new girl the next hold on the jungle gym, carrying you higher. With each new girl, I could again tell my favorite stories and execute my favorite tricks; with each new girl, I could again see myself reflected as if for the first time; with each new girl, I could again showcase only my best qualities. If I failed and the many bad qualities were showcased accidentally, I could simply switch girls. Each new girl had the power to mint me like a coin.

  One night, Jamie and I took our dates to Greek Town. For the kids on the North Shore, Greek Town was Shanghai before the Revolution, or Hot Springs, Arkansas, before Repeal, or Paris between the Wars. It was the port dreamed of by long-haul sailors, a haven of vice. Just off the highway and just west of the Loop, it was a tumble-down strip of seedy immigrant dives. Each restaurant had the same menu of overstewed beef and cheap red wine served by waiters in dinner jackets. There was Santorini and The Greek Isles and half a dozen other joints, but our favorite was Diana’s. Driving my parents’ car, I picked up Jamie and the girls, got on the highway, and did my best to keep quiet. I did not laugh or smile. If I had to say something—“If we don’t get gas, the night is ruined”—I made sure it was gloomy.

  I had been set up with Heather Blunt, a serious-minded blond girl with long legs, green eyes, good grades, and smart friends. I had had a crush on Heather since sophomore year, when we shared a lab table in biology. The teacher, a kindly old white-haired gentleman, had opened the class by saying, “Over break, I had heart valve surgery, so I may die at any time; let’s begin.” In class, I made many smart-ass remarks and talked back to the movies (Why Planet Earth? Zinc and You!) that ran before us like propaganda. Sometimes, with my safety goggles in place, I caused the Bunsen burners to spark up like factory vents.

  Two years later, when I set my mind on a date with Heather and so sent word through that network of high school girls that is even more effective than the pneumatic tubes that once carried messages to the far-flung corners of vast office buildings, word shot back: Heather says no; she is afraid a date with you will play like a sitcom. “You’re too much of a clown,” Pistone explained. “She thinks, in the middle of messing around, you’ll stop to make some dumb joke.”

  It was a crushing response and certainly true, so I took it to heart. Even years later I still believed a person could be either serious or funny but never both. I thought any joke you told, no matter how well-turned, would shoot holes in the serious impression you might be trying to make. After that, whenever I saw Heather at school, I frowned and spoke of continental drift, of nuclear war, of my general sense of dread. I often used the phrase “To hell in a handbasket” or said “It will get worse before it gets to worse.” One day, when Heather mentioned a millionaire who had been caught bilking other millionaires, I said, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” The next day, Heather agreed to go on a date with me. In the car, I did my best to stay in character—a serious young man weighed down by the problems of the world. When Jamie asked if I had seen David Letterman the night before, I said, “I do not watch that kind of television.”

  He said, “What kind of television do you watch?”

  I said, “Public television.”

  A few minutes later, when Jamie asked what I thought of the new Tom Petty record, I said, “When you consider the fact that, at any moment, whether by design or by some absurd accident, we might well die in a fiery conflagration, does Tom Petty really matter?”

  I found a parking spot in front of Diana’s. The sun had gone down. The sky was that cool shade of blue often used as a background in passport photos. Jamie said, “C’mon, little brother, let’s get a table.”

  We found a booth in back of the restaurant. We ordered a bottle of red wine. The waiter asked if we were twenty-one.

  Jamie said, “Sir, I will kindly ask you not to insult me or my friends.”

  The waiter shrugged and came back with a bottle. And soon we were eating stringy meat and fried bread from silver platters. The room was filled with chattering voices, singing, and dishes breaking as waiters shouted “Opa!” and set fire to plates of cheese. We finished the bottle and ordered another. With each glass, the floor, which was made of that kind of black-and-white checkered tile you see in old Italian kitchens, danced and shimmered before my eyes. On the way to the bathroom, to steady myself, I had to look at my shoes. I said, “I am buzzed, I am loaded, I am drunk.” It seemed exciting and dangerous as slowly, drink by drink, Heather opened up like a flower, sitting close and holding my hand as I said, “See how serious I am? Serious, serious motherfucker. Like Kissinger I am so serious.”

  From there, my memory is a blocked station on cable, an occasional image flickering through the static: Jamie leading me to the car and taking away my keys; me sitting in back with Heather, kissing Heather, saying, “I love you, I love you, I love you”; highway signs spinning past like lemons in a slot machine; my stomach turning over and me shouting, “Pull over!” I ran into the trees and puked into the Skokie lagoon, that lonesome swamp where the mob dumps its bodies. We must have dropped off the girls, because the next thing I knew Jamie and I were in the front hall of my house, looking up the stairs, where my mother, in a sheer nightgown, stood on the landing, eyes clouded with sleep, saying, “Honey, is that you? Are you home?”

  I felt the bile rise inside me and rushed into the bathroom. I could hear my mother repeat her question— “Honey, is that you? Are you home?”—and the instant before I started to panic, before I thought, All is lost, I heard Jamie’s voice, slow and steady, say, “Yes, I am home.”

  My mother said, “Good night, honey, I love you.”

  And, in a response that even then I registered as symbolic, Jamie said, “Good night, Mom. I love you too.”

  In April, we went to a party thrown by Rink Anderson, a handsome kid with a broad smile and a cool reserve I recognized from sixties movies about surfing. Rink was the big blond kid on the periphery. His speech was wide-open and breezy and sprinkled with trademark phrases. If, for example, a party went south, he said, “Let’s bail.” If a friend smoked some bad dope and started to panic, he said, “Take a breath and ride down the crest.” If you got dumped by your girlfriend, he said, “You will always have country music.”

  Rink was a strange hybrid, a sweet and melancholy popular kid. In junior high, after years of being the coolest kid in grade school, Rink gained a bunch of weight, his prepubescent body fueling up for the blastoff that would carry it above six feet; for a time, he was ridiculed by the very kids who had once worshiped him. In high school, when Rink resumed his place atop the social order, he cherished the memory of his chubby years; in the story of Rink Anderson, I’ve always felt his brief stint as a fat kid played a role similar to the role polio played in the life of FDR—it gave him depth; it gave him empathy with the masses.

  The Andersons lived in the kind of house you might see in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, a marble slab built into the side of a ravine overhanging the lake. Every window was filled with water and sky. We stood on the back porch as night crept across the waves. Rink had the radio tuned to a weekly show called Blues Breakers. He hummed along with Sonny Boy Williamson. Every few minutes, the doorbell rang and another group of kids came in. When it got dark, Jamie and I went to the living room, where I saw the kind of cute little blond girl that has always made my heart fly into my mouth. She was talking to friends, and now and then she looked over at me. Jamie
saw me looking at her, went over, and introduced himself. I went into the kitchen. When I got back, Jamie said, “I have it all worked out.”

  Jamie arranged it so the girl and I were left alone on the back porch. As I looked at her, I wondered what my face was doing. She smiled. She said her name was Molly. We went into a back room and sat on a bed in the dark. There were other couples on other beds. After a while, we walked down to the beach. We talked. I said something romantic. I drove her home. A few nights later, we went on a date with Jamie and a friend of Molly’s. Then we went out alone. Then she was my girlfriend.

  Molly was just another suburban girl with a room full of stuffed animals and snapshots, but to me she was a Gypsy from the steppes, wild and exotic. I came to know her secrets and to fill in the gaps of her stories. In her place, I built a figure of romance, standing in a fog at the end of the platform. My brother, home from college, said, “I did not know they made human beings that white.” Pistone said, “Like so many nice girls, she is plain.” Jamie thought of her as a starter kit, a demo to introduce me to the toggles and joysticks. Still, she was my girlfriend, and for this reason alone I cherished her and cared about her.

  We met during free periods in the student commons. Around my friends, she was shy. She would nod and blush and look away. But after school, when we were alone, she burned with a low fever, saying my name, guiding my hand. Since I had no experience of sex, I found my way by trial and error, hoping to inflict as little pain as possible. Looking for the sweet spot, we rubbed each other raw. On spring nights, we worked our way from stage to stage— from kissing and squeezing, to undoing and unclasping, to holding and stroking. We fooled around in her bedroom when her parents were at dinner, in my bedroom when my parents were out of town, at the houses of friends, in wood-paneled family rooms in the flickering light of rented movies—Stripes, Volunteers. We did not have sex, but instead lived in the gray land of the dry hump and the hand job, where your mind is capable of imagining nothing grander than the blow job, the great mystical blow job that stands as the crowning jewel of any truly worthy high school relationship.

  One night, in the attic, with the windows open to the cool breeze, with Bo Diddley on the stereo shouting his fast, dirty version of “My Babe”— “My babe, when she gets hot, she gets hot like an oven”—I was crowned, brought from the shallows of boyhood into the wavery depths; and all the while, my parents just downstairs watching Dynasty. After I dropped Molly off at home, I went into their room. My father asked me about colleges. As I answered his questions, part of me marveled: The fool! How he talks! As if I am the same boy that he knew this morning!

  When Jamie told me he would not go to the senior prom, I said I would not go either. The truth is, I had already begun to tire of Molly. In those weeks, I had time only for myself—my own worries, the riddle of my own future. Each day, a few more kids came to school waving envelopes, saying they had been accepted by the college of their choice, second choice, safety; and just like that, they were relieved, for another four years anyway, of the dread fact of having no idea what to do.

  You see, for the most part, the kids I grew up with had been taught that being a success means doing better than your parents, and that doing better than your parents means making more money—but our parents were rich. So what chance did we have of making more money, and why should we want to? What mattered to our parents could never matter to us. What mattered to us—a sense of style, of experience-collecting—seemed so simple and pure we were afraid even to talk about it.

  As a result, most of the kids in towns like Glencoe and Winnetka just went along, high school to college to whatever, hoping they might someday, as if by magic, understand the longing of their fathers, who themselves had made a mistake known to successful fathers throughout history—they had raised rich kids. For the kids on the North Shore this meant seeing college as a hack politician sees another term—four more years, a reprieve, an escape—as it would later mean trying to lose their inheritance in one grand post-college spree, or indeed trying to make even more money than their parents, or trying to spend more, or devising some entirely new notion of success. Of course, to a degree, Jamie and I were immune from such concerns. My father and mother were in no way conventional, and Jamie’s father was not even in the picture. Still, this was the world where we grew up, and it marked us. As we got older, we became increasingly interested in the idea of success and in how to make our way, without too much injury, into the thicket of the adult world.

  One by one, my friends caught the reprieve—Tom Pistone to Illinois State University at Normal, Tyler White to Michigan State University at Lansing, Rink Anderson to the University of Montana at Missoula, Ronnie Flowers to the University of Iowa at Iowa City, where, though he could start over, he would still be Ronnie Flowers. In addition to an acceptance letter, Ronnie had also landed himself Casey Cassidy, a girl he met at the health club, a female Ronnie, choppy red hair, scattershot, hopeful. Ronnie drove Casey’s car as if it were his own—a green Jaguar. Once, when Jamie and I were in the car, a phone rang and Ronnie answered it, saying, “Yes, Casey. . . . No, Casey. . . . Of course, Casey. . . . I love you, Casey.”

  A few days later, my father asked to speak to Ronnie alone. He began by asking about Casey: “Where is she from? What does her father do? Does she have a sister? Is she nice? How many miles are on that Jaguar? How does it handle? What does her house look like on the inside?” After Ronnie had answered each of these questions, my father said, “Ronnie, you know I care about you, right? I want only what is in your best interest? You know that I am thinking only of you?”

  “Yes, Herbie.”

  “Good, Ronnie. Because I don’t want you to take this in the wrong way. Ronnie, marry that girl! Marry her now while you still have the chance. You will never do better, Ronnie. And this is no insult. Believe me, if she had a sister, which, sadly, she does not, I would urge Richard to marry the sister.”

  In May, I was accepted to Tulane University in New Orleans. My parents were not home when the letter came, so I went down the street to tell Ronnie. His mother, Chris Flowers, who was baking cookies, said, “Oh, really? I went to Tulane.”

  At the same moment, in unison, Ronnie and I said, “You did?”

  “For a year,” said Chris. “Then I dropped out.”

  Again in unison, Ronnie and I said, “You dropped out?”

  “Yes,” said Chris. “To get married to my first husband, the one before Bob.”

  From there, Ronnie was on his own.

  He said, “You were married before you were married to Dad?”

  Ronnie asked some more questions and then dropped the subject. He actually seemed to lose interest. That is the amazing thing about Ronnie—his inability to wonder, to worry, to suffer. As I got older, I realized this would be his ticket to true happiness. Ronnie Flowers is a kid who gets hit in the head with a baseball bat, but the moment before he gets hit is still the greatest moment of his life.

  When I told Jamie my news, the results were far less gothic. He smiled and shook my hand and said he would now have a reason to visit the South. “It will be like we’re still together,” he said. When I asked if he had heard from any schools, he told me that, come to think of it, he had not applied to any. In the past, if questioned, Jamie had always spoken in a vague way of the university in Indiana or Wisconsin, and I guess I had assumed he had applied to some of the big state schools. Now I didn’t know what he would do.

  Some weeks later, Jamie and my father were working in our garden: Jamie in shorts, no shirt, dirt-smeared; my father like a cavalry officer in an old war movie: High Plains drifter hat, stubbly beard, cigar. A pilgrim and a wild Indian talking on the naked prairie.

  “What is this about you not going to college?”

  “Didn’t say not going. Just didn’t apply. Up in the air. Figure to figure.”

  “The world is full of morons, Jamie. Don’t be one of them. Mistakes you make now, these are real mistakes.”

&
nbsp; “I’m just taking my time.”

  “Is this about money?”

  “No, it has nothing to do with money.”

  “Because if it does I can help. I’ll pay your tuition. I don’t want you to make a stupid mistake.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Jamie. “I’ll be fine.”

  In June, the New Trier News, for which, on occasion, I still wrote, ran a list of the colleges that each senior would attend. Taken together with your class rank, this list was thought to tell the entire story of your life. In the paper, next to Jamie’s name, there was an empty space. When I thought of it later, Jamie’s decision not to apply seemed brave. He was the only kid I knew with the personality to face that spring without an acceptance letter. You see, in those weeks, I had a sense that life after graduation was already beginning to claim my classmates, that the kids in school were being defined by their future. Pistone walked the halls with shoulders slumped, as if every passing hour brought him closer to his unpleasant fate—Bucko, fallen idol of my father’s youth, was calling. Pistone, at least, went easy, without much fuss or complaint. Other kids— and here I am thinking of a big kid named Will Tickle— had to be dragged kicking and screaming from their glory. Will peaked freshman year. He went downhill from there. By senior year, he no longer had success with girls, or sports, or friends. He seemed to sense that the world outside of school would be even more cruel. He was like a stock that gets devalued and devalued until one day it just drops off the big board.