Lake Effect

by Rich Cohen

  In the first inning, Jean’s 76 collected three quick runs, mostly on drives down the left-field line. When we came up, Tom tried to smack the ball into the trees, then I did the same, and so did Jordie McQuaid. My father shook his head, turned to Ronnie, and said, “Be ready.” Jean’s tacked on a few runs each inning, until we were on the verge of the slaughter rule. As we ran out for the fifth inning, my father shouted to Tyler White. He told him to move from second base and reposition himself behind the shortstop; the center fielder was to shade into left; the right fielder was to move into center. It was something like the old Ted Williams shift—my father said it would counteract the other team’s deadly pull hitting. I said his plan was idiotic and embarrassing. We would not do it. He walked out onto the field and said, “What did I tell you about two coaches?”

  He was standing near the pitcher’s mound, and soon we were shouting at each other in front of the entire town. The players on the bench for Jean’s 76 were laughing. “Desoto Andujar,” one of them yelled. “Look at Desoto Andujar!” The umpire threatened to call a delay of game. My father said to me, “You’re out! Get on the bench!” He turned to the dugout and called for Ronnie, who raced over like a frisky retriever. My father said, “Ronnie, get into left field.”

  “Ronnie doesn’t play,” I said.

  “He’s playing now,” said my father.

  From the seats, Bob Flowers shouted, “Go get ’em, Ronnie.”

  I said, “No.”

  My father said, “What?”

  I said, “You’re fired.”

  My father looked at me, and I could not tell if he was hurt or if he was smiling. Maybe both. He turned and walked out of the lights. He walked home. Ronnie trotted back to the dugout. The next inning, the other team’s catcher, a huge fat man, hammered a pitch high into the air. I watched it vanish into the black sky and a moment later I heard it drop into the trees. I had never seen a softball hit that hard. Three runs scored. The slaughter rule was invoked. The season was over.

  A few days later, I went by Jamie’s house. I told Violet that Jamie had borrowed something of mine, that I knew where it was, and that I needed it back. She held open the door. Of course, this was a lie. I just felt like looking around. I walked out to the porch. Everything was as he left it, his bed neatly made and his books stacked evenly on their shelves. I opened his closet and looked at his pants and at the neat row of shoes and at the neat pile of shirts. I looked at his desk, at the pictures he had set out: his father backed by mountains, the skyline of Chicago, Little Walter in a crisp white suit, blowing his harmonica.

  In a drawer, I found a stack of notebooks. I sat down and looked through the pages. These were journals, hundreds of entries, some long paragraphs, some sketchy descriptions of feelings or moods, some just a single phrase or word. The pages were written in the same style as Jamie’s speech, with each sentence running on and on, circling toward some greater truth. There were theories and ideas in the notebooks, and notions and descriptions and anecdotes and dreams and predictions and stories. Sloppy Ed Carter was in it, and so was the lake ten minutes after sundown (“the sky red and the water so blue it hurt my eyes”), and Ronnie was in it and so was my father, stumbling through the garden like a High Plains drifter, and I was in it, and so was Tom, raising a beer, and God was there, and so too were about a thousand clocks, each ticking off the hours, and there were short little poems and lists, which read to me like something from the diaries of old Ben Franklin, just another experience-crazed American dead set to reinvent himself, and there were stories, one about a Mexican landscaping crew that worked in the yards up and down the North Shore, their broken-down pickup truck rattling with tools and stinking of manure, “the most wretched, hardworking outsiders in the world,” and in the back of each story was Jamie’s father, ambling the great green pastures of heaven. On the last page, there was an entry written a week before Jamie left on his trip:

  I live in the suburbs with my mother and my sister and my grandmother, almost a prisoner but full of road dreams and the constant anticipation of adventures in strange cities. At night, I pore over maps and imagine every highway and hill and out of the way town. I approach big cities in my mind. I explore every back street and alley. From the tops of tall buildings I enjoy crystal views of streets spilling into the country. Sometimes the streets are filled with traffic and sometimes they are deserted and I am alone.

  As I was reading, Violet came in. I never thought of myself as a snoop, as someone who looks through closets and reads the diaries of other people, but then again— here I was. Violet said, “I have fixed you lunch.”

  “I can’t stay.”

  I ran through the house and out to my car. I drove through town and into the fields. I cannot say just how I was feeling. Like a creep, I guess, empty too. In such moments, I feel that everything is spinning and everyone is changing; even the universe is spinning, so the loss of this moment and this mood and these friends will be so utterly complete that no one, not even me, will be around to remember it. I don’t know. It’s kind of impossible to explain. I pushed the accelerator to the floor. I love to speed through the country, flying past cornstalks and telephone poles. Whatever is bothering me, whatever is under my skin—a pain which, like the houses beyond the horizon, I can sense but not yet see—is blown away, and my head clears, and my heart races.

  One afternoon in August I was sitting at the counter of Sloppy Ed’s, eating a charburger and reading Mike Royko’s column in the Sun-Times, when I overheard a conversation between two kids I knew in a vague way—kids who drifted on the edge of school life, riding skateboards and hanging out in the smoking area, emerging, like strange tropical birds, in only the hottest days of summer. One kid was named Chester, but everyone called him Chester the Molester, because he had once dropped his pants and displayed himself to a busload of Catholic schoolgirls. The other kid was also named Chester, but everyone called him Chester the Ingestor, because he would swallow anything. In the course of one summer afternoon, Chester swallowed two Valiums, a cockroach, a piece of broken glass, a butterfly, and an entire bottle of Tylenol. The Chesters were talking as they took turns on Donkey Kong, a video game that filled the hamburger stand with a cartoon collection of chirps and beeps.

  Here is what they were saying:

  Chester the Molester: No way, man, catch it, he is way fucking different. I heard he saw some crazy shit out there and that it fried his brain.

  Chester the Ingestor: I heard he saw a Swami. Fucking Swami gave him a whole shitload of healing crystals. At the airport, they made him put the fucking crystals through the X-ray machine, and the crystals lost maybe fifty percent of their healing power. Maybe that’s what fried him.

  Chester the Molester: Bullshit, he hitched back. No. It was the whole fucking thing, man. It did him in! He was gonna Jack Kerouac it out there, swim in the ocean, and Jack Kerouac it back. But something went all screwy.

  Chester the Ingestor: I heard he took a medicine cabinet full of pills.

  Chester the Molester: I heard he banged a hundred hot chicks.

  Chester the Ingestor: Maybe that’s what fried him. He has eaten everything on the menu, and now there is nothing left to taste.

  Chester the Molester: And he is stuck back here where there is nothing but takeout and skank.

  Chester the Ingestor: Hey, you ever make it to the third cartoon on this machine?

  I went over and asked who the hell they were talking about. Chester the Ingestor kept his eyes on the video screen. Chester the Molester looked at me.

  “What do you mean?” he said. “Drew-licious.”

  “What? Is he home?”

  “Fuck, yeah, he’s been home for at least a week.”

  I did not believe it at first. I thought one or both of the Chesters were lying. Then I did believe it and I was really happy. Jamie is back! Then I still believed it, but I was hurt. Why had Jamie slipped back into town without a word? Why had he ditched me? These were my thoughts as I walke
d to his house. I found him on the stoop, smoking, looking at the streets of town, his hair swept back, his face tawny. He said, “Hey, little brother, I was wondering when you would show up.”

  “What the fuck? Why didn’t you call me?”

  “C’mon,” he said. “Don’t do the obvious thing and be mad at me.”

  For a moment, I was actually too mad to say anything. In addition, I felt like a fool for being so obvious in my anger. I said, “Fine. Tell me what I should be?”

  “Well, I guess you should just be happy to see me.”

  I waited a moment, then said, “Yes. I am happy to see you. Welcome home.”

  Jamie threw open his arms and smiled his great big smile, but it was only his mouth smiling. The rest of his face was gloomy. Despite the fineness of his features, and his broad shoulders, and his clear eyes, he looked washed out, defeated. I asked about his trip and he said, “There is nothing much to talk about.” I asked if he had made it to the Pacific Ocean and he said, “Can’t you tell? I’m a new man.” I asked if he had reached any decision about his immediate future; had he decided on a college? He said, “Don’t hustle me, son, the future is not yet in view.”

  I had known Jamie in hundreds of situations, at hundreds of parties, on hundreds of afternoons, when he was raised up and when he was beaten down, when he was drunk and when he was hung over, when the sun was shining and when his mood was black. But this was more than a bad mood. The light in him, that great mischievous glimmer, had gone out. I wondered what happened out west. What was he not telling me? I thought of my favorite movies ( Lawrence of Arabia, Sullivan’s Travels), and how in each of those films the action is structured around a pivotal scene, an event that forever alters the hero, that fills him with meaning or sets him on the path to glory or on the road to ruin. But in this film, Jamie’s film, the pivotal scene had taken place off-camera, on the other side of the country. So here I was, left to re-create that moment from a few scraps of circumstantial evidence: the slump of his shoulders, the drag of his voice, his end-of-the-world sadness, and how everything in him seemed dead. “What about Las Vegas?” I asked. “How did my napkin trick work?”

  He said, “Oh, yeah, fine. ” Then he stubbed out his cigarette, sighed, and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  Jamie had lost his interest in the variety of life. He would sit for hours on his porch staring at his toes. He spoke under his breath, or in clipped sentences without meaning, or blandly of great events. The color had gone out of his face. His eyes were as cold as embers. Even in the same room, he was far away. He said nothing about his trip. Everyone was worried about him. It was an epic of sadness, and it overwhelmed our little world. We decided, in the last week of the summer, since my parents were out of town, to throw a marathon party for Jamie, which we hoped would lift him from his funk. I filled the refrigerator with food and sangria and made up the beds in the guest bedrooms and set out pictures I had taken in happier times: one showed me and Jamie with linked arms at Wrigley Field, another showed us in a toy store battling with croquet mallets.

  Late in the afternoon Ronnie drove me to Evanston, where we bought beer from an Indian who, because we were young and stupid and knew just a little of the history of the world, we called Gandhi. On the way, talking about the real Gandhi, Ronnie said, “Some people are nice and some people are good, but Gandhi, now that was a great guy!” Then Ronnie grew very somber. “Maybe there is something seriously wrong with Jamie,” he said. “Maybe it is something that even a marathon party cannot fix.”

  I said, “Ronnie, there is nothing that a marathon party cannot fix.”

  When we got home, the street was lined with cars and my house was filled with people. Some were girls from school, some were friends from the beach, but most were people we had never seen. It was a windy end-of-summer night, and I could smell pine needles burning. I found Jamie in the backyard laughing and drinking a beer. Tom put the speakers in the windows so we could listen to R.E.M. and the blues. Ronnie came out of the house with a glass of Old Grandad. He had never tasted alcohol before. Ever since he began lifting weights, which he had done in hopes of escaping abuse, he refused cocktails, saying, “My body is my temple.” Again in hopes of escaping abuse, he now wanted a drink. He was soon going to college and so planned to advance into that club of whiskey drinkers he was certain existed out there in the world. He threw back his head and swallowed. He wiped his mouth and said, “OK if I have one of those beers?”

  Within just a few minutes, I could see the liquor take its effect. Ronnie slouched into his own shoulders and his movements turned loose and easy. Then something truly strange happened; it is something I have never read about, or seen on television, or anything. Ronnie Flowers, who had never been east of Fort Wayne, Indiana, began to speak with a British accent. A Yorkshire accent, really, slang from the factory towns of northern England. He slapped Jamie on the back and said, “Eight boys, eight for nine and they as shy as heifers. You’ll never fill a bag, but the ones you land you’ll be glad you landed.” We were mystified. At last, Jamie surmised that, late one night, Ronnie must have fallen asleep before a television set that was airing an old John Ford movie. “It must have gone straight down into his subconscious,” said Jamie. “Besides, that is how Ronnie has always wanted to live. Just another one of the blokes yammering away in the pub.”

  I had intended to look after Jamie, to care for him, to nurture him, but I got drunk and started to have fun and then really worried about no one but myself.

  Now and then, Ronnie shotgunned a beer or threw back three fingers of whiskey, shouting, “Aye, mate, ain’t we friends after all!” Tom did back flips to impress the girls. If ever he learned the truth—that these flips impressed the boys far more than they ever did the girls— he would have been horrified. Tyler White was in the bathroom, adding and dividing floor tiles. Rink Anderson kissed a girl like someone in a Norman Rockwell painting—leaning forward, hands behind his back, lips outstretched. I was with Jamie in the attic listening to music as the party raged below. In the manner of Roman senators, we occasionally entertained a visitor from the lower floors. “Tell me,” Jamie would ask, “are the people happy?” The party waxed and waned, ebbed and flowed; in the mornings, my friends slept in guest beds or on floors. In the afternoons, when I took a shower, I set a vodka and orange juice on the sink, which I sipped as I shaved. I felt like Bobby Darin.

  On the third night of the party, Jamie and I drove to the town dump, to throw out several Hefty Bags of empty beer cans. As I parked alongside the Dumpster, a cop pulled in behind me, party lights flashing. A moment later, he was at the window. I could see only his uniform and the brim of his hat. In an ominous cop voice, he said, “What are you boys doing out here?”

  I said, “We have come to throw away some trash.”

  The cop said, “Where is this so-called trash?”

  I said, “In the hatchback, sir.”

  The cop said, “Can I see this so-called trash?”

  I said, “Be my guest.”

  A moment later, I heard the cop poking through our empties. He said, “Oh-ho-ho, that kind of trash!” I looked at Jamie. He was laughing. Then the cop was back in the window, saying, “Who bought you this trash?”

  I said, “We made it ourselves, sir.”

  “Look at it from my point of view,” said the cop. “I got underage kids driving around with a load of trash they are not authorized to have.”

  He took out a note pad and wrote down our names. “I am not letting you discharge this trash at this site,” he said. “Furthermore, if I find this trash in any public Dumpster at any time over the next two weeks—and I will be looking, boys, believe that—then I am coming after you with all of my power. Take this trash home and show it to your parents.”

  Jamie and I drove to the Sheraton Hotel by the highway and dumped the bags in the parking lot.

  As the week dragged on, friends began to drift away. The party was a train making stops in the country, and at
each stop a few people got off. It was strange. One minute, a friend would be just as ragged and poorly drawn as me, and the next minute he was as fresh as a new painting, hair still wet from the shower, chinos and button-down shirt, holding a suitcase. He walks from room to room, shaking hands, saying his good-byes. “Well, it’s been an honor to know you!” And he is off to college: North Dakota, or Indiana, or Minnesota, or Iowa. Tyler White was gone, and then Rink Anderson, and then Jordie McQuaid, and then Ronnie Flowers, saying, “Good day to you, chaps. Good day!” One afternoon, as I was sitting in the yard, Tom Pistone came out in pleated pants and a cloth coat, a bag slung over his shoulder. He said, “So long, boys, I’m off to Normal.” And then it was just me and Jamie, laughing and drinking, spinning through the night. And then Jamie was shaking me awake and I was looking up at him as if I were on an operating table hazy with anesthetic and he was showered and neatly dressed, saying, “Hey, little brother, I’m off. Gonna catch a ride and see if I can enroll in that big school they got out there in Kansas. I stashed the last six-pack in the wall. William Burroughs lives in Lawrence, so it can’t be all bad.”

  I fell back asleep. When I woke up, the sun was low in the sky. I walked though the empty house. The rooms had been scrubbed clean. Jamie is a neat freak. He often said, “Destroy what you must but clean what you can.” I stood in the driveway. After a while, my parents came home. We had a farewell dinner. That night, I lay awake in bed listening to the wind and to the message it was carving out of the dead air. It was speaking of farewells and voyages, how roads lead on to roads. In the morning, I showered, put on clean clothes, and left for college.