by Rich Cohen
For the most part, however, Tenafly preferred to play straight pool: that is, to sit alone in his room and get stoned or drunk, or else he liked to sit with just one other person whose mind he could manipulate. Perhaps because I am an open book, he took an instant liking to me and was forever asking me to hang out in his room. One night, I gave in and agreed to match him hit for hit, drink for drink, line for line. Even Congo was surprised. “Why would you want to do that?”
“Adventures,” I said.
“That’s not adventures,” said Congo. “That’s stupid.”
I sat in that room smoking with Tenafly for hours, as again and again he loaded his pipe. At one point I began to shiver, and I could feel the curve of my spine and the fluids moving in and out of my organs and I knew for certain that I was going to die, so I looked up at Tenafly, who was breaking up marijuana on a tray, and he felt my eyes and he looked at me and smiled and said, “No, sir, we still gonna get a lot higher than this!”
When I closed my eyes, it was like being carried away in a swift river. Me on my back, swept by the current, looking at trees and cliffs and a faraway sky. I was certain I would never make it out of that room, out of the maze of rooms and streets that had become my life. Even now, years later, in my bed in New York, I sometimes wonder if I ever did make it out or if I am still in one of those rooms, head back, eyes glassy, dreaming.
In those weeks, it felt as if I were actually growing younger. Day by day, I was shedding that premature little-brother wisdom that had once—to some degree, anyway— kept me on the straight and narrow and so protected me and cheated me from that simple, pointless foolishness that is, after all, at the very core of keek. I guess I was never older than I had been at age thirteen.
In the morning, however, it was like the tide had washed out, leaving nothing but debris and headache and dry mouth and regret. OK, maybe not regret, but at least that sense of surprise that goes by the phrase, “How did I do that?” In this mood, I felt empty and sick for the Midwest, for the change of seasons, the sound of fallen leaves, the smell of coming snow, friends and family. I called my parents. As my father spoke, I could hear his office chair creak and the scene quickly arranged itself in my head: Herbie, in a bathrobe and beetle boots—the only shoes wide enough for his too-wide feet—at his desk on the second floor, looking out at the yard, the leaves turning red with the autumn. “Keep your options open,” he might say. “If you work hard, you can still get the hell out of there and transfer to a decent school.”
And, yes, I called Jamie but just about never got him, and I wrote him dozens of letters, filling him in on each detail, each development of my life. If he wrote back, it was a homemade postcard, a picture of himself: on a dusty street, in the window of an abandoned house, in a yellow field. I studied the foreground and background of each shot, imagining the life my friend lived just before and just after the shutter snap, how he bundled up on the first cold days of winter.
Our relationship had changed, of course; it was now less coherent and more episodic, following the inevitable course of childhood friendships when those friends have left home. No longer an unbroken current, the drama now played as a series of scenes, jump cuts. Jamie would come, Jamie would go, and the seasons would spin off into years.
Four or five months went by, and there was a knock on my door. I was lying in bed, looking out the window at the strange hazy tropical sky that settles over New Orleans. I crossed the room and opened the door. A voice said, “Hey, little brother, think you can let me in?” It was Jamie. He was wearing a wool coat for that cold Kansas wind, and his face was chapped and raw. He looked like he had crossed from the other side of the world. I was surprised to see him, so I hung back. I have always been shy on first meeting people, even friends. Jamie knew I meant nothing by it. He just smiled at me. I caught my reflection in his pupils—a convex little man, hands thrust deep in his pockets. Jamie said, “I came here to see you and to see the Mardi Gras, so c’mon, man, show me around.”
He dropped his bag on the empty bed—with the use of some old-school shenanigans, I had been able to score myself my own room, the much-dreamed of single—and we set off across campus. It was like crossing the deck of a great ship, heaving with the waves, nodding to the other members of the crew. I was proud just to be out walking with Jamie, showing everyone I had such an interesting high school friend. It was like coming from good stock. People stared at Jamie—his loping stride, how he socked himself and said, “So here I am!” Or, “Little brother, we got some things to do!” Or, “Look at these trees, man, do you realize you go to school in the land of palm trees?”
To come down here, Jamie had ditched a week of classes at the University of Kansas, but he said it was OK because it was “field research.” I asked how he made the trip. He said he had caught a ride from a friend of a friend as far as Jackson, Mississippi, and hitchhiked from there. When I asked his opinion of Lawrence, Kansas, where his school was, he shrugged and said, “It’s a half-ass town full of forward-thinking types and a grocery list of alternative scenes. Its parents have declared a war on drugs.”
We went to the house where the boys lived, and I took him from room to room. We found Congo at a desk near a window. It looked out on the backyard and the Dumpster. He was writing in his journal. As he stood to greet us, I stole a glance; the entire page was covered with the sentence, “Yes, yes of course.” Congo shook Jamie’s hand and then asked Jamie several random questions: “Have you ever made anyone cry?” “Do you follow anything that you call policies?” “What do you think of the term pet peeve?” “Have you ever sold anything to a friend?” “What is better, a roller coaster, a haunted house, or a water ride?”
Congo then turned to me and said, “I really like Jamie.”
When you introduce an old friend to a new friend and they don’t judge each other, or hate each other, but actually like each other—that is one of the greatest pleasures in the world. “Why don’t you head over to Fat Harry’s?” said Congo. “You can even take my car.”
“What about you?”
“I’m gonna get back to the writing,” he said.
Fat Harry’s is a rundown dump, as dank and ominous as a bear’s cave. Hours drift by, people come and go, but nothing really changes. Even on clear windswept mornings, it feels like the middle of the night. There is a bar in front and a grill in back. From the door you can see St. Charles Avenue shadowed by a lacy canopy of Spanish moss. Streetcars clatter past, washed-out faces in the windows. And then it is night at Fat’s, regulars wandering in from odd jobs, the jukebox switching from Miles Davis to the Rolling Stones.
Jamie and I had a few beers and a few glasses of whiskey. Every third song on the jukebox was the “Mardi Gras Mambo”—“Down in New Orleans, where the blues were born, it takes a cool cat to blow a horn”—a scratchy trumpet-filled tune by the Hawketts, which is the true anthem of the New Orleans Mardi Gras, heralding the storm as surely as a covey of birds flapping across a thunderhead.
There was a strange moment of silence. Then everyone at the bar ran into the street. People lined St. Charles Avenue for miles, some seated in rickety bleachers, most on foot. Soon we spotted the parade, the Crewe of Bacchus, another one of those restricted old-white-boy clubs putting on its show for the drunken peasants of the city. First came the majorettes, batons playing tricks in the air, then the swaggering horn players in starchy white uniforms, marching hats and chin straps, and white boots. Black boys from all-black high schools razzmatazzing it down the street, shuffling side to side, swinging trumpets and trombones. Each marching band had the name of its school on its uniform: De la Salle, Brother Martin, Cabrini. One was called Cohen. Jamie convinced a majorette to give him a shirt—COHEN stitched in red lettering across the chest.
The street vibrated with footsteps; the horns shuddered through my limbs. It was spectacular. Then came the grotesque, vulgar, billowy, Day-Glo floats and the members of the Crewe in white clanlike hoods and masks, and the women as flutte
ry as French queens in petticoats, tossing out plastic beads, which the crowd fought over and prized. Behind the floats came the torch carriers, shabbily dressed black men on foot, shuffling under a shower of coins, grimacing in the orange gaslight, a haunting throw-back to the days of Reconstruction. “It presents a dilemma,” said Jamie. “If you throw a nickel, you are a bastard. And if you don’t?” Then came the last marching band, a caboose of a kid in back, sleepy-eyed, maybe failed two grades, raising his cymbals: crash! The sound swept over the crowd. Mardi Gras had begun.
We did not see my room for many days. We slept on couches, or on floors, or in backyards. We were often in the French Quarter, in the street or in hotel lobbies, a drink in hand, blue or red, juleps or Hurricanes. Rounding a corner, we would stumble upon noisy crowds, girls hanging from balconies. There was no sense of cause-and-effect to any of this, no logic. It was a train wreck of images—a run-on sentence, a puzzle pieced together wrong.
At one point, we stood in a biker bar downtown called the Dungeon, laughing and slurring and holding each other up. Some old guy bought us a drink. He was alone and full of talk. “You boys are damn young,” he said, “so I just hope your generation is better than mine. My generation has done nothing. We did not survive a depression or win a war, we did not lose a war or go on pilgrimage, we did not immigrate or emigrate. Our lives have been just a collection of aimless conversations in smoky bars.” He thought for a moment, then said, “Just like this one.”
We hitched back up to Jimmy’s, where Dash Rip Rock was playing. It was night. It was always night. The night went on and on. Mardi Gras is a night that lasts six days. When morning comes, it is not morning but just another version of night. Jamie said, “Let’s take drugs.”
I said I could get us a joint.
Jamie said, “No, real drugs.”
We went to the house, where we found Tenafly getting stoned. He took us into his room. We smoked. Touching Jamie, he said, “Feel the keek coming off this kid.” I found a book Tenafly had stashed behind his bed. It was filled with pictures. I read a story written in a fairy-tale type. A voice actually seemed to be reading the words into my ear:
In a land on the other side of the Black Sea lived a powerful King. One day, a peasant visited the court of the King, who gave the peasant a duck and said, “Kill this duck where no one sees.” Many years later the King found the peasant, who was still holding the duck. The King said, “I told you to kill the duck where no one sees.” The peasant said, “Yes, but the duck sees.”
For some reason, maybe because I had been up for days, or because I had been drinking and drinking, or because I was just feeling the effects of the joint, the kicker of the story sent me into a swoon. In my head, over and over, I heard that voice say, “Yes, but the duck sees. Yes, but the duck sees. Yes, but the duck sees.” For a moment, I felt I would never do anything with my life; there would be no escapes, and no guilt-free moments, and no end to my wandering, because wherever I went I would find the duck, and the duck sees. As I teetered on the edge of the abyss, Jamie yanked the book from my hands, tossed it across the floor, and said, “Don’t read that shit. That shit will make you crazy.”
Tenafly had let his sideburns grow, which gave him the look of a lost, road-weary trucker. He was laughing as he looked through an old-fashioned doctor’s bag. He said, “Don’t worry. In here is the cure to whatever ails ya.” He handed two pills to Jamie, who said thank you and dropped the pills into his breast pocket.
It was a relief to get outside. The sun was coming up, and there was a gulf breeze, and the streets were damp and mysterious. Jamie said, “You are free and clear, little brother. There is no duck.” It was a twenty-minute walk to the levee. When we got there, we sat on the grass and looked at the river. My mind cast into the future. I saw myself as an old man, writing reminiscences of my youth.
Jamie said, “Where are you right now?”
I said, “I am thinking about much later.”
“You are not where I told you to be,” he said. “You are somewhere far down the road, which is nowhere, and here I was, looking for you in the five minutes from now. Drugs are the only way I can think of hauling you back into frame.”
He handed me a pill.
“What is it?”
“Something better than Ecstasy.”
In those days, Ecstasy was still in its first youth, and so it wandered the countryside, raising hell. We all knew of its origins, how it was engineered in a laboratory somewhere overseas where a forward-thinking chemist believed he had at last found the key to the pleasure center—to a fast, carefree place in your otherwise mournful, envious brain. We knew too that for several years the drug had been legal, off the charts of the police, and some spoke of those years as a lost paradise. I told Jamie that I was afraid of the drug, and besides I was already drunk and stoned.
He said, “You have hit a wall. Take the pill. Climb over.”
Over the years, there has been a lot made of peer pressure, almost all of it bad. Peer pressure—kids telling other kids how to behave—is said to make people do stupid things, drink too much, run wild, vandalize, shoplift. Mothers, pointing out the logical fallacy of peer pressure, often mention the Brooklyn Bridge and how you shouldn’t jump off it. But in my life, peers—and here I am talking mostly of Jamie—have pressured me into doing many things I would certainly not have done on my own, and in almost every case these have turned out to be the great adventures of my life.
Jamie said, “Take the pill.”
I chased it down with warm beer.
As we walked to Magazine Street, Jamie told me his theory of life. It was based on the Winnebago. Here is what he said:
“Every kid knows about the Winnebago, right? It’s a myth, a dream. I mean, every kid, given a choice, would choose a Winnebago. This is a house we are talking about, but it’s on wheels! When you get tired, or bored, or life is just too much, then fuck it; just drive away. But as you get older, you forget about the Winnebago. Or maybe you are made to forget. You come to believe that the Winnebago is just the opposite of a good way to live. You come to see it as stupid, or low-class, or whatever. And so this knowledge you had from the very beginning, like so much of that first pure childhood knowledge, is drummed out of you, and soon they’ve got you lining up in the ranks of the apartment dwellers! So you see! You have been forged into forgetfulness and brought into society! But some of us, a remnant, a fucking holy remnant—we have never forgotten. We hold on to the dream of the Winnebago.”
Somewhere along the way, as Jamie was talking, the drug kicked in. It was like one of those science-fiction movies, where, as the trusty ship shifts into warp speed, the stars—there are always about a million stars out there—turn from stationary points into streaky lines, and then—wham!—the ship is catapulted clear to the other side of creation! And that’s just how I felt: like I was flying through space, with the stellar wind in my hair, and galaxies and quasars racing by, and far below—isn’t it beautiful from this distance?—the twinkling settlements of man. I guess I was smiling a luckiest-man-in-town smile, because Jamie leaned over and looked into my eyes and said, “It kicked in! And it looks good! I’m right behind you, little brother, and I can’t wait!”
And then we were both reeling down Calhoun Street, giggling and hugging, and the sun climbing higher. We turned onto St. Charles and made our way to Fat Harry’s. It is strange to walk into a bar at seven in the morning and find it still reeling with its nighttime crowd: kids at the jukebox and the pool tables, bartenders pouring drinks and the girls sipping Coronas, Jason and the Scorchers on the stereo, and everyone laughing and waiting for the next parade.
Jamie and I found a place in the corner so we could lean. The morning drifted by in a dazzle; the music poured through me. Sometimes, as I looked at a girl, or out the door at the trees, or at the efforts of the bartender, I would forget that Jamie was even in town and then, moments later, discovering him at my side, I would smile and shout, “Oh, Jamie! Hey! I
t’s you! Wow, it’s great to see you!” His pupils were so dilated that his eyes were no color but black, each eye a camera, the lens wide to capture this strange scene. He had his jaw thrust out and he was grinding his teeth. I was doing the same. Looking around, I saw that everyone in Fat’s was doing the same: this face, the telephoto eyes and outthrust jaw, was a shared mask. Everyone was on Ecstasy. Everything was booming.
As we listened to the music and talked to girls and raced into the street, where it was morning, and back into the bar, where it was night, I realized that this was turning out to be one of the great days of my life. I felt like I was using up something that had collected inside me over many years; that a pair of hands had lifted my brain from my skull and was squeezing out the juice in one mad rush. And the result was a euphoric, charming me, empathetic as hell. At the bar I talked to Jon Close, a kid I had long considered a fool, a big dumb guy, with a gaggle of drones in his wake.
Jamie said, “I thought you hated that guy.”
I said, “Yeah, I do. But you know what? He’s got a point of view!”
Sometimes Jamie wandered off, and when he got back it seemed he had been gone for years, had crossed mountains and oceans, had lived lifetimes. We greeted each other like long-lost friends. At one point, he said, “You have more in common with everyone living today, even with those poor emaciated bastards you see starving in Time magazine, than you do with anyone dead, even your own grandfather or, in my case, my own father, who died tragically young. And it is not just that you have more in common with them in comparison to a dead person; you really have everything in common with them, just by the simple math and great miracle of being alive; and you and me, who grew up in the same town, we are brothers and that is not even our choice. It is no more a choice than it is your choice to have Steven as your real brother, who, as you know, can be moody as hell, except of course, I am your real brother just as much as he is—more, because I fulfill my fucking duties.”