by Rich Cohen
The back of my neck started to itch. It was hard to get any words out.
“What are you doing?” I said. “Are you jealous?”
He stopped pacing, thought for a moment, then said, “Am I jealous? Yeah, I guess I am jealous, but not for Sandy. I don’t care about Sandy. There are Sandys enough for everyone.”
“What’s wrong with Sandy?”
“She is no good,” said Jamie. “The girl is a drain. If you are sad, you can weep in your sorrow. If you are happy, you can get drunk on your beer. If you are with Sandy, you cannot be sad or happy. You can only be with Sandy.”
I did not talk to Jamie for the rest of the summer. I heard stories about him from Tom and Ronnie, and I saw him at a distance, diving off Ming Lee or walking by himself in town. Of course I missed him and thought about him and wondered if he was thinking about me. I guess I was angry. It was not just about Sandy. Jamie and I had begun to drift apart while I was away at school, and that distance had only increased. Neither of us would ever live at home in quite the same way again. We were now visitors on vacation, just passing through. In those weeks, I realized—probably for the first time—that our friendship was tied to Glencoe and to the beach and that it would not necessarily survive forever. There might even come a time when it had faded, Jamie’s name just another entry in my address book, a number dialed so infrequently it actually had to be looked up.
At the end of August, Sloppy Ed’s burned down. I heard about it from Ronnie. He drove me uptown in his mom’s car. When we got there, a crowd had gathered. Flames shot through the roof; firemen chopped through the walls; the burners popped like grenades; the steel sign, as symbolic to us as the Statue of Liberty, swayed and collapsed. It was the finale the town had been cheated of on the Fourth of July. The fire chief discovered evidence of arson, a crime that remains unsolved, a great mystery. For years, the stand remained as a ruin in the center of town. “I want to go to Sloppy Ed’s,” Jamie once said, “but the bastards blew it up!”
It was summer, it was winter, it was summer. Three years drifted by. Each fall, I drove to New Orleans. Each spring, I drove home. I made the trip with other Tulane students from the Midwest in sports cars or station wagons or, when I was an upper classman, in a car that, in hopes of giving me a life lesson, my father helped me negotiate for and buy in a used-car lot one afternoon in Lincolnshire. My first choice was a blue Honda Civic. Stenciled on the hood of that car was the name CHUCK. The driver-side door read BOBBY. The passenger-side door read BILLIE. Otherwise the car was in excellent shape.
I said, “It’s perfect.”
“Yes,” said my father. “But did you see all that writing?”
“So what?” I said. “We’ll paint over it.”
“You’re missing the point,” he told me. “A schmuck owned this car.”
We bought instead a gray, wheezy, salt-stained Dodge Daytona. In my mind I see it from above, wandering in and out of traffic, floating over the causeway across Lake Pontchartrain, which is drenched by green day storms that blow up from the Gulf of Mexico. In each flash of lightning, you see a sudden burst of landscape—weedy shores and rusty barges, trees straining in the wind. On these trips, I was usually with two or three friends, singing along with country music or listening to one of those overheated backwoods preachers on A.M. radio, laughing, and then crying—crying for our sins and for the death that awaits us all. The cities flew by like beacons: Mobile, Jackson, Memphis. At night we listened to Top Forty, shouting out the names of the songs, cursing the singers— the great paradox of my age; too cool for our own pleasures.
Or maybe we are heading south, getting into the car in winter-bound Illinois, wearing layers of sweatshirts, the defroster clearing a patch in the icy windshield. The outskirts are endless, factory yards and smokestacks reflected in the oily water. Iron bridges span frozen streams. Gas stations drift by. The broken lines waver. You can vanish into one of these little towns, live someone else’s life, the years drifting by—it’s the future, it’s coming. Below Cairo, the rivers churn to white water. There are leaves on the trees. You stop for gas. The windshield is a cake of dead bugs. You have crossed into a new season.
Senior year I lived a few blocks from campus in a house of gables and overhangs with Kurt Zaminer and Seth Coral, whom I had known since freshman year. Zaminer was big and gentle, liked to be called the Crasher, was often drunk, and managed a local bar called Clover. When I went to Clover, the Crasher would pour me two shots of whiskey, serve me dinner, and give me a handful of bills from the cash register. Coral was short and dark, smart, violent, and stoned, or else just about to get stoned, or looped on some more potent drug. At the beginning of the semester, on a visit to the State Fair, he traded a stack of old Styx records for a pit bull that snapped at my ankles and chewed on my fingers. If I was fresh from the shower, the dog lapped the water off my legs, so that all year I never once felt clean. Now and then, the dog disappeared on what Coral called “a dog spree,” running with the wild packs, returning days later, scratched up, in the company of a dozen strays.
The wall of my room was lined with French windows. On moonless nights, I would throw open the doors, sit on my bed, and look over the rooftops. I could see dark clouds and wind-tossed trees and telephone lines, which, running from house to house, seemed to stitch the city together. During my time in college, there was never any sense of the outside world, of newspaper headlines, or the rise and fall of markets. At most, I knew that the Japanese, once beaten, were now back at our throats. Otherwise, I was in a room where nothing happened but tonight and the night after that; these nights were, of course, adding up to weeks and months, but this is something I did not realize until it was too late.
Sometimes I drove by the house where the boys had lived, the house of keekness. It was empty. The stories of the house had been forgotten, the boys wiped out by graduation. Like the ancient dynasties of Europe, each had suffered his own collapse. There was Eli Tenafly, who fell in the course of one long night, at the start of which he banged on the doors of the closed public library— shouting “I want to read books!”—and at the end of which, taken away by the cops, he shouted, “Don’t beat me up!” There was Waxey James, who one day was there and the next day was gone, or was seen in glimpses, wandering the streets along the Irish Channel. Congo called him “another poor weaver who has gotten hold of the wrong thread.” There was Congo himself, whose fall was as glacially picturesque as that of the Ottomans. After quitting school, he passed through a series of odd jobs, in the end delivering pizzas, until one night, instead of completing a large order, he broke into the houses of eight friends and left a pizza on each kitchen table with a note, A gift from the Congo. I last saw him on the back patio of the Rendon Inn. He said he was leaving New Orleans and wanted to share one last drink, “something truly terrible.” I ordered Mind Erasers. Congo drank his down and walked out. Years later, a friend told me that Congo was living with a migrant family in California, traveling with the harvest, picking grapes.
Of course, there were all those parties that thunder across senior year, when, facing the same uncertainty, you become friends with your enemies; parties that began at sundown and continued until the first flush of dawn. This was a time of exciting uncertainty, with kids going off to job interviews in distant cities, waiting rooms in glass towers. I was engaged in a struggle with my father, who wanted me to go to law school. It is his belief that a person with a law degree is a person protected from the ups and downs of life. As a kid, when I told him I wanted to play pro hockey, he had assigned me a favorite player, Ken Dryden of the Montreal Canadiens, because Ken Dryden, before entering the NHL, had first gone to law school and so he “always had something to fall back on.”
I took the law school entrance exams but really wanted nothing to do with any of it. I want to be a writer, I told my father. We fought. And fought. In the end, he stopped talking about it. I congratulated myself. I had battled him to a standstill. I had become a man. I wrote up
a résumé and sent it out to various national magazines. That spring, in addition to rejections from those various national magazines, I was surprised to receive rejections from schools I had never applied to, law schools my father had applied to in my name. It was like a girl that you have never asked out calling to say that under no circumstances will she date you. There were more than twenty rejection letters. My father said, “You want to be a writer? Good! I am teaching you about rejection.”
That spring, Bob Dylan moved into a house not far from campus, a house surrounded by a fence that I imagined myself climbing. Bob Dylan would read my short stories and call me the kid, as in Hey, how is the kid doing? Each morning at 7 a.m., he ate breakfast at the Bluebird Café on Magazine Street. In a vague way, I planned to show up at the Bluebird, slide into his booth, and say something essential, which in the end I did not do because I had nothing essential to say. Besides, I was busy with my own life, waiting for the future to unfold, drifting through the Garden District or heading out to the Jazz Festival, which is held in the swampy heat of the fairgrounds, a horse track approached down endless empty streets that unspool like loops of cartoon animation, miles of identical houses beneath a flat blue sky. Jazz Fest runs for two weekends in late April. I was out there every day, wandering the boozy crowds, the faces like flowers, swaying on the sticky wind. We believed, with graduation, our world was coming to an end. Coral said, “If you have any drugs, I suggest you take them while there is still time.” We went from stage to stage, Dash Rip Rock to Clarence “Gate-mouth” Brown to Beaujolais on his washboard. I ran into my math professor, a big long-haired Australian, who, not wanting to wait on line, traded me an A in his class for a six-pack of Budweiser. Walking behind a family on their way to the Arts and Crafts Center, I marveled at the distance between them and me. Sitting in the gospel tent, I watched as the St. Cloud choir, substantial flaxen-haired black women in pink and white gowns, tantalized me with thoughts of the afterlife, singing, “Heaven! Oh, yeah, Heaven is a place where I will lie around all day and watch TV!”
One afternoon I passed out at the fairgrounds and woke up in a car being driven by Coral, speeding in and out of traffic, saying “All right, all right, all right!” There was sunlight on everything, shining off bumpers, glancing off windows. We turned uptown and the sun was behind us and the stars came out and it was night. I passed out again. I woke up at a restaurant, a table of food in front of me. Mexican food. Crasher said, “Eat up, we’ve got a lot more distance to cross.” And we wandered out into the narrow streets of the French Quarter, in and out of the lamplight.
We stepped into the Napoleon House; smoke hung above the bar. A crowd was gathered around a kid telling a story. People were laughing, buying him drinks. I could not see his face but there was the rise of his voice. The crowd burned off like fog and then the kid was alone—in blue jeans and a red cloth coat, face lean and handsome. I said, “Goddammit! That’s Jamie!”
I felt like old Tom Sawyer spotting Huck Finn when, until just that moment, he thought he was dead. I walked around Jamie, touched him, asked a dozen questions. It was as if he had wandered into my dream. He said, “Your mom told me you were going for a job interview in New York, and since she doesn’t like the idea of you making such a long drive alone, I volunteered to look after you.”
When I asked why he had come to the French Quarter, he said, “I just got off the bus and walked into the first good bar.”
I had not seen Jamie in months. His hair was tucked under his collar, his eyes were bright, his lips were chapped, and he looked thin and pure, as if he had shed every excess. For a long moment, he was a stranger to me; but then, frame by frame, this new Jamie, this strung-out, whispery kid of the road, merged into the old Jamie—all the arguments and distance forgotten—until we were right back where we started, and time could not touch us.
It started to rain the morning of graduation, and by afternoon the streets were fast-flowing rivers and the radio broadcast news of the flash flood. The ceremony was held in an auditorium. Families gathered in the doorway, men in seersucker peering into the rain. My parents flew in from Chicago and my father carried my mother through the current. A man in a straw boater said, “The word for that is chivalry.” That night, when Jamie and I got back to the house, Seth Coral was leaning out the living room window, shooting off bottle rockets, which exploded on the roof across the alley.
The waters had receded by morning, and the streets were strewn with debris. Seth Coral and the Crasher had already packed up and gone. So had everyone else. When it ends, it ends fast. Jamie and I walked through the empty campus. The trash cans were filled with notebook pages, some covered with equations, others with the inner meanings of great texts. Jamie read a page out loud: “Gatsby is you and me, and Gatsby is the American dream.”
We packed my car and took a farewell drive through the city. The sun had come out and glittered off the storefronts and streets. The city, rundown houses and vines, more than ever looked like a port in the Caribbean. We stopped by Tipitina’s on Tchoupitoulas Street, bought T-shirts, and listened to Oingo Boingo run through a sound check. We went to Domalici’s, a legendary sandwich shop on Annunciation Street, and got oyster po-boys for the road. Then, for the hell of it, we swung by the Camellia Grill, a whistle-clean lunch counter on St. Charles Avenue, with black waiters in checkered pants, sandwiches naked or dressed, pecan pie, omelets.
We drove along the grassy levee, the overloaded Daytona grinding and bottoming out. The river stretched away to the gulf, its green banks under a blue tropical sky. We saw an abandoned ship in the last stages of dilapidation. It had been one of the great riverboats of polished decks and staterooms, but it was forgotten and rusty, with weeds on deck and vines in the pilothouse.
We reached the Huey Long Bridge at 7 p.m., with the sun dying in the flats. It carried us over the river and into a thicket of smokestacks. And then we were running in the dark, the city far behind.
We drove without saying a word, watching the road unwind, stopping at a Waffle House for pancakes. Jamie stood in the door, smoking a cigarette. We studied maps, followed whims, traveled hundreds of miles out of the way to tour a stupid stalactite cave. By moving we were at last standing still. One night, after not speaking for hours, Jamie said, “You know, when I was a kid, I used to drive my mom crazy with questions. But my favorite questions were always about dying, and again and again I would ask her if I would ever die.”
Jamie was driving. I had no idea where we were.
“So what did she tell you?”
“It bugged the shit out of me, but she always gave me the same answer,” said Jamie. “She said, ‘Yes, you will die but you will live forever in the hearts of those who love you.’ And I smiled like this made perfect sense and like it was very good news but inside I was thinking, That really sucks! I mean, all those kids I ran around with will be at Great America riding the roller coasters and smashing the hell out of each other on the bumper cars, and maybe as they fly down a drop they will think about me, and that is how I live forever? I mean, I’m sorry, but that really sucks.”
The Gulf Coast highway took us through Mobile and Pensacola. After a big lunch of oysters in Jacksonville, we followed I-95 into Georgia and then cut over to U.S. 17, a stop-and-go run of sun-baked beach towns. In Parkers Ferry, South Carolina, we sat in a honky-tonk listening to country music and eating grilled cheese sandwiches. In Honey Hill, Jamie got a haircut and stood on the sidewalk afterward, saying, “I’m the one should be having a job interview in New York. Just look at me!” On the way out of town, we passed a Lincoln Continental driven by a black man in a cream white suit, wife at his side, kids in back. “Why can’t I be one of those kids?” said Jamie. “Or that daddy? Just for a day, why can’t I live that life too?”
By the end of the week, we were blasting through the sweet blue pine forests of North Carolina. We checked into a motor lodge on the Atlantic Ocean, changed into our bathing suits, and stumbled across the highway to the sa
nd. The beach was deserted. There was the strange sea-weedy smell of an incoming tide. Jamie went into the water. He swam out so far I could not see him. I stretched out and fell asleep. When I woke up, Jamie was at my side.
“How is it?” I asked.
“Incredible,” he said. “I’ve never been in the ocean before.”
For a moment, I just looked at the waves. Then I asked, “What about Reach the Beach? On that trip, didn’t you swim in the Pacific?”
Jamie thought for a moment, then said, “Well, it didn’t work out just the way I wanted it to.”
“Tell me.”
Jamie hugged himself; his eyes were as clear as lake water; he was on the verge of saying something. Then his mood shifted. His voice got high and tight. He said, “You see, on that trip there were all kinds of mix-ups that you absolutely have to plan for on the road and there were contingencies of course and backups that led only to more contingencies and more backups and so my adventures had to be found on the fly and in between the hassles but isn’t that the way it always is?”
“So, what? You never made it to the ocean?”
“No.”
Back in our room I closed the drapes and turned on the air conditioner. We could have been anywhere in the country. I got into bed and immediately vanished into that strange kind of dreamless hotel sleep that burns off everything that came before. I did not wake up until the middle of the next afternoon. My interview was in just two days. We took showers and got back on the road. Washington, Baltimore, Trenton. On every horizon were those vast brown buildings that signal the approach to cities. “I hate places like this,” said Jamie. “Not the city and not the country, not even the suburbs, just nowhere.” The closer we got to New York, the faster I drove.
We rolled through the Holland Tunnel into Manhattan—those endless, sweaty, car-tangled avenues. I stopped at Union Square. As I got my bags from the trunk, a cab was honking; otherwise we might have had a better good-bye. As it was, Jamie simply ran around to the driver’s seat. He would take my car to Chicago and sell it. He got in, rolled down the window, and said, “If any of those big shots start riding you, just tell them you’ve got a friend Jamie who does not know or even care that any of them are alive.” And just like that I was alone in the city, my bag over my shoulder, a list of phone numbers in my pocket.