by Rich Cohen
“You know what?” he said. “You’re a greedy sonofabitch.”
He turned and left the house. He did not come back and I did not care that he did not come back. A few days later my parents came home and settled into their bedroom. I slept in the attic. It was as if the clock had been pushed back and everything was as it had been. My father asked why he had not seen Jamie. When I told him, he said, “Oh, Richard, what’s wrong with you? Jamie can have those clothes. Jamie can have whatever he wants.”
I went to Jamie’s house the next afternoon. His mother said he was at work and asked me inside for lunch. The windows were open, and a breeze blew from the lake. Jamie’s mother moved from sink to refrigerator. In the way that parents never seem to age but, instead, track against the distance like a landmark, she looked the same as ever: sandy blond hair, sharp green eyes. She said she was worried about Jamie. “What will he do?”
I asked about Jamie’s life in Glencoe, at work, at school. Then I said, “Do you know what happened to Jamie after high school?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, after graduation he went off to swim in the Pacific Ocean,” I said. “But I never heard from him, and when he got back he was in such a gloomy mood and he never did tell me if he made it out to California.”
She looked out the window and made clucking noises that told me she was trying to remember. “Well, yes, Jamie did take a trip, but it was not to California,” she said. “He went to Wyoming. In fact, he went out there to see his father.”
“His father?”
For a moment I was dazed.
Then I said, “It had been my understanding that Jamie’s father died when Jamie was very young.”
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Drew. “He builds houses in Casper.”
“Why does Jamie talk as if his father were dead?”
Mrs. Drew considered the question. “Well, his father is not a very pleasant man,” she said. “Jamie went out there unannounced, and his father—he has his new life and his new family, after all, so how can he be bothered with Jamie?—put him on the first bus back early the next morning. He just couldn’t wait to get rid of him.”
Over the next few days, working at the house, I thought about this new information. It was like a splash of color that changes the entire picture. It explained the longing that made up so much of Jamie’s personality. His relationship with his father, a relationship that was expressed, like man’s relationship with God, mostly by its absence, was, after all, the great sunless center of his being. His father even spoke in the voice of God—that is, in silence. I imagined Jamie heading toward that distant encounter, down empty highways, with hopes vague and thrilling. Those hopes were with him in lonely hotel rooms, crickets in the grass, a vacancy sign in the window; he carried them into the foothills. And at last he saw his father for the first time in years, a slim-hipped hero of the snowy west—a man of that American generation that somehow let it all slip away. Jamie slept on the couch and in the morning was on his way home, flat-land wilderness wandering past the windows of the bus.
The day before I was to return to New York, Jamie showed up at the house. He did not say anything about our fight or about my discussion with his mother. Did he know that I knew? I did not ask. I have always found it difficult to bring up any subject that might make anyone, especially a friend, uncomfortable. And Jamie was more than my friend. He was what, for years, looking in a mirror, I had hoped to see looking back at me.
When Jamie realized I would not question him, he said, “I have something to show you.”
In the attic, he removed a panel that covered our favorite high school hiding place. Against the wall, glazed with dust, was a six of Mickey’s big mouth. “It must have been up here for ten years,” said Jamie.
We opened a bottle out in the yard. It fizzed like crazy. We each took a sip. It was warm and skunky.
Jamie said, “Let’s go to the city.”
I made some calls, and a few friends from New York who happened to be visiting Chicago agreed to meet us, and so did Ronnie, who was living downtown. We met at a bar in Lincoln Park. Ronnie was wearing a dark Italian suit and talking interest rates. He had taken a job at some kind of mutual fund. Each time I saw him, he looked more sure of himself, more prosperous. That night I realized Ronnie would surely be the most successful of my friends. He was protected by a strange confidence— the confidence of someone who, as a boy, had spoken to God.
At some point, we started drinking. We drank in the bars, in the streets, in the back of an underground club. The liquor got us talking and joking and racing from discussion to discussion. In the club, which was in a basement on the West Side, there were girls in bell-bottoms and belly shirts. Jamie said he was appalled by the retro-craze. “It’s regressive,” he explained. “It means you are out of ideas, have surrendered to the past, have convinced yourself time has stopped.” Wearing such clothes, he explained, requires an industrial-strength irony, a joke so finely tuned it forgets it’s a joke. “So you see, these people are not actually living in the world but in a muddy reflection of the world.” That led him to the subject of multitasking, wherein people, in one moment, perform two tasks: talk to the bank, fold the laundry. “The age of the multitask is a bankrupt age,” said Jamie. “It’s an age in which, by trying to have two experiences simultaneously, you ruin both and so have no experience at all.”
At some point, as we leaned over a bar, I remember thinking, Why can’t we go on like this forever? Why can’t we be free? If we had no parents, I decided, we could be free. If we had no one to answer to, if we were truly adults, if we were autonomous, if we could make our way free of role models and lessons and expectations, free of grand-parents and photo albums, free of heredity—but we can never be that free.
The night ended at Ronnie’s apartment, what you would call a closer, the sun rising at the end of the street. As Jamie and I talked, Ronnie stretched and yawned. One of my friends from New York said, “I think Ronnie wants us to leave.”
“We’ve wanted Ronnie to leave for twenty-five years,” I said. “We’re staying.”
Much later, riding the train with Jamie, I said, “When my parents go to Washington, you should get out of Glencoe too. Just take off.”
When I got back to New York, there was a message on my machine. It was from Jamie. I could hear the highway at his back. He shouted, “Hey, little brother! I’m standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. I’m heading out to Los Angeles. I’m gonna reach that beach.”
Over the last few years, most of my old friends have gotten married and settled down. Some have even moved back to Glencoe. It rises from the suburbs, and so it returns. At first these friends went in bunches, two or three a season. I would speak of them the way people once spoke of wild Indians who at last settled on the reservation as having “come in.” Or as Missouri lawmen spoke of Frank James, upon his surrender, as having come in. “It is for the best that old Frank James has come in.” Or as we spoke of those kids who, after dinner on a summer night, had been told to come in, leaving just a few of us on the street.
Sometimes, if I cannot sleep, I look at pictures of those friends. Tom Pistone, married with two kids, his once-beloved Pontiac GTO rotting in the grass behind his house. Ronnie at his wedding, wearing a bow tie because he always had a Frank Sinatra image of himself at his wedding with his bow tie undone. Rink Anderson in a church out west, a mountain rising steeply in the door.
Or I look at pictures of the Glencoe beach or downtown Chicago, or at a picture that Jamie snapped at a Cubs game—infielders moving with the pitch, the batter stepping into the swing, the catcher on his toes, the ball hanging ten feet off the plate.
If I still cannot sleep, I think of all the years I have already put behind me. To give a face to these years, I think of all the girls I ever slept with, all the girls I ever kissed, starting with Paige Morrison in a field behind North School, her skirt riding up—or was it that girl from Deerfield, who put me down like a prison ri
ot?—and then of every person I have ever known. Or I think of my signature, which my father helped me invent on a couch in Skokie, Illinois, in the house of my grandmother’s second husband, Izzy Blustein, a stooped little man who had lied about his age and died less than a year after the wedding, causing my brother to say, “Izzy come, Izzy go.” That signature is looped and curled, and my father said, “Now you can be famous.” I think of all the times I have scribbled that signature and of all the places I have left it—at gas stations and bars and hotel lobbies—a ghostly image of my passing.
About a year ago, I saw Jamie in New York. For a thousand dollars, he had driven a truck from Los Angeles, dropped it off in midtown, come to my apartment, told me about some of the things he had seen on the road, including London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, and then stretched out on my bed and gone to sleep. By this time, I myself was married. When I got married, I felt that my relationship with my old friends had somehow changed. Even when we went out, the night was no longer open to us in quite the same way. Getting married had not caused this change, but it did seem to acknowledge it. It was like signing a treaty for a war that ended long ago. When Jessica came home from work, I brought her in to see my famous friend Jamie. He was face up on the bed, skin dark and smooth. In high school, I explained, Jamie’s most memorable antics were talked about and told and analyzed and commented on and retold, until they became legends. I said, “This is what my friend looks like sleeping.”
When Jamie woke up, we went out for a drink at a neighborhood bar. Jamie ordered Jack Daniel’s and talked about his life in Los Angeles. He said he was working as a carpenter, designing and building the sets of B-movies. He said this life might sound boring to us, but that he was in fact living it fully and with great passion. “I have tremendous respect for ordinary lives, like the one I’m now living,” he explained. “Such a life is like a song that, in high school, you were too cool for, like ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia,’ but that, if you really listen to it, you have to admit it really is a pretty good song. It is sweet and funny and you can dance to it, and really, what more do you want from a song?”
We headed to the Port Authority, where Jamie had to catch a bus back to L.A. A job was waiting. It was one of those strange summer nights in the city when the sky rides high and everyone on the street looks famous. This is just the kind of thing Jamie would have once noticed, but he did not seem to care. This is the problem with writing about people—people change, as cities change, as families change, as even the past changes, forever weaving itself into a new pattern. At best you can hope to capture a single moment, like a lightning bug in an overturned glass.
Jamie tossed his bag over his shoulder and climbed onto the bus and waved in the window as it drove away.
Acknowledgments
Writing this book was really fun and I want to thank all the people who helped me with it. My sister Sharon and my brother Steven, who is in the process of raising that long hoped for messiah, the Jewish Bobby Orr. I want to thank Bill Levin, Lisa Melmed and Robert Blumenthal, and also my friends Jim Albrecht, Ian Frazier, Alec Wilkinson, David Lipsky and C. S. Ledbetter III, a colossus of American letters; my agent, Andrew Wylie, and Jeff Posternak, also at the Wylie agency; all the people at Knopf but especially Jordan Pavlin, my editor, who really should visit the great city of Chicago. And, while I’m at it, I might as well thank Chicago too! Thanks for everything, Chicago, but especially for the redhots and the Cubs! I also want to thank my mother, who, whenever I demanded a birthday present, used to say, “Your whole life is a gift.” I was stupid then, but now I know that she was right. My father, for his yellow legal pads and his red pens, for his never-ending belief that there is still time for law school. I also want to thank every kid I grew up with, even the ones I was mean to and even the ones who were mean to me. Thanks for not turning me in to the principal, for coming over on a weeknight, for letting me see your test, for letting me date your sister, for lending me your car, for buying me beer. Some of these friends I still talk to but most are scattered. Where are you, Vooch? And what about you, Todd? You were my best friend. And Jenny and Becky, I’ve got some really funny stuff to tell you. Spitzer is still around, but what ever happened to Rocket? Of course, I also want to thank my wife, Jessica, who stood on the other side of this story like the prize in the Cracker Jack box. It has been more fun than a day at Coney Island.
RICH COHEN
Lake Effect
Rich Cohen is the author of Tough Jews and The Avengers. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, among many other publications. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. He lives in New York City.
BOOKS BY RICH COHEN
Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams
The Avengers: A Jewish War Story
Lake Effect
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 2003
Copyright © 2002 by Rich Cohen
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: BMG Music Publishing : Excerpt from “Let’s Live For Today” by Giulio Rapetti and Norman David Shapiro, copyright © 1997 by BMG Ricordi S.P.A.—Rome (SIAE). All rights for the United States on behalf of BMG Ricordi S.P.A.— Rome (SIAE) administered by BMG Songs, Inc. (ASCAP). . Bug Music : Excerpt from “Built for Comfort” by Willie Dixon, copyright © 1960, 1992 by Hoochie Coochie Music (BMI) / Administered by Bug. All rights reserved.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Cohen, Rich.
Lake effect / Rich Cohen.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Teenage boys. 2. Fathers and Sons. 3. Male Friendship. 4.Chicago (Ill.). I. Title
PS3603.048 L35 2002
813’.54—dc21 2001038605
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42654-3
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