We’d become friends basically because we lived next door to each other in the dorm. About two weeks into our freshman year he was walking by my open door and saw me struggling to move my dresser across the room. He knocked lightly on the door frame and said, “Hey man, need a hand?” I’d seen him around, always in a group, always the picture of easy confidence, and never figured that the trajectory of his orbit would ever intersect with mine.
The dresser, it turned out, was bolted against the wall, and it took about a half hour to get it loose. Afterwards, he sat on my bed, leaned back against the wall and said, “Whew, its Miller time.” We went down to the Violet Cafe for a drink and ended up hanging out for a while. And just like that, we were friends. It happened as effortlessly as everything else in Jack’s life. When we went to parties, Jack didn’t wonder if he was going to meet someone, didn’t scan the room until a girl caught his eye. He would just grab a drink and perch himself comfortably, and women would just gravitate towards him. It wasn’t a conscious thing, it was just the way he and the world interacted.
One night, a while after we’d become friends, we were sitting in The Red Room, a piano bar that had become our favorite place to just mellow out, when Lindsey came in with some friends and stopped at our table to say hi to me. I felt a childish surge of pride that such a hot girl was coming over to say hello to me for once and not him, and a hint of fear at the prospect of Jack and Lindsey meeting. I was sure that those two would recognize each other instantly as soul mates, and when that happened I would cease to exist.
Nervously, I watched as Jack’s eyes followed Lindsey back to her table. Still looking at her he said to me, “Is that the vomit girl?”
“Yeah,” I said.
He nodded approvingly. “You got something going on there, Ben?”
“No . . . I don’t know, maybe.” He gave me a sharp questioning look and I said, “We’re friends.”
“Friends, huh?” He stared intently at me for a minute and then, as if he’d finally found something he’d been looking for, gave me a warm smile and hoisted his beer. “I guess we all need a friend like that,” he said. He chugged his beer and banged it down on the table good-naturedly.
“Listen, Jack, there’s nothing going on. If you want to ask her out, you can,” I said, not meaning it.
“Hey,” he said. “Don’t get your panties all in a bunch. She’s your friend, you’re my friend. It’s cool. There’s plenty of other women out there.” With that simple declaration he had offered up a promise that not only set my mind at ease about Jack and Lindsey, but somehow defined my friendship with him as the genuine article. Many things changed over the next few years, but Jack never wavered on the commitment he made to me that night. We never even discussed it again.
“How’d it go in court?” I asked Jack, wedging the phone between my cheek and pillow while removing a golf ball-sized bugger from my eye.
“I’ll get off with a fine and probation” he said. “Probably have to do one of those public service commercials for MTV, telling all the kids not to do drugs.”
“A typical celebrity first-offense deal,” I said.
“They’ve probably already got a standardized script for it.”
I decided to go for broke. “Jack, why don’t we take a road trip, like we used to do every year after finals,” I said. “We’ll drive down to Wildwood or something, hit Atlantic City, just relax and have some fun.”
“The summer’s over,” Jack said. “It’s too cold to go to Wild-wood.”
“So we’ll do it out there, go to Vegas or something. Just take some time off. Take a break.”
“Ben, I don’t need you to come out here on some errand of mercy.”
“It’s not mercy man. I need a break, too. In case you’re behind on current events here, I just got divorced.”
“No shit, really? When?”
“Two days ago.”
“Oh, man. I didn’t hear about it.”
“We haven’t alerted the media yet.”
“Fuck you. Alison could have told me.”
“I guess she’s got other things on her mind,” I said, although I felt a stab of resentment that Alison hadn’t mentioned it. We all sat around worrying about Jack. Couldn’t anyone spend a minute expressing concern over my sorry state of affairs? Even in matters of personal crises, Jack still got top billing. “Look, Jack, my marriage just ended and you’ve got a drug problem that’s garnering national media attention. If ever a situation cried out for a road trip, this is it.”
He exhaled deeply into the phone. “It’s very tempting Ben, but I’ve got preproduction coming up on this film . . .”
“Fuck it, Jack. You need this break. You have a problem.”
“It’s not a problem,” Jack said defensively. “I let it get a little out of control, I admit it. But the accident cleared things up for me. I’m off the stuff.”
“Just like that?” I asked, skeptically.
“Just like that,” he said. “It’s not like I was addicted or anything. I was just working a little too hard.”
“I hope that’s the truth.”
“It is, and you can tell everyone over there to cut out the theatrics,” he said, a trace of anger now creeping into his voice. “I’m doing just fine over here.”
“If you say so.”
“I’m saying so.”
“Okay, so there’s no problem,” I said. “I still think we ought to do the road trip.”
“Now is just not a good time,” he said, and now his tone was edged with concrete. He hadn’t hung up yet, but the connection was already lost. He was back to being Jack Shaw, movie star and stranger. “Maybe in December.”
If you’re not dead, I thought, but I said, “Yeah. We’ll go skiing.”
“Say hello to Chuck and Lindsey,” he said.
“You say hello to Sly and Arnold.”
He snickered. “I’ll do that.”
“Hey, Jack?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m here, man, you know? If you need me.”
“Thanks, man. I don’t. I’ll speak to you soon.”
“Okay.”
I heard him sigh wearily. “Stop worrying so much,” he said.
“I can’t,” I said. “I have to do your worrying too, otherwise it won’t get done.”
“Bye, Ben.”
“Bye.”
I rolled over, remembering how easy it had been for the five of us to hang out in the old days. Jack, Chuck, Lindsey, Alison, and me. No matter where we were, there was a level of comfort between us that let us all know it was the right place to be. Now we had to work to make ourselves fit into each other’s lives, to maintain our relevance to each other. In college our collective friendship had been at the center of our lives, and now the centrifugal force of time had pushed it out to the perimeter, where it was in danger of spinning off the circle altogether. Thirty . . . shit.
The kryptonite green digits of the radio clock by my bed told me that it was just past two in the morning. Crap. I was up for the day. I padded into the living room and flipped on the TV. No Baywatch, so I settled for a National Geographic special on giraffes. In college, Jack and I always used to stay up late and watch the National Geographic specials and Wild Kingdom. We’d even discussed going on safari to Africa one of these years. As the giraffes lumbered across the Namibian plains, the inevitable British narrator explained that the average giraffe’s heart weighed twenty-five pounds.
I knew how they felt.
Jerry Garcia might have been dead, but that wasn’t stopping the band at Ruby’s from killing him onstage again, with a thrashing, discordant set of Grateful Dead covers. I wasn’t even a Dead Head and I was offended. The four of us sat at a table in the back, sipping at drinks and shoveling in free popcorn by the mouthful, discussing Jack’s latest drug-induced public spectacle.
The night before, 911 had received a hysterical call from Jack, telling them that his house was on fire. LA fire fighters arrived to find Jack,
clad only in his briefs, bravely fighting the flames with a garden hose. The only complication was that, despite their years of experience, none of the fire fighters could find any flames. They inspected Jack’s Brentwood mansion from basement to attic and, with the exception of some water damage in the living room due to Jack’s efforts with the hose, found nothing amiss.
Under normal circumstances, the firemen might have been pissed, but it isn’t every day you get to meet a movie star of Jack Shaw’s caliber. The fire chief, who one imagines had seen this sort of thing before, talked Jack down and walked him back inside. Later the crew all posed for pictures with Jack and then went home with an amusing new anecdote for their wives and kids. As it turned out, one of those wives just happened to work at the Los Angeles bureau of the Associated Press, and the story broke early the next morning. By noon they were playing the 911 tapes on every station across the country.
“He’s in serious trouble,” Lindsey said. “He’s totally out of control.”
Onstage, the band finished a barely recognizable version of “Sugar Magnolia” and began playing an even worse version of “Truckin’.”
“He passed out-of-control months ago,” Chuck said above the din. “The only question is if he’s beyond our help yet or not.”
“He called me,” I said, and they all stared. “The night before he made the 911 call.”
“What’d he say?” Chuck asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “He sounded fine. Completely sober. He was angry that we thought he had a problem.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said we should take a road trip.”
“A road trip,” Chuck repeated. “He’s on the threshold of a personal and professional meltdown and you suggested a road trip?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said lamely.
“I don’t think it was a bad idea,” Lindsey said, smiling lightly. “A cinematic remedy for a cinematic figure.”
“He must have looked real cinematic running around in his Calvins with a garden hose,” Chuck said.
Alison put down her drink and looked at us. “I’ve come up with a new plan,” she said.
“You still think we can do this?” I asked.
“I think we have to try,” she said.
“So what’s the plan?” Lindsey asked.
Alison told us. It was a hard and cruel way to go, and the fact that she had even thought it up was an indication of the pain this was causing her.
“Alison,” Chuck said with a smile. “I never knew you could be so downright cutthroat. I like it.”
“Until recently Jack used to call me every day,” Alison said, staring down at the table. “No matter where he was, no matter what was going on, he would call to say hi and just, I don’t know, check in. If he didn’t get me, he’d leave me a message or call back again. Whenever I left him a message he would call back that day, even if it meant waking me up.” She blinked back some tears and nervously crumbled some popcorn in her fingers. “I know you’re all worried about Jack, but I’m more than worried. I miss him terribly. He’s my best friend and . . . I want him back.”
She covered her eyes with her hand and her body convulsed involuntarily as the sobs she was fighting to suppress imploded inside her. Lindsey reached across the table and grabbed Alison’s other hand, squeezing it in her own, and I put my arm around her and pressed my forehead against her temple. Of all of us, she was the most uncomplicated, the most sincere, and I think it hurt us all to see that she was suffering so much. I felt a sudden, hot stab of anger at Jack for fucking up like this.
It had been through Jack that we’d all originally met Alison. He’d been having trouble in his statistics class which, for reasons known only to those at the highest levels of academia, fulfilled a core science requirement. Alison, who sat behind Jack, was good with numbers and offered to help him out. It’s funny, or tragic, really, how an ordinary act like helping someone with their homework could be the inadvertent trigger for almost a decade of silent suffering. Alison’s Peanut Story.
Alison at thirty should have been married with two or three kids, a nice house in Greenwich, and the whole Martha Stewart package. It was where she’d always been headed, her interest in law notwithstanding. She had three sisters, two older and one younger, all of whom had followed that path with nary a glance backward. In staying single Alison wasn’t rebelling against her rich parents or some prosaic Good Housekeeping ethic that clashed with her own sense of independence. She’d unabashedly wanted that life, declared family to be her primary ambition, and was looking forward to it. She’d grown up in an idyllic home with loving, supportive parents, little if any friction between her sisters, and every possible opportunity and privilege. It was only natural that she’d want to recreate her own family in that image. But then she’d gone and fallen in love with Jack, a twist for which she was entirely unprepared, and that was all she wrote. Jack was the horse for want of which her kingdom was lost.
It was so obvious to all of us from the beginning how in love with Jack Alison was, he’d have to have been a complete idiot to miss it, and Jack was no idiot. Yet throughout college and the years after, he never made a single romantic overture, never seemed to even entertain the notion that there was gold to be mined in his friendship with Alison. I know how frustrating it was for Lindsey, Chuck, and me to watch, so I can only imagine what it did to Alison. Lindsey was the only one who was able to talk to Alison about it, to encourage her to move on and look elsewhere for love, but she never met with any lasting success. Her sessions with Alison could become so heated that the two of them would get into fights, sometimes not speaking for days afterward. “Any other guy here would die to have her!” Lindsey would say, her eyes bulging in disbelief. “They’d be fucking lining up at her door! And instead she has to fixate on the one guy who’s too damn stupid to realize what he’s got! What is she, a freaking masochist?!”
Alison did occasionally go out on perfunctory dates, but it didn’t take very long for the new guys to figure out that they were competing against someone they could never beat. Lindsey, so independent and strong-willed, couldn’t stand to see Alison in such a submissive state, and she rarely passed on an opportunity to plead her case. These periodic battles served to forge a strong bond between her and Alison, although it didn’t do much for Lindsey’s friendship with Jack. If Alison wasn’t going to be pissed about the way he treated her, then someone had to be. Lindsey blamed Jack for not loving Alison, or for not letting her go, and while I don’t recall her ever addressing the issue with him, I know she harbored a strong resentment toward him. “He goes out and does every girl on campus,” she complained to me once while we were under the arch in Washington Square sharing a falafel between classes. It was winter, and her cheeks were burnished from the wind and I was wondering how much damage it would do if I leaned over and kissed one of those cheeks. “And then he comes home and goes out for coffee with his friend, Alison.”
I remember thinking that there might be an obvious parallel to be drawn with Lindsey and myself, but in a rare display of discretion I chose not to point it out. “They really are friends,” I said instead.
“Come on, Ben,” she said. “He knows what he’s doing. She’s his, I don’t know what, his safety net or something, and it’s not right. It’s emotional enslavement.”
I know she wanted me to take issue with Jack, to talk to him about it and try to make him see what he was doing to Alison, but I didn’t see things that way exactly. Jack rarely discussed his past, but I knew his mother had died when he was very young and he didn’t get along with his father. Something he’d once said had left me with a vague notion of abuse, but I couldn’t recall exactly what it was. Either way, there was clearly a powerful, maternal aspect in the way Alison cared for Jack, something undeniably nurturing. Jack took great comfort in that facet of the relationship, and he wasn’t willing to risk losing it by turning it into something sexual. Even though it often looked to us like
Jack treated Alison poorly, I think he actually loved her more deeply than any of us imagined, and her warmth and approval were his sanctuary. To defile that with sex might have been unthinkable to him, treating her like any other girl on campus. In a strange way, I think Jack felt himself unworthy of Alison when it came to a true, sexual relationship.
On some level, Jack must have realized that Alison had needs, too, needs that weren’t being fulfilled because of her unwavering commitment to him. Maybe that meant there was an element of selfishness to his relationship with her, but he rationalized it away since she was too important to him to lose. I don’t know if I understood this then, or if I only had a faint notion and I’m imposing years of subsequent analysis on my memory, but I’m pretty certain that both of them understood the true nature of their relationship. They were simply powerless to do anything about it. Jack and Alison loved each other, but needed different things from that love, which put them at tragic cross-purposes. Relationships don’t come with a warranty and being in love is no guarantee of a happy ending. Just look at me and Lindsey. If anything, love is just a starting point. Then life intrudes, along with the personal baggage you’ve spent years packing, and things get royally and irrevocably fucked up. You can get bitter or you can keep trying. Most people do some of each.
I thought about all of that as I felt Alison’s cries pulsating against my forehead, and we all sat there in the bar trying to absorb some of her sadness, to lighten her load just a little bit. After another moment Alison wiped her eyes and offered us a grin. “Sorry,” she said. “I guess I’ve had that coming for a while.”
“Well,” said Chuck, lifting his glass in a mock toast. “To Jack’s health.”
Lindsey picked up her glass. “To saving Jack’s ass from himself.”
“To Alison,” I said. “The lady with the plan.”
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