After Visiting Friends

by Michael Hainey

  He stops.

  I listen.

  I can see a tear in the corner of his eye. Then I hear a clutch in his throat. But I do what I learned to do from old Westerns, what a man does for another man when that man’s falling apart. You pretend you don’t see it. Give a man that courtesy, pardner. I keep my eyes straight ahead, at a point somewhere over the bar.

  “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of your old man.”

  He pauses.

  “He was the best friend I ever had, and then he was gone. And it’s not right.”

  He raises up the remains of his watery martini and looks at me and says, “Your old man.”

  I raise the remains of my watery Scotch. Clarence knocks it. We drain our glasses, put them on the bar.

  Glass on wood, the only punctuation.

  And in that moment I think, I want to be that man. The dead man. I envy him. I want his power. The power, years later, that you have over someone. Still. Your absence is greater than your presence. Presence is fleeting. Presence is easy. But absence? That’s eternal. The great constant.

  Absence is everything.

  6

  STORMY

  I telephone the other guy my mother gave me, Jim Strong.

  “He and Dad went way back,” she says. “We all did.”

  They all worked together at the Tribune. Strong met his wife there, too.

  “The Trib was like a marriage factory,” my mother tells me.

  “Sure, I remember you,” Strong says when I call. “And call me Stormy. How’s your mother?”

  “Fine,” I say, and I tell him why I’m calling.

  He says, “I miss your dad.” He tells me about being at the Trib with him, on the Neighborhood News desk—what they call Metro now. Stormy laughs loud and talks loud and has a thick Chicago accent. Long, nasal a’s and o’s. Newspaper becomes noose-pay-per.

  When I think he’s comfortable, I ask what he knows about that night. “Maybe you were there,” I say. “With him?”

  He says, “Where was your dad, again?”

  I tell him.

  “Phil Cooper lived up there. But he’s dead. Bob mighta gone there with some of the old Boul Mich gang. That was the Trib bar. That’s where I was when I heard the news. I was covering a Teamsters strike that night. But you know, I kept a diary. Lemme dig it out.”

  A day later he calls and says that the only entry he has is about the funeral.

  “I was a pallbearer. I got a list here. Cooper, dead. Bob Morris, dead. Freddy Farrar, dead. Armstrong, dead. Jesus, we ain’t doing too good here, huh!” He laughs.

  “So nothing about that night?”

  “Nah. Guess I was remembering wrong.”

  #

  I have a hope that face-to-face, Stormy will open up. I want to look in his eyes. Then I’ll be able to tell.

  We make a plan to meet for lunch at Riccardo’s, a joint halfway between the Sun-Times and the Tribune.

  “It’s where the old Radio Grill was,” he writes in an e-mail. “We did many a night there.”

  I take the El from my mother’s house and walk north from the Loop, toward the Wabash Avenue Bridge.

  As a kid, I loved the Wabash Avenue Bridge for one reason: It was in the opening credits of The Bob Newhart Show. I always felt a secret pride when, for a split second, I could see the Sun-Times/Daily News building, hunkered down on the bank of the backward-flowing Chicago River, looking like a giant barge waiting to head downriver, its yellow sign shining out in the gray gloom of long Chicago winters.

  CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

  CHICAGO DAILY NEWS

  Not like the Tribune Tower. All peacocky.

  But as I cross the bridge now, the Sun-Times building is gone.

  I see men toiling in an ever-deepening black hole. Men and machines labor to drive pylons into the heavy wet clay and try to not be swallowed alive. I watch the clumps of earth being dug and dumped and piled and I want to take a piece of this ground. I want to climb the cyclone fence that rings the site. I want a shovel. I want to dig.

  #

  My brother and I are with our father, walking through the Sun-Times newsroom. His day off. My brother and I—excited, proud. The old men in the newsroom shake our hands. My dad takes us down to the press room, where screaming metal machines slathered in ink and oil and grease transform enormous rolls of paper into news. An old man with thick glasses and hands stained black as crows squats down before my brother and me and magics two sheets of hot-off-the-presses newspaper into hats that he pops atop our happy heads. Our hats the shape of small lifeboats.

  #

  I look at the hole again. In that distant corner—is that where it happened?

  Men dig.

  In front of me, a sign. TRUMP INTERNATIONAL HOTEL AND TOWER CONDOMINIUMS. There’s a number—FOR THOSE SEEKING INFORMATION ABOUT THIS SITE.

  #

  Stormy tells me to meet him at 11:30 a.m., and when I walk in, he’s already at the bar. Place is empty. But there’s a rocks glass in front of him. Cubes of ice. Half-drained brown booze.

  “Jeez, you look just like your old man.”

  I still take pride in that. Pride that I’m keeping his memory alive.

  I grab the stool next to Stormy.

  “Drinking?” he says.

  He jabs his thick index finger into the bar, like he expects to conjure a drink from the worn-out bar top.

  I don’t want to drink but I feel compelled to match Stormy. Maybe this is how they drank. And I don’t want to do anything that won’t align the spirits. Isn’t that what I’m hoping? That somehow I’ll channel Stormy back forty years and he’ll talk to me not as me but as him—my father? I ask what he’s drinking.

  “Same thing your dad did. Same thing we all did. J&B, rocks.”

  I’ve never had Scotch in the morning. I order one.

  We knock tumblers. I hold his eyes.

  Stormy grins and breaks the gaze.

  “See my picture?”

  He points to the far wall. Black-and-white photos of old Chicago newspapermen rim the room. One is of him. A slimmer version.

  “Was there a ceremony when you went up?”

  “Nah. Budja realize I’m right above the door to the can?”

  Stormy looks like an aging baseball manager. A happy freckly face from years in the sun, square and plump and reddish.

  “How’s your mom?”

  “Good,” I say.

  “Didja know she was the queen of the Maidenform Mafia?”

  “What was that?”

  “There were a group of gals in the newsroom that all wore tight sweaters and pointy bras. Your mom was one. Your mom was the most gorgeous girl in the newsroom. All the other women wanted to be her.”

  He lifts his glass again and we laugh, and I ask him if he came to Riccardo’s a lot.

  He says, “Whatcha gotta understand is every paper had its own bar. But everybody went to Radio Grill. You could get a great martini for seventy-five cents and beers for a quarter. There was a bartender there, Frank Morgner. Had a peg leg. But they tore that place down. I don’t want you to think your dad was a dipso or something. We all drank. And we did it hard. But you know, your dad was a great guy. He wasn’t like your uncle. A lotta reporters at the Trib thought Dick was mean-spirited. But everyone liked your dad. From the reporters and the pressmen to delivery drivers. Everyone. And, like I say, great newspaperman. Starting with makeup.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A makeup man? Your dad could look at a blank page and he could see it. He could see the news and how it fit on the page. Your old man was a master on makeup.”

  #

  We decide to have lunch at Gene & Georgetti, an old red-sauce-and-chops place in a creaky wood-frame building next to the El. Years ago, this area was all warehouse and industrial, a part of Chicago they called Smokey Hollow. Now the “River North Entertainment Area”—so says the map in the back of the taxi.

  We walk in. Handshakes. Backslaps. Where you bee
n? Ain’t seen you in forever. Thought you were dead. Hey, it’s good to have ya. The usual?

  And Stormy slaps his palm twice on the bar and says, “Thank God, yes.”

  It’s something about guys this age, when they run in to one another for the first time in ages. There’s a shock in their faces—or is it joy? maybe relief?—of seeing an old pal they didn’t expect to see again. And so the backslapping and handshaking. The need to touch—the confirmation of the physical.

  Stormy looks me over and says, “How about a canarbo?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Jesus, you don’t know a canarbo?” And he says it kehn-arrrrb-oh.

  “I don’t. Where’s it come from?”

  “Bill Bender at the Tribune. He was a photographer there. He called ’em canarbos. A drink! A drink! So we all did. So . . . how about it?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  The bartender brings two drinks. Stormy raises his rocks glass eye-level. He smiles. His face, distorted through the glass.

  “You know, if your dad had lived, he’da been running the Trib. Clayton Kirkpatrick loved him. We all thought he was going to bring him back. But he was at the Sun-Times at a great moment. It was more freewheeling. And they treated him better. He left the Trib because he wanted a raise, and when they wouldn’t give it to him, he walked across the street to the Sun-Times and started on the spot. He was the guy they wanted. He was a ball to be with, I’ll tell you that. He was irreverent. Sharp-witted. He couldn’t stand someone who was full of themselves or who didn’t treat someone fair. If he didn’t like you, you had problems. And he could cut someone up pretty good and pretty fast. And I’ll tell you one thing: I never heard a bad word about him, may God strike me dead. And I bummed with everyone.”

  We’re into it now. Lunch on the table. Three drinks in each of us. I tell him that one thing I still can’t get a handle on is what happened to my father the night he died. Who are these friends? Did you hear of anyone who was with him that night?

  “What are you saying?” he asks me.

  “I’m saying that it doesn’t add up. What’s in the obits and all.”

  “Look, I never had any clue as to what the guy’s interests were. Fishing? Hunting? Ball games? No. I think he was one of those guys who lived for the paper. It was his whole life.”

  “But from the perspective of a newspaperman, doesn’t it seem like the story doesn’t square?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “He was with someone that night.”

  Stormy waves his hand in front of his face. Takes a slurp of his J&B.

  “Look, the guy was no Paul Newman.”

  “But—”

  “But what? Here’s one for you: Maybe he was with a gay that night.”

  “Was he?”

  “No! But it’s just as crazy an idea as him being with a woman!”

  “I never said he was with a woman. I just said he was with someone. The obits said he had been visiting friends.”

  Stormy nods to the waiter in a red jacket and holds up his glass, then knocks back the last of the Scotch. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “What does it matter? He’s dead.”

  Stormy looks around the room for his drink. Head tilted up, like a man searching for his driver at airport arrivals. He’s silent. When his drink appears at last, he gulps it in. Again with the hand wipe.

  “Didja know Fire Commissioner Quinn went to your dad’s wake? Mayor Daley couldn’t go, so he sent Quinn.”

  “Why would Daley have gone?”

  “He always went to newspapermen’s funerals. It was good for business.”

  Stormy refuses to let me pay. On our way out, more hugs, more backslapping. Then we open the door, stand blinking in the harsh white late-afternoon sunlight.

  Stormy puts his hand on my shoulder.

  “Know where we gotta go? Billy Goat. We should do one there. See some of the old gang.”

  #

  Billy Goat is pretty much empty. A couple of wiry old guys sit at the bar, beers in front of them. We find a table in the back. The walls are crammed with grainy, faded photographs of newspapermen and athletes like Stan Mikita, Bobby Hull. We order more drinks, and Stormy grabs his and wanders about the room, looking at the photographs and framed old clippings, pointing at each of them as he moves down the wall.

  “Harry Romanoff. Dead. Tom Fitzpatrick. Dead. Jack Griffin. Dead. Dave Condon. Dead. Kup. Dead. Royko. Jesus. Look at ’em all, will ya?”

  He raises his J&B to the wall and takes a swig, then drops his head and stares at his feet. He’s quiet. Then—his head pops up.

  “Hey, what time is it?”

  “Just about four,” I tell him.

  “Jesus, I gotta catch a train.”

  Outside, Stormy shakes my hand. His eyes look like bloodshot oysters.

  “This was a good day,” he says. “Your old man was a good man. Remember that.”

  Then he turns. I watch him walk down Hubbard Street, across Rush Street, westward. The sun is low and sharp. All I can see is the backlit outline of him as he ambles toward the train. I wonder how my father would be now, if he were alive. And maybe, I think, maybe it’s better not to know.

  I climb out from lower Hubbard Street, take the stairs up to Michigan Avenue. There’s a spot near Michigan Avenue and Chicago Avenue where, if one stands just so, the old Water Tower appears in the foreground and the Hancock Building looms high behind it. The Water Tower—storied survivor of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The Hancock—symbol of the new Chicago—built one hundred years later.

  I stand there for a moment, my package still strong, trying to take stock of what I learned today. I’m only two friends in, but these guys stick together. I’m convinced they know more than they are telling me.

  #

  October 1971. Second grade. We celebrate the centennial of the Great Chicago Fire. For a whole week, our teacher makes us examine the legend of Mrs. O’Leary. Filmstrips every day. The lesson: Here is the city this woman begat. All because she had to have some milk in the night.

  The cow kicked the lantern and the city kicked the bucket. A city built of nothing but wood.

  “Can you understand that, children? How careless our forefathers were? Wood! Not like today. See our walls? Cinder block. Stone. No conflagration will touch us.”

  I look at the map projected on the screen. “The Swath of Destruction,” it says. From one woman, all of this blooms. The blackness bleeding out from one home. In one night, a city destroyed.

  More images unspool. People huddle in the lake, desperate to escape the flames. Embers of pine, red-orange remains of someone’s home, fall all about them, ssss-ing into the water.

  Ding!

  The filmstrip demands our attention. Our teacher moves it forward.

  # # #

  The next night, after my session with Stormy, my friend John comes to my mother’s. We’ve been best friends since we were fourteen. He’s looking at snapshots my mother has on her refrigerator—the grandkids, my brother, me. He taps a photo of me at my desk in New York. My mother took it last time she came to see me. She almost never takes photos of me.

  “I want to take your picture,” she said, waving her disposable.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Good,” my mother says, looking through her lens. “I needed to kill this.”

  John taps the photo. “Is this your dad?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I could’ve sworn it’s him. It looks like a picture I feel I’ve seen of him.”

  #

  My mother goes to bed. John and I sit at the kitchen table. I tell him what I’m working on. All these years, and I’ve never told him of the mystery. We decide to drive to the 3900 block of North Pine Grove. I need to see it. Walk it.

  It’s a T intersection with Irving Park Road. Two enormous high-rises hulk on the southwest and southeast corners. Honey locust trees that were no more than saplings when my father died on the s
treet. Are these the only remaining witnesses?

  I was hoping for something big. Something hiding in plain view. Part of me was even believing that we’d turn the corner and see him crumpled in the street. I know that I can’t save him. But I want to see it. It is our human need—to circle back to the stations of our sorrow.

  #

  I understand you now, those of you who build your roadside shrines.

  Your frail white cross, lashed to the guardrail. Two wooden garden stakes bound with rusted wire. Your son’s name, stenciled. Or your wife’s. A plastic bouquet. Faded flag. We see your shrine as we speed by, rounding our curve. A glint of color catches our eye. Maybe remnants of that weathered teddy bear. All of it marking that place where someone loved left the road.

  The sod black and torn. The gap in the guardrail. The tree trunk, shorn.

  It is our need to mark. To witness. Our need to create sacred ground.

  “History happened here,” guidebooks like to say.

  No, we say—personal history ended here.

  #

  I think about a show I saw on TV. Scientists looking for an “impact crater” from what they believed killed off the dinosaurs. Without a crater, no one believes them. So the men spend their lives searching the earth for a depression that’s big enough. The place where they can stand and say, “This is what remains.”

  #

  And standing there with John, my lifelong friend, I wonder what kind of friends would watch my father die. And then never speak of it again?

  I think of what Wiley said: You know how guys are.

  Is this what unknowability is?

  #

  John and I head back to my mother’s, up Lake Shore Drive—the lake black and empty, wind blowing off of it, filling our car. John playing Johnny Cash. The album he did before he died. We drive through the summer streets. Not talking. Because we don’t have to talk.

  We stop at Superdawg. The lady comes to our car and takes our order. Like it’s still 1961. We order Whoopercheesies, fries. The works. Sit there, eating, watching the traffic lights and cars coming and going on Milwaukee Avenue. Across the way, the forest preserve is quiet, dark. As a boy, I sledded there on the ancient toboggan runs. No one able to steer.