Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  Will did not strike Conover as being any particular “type.” On the one hand, he had a kind of “macho” thing going, what with his wildish hair, goatee, and athletic build. “He was a puzzle to me,” she said. “He had this way of staring. Like when I first met him I was aware of that.… He struck me as sort of a jock but something different was in there.” She realized that he was also an intellectual. “He was reading Exodus, the Leon Uris book,” she said, “and he would talk about the Middle East. And he thought about things very carefully. He didn’t match any mold, any preconception. So that when you sort of saw him you couldn’t really make it out. And over time I don’t know that I got any better at it. He was very good about people themselves. He really read people well.”

  * * *

  I LIVE ON RIVERSIDE DRIVE and regularly go out running in Riverside Park, in a loop that goes between the tennis courts just west of Riverside Church and then down to 72nd Street. One day, it must have been in the fall of 1997, I was running along and saw Will Daniel sitting by himself on a bench in the park, down the hill from Riverside Church. I probably hadn’t seen him in twenty years at that point, but he was instantly recognizable to me. I stopped and spoke to him. We had a nice conversation—I can’t remember about what particularly—for the next ten minutes or so, during which he told me he was doing something or other involving clinical psychology up at the Columbia medical center. Our conversation reminded me that I’d always thought Will was a bit of an ethereal guy, and somewhat enigmatic. He was not aloof, per se, because that implies a certain negative standoffishness. But his quiet affect was always noticeable. Our conversation concluded, I continued on my run. On the way back home, I thought how nice it was to literally run into an old schoolmate after so many years. I also remember thinking how odd it was that Will was sitting by himself on a secluded bench in Riverside Park. It was the middle of the afternoon, his work was much farther uptown, in Washington Heights, and it seemed kind of random that he would be there, at that time of the day. I was left with the feeling that he was lonelier than I had remembered him to be, and I had always remembered him to be a loner.

  * * *

  ON FEBRUARY 21, 2000, WILL’S FATHER DIED at the family’s Park Avenue apartment, as a result of complications from a stroke and heart disease. He was eighty-seven years old. His lengthy front-page obituary in the New York Times came with all the attendant honors of a former managing editor, not to mention son-in-law of a president of the United States. The Times noted his numerous accomplishments, rising from a pharmacist’s son in rural North Carolina to one of the most powerful men in America. The obituary noted that Clif, Will’s brother, had written of his father in his memoir, “Dad is so impeccable that even in his undershirt he looks almost formal.” After their father’s funeral, the family went to a restaurant up the street. “And arguments started,” Clif said. “So Will was really, really angry with Dad’s funeral because—I got the sense because Dad died before Will could have any kind of reckoning with him. They had not come to some kind of understanding or agreement. Will was pissed that he hadn’t reconciled.”

  From the perspective of Will’s colleagues at the Columbia University Medical Center, the only thing that really mattered about Clifton Daniel’s obituary was that Will Daniel was mentioned as Clifton’s son. This came as big news to them.

  In the days before his father died, Will told Conover that he was thinking of leaving the homeless men project and moving to Portland, Oregon, where the cost of living was lower than it was in Manhattan. He had been making some version of this statement to other friends for years. But after his father’s death, Will seemed to reverse course. He decided to stay working on the homeless men project. He also decided to buy an apartment in a modest co-op building in Englewood, New Jersey, forcing him to commute each day back and forth across the George Washington Bridge. “It was because he got an inheritance after his father’s death and was able to afford it,” Conover said. Terry Gruber, a friend from softball, thought Will’s spare life might have been a political statement. “It seemed like he’d sacrificed his livelihood, in a way, to devote himself to this cause,” he said. “At that point in time, with moving out of the city and stripping down his life, I think he just was rebelling against whatever the Hampton society people or the Park Avenue people wanted him to do.”

  * * *

  MIMI GABER MET WILL AT THE WEEKLY SUNDAY softball game in Central Park during the summer of 1999. A graduate of Bennington College, she was twenty-nine years old. She was more or less an acquaintance of Will’s, just enough to say hello to on Sunday and to also cheer for during the more serious league game during the week. She worked for Gruber at his professional photography studio downtown. Shortly after Will’s father died, he saw Mimi at a party at the apartment of one of their mutual softball friends. There they had their first real conversation, beyond just joking around or saying hello on the softball field. And then Will asked her out on a date “in that sort of old-fashioned-y kind of way,” she recalled. “He was fun and smart and everyone seemed to really like him and kind of follow him.… He had this really nice way of making sure that everyone was included.” She also thought he was handsome. “He was in great shape,” she said.

  But of course, being Will, his approach to their dating was pretty loose and casual. “He asked me out, but it wasn’t really for a date, it was just like, ‘Hey, you wanna go get beers sometime?’” she explained. “Maybe once or twice a week, we would hang out, we would get together. We’d go have dinner or go have drinks or meet up after I did something, or meet up after he did something.” At some point, as summer approached, their relationship turned romantic. “I don’t know,” she explained, “we just started hanging out a lot more. It turned from once or twice a week to three or four or five times a week.” He was also casual about the kinds of things that most forty-year-olds were no longer casual about. Will was living an itinerant’s life. “If he was out too late at a bar and couldn’t get the last bus back to Englewood, he would find a couch to stay on, and if he couldn’t find a couch to stay on, he would just go to his mom’s,” she said. “He was kind of carefree. He didn’t worry about things like that. Most of us sitting in a bar at one in the morning would say, ‘Oh my God, I gotta go, I gotta go get the bus,’ and he would just not worry about it.”

  Often, Will slept on the couch at Terry Gruber’s apartment at 103rd and West End Avenue. He had given up his landline—perhaps one of the first people to do so—and used his cell phone as his only form of communication. At nine o’clock at night, Will would call Gruber: “Hey, can I crash at your house? I’m really not up for going back to Jersey.” Claudia, Gruber’s wife, always agreed, and their son, Tim, thought it was great, too. “Uncle Will’s coming!” They loved Will. But having Uncle Will around was not always joyous. “That’s when I saw a more sadder, troubled, or complicated side of Will,” Gruber said. “Will was not the most pleasant person, a little abrasive, but there was no animosity. He’s a bit of a curmudgeon was how I saw it. At the same time, I felt that there was this pure gold-heart person there.… He was almost like a literary character out of a D. H. Lawrence. I always thought of him as this mysterious guy who didn’t want to talk too much about anything related to him.”

  In April, Marc Wallis, one of Will’s Yale roommates, invited him to a St. Louis Rams football game. Will responded with an email. “On the road,” read the subject line. “Wally, thanks for your mail and sorry to take so long to respond,” Will wrote. “I am a psychiatric social worker doing research with both sociopathic kids and severely mentally ill adults working at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center living just across the George Washington Bridge in Jersey. Glad to hear you and your family are doing well and thanks for the invitation. I’d like to get out of town, but lately it seems to be only on the spur of the moment because my work schedule is so crazy. But, I would like to take you up on it.”

  Early that summer, Will and Mimi “hatched a crazy plan,” she said,
to go to Norway together for two weeks. “We didn’t really know each other that well and hadn’t really been seeing each other for very long,” she explained. “He said that it had been a place that he had always wanted to go to as an adult, but he had been there a couple times as a kid, and I said, ‘Oh, well, I have cousins there,’ and that was it.” In mid-August they flew to Norway, with their first stop being Stavanger, on the southwest coast of the country, where Mimi’s cousins lived. They hopped in a car with one of her cousins and drove around the coast. They stayed in a country house for a day or two, then ditched her cousin and took off driving. They didn’t have a plan. “We would drive for like two or three hours and decide, ‘Okay, this is a cool place,’ and we would find a hotel and stay there for a night, explore whatever we wanted to explore in the area, and leave for the next place before it was too late,” she explained.

  They split the cost of the trip. “We weren’t exactly at a point where it was like everything was ours together,” she said. “Everything was very separate.” It was the kind of vacation, she added, that would either make or break the relationship. In their case, it broke it. “I grew to like and respect him an awful lot, but he was not going to be my husband. He and I actually talked about it on the trip. There’s a religious difference, and when we were on the trip, he was like, ‘You should really go find yourself a nice Jewish boy.’” She said their romantic relationship would not have lasted much longer, by mutual agreement. “He was one of the smartest, most interesting people I’ve ever met, and still to this day one of the smartest and most interesting people that I have ever known, but he just wasn’t the guy for me.” (She also disputed the idea that Will had Tourette’s syndrome, and just chalked up his anger to being upset with his father, especially after he died.)

  She was impressed, though, with Will’s commitment to social justice. “This was the part of him that I respected and admired,” she said. “Not only was his job about taking care of people who were not able to necessarily take care of themselves, but everywhere we went, if he saw a guy at a bar bothering a waitress in a way that was pretty unkind, he would take the guy to task. Even if he’d never met him before, he would say, ‘You know, this person’s working really hard. You might want to treat them with a little bit more respect.’ That’s the kind of person he was.” She thought that after his father’s death, he could no longer hide behind his preferred cloak of anonymity. “He built this whole environment of people that did not know where he came from and so had no pre-judgment,” she said. “And now they all knew, and I think there was a little bit too much exposure.”

  While their relationship hadn’t progressed, they returned to New York still somewhat a couple, or so people thought. On the Thursday before Labor Day weekend, Will and Mimi went to hear some jazz at Cleopatra’s Needle on the Upper West Side. At the end of the night, they were talking about the upcoming long weekend. Mimi had to go to Connecticut for her grandmother’s ninetieth-birthday party. Will wasn’t going to that, obviously, but asked her if he could stay at her apartment—on 77th Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues—while she was away. He asked her if she wanted to join him at “some party” that his work colleagues were throwing on Friday night, in Brooklyn, before she left town. She told him no. She had to catch an early train Saturday morning for her grandmother’s party. “Knowing the party was in Brooklyn, and knowing him, we wouldn’t have gotten back until very early in the morning, and I just couldn’t do that,” she said. They talked about him going to the party alone and staying with her after. “I have a very tiny apartment, so if he’d come in, he would’ve totally woken me up,” she said. “And he was like, ‘All right, I’ll just go stay at my mom’s,’ and I was like, ‘Okay.’ Well, he would call it the Old Homestead. So he said, ‘I’m gonna go stay at the Old Homestead,’ and I said, ‘Okay, great.’” Will called his mother and asked if it was okay for him to stay with her on Friday night. She said sure.

  * * *

  MARK OPLER WAS A PH.D. CANDIDATE working alongside Will on the homeless men project. “I was in my mid-twenties back then,” he said. “So Will was actually, for me, kind of an aspirational figure. This was a guy who’d made his bones, who was gifted in the art of interacting with and influencing the most vulnerable.” Opler was aware of Will’s emotional outbursts. “There were, as memory serves, kind of minor disciplinary issues with him getting angry and swearing with such violence and such volume that people in adjacent offices would complain,” he said. But unlike some of his other colleagues at Columbia, Opler did not think Will’s random yelling was evidence of Tourette’s. Instead, he believed it came from “a very deep and very personal sense of outrage.” He was struck by how “a guy who was as human and humane as Will” played “aspects of life obviously very close to the chest. The family and their background was absolutely unknown. It never came up and Lord knows if it ever did come up he was very good at deflecting it.” He noted that even in casual social settings, Will could be surprisingly abrasive. “You’d be having a casual drink with Will and folks who didn’t know him well would suddenly, without warning almost, find themselves the brunt of very insightful, and perhaps even a slightly sarcastic or cutting remark that came out of left field,” he said. “It wasn’t intended to be cruel by any means, but it’s as though this guy who you didn’t really see at first was suddenly very, very present and very focused on you and something you said. You realized all of a sudden he’s not only listening to you, he was hearing you, and it was a little off-putting at times. But he was an incredibly sweet guy at his core.” He said Will was at his “most comfortable in his own skin” when “he was helping other people.” That’s when Will was able to tuck away whatever demons were plaguing him. “The times when he was able to put it aside were the times when the focus of his identity was external and magnificent,” he said. “That’s when he was at his best.” Opler paused, then continued, “He was very, very good at what he did, and frankly one of the reasons why people put up with him—he’s not an easy guy to get along with sometimes—is he’s very talented and exceedingly dedicated, obviously. And he inspired, for people who got to know him, he inspired a lot of love.”

  It was Opler who invited Will to the party in Brooklyn that Labor Day weekend. The party was in the basement of a town house in Park Slope. Will stayed late, after the party had ended, to help clean up. He had been drinking whiskey, of course, most of the night. “Even in his inebriated state, this was a guy who, generally speaking, held his liquor well and oddly didn’t become any more belligerent than he ordinarily would have been,” he said. “And again, even in his more than slightly inebriated and more than slightly belligerent state, he was still a delightful guy when he remembered to be so.” After the cleanup, Will tossed a Frisbee in the middle of Seventh Avenue in Park Slope for another forty-five minutes. Then, Opler said, “he kind of wandered off, still quite inebriated, into the night.” It was around 2 a.m. “He waved goodbye and he just wandered off. I thought he was headed toward the subway. I don’t remember if it was me or someone else asking him where he was going, but he was done and he walked away. He was headed out.”

  Will was headed for the Old Homestead, for 830 Park. He got on the subway in Park Slope and got out at the stop at Lexington Avenue and 77th Street. It was about 2:35 a.m. Will then walked one block south, to 76th Street, and then west toward Park Avenue. The Old Homestead was on the southwest corner of Park and 76th Street. It was a path Will had walked thousands of times before, although most forty-one-year-old men do not find themselves, at two forty in the morning, returning to their mom’s tony apartment in Manhattan to sleep, after hours of partying in Brooklyn. But that’s how Will had arranged his life.

  Will started to cross Park Avenue on 76th. At that very moment—2:40 a.m. on September 2—a yellow taxi driven by Mohamed Dawoud was heading northbound on Park Avenue. Apparently, according to the subsequent police report, Will was crossing against the light—meaning the cars traveling up Park had n
ot come to a stop at a red light (this fact was later disputed by Will’s mother)—and Dawoud’s taxi, a 1999 Ford, hit him with all the considerable force of a car driving at an unimpeded speed along an otherwise quiet Manhattan thoroughfare. It was no match. John Torres, the night doorman at 815 Park Avenue, saw the aftermath of the accident and called 911.

  According to the police report filed by Constantin Tsachas, then a police sergeant, and David Zucchet, at the time he was hit by Dawoud’s taxi, Will was wearing a blue button-down long-sleeved shirt and khakis—the classic preppy outfit. In their report, the cops wrote that Will “is likely to die” and that they were unable to notify “a family member.”

  At first, the police claimed that Dawoud had left the scene of the accident, a felony. But the police changed the classification to “motor vehicle accident” once they realized that Dawoud had not fled the scene. Dawoud had no alcohol in his blood. He had a valid driver’s license. There were no warrants out for his arrest. The police report said that Will “may have been intoxicated as he appeared to be unsteady on his feet.” The police concluded that “the causative factor of this accident is pedestrian error” and added, “there was an indication of alcohol usage by the victim.” The police also spoke with Matthew Honigman, an employee of the Roosevelt Hotel, on 45th and Madison. Honigman was the passenger in Dawoud’s cab. He told police that he did not “actually see” the accident “but he only heard the impact.” He said the taxi was going around “30–35 mph before the accident.” He told police that he did not see what direction Will was walking from when the cab hit him and that after he heard the collision he “looked up and noticed the pedestrian on the windshield of the cab.” When Honigman got out of the cab, he saw Will “on the ground in an unconscious state.” He said Will was wearing an ID badge of some sort around his neck that identified him as Will Daniel. The police concluded that there was “no criminality” involved in the accident.