When I told Nancy our plans, she gave me one of the smiles I love. The one where she can’t even pretend she’s not excited. That smile made me really glad I had accepted. Made me think that sometimes I can be smart.
Saturday morning, we hit the road at 9:30 a.m. The 405 to the 5, right into lovely La Jolla. At noon sharp, we pulled into Dave Treadway’s garage. I had anticipated traffic, even on a Saturday, and I had been right. The traffic, man, the traffic, always.
We went up to the Treadways’ apartment, and I introduced Nancy to everyone. Then Dave, Davey, Jill, Nancy, and I went back down to the parking garage, got into Dave’s BMW X5, and headed out.
We drove to the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club, a tennis and golf club right on the ocean and right in the middle of an upscale, but old-school and tasteful, La Jolla neighborhood full of pretty flowers—California poppies and, look, some black-eyed Susans—and Spanish-style houses. The club, too, had old-school charm. It hadn’t been redone to look modern and state-of-the-art. It was still sort of a seventies country club. Tennis courts, a golf course, a pool, a couple of restaurants, all organized around a series of low-slung Brady Bunch–style buildings. And, of course, you had a gorgeous stretch of the Pacific running along the whole thing.
I loved it.
We were out by the pool under a parasol, eating salads and club sandwiches, Jill and Nancy drinking mimosas, Dave and I having beers, Davey having some pineapple juice.
Jill said to Nancy, “So, John told us you two met when he came to the emergency room. That’s quite a story. Tell us more.”
“Yeah. He came into the hospital with some head trauma, claiming he had fallen down hiking, and I helped take care of him, even though I knew he was lying. And so did the doctor.”
“What had actually happened?” Jill asked.
Nancy, protecting the privacy of my job, another one of her very sexy qualities, kept it vague and said, “John meets some unsavory characters in his business.”
“Like you guys,” I said.
Dave and Jill seemed to enjoy that.
“Anyway,” Nancy continued, “when John was all taken care of and leaving the hospital, he asked for my number.”
“And?” Jill said, totally sucked in to Nancy’s story.
“I made him stand there in silence and suffer while I thought about it for a pretty long time.”
Dave and Jill howled at this. I just sat there and took it.
Jill said to Nancy, raising her glass, “Good for you, girl.”
They toasted.
Later, as we were all sitting on the beach, a big blanket, a cooler, some chairs, all of us chatting, Davey digging away happily in the sand, Nancy said to Jill, “So how ’bout you two? What’s the story there?”
Jill said, pouring some more champagne into her and Nancy’s plastic glasses, “I think this is a good how-two-people-met story.”
Nancy smiled and took a sip.
Jill continued, “I was jogging on a running path in San Diego. Dave and I both lived in San Diego before we moved up here. So I was jogging along one day, it was a weekend, and, you know, it was 9:30, 10 in the morning, and this guy runs past me in the other direction.” She pointed to Dave. “That guy. Anyway, I barely noticed him. Next thing I know he’s behind me, running now in the same direction as I am. And then he’s right next to me, running along. I’m like, What is this guy doing? So he introduces himself as we’re running along. And then he asked me out, right there, as we were running. It was . . . weird, really. I almost didn’t know what to say, so I just told him how to get in touch with me. Gave him my name and the name of the ad agency where I worked. And said, you know, call me at work, I guess.”
Nancy loved it, laughed out loud.
I said, as Dave poured a canned Budweiser into a red plastic Solo cup and handed it to me, “See, Dave. That’s what you have to do. There’s this conventional wisdom, which as a general rule I hate, that you’re going to see someone you’re interested in in a place where asking someone out is relatively normal, like a bar or a restaurant or whatever. But that doesn’t always happen. Mostly you see people you’d like to say hello to in kind of random places. Like when you’re jogging.”
Dave said, “Or when you’re at the hospital.”
“Right! And you have to pull the trigger. It’s up to us, the guy, to pull the trigger. And that’s hard. That takes guts.”
I looked over at Jill and Nancy and said, “Let me tell you, ladies, what Dave and I did, it’s not that easy.”
Dave added, “It is definitely not.”
Nancy said, a sparkle in her eye, “But look what you get if you go for it.”
She motioned to herself and Jill.
Dave and I couldn’t disagree. Now we were the ones toasting.
We all went swimming. Nancy and I went pretty far out. Dave and Jill stayed near the shore with Davey. The cool ocean, after a few cold beers, felt refreshing, rejuvenating, amazing. Nancy and I, in about ten feet of water, took turns swimming down and touching the ocean floor, an always exhilarating, and just a tiny bit scary, trip.
A few hours later, Nancy drifting off to sleep on the blanket, Dave and Jill a little ways down the beach playing in the sand with Davey, me sitting in a chair looking out at the ocean, I got the surge of dizziness again, the feeling I’d had on the Treadways’ balcony a few days ago. But this time it was even more intense. My head was spinning. The battery taste reappeared in my throat, rancid and burning and strong. Holy shit, I thought, I’m going to throw up. This time, I’m definitely going to throw up. I stood up, thinking that might help. Nancy’s body was still and her eyes were closed. Jill, Dave, and Davey were down the beach, smiling and laughing. Nobody seemed to notice that I had this crazy, uncomfortable feeling inside me.
I walked off toward the clubhouse, had to find a bathroom. I found one of the restaurants, classic club look, windows lining the ocean, then found the bathroom, walked in, got to the sink, turned the cold water on high. I cupped water in my hands and splashed it in my face. Over and over. It wasn’t helping. I looked in the mirror as a fresh wave of nausea and vertigo came over me. I was going to puke. Or fall and hit my head. I dry heaved. And then I dry heaved again. But nothing came up.
I leaned down and drank some water from the sink, took one, two, three swallows, trying to get that battery taste out of my throat and off my tongue. Drinking water seemed to help. I stood back up. Yes, the feeling was fading. Yes, finally. I took a couple of deep breaths. In, out. In, out. I took another big sip of water. Then another big breath. Yeah, it was fading, fading, gone. I was back.
I walked out of the bathroom, through the restaurant, and back outside. The air, the breeze, it felt good. I crossed over to a little grassy area that bordered the sand. I looked out at the beach and found Jill, Dave, and Davey, now back on the big blanket with Nancy. They were all talking, laughing, toasting. I looked at the group of them, at the water everywhere behind them, at the white sand. All the colors coming at me—the sky, the ocean, the bathing suits on the beach—seemed pushed, heightened, surreal. Nancy and Jill and Dave and Davey could almost have been characters in a movie I was watching. And standing there, that’s when I knew where the sick feeling was coming from.
In Jill and Dave and Davey, I was seeing a life that I wasn’t going to have. I was seeing a family, a normal life. A great, normal life.
A part of me wants it, has always wanted it, and, yet I had chosen a job that brings me in close contact with death. Often. I’d chosen a job where you have to be willing to die in order to do it well. Is that just an excuse not to have to face the responsibility of a family? I don’t think so. After all, is it fair to a child, to children, to know that when you leave the house, if you’re doing your job right, you might not come back?
Standing there, looking at Jill and Dave and Davey, and now Nancy, especially Nancy, I felt a certain longing. Like I was living in a world just slightly apart from them. And that evening on the balcony, and right here on the beach, my body was reacting to this reality in a way I’d never experienced. In a way that made me physically feel it. But I knew, standing there, that the life I’d chosen to live was the one for me. I could bring a family into it, but, knowing what I knew, I probably wouldn’t.
I’d told Nancy this. And I’d also told her that if she left, I’d understand. But she’d said she was an adult and could make her own decisions. I understood that, I’d made a decision too. And I felt that it was the right one. Because of that, while knowing that I’d never have that other life gave me great pain, I knew the pain would be greater if I went into situations on the job and hedged a bit. Gave it less than I thought was necessary. It’s a strange irony in a way, the fact that to do a lot of things well you have to put it all on the line. You have to be willing to fail in a spectacular way in order not to fail in a spectacular way. You have to be willing to lose everything to gain everything. Tough choice. And in my line, sometimes—not always, but sometimes—you have to be willing to die to find out what happened, what really went down, and who did it.
Does this mean I have a death wish? I don’t think so, but I don’t know. I hope not. I do know that what I’m saying is true. And I could feel the need to take one of those risks with this guy Lee Graves. I could feel a situation like that coming. And, yeah, I know that if I don’t go all in, I might not find everything out. So I’m prepared to do it. Shit, I like doing it. In a way, my body telling me that I won’t have this other life is also my body telling me that something’s coming. It’s saying: That dream has to die. Know it, feel it, so you can be fully prepared to face the possible nightmare ahead. It’s saying: Are you ready? Are you still ready to do what you might have to do?
Is that why Dave and Jill and Davey Treadway entered my story? To show me a life I wasn’t going to have, but also to say: Are you going to be ready?
I focused again on the beach, then looked beyond it to the ocean, where I could now see some sailboats way out near the horizon, moving steadily, catching gusts of wind. I walked back down to rejoin everyone.
A few hours later we were all back at the Treadways’ apartment. We had decided to have dinner together and were contemplating what to do. Make something, go out, order in? Had this day put the four of us on the verge of becoming real friends? Were Nancy and I going to be part of one of those groups of four, or even six or eight, people who were all in reasonably happy relationships, who hung out together, vacationed together, relied on one another? Oh my god, it was terrifying.
I walked down one of the hallways out of the main room, headed for a bathroom, when I noticed, in one of the back rooms of the apartment, a Ping-Pong table. The table sat in a man cave, a study-type room. Dave’s hideout. Now, was the room big enough for actual Ping-Pong? Well, no. But the table did not have anything sitting on it. No papers, no pens, no backpacks. So that was good. Respect. And the room was definitely big enough for beer pong. Which the four of us were going to play, if I had anything to say about it. Remember earlier how I said there was some beer pong in this story? Well, it’s about to happen.
I walked back out to the front room, introduced the idea. The Treadways and Nancy loved it. We ordered two pizzas and two cases of Bud Light, had them delivered. That’s right, two cases of Bud Light. Beer goes quickly, very quickly, when you’re playing beer pong.
This was shaping up to be my kind of night.
For the record, there are two kinds of beer pong. The kind where you attempt to throw a Ping-Pong ball into a cup full of beer at the other end of the table, and the kind where you are essentially playing a modified form of Ping-Pong, only instead of trying to win the point in the traditional way, you are trying to hit a Ping-Pong ball, with a Ping-Pong paddle, into a cup of beer at the other end of the table. Now, if you are playing beer pong the Ping-Pong way and you are playing doubles, like we were about to, each team has two cups of beer in front of them, and each team has two cups of beer to aim for on the other side of the table. So you start a point, you and your teammate take turns hitting back the balls that don’t land in the cups in front of you, toward the cups on the other side, with the intent being to land your shot in one of their cups. When a ball does land in a cup, that’s a plop. If you and your teammate get plopped, you both have to drink your beer. If you and your teammate plop the other guys—well, you get the gist.
That’s it.
That’s all you have to do to have the best time of your life.
Dave put Davey to bed and brought a viewing monitor into the Ping-Pong room. Everyone had a couple slices of pizza, and then we got to it. Nancy and I versus Dave and Jill. I took it easy, intentionally missing a lot, to make sure everyone got a chance to get into it, to sink balls, to feel the thrill of beer pong.
And boy, did everyone feel the thrill.
When Jill sunk a ball, she screamed, I mean screamed. She didn’t even say anything. She just screamed a glorious scream.
When Nancy sunk one, she yelled: “Yes! That’s right! Yes!”
When Dave hit a plop, he closed his eyes and clenched his fist in an almost primal way.
We had finished a few spirited games and gone through almost a full case of beer when Dave said something I’ve heard a lot over the years when people play beer pong, either for the first time or for the first time in a while. He looked at me and said, with a real longing, a real desperation, in his eyes, “We’re going to play more games, right?”
To which I responded, “Yes. Yes, that’s right.”
Dave put on some music. The Descendents. Somery. A Southern California choice. A great choice. A pop-punk band that I happen to love. Whose lyrics are clever and moving. “Cameage”—one of the great punk anthems ever, for my money. Jill then went into a closet and came back out holding four hats and said that from now on we all had to wear a hat while we played. Nobody objected, not for a second. Jill gave Nancy a black baseball cap with a marijuana leaf on the front. I got a green John Deere trucker hat. Dave got a big straw Vincent van Gogh hat, and Jill gave herself a tiny little cap with a propeller on top. We looked good. We looked ready. It was getting crazy. I was all for it.
We started a new game. I served, got the first point going. (By the way, you don’t aim for the cup on the serve.) Dave hit my serve back, missed. Nancy hit the ball back toward their cups, missed. Then Jill hit, missed. Then I hit the ball, going for it, zeroing in—missed. Barely. Fucking barely. Shit. Then Dave hit, his barely missed too. Then Nancy hit one, high, real high, a nice arc to it, and . . . PLOP. Dead center. Right into the cup in front of Dave.
I looked at Nancy in her black marijuana hat and said, “That’s why I love you.”
Dave grabbed the ball out of his cup and said, “I’m glad you did that. Because I want to do this.” He slammed his entire beer in one sip, even though he technically had a minute or two if he needed it.
Then Jill said, “Me too.” And she took down her entire beer in one fluid chug.
Professional behavior. I liked it. We kept playing. After two more games everyone had a hefty, hefty buzz.
I said to Dave, “Do you by any chance have any southern rock?”
Dave said, “I can’t believe you’d ask me that. Name a Marshall Tucker song.”
As I thought for a sec, he screamed, a wild smile across his face, “Name one!”
“‘This Ol’ Cowboy.’”
“Coming right up. And I think it needs to be a little louder.”
We played a few more games, everyone making shots, everyone loving it, everyone getting even looser, crazier, sillier. Jill was checking the baby monitor and periodically leaving to check on Davey in the other room. I admired her for having fun and still being a good parent.
Eventually and, as far as Dave and I were concerned, reluctantly, we stopped playing. One and a half cases of beer, down. We all went back into the living room. Nancy and I accepted the Treadways’ invitation to stay in their guest room. At this point, let’s face it, it really wasn’t a decision we had to think too much about. We were pretty wrecked. But now that we were officially spending the night, it was quite easy for Nancy and me to partake of the joint that Dave and Jill had just lit up. We passed it around, each taking a hit or two. Or three. And soon I, and I think everyone, had another kind of buzz on top of the hefty beer buzz. It was giddy, but also dreamy, wistful, even slightly hallucinatory. The lights in their apartment were low. The music was low, too. We all talked and told stories and laughed about, reminisced about, some of the better beer pong points. Then we all went out onto the balcony. The cool, soft ocean air felt amazing. And at night, without the cars and traffic down below, you could hear the ocean too, hear the waves coming in. A lot of the city lights of La Jolla were out, but many weren’t. You could see intermittent lights amid the blackness, almost like stars. At some point, I can’t remember the actual time, Dave and Jill went off to their bedroom. And a little after that, Nancy and I went off to ours.
Lying in bed, hanging on to consciousness by a thread, Nancy looked at me and said, “That was fun, John.”
And I said, “Yeah. Yeah. It was.”
And we both shut our eyes and were out.