THE DINNER WAS PROBABLY OUR THOUSANDTH meal together, give or take a couple hundred cheeseburgers. Yet maybe the first dinner in twenty years.
The five of us had gone our separate ways. All those summer nights when we would be crammed into Allen’s blue Ford, “Pretty Woman” or “The House of the Rising Sun” or “Where Did Our Love Go” playing on the car radio (we’d reach our arms out the open windows and in unison bang our fists down against the metal roof each time the Supremes sang the first syllable of “baby”: “Ba-by, ba-by, where did our love go”)…
All of those winter weekend afternoons when, nothing else in the world to do, we would cruise (with the heater going full blast and the windshield steamed up) to the Ranch Drive-In or the Burger Boy Food-o-rama for our third or fourth lunch of the day…
All of those early mornings when, wanting each other’s company even though we’d been hanging out until well after midnight the night before—what could we possibly have had to say to each other that we hadn’t said before going to bed, what could have happened between 2:00 A.M. and 7:00 A.M. that made it so important we gather for breakfast, too?—all those mornings when we’d straggle in one by one to the counter of the Eastmoor Drive-In, just outside the Bexley line on East Main Street, a new day beginning and us together once again, as if decreed by Ohio statute, as if there was a law on the books that we had to be together every day….
ABCDJ.
Allen had been the one among us who didn’t live in Bexley. His parents had a top-floor rental in what was called “the only luxury high-rise apartment building in Columbus,” in those days before condominiums and coops. The Park Towers, as it was named, soared all of seventeen stories. A wry, wiry kid with sarcasm somewhere behind his eyes and a swagger of indeterminate psychological origin in his step, Allen was most often the wheelman—the blue Ford was his (I think his dad leased it through the hotel-and-restaurant-linen-supply company he ran). For some reason the rest of us never figured out and—hard as it is to believe—never asked him about directly, Allen’s parents sent him off to military school during high school, so he was never with us as much as he and we would have liked. Not that we and he weren’t together more than most human beings on this earth were intended to be together: up to twenty hours a day in the summers, probably sixteen or eighteen hours a day during school vacations and on the weekends when he would come home from West Virginia. He got screwed. That’s how we summed up the fact of his uniformed existence at military school: He got screwed, being sent down there, but he was still one of us, screwed or not.
B was me.
C was Chuck, the first among us to have a Beatle haircut, which only accentuated his nothing-matters-enough-to-wipe-this-grin-off-my-face outlook on the world. His father was a businessman who’d had a lot of very high highs, and a few of the deepest lows, and if Chuck was affected by that it didn’t seem to cloud his mind, which was usually busy enough trying with great effort to unravel lesser confusions. Once we had been looking for some girls who on the phone had given us driving directions on where to meet them, up on the north side of Columbus near the Ohio State University campus. Chuck—in moccasins, Bermuda shorts, no socks, a white T-shirt, a dress shirt over that, the shirt buttons unbuttoned all the way down and the shirtsleeves rolled halfway up; that’s what all of us wore during the summer, every summer day, that’s what I undoubtedly was wearing that day, too—was driving, and in his hand he had the directions he had written down. “I can’t find Old and Tangy,” he said, handing me in the shotgun seat the piece of paper. I looked at it, saw what he had written as our turnoff point—“Old and Tangy,” that’s what he said the girls had told him—and I joined in his puzzlement as, lost, we drove back and forth, parallel with and oblivious to the Olentangy River.
Dan had been the most indecipherable of us. A short kid and, were it not for his small stature, a potentially great mainstream-sport athlete, he had seemed to lead an interior life that had little in common with the world the rest of humankind inhabited. His dad and grandfather owned a fish market in downtown Columbus, and Dan took great pleasure in working in the freezer—he loved the freezer, he hung out there any chance he got, I think he took his lunch hours in the freezer. All of the Dick children had names that started with D—his older brother was Dicky Dick, his older sister was Darianne Dick, his younger brothers were Donald Dick and David Dick. Dan used to mention an imaginary frog—it was a specific frog, Dan said that the frog’s name was Reedeep Reeves—and Dan as a teenager was prone, out of nowhere and apropos of nothing, to make sudden pronouncements such as: “Don’t tell a barber how to cut hair.” In September of our junior year in high school, at the first Friday night football game of the season, Dan sat with the rest of us in the stands and, midway through the first quarter, loudly announced: “This is disgusting”—he disapproved of the way the team was playing, they were big but they weren’t very good—and he stood up, walked out, and disappeared. We found him after the game, running frantic wind sprints alone back and forth across his family’s front yard; he pantingly informed us that he had been doing this without a rest break for the almost two hours since he had left the stadium. He hoped to grow during the school year, he said, and when and if he did, and he became football size, he intended to be in shape for the next season.
J was Jack.
The meal was probably going to be the thousandth together for ABCDJ, give or take.
I’D MADE THE CALLS, BEFORE LEAVING Chicago for Columbus.
Allen had been at his law office up in Canton; he immediately processed what I was telling him about Jack, I could sense him deciding to cancel all his appointments and ask for continuances for his court appearances, he understood without asking more than a question or two that this took precedence. I reached Dan at the cold storage company he and one of his brothers ran on Columbus’s west side; when I asked the receptionist for Dan Dick, her reply was: “Which Dan?” I didn’t know what she meant, and she explained that Dan Dick Sr. and Dan Dick Jr. both worked at the company, and when I asked how old Dan Dick Sr. was and she just laughed, I said that was probably the one I wanted. I asked her to connect me with his phone. She said: “He’s in the freezer.”
When Dan emerged, I told him about the dinner gathering, and he said of course he would be there. As I’d left my home for the Chicago airport, I’d reached for my keys and, without thinking about it, brushed my hand against the pewter beer mug that has always sat on the shelf where I toss those keys. It’s tarnished now, and most of the time I don’t even notice it’s there; it’s filled with coins that I have pulled out of my pocket at the ends of the evenings all these years. Quarters and dimes and nickels and pennies, right up to the top. On the front, a little over halfway up the side of the mug, is the engraved inscription. We’d given the mugs to each other in September of 1965, as gifts before we left home for college and whatever else might lie ahead. It had been Jack’s idea; he’s the only one of us who would have thought of it, who would have known that someday we’d be glad we’d done it.
I’d looked at my watch to make certain I wasn’t going to be late for the airport, and I’d grabbed the keys, and my hand had hit the old beer mug with the short engraved inscription: ABCDJ.
IT WAS POURING BY THE TIME CHUCK’S car pulled up in front of Jack’s house.
Chuck had called the Top and made the reservation; of course it was going to be the Top. In the middle of the 1950s, with the fathers who lived in Bexley back from the war and well along in establishing their careers and their families and their lives in the peacetime Midwest, the Top steakhouse had opened a few blocks outside town at the intersection of East Main Street and Chesterfield Road. The owners would have built it in Bexley itself except that Bexley had been dry at the time, you couldn’t legally buy a drink there, and if a man and his wife were going to have a shrimp cocktail and a New York strip and a baked potato for dinner, there’s no way they were going to want to do it without a martini on the tablecloth. So the Top was a ninety-second drive past the Bexley border.
Ring-a-ding-ding—that was the idea. If Frank Sinatra had ever come to Bexley, which he never did, not once, the Top is where the mayor would have taken him. Black leather booths and dim lighting and the feel of imminent action—well, at least more of the feel of imminent action than you were going to get at Ralph and Jim’s Barber Shop, around the corner, or at Swan Drycleaners, just down the street—the Top was there for a reason: to give the men and women of Bexley a place to step into Vegas or Manhattan or Chicago for a couple of hours, to sense short-term snazziness, and then, when they came back outside onto the Main Street of Midas Muffler and Chicken Delight and the squat branch office of the Ohio National Bank, to be speedily and safely home to their children—to us—before the streetlights had been on for very long.
We began going to the Top ourselves when we were eighteen or so, taking our dates there on important nights and sitting in the same booths where our parents had first sat, holding the same tall menus in our hands, eating sirloins in the dimness, feeling somehow more worldly just by being inside those walls and not having the host eject us on the principle that we were merely us and therefore had no business in such a swanky establishment. The snazziness of the Top, it turned out, was not so short-term after all, because here all of us were, all these years later, taking Jack out for the evening, and of course it was going to be the Top, where else would it be?
Chuck’s car was on the street outside Jack’s house and with the rain beating down I walked Jack to the car, holding an umbrella over his head, hoping that he wouldn’t notice I was trying to shield him, knowing that he would.
AND THEN THERE WE WERE, AS IF NOTHING had changed.
The Top had saved us a long table toward the back—it’s not a very spacious restaurant, it tends to fill up, but they’d set up a table close to the fireplace, in which logs were burning even though spring had begun. Look at us. That’s all I could think in those first moments. The boys from that blue Ford hardtop, the boys of ceaseless nights on summertime streets…look at us.
Allen had driven straight down from his law practice on the northern edge of the state; he was dressed for court: dark suit, expensive patterned tie, blue shirt with contrasting white collar. He carried himself with the flinty confidence of a trial attorney who, having faced a career’s worth of adversaries-for-hire, could walk into any courtroom in any of Ohio’s eighty-eight counties to present opening arguments without his pulse rate jumping even a beat. The face of the sardonic kid had turned into the face of the bulletproof professional advocate, and the teenager’s swagger had simply been a preview of how he moved through a room now.
Dan, in a dress shirt open at the collar and no tie, was lined and gray only if you looked closely at his face and made yourself catalog the details of its landscape; something about him was still so boyish, still so unguarded and shambling and free from guile, that anyone who had known him forty years before would see not the weathered man who sat with us now, but the eternal kid who resided inside his body. Reedeep Reeves, that frog who lived solely in Dan’s imagination, seemed to sit invisibly on his shoulder. Dan thanked me twice for thinking to include him in the dinner; I didn’t understand why he would say such a thing—the dinner was not plausible without him, it would feel incomplete—but he had been the one we had seen the least of in recent years, and he said he felt a little guilty for not having been around more. It was as if he somehow thought we could ever forget about him.
Chuck, in a black T-shirt and jeans, had lost his hair but not his Howdy Doody grin; I’d seen him so much over the years that for me the physical changes in him had been gradual enough that they seemed always to have been there. One knee was all but gone, the other was a question mark, his eyes were as brown and bright as ever but my guess was that he could use a hearing aid, his huhs were becoming increasingly frequent. He had a glass of vodka in front of him, as was usual at the dinner hour; his smile grew wider as he looked around the table at all of us, although I couldn’t be certain if it was a smile of contentment to be with friends or merely the cocktail beginning to do its work.
Jack had on three layers of clothing—a dark undershirt, a dress shirt and a zip-up sweater. The treatments he was enduring had made him susceptible to temperature changes, he told me; his thermostat, as he referred to it, was all fouled up, and he was cold a lot. He’d asked if I thought the owners of the restaurant would mind if he kept the baseball cap on, and I said I could not imagine they would object—word spreads pretty quickly in Bexley, everyone knew about the radiation treatments and the chemotherapy. He’d always had this little gap between his top front teeth, one of them was chipped or something, and it had perpetually had the effect of making him seem unthreatening, a little vulnerable. Whenever anyone saw photos of the five of us when we were boys, they would invariably say the same thing when they got to Jack’s picture: “He’s the nice one, isn’t he?”
And there we were. We talked very little about the specifics of what Jack was going through—he shot us a glance early in the evening that told us: Don’t—and instead we laughed as much as we could, and he laughed with us. It started with my socks. They’d gotten soaked in the rain, somewhere between the front door of Jack’s house and the front door of the Top, and when I looked down to see if I might take them off and go sockless, everyone took note of the fact that they were full of holes. Allen said it was pathetic—he tossed a dollar on the table to start a fund to buy me new socks, and then Chuck and Dan tossed dollars, and Jack reached into his pocket and he put a dollar on the table, too. Not exactly the stuff of top-drawer comedy, but on this night seeing Jack light up in a smile, seeing him laugh with the others, was like a gift, for the first time in so many days he was thinking about something other than what had fallen upon him. We told stories about times half-forgotten, Jack showing something close to glee at some of the memories, and at one point I brought up the chicken at the Latin Club banquet.
Actually, what I brought up was about an Internet search engine—something, when we were first friends, no one could have envisioned. I said that I had been fooling around on the computer one recent night, and had put Dan’s name in a search engine, just to see if anything would come up.
What had come up was this:
Will the following students please report to the principal’s office: Dan Dick. Bob Greene.
That’s what the computer had returned to me. In 1964, Dan and I had been on the varsity tennis team, and one day after practice we had come into the locker room—to find boxes and boxes of individual fried chicken dinners from Willard’s Restaurant piled up on one of the wooden benches. The school’s Latin Club was going to have its annual banquet in the gym that night, and the chicken dinners, for some reason or other, had been left for safekeeping in the locker room.
Dan and I had looked at each other. We were hungry after practice. So…
We figured no one would miss a couple of the dinners. We ate them. And soon enough, during homeroom period, came the announcement on the school’s loudspeaker system, piped into every classroom in the building: “Will the following students please report…”
Opal Wylie, the school’s Latin teacher and adviser to the Latin Club, had become distraught when, at the banquet, the chicken dinners came up two short. She had gone to C. W. Jones, the school principal; he had launched an investigation. So there we were, Dan and I, on that long-ago morning, emerging from the doors of our separate homerooms, meeting in the empty first-floor hallway, walking down toward C.W.’s office and certain punishment….
I had written about it at some point in the previous twenty or thirty years, and along came the Internet to suck up just about every piece of public writing in existence—and when you put “Dan Dick” into one of the popular search engines, what came back to you on your computer screen was: Will the following students please report to the principal’s office: Dan Dick. Bob Greene.
I thought this was amazing, this was delirious, our theft of the Latin Club chicken was now available to any computer user in any corner of the globe, and I was telling the story of the computer search to Dan and to the others at the table at the Top.
And Dan said:
“I didn’t steal the chicken.”
I said: “What are you talking about?”
He looked like a person accused of something and trying to bluff his way out of it. “I didn’t steal any chicken,” he repeated.
“Dan, that’s not the point of the story,” I said. “We stole the chicken. It was forty years ago. The point of the story is the Internet.”
He paused for a moment. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. OK.”
Jack was laughing so hard I thought tears might come down his cheeks. Allen said, “The point of the story isn’t the chicken, Dan. Everyone always knew you stole the chicken.” Dan said, “Well, I don’t know why it would be on Greene’s computer,” and Chuck called for another drink, and I was so grateful for this, so grateful for the laughter that was filling the night.
Chuck’s daughter arrived with a camera in her hand. Alyssa Shenk was twenty-eight; she knew where we were going to be on this evening, and she wanted to take a picture so we all would have the memory. Another one of our oldest friends—a guy named Pongi—had joined us at the dinner table, and Alyssa had all of us stand up and pose against a side wall of the dining room.
The very idea of this, back when we first knew each other, would not have seemed conceivable: Chuck would have a daughter? A grown woman? And she would be directing us where to stand in a picture someday? His daughter would be taking our picture at the Top? But that’s what had come to pass, and we put our arms over each other’s shoulders and Alyssa told us to smile, and as she snapped and the flash went off, I asked myself: Are the people in this picture—are we—what fifty-seven-year-old men were supposed to be like, back when our dads were the ones who were fifty-seven at the Top? Are the things that fill our hearts, the things that make us who we are, similar in any way to the things that filled our fathers’ hearts, that made our fathers laugh? Are we what they were like at fifty-seven—and if they were like we are tonight, why didn’t we see it? They seemed so much older, back then—their fifty-seven seemed to be such a stern and calcified fifty-seven, at least through our young eyes.
That was probably it—our view of our dads, when they were the age that we were now, probably had more to do with our young eyes than with the realities of our fathers’ lives. We draped our arms over each other, and Alyssa took a few more shots just to be safe, and when the enlargements came back and were mailed to us several weeks later, I looked into the faces of the men in the photograph—looked at us—and what I saw were without dispute the faces of men who were fifty-seven, not a day younger. That’s who we were—that’s who our dads had been. It was right there in the photo.
And I knew one thing:
Whoever was to see this picture, no matter when, whatever stranger might someday gaze upon it, that stranger would look at the men smiling together in front of the restaurant wall, would single out the man in the center, the one bundled up in the T-shirt and the regular shirt and the sweater, the one with the gap between his two top front teeth, the one who looked a little tired behind his smile—the stranger would single out Jack. And would say:
“He’s the nice one, isn’t he?”
THE CONCRETE-AND-STONE WALK LEADING from the sidewalk up to Jack’s house had a big crack in it.
I noticed it as we were hurrying through the rain to his front door after dinner. All of us had come back home with him; I saw the crack, and I knew how careful Jack always was about keeping his property maintained, any of his property—no socks with holes in them for him—and my first thought was that he probably had not been feeling well enough to deal with repairing it. My second thought was worse. It was whether he ever would. Whether it would be a task, down the line, that fell to Janice, alone in the house. It wasn’t a thought I wanted to linger.
Which it didn’t, because Janice was inside when we got there, making sure the place was bright and welcoming; she was asking how our dinner had been, and motioning us to couches and chairs in the living room, and for the next few hours we did our best—which wasn’t much of an effort, all of us wanted it with all our hearts—to turn that living room into an old blue Ford, to turn the stormy night outside the windows of Jack’s house into a cloudless June noonday sky, to put ourselves back in a place and a time when any trouble we might encounter was mitigated by the fact that we were encountering it together, when trouble was accompanied by the voices of the Beach Boys or the Four Tops coming out of WCOL on the car radio, when all we needed to do to outrun those troubles was step on the gas pedal and go a little faster.
We sat in Jack’s house and we didn’t want to leave, no one wanted to go home, and any transcript of what we said would probably read goofily, but the words weren’t what mattered, what mattered was the laughter. Allen was staying at the Hyatt downtown; I’d remembered that once when he was staying there he had said something about getting a government rate on the room because a court case he was handling in Columbus had something to do with government business, so now I said to him, “You getting that government rate this trip? You wear your old military school uniform when you checked in?”
He shot me a look and shook his head in disdain, and Chuck said to him, “You probably did wear your military school uniform and say you were in the Army.” Jack and Dan started laughing, and I played the parts both of Allen and the desk clerk. “You’re walking up to the front desk in that old green uniform and the sleeves are halfway up your arms and the cuffs are six inches above your shoes,” I said, having trouble breathing as I tried to talk through my own laughter. “You’ve got your military school cap on. And the desk clerk”—now I was out of control, I was unashamedly breaking myself up, I loved this moment and I loved the sight of Jack, over on a chair, laughing, too, wiping his eyes—“the desk clerk recognizes you and salutes you, and”—here I saluted—“you salute her back, and she says, ‘Welcome back, Colonel Schulman, your government rate as usual?’”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Allen said, doing his best not to laugh himself.
“Thank you for your service to our nation, Colonel Schulman,” Chuck said, saluting in Allen’s direction, imitating the desk clerk. “Is there anything we can do for you during your stay, Colonel?” Jack was doubled over, and it wasn’t from pain, I wished Chuck’s daughter had come back to the house with her camera, because it’s a sight I would like to have preserved forever, the sight of the pure joy on Jack’s face, and then Dan stood up and—as if this was somehow part of the conversation, as if what he was about to say was the next logical thought—he announced:
“There was a frog night at this church near my house last weekend.”
Chuck’s face was crimson, I thought he was going to fall to the floor he was howling so hard, and he said to Dan: “What?”
“They have them every once in a while,” Dan said, all seriousness, presumably referring to the frog nights, which my guess was had nothing to do with Reedeep Reeves, but then, who really knew?
“What are you talking about?” Chuck, barely able to gasp out the words, said.
“It helps keep the kids off the street,” Dan said, not cracking a smile.
“Dan, were you even listening to our conversation?” Allen said to him.
Dan turned to him and saluted. “That’s enough out of you, Colonel Schulman,” he said, and the laughter, so much laughter, filled the little room, and I know this may be hard to understand, but the laughter, the rising blend of all that laughter, sounded something like a prayer.