I DON’T KNOW IF IT WAS OUR TALK ABOUT business that did it—I have a feeling that it was—but one afternoon, out of nowhere, Jack said: “Do you want to go over to Main Street with me?”
I told him that I’d be glad to go for him—Main Street was Bexley’s business district, it had hit some less-than-booming times in recent years, but it was still where people went when they needed to buy something and didn’t want to drive to downtown Columbus or to the distant malls. So I assumed Jack wanted to make a purchase on Main Street, and I said I’d save him the trip.
“There’s nothing I really need,” he said. “I just feel like going to Main Street for a while. You want to?”
The news from his doctors had not been so good, and every time he brought up something like this—something that once wouldn’t have caused me to have a second thought—I asked myself if this might be the last time, and if that was the point of the request. I kept getting the feeling that Jack had an unwritten checklist: things he wanted to be sure to do one more time.
“We can go to Main Street,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “We should.”
THE BEST I CAN DESCRIBE IT—THE BEST I can try to explain what was going on—is that he was trying his hardest to taste some things.
Food itself no longer tasted right to him—like mush, he had said that night at Chuck’s for dinner; the radiation and the chemotherapy had ruined his sense of taste and had made anything he ate taste like mush.
But the tasting he was in pursuit of now—on our afternoon over on Main Street, as with just about everything else he and I were doing and would do—was of a different type. He was tasting his life. He was savoring who he was, and where he had been, who he had known…he was tasting it with a fierce and pervading kind of appetite.
It wasn’t nostalgia; this was much more profound than that, this, in my eyes, was something that bordered on holy. All these months, instead of making them about death, he was making them about his life. And I was finding that it was the honor of my own life just to be alongside him.
“I can’t even believe Norwoods ever existed,” he said on Main Street.
“Now, we’re not walking down there,” I said. “That’s way too far on foot.”
He looked to the west. “I know,” he said. “But the idea that Norwoods actually was there, five minutes in a car from us…”
Norwoods was an amusement park, and—wonder of wonders—it was a neighborhood amusement park, right outside of Bexley on Main Street, on the way to downtown Columbus. A Ferris wheel and a steam-engine train ride, a merry-go-round and a shooting gallery, a haunted house, and little boats chained to guide rails beneath the water’s surface in a murky man-made pond, a penny arcade with a row of wood-surfaced Skee-Ball machines…this was before Disneyland, before Great America, this was when someone must have had the idea that for the men just home from World War II—the men and their wives starting to raise families—an amusement park would be just what was needed.
And our dads would indeed take us there. It was the shortest of car rides—a few minutes down the street. Calliope music and the sounds of dozens of metal gears on dozens of rides turning at the same time, children lining up to steer miniature bumper cars inside an oval-shaped open-air enclosure…it was purely a local operation, it did no advertising that I remember, it was just a part of life in our town. A home-owned neighborhood attraction.
“I don’t think it was even there for very long,” I said. “I bet television put it out of business.”
“You look now at where it was, and the lot is so small,” Jack said. “All the rides I remember, I don’t see how they fit them all onto such a compact lot.”
There’s a freeway entrance now, right where the edge of Norwoods used to be; unless you were alive when Norwoods was alive, you’d never guess it was ever there.
“Our dads would drive downtown to work, and they would pass an amusement park every day,” Jack said, shaking his head.
“Not a bad sight as they started their days,” I said to him. “If you want to go in the car later, we can take a look at where it was.”
“No,” he said. “I can see it in my head.”
AT THE PLACE WHERE ROGERS’ DRUGSTORE used to be, we paused and Jack said, “We brought in the autograph book.”
“With my sister,” I said.
“I think that one poor old janitor thought we were making fun,” he said. “I felt so bad. I don’t think he could write.”
My younger sister, when we were very young, had received an autograph album for her birthday, and she wanted to get the autographs of some famous people, but we knew no famous people. So we walked to the place that was the next best thing: Main Street, where grownup people worked.
My sister and Jack and I went to the gas station, we went to the insurance office, we went to Rogers’ Drugstore, asking the men and women at work if they would sign the book. We didn’t mean it as a joke—we wanted their autographs. Most were very nice about it, and I do think that Jack was remembering correctly. The janitor at the drugstore, as I recall the moment, was awkward and a little irritated at our request—he was a man who did not read or write, we were told later, but we didn’t know it, the last thing we would have done was try to hurt his feelings. We were on Main Street, that’s all. We were small and Main Street was big.
“The air-conditioning in that store was always so freezing,” Jack said, tasting it. “And up by the front cash register, it smelled like bubble gum.”
“THAT’S WHERE WE MET THE BEATLES.”
He was gesturing toward a store that had in recent years sold linens.
“We took your dad’s big blue Pontiac, with the white leather seats,” I said.
It was a mid-January night in 1964; the first Ed Sullivan Show appearance had yet to occur. The Beatles, at that point, were still little more than a rumor, their voices coming out of our alarm-radios each morning, via WCOL, to help stir us to wakefulness. We’d seen their picture in Time magazine, we knew they were on their way to the United States, but there was nothing available to buy. No way, yet, for a sense of ownership.
We called Bexley Records every day. A wooden-walled and sparsely stocked storefront set back off Main Street, it was run by a couple of serious-faced young men who were folk music enthusiasts; a musician could purchase strings (either nylon or steel) for acoustic guitars, the latest Kingston Trio and Brothers Four albums were generally in stock, the sounds of Odetta or Joan Baez usually wafted through the store from the record player behind the counter.
The two proprietors of Bexley Records were becoming accustomed to our calls. Theirs was not a store that as a practice carried rock albums, but they had placed an order for Meet the Beatles, which was going to be the band’s first American LP, and while they could not promise to save copies for us, they told us that if we would check in each day, they would let us know when their shipment arrived.
They were true to their word; on a snowy night Jack borrowed his father’s hulking boat of a car and we drove to Main Street and there were the albums, with the black-and-white portrait of the four young men on the cover. Not even shrink-wrapped, as I recall, just the square cardboard album cover and, inside, a piece of round black vinyl that would make the world seem a little different, a little better. Two dollars and forty-seven cents an album, and we each bought one and hurried back to my house to listen.
“It really did feel sort of like meeting them,” he said now. “All the other songs on the album that no one had heard yet.”
“I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the two sides of the single, had been getting constant airplay on WCOL, but everything else on the album—“It Won’t Be Long,” “Don’t Bother Me,” “Not a Second Time,” all the others—was unheard, fresh. When we played the album that first time it felt like receiving long-hoped-for phone calls from people we’d been wanting to know. The voices; the words. Meet the Beatles.
“When I finally did meet them, I don’t think it was as good as that night,” I said.
“That’s what you said when you called to tell me,” Jack said.
In later years, after I was on my own and working, I’d run into George Harrison and Ringo Starr on separate occasions—Harrison in a hotel in Jamaica, where he happened to be vacationing while I was covering a story, Starr on a trip he took that had him pass through Chicago. They were pleasant men, each in his own way. Yet there was no flighty thrill to the encounters, no dizzy sense of discovery—we were all older; asking the merchants on Main Street for their autographs had been a giddier experience than chatting with the two Beatles. The kick had been long before—on the winter night at Bexley Records—when we had gotten the album before anyone else in town.
“My dad asked us why we each had to have one,” Jack said. “Why we couldn’t share.”
Jack’s mom had been gone for less than a year that night he brought his album back to his house.
“We asked your dad if he wanted to listen,” I said.
“He didn’t,” Jack said.
THE WORD WAS “LOOPY.”
I don’t know whether Jack came up with it, or Chuck. They had both been using it, in these months since he had become sick, to describe something that was happening to his cognitive skills.
Jack didn’t mind the word; he said it himself to explain what was going on.
“I’m just feeling a little loopy all of a sudden,” he said as we stood near the door of the store that in its recent incarnation was devoted to selling bedsheets, the linen store that once was Bexley Records. “Am I repeating things?”
He was, a little bit. We didn’t know if it was the cancer, or the dreadful strength of the medicines intended to stop the cancer, but he would forget things, he would tell you something one minute and then, an hour later, he would tell it to you again. Janice had said there were days when he would ask her to do something for him three or four times, and it wasn’t that he was haranguing her, it was that he wasn’t certain he had asked her in the first place.
I told him that, yes, he had repeated some things this day, but that he and I both knew why he was doing it, and that he shouldn’t worry unduly about it.
“It’s not like I don’t know when I’m getting loopy,” he said to me. “But knowing it doesn’t make it go away. It kind of frustrates me.”
He and Janice had looked into the home-health-care situation. It wasn’t time for nurses in their house yet, but they had made all the arrangements for when that time would come. The doctors were recommending a different medicine for the chemotherapy sessions. The first had not had the hoped-for effect.
AT THE BEXLEY PUBLIC LIBRARY HE FELL silent.
So much, I could tell, was flowing through him. The library—the soul of Main Street—was once dim and a little musty, now lustrous and determinedly airy: Recent reconstruction and redesign had rendered it a more physically welcoming place than when we were boys. At least that was the intention. The fact is, there was never a moment when that building was unwelcoming to us.
When we were children, the library was the place to sit on the floor on sultry summer afternoons as a librarian read to us as part of story-hour groups, while outside the stone walls the sun beat mercilessly on the Main Street sidewalks. When we were a little older, and had learned our way around the card catalogs, we would come here by ourselves in search of weekend reading: the Freddy the Pig books by Walter R. Brooks; later the Chip Hilton sports novels by Clair Bee (before we were quite ready to graduate to the slightly more advanced works of John R. Tunis); the Tom Swift Jr. books by Victor Appleton II. In high school our interests had shifted; we’d come to the library on autumn nights in the guise of doing research for term papers, but our real goal was to run into certain girls—to accidentally run into them, on purpose—and persuade them to leave with us. Sometimes we succeeded.
Now Jack stood in the foyer and, just as before, the sound of the library was a sound like no other: shoe bottoms clicking against the marble floor, the clicks, in the midst of quiet, the prevailing noise, if you can call a sound so lovely noise.
“The way those books would smell, back in the stacks…,” he said.
“The bubble gum at the drugstore, the books here—you’re coming up with a lot of fragrances today,” I said.
“They smelled like dust, and binding adhesive,” Jack said.
He was tasting everything.
BROADWAY PLAYS WERE SOMETHING HE educated himself to love.
I’d never been to one—not in New York; not on Broadway.
“You’ve got to do it,” he would tell me, over the years. “You can call these services, or go up to these booths on the day of the show, and you can get tickets at really good prices…Going to those shows have been some of the most incredible nights of my life.”
He would go alone. He’d be in New York on business, he’d be staying in a hotel by himself, and he’d pick out a Broadway play or musical.
“You never ask yourself whether you belong there?” I’d ask him. That, probably, is why I never had gone—Broadway always seemed so far, in every way, from here. A ticket could get me in, but I knew it wouldn’t make me feel like I fit in.
“You belong there the second the curtain goes up,” he’d told me. “You belong there the moment the orchestra hits its first note.”
Now we were in front of the Drexel Theater, Bexley’s only movie house. In there, I’d always felt at home. In there the movies, when we first were going to movies, had mostly been second-run, and inside the Drexel, at the intersection of Drexel Avenue and Main Street, the panoramas—even the most gargantuan Hollywood panoramas—had seemed reassuringly and ultimately life-sized. We had known that, off in New York, sophisticated people were amusing themselves at big-ticket Broadway shows: My Fair Lady, The King and I, West Side Story, and afterward, in our imagining of their nights, they were stopping off at Sardi’s, at Toots Shor’s, places we would never see.
We would walk out of the Drexel—after our fifth or sixth viewing of Kirk Douglas in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea—and step right next door to the Feed Bag lunch counter for a milkshake or some french fries, and that was just about as worldly as we required matters to be, that was just about as much entertainment and post–theater cuisine as we could ever covet.
But Jack had become a man with an appreciation for Broadway shows, he had given himself that, and at the Drexel now he said: “I’m hoping that when I go to Sloan-Kettering I feel good enough to go to the theater that night.” The competing forces: his life, and all its desires and drives, against that which was sapping his capacity to chase those desires.
Not knowing what else to say, I said, “There’s no Main Street in Chicago. I used to think that was really strange. What kind of city doesn’t have a Main Street?”
“Now you’re the one who’s loopy,” he said.
WE KEPT SEEING THE PLACES THAT weren’t there.
Wentz’s Pharmacy was now something else. So was Evans and Schwartz Shoes. The Glass Bowl, and Willard’s Family Restaurant, Paul’s Food Shoppe and Seckels 5 & 10…we walked by the buildings and it was like seeing ghosts. Except ghosts are gauzy, ghosts float in and out of your field of vision; the ghosts of Main Street were ghosts that had left calling cards, they were there and they weren’t there. The buildings, most of them, remained, with new signs, new owners, new purposes. We saw what stood there now, and we saw what went before.
Jack was quiet again, as he’d been inside the public library. With anyone else I’d have pointed out what we were seeing—the Main Street that used to be, the Main Street that had replaced it—but Jack knew what I was seeing and feeling, no words were necessary. This had all been here, had thrived, and now: gone. All these stores, crucial to their community: supplanted. Expendable.
I didn’t have to ask what he was thinking.
“I need to get something to eat,” he finally said. “An ice cream soda or something.”
We went into Graeter’s Ice Cream Parlor—in the old Wentz’s building—and Jack asked for some low-fat ice cream. He was told they didn’t have any; would he like a soda made with regular ice cream?
“No, thanks,” he said. Then, to me:
“Regular ice cream’s no good for my cholesterol.”
I had to stop myself from telling him it didn’t matter. I had to stop myself from saying: At this point, enjoy whatever you want. An ice cream soda with real ice cream in it is no longer your concern; if you want a soda, have them make it with their best ice cream. The outcome of this woeful game will not depend in any way on your sticking with a prudent dessert.
But it was low-fat he wanted, and we walked down Main Street to Johnson’s, where we had gone on summer afternoons for ice cream when we were boys. It was a Monday, though; Johnson’s was closed on Mondays. We’d forgotten.
“What’s that across the street?” Jack said.
I didn’t see where he was looking.
“Right there,” he said. “That Anthony-Thomas place. Maybe they have sodas.”
It was a candy store. I’d never seen the building before. It had obviously, from the look of it, been there for years. But it was tucked into a little parking lot through which I had never walked.
“Let’s cross and see if they’ll make me a soda,” he said.
“We can go over there, Jack,” I said. “But they’re not going to have sodas. They sell candy.”
“Maybe I can get a soda there,” he said.
Loopy, or tired, which I didn’t know. But we crossed Main Street, and there was one young guy working in an otherwise empty store. There were glass cases filled with chocolates. Pieces of candy, boxes of candy. That’s all.
The young man looked surprised to have customers. “May I help you pick something out?” he said.
Jack looked at the contents of the glass cases with some interest—he was, after all, the man who had just shipped five trucks of candy across the nation. He evaluated the goods, then said: “I’d like to get a chocolate soda, with low-fat ice cream.”
The young man said, “We don’t have ice cream here. We don’t make sodas. Have you tried Johnson’s?”
“It’s closed,” I said.
“It’s Monday,” Jack said.
We thanked him and left.
“It was worth the trip,” I said to Jack. “We finally did the thing we thought we’d never be able to do.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“We found a place we’ve never been,” I said. “We went somewhere in town we’d never seen before.”
“I’m going back in there,” he said, turning around.
“Why?” I said. “He told you they didn’t have ice cream.”
“I feel sorry for him standing there with no customers,” he said. “Let’s give him a little business.”