HE WAS UPBEAT AND HIS VOICE WAS FULL of life when he gave me some unexpected news:
“I went to the fair—twice.”
“You did?” I said. “Who’d you go with?”
“Janice and I went with some friends,” he said. “Oh, man…”
“Did you feel old?” I said.
“You start feeling old at the fair when you’re twenty,” he said. “But it was great. It was…you know.”
“You see the butter cow?” I asked.
“What do you think?” he said.
HIS TRIPS TO THE OHIO STATE FAIR came at around the time his doctors were suggesting he add something to his regimen: oxygen.
He detested the proposal—the idea of it, the logistics of it, what it represented.
The rest of us didn’t quite understand why he resisted it so adamantly. His lungs were shutting down—gradually, yes, but there was no denying it. His doctors thought he wouldn’t have to exert himself so much while breathing if he got a little help from a portable oxygen tank. Thin, clear tubes, they said, would be provided to let the oxygen flow into his nostrils. The objective was to make things less taxing for him.
With all the other ways his life had changed—the chemo therapy, the radiation, the bottles of pills that now lined the surface of his bedroom dresser—the oxygen seemed like just one more increment, and not that drastic a one. The doctors’ intention was for it to help him out. To make him—in every sense—breathe easier.
It made him angry. It made him depressed. No wonder he sought out the fair.
HE STILL, SOMEWHERE IN HIS HOUSE, HAD the pencil portrait of himself he’d gotten on the midway of the fair when we were twelve or thirteen. I’d lost mine long ago, but Jack had kept his.
The Ohio State Fair—the sun-baked annual end-of-summer celebration of food, music, rides, farm animals, carny games and aimless all-day, all-evening wandering—was the state’s biggest, longest party. At least it always seemed that way when we first knew it.
Held for two weeks on the sprawling fairgrounds up by the Ohio State University campus, it was the last blast of summer—the last good times before the end of vacation, before the unforgiving timetable of the real world kicked in again in the fall. Yes, it was corny—literally, the place was rife with corn; corn on the cob, corn dogs, corn on a stick—and you weren’t supposed to take it seriously, even when you were a kid the idea was to approach it with a wink. Life itself might be austere and leaden and assiduously regulated. The fair was the antidote. The fair was a 360-acre grin.
You’d ride the bus to the Eleventh Avenue entrance to the fairgrounds, walk through the gaps in the towering letters of the O H I O gate, and immediately you’d be in a place you’d been forever, you’d know exactly where you were and who you were. You were a kid in the middle of the country at the end of another summer—no matter how many times you’d been there, you were always that kid at the Ohio State Fair. The farm families would be present, having driven in from every one of the state’s eighty-eight counties to display their prize livestock and finest crops in competition; city people would arrive for the nighttime concerts in front of the grandstand; there would be harness racing and live radio broadcasts and, when you were young, nonstop flirting with people you’d never seen before and would never see again.
There was Bobo, the guy who sat in the dunk tank, yelling insults as you passed by until you were sufficiently worked up to hand over your money, take three baseballs, and throw them at him to try to drop him into the dirty water; there was the big cow carved lovingly out of pure and beautiful Ohio butter and kept in a refrigerated glass case for fairgoers to approach and pay annual homage; there were sketch artists on the midway to draw your portrait, maybe the first professional portrait of yourself you’d ever owned, and maybe the last.
It’s the one Jack still had; his fairgrounds pencil portrait still was in his home. And of course this year he would want to go to the fair. It shouldn’t have surprised any of us. His doctors were telling him he should consider an oxygen tank, and this made him furious, he knew they were right but the fact that they were right upset him in ways the rest of us could only begin to grasp. Of course he wanted to go to the fair: the last breath of summer.
I THINK HE FIRST FOUND HIMSELF—HIS confident and self-assured self—at the Ohio State Fair. I’d never mentioned it to him; if I had, chances are he’d have told me I was wrong. But I knew him pretty well. I’d seen it.
One summer our friend Pongi’s dad had the soda-pop concession contract in the grandstand. For all the outdoor shows—the horse races, the rock concerts, the tractor pulls, the finals of the livestock competitions—Pongi’s dad got to sell RC Cola, and the other flavors his bottling plant produced, out of paper cups. He hired hawkers to roam through the stands selling.
It was a salary-plus-commission job for the hawkers; they got a little money just for doing it, but their payday really depended on how many cups of pop they sold. As I recall, they had to go underneath the stands and pay in advance for each tray of RC they took out; when they came back for refills they were allowed to keep a percentage of the receipts for each tray.
Jack was hired. Like most kids, he’d always been a little shy in social situations, reluctant to assert himself with people he didn’t know. And for most people, that reticence eventually, to one degree or another, tends to go away over time. With Jack I saw it happen.
It was that summer—the summer he hawked RC in the grandstand. For the first time, he wasn’t working for his father in the market; for the first time, the faces he saw every day were new faces. People moved in and out of the grandstand—sometimes there were three or four grandstand shows of different varieties each day. Jack and his fellow hawkers stayed on; the people in the seats changed.
He would come home at night—meeting the rest of us back in Bexley at the end of the evening—and he was suddenly sure of himself. He’d smell of cola—the RC splashed around a lot when the cups were being filled beneath the stands, by the end of a shift his forearms would be sticky from the foamy, sugary liquid and no matter how hard he scrubbed, the aroma of RC would remain. But he’d have talked, however briefly, to hundreds and hundreds of people each day; he’d have made eye contact with dozens of girls, been openly flattered by the things some of them had said to him, he was feeling like his own person, a person in the wider world. And this was in a context other than ABCDJ; Allen, Chuck, Dan and I didn’t work at the fair. This was brand-new for Jack; this was something he was trying on his own.
We’d see him at midnights that fair summer, after his evenings in the grandstand, and he was changed, if ever so slightly. He’d taken his first steps beyond everything he’d always known; he’d taken his first steps beyond his house, and his school, and us. Yet the stratosphere he’d put one foot into was the friendliest stratosphere a guy could traverse. If you’ve got to begin your lifelong journey into that more expansive universe sometime, you can consider yourself lucky if those first transitional steps take you straight through the Ohio Fairgrounds.
“WE SAW THE RASCALS, THE GRASS ROOTS and the Turtles,” he was telling me now.
That’s one of the things he’d done at the fair at the end of this present and quite separate summer: He’d gone to an oldies concert with Janice and some other couples they knew.
“In the grandstand?” I asked. I pictured him sitting in the same seats through which he used to roam with his soda-pop tray fastened to him by a strap around his neck.
“The grandstand?” he asked, as if I couldn’t be more behind the times for not knowing. “The grandstand has been gone for years.”
A new concert venue had been constructed; he said the show had been terrific, he had let the music fill him up, he didn’t get tired that night and he didn’t ache and he didn’t think about the uninvited new life to which he’d be returning at evening’s end.
“You eat there?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. “Ribs. Corn.”
He said he’d stopped to pause for a few moments by the butter cow; you couldn’t not.
And he answered my next question before I asked it.
“I didn’t see Bobo,” he said.
New generations of Bobos had come and gone in the years since we were first at the fair; they were always called Bobo, they were always yelling insults from their dunk tanks, but the Bobos themselves changed. Pretty frequently, I would imagine; being Bobo would not seem to be a long-term career move.
“Did you look for him?” I asked.
“Well, I wasn’t going to walk all over the fairgrounds looking, but I looked everywhere we walked, and I didn’t see him,” Jack said.
“You think they got rid of him?” I said. “You think the Bobo tank’s not there anymore?”
“Come on,” Jack said. “The fair with no Bobo?”
He’d enjoyed himself so much that he’d gone back for a second night. He couldn’t get enough of it.
I wasn’t sure whether to ask, but I did.
“You take the oxygen?” I said.
“To the fair?” he said, meaning: No.
NOT ALL ATTEMPTS TO DIVERT HIMSELF were as successful.
Chuck and Joyce went on a summer vacation trip to Colorado, and invited Jack and Janice to join them. The idea was to do nothing but relax—dinners, music, walks on mountain paths if Jack was up to it.
But Jack, on that trip, wasn’t up to much. Probably the altitude had something to do with it—they had all talked about it before they flew out there, they had made some inquiries about whether being up in the mountains would be too much of a burden on Jack’s respiratory system, and they had been told it was safe for him to give the vacation a try, if he wanted to. He wanted to.
Once he got there, though, everyone knew it wasn’t working. “Every night we’ll go somewhere or other,” Chuck told me when I called out there and Jack was sleeping and couldn’t overhear. “And he’ll really want to come along. We’ll get to wherever we’re going and we’ll be there for a few minutes and he’ll start getting this look on his face. And after a while he’ll say, ‘I have to get back.’”
He wasn’t taking walks, Chuck said.
“He just can’t.”
The fair was one thing; Colorado was harder. Probably it was the altitude. But maybe he sensed that he was too far from home.
THE SPIELBERG EFFECT, HE ASSURED ME, was still in full force.
“I know I look different because I’ve lost weight, but it’s happened a couple of times when I’ve been out,” he said.
He first noticed it years before, when he grew a small beard, salt-and-pepper gray. When he’d go out somewhere wearing a baseball cap—and especially when he wore wire-rimmed eyeglasses—he would get stares.
“At first I couldn’t understand it,” he told me back then. “I was a little self-conscious—I’d go places and people would be looking at me. I thought maybe I had food on my face or something.”
Then, once, in a restaurant in New York—a very popular place, difficult to get reservations—he was in the foyer area, waiting to be seated along with many other would-be diners, and was settling in for a long delay. The place was packed.
But the maître d’ glanced at him, walked right over to where he and his business associate were standing, and said quietly: “We have your table, Mr. Spielberg.”
He was confused; his business associate’s name wasn’t Spielberg, his own name certainly wasn’t Spielberg—what was this about? He didn’t argue. He thought it was a mix-up that had worked out in his favor.
After that, it kept occurring. Usually it was just the stares; usually it was out of town, not in Columbus. He finally figured out what was happening when someone approached him and said: “I know you must get this all the time, but I love your movies.”
Jack always had a gentle, wise-without-being-aloof face. And in a baseball cap, with the little beard and glasses, he looked very much like Steven Spielberg. Specifically, Spielberg in those on-the-set production stills that show him directing his movies.
I’d never thought about it; once Jack pointed it out to me, I could see the resemblance, but it never would have occurred to me otherwise. What was interesting to me was that a movie director was so recognizable that the public would pick him out of a crowd—or, more to the point, pick Jack out of a crowd. You think of movie actors getting that kind of response, not directors.
It continued to happen. Jack without the baseball cap bore little similarity to Spielberg. No one would ever make the mistake. But with the cap…
He was checking into a hotel on the East Coast once and the entire way up to his room the bellman was talking to him about “his” movies. Jack was amused by it—he had been through it enough times, it had ceased to surprise him—and when he got to the room he gave the bellman a tip (I didn’t ask him if he gave him a Spielberg-sized tip) and then shook his hand. He said, “I know what you’re thinking. But my name’s Jack Roth.”
At which the bellman gave a conspiratorial cock of the head and said: “Don’t worry, Mr. Spielberg. Your secret’s safe with me.”
In Colorado, he said, he still had gotten the Spielberg stares when he was out. But he wasn’t going out that much, even when he returned to Columbus.
“WHAT WERE WE DOING IN THE DIARY TODAY?”
I’d kept a diary in 1964. I’d been attending a convention of high school journalism students from around the state of Ohio, and one of the guest speakers, a teacher, said that the best way to make oneself a good reporter was to keep a daily journal. The teacher said that the discipline of making yourself write down exactly what happened to you every day, even when you didn’t feel like writing, was good training.
So, for that one year, I did it. Jack knew I still had it—the original diary, written in pen and in pencil day by day, in a spiral-bound calendar-journal that an insurance company had sent to my dad as a promotion at the end of the previous year.
“What were we doing in the diary today?” he asked me one summer night, as I was getting ready to come to Columbus to see him again.
He’d been asking the question more and more. He was trying to get something back—a time, a feeling. Maybe it was the same reason he’d gone up to the fair twice.
So I pulled the old diary—with its imitation-black-leather cover advertising the Archer, Meek, Weiler Insurance Agency—from the drawer where I kept it, and I turned to the day, this day, but in 1964.
“Dennis MacNeil came to my house with a Vespa motorbike he’d just bought,” I said to Jack. “He rode me around town on the back of it for a long time. Then he let me drive it myself.”
“Am I in that day?” Jack asked.
“You are,” I said, looking at the diary. “My little brother Timmy asked you and me if he could go out to dinner with us. We said yes. We took him to Howard Johnson’s at Broad and James. We paid our bill and you and I each bought a pack of Tiparillos—those little cigars with the plastic tips.”
“Are those the ones Ernie Kovacs’s wife used to sing about in the TV commercials?” Jack asked.
“Edie Adams?” I said. “I’m pretty sure she sang the commercials for Muriel cigars—‘Why don’t you light one up and smoke it some time?’”
“Then what was Tiparillos?” Jack said.
“You know,” I said. “The woman in the commercial played sort of a cigarette girl, like in a nightclub.”
“Carrying the tray of cigarettes and cigars around in front of her?” he said.
“Right,” I said. “Like you with the RC at the fair.”
“‘Cigars, cigarettes, Tiparillos?’” Jack said, lightness in his voice, remembering now.
“Yeah,” I said. “Anyway, we bought Tiparillos after dinner at HoJo’s.”
“Did I smoke one?” he asked.
“Let me look,” I said. “It says that I did, but you didn’t.”
“I didn’t think so,” he said.
“I smoked one,” I said, looking at what I’d written at the end of that evening in 1964. “We threw a football around in my front yard. We each had the Tiparillos in our mouths—mine lit, yours unlit. We let Timmy play football with us.”
“What else happened that day?” he asked.
I looked at the diary entry.
“Nothing,” I said. “That was it.”
There was silence on his end of the phone. Then he said:
“Sounds like a pretty great day.”
RIGHT BEFORE I WENT BACK TO COLUMBUS he said Lazarus was closing.
The department store, at the corner of Town and High, had been a part of downtown Columbus for more than 150 years. Now it was the store’s last day.
“They announced last year that it was going to close, but it didn’t seem real,” he said. “But this is it. They’re locking the doors for good.”
We’d spent so many hours there—first with our mothers, shopping for back-to-school clothes; then by ourselves when we were old enough; later as adults, even after the store had begun its slow decline as more and more people chose to shop at outlying malls. Jack had worked there one Christmas season. The Chintz Room, where ladies would gather for lunch, dressed up for a day downtown, more than a few of them wearing white gloves; the spectacular Christmas lights, and the Santa Claus parade to kick off the holiday shopping season; the vast book department in the years before there was any such thing as Borders or Barnes & Noble (or, at the other end of the spectrum, My Back Pages); the display windows put together as lovingly and as artfully as something in a gallery in London or Paris, or so it looked to our Midwestern eyes…
Lazarus was as much a part of downtown as…
Well, if someone had said that the Ohio Statehouse was going out of business, that couldn’t have felt any more wrong than this.
“You’re not going down there today, are you?” I asked him.
“I was thinking about it,” he said. “But I don’t know.”
“There’ll probably be crowds for the last day,” I said. “I don’t think you need to fight your way through that.”
I told him when I’d be coming in.
“Lazarus isn’t supposed to die,” he said.