ALLEN WAS AT THE BAR WHEN I GOT there, smoking and looking like he was waiting for a jury to come in, which in a sense he was.
I had called him in Canton to suggest we both spend some time with Jack; he hadn’t seen him in a while. Allen had been due at a fund-raising event—something to do with the top echelons of Ohio politics and law—but he changed things around and here he was at the Top. His wife was with him; they both had cocktails in front of them and he motioned for the bartender to bring me one before I even could sit down.
“Bobby,” he said, in a deep-as-the-briny-sea, comically accented drawl; he’s been using that word, and that exaggerated voice, to greet me since we were kids. He’d gotten it from some black-and-white-era television series long forgotten—at one point it had been a joke whose genesis we both instantly understood, but our memory of exactly where it had come from had faded over the years. The greeting had lasted.
“Alby,” I said in the same voice, the word and the inflection the products of that same lost-in-the-mists-of-memory TV show. It must have made us laugh, the “Bobby” and the “Alby,” once upon a time.
“So,” he said, looking at his watch.
“They’re going to meet us here,” I said.
When Allen gets nervous you can see it. His body coils up. I’ve never observed him in a courtroom, even though practicing his profession in court has been the dominant fact of his adult life.
But this was what it has to look like—this taciturn, quietly wound-up demeanor is what opposing counsel must see on decision days before the bench. When something that counts is on the line.
“Come on, sit down,” he said, an edge to his tone. “You going to stand there?”
Impatient. Irritable. Waiting for the jury to return. He kept glancing toward the front door, waiting for Jack. One look would tell Allen volumes. He’d know within a second what the odds were for a favorable verdict.
WE TALKED ABOUT THINGS THAT HAD NO importance to us, just to pass the minutes; he tapped his pack of cigarettes on the surface of the bar.
His wife asked me how my flight had been and when I had gotten in; I asked her questions neither of us cared about. We waited.
Then the door from the parking lot opened and Jack and Janice entered, and Jack flashed us that chipped-tooth grin.
“Oh, Jesus,” Allen said under his breath, even as he was allowing a broad, too-vigorous smile to cross his face, even as he rose with his arms extended. Hiding his cards. Not letting Jack see what he was thinking.
“I’m glad you finally got here,” Allen called to Jack. “Bob’s been sitting here telling us the dumbest stories you could ever hear. You’re lucky you missed it.”
Jack had regressed even in the time I had been away—I could see that. He was much thinner, there was a hollow look in his eyes and an overall pallidity about him. Still, I had seen him more recently than Allen, and I suppose I had been hoping that Allen, encountering Jack for the first time in months, would be able to reassure me that things weren’t that bad.
“Come on, let’s get to the table,” Allen said, and he put a hand on Jack’s back. He was smiling ardently for Jack’s benefit, and he turned briefly to look at me and even though he maintained the smile I could see that he was wanting to weep.
WHEN WE WERE IN OUR EARLY TWENTIES—during that period when Jack was teaching in the suburbs north of Chicago, when I was starting as a reporter at the Sun-Times—there was a Friday night when he rode the train downtown to meet me at a bar called Riccardo’s, near the newspaper building.
It was a famous hangout for reporters; I had only recently worked up the nerve to go in there without thinking I’d be asked to show a passport and then be summarily turned away. Mike Royko, then still in his thirties, would be at the bar, and Bill Mauldin, after he’d drawn his editorial cartoon for the day; Mauldin’s friend and fellow cartoonist John Fischetti of the Chicago Daily News would be on hand, as would my personal newspapering hero, sportswriter Jack Griffin of the Sun-Times, in his crewcut and his trench coat at the end of the bar, seeming more like Bogart than Bogart himself. Peter Lisagor, when he was in town from Washington, would come in, and this was a place quite far, in every way, from everything I’d known back in Ohio.
So when Jack joined me that Friday night, we kept sneaking little looks over at each other, translating to: “Can you believe this?” Translating to: “Are we really here?” We didn’t say it—at the start of your twenties you seldom express out loud your wonderment at where life has suddenly taken you, there’s something inside that makes you think you should pretend this is not all that big. But we knew; we looked at each other, and we knew.
Not so very long before we had been at the Toddle House on Main Street; not so very long before we had been purchasing tickets to see Goldfinger in its first run at the Loews Ohio Theater, just down the block from the then-thriving Lazarus. That was where we were from, and now we were here, and this felt more exotic than anything in Goldfinger, our being here seemed like something out on the far reaches of imaginability.
The evening grew raucous inside Riccardo’s, and the drinks kept coming, and Jack was talking to newspaper people and television reporters and they were treating him just fine, he might as well have stepped into The Front Page, the Ben Hecht–Charles MacArthur play we’d both checked out of the Bexley Public Library not so many years before. In Riccardo’s he had raised his voice so that I could hear him and he said: “Let’s go to Las Vegas.”
“When?” I said loudly back, in the midst of the din.
“Now,” he said. “Tonight.”
Neither of us had ever been there. In the jumbled dissonance of the bar, with the drinks doing their job on us, it seemed like a reasonable idea: Go out to O’Hare, buy tickets to Las Vegas, fly there without suitcases or changes of clothes, and…
“What do you want to do there?” I’d asked him.
“Whatever we end up doing,” he said. “We can come back Sunday night and be at work on Monday.”
And, as unlike him as this was, we almost did it. Being in Riccardo’s, in Chicago at night, in the company of all those people, had intoxicated him in ways separate from anything having to do with the cocktails. We were different than we’d been back home—that’s what it felt like. We were in Chicago now, and if that was possible for us then anything was possible—if we could be here, then we could be in Las Vegas tonight, too. Our old world wasn’t our world anymore.
Or so it seemed until we left Riccardo’s and walked out onto lower Rush Street. In the night air, without the noise from the barroom, there was a sense of deflation, or at least of reality, and as we climbed the stairs up to Michigan Avenue to get a cab to the airport, Jack said:
“What time do you think we’d get to Las Vegas?”
“Really late,” I’d said. “But we’ll pick up some time zones. And it never closes.”
“Where would we stay?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I’d said. “One of those hotels.”
“Do you have enough money with you?” he’d said.
“My checkbook’s at home,” I said.
We both knew by the time our feet hit the sidewalk in front of the Wrigley Building that we weren’t going anywhere. The action inside Riccardo’s may have fooled us into thinking we had turned into people who could fly to Vegas on a whim, who could step up to the craps tables (even though we had no idea how to play) and stay out until the sun rose above the desert and then start all over again…
“How much do you want to do this?” he’d asked.
“It was your idea,” I’d said.
“I know,” he said. “But it’s been a long week. I’m kind of tired.”
I knew.
“We can do it some weekend when we have time to plan,” I’d said. “When we can pack bags and make reservations.”
“I think that makes more sense,” he’d said. “Don’t you?”
So we’d gone down the street and gotten a cheeseburger somewhere; just us being in Chicago felt implausible enough, we didn’t need Las Vegas to make us realize we were fish out of water, we recognized that quite pointedly right where we were. We never did go to Las Vegas together; I think we probably knew that evening that we never might. It didn’t matter. Back home, we’d never even have gotten this far—we never would have entertained the idea of flying off to Vegas.
And now we were back home once again, at the Top once again, and Allen, a man who himself had seen the lights of Las Vegas many times, called for a new round of drinks for everyone, and in his eyes I saw something close to anguish for the friend he loved.
CHUCK AND DAN WEREN’T HERE TONIGHT. Chuck and Joyce had gone out of town; Dan and his wife were scheduled to take a vacation cruise leaving out of Fort Lauderdale. (Severe hurricanes in the Caribbean were bearing in on south Florida; Floridians were beating a retreat north on jammed interstates, were trying to get on overbooked flights to anywhere they could—all that mattered was that they flee the oncoming storms. I had said to Dan: “You’re actually going to fly to Florida so you can cruise in the Caribbean?” He’d said: “Oh, yeah.” I’d said: “Have you watched the news this week?” He’d said, in the staunchly pedantic manner of Woodrow Wilson addressing the League of Nations: “Go to Princess dot com,” and although as usual with him I had no idea how that applied to what we had been discussing, at this point I knew further colloquy with Dan on the subject would be fruitless.)
So Allen and his wife, and Jack and Janice, and a friend and business associate of Jack’s—a guy named Joe who had flown in from overseas—were at the table. This kind of thing was happening quite a bit: people who were in business with Jack, or who had known him as friends over the years, were finding reasons to come to Columbus. There was really only one reason: Jack. I think he knew it.
He was trying so hard tonight. He had told me that his ears had become increasingly sensitive to loud noises—there had been some concerts in Colorado that he’d had to leave, he said, because it had been uncomfortable for him to sit in the midst of highly amplified music. I could tell that, in the restaurant, every time the sound level rose it was getting to him. Once or twice I saw him wince.
But he wanted to be here. “Joe, tell them about…,” he said to his friend, the one we didn’t know, and it wasn’t Joe’s story that Jack wanted Allen and me to hear, what he wanted was for his friend to be our friend, too. This, all of it, was important to him.
Someone we’d known and liked growing up came by the table—he was a podiatrist now, but that’s not who he was to us, to us he was the guy in whose oddly shaped little driveway on Remington we’d shoot baskets—and he was very good about not directing the conversation to Jack’s health, he was very smart about hitting just the right tone and telling a funny story and making it easy for all of us, and especially Jack, to laugh. But all through the evening the laughter at the table seemed like laughter in response to a carefully constructed screenplay—we were laughing in the right places, sometimes a little too heartily, we were laughing because we knew we were supposed to in defiance of the darkness before us. Back in April, when we’d had that first ABCDJ dinner, the laughter had been like a conferment, hopeful and precious. This was different. We were many months down the line, we knew more about where all this was going, and we laughed on cue, from somewhere in the throat, well north of the heart.
ALLEN WAS INTO THE POWER YEARS—those years to which most men in business seem to aspire all through their careers, and only some manage to reach.
The power years, or so I’ve observed, usually kick in—if they’re ever going to kick in—when a man is in his forties or fifties. It’s not just a matter of being successful, although success is a prerequisite for entering the power years. And it’s not something that can be given to a person, like a promotion or a raise.
In the power years, there’s an aura around a man—he’s in charge, not just of other people but of himself. It’s more than being a boss—you can be a boss in your twenties or thirties. The power years are, if not a state of mind, then something very close to it. In the power years, you report to no one but you—not on an organization chart, not just in a boardroom, but in your head. You see this all the time in prosperous and supremely self-confident men in their forties and fifties. Country-club grill rooms are the natural settings.
I never saw Jack covet the power years. It’s not that he didn’t make it—it’s that it never occurred to him to desire it. Yes, he wanted to run his own operation and make enough money to do a good job of supporting Janice and Maren, but to be one of those guys—grill-room guys, power-years guys—had no appeal to him.
When I’d asked him once if he believed that a man’s forties were when he first became eligible to enter the power years, he had thought for a second and then said:
“I don’t think the forties are the power years. I think they’re the fool-you years.”
“What do you mean?” I’d asked.
“Well, you see these guys in their forties, the ones who build the biggest houses and get their pictures in the paper with their wives at black-tie fund-raisers,” he said. “They have this look about them, you know? Like stuffed cats. Very satisfied.
“It’s like they know they’ve achieved everything there is to achieve. They’re on cruise control.”
“So why are those the fool-you years?” I’d asked.
“Because it’ll fool you,” he’d said. “You become one of those guys, thinking it’s smooth sailing from then on out, and those are the guys for whom things go wrong. The power turns out to be an illusion. They get fooled by it.”
“Not all of them,” I’d said. “Some of them go sailing right on.”
“I bet you the ones who stay at the top are the ones who never believed in power years anyway,” he’d said. “Just because they look like they have no worries doesn’t mean they don’t. The guys with more than a few worries in their forties and fifties are the guys who are going to be all right. The ones who assume they’ve won the championship of life—those are the ones who are going to get fooled.”
He’d said this to me before life fooled him anyway. And he’d never assumed anything.
AT THE TABLE, THE LAUGHS WERE STILL screenplay laughs—everyone was trying too hard. You could hear it. Jack knew it.
At one point, though, he leaned over to me, a true grin on his face. He was thinking about something that made him want to laugh for real.
“You know when we were talking about the Forty Winks?” he said.
That’s what he was thinking about—the old alleged call-girl motel down the street.
“I told Chuck that we were talking about it,” Jack said, “and he claimed never to have heard about it. Can you believe that Chuck’s never heard of ‘Change for a penny’?”
“Chuck’s never heard of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’” I said, and Jack lit up, he laughed out loud, and for a moment—a fool-you moment—we were somewhere else.
WE WANTED DESSERT, AND EVERYONE WAS tired of sitting, so we took the one-minute drive to Johnson’s.
Full-bore autumn was on its way, but this was one of those nights that had one foot in summer. We’d been having milkshakes and sundaes outside at Johnson’s our whole lives; the ice cream stand came into being right around the time we were born and here it still was, with picnic-style tables in front as if the view was of a rolling-to-the-far-horizon verdant meadow instead of the traffic on East Main Street.
So many lazy nights here, so many lingering conversations. No one ever rushed you at Johnson’s. For the price of a cone you could sit with your friends and stay as long as you pleased.
“I still think you’re wrong,” Jack said.
“I’m not wrong,” I said. “You didn’t used to be able to go inside and eat. There was no inside. The only way to order your ice cream was through that little window cut into the front of the store.”
“That’s just not right,” Jack said. “There was always an inside—they just made it nicer a few years ago. But you could always eat in there.”
“No,” I said. “There was nothing in there but the people scooping.”
“Then where would you see the sign with all the flavors of ice cream?” he said. “The sign was inside.”
He might have had a point.
But arguing about the history of Johnson’s was safer than saying what was on our minds.
Allen wasn’t talking at all. He was looking toward Jack with a remote expression on his face, sitting at a picnic table and smoking. I said to him, “I think, if you ask, they may have a cigarette-flavored ice cream.” He mouthed me a common curse.
“Or a tobacco float,” I said.
It felt like summer.
But it wasn’t.
Allen stood and said he and his wife had to be taking off. He placed a hand on Jack’s shoulder and said, “I’ll see you,” having no idea if it was true.
Jack nodded that nod.
So many nights, right here. A car pulled up; the person in the front passenger seat got out to buy ice cream for the driver and for the people in the back, and as he opened the car door I could hear the music, an old number from the Hard Day’s Night soundtrack. John Lennon always did have that knack: to sing songs with words of absolute hurt, yet to make the songs seem peppy and bright because of the quick insistence of the melody. I don’t know how he pulled it off: singing the saddest songs while keeping a rough-edged smile in his voice. Allen took one more look toward Jack, then turned to leave, Lennon’s voice in the background singing “I’ll Cry Instead.”