LESS ACCOMPLISHED SINGERS THAN MR. Lennon weren’t quite as adept at masking their emotions. I can testify to that. I was one of them.
Beginning in 1992 and for the next ten years, in about as unlikely and unanticipated an alignment of the planets as I ever hope to encounter, I spent my summer weekends touring the country as a backup singer and two-songs-a-show lead vocalist with Jan and Dean, the surf duo from southern California whose mid-sixties hits included the number one “Surf City,” “Dead Man’s Curve,” and “Little Old Lady from Pasadena.” As with just about everything else good that ever happened in my life, Jack had something to do with how it came to pass. Not that either of us could have known it at the time.
On an April Saturday in 1964, Jack, Dan and I had gone downtown to Lazarus to buy records in the department store’s fifth-floor music department. I had bought two singles—“I Am the Greatest,” by Cassius Clay, and “The New Girl in School,” by Jan and Dean. I’d written down that fact inside the insurance-company diary. Three decades later, in a piece of writing based on the diary, I referred to what happened that day, including the purchase of the Jan and Dean record. (Details were the strong suit of the diary; the teacher who had recommended keeping a diary had stressed that noticing tiny things was key.)
A musician named Gary Griffin, the keyboard player for Jan and Dean—who were still, after all those years, out touring—read what I wrote about the diary, told Dean about it, and the band invited me to join them on the road. I flew with them to a show in Kansas City, we all got along quite well, they invited me to sing on one song, one thing led to another, and before long I’d bought a guitar and was joining them on a regular basis. They played everywhere from football stadiums to minor-league baseball parks to corporate conventions, and one night the tour took us to Minneapolis for an event in a hotel ballroom.
Jack and Janice were still living in Minnesota at the time, and I asked them if they’d like to come to the show. I introduced them to the band—to see Jack and Dean Torrence sitting around before the show having a beer and talking warmed me in a way I couldn’t have predicted. We’d cruised the streets of Bexley with Jan and Dean blasting out of our car radios, the world had grown more complicated over the years both for the famous singers and for the kids who used to listen to them, and somehow here we were. If Jack and Dan and I hadn’t gone to Lazarus that day, and if I’d bought some other record—if I hadn’t kept the diary—we would not be here this night. But all that did happen, long ago, and here were Jack Roth and Dean Torrence, absorbed in conversation together. Life, when you let it, can thrill you.
At the concert that night the audience was invited to dance in an area just below the stage. Most of the show was fast songs—we did a lot of Beach Boys music, “Little Deuce Coupe,” “I Get Around,” “Surfin’ U.S.A.”—but at one point Jan and Dean asked if the people in the crowd felt like slow-dancing.
They did. We went into “Surfer Girl,” which had helped to form the seamless soundtrack of our Ohio summer in 1963, and the couples in Minnesota took to the dance floor and I saw that Jack and Janice were among them.
We sang, and that beautiful Brian Wilson song was just as haunting and just as heartbreaking as it had been so many years before; it still had the power to put you right in a certain place and a certain time. I sang and I looked at Jack, gazing into Janice’s eyes as he held her…
And it was too much, I had to look away. It was too intimate—I don’t know exactly why, but from the stage I saw my oldest friend, adoring his wife, and here I was, helping to provide the music, and the loveliness of it was almost painful, I felt I was intruding on something I shouldn’t see. Onstage we sang: Little surfer, little one, made my heart come all undone…
Jack and Janice locked their eyes on each other, they were a man and wife deep into their married life, in love and holding on to each other and moving in slow circles on the dance floor, and I didn’t feel I had the right to be witnessing this, it all felt too close. I knew I wouldn’t be able to explain it to Jack—I knew I wouldn’t even want to try.
How did we get here? In the Minnesota night the best friend I ever had embraced his wife and danced slowly with her to the song I was singing, the song we all had danced to when we were so young. Do you love me, do you, surfer girl? we sang, and Janice leaned up to kiss Jack on the cheek, and how did we get here, how do such things come true?
“HELP ME CARRY SOME BOXES FROM THE car.”
Two days after our ice cream night at Johnson’s, Jack and I were at his house, and he was asking me to give him a hand bringing some things inside.
“This is your car?” I said.
“Yeah, of course,” he said. “Do you think I’m going to open the trunk of someone else’s car?”
It wasn’t that. It was that I had no idea what kind of car Jack drove. Even though I’d ridden in this one in the months since I’d been coming to see him, I couldn’t have picked the car out of an automotive lineup. It was just one of those cars that people buy or lease—one of dozens of kinds of cars that all look pretty much the same.
“Did you ever think it would be possible for us not to know what kind of cars each other drove?” I asked.
“Well, the answer’s easy with you,” he said.
I didn’t drive a car these days; living in the city, in Chicago, I’d decided many years before just to get in a cab if I had to go somewhere. Keeping a car in the city didn’t make any sense. Still, I meant the question I’d asked Jack.
“Think about it,” I said. “Could you have seen a day when I didn’t know what your car was?”
“Put it this way, it’s not a 409,” he said.
Meaning: Now that no one writes songs about cars—now that cars, in the main, are transportation and nothing more—why should anyone much care what anyone else is driving? Jan and Dean had been a big part of the legend making—Jan and Dean, and the Beach Boys, and the Rip Chords: all of them convincing us that fuel-injected Sting Rays and Three Window Coupes and 442s and Jags were the ticket to ultimate happiness, that buddy, gonna shut you down was the mantra of American manliness, and that anything that mattered in life was most likely going to take place, or at least begin, behind the wheel of your car. To quote from car-radio scripture: It happened on the strip where the road is wide.
“Was it Doug Dauber who had the 409?” Jack asked.
“He had one of those cars,” I said. “One of those car-song cars.”
“Can you believe guys used to ask other guys what they had under their hood?” Jack said.
“I think the safe answer, if you didn’t know or didn’t care, was ‘a three-twenty-seven,’” I said.
“Whatever that meant,” Jack said.
We started lugging the packages from the trunk of his car—whatever kind of car it was.
“I think I lost track of the cars you drove by the time you were in your thirties,” I said.
“You didn’t miss much,” he said, slamming the trunk.
THERE WAS ONE CAR RIDE THAT, IF IT HAD ended differently, would have meant that Jack and I would not be lugging boxes on this day.
One winter Saturday after we’d first gotten our drivers’ licenses, Jack, Dan, Chuck and I got into Pongi’s Chevy for a ride over to Dayton.
We’d just wanted to be somewhere else for the day. Jack knew a girl over there—her name was Joyce Burick—and we went to her house, then cruised around Dayton.
After dark, we started the drive back to Columbus. It began to snow, and then the snow picked up, and the road became covered with ice. This was before the interstate in that part of Ohio, this was a highway with no median island—the lanes of traffic came right at each other.
Pongi hit a patch of ice, and we started to swerve. He was fighting the steering wheel, pumping the brake, but nothing was working. We swerved once into the lane of oncoming traffic; Pongi wrestled the car back into our own lane. The next swerve was more severe. He was helpless to stop the skidding—we swerved four times into approaching traffic, each time more out of control than the one before, and it was only through grace and providence that each time we spun across the middle paint line there was no other car in position to slam into us.
After the fourth wild, wide skid across the lanes Pongi said “Here we go,” and we crashed through a guardrail and over a steep embankment. In the diary entry for that night, I wrote that I had been calm, but sad. I knew these were likely the last seconds I would be alive. I had not told my parents I was going out of town for the day.
The car bounced three times and finally came to rest in a ditch. We looked at each other; somehow we were all right. We climbed out of the car and into the blizzard.
Someone in a nearby house must have dialed the telephone operator; within ten minutes two ambulances, a police cruiser and a tow truck arrived. We stood in the snow; a news car from Channel 10 television in Columbus pulled up—the station evidently heard about the accident on the police radio scanner, and it must have sounded bad enough for them to have dispatched the cameraman.
It’s just a story for us now; just something we talk about from time to time. Because it turned out the way it did, we can do that. But one car barreling at full speed the other way through the snow at the wrong moment, one two- or three-second delay in Pongi grappling the steering wheel to the right or to the left to bring us back across the road, one different-vectored bounce when we went through the guardrail, a bounce that would have flipped the car onto its roof…
The combination of factors that, thirty years later, ended up bringing Jan and Dean, Jack and me together at a Twin Cities concert was one way—one sunny way—the fates can conspire to change lives. But there are other ways. Any shift in the factors of fate that night on the highway…
Jack and I, outside his house, stood with the boxes in our arms next to his car, and as bad as things were for him, as terrible as all of this was, there had been a chance that we never would have made it to here. That everything in our lives—everything good, everything bad—that had occurred between that night and this morning would simply never have taken place.
I don’t know if the others prayed when they got home that night. I did.
ALTHOUGH EVEN ON A NIGHT LIKE THAT—when you are young—there are reminders of unsuppressed joy.
The Channel 10 cameraman? The one who showed up in the snowstorm?
As soon as we saw him we knew that although we were alive, we now faced a different problem. If our parents turned on the eleven o’clock news and saw us next to Pongi’s crashed car…
Dan sprang into action. I have no idea how he knew to do it.
When the cameraman started filming, Dan stepped right in front of his lens—and held up his middle finger.
The cameraman tried to shoot pictures of the car, and of us, tried to shoot pictures of the police officers checking out the scene.
But Dan was dogged. Everywhere the cameraman moved, Dan moved. Every direction the lens pointed, in front of it was Dan’s finger. I don’t think there was a single exposed frame of film that night that didn’t have, as its main element, Dan giving the lens the finger.
He knew that Channel 10 would never put on the air a piece of film showing a kid giving the finger. It was a sagacious decision, and one Dan made on the spur of the moment; in that era, there was no way the film was going to be broadcast. (Today, a cameraman would not only find a place to air such film footage, he’d probably pitch it as the pilot for a reality series. Dan would be a star on MTV.)
That night, for us, there would be no TV appearance; Dan had saved us from our parents’ wrath. The cameraman finally muttered something and got back into his car and drove away; the tow truck pulled Pongi’s car from the ditch and he managed to drive at a crawl back to Bexley.
In one night: the most fearful of possibilities, and laughter that was a mixture both of relief and of the dawning recognition that in Dan there was some nontextbook variety of raw genius. Pongi had to tell his parents, but ours never found out. Dan had made sure of that. We asked him how he’d thought of it. He’d said: “You guys were just standing there. Someone had to do something.”
NOT THAT SUCH AN INSTINCT NEVER REAPPEARED.
One November when all of us were in our early fifties, and my mother was in the hospital in Columbus and I was spending time there, I was supposed to do a live television commentary late at night for a national cable newscast. Hospital visiting hours had ended, and I had no convenient way to get to the local television station that had agreed to provide the remote facilities.
So Jack and Pongi said they’d take me up there. The station, it turned out, was Channel 10—the same station whose camera crew, more than thirty-five years earlier, had showed up at the guardrail scene.
We arrived at the studios—I was doing the remote from one of the Channel 10 news sets, the national cable show was paying them to provide the cameras and the set and the technical personnel—and Jack and Pongi and I walked back to the area that had been set up. I put the earpiece in and fastened the microphone to my tie and sat in the chair facing the camera.
Off in another part of the room, some Ohio State football coaches were taping a preview show for that Saturday’s game. Jack and Pongi recognized the coaches, and the sportscaster who was interviewing them, and watched intently. I could tell that this was sort of exotic territory for them.
Then the time arrived for my commentary to go up on the satellite—it was one of those setups where the anchors in the distant city asked me questions and I provided unscripted news analysis. I was hearing the anchors but could not see them; there was no monitor beneath the camera.
What I did see out of the corner of my eye was Jack and Pongi, staring silently at me. I didn’t break eye contact with the lens, but even as I was talking I was thinking: What a stupid skill to have. Speaking to a glass lens as if it were a person. A lot of the time, I was more at ease doing that than talking to people face-to-face. It was just something I had developed over the years: a preference for this kind of communication, through a faceless lens or through a keyboard beneath my fingers—a preference for that over the kind of communication human beings are supposed to be best at.
There were exceptions, however, and Jack and Pongi were among them. The people with whom I never felt even a twinge of unease were the same people with whom I’d first spent so many days and nights, and even though my words on this night were about some news item that undoubtedly was being presented as overweeningly consequential, the news item would be forgotten within a week. I knew it even as I talked.
And to the left of the camera, in folding chairs, were Jack and Pongi; I saw them for the entirety of the commentary, although I don’t think they knew it, and all I wanted to do, for their benefit and amusement, was what Dan had done to the Channel 10 camera on the highway all those years before.
I knew they’d love it; I knew they would fall off the chairs. If I’d flashed my middle finger at the camera they would have gotten the significance right away, it would have been far more real a moment than whatever alleged insights I was providing about the story in the news. It was another of those How did we get here? instants—it seemed that we were at the guardrail in the snow one minute, and then suddenly we were here, and what happened to all the years in between?—and as I spoke to the flat and impassive lens, spoke with more emotion and animation than I would to a person, I wanted to do to the lens what Dan had done to the lens. But of course that would have been suicide; the people on the other end would not have understood, nor should they have, and of course I didn’t do it. Making Jack and Pongi laugh would not have been worth it.
Maybe.
EVEN WITH JACK, THOUGH, SOME THINGS were difficult for me to say.
We were at his house the same day we’d unloaded his car trunk. There was an underlay of unreality that was building in these months; we each knew how the story was going to end, there wasn’t much doubt about it by this point, yet to dwell on it was something neither of us wanted. So much was going unspoken, by our own choice.
We went out back, to the alley behind his garage, and a garbage can—apparently it had been left in the alley early that morning for city sanitation crews to dump—was there. Although the contents had by now been poured out, it was still dirty inside—it was a garbage can, after all.
Jack walked over to take a look at it and then called, “Greene, do me a favor.”
I joined him and he said, “Carry this garbage can back to my garage.”
I’m not a guy—how should I say this?—who has a history of being overly devoted to the idea of doing chores. It had been a running joke with Jack and me for years. I’m not the most helpful person around the house—any house.
Those friends of Jack’s who had worked in his basement to put up the shelves? Think of the opposite of those guys. Jack, in his whole life, would never have asked me to take a garbage can anywhere. It wouldn’t have occurred to him.
But he was asking me now. And we both knew why.
The chemotherapy had lowered his resistance dramatically. He was susceptible to all kinds of infections. The last thing he needed was to put his hands anywhere near a garbage can.
He knew it and I knew it.
And neither of us said a word about it. At least not a serious word.
I carried the garbage can to the garage and then shot a look in Jack’s direction. It was a look you would give to someone who had just requested that you climb Mount Everest twice in a row.
He broke into a grin.
“I know you didn’t want to do it, but it may have saved my life,” he said.
“That’s all very nice, but it ruined my day,” I said.
We stood in his driveway, looking at each other, holding on to the moment.
HE’D HEARD SOMETHING.
It was while I had been back in Chicago, he said; someone told him about it.
“They finished fixing the track,” he said. “As soon as I heard, I went over and looked.”
And…
“My heart skipped,” he said.
Not the way your heart skips when it is filled with new romance; not the way your heart skips when you’re startled.
“Remember those dirty black cinders the track was made of when we were kids?” he said. “If you fell down you’d get those things stuck in your knees. I don’t even want to think about where they got the cinders.”
We’d walked the track many times since I’d been coming to see him these months, but apparently there still had been some final work to do, and now it was ready.
For the future.
That, he told me, is why his heart had skipped.
He wasn’t going to be around for it.
Everything had sunk in when he realized that. The city had gotten the track ready for the future—like all renovation projects, that was the goal. The new track was meant to be useful and pleasing for new generations of the people in the town, starting right now.
And he wasn’t going to be one of them.
HE DIDN’T FEEL WELL ENOUGH TO GO FOR a long walk and his stamina was low, but he asked me if I would go look at the track with him this one time.
So we walked there, and we stood on the track, and he talked some more about the filthy cinders on which we once ran.
“They probably were a health hazard, but you have to keep in mind, that was the era of blood brothers,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Don’t you remember—little kids would prick their fingers, and hold their fingertips together at the cut parts, so their blood would mix?” he said. “That was how they showed their friendship. By becoming blood brothers.”
“That’s one you don’t hear about these days,” I said.
“If a kid came home now and told his parents he’d become blood brothers, the parents would probably call the National Institutes of Health,” Jack said.
“If not the National Guard,” I said.
He took a long look around. “Let’s go see if that water fountain is still there,” he said.
It had been this crummy ceramic thing—hard and white and discolored by rust stains, bolted to a brick wall near the side of the football grandstand. The stream of water that came from its scratched metal spigot was always weak but surprisingly cold. You had to really work to turn the handle; you thought if you twisted hard enough you could make the water arc a little higher, so that you wouldn’t have to lean so low to drink. But the parabola of water perpetually stayed the same, too close for comfort to the ceramic base.
“It felt like spring,” I said. “I don’t know why. I think of spring when I think of that fountain.”
“I know why,” Jack said. “We’d always go drink from it when we were little and we would be watching the high school baseball games after school. The varsity diamond used to be there—the fountain would be behind the right fielder.”
At those baseball games we wouldn’t wear jackets, because it was March or April and the sun was brilliant in the sky. We were seven or eight, and we’d watch the high school varsity, and we’d constantly be running out to that cruddy little fountain. When the sun would start to go down, we’d get chilly—the earlier warmth had been a tease, and we would shiver in the late innings.
But we’d never learn our lesson; next game, we’d be back without our jackets again, running together to the fountain again, sure that one spring day the sun would set and we’d still be warm enough. And one spring day we would be right. The warmth would last.
We walked toward where the fountain had been, and without saying a word to me Jack did something.
He dropped to one knee next to the football field. And he touched the grass.
He let his hand rest on top of it for two or three seconds. Then, without explaining, he stood.
I knew we’d never be coming back.
BEFORE GOING HOME WE STOPPED AT THE ABCDJ brick, and at Audie Murphy Hill.
This was the trip to the hill when he said it was too steep to climb. When—as when he was a boy—the gentle little rise of grass looked, through his eyes, to be too much.