We’ve been getting together at an Indian restaurant near my house at the beginning of every season; our quarterly dinners, I called them. But these days life has gotten too hectic even for that, so now it’s more like twice a year, summer and winter. A bunch of us from high school – we played in bands together – and some of the girls we knew. “Girls” – women now, with grown children, one an attorney, another a composer, a few others. I still call them “girls,” because they were girls then. And we were boys.
First I call Bob, to see if he’ll be available, because he tours with a classic rock cover band sometimes, and when he’s not touring he’s got gigs playing guitar at country-western bars around town or recording. The rest of us work day jobs; one at a bank office, a few teachers, a salesman, a computer animator, a farm owner and some others. Bob and I pick a night when he’s in town and free, then I e-mail everyone and most show up. About six of us. Sometimes eight or nine. It’s pretty fun.
It started after Barry’s funeral. Barry was a prop master on Hollywood movies. I’d seen him ten years before he died, when I was walking down a street in Venice. A booming voice called my name from the shadows inside a huge trailer. I instantly knew it was him, even before I saw him as he stepped out into the sun. He was a huge guy, maybe six-foot-five and at least 250 pounds, with a helmet of black hair and wire-frame glasses. I’d last seen him when we were 18, he had terrible health problems, but he hadn’t changed in fifteen years.
“Hey, watcha workin’ on?” I asked, stepping in to have a look at his trailer. It was filled with monster masks, fake guns, holsters for them, sports equipment, hats – a rolling house full of odds and ends that someone might need for a movie.
“A Christian Slater bang-bang,” he said. It was called “Kuffs” and it still shows on cable sometimes.
A few years out of high school, Barry shot up heroin with a few of his friends at someone’s apartment one night. They shared the needle. Within weeks, he got a staph infection that landed in his heart and ate up one of the valves. He had to have it replaced with a pig’s valve, and suffered from bad circulation for the rest of his life; toward the end he was traveling to film shoots wheeling the stand for his I.V. bag. He died at 43. He always claimed it had nothing to do with the heroin and the shared needle. None of us believed him.
Mike called to tell me about the funeral, and I called Fred and some of the others. When I told Fred about the funeral, he reminded me that B. wasn’t just a big goofy guy. Barry was deep. Fred remembered seeing Barry in front of high school one morning wearing a black armband. He asked him what it was for.
“Kent State,” Barry said. It was the anniversary of the day the National Guard shot and killed four students protesting the Vietnam War. Four students Barry didn’t know, and who had died years before and many miles away. But he cared. Fred and I cared, too. A lot of people cared. But Barry cared enough to wear a black armband.
Mike and Barry had been friends most of their lives. Mike remembered the first time he saw Barry, washing his hands in the bathroom of their elementary school. Barry was huge even then, twice the size of the other kids, and he was wearing his Cub Scout uniform. They were in second grade.
Later, teenagers, they got arrested at Disneyland while they were on acid. The official charge was “being minors in danger of leading an idle and dissolute life.” I didn’t know that was a crime. In any case, it’s obviously a law that’s selectively enforced. They spent the night in a cell at the Orange County Jail with two other friends, Scott and Jeff. Barry had punched a Disneyland employee in the face when they argued about a magazine the worker thought he was stealing from a shop – he wasn’t, he just didn’t realize he had it in his hand. Mike had to ask passersby to call for an ambulance while he and Jeff were walking through the parking lot to their car, because Jeff was turning blue and said he thought he was going to die. Mike describes their trip this way: Picture an M.C. Escher drawing, animated, backwards and upside down.
Mike and I and a few of our other friends from the old days all went to Barry’s memorial service. I didn’t go to Barry’s parents’ place afterward, though, but most everyone else did. Mike called me later that night.
“I felt so guilty!” he said. “It was Barry’s funeral, and I was having the best time I’ve had in months – maybe years – because I got to see everybody again!”
Fuck that, I said, not angry at Mike, but at life, at myself, for not picking up the phone and inviting my friends to dinner every now and then. “We’re not going to get together just for funerals anymore,” I promised. So I started setting up the quarterly dinners, which are now semi-annual dinners. But at least it’s not just funerals.
We’re all impressed with and grateful for each other’s attendance at the dinners. It’s built up to where most of the people we used to hang out with in the old days come every time.
Most of the people. Not all.
The name that comes up at just about every dinner is John’s. “Why isn’t John here?” someone will ask. “Have you called him?”
John. We all shake our heads and laugh a little. I call him every time. I spoke to him once. Since then, he doesn’t pick up so I just leave a message. On his answering machine, you can hear him play the guitar chords for “Tequila” and whistle the melody. Then he growls: “TEQUILA!” Then you hear the tone. I leave a message, telling him when and where we’ll be meeting for dinner.
But he doesn’t return my calls and he never comes.
---
We were all in high school music history class together. John was a tall guy with braces, shaggy hair and granny glasses. We got to talking about music and he brought his guitar up to my house one day and taught me how to play a song called “Mister Moonshine” on my Vox organ, and he sang and played guitar. We had a pretty good time. Then we drove down to have coffee at a doughnut place where L. worked. She was a blond pianist in our class and he was in love with her. John didn’t know that I was, too, but he realized something was up while we were with her. On the way home, he started yelling at me.
“I’ve finally found a girl I like, one who can talk about music, and I’ve got to compete with you for her! That’s so fucked! My life is so fucked! That figures! My life is so fucked!”
“John, I swear, I’m not getting anywhere with her. She’s not interested in me. I’ve tried in a dozen ways to let her know, to ask her out without it being like a ‘date,’ you know, just a concert together or something where we could meet, but nothing. All clear for you, big guy. She’s all yours if you can get her. Go for it! Don’t worry about me! I’ll be happy for you if it works out!”
That calmed him down. Whew. I was worried there for a few seconds.
Mike had told me John could be intense.
They had stayed up late one night smoking pot and watching TV. A commercial came on, showing a lot of numbers, orange, blue, yellow numbers, floating on a white background.
“Wow,” Mike said. “Numbers.”
“They’re so fucked,” John said. “I hate ’em.”
“They don’t lie.”
“YOU REALLY BELIEVE THAT, DON’T YOU!” John snapped at him.
John didn’t get anywhere with L.
“I don’t really want a girlfriend,” he told me. “I just want the lower half of one. Just the legs. Just to fuck.”
“That’s all you want to do with a girl? Really?”
“No.” He thought for a second. “I’d take her riding on the back of my motorcycle.”
“Do you have a motorcycle, John?”
“No, but if I had a girlfriend like that, I’d get one!”
John and I took a humanities class together that summer. The teacher was pretty hip, for an old guy. Mr. Rifkind. He had us build our own instruments from kits you could order. John and I both did kalimbas – African finger pianos. John’s came out nicely, mine was awful. Two girls who lived on his street were in the class, too. They flirted with me, but I wasn’t interested. So when they’d see John outside his house, they’d shout to him: “How’s your gay friend?”
After a couple of times, he got tired of it, so he shouted back:
“Just because he doesn’t want to fuck your fat ass doesn’t make him gay.”
That took care of that.
Two actors came to our school and performed Ionesco’s “The Lesson” in the auditorium.
“What did you think?” I asked John as we left.
“What did you think?”
“I liked how the dynamics changed as the play went on. The student was submissive at the beginning, then became more and more confident, until she was a threat to the teacher and he had to kill her.”
“Yeah, well,” John said.
“Well what?”
“You know, if you’re going to do an Ionesco play, then you have to do an Ionesco play. It was too timid. It wasn’t crazy.”
I had glossed over the surface; John distilled the essence.
I went up to Don’s house one afternoon a couple of months later. John was on acid. He was sitting in a chair and looking at an art book. I sat on a couch near him and started talking to Don’s girlfriend, Jenny. Suddenly something hit me in the chest.
“Time for Miro!” John shouted. He had thrown the book at me. It was a pretty heavy book.
“John! That hurt!”
“I’m sorry!” he said with a big smile.
I saw him again a few months later when I started college. He was walking down the promenade. He had shaved his head. I called out to him.
“New hairstyle, huh?”
“I don’t want to do art anymore,” he said. “I want to be art. I’m interested in extreme art. Have you seen photorealism?” He pulled a book out of his backpack to show me. It was the first time I’d seen photorealism. “And I want to do art that most people wouldn’t think is art.” He also had a book of photographs by William Wegman, that guy who posed his Weimaraners in odd positions and costumes and took pictures of them. It was the first time I’d seen Wegman’s dogs, too. I thought they were really funny. I don’t think they’re funny anymore, though.
Mike and I put a band together, we covered some jazzy rock songs by Jeff Beck and Steely Dan. Rick asked us to play a party at his house one night when his parents were out of town, but our bass player – Barry’s younger brother, who now plays double-bass for an orchestra in Amsterdam – couldn’t make it, so we asked John to sub. Hundreds of kids flooded Rick’s cul-de-sac as the party got started. We played for about an hour, then the cops came to break up the crowd. John took a legs-spread stance, dropped his bass onto his thigh and thundered away on it as if he were a rock star in an arena. A cop walked over to his amp and unplugged it. John laughed.
John lived next door to Hank, who was a few years older than we were. He was finishing law school. John’s father, a rocket scientist, was having an affair with Hank’s mom, a secretary at the defense contractor where they both worked. John and Hank would follow the unfaithful couple to the parking lot of the missile company and watch them make out like lovestruck teenagers. Both families broke up.
I was naïve. I didn’t know what a divorce could do to people. I thought it would just be traumatic for little kids. But the day Hank went to take the Bar exam, he couldn’t write. He just froze. Then he couldn’t speak. I don’t know what ever became of Hank. That was about the time I left L.A. I was going to ride my bike across Europe for eight months, stopping to work at restaurants or hotels or harvests every now and then, but I found a job in London, stayed there for a year, then traveled some more, then studied in France and got a job there.
I had to come back to L.A. to get my student visa for France. That’s when Mike and Jenny told me what had happened to John after I’d left. He had been sent to Camarillo State Mental Hospital. They let him out after his three-day evaluation, though. Doing fine, they told me at the time.
I had a friend, Tony, who was about 10 years older than I was, I met him when we worked together at a porno theater, he became my mentor in literature, movies and music, he turned me on to Nathanael West and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and a lot of other writers, filmmakers and jazz musicians. He knew most of my crowd because they had worked at the theater before I did. He agreed that John was obviously the smartest of all of us. I guess it made sense, then, that John would be the one to get thrown in the psych ward. Even if it was just for three days. That’s how it goes: I think it’s toughest for the smartest, the ones who can grasp things the rest of us don’t.
I was in Europe for about eight years. Then I moved back and I stayed at Mike’s house for a while. John dropped by. He was on his annual pilgrimage to the old neighborhood, to visit Terry’s parents. Terry was a friend of his from high school, another tall guy, sharp dresser, though, styled hair. Terry disappeared one day. Gone. Picked up hitchhiking and killed? Or did he just run away and assume a new identity? No way to know. Truly bizarre.
John’s mom had bought some apartment complexes by the beach with the money she got after the divorce. John was living in one of the units. He would put on his wet suit and take his boogie board out to the surf every day to ride a few waves. He could do that most days because he worked odd hours as a directory assistance operator. Classic case: He was too smart to do anything besides a mindless drone job. Probably too intense, too.
I hadn’t seen him in eight years.
“So I hear you did some time in Camarillo,” I asked. “Like Charlie Parker, huh?”
I wondered if he would get mad at me; I hoped he didn’t think I was making fun of him. But he was proud of his experience. He explained what happened:
At the time of his parents’ divorce, he was – unsurprisingly – not ready to move out on his own and was severely stressed out about it. He went for counseling at a county mental health center. That’s where the trouble began.
He lit a cigarette in the waiting room. There was no ashtray. He asked the receptionist for one. She ignored him. He pulled a Kleenex from a box that was on the table next to the old magazines, cupped his hand and ashed his cigarette in the tissue.
It caught on fire.
He threw it on the ground and stomped it out. The receptionist saw him and told the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist brought him into his office.
“How long have you been starting fires?” the psychiatrist asked him. “Do you start fires often? Is that how you deal with stress?”
John laughed and tried to explain that it was just a little accident with a Kleenex and his cigarette. But he saw that the psychiatrist had written “PATIENT STARTED FIRE IN WAITING ROOM; THEN PATIENT LAUGHED” on his notes. He realized he was in trouble.
The psychiatrist told him to report for a 72-hour evaluation at Camarillo the next morning or there would be a warrant issued for his arrest.
After he checked in at Camarillo, he walked down the hallway where a 300-pound woman was singing opera.
“May I have this dance?” John asked her. She was delighted. They danced down the hall while she sang.
“I did it,” he told me. “I can honestly say I waltzed down the hall of Camarillo with a 300-pound crazy woman while she sang opera,” he said, smiling widely and nodding. John’s bragging rights.
“What else happened there?”
“Well, there was this really cute girl who came up to me later and said, ‘Hey, see that wall out there on the other side of the field? Meet me there later, right after dark.’ Then she walked away. So I thought: All right! This is great! I danced with the crazy opera-singing fat lady and now I’m even going to get laid!”
“Did you?”
“Right after that a guy came up to me and asked what she said to me. I told him and he said I shouldn’t go. ‘Why not?’ I asked him. ‘You don’t want to know,’ he said.”
“So you didn’t?”
“No. That was pretty scary. Would you have gone?”
“I guess not,” I had to admit.
The doctors there quickly realized he was perfectly sane, or at least not insane enough to commit to the mental hospital, so he got out after his three days.
They closed the hospital. It’s a college campus now. California State University Channel Islands. Or C-Sushi, for short. These days, the mentally ill live on the streets or get taken to jail.
The year after he told me the story of his stay in Camarillo, John stopped at Mike’s house again on his way home from his visit to Terry’s parents. He pulled a washtub bass out of his car trunk, set it up on the driveway and played it for Mike, singing an old hillbilly lament, really loud. Mike loved it.
Years went by. Time passes.
John called Mike, told him he was on antidepressants and was really happy as a result, really feeling good. He played him some Stones licks over the phone and asked for Bob’s number: He wanted to tell Bob that he was proud of him for having made it as a professional musician. He said he’d seen Bob with a guitar case outside a recording studio in North Hollywood. Mike didn’t have Bob’s number so he called me to get it; I didn’t have it either, so I called Fred. Fred gave it to me, and called Bob to tell him that John would be calling and why.
Bob was baffled. He hadn’t been to North Hollywood anytime recently. John must’ve imagined it, he said. Then he realized something:
“I’ve been astral projecting,” Bob told Fred. “Maybe John was astral projecting, too, and he saw me on the other plane!”
As it turned out, John was astral projecting, too. I was surprised to learn I had two friends who were astral projecting. Not too surprised, though.
But John didn’t think he’d seen Bob on the other plane. In fact, he remembered distinctly seeing Bob on this plane, in North Hollywood. When they chatted on the phone, they compared notes and realized the discrepancy was related to time, not space.
“That was years ago,” Bob told Fred, somewhat puzzled, the next time they spoke.
“But John described it as if it had happened the day before,” Mike said to me later.
“A misunderstanding,” I said. “Or maybe they really did meet on the next plane.”
John called Mike every now and then; he’d play some guitar on Mike’s answering machine. Mike would call him back and play some guitar on John’s machine. Musical messages.
More years went by; time kept passing.
My friend Mark’s wife Nikki died of bone cancer that spread through her body. Tony died of a brain tumor. A girl named Karin I used to work with got married, moved to a Caribbean island with her husband, had a baby and then drowned in a current at the beach one day. With Tony gone, Mark had become my closest friend. He took too many sleeping pills with his gin and tonic one night and never woke up. That all happened in less than two years. I call them the hell years.
Then Barry died and the rest of us started getting together for those dinners. Another one of “the girls,” Betsy, came once or twice. She was a friend of John’s sister, Sylvia. Betsy works in the building across the street from where I work and we have lunch together every now and then. So that’s how I found out what was going on with John, and that’s how I got his phone number again.
John’s mother died. John, Sylvia and their brother Pete inherited her property, including the apartment where John lived. Sylvia was having an attorney liquidate the assets so they could divide the money three ways. But that meant selling the complex where he lived, so John wasn’t happy. Betsy told me he threatened Sylvia and he threatened her attorney. Meanwhile, he got in a huge battle with his bosses at work. As a result of an e-mail of his complaints that he sent to the entire corporate directory, he was placed on stress leave.
Sylvia’s attorney arranged the sale of the apartment complex in a way that allowed John to remain as a tenant. Sylvia, John and Pete got a lot of money. Not millions and millions, but an amount that would allow most of us to live comfortably the rest of our lives.
I called John to invite him to one of our dinners. When he called me back, he asked me to help him find a writer to document his battle with Sprint. His plan was to turn his story into a book and call it “Working for Sprint Drove Me Completely INSANE!” He would self-publish it and then advertise it in the New York Times. Hey, he had enough money, he said, so why not? He told me he would pay a good freelancer a generous sum.
“John, write it yourself,” I told him. “I’ll edit it. You can pay me a little to edit it.”
“I’m not a writer,” he said.
“Doesn’t matter. Just get it down on paper. I’ll help you turn it into a book. Just gimme something to start with.”
“Hmmmmm.” He thought for a second. “Yes! GONZO! I will tank up on coffee and JAM! Stream of consciousness! … Like Jack Kerouac! I’ll get a legal pad, drink lots of coffee and stay up all night!”
“Exactly! Meanwhile, come to the dinner next week. We all want to see you. Your name comes up almost every time. We all love you. Someone asks every time: Where’s John?”
I had heard John was something of an agoraphobic. I suspected that’s why he wasn’t coming. He confirmed it.
“I get anxious when I go out, and I just know how I’ll feel while I’m driving out to see you guys. I’ll be worried about what you think of me.”
“John, I promise: Unconditional love. I promise. No need to worry what we think of you.”
“There’s a great taco stand by my place, though. I guarantee the best carne asadas you’ve ever eaten! You should come by anyway. This friend of mine has set up his Swedish bells in my apartment and we’re recording with them!”
Like all those years before, I thought to myself, when I first got to know John, playing “Mr. Moonshine” in my room and then going to the doughnut shop to visit the girl we were both in love with.
I practically begged him to come out my way, because getting us all together in his neighborhood would mean too much of a drive for some people in the group. I guess he just couldn’t. That’s the last time we spoke. I’ve left a couple of messages since then, but I haven’t heard back from him.
John’s brother Pete was a heroin addict. If you know about heroin addicts you will have already guessed what happened as a result of the windfall that followed his mother’s passing. He bought more heroin that he’d been able to buy before, shot up more than he’d ever shot up before and died of an overdose. That happened within weeks of his getting all that money.
I think of the English translation of a Jacques Brel song: “Death waits to allow my friends a few good times before it ends.” But then ….
---
This time we decide to meet at a Japanese restaurant instead of the Indian place. My friends and I all click our cups of hot sake. “To John,” I say. “And the passing time.”
We split the check, say goodnight and I make the short drive home. I get in bed, I close my eyes and float up slowly, slowly, then out the window. It’s the night of the Perseids, and I am heading northeast, toward the shooting stars. I glide over the city lights twinkling below and I see John in the distance, sailing toward me. When he’s close enough for me to hear him, he whistles the melody of “Tequila.” I call back to him: “TEQUILA!” Then we float off in opposite directions. I look over my shoulder and I see him fade into the dark night sky.
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