After Visiting Friends (12 page)

After my father dies, Lorraine and Clarence are two of the few
who step in to help us. We start to spend a lot of time at their house. My mother
and Lorraine have been friends since they were thirteen. A Polish girl and a Czech
girl on the Southwest Side. They meet at Gage Park High School. They get married a
year apart. Clarence once referred to my mother and Lorraine as “the Gage Park virgins.”
I remember thinking at the time that it was right and funny. But if he had said the
opposite, then what would I have felt?

Lorraine and Clarence have three kids about my brother’s and my ages. Fourth of July,
when I’m ten, they have a cookout and when night falls we launch bottle rockets toward
the thin creek that snakes behind their house. Later, Clarence breaks out Roman candles.
A sloshing rocks glass of bourbon in one hand, cigarette in the other, he weaves through
the yard, setting fireworks ablaze. Suddenly, there’s a flash. The bourbon on his
hand has caught fire. For a moment, Clarence stands still, considering his hand as
though it is not attached to his body. He is quiet. Until all at once he swings his
arm aloft and says, “I’m the Statue of Liberty. Happy Fourth! Wait! Get the marshmallows!”
Then he laughs one of those cigarette-hack laughs that starts as a laugh and becomes
a cough and then he buries his hand in the washtub full of icy cans of Old Style.
His hand hissing, like a torch in the rain.

The night my mother marries Paul, we have dinner at the hotel, then go to the hotel’s
bar, Cricket’s. And if I remember anything about that night, it’s not what my mother
wore or my feelings that she was remarrying and closing the door for real on my father,
on being a widow, on being defined by his name or anything. No, it’s Clarence and
me at the end of the bar, drinking. Him, martini on the rocks. Me, twenty-four and
trying to imitate what I think Chicago reporters do—I am just starting as a stringer
for the
Tribune
—and I’m drinking Scotch on the rocks.

And by now, Clarence and I have had a few, and he leans in to me, breath all sweet
with vodka and says, “I never got over your old man dying. He and I?
Sssshhhhhhhit.
 . . . ”

He waves his hand across his face, past his eyes, and then, for a moment, stares at
nothing I can see.

He says, “I remember the night your brother was born. Your old man, throwing pebbles
at my bedroom window. I look out and there he is. Crazy guy had driven across half
the city in the middle of the night. ‘Hey!’ he says. ‘I’m a father!’ And he used to . . .
He used to . . . He had on that raincoat. He had this raincoat. Wore it everywhere.
Like he thought he was Bogart or Murrow. Sometimes we’d meet downtown, after work,
go drinking. He’d take me to those newspaper bars and never take that coat off. I
said, ‘Hey. What’re you? A flasher?’ ”

We laugh.

He takes a gulp of his martini.

“But I’ll tell you . . . something. I’ll tell you something. Something I’ve never
told anyone. Not then. Not since. Not my wife. No one. I never forgave him for dying.
Never. He and me? . . . He and me? . . . You know, every Sunday I go to church with
my wife. With my kids. And I walk in and drop to my knees on that crummy kneeler and
pray. And I don’t pray for my wife. I don’t pray for my kids. I don’t pray for me.
I pray for your old man.”

He stops.

I listen.

I can see a tear in the corner of his eye. Then I hear a clutch in his throat. But
I do what I learned to do from old Westerns, what a man does for another man when
that man’s falling apart. You pretend you don’t see it. Give a man that courtesy,
pardner. I keep my eyes straight ahead, at a point somewhere over the bar.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think of your old man.”

He pauses.

“He was the best friend I ever had, and then he was gone. And it’s not right.”

He raises up the remains of his watery martini and looks at me and says, “Your old
man.”

I raise the remains of my watery Scotch. Clarence knocks it. We drain our glasses,
put them on the bar.

Glass on wood, the only punctuation.

And in that moment I think, I want to be that man. The dead man. I envy him. I want
his power. The power, years later, that you have over someone. Still. Your absence
is greater than your presence. Presence is fleeting. Presence is easy. But absence?
That’s eternal. The great constant.

Absence is everything.

STORMY

I telephone the other guy my mother gave me, Jim Strong.

“He and Dad went way back,” she says. “We all did.”

They all worked together at the
Tribune
. Strong met his wife there, too.

“The
Trib
was like a marriage factory,” my mother tells me.

“Sure, I remember you,” Strong says when I call. “And call me Stormy. How’s your mother?”

“Fine,” I say, and I tell him why I’m calling.

He says, “I miss your dad.” He tells me about being at the
Trib
with him, on the Neighborhood News desk—what they call Metro now. Stormy laughs loud
and talks loud and has a thick Chicago accent. Long, nasal
a
’s and
o
’s. Newspaper becomes
noose
-pay-per.

When I think he’s comfortable, I ask what he knows about that night. “Maybe you were
there,” I say. “With him?”

He says, “Where was your dad, again?”

I tell him.

“Phil Cooper lived up there. But he’s dead. Bob mighta gone there with some of the
old Boul Mich gang. That was the
Trib
bar. That’s where I was when I heard the news. I was covering a Teamsters strike
that night. But you know, I kept a diary. Lemme dig it out.”

A day later he calls and says that the only entry he has is about the funeral.

“I was a pallbearer. I got a list here. Cooper, dead. Bob Morris, dead. Freddy Farrar,
dead. Armstrong, dead. Jesus, we ain’t doing too good here, huh!” He laughs.

“So nothing about that night?”

“Nah. Guess I was remembering wrong.”

#

I have a hope that face-to-face, Stormy will open up. I want to look in his eyes.
Then I’ll be able to tell.

We make a plan to meet for lunch at Riccardo’s, a joint halfway between the
Sun-Times
and the
Tribune
.

“It’s where the old Radio Grill was,” he writes in an e-mail. “We did many a night
there.”

I take the El from my mother’s house and walk north from the Loop, toward the Wabash
Avenue Bridge.

As a kid, I loved the Wabash Avenue Bridge for one reason: It was in the opening credits
of
The Bob Newhart Show
. I always felt a secret pride when, for a split second, I could see the
Sun-Times/Daily News
building, hunkered down on the bank of the backward-flowing Chicago River, looking
like a giant barge waiting to head downriver, its yellow sign shining out in the gray
gloom of long Chicago winters.

CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

CHICAGO DAILY NEWS

Not like the Tribune Tower. All peacocky.

But as I cross the bridge now, the
Sun-Times
building is gone.

I see men toiling in an ever-deepening black hole. Men and machines labor to drive
pylons into the heavy wet clay and try to
not be swallowed alive. I watch the clumps of earth being dug and dumped and piled
and I want to take a piece of this ground. I want to climb the cyclone fence that
rings the site. I want a shovel. I want to dig.

#

My brother and I are with our father, walking through the
Sun-Times
newsroom. His day off. My brother and I—excited, proud. The old men in the newsroom
shake our hands. My dad takes us down to the press room, where screaming metal machines
slathered in ink and oil and grease transform enormous rolls of paper into news. An
old man with thick glasses and hands stained black as crows squats down before my
brother and me and magics two sheets of hot-off-the-presses newspaper into hats that
he pops atop our happy heads. Our hats the shape of small lifeboats.

#

I look at the hole again. In that distant corner—is that where it happened?

Men dig.

In front of me, a sign.
TRUMP INTERNATIONAL HOTEL AND TOWER CONDOMINIUMS
. There’s a number—FOR THOSE SEEKING INFORMATION ABOUT THIS SITE.

#

Stormy tells me to meet him at 11:30 a.m., and when I walk in, he’s already at the
bar. Place is empty. But there’s a rocks glass in front of him. Cubes of ice. Half-drained
brown booze.

“Jeez, you look just like your old man.”

I still take pride in that. Pride that I’m keeping his memory alive.

I grab the stool next to Stormy.

“Drinking?” he says.

He jabs his thick index finger into the bar, like he expects to conjure a drink from
the worn-out bar top.

I don’t want to drink but I feel compelled to match Stormy. Maybe this is how they
drank. And I don’t want to do anything that won’t align the spirits. Isn’t that what
I’m hoping? That somehow I’ll channel Stormy back forty years and he’ll talk to me
not as me but as him—my father? I ask what he’s drinking.

“Same thing your dad did. Same thing we all did. J&B, rocks.”

I’ve never had Scotch in the morning. I order one.

We knock tumblers. I hold his eyes.

Stormy grins and breaks the gaze.

“See my picture?”

He points to the far wall. Black-and-white photos of old Chicago newspapermen rim
the room. One is of him. A slimmer version.

“Was there a ceremony when you went up?”

“Nah. Budja realize I’m right above the door to the can?”

Stormy looks like an aging baseball manager. A happy freckly face from years in the
sun, square and plump and reddish.

“How’s your mom?”

“Good,” I say.

“Didja know she was the queen of the Maidenform Mafia?”

“What was that?”

“There were a group of gals in the newsroom that all wore tight sweaters and pointy
bras. Your mom was one. Your mom was the most gorgeous girl in the newsroom. All the
other women wanted to be her.”

He lifts his glass again and we laugh, and I ask him if he came to Riccardo’s a lot.

He says, “Whatcha gotta understand is every paper had its own bar. But everybody went
to Radio Grill. You could get a great martini for seventy-five cents and beers for
a quarter. There was a bartender there, Frank Morgner. Had a peg leg. But they tore
that place down. I don’t want you to think your dad was a dipso or something. We all
drank. And we did it hard. But you know, your dad was a great guy. He wasn’t like
your uncle. A lotta reporters at the
Trib
thought Dick was mean-spirited. But everyone liked your dad.
From the reporters and the pressmen to delivery drivers. Everyone. And, like I say,
great newspaperman. Starting with makeup.”

“What’s that?”

“A makeup man? Your dad could look at a blank page and he could see it. He could see
the news and how it fit on the page. Your old man was a master on makeup.”

#

We decide to have lunch at Gene & Georgetti, an old red-sauce-and-chops place in a
creaky wood-frame building next to the El. Years ago, this area was all warehouse
and industrial, a part of Chicago they called Smokey Hollow. Now the “River North
Entertainment Area”—so says the map in the back of the taxi.

We walk in. Handshakes. Backslaps.
Where you been? Ain’t seen you in forever. Thought you were dead. Hey, it’s good to
have ya. The usual?

And Stormy slaps his palm twice on the bar and says, “Thank God, yes.”

It’s something about guys this age, when they run in to one another for the first
time in ages. There’s a shock in their faces—or is it joy? maybe relief?—of seeing
an old pal they didn’t expect to see again. And so the backslapping and handshaking.
The need to touch—the confirmation of the physical.

Stormy looks me over and says, “How about a canarbo?”

“What’s that?”

“Jesus, you don’t know a canarbo?” And he says it kehn-
arrrrb-
oh.

“I don’t. Where’s it come from?”

“Bill Bender at the
Tribune
. He was a photographer there. He called ’em canarbos. A drink! A drink! So we all
did. So . . . how about it?”

“Sure,” I say.

The bartender brings two drinks. Stormy raises his rocks glass eye-level. He smiles.
His face, distorted through the glass.

“You know, if your dad had lived, he’da been running the
Trib
. Clayton Kirkpatrick loved him. We all thought he was going to bring him back. But
he was at the
Sun-Times
at a great moment. It was more freewheeling. And they treated him better. He left
the
Trib
because he wanted a raise, and when they wouldn’t give it to him, he walked across
the street to the
Sun-Times
and started on the spot. He was the guy they wanted. He was a ball to be with, I’ll
tell you that. He was irreverent. Sharp-witted. He couldn’t stand someone who was
full of themselves or who didn’t treat someone fair. If he didn’t like you, you had
problems. And he could cut someone up pretty good and pretty fast. And I’ll tell you
one thing: I never heard a bad word about him, may God strike me dead. And I bummed
with everyone.”