Re-Writes of Passage: Chapter 11

Footloose

Photo by Jesse Gardner on Unsplash

We were four lusty 17-year-olds two weeks away from our final year at Buffalo’s tony Jesuit high school, the place to which our parents had entrusted our bodies and putative souls. It was deep in the summer of 1967, and for the next seven days we were fledgling jailbirds out to test our wings in the smoggy, muggy, rip-snorting air of Sin City. Or, failing that, at least to strut the city’s steaming summer streets, our heads tilted skyward, grinning like idiots at New York’s grimy towers, grooving as best we knew how to the bustling city’s hustling rhythms and the attendant possibilities we’d only, until then, dreamed about, utterly confident that whatever adventures were coming our way—as we hoped and prayed they would—we would be equal to their challenges.

Three of us were the scions of up-and-coming, well-respected men in the blue-collar South Buffalo parish we all hailed from: a sports executive, a state senator and a funeral home director. We had been friends since our kindergarten days. 

My dad was an executive with the Buffalo Bills, a position akin to being a demigod in sports-mad Buffalo. Pat’s dad was a state senator, a high-powered politician with big ambitions. Jerry’s father as a funeral home director commanded neighborhood respect not unlike a doctor’s. If the doctor brought hope to families of the sick, the funeral home director brought comfort to those same families when the doctor’s efforts failed. 

We all were going-to-be seniors at Canisius High School, the Catholic prep school where the scions of an emerging elite were groomed to inherit their fathers’ control over the still-thriving city’s legal, social and cultural levers of power. 

Tim, the fourth member of our crew, was a mystery to me. He was Jerry’s and Pat’s friend. I didn’t know him; he’d grown up in another parish, which to me was akin to growing up in a foreign country. His father worked for the city. I understood him to be a garbageman. 

I didn’t know if Jerry had asked him along or if Tim had invited himself. Jerry was that generous and Tim was that determined. Lacking a paternal pedigree, I could see Tim had the hungry outsider’s eye for opportunity. 

Fortunately, despite my doubts, Tim fit right in, displaying as he did a perfect understanding of our shared mission, which was girls – where to find them, then what to do with them. That was Priority One. Booze, and how to get served, was Priority Two, especially since we viewed inebriation—our own as well as that of our imagined conquests—as being inextricably entwined with Priority One. 

Oh, we were cool—super-cool schoolboy swingers, sophisticated beyond our years, striding shoulder-to-shoulder down funky Broadway in our winter-weight Glen plaid, hounds tooth and herringbone sport coats, regimental ties hanging at half-mast around pimply necks, cuffed tan khakis draped atop shiny oxblood penny loafers. We loped through sweltering Midtown to 42nd Street, a pack of yammering preppy bloodhounds brought to baying life by the dank and mysterious street scent of sinful promise emblazoned on the neon-crusted marquees jutting out over our heads, the glittering prows of so many sky-beached frigates of sexual fantasy. Standing in the shade of one of these frigates, breathlessly surveying our dirty-movie choices, we argued with Jesuitical fervor about which dirty triple-bill to favor, unaware that even as we weighed our sinful alternatives that first day on the town, fueled by infusions of Orange Juliuses, streetside hot dogs and coursing rivers of testosterone, Jerry and Tim’s hotel room was being rifled and relieved of its poorly stashed cash.

Later on, ignoring this setback, we pooled our resources and quit the New Yorker Hotel for the nearby Statler Hilton. The week still stretched before us like a sun-washed tropical beach, and a little thing like a robbery wasn’t going to stop us. 

The next day delivered us to a quintessential New York experience: my father, who had connections at NBC, had wangled four otherwise-impossible-to-get tickets to The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. 

Everything was magical at the afternoon taping. Jolly Ed McMahon came on before showtime and told us Johnny’s musical guests would be . . . the Cowsills! The band that would later become the inspiration, if that’s the word, for TV’s The Partridge Family, had seen their debut single, “The Rain, the Park and Other Things” become a smash summertime hit, a lush, string-filled bit of pseudo-psychedelia about a boy who meets a mysterious girl with flowers in her hair, who takes him to a park, makes him harmoniously “happy, happy, happy,” and then disappears. 

Not even the corn-fed Cowsills could dampen the magic of being in the studio audience that day. 

The real magic at work for me was how everything I was witnessing seemed completely possible to one day be mine. All I needed was some pull at NBC, which my father obviously had and bingo, I could be an NBC page. Being a page would be my ticket to a future in which I would share a loud knee-slapper with Ed and tell clever stories to Johnny.

That I could neither sing, dance, act nor even tell a joke fazed me not a bit. I knew it was an outrageous fantasy. But New York was where outrageous fantasies were hatched, wasn’t it? And didn’t those fantasies become true? Being 17 and footloose in the Big City was as intoxicating as a couple of gin-and-tonics. Anything seemed possible. The future was mine, bright and shiny as the spangly curtain from which Johnny’s guests emerged. 

As it happened, I would return in something less than triumph to Rockefeller Center in two years, as a part-time clerk in the sports department of the Associated Press. Where Dad also had friends. But my reappearance at 30 Rock would be as nothing compared to the return another of our crew would one day make. 

Streetwalking

The week progressed with zero success on the girl front. They had apparently all fled town that week. Their dissapearence didn’t stop us from walking the streets everyday, looking for their hideouts.

On our third night of fruitless trawling, Pat demanded we stop and take stock. The week was half gone and we had yet to score. Girls weren’t falling at our feet. So, Pat reasoned, we would have to fall at their feet. And he said he knew the secret to finding us some feet to fall at. 

Pat was a pragmatist who prided himself on knowing how the world worked. To him, a spade was a spade and a prostitute was a prostitute. And, being good Catholic boys, “prostitute” was the word none of us had been able to utter since our arrival. That was what we’d all been scouting for all week but couldn’t admit until Pat broke the ice. 

He did more than that though. Pat told us the secret he had himself been silently practicing without our knowledge: all prostitutes carry umbrellas, he said, no matter the weather. That’s how we would recognize them. It was a sort of secret code.

Armed with this new insight, we renewed our cruise, full of new purpose. Before long, Pat told us with a roll of his eyes that he’d spotted a candidate: a woman walking ahead of us, wearing skin-tight short-shorts and a tank top that fit her curvaceous body like a gigantic tube sock. 

She wasn’t carrying an umbrella. This did not discourage us. 

Pat took the lead, catching up and matching speeds with her. He and the woman paused on the steaming Midtown sidewalk. The rest of us stalled in flight, hovering like seagulls awaiting a fish dinner. Pat exchanged a few words with his quarry, shook his head and returned to the flock.

“She says ten bucks apiece or thirty-five bucks for an around-the-world.”

Silence. Heads tilted downward, studying our shoes.

“What’s an around-the-world?”

That was me, feeling weak in the knees.

“The hell do I know? Go ask her yourself.”

That was Pat, swaggering.

I returned to shoe-study.

The four of us fell into a tangle of strangled squawking even as we began drifting down the street, an eight-legged creature of stifled lust. The focus of our desires strode ahead of us with an air of brisk self-assurance that left us falling farther and farther behind the clickety-clack of her echoing boot heels. 

As she disappeared over the concrete horizon, I stopped in my tracks, suddenly desperate not for the taste of forbidden fruit but rather for something less threatening, more familiar. Something like the pulpy sweetness of yet another Orange Julius. 

I realized with a shock that I didn’t really want to score. I’d not been looking to lose my virginity or prove my masculinity. I’d not been looking for a woman at all. I’d been looking for a girl. 

A flower girl, in fact. Someone who was as innocent of life as I was. Someone who could make me happy, happy, happy. And if that meant staying a blithering schoolboy instead of becoming a manly man, that was fine with me. I knew where I could find girls. And they weren’t to be found on the steamy summer streets of Midtown Manhattan.

Thievery

Our luck finally turned, girl-wise, as the weekend approached. The fact that some of the girls we’d finally found had green skin and pointy ears made not a whit of difference to us. 

On the Friday before our scheduled flight home, we were as startled as the dimmest tourist to see people our age—and older!—strolling around our hotel hotel lobby dressed as denizens of a universe that would one day become one of the world’s most lucrative movie franchises but was then a cheesy TV space opera teetering on the edge of cancellation. We’d landed on Planet Trekkie and could not have been happier. The hotel was crawling with mini-skirted space creatures with avocado-colored skin, towering orange bouffant hairdos and oversized metal jewelry. The four of us had finally landed in a hotel full of Earth girls, none of whom were carrying umbrellas. Each of us knew we had only to engage these strange new creatures in our particular brand of sophisticated, worldly-wise banter to finally achieve our Prime Directive.

One of us finally discovered and gained access to a roomful of beer-swilling space cadets. Six-packs of warm brew abounded. No one asked us for proof of age or planet of origin. We were over the moon with delight.

Finally, the equation we’d all been navigating by—alcohol + opportunity + girls = heaven—was at hand. With two beers under my belt, I struck up a monologue with one space girl before she beamed herself to another corner of the room. And while each of us did our manly best to get where none of us had gone before—second base—it was Tim who disappeared the longest and had the most explaining to do the next morning.

Turned out that Tim had succeeded in speaking to a young lady for several hours, long enough to later tell us, in the hushed tones of a jungle explorer who’d discovered the long-sought source of a mighty river, that in addition to being a closet Vulcan, this young lady was a school teacher. From New Jersey. The rest of us were suitably impressed and consumed with silent jealousy. But there the story ended. The two had exchanged mailing addresses. Tim had secured bragging rights, which was less than he’d hoped for but much, much more than any of us could take home with us.

We left Sin City the next morning with hardly a sin worth confessing. We all spent senior year trying our best to sin on more familiar ground, with about the same, unremarkable success. 

Pat and Jerry and I stayed close during senior year, went to the senior prom together—with dates—and then went our separate ways to separate colleges. 

By senior year of college, we were all pretty much strangers to one another. We got married, had kids, got into and out of trouble. I’d still bump into Pat and Jerry every now and again on visits back home; I only saw Tim once in the ensuing years, in 1979, in the newsroom of the august Poughkeepsie Journal, where I was a reporter.

Tim was by then the press flack for his mentor, United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. While the senator huddled rambunctiously with the paper’s poobahs, Tim and I stood in a corner of the newsroom and talked small. 

It was awkward. It had been nearly a dozen years since Sin City. The past was far less interesting to either of us than the future. Besides a familiarity with state politics—his much sharper than mine—we found that neither of us had much in common. He was still single; I had a family and a career path I still hoped would lead me, as it had my father, to a newsroom in New York City.

Tim’s career trajectory was more interesting. It was targeted, it seems in retrospect, with the precision of a NASA moon landing.

From being Moynihan’s wrangler to becoming an advisor to New York Governor Mario Cuomo, Tim would eventually return to 30 Rock, to NBC studios, not as a guest of Johnny’s but as an equal.

When Tim Russert died on a sunny New York afternoon in June, 2008, the world noticed; flags flew at half-staff, the president of the United States took a moment to note his passing. His peers in the ranks of television journalism compared him to the greats of their profession. 

But on that afternoon in ’79 in Poughkeepsie, standing before a blistered old bulletin board covered with dot-matrixed memoranda, we were just two guys, not exactly friends, shooting the shit for a few minutes while our masters laughed at each other’s jokes and discussed the Big Issues facing the dying City of Poughkeepsie. We were both still brimming with possibility, eager to size each other up in our particular ways. If I had the reporter’s secret contempt for a politician’s flack, Tim could only have looked around the dismal, noisy Journal newsroom, taken note of the backwater city (Poughkeepsie!) he was visiting and I was stuck in, and drawn the obvious conclusion.

I don’t remember saying goodbye to Tim that afternoon. Once he’d pried the irrepressible Moynihan out of the editor’s office, he had no reason to linger. 

If I try, I tcan summon the image of tossing him a hurried nod goodbye as the nearby elevator doors slid around him and his ever-grinning charge. We never shared another word, let alone an adventure.

Our futures loomed on two very different horizons, out where life’s possibilities seemed to go on forever, out where death was a thief neither of us could yet imagine.