Lake Effect Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  BOOKS BY RICH COHEN

  Copyright Page

  For my friends on the North Shore

  Acclaim for RICH COHEN’s

  Lake Effect

  “Cohen . . . has taken the everyday stuff of life and made it joyously readable. The mundane becomes richly evocative in his hands. The usual becomes unusual, the boring becomes interesting, the sweet becomes bittersweet, and Lake Effect becomes the proverbial book you can’t put down.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “Arresting and thoughtful. . . . Cohen brings back the flavor of the ‘80s culture with insight and humor.” —The Washington Post

  “A rare book [with the] glint of a superb novel. . . . It contains lines so heartbreakingly apt and funny I stopped to reread constantly.” —Jonathan Lethem

  “Cohen has written a fine book.” —Chicago Tribune

  “Elegiac, nostalgic and Gatsby-esque . . . Cohen’s memoir is filled with tender moments . . . but never loses its realistic, hard edge. . . . Poignant and lyrical.” —Publishers Weekly

  “A universal story of youth, maturity and love, Lake Effect is a probing meditation on the passage of time, an accomplished book.” —Bookpage

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  While Lake Effect is, in essence, a true story, in telling it I have changed most names and many details and, in a few exceptional instances, the course of events. Otherwise, I might have given the impression, wrongly, that I was after a kind of objective truth; in reality, these stories are subjectively told through my eyes and through my memory. Nor have I tried to tell the full and complete story of any of the people in my life. After all, almost everyone I know, even my very oldest friends, remain, in important ways, a mystery to me. I was instead after the spirit of a certain season and the thrill of a certain kind of friendship and what happens to such friendships when the afternoon runs into the evening.

  Part One

  In summer we slept on the beach. We would park our cars on a side street and hike through the trees to the ravine and then down to a secret little shore that only we knew about. We would get a fire going and drink red wine and look at the lights winding along the north coast and, to the south, at the haze above Chicago. Out on the lake, we could see the red hazards of ships, and sometimes a speedboat splashed its tiny wake onto the rocky sand. Jamie told stories about the lake, which he said was over a thousand feet deep, and about the ships that had gone down beyond the horizon, voices vanishing in the cold water. When the wine was gone, we sat talking about girls and fights, or what we would do next week or next month. Who could see beyond next month?

  There were a lot of us on the beach, the usual crew. Tom Pistone, who wished he had been a teenager in the fifties, drove a ’61 Pontiac GTO, walked with a swagger, and dated girls in polka dots. Ronnie Flowers, who tagged after us like a mascot, was simpleminded and easy to fool and knew just one way to deal with people—as the butt of a joke. Tyler White, a genius or a fool, spent hours watching construction sites.

  Of all those friends, the one I remember best is Jamie Drew. Looking back, I see that Jamie was the true hero of my youth, the most vivid presence, not only of my childhood but also for kids up and down the North Shore. Words he said, gestures he crafted, swept our school like a craze, imitated, in the end, even by the teachers. He was quick and dashing and honestly the smartest person I have ever known, and yet he seemed to hold his own talents in mean regard. My mother called him a lost soul. For a long time, I saw him as a tricked-out racer rusting in the garage—that part of each of us that did not survive the rough transition into adulthood.

  When the fire burned down, we buried the embers and settled on the sand, which stayed warm for hours. In the morning, the sun appeared across the lake and, one by one, we climbed the hill to our cars and drove home to top off our sleep in our warm beds. Jamie and I often dozed late on the sand and then swam up the shore to the public beach, where our friends, showered and shaved, were waiting.

  This was in the middle of the 1980s. It did not seem like it at the time, but that decade, as odorless and colorless as a noxious gas, came to inhabit every part of our lives. On the radio, we listened to “Scarecrow” by John Cougar Mellencamp, each of us worrying, in his own way, about the plight of the American farmer. In the fall, we wore jean jackets and chewed tobacco—Skoal long cut. On the weekends, we disappeared on end runs to Wisconsin, where the drinking age was eighteen, returning with a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon or Point beer. Jamie’s favorite beer was Mickey’s Big Mouth, which he drank in noisy, head-clearing slugs. We would hide the beer in my backyard, bringing it inside only when my parents left town. A six pack might make a half dozen trips from the yard to the fridge. When a can was finally opened, it fizzled and foamed with the sweet skunk taste of summer. On television, we watched David Letterman, who was then still funny, and Ronald Reagan, whose smiling face beamed down on us. We knew that Reagan also was from Illinois, but his state and our state seemed far apart in time and place. My father called him the man with the very old face and the very young miracle hair. In school, Jamie and I studied all this in Popular Culture, a class where we also learned stereotypes from entertainment history. Our favorites were the Old Nat stereotype, which resulted in courtly black gentlemen dancing on white movie screens, and the Fu Manchu stereotype, featuring Oriental tyrants hellbent on world domination. Sometimes, as we sat on the beach, a Japanese kid would walk by and Jamie would say, “Think he suffers from the Fu Manchu stereotype?”

  Most days ended with a dozen friends back at my house, sitting around the kitchen. I was at first flattered by the appeal I had for my friends, until I realized it had nothing to do with me; my friends were coming to see my father. My father was different from the other fathers in town: men in gray suits, newspaper under an arm, waiting for the train to the city. My father wore dirty brown pants and T-shirts crossed by lines and a watch on each wrist. “A man with one watch thinks he knows the time,” he would say. “A man with two watches can never be sure.” He had a job that kept him on the road. If not working, he was at home weeks at a stretch, wandering the house in reading glasses and boxer shorts. He often wore a suede cowboy hat, which, he said, identified him as a High Plains drifter. When a friend of mine, accustomed to the routines of his own father, crinkled his nose and asked, “Mr. Cohen, what is it you do?” my father wiped a plate and said, “Son, I am what you call a house husband.”

  A few years before I met Jamie, his father had been killed in one of those pointless high-speed tragedies that stain our national highways. Now and then, when Jamie mentioned the accident, he would curse under his breath. For this reason, he developed a special attachment to my father, who, rather than advise or instruct, simply treated him like a man. More than anything, Jamie was a boy raised by women, by his sister and his mother and his grandmother. I once warned him that a boy raised by girls had a greater chance of going fag. It was a stupid thing to say and a joke, but it turned into a big fight. I guess I was oblivious to the great fearful need in Jamie, the need for authority, someone to guide him. It was a need I would come to recognize in so many of my friends, kids who came of age during the divorce boom, in a nation seemingly without adults, a nation dedicated to the proposition that nothing counts except celebrity; it was this need that would later send us flitting from mentor to mentor, party to party, scene to scene, never resting, never settling, never satisfied with ourselves. For a time, it was a need Jamie and I filled in each other. One night, when he
was lying in the twin bed across from mine, after we had each gone through the list of the girls in school we wanted to sleep with, Jamie said, “I wish I could be more like your father: you know, a High Plains drifter.”

  I laughed. “Jamie, it’s just a fucking hat. He’s from Brooklyn.”

  Jamie said, “Yeah, but still, I wish I could be that way.”

  In the autumn of 1972, my family moved to Glencoe from Libertyville, a farming town in northern Illinois. We were the only Jewish family in Libertyville. When I asked my father if he had met with much anti-Semitism, he smiled and said, “Are you kidding? When we moved in, the neighbors shook my hand and said, ‘Thank God, we were afraid they would sell to Catholics.’ They hadn’t even worked their way down to us yet.” Before Libertyville, my parents, newlyweds out of Brooklyn, had lived in New Jersey and Long Island, moving as my father was transferred. As a result, we came to have that special closeness of families on the go. I was four when we left Libertyville. My only memories of that town are of a sunny main drag of car dealerships and Dairy Queens and of the Des Plaines River, which wound by our house. Once, to convince my brother it was safe to walk on the frozen river (in school, my brother had been warned of black ice), my father jumped up and down, breaking through the ice into the swift current. The other things I remember are from stories later told to me: myself, in a red snowsuit, floating face down in a sewer of runoff, where my sister had dropped me; being crammed up the shirt of Tracy Hawkins, a neighborhood girl who wanted to pretend she was birthing me; driving with my mother to see a house she liked in Glencoe, which, in my mind, plays like a fancy movie dissolve into the next scene.

  Glencoe is thirty miles up the lake from Chicago. It is a perfect town for a certain kind of dreamy kid, with just enough history to get your arms around. It was founded in the early 1800s by a blacksmith named Taylor, who walked out of the city, dark buildings and foundry flames at his back, into the great silence of the north, forests of oak and elm, Lake Michigan appearing and disappearing beyond the trees. He waded streams and passed through Indian settlements teeming in the open fields—settlements remembered today only in the names of country clubs that, until recently, did not allow blacks or Jews. In a flat place between the lake and the swamps to the west, he cleared trees and built a house and a dock and invited his friends and family to join him. He called the town Taylorsport, a name later changed to Glencoe. For a time, it was an industrial center, where lumber and coal were stacked on barges and towed down the lake. By the 1880s, it was a bustling country hamlet of unlit dirt roads. At night, the sky above the lake was a canvas of stars. In 1892, the town was destroyed in a cattle stampede, a thousand head of raging beef bound for the slaughter yards of Chicago. Ten years later Glencoe had reemerged as a prosperous village of feed stores, blacksmiths, and schoolhouses. When the railroad was built, with a station in Glencoe, the town was yoked to the city. The president of the railroad built a mansion in town.

  When my family moved to Glencoe, it still had the character of a village, a life removed from urban turmoil. In the summer, we went without shoes under a canopy of trees along trim midwestern streets lined with Victorian and Tudor and ranch houses. In the woods, there was a bridge built by Frank Lloyd Wright, the only bridge he ever designed, that cut over a steep green gorge. In town, we would wander into stores where the owners knew our names and the names of our parents. Some considered Jamie a bad kid and followed him through the aisles.

  There was Ray’s Sport Shop, a dark cave cooled by an industrial-sized fan, naked metal blades cutting the air. Ray, in sweat-stained short sleeves, greasy brown hair, and a wispy mustache, thrived on fear, on the terror he spread to the kids in town. If he saw you in a brand of shoes not sold at Ray’s Sport Shop, he waited for your mother to walk into a store, grabbed the meat of your arm, and said, “I run a family business. Maybe I don’t sell the best stuff, but I sell it only to you kids. If you don’t buy my stock, my family starves. Get it?” A few years later, when Ray sold out to a Korean immigrant, the kids of town, free at last, went on a magnificent mall spending spree. There was U-Name-It, a store that surfed the T-shirt craze, pressing decals of Arthur Fonzarelli or designs that said HOCKEY MOM or I’M THE GREATEST AND KNOW IT. I had two shirts that identified me as A WILD AND CRAZY GUY. There was Harry’s Delicatessen, where my father often ducked out back to smoke a cigar with the owner. The walls of Harry’s were lined with pictures of regulars, including Jamie’s mom, who was a secretary in a doctor’s office in the city. Once, when I wanted to complain that my father was not on the wall, Jamie said, “Why not let my mother enjoy this glory alone?” There was Sloppy Ed’s, a hamburger stand where we stopped every day on the way home from the beach. Sloppy Ed himself was a sort of guru, sweating over the grill and cursing the kids who came in just to play the video games—Frogger and Donkey Kong.

  We lived on a plateau north of town, in an upscale area known as the Bluffs, down a winding street buckled by tree roots, in a drafty brick house built in the 1920s. It was a rambling collection of back stairways and secret rooms. For years, my parents did not have enough money to furnish the rooms and every word echoed in the emptiness. As a result, the house felt like a piece of scratch paper, something you scribble on and throw away. When I was older I played floor hockey in the basement and, using markers and spray paint, filled the walls with the faces of spectators and scoreboards and dreaded hecklers. I covered the floor with the boulevards and buildings of a major city. Starting with a piece of Astroturf, I built a cemetery, with overturned garbage pails standing as tomb-stones, each recalling the life of another dead eight-year-old—my age at the time.

  Soon after we moved in, my mother led me through the street, from house to house. I had to knock on each door and say, “Hello, I am new in the neighborhood. Are there any kids here I can be friends with?” It was torture. After several misses, we came to a blue wood house down the street. Before I knocked, the door opened. There was a short roly-poly kid: big mouth, giant teeth, bright eyes, dopey grin, fluttery hands. His voice was high, persistent, excited. It said, “My name is Ronnie. I’ll be your friend. Best friend. I love friends, love ’em. Don’t got many. See that car over there? That’s a Valiant. It got top marks on the test track in Chamonix. My house is old. Let me get my stuff. My butt hurts. Can I sleep over?”

  Ronnie was the first friend I ever made. Every day, before school or on weekends or after school, he would come over to our house, knock on the door, not leave. If the door was open, he did not bother to knock and you would come across him in the halls, smiling, waiting to say, “See that car out there?” Or “Want to hear the funny thing about this jar?”

  Sometimes, my mom would find him in the kitchen and say, “Ronnie, Richard is not home.”

  Ronnie would say, “That’s OK. I’ll play with Herbie.”

  One afternoon, when Ronnie was standing in the downstairs foyer, my father—Herbie—spotted him from upstairs. Stepping into the shadows, my father cupped his hands and, in a voice that boomed through the empty halls, said, “Ronnie, this is the Lord thy God.”

  Ronnie looked up and said, “Yes, God. I hear you. Where are you, God?”

  “Ronnie, I will not reveal myself to you yet. You are not ready. You must first go home and ask your mother to read to you from the Bible. Go home, Ronnie.”

  In town a few weeks later, my mother ran into Ronnie’s mother, who said, “We’ve got Ronnie in counseling. He thinks he spoke to God.”

  I walked to school each day with Ronnie and my brother, Steven, who is five years older than me. In those days, my brother worshiped my father and imitated everything he did. When my father threw out an old briefcase, my brother fished it out of the trash, patched it, and cleaned it with a miracle product ordered from television. So there I was, between a roly-poly Ronnie and a twelve-year-old with a briefcase full of book reports. In this manner, I went grade to grade—from the Explorers to the study of mold. One morning, a gym teacher named Bowman, a crew-cu
t ex-Marine with whiskey breath and dark glasses—during lunch period, he sent me to buy him smokes in town—told my class, “In high school, you are in for a rude awakening. You’ll be walking down the hall and a senior will hit ya and ya’ll hit the floor and he’ll keep on walking.”

  I remember thinking, At least he won’t stay around to kick me.

  Then I was at New Trier, a rambling high school backed by fields and running tracks. There were floors and floors of classrooms and a swimming pool and a theater and gymnasiums and a fenced-in smoking area for bad kids and an auto shop also for bad kids and a power plant with smokestacks rising in a winter sky. It was the typical American high school, with kids swimming by in tight schools—green schools of football players, black schools of theater geeks, tie-dyed schools of Deadheads. When a school of football players passed through a school of theater geeks, there was a flurry in the water, a commotion of charley horses and arm slugs. New Trier is where John Hughes set his movies about teenage angst: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. We were often told that it is the best public school in America, a citadel of success, where every kid goes on to college and the good life. We were taught the names of the many celebrities who were graduates: Ann-Margret and Rock Hudson, Bruce Dern and Charlton Heston. We were warned of the pressure of such an environment—not everyone can be a Rock Hudson—and guidance counselors reminded us that our school district was the center of the teen suicide belt. I had a teacher named Tony Mancusi who introduced himself to us, saying, “Kids, my name is Tony Mancusi, but call me the Cooz. The door of the Cooz is always open; whether you want to discuss a grade or a teen pregnancy, do it with the Cooz.”

  There were more than four thousand kids in school. In those first months, people who had been stars in junior high school might rise quickly through the ranks and just as quickly flame out, sputter, and die away. Other kids simply vanished, falling to the bottom of the food chain— you might ask after them at the Dr. Who Club. For much of high school I just let myself be carried by the current, lost and drifting, searching for interesting faces. One of the best friends I made was Tom Pistone, whom I met junior year in gym class, first period swimming, toeing the line in our damp school-issued Speedos, taking orders from a mustachioed, comically vain teacher everyone called Magnum P.E. On the weekends, Tom built cars from scratch, and he loved the fifties. At my house, my father looked Tom up and down and said, “You remind me of a kid I grew up with: Bucko. Bucko was the coolest kid I knew.”