John Kennedy; Robert B. Colgin

John Kennedy

          With a few exceptions, the people I ended up hanging out with the most in my last two years of high school were the local hoods. More specifically, I shared leisure time with proletarian, mostly Irish- or Polish-Catholic, teen-aged alcoholics who appreciated my ability to slug down the beer. I could go to dances at the union hall (beer out in the car before going in) and have the protection of the likes of big ‘Crazy’ John Kennedy and tough Mike ‘Froggy’ Clough, should anyone consider drunken combat with me. Taking the baton from Bobby DiGiacomo.

          Crazy John Kennedy was an enormous, powerful broth of a lad with dark blonde hair over a pink, open, Irish face that was usually set in a peculiar grin. As I remember it, Crazy John’s grin combined shyness, recklessness, and a suspicion that there was something dirty-sexy hidden everywhere. He pumped iron and played tackle, which is something like lock in rugby, on the high school football team. Oddly, this being 1961-1963, I don’t remember him ever getting much flack over having the same name as the President. We all just figured that John Kennedy is a common Irish name, and so what?

          We used to have a few beers and then go looking for social events. I remember one dance at Brandywine High School, supposedly my high school’s Big Rivals, where an officious student-council type caught us smoking in the boys’ room. This wasn’t a future cop; this was a future auditor, or maybe district attorney. He was short and wiry-looking, neatly dressed in the standard preppie uniform of the day, and wore Buddy Holly glasses.

          “Smoking is not permitted anywhere in the building during this function.” His words were clipped, authoritative.

          Crazy John loomed over him and grinned, “I got your function, Ace!”

          The figure of authority turned and left, and we strolled away to the car before he could muster reinforcements.

          Oh, we were real hoods, all right. Just as much as we were clever, or even attractive. More than fifty years later, and who cares?

          Crazy John would laugh at anything he thought was gross — that was his special word. He’d half-giggle and say, “Ooo, gross!” And he thought lots of stuff was gross. I could leave him laughing and making gross judgements all night long. And sometimes well into the next morning, as was the case one time when four or five of us had driven down to spend a weekend at Rehoboth Beach, which is a resort town at the southern end of Delaware on the Atlantic Ocean. We were all about 16 or 17.

          Anyway, we’d spent the evening engaged in fairly disgraceful behaviour, driving around and getting stupid-drunk. I remember throwing beer cans out the window of the car onto the beach, when I knew better, and thinking profoundly how this was evidence of my fallible humanity. I even half-composed a beatnik poem on the subject in my mind right there. I have vague memories of going to and leaving a party at somebody’s house a few miles inland, but I must admit that now, all these years later, the hours after that particular midnight are more than a little hazy. What I remember is that it was still dark outside the bare room the bunch of us had rented when Crazy John started shaking me.

          “Rich! Rich! Get up!” Crazy John was the only person who called me Rich.

          Anyway, I suppose I made the usual go-away-and-let-me-sleep noises that a 16-year-old who has drunk maybe three six-packs of beer and then crashed less than two hours before might be expected to make.

          “Rich! Come on! Get up! We’re goin’ to Mass! Fishermen’s Mass starts in 15 minutes!”

          “Oh, fuck off, John! I’m Jewish!”

          But he was not to be deterred. He physically lifted me and half-carried me to the church, which, as I recall, wasn’t all that far from our fleabag. I sat there with a major headache while this dude in a costume droned on in a language I didn’t understand (This must have been before Vatican II or III or whichever one it was). It reminded me of going to my grandfather’s shul in Wilmington (Latin, Hebrew — who gives a fuck?), only I never had a still-drunk 4:30 am headache there. It was the last time I’ve ever been to Mass. It was not the last time I ever drank beer, though.

Robert B. Colgin

          During my last year or so of high school Bob Colgin, a tall blonde dude with a big white smile and a square chin, became my main middle-class buddy. He liked a beer or four and had a fine sense of self-mocking satirical humour.

          He’d taken on as his alter ego one Harvey Zooker, a former missionary in India, now a Joe College. Zooker, the character, had a high, nasal, clenched-tooth-smile voice, and an attitude of being overly-friendly, superior, and wanting something from you. His hand was usually extended to shake the hand of whoever was in front of him. Zook. A magnificent creation.

          I think it was also Colgin who came up with the idea of driving people nuts by saying everything twice. Zook figured it was an appropriate response to having to repeat something for somebody. Saying everything twice, saying everything twice, spread like wildfire, spread like wildfire, amongst our circle, amongst our circle, for a time back then, for a time back then. Try it. Try it. It really drives people nuts. It really drives people nuts.

          Colgin and I both went to the University of Delaware in college-town Newark in 1963-64, but we didn’t see each other that often. For some reason he was able to get around the university rules and lived in an off-campus apartment in Wilmington, about 32 km (20 miles) from Newark, and commuted to school in a cool convertible of some sort. He did well with the girls. I didn’t.

          Colgin and I both transferred to George Washington University in DC in 1964. He pledged the snobbiest, Joe-College, BMOC fraternity on campus. I didn’t pledge at all. But we lived in the same dormitory — an old, converted, 1920s-era apartment house at 21st and Eye Streets NW. My room was two floors up from Colgin’s room, but my roommate lived in a different world, and the social life was down on Colgin’s floor. Colgin’s roommate and I got along fairly well, and shared an apartment the following year.

          Colgin and I both got part-time jobs as file clerks at the Civil Service Commission in October, 1966. Talk about the very throbbing heart of the bureaucracy! My job was in the Clerical Examining Section, which processed the applications of people going for government office jobs. Secretaries and stenographers and such. Most of the full-time employees in my section were formidably-sized middle-aged African-American women very much concerned with how smartly they and their friends dressed.

          Sometimes I’d get up from my desk and walk down the hall to the office where Colgin worked with some government form in my hand, and he’d pretend to initial it, and we’d bullshit a bit, and then I’d go back to my desk, and then Colgin would show up with something for me to initial, and we’d bullshit a bit, and then it’d be time for the coffee break. And sometimes I’d actually alphabetise people’s applications by surname.

          Colgin and I kept in touch for a couple of years after we finished at GWU in 1967. On one of the many coast-to-coast drives I engaged in over these years I stopped off at Colgin’s apartment in some high-rise near the interstate in Arlington, Virginia, just across the river from D.C. We visited together for maybe an hour or two. Over the next few years I heard from our mutual ex-roommate that he was in the hotel business in San Francisco or some other place in Northern California. Then nothing for a long time.

          When, in 2001, I got on the internet and started looking for old friends, I found Bob’s brother Bill, who, although addicted to the caps Lock key, eventually got me in touch with Bob, who didn’t seem to have email, but sent me a letter, signed “Robbie”. He was living in a “quite lovely penthouse” in the Watergate complex in DC.

          After leaving GWU, he told me, he’d married a girl he met there, and had gone “into the hotel business & publishing”. He went on to tell me he was currently “producing a movie on the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty”. He attributed his attendance at GW to my advice.

          For several years afterwards I received a couple of postcards and one Xmas card from him without any more hard information: he was still working on the post-production of that movie, and moving around from DC to the New England shore to Bethesda, Maryland to Atlanta, Georgia. I got a phone call from an Air New Zealand pilot who’d run into him at a barbecue somewhere in the DC suburbs, if I heard correctly. I was half-asleep when he called. From all this I came out with two different email addresses, but emails to these addresses brought no replies. Then I got an email from one of our mutual high school friends that he’d seen Colgin. I replied but got no reply in return.

          In 2005 I received, forwarded from my previous address, a wedding announcement informing me that he’d married again in Atlanta. I sent a letter with my new contact information to the return address on the announcement. Several months later I got another short letter from him with his new postal address and phone number and little else.

          After that I received one xmas card with a photo of him and his wife and two miniature schnauzers, with a message saying that schnauzers were his new main thing. Not a word since then.