Chico

 Chico

          Now, I’m going to refer to this person by an ubiquitous nickname, and not his real nickname, because if he reads this he might not like it, and I am genuinely afraid of him. He was Colgin’s roommate our first year at George Washington University. Here I’ll call him Chico.

          Chico was an ethnic Sicilian from Jersey City. He’d been an active member of a hard-core street gang until a year or two before, but he had a remarkably powerful mind and the determination to succeed at education. His nickname in the gang, called The Golden Guineas, had been ‘Brain.’ Still, his idea of sartorial splendour — stingy-brim hat, razor-creased sharkskin trousers worn up high and tapered from 16½ inches (42 cm) at the knee to 15½ inches (39 cm) at the cuff, sleeveless white undershirt (which he called a bonjee, but which would later be called a tank-top, and in New Zealand a singlet), and a three-quarter-length black leather coat — came from the lawnless streets of northern New Jersey.

          He had a round, pinkish face with a somewhat embarrassed-looking smile. He was fairly short, but was also a serious, bulked-up iron-pumper at a time (1964) when such an obsession was far less common than it became later. I thought his iron-pumpers’ magazines, which sometimes featured photos of a teen-aged Arnie, particularly bizarre. And he boxed. Which I thought was cool, although I didn’t envy him his facial bruises. And he was street-tough mentally — cynical and sceptical and fond of laughing at human cultural foolishness, including his own. He and Colgin and I developed a code language for classifying people, which included several different categories of ass-holes: screamers (screaming ass-holes), gapers, bleeders, flamers, and so on. We had a little gesture with two hands, denoting the use of an imaginary water-hose, which we aimed toward flamers. And so on.

          Although Chico had as much scorn for beatniks (which he called boe-heems) as for any other type, as a Golden Guinea he was far from unfamiliar with dope. “Look cool. Walk cool. Be cool. And that means dope,” was one of his primary gang maxims. That year at least, though, if he brought pot back down to school from trips home to Jersey City he didn’t share any with me. What he did do was teach me about robo — codeine cough syrup. What kinds I could get at pharmacies. How to get it. How to drink it (in one gulp, then quickly washed down with hot tea to suppress the nauseating flavour). He also taught me about other legally-obtainable opiates, and how to get compliant doctors to prescribe them. And the G.W. school clinic’s doctor turned out to be enormously compliant.

          Chico, much to my surprise and horror, joined the second-snobbiest fraternity at GW. Being Jewish, I could have joined the GW chapter of the Jewish fraternity, AEΠ, a bunch of rich New York and Miami Jews with flashy cars. I didn’t feel like trying to identify with them.

          Chico and I had decided to share an apartment for our junior year, and since I spent the summer of 1965 in DC working and going to summer school, and he was summering in Jersey City, it was my job to find a place for us. I finally got a place through a real-estate management company run by Jeane Dixon, the famous fortune-teller. Her husband, F.W., was the nominal owner, but she ran it. He was apparently too busy as head of the DC John Philip Sousa Society, or something.

          I didn’t deal directly with Mrs Dixon, anyway; I dealt with an underling on her payroll. I rented apartments from them that year and the next, and I only met the Great Lady once. The underling, a crisp, youngish, bobbed-hair, business-suited Becky from Indiana named Connie Crigler, led me with some ceremony into the exalted presence. The renowned psychic looked up at me from her desk, smiled, and said, “You know, you’d be a nice-looking young man if you’d shave off that beard.” So much for my fortune.

          The apartment Chico and I shared was in the basement of a three-story town house on Riggs Place off 18th St NW, fringing on a down-market black neighbourhood about a mile or so north of GW. It had two rooms separated by a hallway shared by everybody in the building. The building’s trash room was also off the basement hallway. Our front room had two single beds and exposed pipes running along the ceiling. The back room had a closet, kitchen facilities in one corner, a bathroom off another corner, a sink along a wall in another part of the room, a table and some chairs, and a sofa-sleeper.

          Probably the most inconvenient thing about that residence, though, was having the apartment directly overhead occupied by five queer dudes who danced thumpingly into the wee hours a couple nights a week. At least.

          When Chico returned from his first weekend home a couple of weeks later, he brought with him my first nickel bag. If you remember nickel bags you must be an old fart from the East Coast like me. For those of you born after 1953, or who lived somewhere else in the 60s, a nickel bag was a $5 measure of sifted pot (maybe four or five grams), often cut with some neutral vegetable substance such as oregano, and usually folded up in a brown paper envelope such as banks used to give you change in before they changed to plastic zip-locks. Chico also had some Zig-Zags for me and showed me how to roll a joint (something I never got particularly good at). Then he showed me how to smoke it (something I did get particularly good at).

          Then I went for a walk. The sidewalk, the traffic, the air — everything seemed different. And better. More beautiful, sharper, clearer. People have written plenty of books about it. I went back to the apartment and put on a record. Even better still. I knew that all those years I’d pictured myself as a pot-smoking beatnik I’d been right.

          Chico and I started telling each other bedtime stories. The characters in the stories were glorified depictions of the teller and gently mocking depictions of the listener. We also invented a professional German sexual dominator called Count von Whiplash, and started calling each other “Count”. I treated the sexual domination thing as extreme satire without meaningful relevance to the real world, but then I was hopelessly naïve. I have no idea how aware Chico was of the real thing.

          Sometime during the year I got a girlfriend, a friend of whose Chico screwed one night. She later reported to me that he’d just pulled his trousers down to his ankles and hadn’t taken them off at all – which she found to be incredibly gauche. Then Chico got a girlfriend, too, an ultra-Catholic girl from Guam, of all the bizarre places. I became a witness to noisy recrimination sessions on Saturday afternoons after she’d come over after confessing to priests about spending Friday nights on the fold-out bed in the back room. I’d be in the front room reading or listening to music, the row in the back room would reach a peak, then I’d see her storming through the basement hallway past my open door, on her way to the stairs leading to the street. Chico would follow behind at a more leisurely pace, stopping long enough to direct an embarrassed grin and a shrug of his bulked-up shoulders at me before following his lady-love up the stairs. It helped to keep things interesting.

          We both studied hard that year and got good grades. Chico was in pre-law. He was in a bit of turmoil over the conflict in values from his hardass gang background, the educated world of his intellect, and the snob fraternity he was in.      We kept in touch during our senior year, but we didn’t room together. A couple of years later I returned to live for a while in Delaware after living in California for a year and a half, and I got in touch with Chico in DC. This was in January, 1969. He was at GW Law School, and loving it. He and his Guamanian former-girlfriend-now-wife came up to visit. He was getting very straight. Cynical, but straight. He wasn’t interested in becoming a lawyer for the capo who ran his home turf in Jersey City, who went by the name of Uncle Joe. He rather fancied a career with Uncle Sam, instead.

          Chico and I had somehow managed to keep in touch over the years. He’d been a lawyer on Guam. I’d received baby pictures in the mail. He’d gone on from boxing into serious martial arts. By the mid 80s I’d been living in San Antonio, Texas for about a dozen years and looking to use my newly achieved teacher’s certification as a passport to travel. I read about a teacher shortage on Guam. I talked on the phone to Chico about it.

          Somewhere along the line, there in the 80s, Chico had started to get vague about what he was up to. He worked for the Army. He lived on an Army base outside Washington, DC, and had an officer’s commission, but he wasn’t actually in the Army. He talked about his “job”, as in, “I was in San Antonio on my job last month, but I couldn’t get in touch with you, Count; Great city,” but he never said what his job was. Once when I began to reminisce about the Good Old Days he told me to watch what I said — “They have my permission to tap my phone.”

          He didn’t say who ‘they’ were, but he was clearly a spook of some sort. Obviously. Maybe DIA. Maybe CIA. I don’t know and I don’t care. But I don’t want him mad at me. Which is why I’m calling him by a bogus name here.

          Anyway, I asked him about Guam and he was positive about it.

          After moving to Guam in the summer (actually, the rainy season) of 1986, I wrote to Chico to convey a mass of my earliest impressions of the place, but he didn’t seem like he wanted to hear it.

          And then, in April or May of 1988, I saw Chico’s name in a story in the Pacific Daily News. It had something to do with his job as an investigator with some Guam government department. Bureaucratic investigator? On Guam? I phoned him at his department. When I got through to him his response was, “Well, Count, it looks like you’ve found me.”

          Now, I asked myself, what kind of a response is that? This guy was once more or less my best friend. We’d kept in touch for over 20 years. We’d spoken to each other less than two years before. He’d clearly been back on Guam himself for some time without getting in touch with me. What was this shit — were we playing hide and seek? Why? How come I hadn’t known that we were? What a bunch of crap.

          We didn’t talk for long, and he kept it vague. He didn’t suggest that we meet for lunch, let alone invite my wife and me over for dinner. And I didn’t suggest or invite, either. He gave me the phone number of his desk’s direct line, so if I wanted to call him again I wouldn’t have to go through the departmental switchboard. Big fucken deal. I didn’t have any idea what he was up to and I didn’t want to find out. I confess that when we’d finished our little chat and hung up our phones I felt creepy and frightened.