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.

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.