The Troubadours: Description

       THE TROUBADOURS tells the story of seven men who meet living in a rooming house in Oak Park outside Chicago during college, before the world changes for all of them forever.  It follows them for the next thirty years of their lives until they are fifty. 

     Laurent, who arrives from Paris, France with what he calls a hi-fi and his Frank Sinatra records, is at the center of this group as he searches his ancestry.  Ethan MacKenzie finds himself at the rooming house when his parents turn him away from their home after he comes out as being gay to them.  Tim O’Brian is the reckless Black Sheep of his wealthy River Forest family, filled with enough charisma to turn any gathering into a party.  Irish Catholic Dan Cleary provides the group’s moral compass while quiet Tyler Vernon’s music pushes him to the limelight.  Ross Whitman is the reluctant member of the group drawn into it despite his resistance.  But it is the narrator, Tom, who provides the thing the group needs more than anything– undying loyalty that unites these men who meet as boys, and the women they love, forever.

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THE TROUBADOURS

 

                                                           The Troubadours

                                                                   A Work of Fiction

                                                                               by T. Patrick Mulroe, Jr.

          

PROLOGUE

                    

                                          _________Prologue_________

          The boy who could have been my son is getting married today.  If my own youth had been different there might have been someone to advise me, while I was still impressionable, against returning to the scene of the crime.  I might not hold the scorn or judgments that occupy the deep recesses of my heart had my early life known an individual like that, a person who would have been able to warn me against returning to this rooming house in Oak Park. Instead, I have attempted to create a world around it.  What hushed dreams must have lived in whispered thoughts, through the tight hallways and aging corridors of the very place where I stood only a few years back when my heart still knew such a large capacity for wonder.  How foolish I had been to hold something that I was too young to even play with, the hope that had flowered like the first green signs of spring against a crust of left behind snow after a hard won winter.  I had no business returning to this rooming house the way that I did, slamming into it as water does a pier, always demanding from it what I would never be allowed to behold again.

            An El Train passes on the way to Downtown, Chicago as I stand on the porch of the rooming house with Smitty Rion who uses a cane these days to walk because of his sciatica.  He is exasperated as he explains the thing he told me over the phone, that the second floor bathroom is flooded.  The sink is clogged. When I bought the rooming house I made Smitty the On-Site Manager. He calls me often with problems. The roomers at the house take as little if not less care of things as my kids do. Physical work I have avoided all of my life appeals to me these days.

          I smoke a cigar from the wedding on the porch with Smitty, his phone call taking me from a wedding reception.     

     “I never wore a suit in my whole life!” Smitty says, his eyes on mine.

     “They’re overrated,” I tell him.

     “You look like a movie star!” Smitty says. “Like someone who went to Harvard!”

I nod, reminded that Smitty recalls when I left the rooming house to attend Harvard.   He looks away as I drop the cigar to the ground, smashing it beneath the pointed toe of my black tasseled loafer from Italy that my wife paid a fortune for. We go into the rooming house.

     “Bad habit my wife doesn‘t know about,” I mutter to Smitty.

     “In school I just tried to get by,” Smitty says.

I begin to climb the winding staircase to the second floor.

     “Funny,” Smitty says to me, behind me on the stairs. “Now that’s all I’m doing in life these days, just getting by.”

We are both silent for an awkward moment as I remove my suit jacket, hanging it on the same banister where I once hung a backpack when I lived in the house.  On my back beneath the sink, in shirtsleeves with the tie my wife more than likely paid a king’s ransom for to match my suit for the wedding splattered across my rumpled white shirtfront, I think about living in the rooming house while I work at the pipe causing trouble.  My mind goes, of course, to the Troubadours.

       I stood in the vacant room at the front of the rooming house earlier this afternoon waiting for Joel. He called my cell phone to tell me he would drop off the keys to the room he rented from me since he came home from college last May. His mother had been on my mind for weeks, because of the wedding.  Rita’s son was getting married.

      Joel stood in the center of the room we were in on the second floor of Clinton House, the rooming house, this afternoon.

      “Meg will kill me if I’m late for the wedding,” he said. 

       “So it begins,” I grinned. “They never really kill you, Joel. Wives just make you wish that you were dead at times.”

He smiled. His mother’s smile. It weakened me at the knees each time I saw it. I turned away, remembering seeing that smile on her face in that very room.  An odd notion rushed through me. It was the room. The entire time he rented it from me I debated telling him that it was Rita’s room when I first met her. The room was blue then. I looked at the walls just painted white earlier this week after Joel moved out.  The entire rooming house was blue when I first saw it, for years after that. The halls and the foyer downstairs.  Rita hated the color blue because of it. Joel was getting married, I thought.  I wanted to tell Joel that it was Rita’s room, perhaps more for me than for him.  I wanted her there.

      The words did not come easy. I had to look away from Joel to say them. He was anxious to go, afraid of disappointing the girl who would become his wife or his future in-laws. Outside an El Train passed by on the elevated tracks across the street.

      “I want to tell you something,” I said

       “Not to get married?” he grinned. 

        “Run like hell!” I told him, smiling.

He smiled so that Rita danced all over his face.

        “No–it’s about your mother.”

        “Carol?”

        “Rita.”

He nodded, a serious look crossing his face.

         “I know about you and her,” he said. “Carol told me about the boating accident, that place near Boston.”

         “Truro,” I said in a low tone. “Cape Cod.”

I had told him before about Rita.  He knew she died. Carol had told him that it was a boating accident.

        “She lived in this house when I met her,” I said.

       “I know you’re my father, Tom,” Joel said to me. “I’ve always known, forever.”

This surprised me. I looked up at him.  Me–his father?

  “It wasn’t hard to figure out,” he said. “You’re the reason I’m not screwed up the way she was. She didn’t have a father. I had Bob, then you once he was gone. Carol and Bob will always be my parents, great parents, but knowing you were out there saved me. It kept me from being insane about it all the time. I’d look at you and know where I came from.”

       “Joel…”

       “I was lucky,” he said. “You were there for me, almost my whole life. Other people have to look for their biological parents. You found me.”

I swallowed hard.

       “It saved me, knowing that,” he said. “I mean, it must’ve been hard for you when I was born. You were young, both of you. I had good parents, a good life. You gave me a good life, Tom. That saved me. I know you did it to give me a good life.”

I stood speechless.

        “If you threw me away like garbage it’d be different, like I didn’t matter,” he told me. “But you didn’t. You were there for me in your own way, when you could be.”

I thought about Rita being told to have an abortion, throw this boy away.

      “Bob is always going to be my father, the dad who taught me to ride a bike and play baseball,” Joel said. “But you’re Tom, right behind him. I was lucky to have that, to have you.”

I stood silent, unable or willing to tell him the truth. How could I tell him about his biological father who wanted to throw him away, abort him? So I stood silent, letting him believe that I was his father because in the ways that counted I had been. In so many ways he was one of my sons.

       

            

   

PART ONE: False Spring

One

 

    Vito Sheridan sat waiting for his phone to ring the winter that I was twenty. He was alone when we came upon him, sitting on the soft cushioned chair in his rented room at the back of the rooming house. The black and white television set, which was placed on the dresser, was turned on but Vito wasn’t watching it. The sound was off. Outside, beyond the frosted glass of the windows which looked out over the El Tracks and South Boulevard stained with a scar of ice at the intersection where the Seven-Eleven stood surrounded by the ash-white blacktop of the street, a cold January Night Sky had descended upon the Chicago Suburb.  The filtered sun of late afternoon, that barely melted a dusting from the night before on the front porch of the rooming house, was gone.  Oak Park was freezing. Vito sat waiting, he told us, for a phone call from his son.

     A cold chill crept over me as we came upon Vito waiting. Ethan MacKenzie, Tim O’Brian, Tyler Vernon and Dan Cleary were with me.  Ross Whitman  stood in the opened doorway of his room in stocking feet looking bemused at the prospect of our going out on such a freezing cold night, none of us having a car.   Studious and mysterious because he had had a life before meeting the lot of us–he had been a Merchant Marine right out of high school–Ross only came out with us, as Tim O’Brian always claimed, at gunpoint.  Tim had known Ross first, before the rest of us.  He claimed the strong work ethic came to Ross because his father was a Presbyterian Minister.  To the rest of us it just added a bit to the allure that was Ross.  All of us were in classes together at Triton Community College.  We met working on the school newspaper, before living together in the rooming house.

     Vito told us that it was his birthday. I could tell that he was wondering if this was the year that his son would forget to call. We had come to ask Vito if we could use his phone. He was one of the few people living in the rooming house who had a telephone.  It was an old fashioned one, black rotary dial.  None of us had one because of the extra cost, let alone a cell phone.  Even Tim O’Brian, who had come from Old River Forest Money, didn’t carry a cell phone.  A fact that bothered his parents who supplied enough monthly funds for him to afford one.  Tim liked to spend the money his family provided him in other recreational ways. Most of the time girls we dated had cell phones.  When girls were not around we often had to pump coins into public phones the old fashioned way.  We used the pay phone at the Seven-Eleven when it was good weather. There were two phones in the post office on Lake Street, indoors. The post office was closed. Vito was our best option for a quick call before we went out. He told us that he had to keep the line open because his son was going to call.

     We watched Vito stand up. He walked to the closet where he found and old gray sweater he pulled on over his flannel shirt.

     “Even my long underwear ain’t keepin’ me warm tonight!” Vito told us. “What the hell is wrong with them realtors? I’m gonna’ ring ’em up on Monday an’ give ’em a piece of my mind!”

Realtors had taken over the management of the rooming house.  A rumor had passed through the house, from the old men who had inhabited the rooms for years before us– sometimes decades in the case of Vito– to the newest and youngest tenants that the rooming house had recently been sold to a woman who intended to live in the first floor apartment with her daughter.  Until this supposed new owner arrived the rooming house was being handled, poorly Vito and many of the other Old timers believed, by realtors.

     “Old Mrs. Garrison never kept the place so cold when she and the preacher owned it,” Vito said. “Not the last owner either. If he didn’t move away it wouldn’t be like this! No respectable person who cared ‘bout people would keep it this cold!”

Vito had been living in rooming houses since he left Iowa decades earlier. He’d liked this one until the realtors took over. Vito had lived in the large red three-story rooming house on the corners of Clinton and South Boulevard for twenty-three years. None of us could imagine living in the house so long. We were all planning to move out as soon as we could, when our real lives began.

      Ethan wanted to travel the world first, then said he would live in New York– possibly owning an art gallery hosting showings he said would define our time.  Tim O’Brian was destined for money.  It was in his River Forest blood.  Whatever he did Tim would be rich.  We all knew that.  Tyler Vernon was shy and quiet in a way girls loved along with his boyish good looks.  He came to life on stage with his band.  Tyler,  we were all sure, would be a famous musician.  Dan Cleary could be president.  People loved him.  They were drawn to him.  He belonged in politics shaking hands and kissing babies.  Ross Whitman was going to bring peace to the Middle East.  More traveled than the rest of us, even Tim who had been everywhere as a kid with his family, Ross could end the wars of the world as we knew them.  I planned to go to Harvard.   It was the only goal I had at the time.  Not to graduate Harvard, but to go there.  I just knew I had to go there.  It was something I had known since I first read about the school at the age of sixteen.  None of us would be in the rooming house for very long.

     Different things had brought us to the rooming house and the classes we shared at community college.  Ross Whitman had returned from sea looking for direction.  His father suggested community college before he decided on a four-year-school.  The rooming house gave him the independence he needed from his family home in North Oak Park a little more than a mile away.  Tim O’Brian was banned from his estate in neighboring River Forest after returning home for Christmas from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois on academic probation.  Since high school Tim said he had been the Black Sheep in his family.  The day he left for college his bags were emptied in the living room by the maid before the entire family, all eleven of his siblings and his two parents, in a search for drugs.  Tim talked with scorn of how little his family thought of him when he told the story,then snickered because the drugs they were looking for were in the shoes he was wearing.  Tyler Vernon’s salesman father had bartered with his son who wanted to play and sing with the band after high school.  He had to attend college classes somewhere, at least at a community college.  Dan Cleary was from Boston.  He’d attended Notre Dame but found his way to Chicago with a business internship formed on a handshake in a tavern where he worked the summer before I met him.  Ethan MacKenzie had been thrown out of his parents’ home in high school when he announced to them that he was gay.  He had lived in the rooming house the longest.  That winter he started taking classes at the community college because the rest of us were.  I was living in the rooming house for the same reason I attended community college.  It was all I could afford.

      For another twenty minutes that night it all began we listened to Vito Sheridan complain about how cold the rooming house was. Finally, he asked us to listen for the phone while he used the facilities. We all laughed because we knew Vito would urinate all over the toilet seat and the floor. He denied it but I knew he was the one who did it.

        I knew the bathroom habits of the roomers because I cleaned the house to lower my rent each week. Larry Stern was in and out quick like a frightened bird. The small bald man with glasses who always wore a hat even when he was indoors was mild and meek but when he drank late at night he could be heard swearing to himself in his room wildly. Moses Martinez, the deaf man on the third floor who worked at the post office, spent three hours every Saturday taking his weekly bath. Afterwards the entire bathroom would be soaked–drenched. Ethan MacKenzie spent a fair amount of time preparing himself in the bathroom each morning.  Tim O’Brian often bowed to the porcelain God after long nights of drinking and shooting pool down the street at Oak Park Billiards on South Boulevard. Tyler Vernon had a routine.  His showers were quick but he spent plenty of time before the mirror worried about his hair.  An equal amount of time he spent on an anti-gravity machine in his room upside down to perfect his already perfect posture.  Dan Cleary had matinee idol features set on his Irish face highlighted by short dark hair he wore cropped close to his head.  Only his nose, broken too many times boxing, took away from his perfection.  The nose, I thought, gave him character.  He took quick showers and needed no mirror time. I knew their bathroom habits because I cleaned. Vito Sheridan pissed all over the place.  That we all knew.

     When he came back to his room Vito asked if the phone had been ringing while he was gone. He was disappointed that it had not. He grumbled, zippering his pants as he came back into the room.

     “Ya’ boys goin’ out dancing’?” he asked us. “Ya’ gonna’ cut up a rug? I useta’ dance up a storm when I was Ya’re age. Back then I was a kid growin’ up on a farm in Iowa. We’d all go out, buncha’ buddies of mine an’ me. We’d grab some girls an’ go to a dance. Ya’ ever been to a dance hall?”

     “No,” I said.

The short stout man smiled a bit. He had an unpleasant looking face.

     “Don’t seem to have ‘em like they useta’,” he said. “Back home we had plenty. Every Saturday Night we was out dancin’ never stoppin’ till it was time to get with the girls in the weeds.”

We all grinned at this.

     “Let me give ya’ boys some advice ‘bout women! Ya’ watch ‘em. They’ll grab ya’!  Grab ya‘ fast, they will!”

We all laughed.

     “Don’t laugh!” Vito said. Some farm girl will come up an’ grab ya’! She’ll want ya’ to get married. She’ll tell ya’ anything’ to get what she wants!”

     “I always warn you boys about women,” Ethan said, laughing at his own joke.

     “The president could have used that advice, Vito!” Dan Cleary stated in his heavy Boston accent.

      “Disgrace, that is,” Vito said.  “The man running the country running around the White House with his pants down around his knees!”

      “Old guard, Vito,” Dan Cleary assured him.  “The country is ready for a change.  There’s going to be a big change when we get a republican in the Oval Office next year.  Wait and see!”

        “Republicans!” Vito said in a tone of distaste. “ Save ya’re money if ya’ intend to get one of them in the White House!  Get an apartment so ya’ can get outta’ here. Ya’ don’t want to end up in a place like this!

We stopped laughing.

     “When I was nineteen I got married,” Vito told us. “Let her talk me into it. I said I ain’t got no money, only ’nough for me to get by myself, what I could make every week an’ not drink up. I told her I didn’t have no place to live.”

We listened.

     “We go on over to her parents’ house an’ I sit down with her Pa’–askin’ him for her,” Vito said. “He said it was okay. Fine. Take her. So I did. We moved into a room it occurs to me was like this one– small. On Second Avenue back home, Iowa. We lived there for almost a year before the kids started to come.”

Vito shook his head at the memory.

     “That girl had never done a day’s work before I married her,” he told us. “She had me doin’ all the women work. She couldn’t cook or clean.  I sat her down and told her. Lookey here, I says. Ya’ gotta’ start learnin’ to do things!”

He looked at us.

     “Ya’ think she did?”

I shrugged.

     “Acted like she was gonna’ but didn’t learn a damned thin,” Vito said. “Dumb as a stump, still had me doin’ everythin’!”

     “Dumb like a fox,” Ethan grinned.

We all laughed.

     “Don’t trust ’em women!” Vito warned us. ’Ya’ don’t know what they got planned. Ya’ jest don’t know!”

Vito stood nodding, telling us he was sorry that he couldn’t let us use his phone that night. His son was going to call because it was his birthday.

     As we were leaving to go use the pay phone outside despite the cold we all heard a loud bang then a grunt from the foyer.  Tim hurried down the winding staircase first, high on his natural adrenalin and whatever substances he might have used that night.  Tyler and Dan were right behind him.  Ross Whitman had ventured from his room in stocking feet. Ethan stood perched on the landing.  Snow and cold were blowing in through the front door that was propped open.  I looked over the railing to see an old fashioned hi-fi stuck in the doorway.

     “What the fuck?” Tim O’Brian demanded.

     “It’s an old hi-fi!” Dan Cleary said.  “My grandmother had one she always played every Saturday back in Boston.”

      “A hi-fi?” I asked.

     “It plays music!” Tyler Vernon told me.

     “Music?” a voice I did not know said from the foyer.  “No–not just music!  Magic!  It plays magic is what it plays!”

Straining I could see him now.  Tall and lean he was better looking than any of us with dark wavy hair and olive skin.  As Ethan and I came down the stairs he held out his hand to us as he had to the others.

     “Laurent!” he said.  “From France, Paris.”

It was the only name he ever gave us.  All we ever knew him as.  Laurent from France. 

     He announced that he was moving into room number nine on the third floor.  The one we called the penthouse because it was really two rooms.  There was a small windowless area where the last tenant who had been arrested for drugs kept a bed, then a longer space containing a sofa and chairs.  An actual space to sit unlike the other rooms, some of which did not even host a chair.  The ceilings in room number nine at the top of the house were slanted like dormers or an attic.  From the front windows there was a view of the train tracks of course and beautiful sunsets.  We had all gone up there after the arrest of the last tenant, climbing past the yellow crime scene tape.  Laurent from France was the new guy in the house, moving into the penthouse on the third floor.  That winter night, when it all truly began for us I believed, we helped him free his hi-fi from the clutches of the narrow front door of the rooming house and lugged it up the narrow winding staircase together. 

     On the second floor Vito Sheridan recognized the hi-fi for what it was.  As we struggled and strained with it he stood talking about nights he had spent listening to music and dancing.  Of course he talked about dancing.  Everything with Vito Sheridan was about the dancing he had done when he was young.      

      Vito called out to me as we were leaving.  Laurent was moved in.  He was coming with us because he had the one thing none of did–a car.  Ross was being ‘kidnapped’ by the others from his studies into that car at the moment, forced to associate with us.  It was not that Ross did not party.  He just did not party with us.  That night changed that.  As I was leaving Vito Sheridan called out to me.

    “I’d let ya’ use the phone but my son’s gonna’ call,” he said to me again. “It’s my birthday.”

I nodded.

     “How old are you, Vito?” I asked.

     “Seventy-seven,” he said.

     “That’s great,” I said.

     “How old are you?” he asked me.

     “Twenty,” I told him.   

     “That’s great–twenty!” he said.

I laughed.

     “Go out and get dancing’!” he told me. “I gotta’ keep the line open for my son or I’d let ya’ call ’em girls ya’ always have up in ya’re room from here.”

I nodded, turning to leave.

     “Hey, Kid!” he called after me.

I turned toward him.

     “What I said ’bout women ain’t all true,” he told me. “My wife never gave me nothin’ for my birthday. We never had two nickels to rub together. No money. But in the night she would wake up an’ call out my name, tell me Happy Birthday.  Happy Birthday, Vito!”

He was quiet a moment. His mouth hung open with a stretch of saliva strung between his lips. His son wasn’t going to call. Vito knew it. I could see it in his eyes.

     “That’s what women are,” he told me. “They’re warm an’ soft, someone to wish ya’ Happy Birthday in the middle of the night when nobody else in the world much cares or remembers.”

I looked down the hallway at him.

       “Happy birthday, Vito!” I said.

      “Watch out for women! They’ll surprise ya’,” he told me. “They’re liable to do anythin’!”

We did not say another word to one another, each of us I was sure thinking about women.

Two

        Spring arrived unannounced on a sunny Saturday in Mid-February. For weeks, even before Ground Hog Day when the prediction had been for an early end to winter, mild weather surprised weary Midwesterners as they awaited a cold front or big storm.  In the rooming house Smitty Rion greeted the warm weather eagerly with the announcement that he was going to the park. Saturday was his favorite day of the week because it was all his. He did not work at the parking garage as a parking attendant on Saturdays. On Fridays he could be heard in the rooming house saying the same thing to himself week after week, Friday Night, my delight!

     As he finished dressing I watched Smitty turn away from the reflection in the mirror. Smitty had lived in the rooming house for nearly five years, before any of the rest of us except for Vito Sheridan arrived.  His tall body was hunched as if he was walking into the wind. He had greased black hair stuck to his head and a long narrow face covered with bad acne. Smitty had too many ailments for a man of thirty. That day he was going to the park. I was going to walk with him on my way to the community college library to study.

     Smitty wondered aloud if he needed his winter coat as he gathered the colored pencils that Ethan MacKenzie, who loved art as much as life he said, had given to him for his birthday in January. It was sixty degrees outside.

     “Who needs a winter coat?” Smitty called down the hallway to where Ethan MacKenzie was with his friend Porky.

They were in Ethan’s room with the door open.  Music poured from the hi-fi stereo in Laurent’s room. Frank Sinatra as was usually the case, FLY ME TO THE MOON. I saw Smitty hold up the pencils for Ethan to see.

     “My mother would tell me that I’m crazy, not wearing a coat in February!”

Smitty said. “But today it’s spring!”

As he pulled on his spring jacket I could see that Smitty fancied himself a free spirit for the afternoon. It was the reason that he had called down the hall to Ethan MacKenzie. Prior to Laurent Ethan was the only free spirit any of us knew.

        When the park loomed ahead of us it was barren. I could see Smitty’s face dropa bit at the sight of the empty benches.

     “From time to time I think about going to other parks,” Smitty told me. “But they wait for me at this park.”

We were in Lindberg Park.

     “They?” I asked.

     “A group of us who are always here in good weather on Saturdays,” he said.

I nodded, glad that Smitty had friends.  He seemed to live a sad life I thought often as I ran in and out to my own busy life that was filled with school, work and friends.

     The place Smitty Rion called his own was a bench in full view of the volleyball nets that were not up yet because it was winter still on the calendar. Smitty stood looking at it for a long few moments, taking in the peeling green paint, before sitting down to make use of his sketchbook. I lingered for a few moments before heading to the library on campus. It was good to be outside.

     Smitty scribbled at first then started to draw the volleyball nets as if they were there. An elderly couple walked past us and smiled. I saw Smitty smile back at his ‘friends’ as he called them. An aging man who was bundled tight in too much winter clothing stopped at the bench.

     “Enjoy the false spring!” he told us.

Smitty nodded, proud to be in his spring jacket I could tell as he let the warm sunshine wash over his face. He loved being out at the park.

    For months Smitty’s Saturdays had been spent in his room watching the fuzzy television set that his mother had given to him, telling me that it was his only link to reality.

     “There they are,” Smitty told me. “I knew that they would come out today!”

The “they” Smitty spoke of rushed onto the tennis court. He told me that they were regulars, part of the park’s life during the warm months the way that he was. Smitty watched them before looking through some drawings he had made of them the previous summer.

     Two girls who were young, junior high I thought, carried a kite in their hands as they past us. They stopped near the tennis courts. Smitty smiled at them as he started to sketch the scene of them and the tennis players onto his pad. I heard the girls begin to laugh the way that girls that age can laugh so that it cuts through a person to the core. Smitty raised his arm. He waved to one of the tennis players.

     “Look who’s back!” one of them said to the other.

Smitty was aglow with their recognition of him.

     “The weird guy with the sketchbook,” the other player laughed.

     “Hey, Buddy!” the first player who spoke shouted toward us. “Take a picture. It lasts longer!”

The two tennis players began to laugh as the girls with the kite became hysterical.

     “Freak!” one of the tennis players yelled. “Stop drawing us, You Homo!”  

Smitty sat silent with his face flushed before he stood. I followed him. He walked in a driven manner. At the trashcan he threw the sketchbook and colored pencils that Ethan MacKenzie had given him away. He left the park. Smitty rushed back to the rooming house I supposed where I was sure that he would sit in the dark of his room watching old movies on the fuzzy black and white television set.

     That night when Ethan MacKenzie and his friend Porky came in I told them what had happened. Ethan was wearing the big green coat his father had given to him. It was the only thing he had from his father, a reminder of his family  before he was thrown out of their lives for speaking to them who he was. Porky called the coat Ethan’s “fur” because the hood was lined with coyote fur that Ethan took such pride over.

     “There are people who live and die alone in this world.” Ethan said.  “I’m afraid Smitty is one of them.”

       “That’s a terrible thing to say, Ethan!” a voice full of anger and astonishment said from behind me.

It belonged to Rita Billington who lived with her mother in the apartment that occupied the entire first floor of the rooming house.  Sandra Billington was the new owner of the rooming house.  She and her daughter had moved into the house the week before Valentine’s Day when Chicago was still hosting sub-zero temperatures.

       Our age, Rita was bookish with a pale face hidden behind glasses and brown mousey hair worn too straight and long. 

       “I speak the truth,” Ethan said to her then turned toward me.  “Don’t I, Tom?”

I nodded.

      “Ethan always speaks his truth,” I said.

A look of satisfaction crossed Rita’s face as she began to turn on Ethan.  He wore a similar expression.  It was my gift, the ability to appease all members of a group.

      “Smitty is just special,” Rita stammered.  “Not everyone can appreciate him!”

I nodded.  Ethan turned to leave.  Rita stormed after him as if she was his shadow.  He did not have a chance of making it to his door before she stopped him.  Ethan’s friend, Porky, looked uneasy standing alongside them.  At just that time Laurent appeared in the second floor hallway of the rooming house naked.  Seeing Rita he put on a towel.  All of his wavy dark hair was slicked back from a shower.

       “Such a long face, Cheri,” he stated looking at her.  “This is no time for sorrow.  We are about to descend upon the city of Chicago.”

       “Descend?” Rita asked, her pale face still red from the near explosion with Ethan.  “Who are WE?”

       “Tim is leading us,” Laurent said.  “Ross might join us.”

       “Fat chance at that,” Ethan grunted.  “Ross only goes out under duress.”

       “You won’t see Chicago with those two,” Rita stated.  “They’ll have you getting high at Montrose Harbor before the police pick you up.”

I grinned at that.  None of us had impressed Rita much when we first met.  Tim and Ross were the lowest on her list, getting high together in Ross‘ room at the time.  Laurent was the exception, no surprise.  He had a way with women.  Tim claimed it was because he was French, from Paris.  He was different from the rest of us.  In addition to having a car and a cell phone Laurent had an apartment in the city that he kept where he entertained the many women, not girls, that he dated. 

       “Come then,” Laurent said,  “You must, Cheri!  Save me from this thing!”

       “We’ll come,” Ethan said.

Porky was silent.  He nodded.  Rita hesitated. She looked toward me.  I nodded that I would come.

       The front door slammed closed down in the foyer.  Dan Cleary climbed the stairs toward us.  He agreed to come.  His thick Boston accent bellowed through the hallway as he attempted to convince Ross to join us.  Laurent said that he would get Ross to come.  The rest of us waited in the car with the heat barely working on the night that had turned from spring-like to February in Chicago very quickly again, too many of us crammed into the ancient Saab as usual.  Laurent came out of the rooming house with his arm wrapped around a struggling, laughing, Ross.  We all cheered as they forced their way into the car with us.  Pulling away from the rooming house I glanced back toward the dim light of television in Smitty Rion’s room.  I imagined him alone.  As we drove off I was thinking about what Ethan had said earlier.  There were people who lived and died alone.  Smitty might be one of them, but I was not.  This, being surrounded by too many laughing people in an old Saab headed who knew where, was saving me from that.  In that moment I knew that as long as I was somehow part of this group,

connected to them by any fabric of intimacy, I would never be alone.  

Three

       Summer that year went quickly.  We all were caught up in our summer jobs,positions we worked full-time because we were not in school.  Ethan and I worked at the Oak Park Community Center with school-aged kids.  I was a camp counselor.  Ethan taught art workshops, going from site to site.  Dan Cleary returned to Boston where he worked with the post office, a summer job his father who had been a Braintree Mailman for years urged him to take.  Before he left Dan told me that the real reason he was moving back to Boston to work the summer was to work with his father and spend time with his parents and nine siblings.  Dan’s family, like Tim’s,had the Irish Catholic business of large families down.  Tyler Vernon had a landscaping job in nearby Forest Park where his family lived.  Tim O’Brian worked at the MARS Candy Factory, work he hated but took on to earn as much money as he could over the weeks stretching between June and September in order to prove to his parents that he was ready to return to NIU in DeKalb.  Ross was in the Middle East with his father’s church building bridges.  Laurent did not work, sleeping most of the day and dating a series of women the rest of us were in awe of.

       In Mid-July a tragedy stunned us all.  John Kennedy, Junior’s plane went missing somewhere off Cape Cod outside of Boston, a place I had only read about.  John, his wife and her sister were gone.  The country was grieving a Kennedy once again.  Ethan decided we all had to be together again as soon as possible.  It was imperative he told me that we all be close enough to touch. 

        The third Sunday in August Ross returned to his father’s church from Beruit to give a report of the work he had been doing all summer.  Dan had come back from Boston a week earlier.  Ethan said we had to celebrate the fact that we were all in the house together again.  I agreed.  The week prior to Ross’ return we began to plan something special.  A trip to the Michigan Dunes. 

         From the post office each night that week I made phone calls to people we knew from Triton College.  Ethan worked on activities.  Everyone said they would come.  Tim had the day off of the factory.  Tyler was not landscaping.  Laurent convinced Rita Billington to join us.  All of us agreed that the most difficult part would be getting Ross to attend something he would see as frivolous.  Tim assured us that he was hatching a plan to make sure Ross came to the dunes with us.

        The subject of Ross had been a sore one with Tim all summer.  Prior to leaving Ethan staged a gathering in the woods, one of the many picnics and outings he began to plan that spring.  Seated on a picnic table getting high Tim told Ross in front of all of us that he expected letters and postcards that summer.

         “Don’t expect,” Ross told him.  “Be surprised.”

Seated near me Maggie Hampton sighed.  Her soft round features had gone hard.  She was frustrated by an attraction she did not want to have to Ross.

         “A crush on him is just so typical!” Maggie told me.

Her dark hair fell into her eyes as she spoke.  The one thing I knew from the short while I had known Maggie Hampton, in a journalism class Ross and I had with her, at Triton Community College was that she did not want to be typical.  The obvious crushes other girls had on Ross disgusted her.  She rolled her eyes as he came into class in shorts with a colorful bandanna wrapped around his blond head and a pair of sandals in his hands, having skateboarded barefoot from Oak Park.  After class she would complain to me about the typical girls with their typical crush on the typical guy.  By the time Ethan had his picnic in the woods late that spring before Dan and Ross left for the summer Maggie Hampton gave into her attraction.  Listening to Ross tell Tim not to expect a letter or postcard but to be surprised if one came Maggie sighed heavily.  She rolled her eyes at me.

      “Ross Whitman!” she muttered.  “What a person to have to meet in life!”

I laughed.  As promised Ross did not send a letter or postcard to Tim.  Each afternoon Tim checked the mail left on the radiator in the foyer of the rooming house for one but nothing ever came.  The day Laurent had a postcard from Ross hurt Tim.  I could tell.

      We gathered at the rooming house early that Sunday.  A series of vehicles lined the tree covered street the rooming house was on, Clinton.  The name of our President.  Most of them belonged to the people we had invited or their parents.  Seated on one of the metal chairs of the front porch Ethan was calm.  I was worried that this gathering we planned would not happen.  What if the people we invited did not come?  Ethan assured me they would.  I worried, my nature.  He was right.  By nine o’clock the porch was filled with people we had invited, some we had not.

       Laurent arrived from his apartment in the city where he spent most of his time with the latest woman he was dating, Deirdre. She was tall like him with blonde hair Maggie Hampton told me must have come from a salon.

       “You can’t get that out of a drugstore bottle,” she said.  “That color blonde only comes from a salon–a very expensive salon.”

Deirdre and Laurent stood in sunglasses and large hats.  Frank Sinatra boomed from the hi-fi in his room, FLY ME TO THE MOON.  It was Laurent’s favorite song.   Laurent and Deirdre, they looked as if they could be in a fashion magazine.  Maggie felt frumpy she said in her jeans and T-shirt alongside them.  Tim wore a golf shirt with his white uniform pants from the MARS Candy Factory.  Tyler Vernon stood with his girlfriend Melinda, both of them blond and tanned in athletic shorts and tank tops.  Being an attractive couple, they did not make Maggie feel any less frumpy.               

    Jake Martin and his girlfriend, Robin, arrived on his Harley.  An ex-Marine Jake, and Robin by association,  was the closest thing to a Biker any of us knew.  He had edited the newspaper for our journalism class at the community college.  Nights Jake worked loading trucks for UPS.  They arrived at the same time Glen Crabtree did.  Glen was devoted to politics.  Others from our journalism class would argue with Dan Cleary over his republican beliefs.  Glen Crabtree made fun of them in a way that even made Dan smile.

       The sight of Jake and his motorcycle excited Ethan.  Jackie from the broadcasting class arrived with her boyfriend Benjamin.  Together they were an odd couple, Jackie quite tall and Benjamin short.  A psych student always smiling Benjamin fit in right away.  Jackie and Ethan howled in the street together.

         “Are you crazy–the beach?” Jackie asked him loud.  “I don’t need to be any darker now, Ethan!”

         “What are you worried about?” Ethan screamed.  “Black don’t crack!”

They laughed and hugged, the rest of us gathered around them on that perfect summer Sunday.

         Dan Cleary brought a pale blonde girl named Mary who he had met the previous winter working for Pro-Life.  Admiring Dan in his usual faded jeans and white T-shirt Ethan told me straight men were wasted.  He had little regard for the flowery dress Mary wore, saying it reminded him of something from the television show THE WALTONS.  Ethan himself was decked out in sumer splendor, an oversized short sleeved cotton shirt that matched the blue and white shorts and shoes that he wore.  His hair was bleached blonde, not from a salon.  Rita Billington, who stood in cut-off shorts and a bikini top, her glasses off and hair lighter from summer in a ponytail,  said he resembled Billy Idol.

       “No–not Billy Idol, Cheri!” Laurent told her.  “Sting, yes!  A young Sting!”

Deirdre nodded behind her dark glasses.

       “Yes, Sting,” she agreed.

This pleased Ethan, I could tell. 

      “Don’t stand so close to me…” he tortured us with his voice.

We all stood together on the porch laughing, begging Ethan to stop.  That’s when it arrived, a dark blue utility van Ethan and I were not expecting driven by Sheila Dobbs, who we knew from school.

     “The Party Wagon is here!” Tim said, jumping down from the top step of the porch.  “Let’s go get Ross!”

We all followed Tim off of the porch.  Each of us was puzzled as to what Tim was up to.  Nobody ever knew what he was up to.  It was the pleasure of knowing him.

     Wearing a suit and tie, Ross Whitman stood at the front of the Presbyterian Church talking about the time he had spent in Beruit that summer building bridges.His hair was cropped shorter to his head than I had ever seen it.  The gray-blue suit he wore and white shirt boasted the deep tan his summer in the Middle East had given him.  A pale blue tie ran down his shirtfront.  His voice was soft but solid as he talked about relations he and his group had worked on while literarly building bridges.  I noticed as he sat down that his feet were in dark dress socks and a pair of black wing tips, unusual because Ross rarely wore shoes.  Listening to him I was impressed.  He seemed more mature somehow, in a good way I thought.

     Outside the church Ross shook hands and talked with one person after another before he was finally alone, moving toward his father’s Volvo.  As he walked across the parking lot behind the church Ross removed his suit jacket.  Tim O’Brian rushed up behind him.  A cigarette poked out of Tim’s mouth.  He offered one to Ross who grinned.  The two of them stopped.  Ross was lighting the cigarette,tossing his suit jacket onto the passenger seat of his father‘s car.  He did not notice the van Sheila Dobbs parked alongside the Volvo.  From where we stood making sure nobody from the front of the church came to the parking lot in that moment Ethan and I saw the side door of the van slide open.  Jake Martin, built like a tank,climbed out with purpose.  I heard Ross protest.

       “What the hell…” he managed to say.

       “Into the Party Wagon!” Tim’s voice said, his charismatic tone loud.

Jake and Tim lifted him off of his feet. One of his black wing tips came off in the struggle.  I turned away to make sure nobody from the small group remaining at the front of the church was coming.  Inside the van Jake and Tim were wrapping Ross like a mummy with several rolls of duct tape.  The coast was clear.  Nobody was coming.  By the time I turned back Ross was wrapped up, grunting and making noise vehemently behind the tape spread across his mouth.  The side door of the van was closed quickly.   Ethan and I rushed to Laurent’s car.  He was on his cell phone, talking into it quickly to Ross’ father.

       “We are taking your son to the beach,” Laurent said into the phone, pulling out of the church parking lot after the dark blue utility van Sheila drove.

A surprised expression covered Laurent’s face.  His eyes were wide now.

       “No, Sir!” he said.  “Not to the Bitch!  To the beach!”

Laurent’s accent I realized as Ethan laughed loud beside me.  All three of us laughed all the way to the rooming house.

         Sheila and Tim drove the van.  Ross was hog-tied in the back of the van, tight knot of his loose with wrinkled tails of his white dress shirt pulled out over the buckle of his belt.

       “MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMPPPPPPPHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!” he grunted louder now, his gagged sweaty face appealing to us.  “MMMPPPPHHHH!!!”

  Laurent and Ethan were in Laurent’s Saab.    Jake nodded toward the back of his motorcyle.  I stood stunned.  Me ride on the back of his bike?  Robin was in one of the cars that left already.  Without a word,not knowing the first thing about what I was doing, I climbed onto the back of the Harley Davidson.  My glasses slid down my nose.  I shoved them up as the bike began to roar beneath us.  As we started to move I grabbed Jake’s waist.

       “That’s what Robin holds onto,” Jake said.  “There’s a strap for you, Tom!”

I found the strap, clutching at it hard the entire way as the wind tore through my hair all the way up to Michigan where we were told there was a helmet law as we stopped for gas.   By then the rush of the ride was with me.  I felt as if I was flying to the moon, living the wildest best time I had ever known in all of my entire life.

          Stripped to a white crewneck undershirt and suit pants Ross was being dragged up a dirt path through the trees on the wooded side of a dune at the campsite we settled on.  He was in stocking feet.  At a picnic table he sat with red rage all over his face.  The girls laughed while Jake and Tim unwrapped the tape that made him look like a mummy.

        “Assholes!”  Ross said, once the gag was removed from his mouth.  “Taken against my will, kidnapping!  Brought across state lines–that’s a fucking federal offense!”

For a moment I worried suddenly.

       “We had to bring you with, Ross.  Even at gunpoint,” Tim said.  “We’re the

Troubadours! You’re one of us. Poets we are bound together by a love, no a lust,for life!  Or in your case… duct tape!” 

Everyone laughed an anxious sort of laugh. 

       “Hand me a beer!” Ross said finally.  “It was fucking hot in that van!”

Now we all laughed.  One of the girls handed him a beer.  Rita Billington sat down alongside him.  She teased him about how he looked like a mummy.  I left them like that, joining the others up the sand dunes in the sun then finally the water.  An hour or so later I saw them again.  Ross had removed his socks and his suit pants.  In his white undershirt and boxers he rushed across the sand with Rita.  Something about the sight of them in that moment froze for me.  It was as if they belonged together I thought.  Two pieces of something joined together, forced upon one another–at last.

         Perched upon the highest dune precariously Tim O’Brian tempted fate by jumping.  As he did he screamed that he was at the top of the world, pretending that he was Leonardo DeCaprio in the TITANTIC movie. 

      “I’m the King of the World!” he yelled.

Ethan and Porky reached him before I did.  Tim was on his back laughing and stoned.  We stood in awe then suddenly of our charismatic, impetuous leader who for us was always at the top of the world.

         Seated around a fire as the sun was starting to disappear over the top of the dunes Laurent became as serious as I had ever seen him.  Jake had asked him why he came to Oak Park from Paris.

        “Hemingway,” he said. 

        “The author?” Jake asked.

         “Ernest Hemingway,” Laurent said.

I had taken Laurent to the birthplace, in Oak Park, of the author when he first arrived because he had asked, then to the other residences in Oak Park I knew where Hemingway had lived as a boy.

         “You like his writing?” Jake asked him.

         “He is my family,” Laurent said.

         “Family?” Ethan declared.  “Now this is getting interesting!”

          “We are his illegitimate family,” Laurent said.  “From his time in Paris.”

          “No shit!”  Tim stated.  “Fuck!”

          “This is the story I am told,” Laurent said.  “All my life I am told so I come.”

          “He was your–grandfather?” Sheila asked.

Laurent nodded.  His silence gave him away to me.  It was what he had been told.  He wanted to believe that he was related to Ernest Hemingway but there was no proof.  He came looking for answers I thought.  That made sense to me.  For the first time I could reconcile what Laurent was doing with us.  He was looking for answers as I had been most my life.  I knew what it was like to wonder.  My biological father had been absent from my life.  There was something in Laurent suddenly that Irecognized, a wanting to believe and know I could relate to.

         Packing up with dusk I climbed the dunes to find Ross and Rita.  Robin rode away with Jake on their Harley.  I was going in the van with Shiela and Tim.  Several cars had left already.  At the top of the dune I saw a thin layer of sunlit sand then the water calm and inviting in the distance.  My feet were buried in the warm yet cool sand to my ankles.  I moved toward the beach side of the dune away from the woods.  Out in the open I stood framed by the approaching night.  As I turned to go back deciding I would not find Ross and Rita I heard them.  Their sounds surprised me.  Stripped to his boxers Ross Whitman was on top of Rita, all of the musloces of his bare back working.  She was naked beneath him. I heard a low groan of deep satifaction rise from Ross as he came into her.  Rita’s eyes looked back at me over his right shoulder.  Without a sound I turned away, taking my time returning to the others.

         When they finally came down the dune Ross and Rita held hands.  He stood without a shirt.  Rita was wearing it.  His boxers looked like swim trunks I thought but the others saw what had happened.  They could tell.  In an angry action Tim slammed his opened palm on the horn of the van.  Grinning, Ross led Rita to where we were waiting.