THE
UNFORGETTABLE FALL OF JACK MCGRATH
A Small
Rumination On Friendship
I’ve been thinking a lot about
friendship lately – its contradictions and conundrums -- because two very old and close friends have died in
recent months. The first, Merrill Grant – born and bred in New York City -- was
one of the most honest, self-effacing men I’ve ever known; and also the funniest.
We first met over lunch many years ago when I was trying to recruit him into my
company. Halfway through the
second martini (It was the ‘Mad Men’ era.), we were cautiously feeling each
other out; gossiping a little about the television business and talking eventually
about our families.
I told Merrill that in a few weeks I
was taking my kids on safari to Kenya and Tanzania and was really looking
forward to the trip. Merrill, who
had a distinctly New York accent, broke into a cherubic smile and said:
“Yeah? That’s wild! My old man did the same thing when I
was a kid.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yeah, really … except
it was called the Bronx Zoo.”
I loved Merrill from
that moment on and for the next thirty-five years.
My second friend – Bob
Schneider – was of a different sort entirely: cautious, loath to make decisions and always a bit defensive.
He and Merrill never met; and it’s safe to say each would have disliked the
other. Coming from a very modest background, Bob became a vice-president of
Xerox Corporation and had a career that anyone would consider successful. Yet
his attitudes and his opinions were usually tentative and unsure, and he was
most at home in while sitting on the fence. He once told me a story that – in
all probability -- played an important role in shaping his dedication to studied
neutrality.
When he was a senior in a small-town high school, he became enthralled
with a girl whom he considered “way above his station”; the daughter of the
local bank president. In order to impress her, he began saving money from his part-time
job as a grocery clerk until – after a few months – he’d saved enough to invite
her to dinner at the only “high class” restaurant in the area. Much to his
surprise (and relief), she accepted.
When the night arrived, they were seated by a tuxedoed maitre d’ (intimidating
enough, to say the least) and given menus the likes of which Bob had never
seen. But he studied his carefully as if he knew what he was doing and finally
asked the girl of his dreams what she was going to have.
“I think I’ll have the lobster
bisque.” she said.
“Good choice.” Bob told her.
“But wouldn’t you like some soup first?”
Bob’s life-long philosophy of ‘better safe than sorry’ may
have been born that night. In any
case, he became in time a decent man who avoided risk, never again put his foot
in his mouth and lived a satisfying and largely predictable life. I think of
him as one of an endless and anonymous herd of executives who spend a lifetime
in our giant corporations and retire without a trace. And yet he remained a good
friend long after he faded to self-absorption and ennui in an assisted-living
community.
And then – inevitably --
Jack McGrath came to mind. I met Jack when I was eighteen and innocent. A year
later, I was ten years older.
I’d gotten a job as an
attendant in a private mental hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, and had moved
into a five-bedroom apartment with four other ‘psychiatric aides’ (as we were
charitably called), including Jack who was in his early thirties. The apartment
was a sprawling, five-bedroom wreck (cracked linoleum floors, one bathroom,
green and purple wallpaper) within walking distance of the hospital and – more
importantly – upstairs from a hangout called The Cardinal Bar and Grill,
generally referred to as ‘The Bird’.
My other three roommates –
Carl Ringhouser, Howie Boudreau and Milton Kanzaki – were in their mid to late
twenties and working on ‘advanced degrees’ in psychology and sociology. Since I
was barely out of high school, and had never heard of an ‘advanced degree’, I was
benignly tolerated but generally ignored; except by Jack who with enthusiasm
offered to introduce me to ‘the real world’.
I had no idea at the
time that he was a satyr. I’d never even heard the word. (For anyone unfamiliar
with satyriasis, it’s the male equivalent of nymphomania.) All I knew was that
he was a tall, skinny Irishman who played hard and drank heavily and loved
great jokes and said a lot of outrageous things. He was a great mentor, or so I
thought, for a young kid who’d never been in ‘the real world’ and was aching to
explore it. So Jack’s obsession with sex came as a shock, but not necessarily a
negative one.
Although his audacity
with girls – his outright lasciviousness -- was way beyond the bounds of my imaginings, I did get some
vicarious pleasure from watching him ‘work the room’. Hanging around The Bird night after
night, month after month, he talked and laughed with ‘the guys’ while his eyes
scanned the bar for any female, and I mean ANY female, he might take to
bed. Once he found a target, he
managed to proposition her within five minutes of saying hello. If he were rebuffed,
which was less often than one might think, he took it in stride and just
targeted another female sitting a few barstools down. And needless to say, there
were nights when we had to pull him away from near-fights with boyfriends or
with husbands who were playing pinball at the other end of the bar. Even as we
hustled him back to safety, he’d be laughing and joking and re-scanning the
room. (At one point, Jack thought he’d died and gone to heaven when he met a nurse
who turned out to be a nymphomaniac. The relationship was headed for disaster
when a hastily-organized and very hush-hush intervention forced them to stop
fucking in empty rooms, alleyways, broom closets, shower stalls, and stairwells.
But that’s another story for another time.)
Yet despite his sex addiction, Jack
generated loyalty from an astonishing number of people because he had little
malice in his soul and was, in fact, supremely generous; lending money to
anyone who needed it and never asking for repayment. In fact, he seemed
surprised when people did repay him. Even women who were at first appalled by
him came to accept him and often to like him. He also earned people’s respect
because he was brave beyond bravado and dedicated to his job assignment. As
senior ‘aide’ on the most violent ward in the hospital, he was always the first
to dive into a fight or to try to restrain a patient who’d gone ‘high’. Not
easy, and often dangerous. But he was always there. Always reliable. Always in
good spirits.
And then, suddenly, he wasn’t. Our crazy, tough, free-spirited,
sex-addicted Irishman was gone. I don’t remember how exactly: a heart attack, a
brain embolism. Whatever it was, it struck without warning and killed him
instantly. Nor do I remember how Milton Kanzaki ended up with the urn. But it
was Milton, a shy and awkward intellectual, who remembered Jack insisting one
night that when he died, he wanted to be buried at sea. And Milton – thinking
Jack’s request serious but absurd --had soberly promised he would make it so.
That’s why, after a few days of alcoholic debate, and using money
chipped in by the Bird’s regulars, we chartered a plane in Bridgeport,
Connecticut, to spread Jack’s ashes in the ocean. We could have rented a boat,
of course, but the prospect of a plane ride (suggested, by the way, by an
ex-girlfriend) captured our imaginations. And Jack, we told ourselves, would
have loved it.
We took off on a sweltering summer Saturday in a little plane that
seated three plus the pilot. Milton sat in the copilot’s seat holding the urn,
and Carl and I sat in back. The wings were above the fuselage – which gave us
an unencumbered view below -- and the two side windows were open which gave us
a welcome breeze. As we climbed
past the shoreline, we could see sailboats and motor craft all over Long Island
Sound. Carl claimed he could even see an outline of the Empire State Building
to the west. And when Milton and I turned to look, the inexplicable happened.
Jack’s urn fell out the
window. Milton had balanced it on
the window ledge for only a second and it had somehow slipped his grip. It
happened so quickly that we could only react with shocked silence. Yet,
paradoxically, time seemed to slow as we watched it plummet toward a raucous
flock of seagulls circling a garbage barge almost directly below us; and saw it
land – unbroken -- on a huge mound of human detritus being towed toward a
dumping ground in the open ocean.
And so our flawed true friend, Jack McGrath, -- whom we valued deeply
and will always remember -- was consigned to the sea as promised; but not
exactly as planned.
****
It’s been said that the true test of friendship is time. But that
strikes me as tautological and
self-evident. True friendship
barely recognizes time. If Merrill or Bob or Jack were alive today, we’d pick
up right where we left off; as if no time at all had passed.
So it occurs to me that true friendship usually lasts longer than love,
and is more trustworthy. Almost from the day we’re born, we’re fed the messy and
misleading mythology of love: love conquers all .. all your need is love ..
you’ll find the love of your life .. you’ll live and love happily ever after ..
etc. But whether framed in the
language of sappy romantic novels or great literary masterpieces, we soon find
out that we’re neither Cinderella nor Prince Charming; and that love is at best
a moving target; fickle and ephemeral. And while that may sound cynical or even
bitter to a romantic, the divorce rate alone testifies to its truth.
The fact is that love, in
the end, rarely endures the test of time unless it’s based on and buttressed by
friendship. If we’re not lucky enough (and luck plays a big role) to enjoy both
with a partner, our friendships still endure and support us.
We may separate friends for our own reasons, as I’ve often done, and we
may not even acknowledge them for long periods. But they nonetheless last a
lifetime, and the mutual loyalty that seals them yields its own reward.
Thus the burning question is: why can’t more of us get past the
deceptive mythology of love and realize that fulfillment can be found in true friendship
as well?
It beats me. But I for one am thankful beyond words for friends living
and dead. They’ve made life well worth living.
****
AFTER DINNER MINTS
I worked at the Hartford hospital for nearly five years and
eventually started college. But after the eccentricities of an institution
whose staff was nearly as dysfunctional as its patients, college life seemed
only intermittently interesting. Ultimately, I dropped out.
After three years, we were summarily evicted from our apartment
when Milton Kanzaki – finally learning how to drive -- lost control of Carl’s aged Lincoln
Continental and ripped off an entire corner of the building. The bar owner also
eighty-sixed us, but soon changed his mind when business at The Bird started to
slump.
At about the same time, a new drug called Thorazine (a
great-granddaddy of Valium) was introduced into mental health care. We welcomed
it because violence in the wards dropped dramatically. That the patients seemed
unnaturally mellow and at times trancelike was just fine with the staff and was
taken as a sign of progress ..
which, of course, it wasn’t. A pacified schizophrenic is nonetheless a
schizophrenic.
The nymphomaniac nurse was ultimately fired after a doctor
caught her in bed with one of his patients. Reliable rumor had it she was given a decent severance
package. The patient’s family, as one might expect, was never told.
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