A Loss of Some Significance
Before we meet Al, first allow me to tell you a story…
This is a sad, funny story about a loss that I suffered as a younger man.
I was a student at Hamilton College, in upstate New York, in the early 1990's.
Hamilton is a quaint, cinematic campus. Like all of the postcard-perfect, ritzy, liberal arts colleges in the New England states, Hamilton is pinned, quite literally, to a classist hilltop (“Hello, down there, Townie commoners!”) by a white-washed and, well, rather turgid chapel. It looms above the town of Clinton, New York at this very moment.
In the summer between my junior and senior years, I made a controversial decision: I chose not to retreat to my backwoods home, as I normally did. Instead, I remained on campus that summer, living in the damp basement of an abandoned fraternity house. The house was of monstrous proportions. Room after room, each more vacant than the last. There was a dedicated library. There was room that was known, to the fraternity brothers, as “the Goat Room.” I served as a kind of live-in security guard for the house. At night, I walked the halls with a flashlight, ensuring that the doors and windows remained locked, making the rounds like the nightwatchman of a ruined estate.
While in my bed, I’d hear clattering noises, upstairs, coming from the far reaches of the mansion. I should have grabbed my flashlight and investigated. I did not do this. Instead, I pulled the covers over my head and prayed that whatever being had gotten inside would not be able to find my basement room.
During the daytime I worked on the campus grounds crew.
We started work at 7 AM sharp each day. We tooled about the campus in handsome, blue pickup trucks, hauling lawnmowers and gas-powered weed eaters, migrating from one breathtaking expanse of verdant lawn to another.
Upstate is humid as all fuck in summer. Because of the stifling humidity, and because we were lazy, we engaged in the bare minimum of groundskeeping. We clandestinely parked in the shade somewhere, in a spot we knew our supervisor would be unlikely to ogle us. Then we bullshitted and played cards and napped the afternoons away.
I was paired with an older man on the grounds crew named Jim. Jim was surprisingly vain——his full head of silver hair, the object of his affection. Jim had a great weakness for chewing gum——a cinnamon-flavoured gum named Big Red. Jim’s jaw worked while he talked. He often looked like an old bovine. I liked Jim a lot. He treated me like I was his long lost son for some reason. Teaching me whatever life lessons he could. Hamilton was rich——filthy rich. Jim and I were poor. We bonded over our shared poverty, mostly.
Jim and I drove around campus at absurdly low speeds—“No reason to rush the day, old chap,” he said to me, slowing our handsome blue truck to a crawl. We puzzled over the confounding mysteries of the fairer sex. What did they want, really? Did they want what we wanted?
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Then Jim and I mowed another lawn, the one around Bundy. Then we puzzled some more.
Sometimes Jim and I were assigned tasks to prep for alumni events that took place on campus in the summer months. For example, we picked up great, iron hibachis. The hibachis the size of dinghies. Thankfully, they were outfitted with wheels, which made their enormous bulk somewhat easier to move. On an afternoon in late June in 1990, Jim and I loaded a dingy-sized hibachi into the back of the pickup truck. Then we set off.
Usually, Jim did the driving. But that day, he begged me to drive. He confessed that he was hungover. Had stayed out in one of the bars downtown later than he’d planned to the night before. I still remember what happened next clearly…
First, Jim leaned his silver mane against the window and shut his eyes tight, his square jaws reliably working away in silence. Was he trying to chew his hangover away? I wondered. Because that’s what it looked like.
I pulled up to a stop sign. Tapped the brake accordingly, bringing us to a halt. It was in this moment that the wheeled hibachi, standing in the flat bed of the truck, began to roll. I watched it in the rearview mirror. The hibachi was slow at first. Then it quickly picked up speed.
The cast iron wheels, turning in the flat bed, sounded like a 747 landing at Hancock Field.
“What hell is that?” Jim asked me.
The iron hibachi exploded through the back window. Glass, now in sand-like slivers, showered over both of us.
Hungover Jim stayed cool. I looked at him, for a clue for what to do next. He calmly instructed me to pull the truck down a nearby alleyway, to park the truck in front of a storage barn. “We’ve got to get out of these fucking clothes,” Jim said. I asked him why. “Why? Because those little bits of glass? Oh, they’re little bastards. They’ll get into all of the untoward places, old chap. Our only option is to get rid of them tout suite.”
And so that’s what we did. Jim and I, both gnawing mindlessly on Big Red, went into the quiet gloom of the barn, peeled off our glass-filled clothing, before the little bastards could get into the so-called untoward places. We both proceeded to strip down to our underwear. I felt relieved to discover that Jim was a tighty-whitey man like myself. We shook out our clothes carefully. The shard-sand of the glass raining down onto the gravel around us. Then we got dressed and headed out with a couple of dustpans, to clean out the cab of the handsome blue truck.
That afternoon, as the two of us drove up to the supervisor’s office on the far side of the campus to confess to Incident 474, as it would become known, the white blowing around the both of us through the blown-out rear window of the cab, Jim told me that he would take the fall for this.
I protested, weakly. “Just follow my lead, old chap,” Jim said. “Got it?”
Jim was awaiting my response. Instead of saying, “Got it,” what I did was this: I told Jim something that I hadn’t planning on telling him; I told him that I had a chronic ache in my twig and berries. He looked at me with big eyes as he drove. He asked if the chronic ache was in the twig or the berries? The berries, for sure. Jim’s face went slack. His jaw continued to churn. “Then you’d better get your ass to the doctor, old chap,” he said.
We went up to the supervisor’s air conditioned office. I stood in the background and stayed quiet as Jim and his Big Red confessed that he had blown out the window of the pickup truck. That he had made an error, for which he was very, very sorry. The supervisor was irritated. He exhaled and began filling out the paperwork for “Incident 474.” Afterward, I thanked Jim. Promised him that I’d call someone. I went back to the lonely hollow of the fraternity house. The sun was going down that afternoon, casting long shadows across the acreage of the vacant Great Room. The floorboards were warped into oblivion from decades of spilled cutrate beer. I made a phone call, the floorboards tilting wantonly beneath my feet——it was honestly akin to walking across the sea-warped deck of an ancient schooner——my voice echoing through the rooms and the myriad stairwells, and I tried to secure an appointment for myself.
