What is the difference between accident and coincidence. An accident is when a thing happens. A coincidence is when a thing is going to happen and does.
āGertrude Stein
But I donāt want to talk about the dead guy.
Itās Sunday, Memorial Day weekend, the year 2000, and Iām in the East Village, counting my pulse. My heart beats too fast. You can hear it over my breathing, like a remix where the bass line, pushed way forward, thrums whatwhat, whatwhat. Itās the caffeine talking. Iām drinking black tea in a coffee shop, fueling up for another hundred years, and reading Saul Bellowās Ravelstein, about a dead guy Everybodyās got one. Mineās Zack. Heās buried in Queens, behind Queens College, where I teach. Though heās been gone six years, his voice is still in my head, hectoring me, raw with complaint. Whatever, as Justin says. Why stress? Everyone is headed for a graveyard in Queens. In the meantime, I try not to hear Zack too clearly or to think about Justin, who is sleeping in my apartment. I crept out this morning without waking him, then came here for my morning caffeine fix. āFriends donāt let friends go to Starbucks,ā says a sign on the counter, where a skinny kid pours my fourth cup of Earl Grey. Heās wearing a knit cap indoors and a T-shirt that says GUIDED BY VOICES.
āThatās me,ā I think, going back to my seat. Iām returning to Ravelstein, trying to turn down the volume on Zackās rasp and Justinās drone, when I look up and do a double take. Strolling into my neighborhood cafĆ© is my high school best friend, Richie McShane. Richard, son of Shane. Heās in a hurry, and heās headed for me.
He comes through the door with spontaneous grace. Thereās no tortured strategizing for Richie. Always the high school point guard, he brings the ball down the court, and you wait to see how he sets you up. The game plan is all in his head, thereās no consulting the coach, and Richie never looks to the sidelines for verification or praise.
āRichie, yo,ā I say, posing as a regular guy. Itās an occupational habit. I teach New York college kids, and I have picked up their slacker lingo: āyo,ā and ādude,ā and āchill,ā and the one I manage least well, āpeace out.ā Itās embarrassing to catch myself talking like a twenty-year-old, but it doesnāt bother Richie. Iāve seen him maybe six times since high schoolāmost recently, last Thanksgivingāand whenever we meet we fall into boyish speech patterns.
āDude,ā I say again.
āDude,ā he nods, as if I were expecting him. He lives an hour away by train, seven miles across Queens in downtown Flushing. What is he doing in my neighborhood? I donāt ask and he doesnāt tell. Instead, he gives a low wave with his outstretched hand and says, āYo.ā
Heās in jeans and a wife-beater T-shirt under a bowling shirt open down the front. On his feet are sandals with rubber soles. Heās broad-shouldered and slim-hipped, Irish Italian, with a fighterās fluid battling stance. The diagonal strap of his mail carrierās bag cuts across his torso like a slash of black on an abstract canvas against the white of his muscle T, flattening the hair on his chest. Richieās head is regal. Heās Fergus, dispossessed Celtic prince, and the back of his skull curves out and arches high, like a natural crown. His dark brown hair, short and tightly curled like Caesarās, retreats from the dome of his brow.
āHey, old buddy,ā he says, coming toward me, using his dadās phrase. Richieās dad was a gambler and, when I knew him, an ex-cop, a working-class Irish guy with Humphrey Bogartās raspy voice and his slight lisp. I never met a man with more beautiful manners. He was polite as a detective luring you into a sting, and he called everyone āold buddy,ā including his son.
Like his dad, Richie is corrosive and neat. He holds his fist straight out and we knock knuckles as if we were still kids.
āWhatās going on?ā he says, sitting down. He leans forward, studying my face, and reaches out with a thumb to wipe a crumb off my chin, an unconscious gesture of what Saul Bellow calls āpotato loveā: fuzzy warmth, Momās embrace, a reference to our common fate, humankind. All touch is a presentiment of death. Thatās what I said to Richie once in 1979, when I was a senior at Kenyon College in Ohio writing an Honors Thesis, āThe Past Tense in Ernest Hemingway.ā I spent a whole year counting the verbs in The Sun Also Rises and separating them into groups: verbs of action, verbs of reflection.
When I wasnāt busy with Hemingway, I called Richie from the dorm phone, trying to sound like an existential poet. āWeāre flawed, Richie,ā Iād say. āIf we were perfect, weād be one. Iād grab my wrist and get you.ā He was walking the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and I heard the rise and fall of stocks in the crackle of his voice. āAll right, Jesus,ā he said. āYou coming home for Christmas?ā
Now his thumb is on my chin, quick, automatic. He pulls back and draws his shoulder bag over his head, ducking out from under the strap like a rock star unloading an electric guitar. He sets the bag down and points at my chest. āTexas is the reason for what?ā he asks.
He means the logo on my shirt: TEXAS IS THE REASON, it says in big letters, next to the Texas state symbol, a star.
āItās not mine,ā I say, plucking at my collar, half hoping Richie will ask, āNot yours? Then whose?ā And I could tell him what happened yesterday with Justin. Richie would be the perfect guy to confide in: Heās an old friend, but a distant one. We have known each other for more than twenty-five years, but still, he doesnāt like to pry.
āOf course itās not yours,ā he says, noncommitally. I wish he were willing to be nosy, because I need to talk about Justin. Richie would probably like him, though he would have hated my dead friend Zack. I made sure they never met. I try to keep people in separate containers, like the capsules in Zackās divided pill box: Paxil, Haldol, AZT, d4T, Extra Strength Tylenol. Lately, though, their voices have been dissolving and combining in my head like mixed medications.
Dead people talk to me, and the living scold. Richie wants to know what the hell my shirt means. The dead guy gets personal. āYouāre over forty,ā I hear Zack saying. āArenāt you too old to be wearing a teenagerās T-shirt?ā
Justin is not a teenager. Heās twenty-five. I wave my hand, like, āBack off.ā Richie, who believes I am talking only to him, takes the hint and starts again.
āSo,ā he says, making nice. āYou lost weight.ā
āYeah,ā I say, both sorry and grateful that he doesnāt want to know about my private life. āYeah,ā I repeat. āI had to.ā
āYou look good.ā
āI couldnāt have gained more. There wasnāt any stock left in the warehouse.ā
Now heās grinning. He approves of me, which makes me absurdly happy. āYou look exactly the same, Richie, of course,ā I tell him truthfully.
āItād be nice if I still had some hair,ā he says, looking around the cafĆ©. āThey got coffee here? Black coffee? Just the plain kind? People still serve that?ā
āItās up there,ā I point, and he touches my arm and says, āSomething?ā
āNo, thanks, Richie,ā I say, watching him go, pal of my youth. He is my most improbable friend, unlikely to know me now, maybe even less likely to have been my best friend when we were kids. I guess we have always enjoyed being unsuited to each other. We were certainly an odd pair in high school in rural northwestern New Jersey. The place was wrong for both of us. I grew up there, but Rich didnāt move out to the sticks until he was almost eighteen, when his father built a retirement home way back in the woods. In the Jersey wilderness, Richie was a rare birdāa city kid, everybody thought, though he came from suburban Massapequa, or, as he said, āmatzoh-pizza.ā He was a wisecracking nasal Long Island guy who had funny, mean names for everything. When he graduated from high school he stayed home at his dadās house and commuted to Fairleigh Dickinson UniversityāāFairly Ridiculous,ā he called it.
Our big year came when I was fifteen, a high school sophomore. Richie was two years ahead of me, a senior with a driverās license, and we rode around in his dadās car, listening to prog rock on his eight-track and getting high all over Hunterdon County, near the Delaware River. We were high on hilltops overlooking the Spruce Run Reservoir. We drove down to the south branch of the Raritan River along the Gorge Road and smoked joints on the sharp gray boulders jutting out of the current. We got high in graveyards, deserted dairy barns, and empty silos still dusty with crushed corn.
We were stoned as motherfuckers at a Jethro Tull concert in Madison Square Garden in 1974. Afterward, we went for midnight snacks at the Horn and Hardart on Eighth Avenue. We wolfed down burgers and fries, and then Richie tried to get me to leave without paying. āDining and dashing,ā he called it. He had been reading Abbie Hoffmanās Steal This Book, where Hoffman tells you how to get all kinds of supplies for free. āYou finish your burger,ā Richie told me, āand then you slide a cockroach under your last piece of bun and start yelling.ā
āWhat cockroach are we supposed to use?ā
āThe one,ā Richie said, āthat I have thoughtfully brought you from home.ā And he reached into his pocket and produced the bug, which was cased in a tiny baby food jar.
āDid you spike the coffee with head lice?ā I ask him now, as he comes back to the table at the cafĆ©. He laughs, getting the childhood reference.
āYou do that after you finish eating,ā he reminds me. āNot before.ā
āI could never get it right.ā
āNo, you couldnāt.ā
He sets the coffee on the table, staring warily at the oversized mug.
āJesus,ā he says, āwhat does it mean about Manhattan that they serve you coffee in cups the size of fish bowls? I could spawn a guppie in this.ā
Heās smiling, happy, pumped because the Knicks won game three last night at the Garden. āEwing they should leave on the bench more often,ā he says. āItās nice to see him in a suit and tie. Heās their good-luck charm. Somebody has to counteract Spike Lee jumping up and down in his Sprewell jersey. That can be Patrickās job. He can be the counter-Spike. You see the game?ā
I shake my head. āI was busy,ā I say.
āToo busy for a ball game?ā Richie says. āWhat do you do all day?ā
āTeach school. Hang out with my students.ā
Iām back to giving obscure hints about last night, taking a more dramatic tone, but Richie still doesnāt bite. Instead, he heckles.
āDonāt you have any adult friends?ā
Is it Richieās question? Or is my dead friend talking again? Since the day he died, Zack has been interrogating me. Instead of dying, he got inside me, like Athena in reverse, not sprung from my brow but jumping into it, setting up house in my forebrain, giving me a headache. Until somebody splits open my skull with an axe, Iāve got a corpse in full battle gear taking up my ego, swinging his halberd, acting like he knows whatās good for me.
His favorite theme is how I spend all my time with kids. My students, that is.
āYouāre their professor,ā he says, ānot their classmate.ā āLook,ā he says, holding out his hands, which are covered, in death as in life, with stigmata: burn holes from a laser surgeon who was zapping his lesions. āYou. Not You,ā the dead guy says, presenting one charred hand, then the other. āThis is You,ā he says, āand this is Not You. Notice how theyāre separated? Teacher, Student. Dead, Alive. Me, Not Me. Now you try,ā he says. āHold out your hands.ā
āNo way,ā I tell him.
āNo, I figured you didnāt know any grown-ups,ā Richie says, emptying a packet of Sweetān Low into his black coffee. āYou like to hang with people who have to call home if they stay out past ten.ā
Does everyone s...