Three Friends, Three Lives

From right to left, John, Howard, and me

This September I had a chance to catch up with two of my best friends, John and Howard. We got together in Northfield, Minnesota, where all three of us went to St. Olaf College over thirty years ago. Every year John sells corn dogs and cheese curds at the Jesse James Days, an annual celebration of the near-extermination of the James-Younger gang when they tried to rob the Northfield bank. This was the second year I'd driven down from Minneapolis to work the booth with John, and after hearing about last year's late-night bull sessions, this year Howard decided to fly in from Pennsylvania and join us.

In spite of the long, grueling days, the three of us stayed up until two every night, talking and drinking watery, tasteless beer. Every day the stand became a little harder to stand up in, the corn dogs more viscous on your tongue, and the fatigue and hangovers more brutal, but each night we did it all again. Sleep and good health were obviously not our reasons for coming to Northfield. We didn't know when, if ever, the three of us would get together again; as with so many things in life, time was paramount, and we did our best to bend it to our wills.

Our conversations were frank and revealing. By the time you're fifty you've lost nearly all tolerance for bullshit and you have a hard time hiding the truth from yourself; nor is there any point in hiding it from your friends; if you can't tell them what's on your mind by now, you never will, and the most important and secret aspects of your self will probably die with you.

John

John was a preacher's kid who moved from town to town whenever his father transferred parishes. When he was sixteen, the family left Nebraska and moved to Albert Lea, Minnesota. All at once he lost his girlfriend, all his friends, and his near-perfect high-school life. Shortly after that he went into a depression. He said that for a year he didn't care whether or not he lived or died. He was taking flying lessons at the time, and as soon as he could fly solo began flirting with a one-man air-show disaster; several times he put the plane into a steep power dive, not really caring if he could pull up in time. He was lucky and survived, and eventually he came out of his depression, but he kept (or maybe always had) the infatuation with danger. When I met him in college he was a hard-partying misfit adrift at a very tame Lutheran institution––much like me––and we hit it off instantly.

John, however, was also a brilliant student, posting first or second scores on most of his chemistry tests—no small feat at St. Olaf, which boasted the best pre-med program in the state—but then he would blow his GPA getting mad at his art professor and turning in stick-figure drawings for his senior project. John was one of those highly creative, easily bored people who needed constant stimulation; at the first hint of boredom, he either pitched whatever he was doing or made a game of it. And he had the James-Dean/Marlon-Brando aura of someone who would take direction (or shit) from no one. Did I mention the girls liked John? No need to.

John was also one of the few well-educated people I've ever known who got into fistfights beyond high school. He never went looking for a fight, but there was something about him, maybe the smartass grin, that seemed to attract every jerk in the world. They would push him, once, twice, and then assuming he was a wimp or a coward, that fatal third time. John always fought as though his life were on the line, and most of his fights lasted only seconds.

After St. Olaf, he turned his back on a possible career in dentistry and turned his summer job––selling corn dogs at carnivals––into a full-time career. Although it was hard, dirty work, he made a surprising amount of money at it, doing better than most of his classmates with more traditional careers in business. I joined him for a couple of seasons after I graduated, selling T-shirts with moronic slogans on them like "No muff too tuff" and "Ass, gas, or grass; nobody rides for free." It was a fun, slummy romp through the fairgrounds of the Midwest and South, but I was a little surprised when John stuck with it, even though it was pretty good gig: he only worked for six months and spent the rest of the year loafing around in Arizona.

After I got married, John and I began to lose track of each other. Our lives were going in different directions, and we didn’t seem to have that much to talk about anymore. Then one day he told me he'd been diagnosed with stage IV non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. His doctors had given him a zero percent chance of survival, with or without any form of treatment. He was scheduled for chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant, just to buy some time, but he declined both, deciding he had nothing to lose by treating himself.

That was roughly 25 years ago. Today, John still has cancer, which he's treated with his own unique regimen (he was a brilliant chemistry student after all), but the cancer is manageable, and he's not planning on going anywhere. And he'd better not: recently he married a young Russian woman, a world-class distance runner and a rising star at IBM, and they now have two of the most beautiful twin girls you have ever seen in your life. They've been living in Moscow for the last couple of years, but John still comes back every summer to work his festival route, which gives us the rare chance to get together again.

Although John now has a wife and kids to keep him respectable, neither his nature nor his attitude has changed much. He still takes in life by the gallon, still grins like a mischievous elf, and still has a knack for asking penetrating questions, like "Charlie, what's the stupidest thing you've ever done in your life? (The list is long.) But he asks the question not only because he's genuinely curious to hear your answer, but also because once you're finished, he has a better tale of his own to tell you.

Next time, Howard