My Old Friend John

The mists of time cover over the details of the first time I met John Thompson. They also cover over the details of the last time I saw him. But, in between those things? Well. There are lots of things that burn through that mist…and burn pretty brightly.

At some point during our respective childhoods, John moved in just down the street from me. He didn’t just live within walking distance, he lived within “shouting” distance. (And, if you remember those days, you know that the neighborhood moms took full advantage of “shouting distance”. Hey, there were no cell phones, but when a mom was shouting for one of us, nobody “sent her to voicemail”, because, we knew where we’d be sent if we tried something like that.)

John quickly became part of the neighborhood “gang”, and a bigger hearted guy you’d be hard-pressed to find. John, or JR as the family called him, was generally easy-going and easy to get along with. And, that was fortunate. Because he was a big guy and also a very strong guy. John was the kind of guy you wanted on your side in a fight. And, fortunately, in my case, he always was.

Now, again, John was easy going, so, he didn’t go around looking for trouble. And, it took a lot to get him to the point where there was going to be trouble. In the neighborhood, he almost never got to that point. Because, while we were all putzes, again, he was easy to get along with and he put up with us. But, one day. Well. Here’s the story.

This was during high school and we went up to the school to shoot some baskets. Somehow, we got into the gym. There were times when we managed to do that, though I don’t remember how. Other times, the place was locked up and we couldn’t. But, on this day, we did. And, there were some other folks there, most of which we knew. A game started up and all went well. Until one of the guys in the other group, one I knew but John didn’t, crossed the line.

I don’t remember exactly what that guy did, but John took exception. And, I quickly did what I always did when stuff like this was about to start. I grabbed John to stop him from killing this guy, which was exactly what he was going to do. And, then the guy did something that made me lose all respect for him. He swung on John while I was holding him back, hitting him in the face. At that point, all you-know-what broke loose. Fortunately, a bunch of guys got between this goof and John and stayed between him and the instrument of his imminent death until we could get John out of there. (And, while said goof went through the motions of being “held back”, trust me, if those guys had moved out of the way, he’d have ducked back behind them.)

On the way home, John was steaming. He spent almost the whole trip vowing to “get” the guy in question. Meanwhile, the punch that had been thrown, and it was a clean shot, hadn’t bothered John at all. I’m sure it hurt, mind, but he wasn’t unsteady on his feet or dazed or anything like that. A clean shot and it didn’t bother him at all. Yeah, you wanted him on your side in a fight. Meanwhile, the guy in question steered clear of John after that. As far as I know, revenge never happened, because, again, John was a nice guy. But, if he’d have heard “boo” from that clown even once, well.

But, most stories about T-Man, as we came to call him were a lot more lighthearted. Because, while John was a nice guy and just about everyone liked him, he was also quirky and would do stuff that we’d talk about for, well, ever afterward. We’ll get to some of that, but before we do, back to basketball. John was pretty good at the two main sports we played, baseball and football. When it came to baseball, he got it honestly. His dad, Ron, had been a good player in school. (And, it turned out, friends with my Dad, who’d also been a good player in school. Ron later became an umpire and could talk all day about umpiring and the ins and outs of same. And, Dad and I could listen all day, because it was fascinating stuff. To us. Not, however, to Mom. And, Dad well knew that. This, however, did not stop him from, at a party, “setting Mom up”, by telling Ron that she was a huge baseball fan and was interested in learning about umpiring…then walking away. Yes, Dad lived to be 80. But, there were some close calls. This was one of them.) In football, John could run fairly well and use his height to catch passes. And, if we were playing tackle, he was not exactly easy to bring down. But, in basketball, he was close to hopeless.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t play. He could do the basics as well as most of the rest of us (read: not that well). It was just that the game didn’t play to his strengths, which was using all that size and power. I can still remember a game on the outdoor courts at the high school. John was on a team with Mike Bowland (who, unlike most of us, was actually a pretty solid player). Mike kept feeding him down low…because I was guarding John and he had more than half a foot on me. Yet. He still couldn’t score. I’d get in his face with my hands up and he’d either pass the ball back out or throw up something terrible. And, Mike kept shouting “Power up!” But, John never did. Much to Mike’s dismay.

Speaking of high school and the high school, there was “The Hillside Fire Incident”. We were walking across what’s now known as “The Alumni Bridge” one morning on the way to school and John found a cigarette lighter lying on the bridge. He picked it up and began trying to light it. I told him to stop doing that, because the thing had been lying on the ground for who knows how long and was soaking wet. Trying to light it didn’t seem like a good idea. It was, however, a far better one than what he did next. He heaved the lighter over the fencing of the bridge and it landed on some rocks on the hillside below. And exploded with a puff of smoke and flame. Things were pretty dry down there, and a fire started.

Now, what happened next is all you need to know about which of the two of us was the better person. John looked over at me and said, “Uh oh, what do we do now?” What he meant, of course, was, “who do we call?” Should we report it to the school office, call the fire department, what? Because, obviously, we had to do something. My mind, however, was working differently. Because, neither of us were going down for this. I responded, “Start walking.” He looked at me, stunned, and said, “But…” I said, “We go to class, just like every day.” And, he said, quite logically, “But, the hillside outside the school is on fire! What if it spreads?” Me: “Then, we’ll have a fire drill. Now, start walking…”

We went to class. And, for about the first hour, I kept expecting the fire alarm to sound. It never did. On the way home, however, neither of us was completely certain we’d gotten away with it. So, as we crossed the bridge, we both looked, kind of surreptitiously at the spot where the fire had started. There was a nice burned patch, but, fortunately, the fire had reached an area with little vegetation and hadn’t spread any farther. Once we were long over the bridge and on the way back to the neighborhood, we gave one another a look…one that said, “We shall never speak of this…” And, for many, many years, we did not.

Not long after high school, John joined the Air Force and left the area. He was eventually stationed in North Dakota, but we stayed in touch. He’d return home every so often and we almost always got to visit. He’d regale us with tales of those crazy “Daks” (natives of the Dakotas) and the cold and the snow.

Two big things changed about John in the service. One had to do with that cold. He’d become so used to the biting cold of the Dakotas that most of what we got here in Western PA didn’t bother him. He’d walk around in a light jacket when it was well below freezing. The second involved cigarette lighters. Because, while John never smoked when we were growing up, that changed in the service. The next time I saw him, he smoked like a train. Which leads me to some more stories.

After John left the service, he returned to Guntown and we started hanging out some again. And, one day, we were headed somewhere in his car and I noted that he had a little holder for his cigarette pack. And, being the putz I was, while he was concentrating on driving, I took the pack from the holder, closed the holder up, and hid the pack. Yeah. That was a mistake. He reached for a cigarette, then started looking around the car for the pack. “Where are my cigarettes? What happened to my…” Now, he is not looking at the freaking road here. He’s searching for this cigarette pack. And, I figure the joke is now officially over before we die in a high speed car crash. “Here! Jesus Christ, look at the damn road!!!” To his credit, he looked at the road the entire time he pulled out the cigarette, lit it, and then inhaled. Then, he looked at me with a grin. “Don’t ever do that again!” Me: “Don’t worry, you nutjob!”

And, speaking of cars and cigarettes, here’s another story. One day we headed over to my grandmother’s to pick up something. Again, John was driving and this time The Bro was along. Now, John and I were grown men at this point, but, Grandma, as she always would, still saw us as kids. And, she didn’t let us leave without doing something she always did when we were kids. Giving us a sweet snack for the road. In this case, it was pudding pies. Vanilla. Now, the only possible reason Grandma could have had for having pudding pies in the house was to have something to give to any kid (or, any adult she’d known as a kid) for the road. In all the years I knew her, I never saw her eat a pudding pie. Nor did I ever seen Grandpap eat a pudding pie. Nor did I ever see either of them eat anything in that oeuvre. But, she had ‘em, and, like she did when we were kids, she pulled out three and said, “One for you, one for your brother, and one for your friend.”

Out to the car I went with three pudding pies and whatever we’d gone there to pick up for Mom. I passed out the pudding pies, and, as I was doing so, John dropped a lit cigarette on the floor of the car. It rolled up under the dashboard where we couldn’t get to it. It was going to be the hillside fire all over again, except this time it was going to burn whatever manmade fiber the carpet was made out of. With luck, it wouldn’t have become a conflagration. Without it, the whole car might have gone up. So, I grabbed the first thing I could find that I could shove under the dash to smash out the cigarette. John’s pudding pie. (I’m not making this up. Because, this is too ridiculous to make up.) A few quick smashes and the cigarette was out. But, not before John shouted, “Hey! That’s my pudding pie!” Me: “The car is literally on fire here!” And, in a classic line The Bro and I have repeated ever since, John said, “The car is insured. The pudding isn’t.” We were laughing too hard to wonder if the car were actually insured for that. (Insurance agent: “What happened to your car again?” John: “I dropped a lit cigarette on the floor, it rolled under the dash and it caught the car on fire. We couldn’t get fire out in time and, eventually the gas tank blew…” Insurance agent: “You couldn’t crush out the cigarette?” John: “Well, the only things we had were pudding pies, and we didn’t want to ruin those, so…” Insurance agent: “Pudding pies cost, like, fifty cents! A fifteen thousand dollar car is a burned out hulk!”)

But, as much fun as he sometimes had after returning from the service, he was drifting. Not personally. He had friends and a great family, but professionally. He didn’t really know what he wanted to do. I think he missed the service and sometimes wished he were still in the USAF. So, he went from job to job and nothing really stuck. Things were coming to a head, but, before they did, there was one more adventure. Baseball season was coming and I decided I wanted to go to the opener. But, even in those years, tickets went fast. I managed to get seats, but they were plenty high. Then, I invited John and his dad to come with. (I’d have invited my dad, but there was no way that Dad was taking a day off work to go to a baseball game.)

It was a freaking disaster. We’re talking Three Rivers here, where there were about 20,000 good seats for baseball. And, we were nowhere near any of those. We were in the nosebleeds, where every pop up looked like a home run and the players looked like the ones in early sports video games, little specs moving around the field. To make matters worse, it was about 35 degrees and the wind was blowing at about fifty miles an hour. We didn’t see a vendor all day. No popcorn. No peanuts. No hot dogs. (There was no sense bothering with the cold beer…but a nice bottle of whisky would have hit the spot.) And, to put the cherry on top, the team lost. (Shocking, I know.) Now, here’s all you need to know about John and his dad. All we did on the way back to Guntown was laugh and joke about how ridiculous the whole thing was. It was a disaster. But, we all had a good time anyway.

Not long after, John decided to make a move. He left town again and moved to Tennessee. At that point, as people so often did in those pre-social media days, we lost touch. I’d hear things about him now and then, what he was doing, where he was. Some of the stories came back to me through Dad, who saw John’s dad every so often and would ask him about what John was doing. Eventually, my old friend became a truck driver, and, according to what I heard, he enjoyed the job and the life.

Now, here’s what I expected. I expected that, one day we’d cross paths again, and that one night we’d sit around talking and laughing and catching up and then bringing back all the memories from our teens and twenties. Sitting around talking, just like we did the night of the five-year class reunion. Not with the class, mind. Just the two of us. Yeah. One last story.

We both got letters about the reunion and he called me a few days after receiving his. “Are you going?” Well. I hadn’t thought much about it, but, sure. Why not. So, we made plans to go. And, on the night in question, John calls. “Still going?” Me: “Why not.” He comes over to the house. We get up to go and I made a joke about missing a ballgame for this. And, we shared a look like the one we did the day of the hillside fire. “You sure you want to go?” Me: “Let’s go down to the bar and watch the damn game.” And, that’s exactly what we did. And, like always, it was a lot of fun.

So, that’s what I figured. I figured we’d do that again someday, talk about the old neighborhood and all the fun we had. Well. I figured wrong. And, it’s not OK. It’s too soon for him to be gone. Too soon.

Know what I remember most about John? The laugh. Man, that laugh was something, a sort of snicker that could roll into a full on belly laugh at times. I was pretty sure I was going to get to hear it again someday. And, I wasn’t wrong about that. Because I can hear it right now. And, I can see that grin like it was yesterday. Thirty years or so, it’s been. Thirty years. But, like it was yesterday. Thank you, my friend. Thank you for all those good times. I know I was lucky to get to share them with you. But, I’d still give an awful lot right now for just one more.