The Men We Became Read online

  Off campus, John remained an object of curiosity. Usually, though not always, the attention he received from strangers was innocent, laced with affection for his father, which John appreciated. Still, it was a little nutty to walk down the street and see people stop in their tracks and stare or shout to him, “Hi, John!” I often jokingly asked autograph seekers if they didn’t want my autograph as well. “Who are you?” they’d reply. To which John would respond, with reverence, “Why, that’s Rob Littell.” We made a joke out of it. And I’d learned to enjoy the flash and dazzle of his public life. It was a great show.

  By the middle of freshman year, John and I had more or less found our footing, except where women were concerned. I was falling fast for Frannie, while John was in that classic transitional phase between high school and college when you realize that your high-school sweetheart is just that. John’s girlfriend at Andover was Jennifer Christian, a natural beauty and emotionally mature girl who was, and is, a salt-of-the-earth type. College presented too many obstacles to keep their long-distance flame burning, but they remained friendly over the years, and John kept a place in his heart for her. I spent only a little time with Jenny, first in 1979 and then again briefly at John’s funeral in 1999, but it was clear that John loved her and that they’d had a sophisticated, empathetic relationship. While at eighteen I was barely at the subject-verb-predicate stage of dating, John had already sought and found some depth in his relationships. And he was lucky, or maybe clever, in that the women he went out with were remarkable. Smart, beautiful, and savvy, they all challenged him in some way or other. At that moment, however, I was the one with a girlfriend. This imbalance didn’t come between us, though, because John liked Frannie. And more important, he wanted to be in a relationship himself.

  A stunning blonde from Southern California was the first Brown student to capture John’s attention, around Christmas. As far as I know, she was also the first and only woman to reject him. They never got that close—it was more an elongated fling than a relationship. But they saw each other enough so that when she wanted out, a breakup was called for. She told John the truth, that she’d met someone else. But she left out one little detail, which John heard later through the grapevine—the “other person” was a woman. I barely knew her and don’t know if her rumored foray to the other side of the sexual fence was permanent. But I still chuckle at the image of John sitting on his university-issue dorm-room twin bed, head down in confusion, hands wrung in his lap, asking himself, “Did I do that?”

  Momentarily confounded by love, John did what men have done for ages—he sought solace in sports. He found some first-generation protogym complex in Swansea, Massachusetts, that had a couple of racquetball courts. (For some reason, probably related to his aversion to elitism, he loved racquetball as much as he disliked squash.) I liked a good game of anything, so John and I began a twenty-year career of playing a game we proudly called “stupid ball” because the Ivy League crowd looked down on it. Over that extended time span, we never really improved our skills much. The point was just to leap around and yell and abuse each other and sweat and suffer and lose and win and sweat some more.

  I should probably note that I won the first 237 matches. It was years before the playing field leveled, and then it wasn’t because I’d lost a step but because John, in his determined way, had become a better athlete. Most people either are born good athletes or don’t play sports. John took a tougher route. He was pretty clumsy when I met him, though he had the body of an NFL quarterback. He’d take his shirt off and you’d picture cheering crowds and trophies in his past. Then you’d notice that he could barely walk down the stairs. He dropped more passes and stumbled over more pebbles than anyone I know. Partly it was a psychological thing: As a game, any game, would progress, John would become distracted. He’d realize he was losing his focus, try to compensate, and lose his grip even more. There’s an art to closing a match, and it eluded John for years. As a result, I found it ridiculously easy to mess with his mind. I didn’t even need to make a good shot. Rather, I’d interject a comment at a critical moment—for instance, when his 9–4 lead had slipped to 9–8 and we were both winded. If I said politely, “We could finish tomorrow if you want,” I’d win, 15–9. Simple as that.

  Though he wasn’t a star athlete, John loved sports and arrived at Brown determined to play something. He was what I call athletic scrap. Most kids who excel at a particular sport in high school get to college already knowing the coaches and whether they have a shot at the team. For would-be athletes who arrive without having played a sport at all, there are two paths to intercollegiate play, at least in the Ivy League. First, during orientation week, the veteran crew jocks—that is, the rowers—canvass the school cafeterias looking for prime-grade beef. Because so few high schools have crew teams, it’s up to the college teams to find big unspoken-for athletes who love running and pain. Somehow they manage to do it each and every year, staffing the boats with young men and women who look as though they’ve stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch billboard.

  If you remain an unclaimed athlete after the crew team has finished, there’s still hope. The rugby players are the next to visit the cafeterias, looking for would-be teammates. Ruggers are a different breed, the Oscar to crew’s Felix, as wild at heart as the rowers are disciplined. They got John, who ended up a proud Brown rugger. They played miles outside of Providence, since Brown had no field space, so I caught only one game. And John was great—afterward, recounting limericks at the bar. He drank like Jiminy Cricket relative to the average rugby hulk. So, as possibly the worst drinker in Irish history, he compensated with hilarious bar tales and a superior Irish brogue.

  He also entertained his teammates with his driving skills, using my car on occasion. I first learned of John’s off-road skills from a high-school mate who was attending Princeton. He called one day to ask if I’d been at Princeton the week before. He’d seen my car, driven by a woolly-haired fellow, doing doughnuts on one of the campus greens. I revoked John’s driving privileges, immediately and forever, in theory.

  Though John’s rugby career didn’t take him far, there was one sport he excelled at long before he reached college—skiing. He was an incredible alpine skier. In the moguls, in the crud, wherever, he skied with total control and enormous skill. He was beautiful to watch. Of course, he and I battled endlessly, with words and with skis, over who was the better skier. Given that I’m the last one standing, so to speak, I’m claiming victory. John was also a great water-skier, probably the best I’ve ever seen. And by the time he died, he was as good a football player as any of us who challenged him in Central Park. What had changed most by then was his mind. Not only did he keep himself in great shape while the rest of us moved to the couch, but he had learned to hold his focus in the crunch. Typically, he just kept at it, getting better and better as time went by.

  That was John’s standard, stealthy shtick—to get better and better at whatever he set his mind to. “Stealthy” because he always maintained an outward cool as he deliberately moved toward mastering something. He had a keen sense of his own weaknesses, maybe because his father had been so accomplished at such a young age. I think he also felt the need to earn, by effort and real accomplishment, the privilege and praise he’d received since birth.

  If he’d lived, I’m sure John would have become President of the United States. It wasn’t something he talked about in the early years of our friendship, though it seemed perfectly logical to me even then. We joked about it a lot. The first time John ever addressed the issue directly was in 1988. We were at his mom’s house, watching the 1988 Republican National Convention on TV. Ronald Reagan’s “last ride” movie was playing, and we both had tears in our eyes. As Reagan trotted off into the sunset on his horse, John said, “A guy could learn a lot from that man.”

  He said it somewhat guardedly, so I pressed him. “Yeah, he sure can ride a horse.”

  John grinned at me and said, “You’ve said it yourself
, the man can communicate like no one else. Combine that with a working brain and who knows.”

  I remember that I looked right at him, hard, and said, “It sounds like you know.”

  John screwed up his face, as though it took some effort to finish the conversation, and replied, “Gotta go home someday, right?”

  Surprised at his frankness, though not at his meaning, I laughed and demanded, “Where am I gonna live?”

  John snorted and said, “Bangladesh, of course. I can think of no better representative for our nation. And you’ve always wanted to be an ambassador!”

  And he winked. I know it sounds corny, but he did.

  Never able to resist an opening, I asked, “Something in your eye?”

  He ended with “Nothing at all, Richard. Or can I call you Dick?”

  All future discussions on this subject were typically cryptic, but John’s intent was clear. And he never forgot to reference my service in Bangladesh.

  Three

  FRATERNITÉ

  I’M REASONABLY SURE I got into Brown because I’d been an all-star lacrosse player in high school. I had good SAT scores and I’d been an honor student at Lawrenceville. But high-profile internships, community service, a brilliant essay—I didn’t have those. What I did have was a nod from the lacrosse coach, Cliff Stevenson. Cliff was a small man who wore wrinkled clothes and made apparently random roster decisions. He was a master of the Yogi Berra–type remark, as in, “Half of ya over here, half of ya over there, and the rest come with me.” Or, at halftime of an important game, “You know what we gotta do? We gotta score more goals than they do. Because, by golly, then we’ll win!” I’d been invited to a recruiting weekend at Brown after the assistant coach, Dom Starsia, watched one of my high-school games. As I recall the scene, I was standing outside the Ratty, Brown’s main dining hall, getting ready to drive home. Cliff came over and fixed me with his crazy baby-blue eyes. With a voice that was pure James Cagney, he asked the critical question: “If you get into Brown, will you come?”

  I knew how it worked: I said yes and he made it so. The Ivy League may not have athletic scholarships, but coaches have a couple of spots on reserve at Admissions. And the opportunity was not wasted on me. I played four solid years of award-winning varsity lacrosse and graduated with a political science degree to boot. Admittedly, academics were not high on my list of priorities. In fact, I’m planning on going back to school someday so I can avail myself of all the glorious education I missed. It’s possible that education is wasted on the young, but love and sports and play are not, and I was intently engaged in all three.

  In contrast, John came to school with clear academic goals. He had a serious streak that made studying feel right, and a genuine curiosity about the subjects he was taking. He was also under considerable pressure to do well, both from his family and from the tabloids, which chronicled his every success and failure. Sometimes it seemed as though everyone had a stake in John’s progress. One of the most irritating was a professor who took it upon himself to “mentor” John his sophomore year. Most likely he was thinking ahead to the John F. Kennedy Jr. School of Politics at Brown and wanted John to produce some seminal work for publication. Or maybe he’d been asked by the university to make sure its most famous student did well. Whatever the reason, the worried and worrying man called our room constantly. I considered his phone calls harassment, but John, typically, shrugged it off.

  I guess he was too smitten to notice. Despite the less-than-romantic setting that was Phi Psi, John had fallen in love with sweet Sally Munro. She was (and is) a smart, down-to-earth woman from Marblehead, Massachusetts, who physically resembled John’s sister and spoke her mind without guile. For John, her honesty and straightforward manner were like a breath of fresh air. He never really liked dating and the single life, preferring the intensity of a serious relationship, and he and Sally grew close quickly. She was a big influence in his life. It was Sally who suggested to John that people tried hard, sometimes too hard, to be their best when they were around him. She was right, but John hadn’t thought about it before. And it bothered him. He mentioned it to me more than once. It meant that people were uncomfortable around him. John, of course, tried to correct the situation by working to put people at ease. Which I figure just made them try harder, but John was an optimist.

  Despite John’s academic intentions, Phi Psi was no place for the studious. In fact, my head hurts just thinking about our year there. We were given a room, number 201, on the second floor, just to the right of the frat’s big stairs leading up from the front hall. The first thing we did was construct two sleeping lofts to free up space for our desks. Next we decorated, which consisted of putting a tiger cub in our window. This wasn’t a plushy F.A.O. Schwarz escapee, either. It was a real stuffed tiger cub. I don’t recall where John got the tiger, though he was too much of an animal lover to have killed it. In any case, political correctness hadn’t been invented yet, so we placed the stuffed animal in the window for passersby to enjoy.

  Once our lofts were built, John and I discovered that we had some territorial issues. Each morning, John would leap out of bed and land on an old green couch that my mother had given me. After a few weeks of this Tarzan-like behavior, the couch began to rip. So every morning I was forced to yell at him for not caring about my family’s legacy. He’d make his leap and I’d snarl something like “Hey, do you do that at home? Enough on the heirlooms. All right?”

  To which he’d reply, “Feck you,” in his perfect brogue.

  I’d respond, “Do you need a little sign over there? ‘No more leaping on the antiques.’”

  To which he’d say quietly, “Blow me. This is state government lobby furniture.”

  John’s misuse of my furniture was more than balanced by my own roommate abuses. First and foremost was the Beast. That was the name John gave my closet, as far as I know the only closet on campus to have such a dishonor. Picture the most frightening-looking closet you’ve ever seen, then think some more. The Beast grew at an astonishing rate, and perhaps because of the organic properties of sweaty socks and balled-up clothes and maybe a crumb or two, over time it took on an animated quality. The whole great smelly mass seemed as if it might just rise up and bite someone. But I knew where everything was. A little wrestling and—presto!—I could put my hands on socks, shirts, books, the occasional stuffed tiger, and, of course, my schoolwork.

  For a time, the Beast kept company with the Smell, a mysterious odor that permeated our room for weeks, gaining wide notoriety across campus. It was so bad that Frannie and Sally refused to enter the room. Our frat brothers were kinder. They’d come upstairs, stand as far from the door as possible, and yell in that we had a visitor downstairs.

  One day that fall, Mrs. Onassis was one such visitor. She’d come to see John act in a play. One of the brothers yelled into our room that she was there. John sent me down to entertain her while he foraged for his best shirt. He always treated his mother with the utmost respect, privately as well as publicly, and he usually kept a pressed white shirt around for her visits. I ran downstairs to find Mrs. Onassis standing out in the cold on the frat porch. She was looking elegant and a little out of place, as she always did at Brown. She explained that she’d been warned of the smell, and though she didn’t want to be rude, she didn’t feel the need to go inside. I was embarrassed and tried to apologize, but she just laughed and changed the subject.

  John the freshman as Bonario, a soldier in Ben Jonson’s Volpone. (Bettmann/Corbis)

  Up to that point, rather than solve the problem, John and I had loudly and indignantly blamed each other for causing it. Now that even our mothers were avoiding us, we were forced to take action. Besides, it had become difficult to sleep. We tore apart the room, desperately searching for the source of the odor. As frantic as we were to find the cause, we were just as determined to prove it was the other’s fault. So he turned my side of the room upside down and I dismantled his.

  I found it (read: it
was his fault). Hooray! A mug that had been filled with hot chocolate and whipped cream had fallen and lodged itself, still full, behind John’s desk. Rancid does not begin to describe the state of its contents. John was crushed, especially since I was supposed to be the pig of the house.

  I wasn’t able to rest on my victory for long, however, as John launched a counterattack the next weekend. He snuck out in my Mazda GLC and drove out to a local farm, where he bought a pig. Thus far I have declined to mention my Phi Psi nickname, for no other reason than that I loathe it. But in the interest of truth, and because John named the little creature after me, I shall admit that I was known as Litpig. The pig, now christened Litpig, was not a cuddly, potbellied Vietnamese pet, but a fast-growing, sty-loving farm animal. And John honestly believed that Litpig would live with us. There was perhaps a twisted logic in bringing Litpig to live with us, but I still don’t see it. I banished him from our room. The piglet spent a week in the frat basement in a little tiled corral of sorts, where he had a constant stream of curious human visitors who brought him slop they had secreted back from the Ratty. He pooped prodigiously. The following weekend, with the joke over and the pig’s presence known campus-wide, John put him in the passenger seat of my GLC and drove him back to the farm. He dropped little Litpig gently into the pen and left, without even informing the good farmer of his return. I can’t say that I missed him.

  About a week after saying good-bye to our pet, John came back from lunch one day to find me asleep, resting up for a late lacrosse practice. The weather had gone Providence, which is to say windy, rainy, dark, and cold. John poked me awake to ask if he could borrow my car. Marvel Gym, where we practiced, was about two miles away from our room, so I said no and rolled over.