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FRIENDS 10/23/2010 6:35:18 AM
Juan Williams and Vivian Schiller are not friends of mine, but I too am a bit nervous whenever Muslims in traditional garb are on an airplane with me, especially in First Class. As of now, all terrorists are Muslims. And, as Faisal Shahzad says, our “war with Muslims has just begun.” So fire me. (Hold on; you can’t. I’m retired.)
Ms. Schiller, the CEO of NPR, was in town addressing the Atlanta Press Club when she was instructed to punish Mr. Williams for his milquetoast remarks. Luckily, I did not spend $30 to hear her, although I gladly would have if she’d referred to herself as an a-hole, which she certainly turned out to be.
But I digress: some people collect friends the way they collect stamps---the more the better, neatly arranged by value and importance. Maybe that’s why all my friends can be counted on both hands and part of one foot.
Back in the 1960’s I had four very special friends—-Bob and Joyce Scheerschmidt, and Mike and Marion Hyman. I think I especially liked them because of their goofy names. It was great fun corrupting Scheerschmidt to Smearsh-t. Hyman presented scads of clinical possibilities and most had to do with “The Education of . . . ” If this seems too obtuse, don’t sweat it.
Bob, Mike and I played golf religiously, never breaking a collective 300 in spite of thrice weekly attempts. Cheating was our biggest accomplishment—-anything on the green within ten feet of the hole was an automatic “gimme.” Mulligans were as routine as Fred Astair’s machinegun taps.
The only serious water hazard at Happy Acres C.C. was Lake Ontario, roughly two and a half miles away, but Hyman was often (if arguably) penalized for drowning his 35¢ Club Specials. Balls lost or out of bounds were never counted, anyway. A score of 10 or more on a hole was recorded as no worse than 7.
We played in the heat of summer and the snows of winter (winter in Western New York ran from September to May,) and after five putts our balls were boulders that wouldn’t fit in the cup even if anyone got close. Pars and birdies were as infrequent as sobriety.
The three of us (and our respective wives) often vacationed together. Scheerschmidt, a newspaperman for regional weeklies, had advertising “due bills” from various resorts. One year he arranged for an all-expenses-paid week for us in Miami Beach.
That February, we drove two cars from the frozen tundra to the heat and humidity of southern Florida, a non-stop journey of five days and thirty-seven nights, covering 600,000 miles roundtrip (or so it seemed.)
I rode with Mike and Marion Hyman in their fairly new Buick sedan, and the three of us shared the driving: four hours on and eight off. My second shift was from 11 PM to 3 AM, and I thought I’d died and been sent to Hell; my punishment was to drive for all eternity on the straight, narrow, two-lane roads through South Carolina and Georgia.
My soon-to-be erstwhile wife opted for the Scheerschmidts’ brand new Thunderbird, so off we all went (ironically, my luxurious Cadillac convertible remained at home for reasons I gratefully but never fully understood.)
“Doesn’t your dad and his new spouse and kids live in West Palm?” Joyce asked me. “You should go visit him.” I did, while the rest of them checked into a nearby Holiday Inn; but it was a pointless experience. My dad was immersed in alcoholism, and I spent the next twenty-four hours hiding from my half-siblings and stepmother, all the time pretending to help my dying father remember where he’d stashed his Johnny Walker Red and Remy Martin.
At the end of that disastrous time in 1962 I never again laid eyes on any of those relatives.
The next afternoon I joined my wife and friends as they were checking out of the Holiday Inn, and our caravan moved on to Miami.
The vacation itself is a blur of unending stretches of bad roads, swollen ankles, hangovers, stomach cramps and tacky accommodations, but the trip home was broken up by a maliciously memorable overnight at the Sleepy Rendezvous Motel alongside the Susquehanna River, somewhere in the bowels of Pennsylvania.
Unfortunately, it was “off-season” and the boiler was shut down and the restaurant closed. We didn’t care; we were dead tired. We took three unheated rooms and went to bed hungry and smelly, sleeping fully dressed beneath extra blankets begrudgedly provided by a surly proprietor/manager. We were well aware that a morning shower was out of the question and vigorous teeth brushing our only hope of salvation.
The tab was $24.99 (plus tax) per room and friend Mike, who owned a small record shop in a strip mall, accurately predicted we’d someday get even.
And we did.
A couple years later Hurricane Connie roared through eastern Pennsylvania, overflowing the Susquehanna and, according to news reports, demolished the Sleepy Rendezvous Motel and sent it to the Landfill of Oblivion. To my knowledge, it was never rebuilt. Hopefully, the saturnine proprietor/manager collected millions in insurance and lived miserably ever after.
One Friday, circa 1964, before Scheerschmidt became an executive with Xerox and moved away, he phoned me at the TV studio and said we should go duck hunting. I told him I not only did not own a gun, I had never even fired one. “And I know nothing about duck hunting,” I informed him; “I don’t even have a license.” (This was years before I’d ever heard of O’Neill Williams. Who? Never mind.)
“No to worry. I have four shotguns,” Scheerschmidt vaguely admitted. “Well, not mine, exactly, but they’re my dad’s and he never uses them. Also, my license covers first-time guests.” (A bold-faced lie.) “Do you have a flask? Fill it with Wild Turkey, and I’ll pick you up at 3:30 tomorrow morning.”
In the dark the next day I found myself shivering in Bob’s boss’s duck blind at Braddock’s Bay. Sipping bourbon helped, but it was a miserable thirty-seven degrees as we sat silently hunkered down in the blind, the borrowed shotgun loaded across my lap, waiting anxiously for a covey of mallards to honk overhead and signal their doom.
By ten, not a single duck had come our way. The sky was as virgin as my borrowed shotgun. We decided to chuck the entire adventure and wander out on the pebbled beach to thaw in the bright sunlight.
“I brought some coffee cans,” Scheerschmidt said, tossing a couple as far as he could into the Bay. “Shoot at ‘em, and when the pellets make holes, they’ll sink. Go ahead. You first.”
I raised the shotgun to my shoulder and peered down the double barrel at the Maxwell Coffee logo bobbing in the surf fifty feet away. Feeling like Gary Cooper in “Sergeant York” I lowered the gun, wet my thumb, and flicked imaginary dust off the sight. I’m glad I did.
At that precise instant Scheerschmidt absentmindedly stepped in front of me, between the coffee cans and where I was standing. Had I held my bead on the target, I would have pulled the trigger and blown my friend’s head off!
Instead, I simply screamed and dropped the shotgun to the ground. “Hey, be careful!” my friend shouted. “That stock’s gonna get all scratched up! My ol’ man’s gonna have a cow!”
That was about forty-five years ago. I don’t know if Bob, Mike or Marion are still alive—-I was informed by my kid brother that Joyce passed away this early October and I obtained son Gene’s telephone number from the local mortician—-we all had drifted apart around 1968. I do know, however, my record is intact:
I still do not own a firearm, and I have never pulled the trigger on one.
The closest I ever came was the Red Ryder Daisy BB gun (lariat ring with genuine leather thong and all) I got for my tenth birthday (every kid’s dream,) but even that was destined to tarnish from neglect by the time I was twelve. Deprived of military service and opting for something more substantial than a life of crime, packing heat was never a priority.
Not that there aren’t people I’d like to get the drop on-—like that motel proprietor/manager in the state of brotherly love. Trouble is, I’d probably let go of the damned thing and get the stock all scratched up.
