AND NOW THERE IS ONE

There once were three of us, all working in the creative department, all good buddies, all having a time of our lives. There was Frankie: the head of the mechanical staff of people that put together the boards for production after my guys designed the comprehensives. Frankie was a genial guy, quick to laugh, even quicker to have a drink a smoke and eat, just like the rest of us. He was always plotting some trick to play on one of us, and when it backfired, he paid dearly for his indiscretion. At lunch time twice a week, usually Mondays and Fridays, he would sit at the round table, a fresh pack of Vantage cigarettes, and a glass of vodka, straight up, and a lottery ticket resting in front of his chubby fingers, as he dreamed of some secretary or clerk, or relating his latest home improvement he was enmeshed in. More often than not he would mix his words in both Italian and English, and always ending his sentences or thoughts with a little laugh.

Sitting in his usual place each of these luncheons was Bruce, or Brucie. Bruce could put the Jack Daniels Manhattans away like no one else I knew then or know now. He and I imbibed in the same drink, him more so than I. Bruce would sit and take out his black Pentel, and draw some elaborate picture in a cartoonish way, all the while making comments about someone in the office, as we laughed our heads off upon the observations. When Bruce went to work in the morning, he got what he could get done, when he came back in the afternoon, he was shot, or wasted, or just plain drunk! No one bothered to ask him questions after 3:00 P.M. When his office day was over, he would join Frankie, and off to the bar for a few more before heading home, their wives thinking they were working too late so therefore: too hard.

This was the ritual, every Monday and Friday, mainly because I didn’t go out with them the other three workdays, and felt if I did, I would be responsible for them, or would wind up just like them.

Then one day Frankie started missing work, a day here and a day there, and before you knew it, a week and then weeks. We were worried, he complained his stomach hurt constantly, and soon he was bed-ridden. Then one February afternoon, while Frankie was in the hospital, word came that he had passed on! A cold shock took over, the whole department stunned: people were walking around, their heads down, their faces expressionless. All I remember that day was how brown the carpet was, how I studied one little spot in my office, my door closed, quiet was dictating to me.

The following Monday, at the funeral Mass for Frankie, a lot of the company showed up, and afterward we went to our usual lunch spot, just Bruce and I. Going to our usual table, (The waitress always kept the table open for us,) we sat down quietly, and ordered our drinks. The waitress was told that we wanted our usual. She looked at us and said: “Two Jack Daniels?”

“NO! We also want a vodka straight up, and bring over a pack of Vantage cigarettes, too!” I don’t know why I said it, but I needed to say goodbye to an old friend. Bruce, looking at me asked: “How did you know to do that?” as he placed a lottery ticket down where Frankie sat. We ate, the ash tray sitting with a burning Vantage cigarette, and the vodka sitting there, all testimony to a lost friend.

And so it went for a few years, then Bruce and I both left the company about the same time, when his wife became ill with cancer, and he needed to take care of her for the first time. We commiserated about how to wash floors and do laundry, or even cooking a chicken, as he wife bravely fought to survive.

One morning, I get a call from his wife, Bruce is in the hospital, Bruce has mouth cancer, it doesn’t look good. It wasn’t, soon he was in hospice, but Bruce had one more drink in him, this time in the form of a dream he always had. He always wanted to move to North Carolina and build a log cabin house. He had gone so far as to order a kit, have it sent down south where it was sitting waiting for him to put it up. It was his design, and he was determined to live in it.

I visited Bruce one day, his house filled with packed boxes, he was moving south. The Hospice nurse had just left, and the next day he would fly down to his new place with his ailing wife. He had arranged an ambulance to take him to the airport, and special accommodations on a plane, and another ambulance when he arrived in Raleigh to transport him to his newly built home.

He arrived in his new home, and died the next day! His wife died almost immediately afterward. They had a memorial with the two urns in St. Lawrence the Martyr in Sayville, NY, his old parish. A few of us showed up that day, and there was no place to go afterward, no restaurant that could do us justice, just one more time, no matter how lonely.