Johnny Fox
Johnny Fox died. I loved him.
I don’t know where we met, somewhere around basketball, I would guess. We got acquainted somehow, got to be friends.
Johnny was a very good golfer; his instruction led to the first and only time I would drive a ball straight. We were both 19. Johnny shot a great game in the low 80’s. For a kid, he had a very professional swing—the type that appears to meet the ball a hair late but sends it soaring well over 200 yards. I never determined where the power in that drive came from. He was classically handsome, though handicapped by a crippling shyness that many found irresistibly charming (and perhaps simultaneously rueful. I, too, was shy and under-confident, so we got along fine.
He was the sweetest guy I’ve ever known: straightforward, guileless, and without agenda. As I got to know him, however, I sensed something darker, something mystifying in him, something possibly dangerous—not to others, but to himself. He had this twitch, a sort of jerk of his right lip into what looked at a glance like a grimace, and likely was. We were both in therapy at the time, and the joke between us was Did you see your guy today? Nobody was in therapy at that time. It was a bond we had in common.
We were like siblings, so alike in many ways. Both unmoored. I was more intact, but not by a lot. In the fall of 1964, we were both brokenhearted, a condition from which he never recovered. Johnny was one of those guys who needs protection: the world is too tough a place for his kind.
Susan was the source of my heartbreak. She was pretty, beautiful really, like a teenage Elizabeth Taylor with perfectly white teeth. We were together about 16 months from the summer of ‘62 through November ‘63. At first, we were very close, but as the months went on, my insecurity and possessiveness drove us apart. She wanted to enjoy her senior year, and I wanted all her attention. She became afraid of me.
Johnny and I played basketball a fair amount that fall. I’d played in high school and Johnny played well enough to hold his own in most games. I was playing on the junior college team where we were both students. It was a night school, and every day, Johnny and I would mix up a gallon of whiskey sours and drink them as the afternoon and evening wore on. I went to practice every night high as a Georgia pine.
He and I were hunting squirrels the day Kennedy was shot. The woods were a good place to forget our troubles. We decided to withdraw from school and travel somewhere in hopes the pain would lessen with miles and time between us and the girls. It didn’t work. On weekends when I wasn’t playing, we’d drive to Annapolis or D.C. and get loaded, trying to decide where to go. We thought of Texas, where Johnny would play golf and I’d play basketball. Or the University of Georgia, where I knew a guy. Booze dreams.
We slept in Johnny’s old blue sedan many times that fall and winter, resting fitfully and waking to icy windows in his frozen driveway. Once in Annapolis, we ended up spending a night in the Naval Academy jail after being caught taking off residents’ tires and trying them to see if they fit Old Blue, which had a flat tire. They didn’t seem to know what to do with us and finally just let us go the next morning. We were lucky they didn’t investigate further, as we had been rolling the tires that didn’t fit down the hill into the Severn river.
We finally decided on Florida, away from the Maryland winter, and set off in January for Fort Lauderdale, with me, Johnny, his brother Randy, and a friend named Mike. I had a contact down there I had worked with in Ocean City, and we stayed in his rooming house until I got a job. We drank beers every night at the Cat and the Fiddle, and it was there Johnny told me a chilling thing that concerned me greatly. We were talking outside one balmy evening about his heart-breaker, Josie, when he said to me, Terry, you have something I don’t. I don’t know what it is, but you can make it—which I took to mean you can survive—I don’t have that. I took this statement seriously, and it scared me; Johnny seemed on very shaky ground indeed. For some time, Johnny had been acting erratically, often locking himself in bar room bathrooms for hours at a time, impervious to knocks and shouting outside.
In Florida we stayed at kindly Mrs. Scott’s for six weeks or so, drinking and desultorily looking for jobs when we felt like it. I still have a picture of myself standing in an Acacia tree outside Mrs. Scott’s, Busch Bavarian in hand, sporting a three-piece Herringbone suit in what was likely a sizzling sun. We finally hooked up with an employment agency which sent me off, three-piece suit and all, to interview for a job as an usher at a local movie theatre. They rejected me as overqualified, an ego boost. The next one was a job as a lifeguard at a posh resort hotel in Lauderdale by the Sea, The Sea Ranch. I’d get a little single bungalow, eat three meals at the staff table as opposed to the kitchen, and guard about 1,000 feet of ocean and the pool as necessary. Of course, all these seeming perks came out of my salary, paltry as it was. I took it.
Though Johnny could have accompanied me to the bungalow, he was having none of it. He decided to go home. I spent days trying to talk him out of it. I begged him to stay as we stood outside the Cat and the Fiddle. I thought I could protect him, save him, and I was very afraid of what he might do back in Maryland. He was entirely unmoored. But he was determined—he couldn’t find a job and he felt broken. Months later, I learned he went back to the bathroom-locking behaviors. I drove Johnny out to A1A the day he left. I’d go ten miles and he’d say, Okay you can let me out here. I’d say, I’ll take you a bit further and go ten more. Finally, he said, Look, you can’t take me all the way to Maryland, just let me out. So I did. I watched him walk north in the rearview mirror until he disappeared, and I never saw him again.
In early March, Johnny took that same 22 we hunted with so many afternoons, put the barrel up to his heart, and pulled the trigger. He stumbled down the hall to his brother’s room, stopped at the door, said Please help me, and died.
I didn’t find out till mid-May when I stopped by Maryland while taking a waiter friend from the Sea Ranch up to New Bedford, Massachusetts. We stopped by my Aunt Charlotte’s who lived in Hempstead, Long Island then, stayed with her a few days, and went to the 1964 World’s Fair. In Maryland, I’d heard from a friend what had happened. The whole trip I was numb. I was a kid; I didn’t know how to react. I shut down, withdrawing my senses, drinking more, and trying not to think about it. There’s a melancholy song on Lucinda Williams’ Sweet Old World album that wonders perfectly what may have happened to a passed brother: Didn't you think you were worth anything / Didn’t you think anyone loved you/ See what you lost when you left this world/ This sweet ole world.
It was now early June, 1964. I realize now I was clinically depressed and had been for several years. I drove back to Maryland, hung out in my parents’ yard for three weeks and went down Ocean City to my summer work selling telescope pictures to tourists on the beach. There, I had to grapple all summer with Susan, my reason for the original heartbreak. She dated lifeguards, beach boys, bartenders. That summer the pain would often stop me in my tracks right where I stood on the sand. It was searing. The next step took all I had.
Now there’s a space, an emptiness where Johnny should be. I know we probably would have grown up and gone our own ways, but I didn’t think that way when we were together. I thought he’d always be there. The emptiness has been there all my life, though I didn’t recognize it until a couple of years ago when I had a encounter with his younger sister. Like an injured feral cat, Lori was curled into a ball, prepared to lash out at anyone who touched her open wound. I wanted a picture of Johnny, having misplaced the only one I had. She saw me as an intruder stoking to life the quietly smoldering coals that had lain dormant all these years. I told her I had loved him, and she retorted Well, your love couldn’t save him, could it. She mislead me, refusing to send me a photograph, and instead pointing me towards sources of photos that did not exist.
Johnny had suffered immediate regret, hence his plea to Randy. What did that feel like? Sounds terrifying to me.
These past few weeks I’ve lived back in 1964 with Johnny, and I feel changed. I see now, particularly following the episode with Lori, how important he was to me and how much his loss has affected me. He was the brother I never had.