You Can Call Me Johnny
Upon cursory reflection the list of people one would assume frequently wear striped clothing seems limited to referees, inmates and the New York Yankees. Courtesy of State Farm auto insurance company and my desire to drive as a teenager there was another occupation that met the criteria as well.
My parents gave me a black Schwinn Continental II ten speed bike on my 16th birthday. In lieu of my own car I practically became one with this gift, putting hundreds of miles on the bike. Although my travel radius was limited and constrained by the seasons my mobility was greater than it once had been. Almost coincident with this was the arrival of construction equipment and a sign announcing the future home of Wendy’s Old-Fashioned Hamburgers.
Thus, would begin my journey in pinstriped polyester and french fry oil. I passed by the construction site almost every day on my bike, and soon a large sign appeared in the window of the new building announcing that applications for this location were being accepted at an established location. Shortly thereafter I found myself completing an application unsure of what I might be getting myself into. I have no recollection of the interview nor do I recall getting the call that welcomed me to the inaugural crew. I do recall the odd mix of excitement and nervousness I had as I began training for a position I would hold for the next 4 years.
Like almost any new environment things were awkward at first. The combination of learning the proper way to prepare hamburgers or estimate how many french fries were needed while dealing with the public and other crew members meant shifts were rarely boring. As it turned out, despite the rock bottom pay scale, there were other less obvious benefits to be had that would serve me well. One important such benefit was that I became friends with a number of public school kids whom I would likely never have met otherwise. One such person was named Dean. Dean was maybe 1.5 years older than me and represented more of an enigma to all of us than other crew members did. Dean was soft spoken, wore his required work hat deeply punched down over his forehead, and tended to mumble comments under his breath in a way which strained the limits of human low frequency hearing. As time passed the crew seemed to sort itself out in terms of efficiency and interpersonal dynamics. Within a few months Dean and I had become scheduling partners, we formed the core of an afternoon lineup, working 4 until store closing while a cast of our coworkers rotated around us. Soon we became friends and his stoicism dissolved into an endless stream of inside jokes and one liners which gave those around us the impression we were telepathic.
When there was a lull in business, we were expected to pick a cleaning duty and attend to it until we were needed for customers. Dean would often grab a broom and begin sweeping behind the counter in a location hidden from customer sight. One of his favorite routines was to hold the broom as though it were a guitar, leap out of his sequestered spot and in a move not unlike Pete Townshend’s windmill, crank his arm in a circular motion and say what sounded to me like, ” She’s so frump tee ay”. This went on for months until I finally asked him to slowly tell me what he was saying and or what it meant. Dean was quoting the Peter Gabriel song ‘Games Without Frontiers’ and was allegedly saying ‘je sans frontier’. I had not heard the song nor really knew who Peter Gabriel was, and so the next time I was at his house, Dean cued up a Gabriel album, and thus I was introduced to the performer who quickly became my favorite artist. To date I think I have seen Peter Gabriel liveat least a dozen times over 40 plus years.
Dean also introduced me to his best friend at school, a kid named Dave, except that Dean called him Johnny, short for Johnny Hoghead, as in the lead singer of the fictitious band Johnny Hoghead and the Dead Livers. Johnny was about as awkward as one human could be, never able to look anyone directly in the eye. He seemed to exist on the very tenuous interface between Howard Hughes like reclusiveness and functional society. Johnny was very artistic, his gifts included freehand drawing, and lyric writing. He loved music as well and had a record collection that rivaled that of any small radio station, with almost as much high-end stereo equipment. Johnny often bought used records for the sole purpose of transforming the cover art, labels and any inner artwork into fictitious Dead Liver releases. This might not sound impressive, but it truly was. Along with my friend Earl, we quickly became quite an unlikely quartet that against all stereotypes were frequently inseparable.
Dean and Johnny graduated from high school and both decided to attend Penn State at the local campus. However, before the end of their freshman year, both also decided that college was not the path they needed to pursue. For Dean this translated to joining the Air Force, and for Johnny it meant joining the work force. I accompanied Dean to Dover Air Force base on the day of his departure, realizing that things would be different, and they were.
Dean sent 1 letter while in basic training, and true to form it was erratic, disjointed and funny but not very long or informative. Following basic he had some time off and returned home for a brief stint. While my life remained relatively unchanged, we all knew Dean belonged to the Air Force now, and so his deployment overseas was the hand of fate intervening in all our lives. I saw Johnny occasionally but not nearly as much as I had in the not too distant past. Dean had been the conduit to Johnny; I did not even have Johnny’s phone number. Earl and I remained as tight as ever and still are to this day. I graduated high school in 1981, and went on to attend Neumann College, a local commuter only catholic college in nearby Aston.
Years passed, and both Johnny and Dean seemed to have disappeared underground. Even in the burgeoning age of technology, neither name produced a hit when I searched on social media platforms. Then one day out of the blue I received a friend request from an obvious alias, ‘Tommy Tunes’. This turned out to be Johnny who had assumed a new moniker. I was happy to be reconnected to Johnny. As it turned out Johnny had met a woman online, fell in love and moved from his boyhood home in Pennsylvania to the middle of somewhere Texas to be with his girlfriend. Johnny said Dean maintained a website of his highly diffracted ideas and he too had assumed an alias, Decanus Picto. I found the site but must admit that the content was an electronic stream of consciousness trip that focused on why a group of extraterrestrials were obsessed with a blue hand truck located somewhere in Ohio. Although infinitely less coherent, the premise reminded me of the hand towel in ‘The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy’. Despite trying, I never managed to connect to Dean through his site or other social media outlets. However after exploring his site I felt a mixture of disappointment and relief.
Two years ago I got an urgent direct message from Johnny. When I replied, Johnny told me he had just heard from another mutual friend that Dean had passed away. The account he relayed said that there had been a motor vehicle accident, a younger driver was involved and found to be at fault for the collision that had put Dean in a coma. Dean lingered in that state for 6 days until he succumbed to his injuries. I was profoundly saddened by this news. Not knowing the status of an old friend was like having a placeholder in my life, a dog-eared page in a favorite book that denoted where we left off, and where we could begin again if chance granted the opportunity. Such tabs are tiny but significant beacons of hope that someday the narrative might resume. In this case it marked the final chapter of the story.
Reflecting on this news I could not help but replay the end scenes from a popular movie about 4 friends in search of a dead body. ‘Stand By Me’ is the cinematic adaptation of the Stephen King short story titled ‘The Body’. The story of their fateful summer is narrated by one of the boys as an adult. The recounting is triggered by the untimely and senseless death of one of those friends. How odd to realize that I am doing the same thing.
