It is difficult to express in words that which I write today, Monday, July 19. It's difficult, because it involves someone I admired, someone who has touched us all from a family that has touched us all, but in particular, because it is about someone I had the pleasure of meeting and bonding with. John-- he never let himself be called Jack or Junior or John-John-- Kennedy has been pronounced dead, although no body has been recovered as I write this. I mourn his wife, Carolyn, and her sister Lauren, whom I am three degrees separated from through friends in Greenwich Connecticut, but John... You've read more eulogies than you probably have cared to read, from people who knew him as a Kennedy. Allow me this last one from one who was touched by him, and perhaps touched him, as well. The Kennedy mystique carried weight, even in the circles I travelled as a kid, so the night I first met John, I was in awe. Forget the assassination of his father and uncle Robert, and the disgrace of the last remaining Kennedy brother. Jackie O. alone would have been more than enough of a burden and inspiration for anyone on the Upper East Side, and that's what I found so awesome. The fact that his childhood had been nothing but trauma and jolts from his birth on only compounded all that admiration. There was this bar on East 79th Street, it may even still be there for all I know, called Mike Malkin's, although it later changed it's name to The Sugar Mill. Malkin's was the kind of place where, in the 70's, if you could reach above the bar, you could buy a drink. It catered to the upper class drunken teen. I went there all the time. I was almost eighteen, so this must have been the summer of 1975, possibly '74. Malkin's was always crowded with girls that dressed even better than their moms did, and guys who snuck the keys to the family car into a pocket and drove out of the monthly garage spot, after tipping the attendant generously to keep his mouth shut. Me, I showed up in my red and white NYU T-shirt, tight jeans, hair pulled back in a pony tail. I was the poor kid on the block, the son of a carpenter, and damned if I wasn't going to advertise it the way these others were advertising their wealth. In my own way, I was putting on airs. Events from that night stand out in my memory: the raven-haired twins who kept groping me whenever they came up to the bar for drinks; the kid from Dalton, complete with prep school jacket looking for all the world as if he was twelve, elbowing me at each opportunity, practically begging for a fight; the bartender, Phil, cutting him off and the kid threatening to sue until Phil "promised" to call his dad in to talk about it; Mike Malkin, his hair slicked back wearing a black suit with a white carnation boutonnierre, sitting with his boy toy of the moment at the first booth nearest the door. Mike owned a few other bars on the East Side, most notably Adam's Apple, one of the then-trendiest discos after Studio. I was hanging out with Danny, another "underprivileged" kid who worked with me at the drugstore doing stock work and making deliveries. Danny was well-off, just not old money like the rest of the crowd that night, so he was isolated a little. I sensed the crowd parting behind us as we hunched over our whiskey sours (I said I was a kid!). Turning, I came face to face with the face that I must have seen hundreds of times in the paper, in spite of Jackie's best efforts to shield him and his sister, Caroline. My jaw must have hung down to the floor, because he looked at me, smiled tightly, and said "Hi." Danny started the conversation going, I guess, in typical Danny-style: "Where's your sister?" Danny was a horn-dog. John laughed, ordered a beer (Beck's), and turned away to mingle with his friends. He stopped, turned back, and asked Danny and I to join him. Just like that, there were two empty barstools before you could say "JFK." We sat with him, and Mike Malkin joined us. Two other boys were with him, but damned if I can remember the names now. John noticed my NYU shirt, and asked me about the school (my answers, I'm sure, are what drove him to go to Brown University a few years later). The conversation ranged all over the place, and slowly, the booth emptied out, until it was the three of us left. Eventually, the inevitable topic of being a Kennedy came up. I was none too subtle about it, but I had a chance to thank the clan through its most famous child, and was not going to be dissuaded from doing it. I had tenuous Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon ties to the Kennedys in some very bizarre ways, most recently through the RFK Foundation, which was established to help mainstream mentally retarded children and adults into society. My brother was one of the first people helped by the foundation (he was placed in a job that he still holds today, some 30 years later). Another example: my mother was a seamstress, and did work for Robert Frost's daughter. Robert Frost was JFK's favorite poet, had recited at the inauguration. His daughter was a writer of children's books, and she mentioned that this book she was giving me she had given to John-John, too. Other weird connections like that. I never did get around to it, though. It seems as though he was there, and then gone, once that topic started to take shape in discussion. To this day, I never remember him leaving the booth. I only remember his graciousness, his ease, and the fact that he stuck us with the tab, which wasn't very large. And my memento of that evening: a cocktail napkin with his phone number on it, which he gave me when we were discussing football, and I mentioned that I played in Central Park right near his house on Fifth Avenue. I'd had other, briefer encounters with him over the course of the next few years. He never forgot my name, and our in-joke was that he never picked up that tab, the cheap bastard. I followed his tabloid life, knowing the man who made the photos and magazine covers to be both different from and the same as the one they covered. I watched him grow, finally become a lawyer, marry, and all the time kept this very warm smile of his locked in my memory. And I always knew that, when my name nudged into the public eye, he'd remember me, and that was when I'd have the chance I missed when I was young and not really socially-graceful. I never said thanks to him and his family. I never said I was sorry for bringing the family up in our first conversation. I want to now. Thank you, John and to the main part of your family, for being normal. In this age of kids who forgot where they came from or who never knew the struggle their families went through to get them there, you and yours remembered that passage from Luke 12:48, "Of those to whom much is given, much is required." It would have been easy to feel a sense of entitlement simply for being a Kennedy, like William Kennedy Smith, your cousin, did. You didn't. You never lost your grace, no matter how many sleazy tabloids covered your arguments with girlfriends, and touch football games and bike rides in the park. Thank you for the help your family gave my family when my brother was de-institutionalized, and we struggled with where to go next. It may have been a different branch of the tree, but it grew from the same trunk, and damned if this wasn't the exact wording I was going to say that night if I hadn't hurt you and made you go away. Thank you, John, for never forgetting my name, even though I would have gladly said it to you over and over, never once reminding you that we'd met before. Thank you for wanting to be included, even if that invitation never did materialize because we never played football in the park again. I'm sure if I had dropped your name, I could have rounded up hundreds of guys from my Sutton Place crowd to play, but after that first evening when I embarassed you, I was ashamed of what might happen, that you'd play and they'd mention the name "Jack", and that would be the last game. In fact, I was too arrogant, too elitist, because it never occured to me to call you and ask you out for a drink or a movie. It seemed like I was trying to protect you from being seen with me, when maybe that's exactly what you would have wanted. It's as if I wasn't treating you like a normal guy, and in truth, you were more normal than most of my friends. That's an admission that comes painfully from me, because all my life, I've been "special", too, in my own ways, and have railed against those who gained my trust and love and devotion for what I was, for what I could do for them. Who I was did not mean much, and once it became a bigger problem for them than what I could do to ease their way, I was abandoned. Those friends I referred to just now? Some of them are dead. None of them were mourned much. And I'm sorry, not only for my clumsy attempt to fawn a little, but for not realizing back then that it was OK to be human with you. Who knows what kind of friendship we'd have had if I had just stuck to football? I'm sorry for not calling. I'm sorry for not even sticking a note in my mother's purse when she would attend to Mrs. Whitehouse in the same building, and ask her to drop it off with your mom. I think you might have enjoyed that little touch. I was with a friend when the news came that you were lost at sea this weekend, and had to hold her to stop her from coming apart, and I wondered why her train was becoming derailed. She understood what has only now dawned on me: you're gone, and the hopes we had as a nation that you could pick up the torch dropped in Dallas die with you. But for me, it's not just about the torch and Dallas. You're gone, and the hopes I had that, just one more time, I could shake your hand, and hear your voice (that mix of Kennedy and Bouvier) speak my name, rest with you. I mourned your father deeply, but was only six when he was shot, so I mourned as one who lost a little innocence to death, a tribal chief killed by a predator. I mourned when your uncle was killed, keenly, the mourning of lost hope, and remember standing in line in 90 degree heat, nearly passing out from exhaustion on Lexington Avenue around 47th Street with still a quarter-mile of line in front of us before we got to St. Patrick's, and crying even more when I knew that I wouldn't say goodbye to him. Them, I never met. I haven't stopped crying today, and the tears obscure the screen as I type this. I mourn lost vitality. Now that we've become of age and established life, I see how easily one can lose it, and how easily one can miss opportunities in the scurry of days. And this doesn't just refer to me, John. We both lived life destined to crack into a wall. I survived mine, and learned. And while this sliver of my heart sees you even now wandering down a beach near Buzzards Bay, dazed, confused, clothes tattered and soaked, that heart... One day, when the crowds of gawkers have thinned, I'll visit North Moore Street, and place flowers there, and I'll go to the Vineyard, or maybe Hyannisport, and leave some flowers there, and stand by the sea, and recite that epitaph on RFK's tomb: "In our sleep, pain that can not forget falls drop by drop upon the heart." Goodbye, John. And that was six bucks for your Becks, ya cheap bastard. Carl
Salonen,
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