One summer Jerry went back to Oklahoma to stay with his grandparents.  He might have been toying with the idea of maybe moving back there.  When he came back at the end of the summer he said the only job he'd been able to find was as a truck driver.  He was certain that was not the kind of life he wanted to lead.

Other people have noted this.  Here's a quote from Salman Rushdie, who was concerned with the situation of the migrant when he wrote Satanic Verses.

"The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief."  

The situation is complicated by a lot of other factors, but I think what Rushdie says applies, at least to some extent, to people who have been moved about as children.  Jerry was born in Oklahoma and moved several times when he was younger.  I wasn't born in Oklahoma, but I moved a lot also, as did several of our other friends.

Mike Booth's comment after the first post (August 27) describes how he became persona non grata at Claudia's mother's house.

Jerry got tickets for us to Saturday Night Live when the Muppets were on the show.  At the time, the Great God Favog was smoking craters.  (“He’s smoking craters again.”)  It wasn’t clear whether they’d be allowed to do the bit.  Finally word came from a studio executive: he could smoke the craters as long as he didn’t enjoy it.  If it made him sleepy, that was O.K.

Jerry met us outside to take us in.  On the way in we saw Jim Henson, racing through trailing a long black cape.  Jerry introduced me and started to say, “this is my friend...” then hesitated (how could you explain it?).  We both laughed and said almost at the same time, “from long ago.”  Jim smiled and nodded and went on his way.

At different times, Jerry and Marshall both drove cabs in D.C., usually on the night shift.  Each cab had a shortwave radio to communicate with the dispatcher.  One driver couldn’t hear what another driver said, but all the cabs could hear the dispatcher.  Occasionally a driver would call in for a new assignment and the dispatcher would ask, “Where are you now?”  It seemed strange, driving at night, to suddenly hear the question, “Where are you now?” burst out of the radio, like something out of a Cocteau movie.  It seemed portentious, freighted with layers of existential meaning: in life?  It became part of our conversations, a kind of greeting, “Where are you now?”  (in life?)

I don’t remember where the idea came from, but for some time we thought about painting bird footprints around the campus.  We envisioned a bird 15 or 20 feet high that might land, walk around the campus leaving footprints behind, and then fly away.  [I don’t want to mislead you.  We thought of a big bird but not Big Bird.]  Finally Jerry and I got together one afternoon and cut out a bird footprint from a 4 x 8 sheet of fiberboard - three toes pointing forward and one pointing behind.  We had a can of white paint and I got a wide paint brush that we could use to fill in each print quickly.

That night dressed in old clothes we took our stencil, paint, and paintbrush and went to campus.

Around that time the movie by Paddy Chayefsky, Marty, had been playing.  In the film, a group of bored guys get together in the evenings with nothing to do.  In several scenes they ask each other, “What do you want to do?” and another one answers, “I don’t know, Marty, what do you want to do?”  Of course we picked up on some of this dialog and used it in conversation.

Under cover of darkness, we made the bird “land” in the middle of the quad - two footprints side by side.  Then the bird walked across the quad toward the library, left, right, left, right, with about a 3 ½ to four foot stride.  We were delighted with the appearance of the footprints.  The tracks crossed the road and got to the sidewalk in front of the library.  We had turned and started down the sidewalk toward the girls’ dorm when a car turned off of Nebraska Avenue into the main gate and headed our way.  It was obvious the headlights would sweep across us when the car turned the corner and came past the library.  Jerry turned to me and said, deadpan, “What do you want to do, Marty?”  Of course I said, “I don’t know Marty, what do you want to do?”

Then we moved quickly.  We left the stencil on the sidewalk - it would lie flat and probably wouldn’t be noticed from inside the car - and picked up the paint can and paint brush and hid behind some bushes in front of the library until the car went past and we had escaped notice.  Typical of Jerry: good timing, quick insight, and most of all, someone you could count on to come through when it was important.

There were no more cars that night.   After the car went by the bird continued down the sidewalk to the girls’ dorm.  By this time the stencil was breaking across the middle.  We both had to carry it, one on each side, to the next spot, to keep it from splitting in half.  The tracks turned and the bird faced the dorm, feet side by side.  Perhaps the bird was thinking.  In those days there were “parietal hours,” the girls’ dorm was locked at 11 p.m.  Then, as if the bird had flown over the dorm, the tracks “landed” in the road behind the dorm, and walked down the road to Clendenon Hall where they stopped.

Now the denoument to our adventure.  Quite tickled with ourselves, we waited to hear what the reaction had been to the bird tracks: outrage, amusement, certainly puzzlement?  But we heard nothing.  After two days someone told us that since the tracks stopped at Clendenon Hall where the theater auditorium was housed, people thought the tracks must be an advertisement for one of the college plays.  I don't know, Marty, what do you want to do?

Don’t ask me why, but when we were in college we went through a period when we gave people names of animals.  We had Spider, Frog, and so forth.  For some reason we decided Jerry should be “Ape,” and Jerry more or less accepted the name.

He had a long drive to get home to his parents’ house in Fairfax so some nights Jerry would sleep on the “couch” in the living room.  Of course, the couch was just an army cot, one of those things with a steel frame and wire links holding up the mattress.  It had a thin mattress pad, with a cover and some pillows.  Some mornings we would get up and Jerry would still be there, other mornings he would be gone.

One afternoon I opened a desk drawer and took out a small matchbook.  Not a big box of kitchen matches but a small box with the kind of matches you’d use to light a pipe.  When I opened it, on top of the matches there was a small, folded piece of paper, about 3/4 of an inch square, that I hadn’t seen before.  I unfolded it.  Inside it said “Ape slept here.”