When I was finishing my MFA in creative writing at UNC-Greensboro, I met a fellow, Doyle, who enchanted me. His people were Philly Irish; his father would say, in the hoi-toiders’ accent of the east coast,“Oi don’t moind.” Doyle had curly dark hair and pale Irish skin. He bit his nails.
Doyle the son behaved in no way that I had been taught. A trip to the grocery required him to load beers, pot, chips, and cigars in the car. He played basketball obsessively and not necessarily cleanly; when he jumped up under the basket for a lay-up, he threw a hip into the person guarding him.
I think his blitheness enchanted as well as irritated me--I always fretted. One day in my last summer in Greensboro, I had finally acquired a car. I was washing it when a thumbnail tore against some protruding metal trim. But he wanted me to come play basketball. “Oh, come on,” he urged, “you’re just going to lose the thumbnail anyway.” His statement annoyed me; he cared only about filling out a game
But I had never had a friend like this. I had no male friends in the MFA program as they were all either southerners or an unfriendly Yankee or two.
I had only a couple of friends in college. One was my roommate, a Chicagoan who wasn’t very bright but doggedly pursued subversive memes: he wanted to create a poster of Auburn’s Heisman Trophy winner, Pat Sullivan, with his hands on a woman’s large breasts, with the caption, “It takes two hands to handle a Whopper.” The concept made no sense, but he obsessed about it.
So meeting Doyle at the end of my MFA was a multiple kind of blessing. He was fun and illegal: I had never drunk so much beer and then driven. I told him once, “Doyle, I have no business driving,” and he replied, “Come on, Rach, how do you think the cops get to work?”
That was something else: he gave me the first and only nickname I ever had, Rachmaninoff, which he shortened to Rach. I have no idea how he arrived at it.
He was a senior undergraduate to my MFA. He knew a lot of fun undergraduate girls whom he treated kindly though with ambiguous intentions. He was friends with Caroline Watson, the daughter of Robert Watson, the esteemed poet in my program. He dated a funny petite girl named Eliza Battle Dorsett, with enough North Carolina-prominent names to suggest connections, but I think she was simply a smart, fun girl who took enormous joy in giggling out “Chiquita banana!” one drunken night.
We played basketball with the girls at midnight, we smoked dope, we sneaked into a pool and went skinny dipping. We took a road trip and drank beers the whole way. I had fun like never before.
He treated me ambiguously too. He involved me in everything, but on his terms. When I was sad at a pickup basketball game once, he asked why, and I told him that I was mourning the departure of a girl. “Oh, come on, Rach, there’s plenty more where she came from!” There weren’t, she was special to me, so I thought him insensitive. When a few years later I told him about a girl with whom I was involved, and told him the strange-sounding Scandinavian name by which she was called, he laughed and asked, “Rach, is she white?” His casual racism bothered me.
I wasn’t anywhere near as good a basketball player as Doyle; he was over six feet, could shoot from anywhere and defended casually but effectively. I had a good jump shot, but that was about all. Once he made fun of me. His friend John was guarding me, and with one quick step I had passed John and drove to the basket and I laid it in. Doyle laughed loudly: I had embarrassed John, and Doyle was laughing at his, and thus my, expense: I wasn’t good enough to have been able to do that.
He doesn’t sound like much of a best friend, does he? But he included me with his large circle of friends; I’d never been in a group before. Though they mainly played basketball, one day they summoned up enough of a group for a softball game. I hit a ball in the gap that went for a home run; playing shortstop, I sprinted well behind third base to catch a foul pop fly. One of his friends commented, in my hearing, “I guess we saw Jarecke’s true colors today!” I was surprised by the compliment.
Soon, that wonderful summer was over, and I went to Auburn to teach. We kept in touch. I had introduced him to a nice woman, Linda, before I left, and they married. He got a job eventually as a journalist in Lexington, VA. I remember visiting him there.
I discovered later that Doyle always had financial problems; that last bachelor summer in Greensboro, he had actually borrowed $300 simply to spend on a good time with Linda. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s $1,600 in today’s money. He bought a small car that eventually had to be repossessed. Some of these details feel suspended in the long duration of our friendship. I was in his wedding party when he married Linda.
Her mother didn’t like him. She had thought him unreliable during the wedding, which he treated like a big party, and his in-laws were offended. They married in the bride’s hometown, Kinston, NC. On the afternoon before the next day’s wedding, he and I found a gym and played two-on-two with a couple of black kids, whom we were thrilled to beat. Who does that on his wedding eve? Why didn’t that strike me as inappropriate?
After Lexington, they moved to Louisville, KY, for his job. Soon Linda was pregnant with Emma. A cliché, she was named for the Jane Austen character. I visited them there, and it was clear that things were off with them. He planned a day at Churchill Downs, where I won a bet on a race and took us all to a Chinese restaurant. It was a fine day, and for a few hours he and Linda seemed OK together, and I felt good with him again.
Eventually they moved back to Lexington, VA, and there the marriage blew up, and Linda’s parents came with a van and moved her back home.
Doyle filed for bankruptcy sometime around then. I went to law school, and at some point a girlfriend and I went to visit him. He was magnanimous about material things; he wasn’t going to be there for dinner, and he had fixed a meatloaf dinner for us.
Sometime that weekend, I found some handwriting on his desk. It seemed like the beginning of a story. He had written, “My friends and I work at our desultory jobs, writing our execrable prose, but…..” He hadn’t finished the sentence. Ah. Doyle wanted to be a writer.
He came to Chapel Hill to visit when I was in law school, and I set him up with Eliza Battle Dorsett, who had surprised me by appearing in law school a year ahead of me. The next day, I went into my guest room where they’d stayed, and the two single bed mattresses had been laid out on the floor. I asked him, “Doyle, what were you thinking?” He answered, “That’s just it, Rach, we weren’t!” That kind of breezy dismissal of simple politeness—he could have put the mattresses back—began to annoy me.
Back in Lexington, without Linda, he met another woman, Joyce. I met her once. She was tall with extravagant blonde hair and large breasts and I thought not up to his level intellectually. In the middle of this romance, Doyle, broke, had to move home to Virginia Beach to live with his parents. He must have been 30, and he stayed there a couple of years, at some point working in a grocery.
Eventually, though, he decided to marry Joyce. He asked me what I thought about that choice. I wrote him to suggest that he was only marrying Joyce to move out of his parents’ house. I didn’t hear back. I was pretending, I guess, that we were best friends and thus I was entitled to opine on his choices.
We lost touch after that, and a decade or more went by. In the 1990’s, I tracked him down in Lexington, VA, where he was fundraising for the George C. Marshall Institute. He had more kids, and seemed to have settled down, though it wasn’t with Joyce. I don’t recall the third wife’s name. He wrote saying that he’d wanted to write me but hadn’t felt like he could—“but not a problem for you,” he wrote, praising my courage.
We wrote and talked on the phone a couple of times. In the early 2000’s, Nancy and I were considering moving from Seattle back to the Lexington area, and he spoke in favor of it. Eventually we decided not to.
Then he wrote that the Marshall Institute had parted ways with him—they wanted someone who could take them to the next level of fund raising, he said. Telling: I would have thought that Doyle with his charisma and verbal dexterity would be perfect for that line of work.
We exchanged one other email after he moved back to North Carolina. What struck me about the email was not the work he was involved in, which I can’t remember, but the tone and the substance: he had never gotten beyond obtaining tickets for UNC teams, never evolved beyond the regional loyalties. I wonder if he ever resented having to go to UNC-Greensboro, for his loyalties all lay an hour down the road in Chapel Hill.
He spoke of having met various celebrities, like Hillary Clinton, I can’t remember all of whom, but he seemed to be bragging to make up for some shortcoming that I couldn’t divine. I didn’t write back. I no longer much cared about North Carolina and its red state ways.
I doubt we’ll speak again. He’s not one to get in touch; he is too involved with what’s in front of him, even if it’s the same things as they were in 1976. I see now that he manipulated me, insulted me, never cared about my feelings, and used me as a conveniently pliable sidekick.
As almost 50 years have passed, I think he saw that he had never lived up to his expectations and was disappointed—I can’t forget that half sentence on his desk. Probably that’s why he would never let me feel good about myself. Yet, in the end, he taught me how to have fun—not all of it legal or prudent, but undeniable fun. For that I’m grateful.
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