My Dinner with Joe
My one and only date with my friend Joe might have passed entirely from my memory if it weren’t for what happened in the larger world that November night. For decades people have continued to talk about it. It’s not in the same league with an election, or an earthquake, or an assassination, but still they talk. Some laugh and some shake their heads, and a few diehards are even angry. But whenever someone brings it up, I think about my only date with Joe.
I was just 20, and I believe he was nearly 21. We’d known each other for a few months. I really don’t remember how or where we met, but there were lots of people I knew from just “around.” People I met in the bars my roommate Judy and I visited with our borrowed IDs, or all-night restaurants where we hung out when we couldn’t borrow someone’s ID, were just as much our friends as people we met at the office, or were introduced to, or worked with in the community theater group. I’d met Judy while working on one of those community theater productions. At first we’d been rivals for parts and the attentions of the young men we encountered, but eventually we became friends and, for almost a year, roommates.
But we weren’t roommates any longer that November. Things hadn’t worked out and we drove one another crazy so to remain friends I moved back in with my family. Judy had no family to speak of, so she moved to a hotel for women that was run by the Salvation Army. It was an okay place to stay and the fact that men weren’t allowed in the private rooms kept her out of trouble, just as living with my parents again kept me in line. We weren’t all that wild, really, but there were always possibilities.
At first, Joe had been a prospective boyfriend for Judy. Joe was gay, but he entertained the possibility of being bisexual. He was young and hadn’t got the whole picture of himself. Judy liked him, but things didn’t work out between them. Then sometime that fall, Judy told me, Joe got the notion that he wanted to date me. Not just hang out at the all-night restaurant or anything, but go on a real date. She encouraged him, and told me of his intentions.
I don’t think I really wanted to date Joe – not date date, anyway. Hanging out with a group was fine. Even going to the movies with Judy and one or two others was fine. But just the two of us on a date seemed weird. But somehow it happened. He called and asked me to dinner. Then he apparently called Judy to tell me he had asked me out because she called me to tell me that Joe had called her to tell her we had a date. He was quite excited about the prospect. I think Judy might have cautioned me that he had great hopes for a relationship, so I had better let him down easy if I wasn’t really interested.
And I wasn’t really interested. Joe was nice and I liked him as a friend, but I’d never thought about him as a boyfriend. It wasn’t because I knew he was gay. There were lots of gay guys I found attractive. Joe just didn’t appeal to me that way. And he wasn’t ugly or sloppy or mean or anything. In fact, he wasn’t much of anything except funny. I liked him for being funny, but that wasn’t enough. So I don’t remember why I chose to go out with him. Maybe it was just to have something to do to get out of the house and away from my parents, who were still being very superior about the fact that I couldn’t make it living on my own and had moved back home.
I don’t know why our date was for an early dinner on a Sunday. My job was a 9 to 5 office gig, but perhaps Joe worked on Friday and Saturday night. He did wind up making a career in food service, so perhaps he did then as well. Restaurant workers seldom have Friday or Saturday nights off.
We went to an Italian restaurant. Our table was by the window overlooking Woodward Avenue, the city’s main street. I don’t recall what we ate or what we talked about, but at some point Joe realized that some people we knew – Steve and Pam – were seated nearby in the scantily populated room. There was no question of turning our date into a group thing as the others were clearly on a date. They were seated on the same side of a booth, talking with heads together. I didn’t know Steve very well. He was our friend Jeff’s older brother. Judy sometimes dated Jeff. Pam was separated from her husband, and was somewhat on the fringe of our circle of friends. I vaguely remember exchanging greetings with them as we were leaving the restaurant, but that’s it.
If we’d made any plans to do anything after dinner I don’t recall what they were. And I don’t know why Joe thought that an appropriate after-dinner activity was to drop in on Judy. True, we were in the neighborhood, but it seemed an odd suggestion. We did, though.
I had visited Judy once at her new place. She had a small room on one of the upper floors and seemed to be satisfied with the whole arrangement. The residence hotel had its rules and regulations, but it also offered her the kind of companionship she had never known. She was an only child and had lived at home until her mother died when she was 19. Her parents had been separated for years and after her mom’s death her father had sold the house. Judy got an apartment with a friend for a while, but that didn’t work out so she got her own place. Then I moved in with her, but that didn’t work out either. A woman from her office told her about the residence hotel, and that seemed to suit her budget, which was the main concern. It was close to work, so she could walk or take the bus, and there was always plenty of company.
What had struck me as rather a grim arrangement turned out to be lots of fun for Judy, who was always very social. In many ways it was like a college dormitory, with about a hundred women, mostly young, visiting one another in their rooms, chatting in the hallways going to and from the communal bathrooms, and sharing meals in the dining room. The rooms didn’t have TV sets, and personal TVs were rare and expensive in those days, but there was a big set in the lounge where everyone gathered to watch whatever they democratically agreed to watch.
Gentleman visitors were allowed in the lounge, so that was where we went to visit with Judy. I don’t know if our arrival was expected, but looking back I’m not sure we were entirely welcome. Judy and Joe and I were good friends, but now Judy had other friends as well. They were all gathered to watch a special TV show and the room was packed with residents – all Judy’s new friends. There were rows of chairs facing the television and it was rather like being in church. We sat in the back of the room, and I remember thinking that Joe and I were rather like outcasts in a closed society. All these women lived under the same roof, ate the same meals for breakfast and dinner, and gathered to watch the same TV shows. And tonight, while they awaited the start of the Sunday night special they had all chosen to watch, we were not fully part of the scene.
The three of us must have chatted, as the others did, until someone undoubtedly issued a shush or said something like “it’s starting.” I remember looking at the large TV in the distance and seeing a girl standing on top of a hill and a single word in bold letters nearly filling the screen: “Heidi.”
We in that room had no way of knowing that elsewhere in the eastern time zone, football fans were cursing and throwing things at their TV sets because NBC had cut off coverage of the New York Jets vs. Oakland Raiders game to air “Heidi” as scheduled. Meanwhile, at a stadium in Oakland and elsewhere in the country, fans cheered one of the most exciting finishes in the team’s history. In a single, final minute, Oakland scored two touchdowns and smashed the three-point deficit they’d been suffering as Heidi took those steps up her mountain.
There was a lot we didn’t know that evening. We didn’t know that just about a year later, Joe and Judy would be visiting me at my apartment in New York City, where I had moved to try to break into professional theater. I didn’t know that things wouldn’t work out, with the apartment or with my theatrical ambitions, and that I would wind up living for a time in a New York residence hotel run by the Salvation Army, and that I would come to enjoy and appreciate the sort of arrangement Judy had back home. And I didn’t know that I would wind up back in Detroit with a circle of friends that would include Joe and his new wife, or that I would be a bridesmaid when Judy married Steve. I’m sure we expected that life, families, work, and just stuff would come between us and that we would drift back together at times, and we did, but I certainly didn’t know that the last time I would see Joe would be on a Sunday in winter, nearly forty years after our only date.
We had both traveled some distance to the funeral home where Judy lay in state. Life had taken me away from Judy. Years earlier she had moved to a community that was a two hour drive from where I lived, and although always enjoyed getting together, our meetings “in the middle” were few. We hadn’t spoken in nearly a year, and even then it was because of death. My mother had passed away about the same time that Steve died suddenly of a heart attack. We promised that we would get together, but time had its way and we never did. The day she died I had thought of her and promised myself that I would call her before the weekend and that very soon – that Sunday, I thought – I would make the trip to her place.
As I drove the distance I marveled that the highway I traveled in what seemed like so little time had separated us for so long. Two hours … less time than it takes to play a football game. At the funeral home I was happy to see so many of my old friends. We talked and shared memories and it was almost like a party. Joe was there, as expected. He and Judy had never lost touch, never let distance or life interfere with their friendship. Joe had been the last person to talk with Judy. She was three time zones away, but he’d called her just before she went to bed the night she suffered the heart attack that took her from us permanently.
Joe died, also from a heart attack, a few years later, but I didn’t hear of it until months after the fact. I’m sure we meant to get back in touch, but we didn’t. And there was never any question of us having a date. Joe was divorced from the mother of his children, had a food service business to run, and a couple of grown children with kids of their own. He’d told me he had a girlfriend, and I suspect he had a boyfriend as well. Some things change, some things don’t.
“The Heidi Game,” as it is known, changed sports TV and certain aspects of communication. As a result of the furor, TV stations now agree to air all scheduled games in their entirety, no matter what the score or how predictable the outcome. Consequently, people anxious to watch the show that comes after the game know that they need to be patient. And broadcast officials set up separate lines to discuss program changes across the time zones. I understand they call them “Heidi phones.”
Through the years, that game and that Sunday have become sports and TV legend. Like all legends, not all that is said about “The Heidi Game” are true. It has been morphed from a regular season game into a Super Bowl, for one thing, and no doubt there are those who will swear that they heard of crimes of passion being committed by men whose wives cheered as “Heidi” appeared as scheduled. And although only the eastern time zone was affected, it’s been said that the whole nation was outraged. But perhaps, since a New York team was involved, that perception is accurate … to New Yorkers, at least.
I’m rather glad that “The Heidi Game” has become the stuff of legend. Were it not for the controversy, I might never have remembered my one date with Joe. In football there’s a saying that on any given Sunday, any team in one league can beat any other team. And on any given Sunday, or Friday, or Saturday, any girl might go out with any boy and it might become a romance or a lifelong friendship. Or it might fade from memory as life intercedes.