Sean Nolan - Guys Like Us: A Memoir of Life Lost and Found

GUYS

LIKE

US

SEAN NOLAN

First published by GemmaMedia in 2011.

GemmaMedia

230 Commercial Street

Boston, MA 02109 USA

www.gemmamedia.com

2011 by Sean Nolan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5

978-1-936846-01-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Nolan, Sean, 1974

Guys like us : a memoir of life lost and found / Sean Nolan.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-936846-01-6 (pbk.)

1. Nolan, Sean, 1974 2. Nolan, Joseph Michael, 1949 3. Fathers and sonsNew JerseyBiography. 4. Cycling accident victimsNew JerseyBiography. 5. AmnesiacsNew JerseyBiography. 6. Nolan family. 7. New JerseyBiography. I. Title.

CT275.N6868A3 2011

974.9043dc23

2011017559

Cover by Night & Day Design

For Mike and Kathy and everyone who showed up

I had an accident. Im sorry. I dont know who you are.

Joseph Michael Nolan, Jr., former lawyer, former basketball player, former man of the world, stood on the beach in front of his house, shaking hands with another white-haired man who had just introduced himself. His vacant blue eyes took it all in and his distinguished older Irish-American guy hair blew lightly in the breeze, not unlike the man himself these days.

Thats all right, Michael, the man was saying, all the while smiling and shaking his head. At some point, he had said he was a judge, and he began talking excitedly to his wife about who my father was to him, the cases he had worked on, the stories she would know him from, and she was nodding and smiling even more, and the both of them looked a bit like they might cry. Its just so damn good to see you, Michael. Thought wed lost you out there. He jerked his head out back inland towards the rest of the island where Route 35 rolled right through the center of our town.

Some people are forever. You know that wherever they are, whether its been ten minutes or ten years, theyll walk into the room and look and talk and move the same way they did the first time you met them. They barely seem to age, and when they do, it happens so slowly that the next thing you know, theyre just gone. Youd swear all day that these people were the measure of your life, your atomic clock. If they barely changed, you seemed all the more different each time you were near them, and they became a thing you could tie yourself to so that maybe you wouldnt change quite so much either.

Thats how they saw my father, a thing against which their own lives would be measured. Seeing him so altered, it was hard for them not to linger with him longer than they ever would have before, watching all the new pieces of him fit together.

People were always like this around him now. It had been nearly a year since the accident, and he had been in the hospital most of the time recovering from the head injury that nearly killed him and that totally erased his memory of his entire life. I knew that most of the people who had known him as Mr. Big Shot Lawyer had heard he was dead at first. Then they heard he was dying and then in a coma, and then they stopped hearing anything for months. Then maybe they heard he was locked away in various hospitals, being rehabbed, and then his wife Kathleen hid him away once they let him out, until it could be decided where this man would find his place in the world. Maybe he was in a wheelchair, or drooling on himself in the corner of some expensive rest home in Manhattan.

Since hardly anyone outside of a tight circle of friends and family had seen him for so long, people had a way of going all to pieces when they ran into him. He was a cross between a ghost and some kind of baffling miracle. He was a man not unlike themselves before it all happened, and someone who they had expected for months to finally die, and who had solemnly refused to do so.

It was hard to know who it was harder on now, them or Michael. He at least had the luxury of having no goddamn clue who he was, much less who they were.

Im starting to get better, he told them. I cant ever be a lawyer again. I know that much.

Heard about that, Michael. I was very sorry about that. Well miss you. So what will you do now?

Mike laughed and gestured as if to say Here I am, this is where its at, and they laughed too.

They walked away in a flurry of smiles, and as they continued on down the beach, looked back in appreciation. We resumed gazing out on the water. It was still hard for him to talk. He used to talk incessantly, yelling or needling or pushing people. Now he could barely put a few sentences together before he had to look up at the sky for the answers.

I wish I knew myself as well as they do.

You will, man. Its all going to come back.

It was fitting that this tragedy had played itself out here, down the Shore, as we all called it. Our address was nominally a small town up north where we went to school and the post office delivered our mail and we happened to live for nine months of the year. But it seemed like anything that really happened to us happened here, at the beach where we spent all our summers and many weekends during every other season. This was the place where I learned to ride a bike, to swim, to read, to drink and to fall in love. The Nolans had been coming here for decades, stretching on back to when my grandfather, Joe Nolan, first bought a house when he became A Big Deal. After that initial incursion, the Nolans had infected the place ever since.

Joseph Michael Nolan, Sr., named his first son Joseph Michael Nolan, Jr., and even the names carried a ring of constancy about them, as if the one, looking down on the other, had decided we would just have more of the same, because maybe now we had finally gotten good enough. One went by Joseph and the other by Michael so that you could tell them apart, but even then, sometimes they could not. They were both lawyers, they got each others mail; they both complained about it and asked you not to mention the complaints to the other guy.

Growing up Nolan, I was spoiled for fairy tales and childrens books. There was nothing in the world of unicorns and wild things and hobbits that could really tempt me. I had grown up surrounded by giants. Beyond Joe and Michael was a family that seeped into every aspect of your life, they were that big in my memory.

These Nolans moved around with a fabulous awareness of their own power, and it wasnt power made of money or fame or muscles, mostly it was just personality. Every one of them lit up a room when they walked in, because they were always the loudest and the sweetest and the worst. They drank, they smoked, they pounded the table. Mostly they just laughed at everything, in the best way, a kind word to you when you walked in and a bit of a sneer when you walked by. You knew it, but you didnt really care. People were happy to have their hands shaken with a smile and then asked why they looked like such shit on a swell night such as this, because why not? It was a Nolan asking. They didnt really mean it, did they?