Regina Landor

Goodbye to Clocks Ticking

Lenny stood alone by the green hedges that separated our driveway from his yard when we moved into the neighborhood just before the moon landing, like he’d been standing there waiting for us since the day he came into the world five years prior. 

In the summer of 1969 when I was four, my mom, dad, big brother, and I clustered together on our front lawn in Berea, Ohio looking up at the night sky. “I see him!” I said, pointing upward. My parents probably scooped me up in their arms, laughing, and carried me into our warm interior. Sometimes now, when I’m having a fitful night I’ll settle on a comfort from my childhood home, like the sound the doors our built-in glass bookshelves made as I opened and closed them—thump—which secured those rows of names: Dostoyevsky, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Brontë, Tolstoy, Austen. A two-story wooden-framed house, our home was an outlier between two others, a family with vicious dogs on one side, and Lenny and his family on the other. 

Lenny rapped three times at the window next to our front door. He feared my father’s sternness, so avoided the doorbell which would have roused the whole family. My father was writing at his desk in the attic and didn’t descend much anyway, but I heard the knocking from my bedroom and ran down the stairs. Lenny’s big eyes peered in from the outside, his cowlicked hair stuck up, his large sloppy grin exposed his wide gums. I pulled open the door and we bounded up two stairs at a time to my room. I poked around in my mom’s closet looking for her strapless high-heeled sandals and long flowing purple scarf. I twirled and twirled for Lenny as he sat on my bed watching me.  

He came over often to hide from his older sister and four older brothers and maybe his parents who were somewhere inside that enormous house. Their side porch was so long it had two doors. I wonder now if the house was a fraternity or a boarding house for kids a century ago in that old college town. The brothers were kings of their frat-house-like home and idled away afternoons blasting Led Zeppelin from the garage, wore tight jeans, worked shirtless on their cars, and got stoned. Much later, Lenny idled away afternoons in his bedroom composing music and caring for his plants.  

The cavernous living room of Lenny’s house was always dark, the shades drawn. His brothers and their girlfriends lolled around on the couches blowing smoke out of their nostrils eyeing us as if we were small morsels to be eaten alive. I was seven and not only did we not have any electronic toys in our house, my father would not let us get a TV. My brother and I, and our little sister Amiel, snuck over to Lenny’s, and with our backs to the darkened cave, we’d wait for the remote so we could have a turn at Pong. We had to be very quiet inside the Hoffman house. Someone always had a headache and no one particularly liked kids. When we found teeth from their old mutt Georgie buried in the shag carpet, it was hard stifling our laughter.  

Old medicine bottles lined a windowsill in their garage, yellowed labels collecting dust, a semblance of forgotten order from the time when Lenny’s father, Leonard, had been a pharmacist. While his older kids revved their engines and sped out of the driveway, Mr. Hoffman mowed his lawn with an old-fashioned push lawn mower attempting to tidy things up in spite of the clutter of car parts spilling from the garage, the rusted-out sedan on the side-lawn, the unexpected teen pregnancies. Sometimes I watched Mr. Hoffman from the window at the base of our stairs inside my home as he pushed his quiet, whirring lawn mower, making even, neat patterns on his patch of grass.

Hot summer days we’d go to the pool, my mom sometimes taking us in our Volkswagen van, the van with a hole in the floorboard. On one of those trips, Lenny sat behind me and with his finger zig-zagged the space between my red braids. I didn’t turn around, but I remember the feel of his touch on my scalp. 

When we were older, we’d ride our bikes to the pool. If we only had one bike between us, I’d balance on the handlebars and Lenny would steer and peddle, carrying me the entire way. We took the same route: through the woods opposite our homes and onto the campus of Baldwin Wallace College, the winding paths and expanse of grass secluded by dormitories, past Ritter Library, across the road and down Seminary, a tree-lined street with college buildings built over a century ago and a Methodist church, it’s front door as bright as a cardinal, a warm opening on that street of old gray stone. We reached the town center where he skidded to a stop at one of three places—the pool, the library, or Baskin-Robbins. Once, on our way back from strolling into town, I dropped my chocolate scoop on the sidewalk. Lenny watched me bend down and pick it up and place it right back on my cone. No way was I gonna leave behind that ice cream. He doubled over into spasms of loud and awkward laughter, a sound that was as familiar to me as my own mother’s voice.

Our friendship grew as airy and wild as the weeds that climbed the chain link fence behind my house. We rode our bicycles, night after summer night. Riding bikes with Lenny, round and round the circular paths and then later farther afield, through the Metro Parks and past Wallace Lake, felt as natural as the wind rushing through my long, red hair on a cool, summer evening. 

My sister Amiel started trailing us whenever we took off. Lenny would come over to see if I wanted to go to the corner store for candy, and we’d jump off the porch over the steps and there she’d be, right at our heels. Lenny was mine and I wanted him all to myself. But he was fond of Amiel and sometimes just the two of them would head out together. She was young when she became a confidant for him. 

Season upon seasons we believed would never expend, Lenny was my Yes-man. He agreed to all the games I wanted to play, like the game I called “Merv Griffin.” We sat at a table on his front porch and I spoke in a British accent and he was Merv and he interviewed me, a famous actress, about my celebrity life. In real life I wanted to be an actress and he understood this. He dove head-long with me into our pretend interviews, as if he were part of my warming up process. 

Every summer, we signed up for acting classes for kids in the college theater department. In middle school, Lenny and I picked a scene to do together from Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. For an entire summer, we lived and breathed George and Emily. He’d sit on my couch holding the script while I practiced my monologue, the one where Emily comes back to life and receives one more day on earth after she dies during childbirth. The things she misses are little details in an ordinary day. 

Lenny watched me as I looked at a spot above his head where he sat on our yellow, high-back couch. “Good-bye to clocks ticking…and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths…and sleeping and waking up,” I recited the rest of the speech, then he and I practiced our scene at the soda counter. We looked into each other’s eyes. We were only thirteen and fourteen years old, but we took our words seriously. 

On endless summer days, we’d sneak into a side door of the theater building a block away to study the black and white photos of past Berea Summer Theatre stars hanging in the darkened hallways. Somehow, Lenny always found out interesting tidbits about people before I did. He told me on our way to school one morning that the leading lady of the musical “South Pacific”—the perky lady we adored with the pixie haircut and captivating stage presence—had a drinking problem. I didn’t understand how she could have hidden that so well—a fun-loving actress concealing a bottle in a paper bag didn’t add up. 

Once, much later in high school, we sat together in the auditorium at an award ceremony watching a senior who won an award bounce back up the aisle, beaming. Later that evening walking home with Lenny, I remarked, “Did you notice she wasn’t wearing a bra?” 

“Yeah,” he said, paused, then added, “and it was cold.” We both laughed, me more out of surprise that I’d never thought about that before, how nipples get hard when it’s cold. Somehow, Lenny knew things.  

The basement of my home was a converted, dank apartment which my parents rented out over the years. For a while, a gym teacher lived below us, a big guy with a girlfriend. While talking to my mom in our kitchen, she accidentally left behind her black leather purse. Later that day, alone with Lenny, he and I rummaged through it, carefully examining every item, laying them all out on the dining room table—the tubes of sticky lip gloss, the keys, a plastic container with pills in them. “That’s the pill,” Lenny said, as I held it in my hands.

“What pills?” I asked. 

“The pill,” he said, with his barking laugh. I didn’t know what he was talking about and he explained it to me as I looked at the numbers and days of the week spelled out inside the little box. I was shocked that our tenant was having sex in our house. When? Later, I would sneak downstairs in the dark basement alone and find the gym teacher’s stash of porn magazines in a corner on a shelf and sit in that corner for as long as I dared, slowly turning the pages.

* * *

Playing Candy Land with Amiel and Lenny was replaced by Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” Even my mom came out of the kitchen to dance with us in the living room when “Crocodile Rock” came on the record player. When the weather was good, the indoors were abandoned for the trees and the sun. The day Lenny came over after a long winter snowstorm, and he and Amiel went out to play. I sat inside leaning against the pillows on the window seat reading, sometimes looking up and watching them in our backyard. Lenny and Amiel hurled snowballs at each other, then started building a snow fort. Every time I glanced up, the wall of the fort was a little bit higher as Lenny packed the snow then peeked up from behind the wall, tiny icicles forming around the edges of his hair and around the hair above his lip. Up he’d pop into the cold, then back down again behind the wall.

After so many seasons of playing together, Lenny and Amiel came to share an affinity for each other. She grew up fast and maybe as he began to grow into his young adulthood the bond he felt with her was safer. He chose to tell her, before he told me, that he was gay.

Lenny and I knew who we were when we were with each other in our homes, but we didn’t know who we were in that cesspool of other teens in school. We awkwardly said Hey to each other in the hallways, him slinking alone against the edges of the lockers, me trying to keep up with more popular kids. I was on the outskirts myself, trying to fit in somewhere, and Lenny was never going to be helpful to my image. 

When we were young teens, Lenny’s brother John died of a drug overdose. I ventured over to the funeral parlor to see what a funeral was all about. Lenny was outside by the front doors, looking strange in his dress-up clothes, and he asked me if I wanted to come in to see John’s body.  I followed Lenny around the few people and up to the coffin. There was John, in a white suit, not moving a muscle. He was dead alright. Lenny stifled a laugh. And then I was trying not to laugh. We made it outside and I wanted to leave so began walking away, looking behind me when I got to the corner to wave to Lenny standing outside by himself.

Not long after, Lenny ran away from home. His mom, Rosemary, called our house and asked us if we’d seen him. He wasn’t gone long, maybe one full day, maybe even overnight. His mom called us again to let us know the police found him with his ten-speed bike on the highway, a few cans of Spam in his backpack. I could not imagine how it felt to want to run away from your own family and maybe that’s when the start of a chasm began to take shape between us. It’s silly, but I wondered at the time what Spam is. I was relieved he wasn’t stuck on a highway with cars rushing past him in the dead of night. But I don’t remember asking him why he left in the first place.   

We kept our distance from each other in high school, too, but still he listened to my problems. School was a battleground and I fought my way through a lineup of mean girls, year after year—the girl at the top of our street who sold me a cup of lemonade then told me she’d peed in it, the girl who sat behind me during study hall and threw gum in my hair—but I always had Lenny. He was the friend with whom I could share my troubles while we ate bowls of mint chocolate chip ice cream in the comfort of my kitchen after school.

The one or two friends he hung out with in high school wore the same jean jackets every day, grew their hair long, wore dark glasses in school, skipped classes, and lounged around in the smoking area off the side of the cafeteria. Lenny was a geek who liked plants, and then he found drugs. Prince replaced Elton John. Around that time, he started composing melodies, writing music and stories while stoned. He showed them to me in my living room one afternoon, wanting to convince me of the creativity drugs generate. But I was upset that he was smoking pot. I can’t remember what body language I used to convey my lack of interest. Maybe I simply turned away. 

As I sought to spread my wings in high school, Lenny slunk closer to the edges of the walls, his identity threatened with being slammed inside a metal locker. He’d pass me in the hallways and keep his distance, like I was in a spotlight and he was afraid of the light shining on him too. He rooted for me. After every audition, he’d tell me I should be chosen as the lead. He was my solitary pep squad, cheering for me when I did get picked. I kept trying to get closer to the limelight and he was still my Merv Griffin.

When I was a junior and he was a senior, we got into OK Chorale, a school choir that also performed dance routines. I wasn’t short, but I wasn’t tall either and Lenny was only a tad taller than me. Both of us were skinny and our bodies fit well together. He and I naturally leaned into each other when it came time to choose partners for our upcoming Christmas concert. The only time I saw Lenny now was when we practiced for the concert at school. Whenever I called him, Mrs. Hoffman heaved her sigh into the phone and said, “He’s sleeping.” 

On the evening of the concert I headed out of my house to walk to school. I thought to myself as I strode past Lenny’s house, I’m not going to stop and get him. It’s not my job to take care of him. I was becoming more and more frustrated by his behavior, how poorly he did in school, how he didn’t apply himself, and how little he seemed to care about succeeding—at anything. What kind of person sleeps so much, and during the day? To hell with him, I thought, glancing at his quiet-looking house. Maybe he’s left already. I’ll see him at school, I thought. But he wasn’t at school. 

Lenny was missing and no one had seen him. The theater started filling up. The show was about to begin and everyone took their places on stage, me right up front waiting for him to magically appear. All I was thinking when the music began was, What am I supposed to do with my hands? Amiel later told me she cried, watching me up there dancing alone.

I hated him. I was humiliated and angry and thought, What can I do to shame him, to let him know how wrong he was to do that to me? I decided to let a few days pass before I went over to his house. I knew exactly what I was going to say to let him know how worthless he was. 

I knocked on his front door, my face a frozen expression of accusation. Lenny opened the door like he’d been expecting me. Before I had a chance to say anything, he looked me in the eyes and said, “I’m sorry.” The speech I had planned started melting. He told me that the night of the concert, he’d gotten out of bed and ran to school. I could picture that—his shock at noticing he was out of time, flying down Fifth Avenue toward the high school, desperately hoping he’d arrive before it was too late, never wanting to let me down. He told me he pressed his ear to the auditorium door and thought that our performance was over, so he turned around and walked home. 

As he told me his story, I realized that the songs he described hearing were from the group that went before us. Our performance hadn’t yet begun. And nothing could be done about his mistake now. But I didn’t tell him it was okay, or that I forgave him. I didn’t want it to be that easy. So I just decided not to say anything. Then I left.  

On Lenny’s eighteenth birthday in 1982, with one semester left of high school, he told me he was going to drop out. My mom was a junior high school counselor and when I told her of Lenny’s plans, she became determined to help him change his mind. She sat at our dining room table with him the next time he came over and laid out a plan for him to finish school, pleading with him to understand the importance of having a diploma. He listened, and she thought she had him. In the end Lenny made up his own mind and quit. 

On my eighteenth birthday the following year, Lenny and I sat on my front porch, and he reached into his jacket pocket and handed me a wrapped package. I smiled at him, surprised, and slid my finger under the tape. A silver bracelet, twisted in the center, lay on a square of cotton. Maybe my bracelet was a parting gift, too. I was leaving the country the following month, moving to London to live with family friends for the summer, and begin a year-long theater program there. 

* * *

I was almost twenty years old when I came home from living abroad for a year and a half. Sitting on my front porch, a cool gray day in late winter, I saw a familiar gait going past and I shouted hello. Lenny turned and saw me and as I stepped around patches of mud in our front lawn to greet him, he ran to me, throwing his arms around me, so happy to see me, so happy I’d come home. It was a greeting I didn’t expect. He missed me more than I missed him, I could tell.  I was embarrassed. I tried to match his enthusiasm by hugging him and smiling in return, but I felt a hollowness, like the chasm had grown too wide to reach across.

Was it goodbye? Is that what I wanted? Maybe standing alone with Lenny in my front yard, chilly now but the same spot where we played Kick the Can in the heat of the summer with other neighborhood kids, echoes of our gleeful hollers long ago swallowed up by the trees, was the moment when all the clocks of my childhood stopped ticking, the clocks near the concession stand behind the pool, the clocks backstage before curtain time, the clocks ringing the dinner alarm while we played two-square in the driveway next to my house, the clocks telling my friend it was time to get up and go to school. There would be no more clocks ticking on the walls of any room of my childhood ever again. 

Was I also leaving Lenny behind? Was I thinking then that my time abroad had created a deeper chasm, this time too wide to bridge? Or that my life was more important because I was going to college, or my family’s status was higher because we read books? It’s a hard thing to reckon with now, thinking that I may not have accepted who he was as he grew from boy to man, and that my heart may not have been in the right place.  

Shortly after that time, Lenny took off. I like to think that his moving to San Francisco was a courageous choice; he was finally spreading his wings. I have a memory of holding a letter written in his tight script, describing a sparse apartment he was sharing with others. If I thought his life sounded miserable in his letters, the description of a sparse apartment was child’s play compared to the suffering he must have faced only a few months later. 

I was home from college during the holidays when we heard that Lenny was sick. He was in Intensive Care. He was so weak, Mrs. Hoffman said on the phone, that when he flew home his brother had to carry him off the plane. “He doesn’t want you to see him like this,” she said when Amiel and I asked if we could visit. We went over to her house and gave her some chocolates to give him. Later she told us, “He tried to eat some of them. He put one up to his lips but couldn’t eat.”

Our family drove to visit relatives in Chicago and when we returned to Berea after Christmas, I called the hospital to check up on Lenny. There was no Lenny Hoffman in Intensive Care. I asked if he was on another floor and the nurse checked her records and said, “There’s no Lenny Hoffman in the hospital.” That’s when I knew.

Amiel and I sat at our kitchen table together and without telling her what I had already suspected, I asked her to call Mrs. Hoffman. I leaned in so I could hear her speak. “How’s Lenny?” my sister asked, unaware.

“Well,” Mrs. Hoffman sighed one last time into our telephone, “he died.” A silence on both ends as the world dropped from under us. “The nurse didn’t even close his eyes when I went in to look at him,” she said. “He had pneumonia.” And Amiel and I understood that she was using code language for an unspeakable disease. 

Amiel was in shock, but still she spoke some words to Mrs. Hoffman, then put the phone back in the receiver on the wall. She and I sat frozen in our chairs. Without speaking, we knew what we had to do. We got up from the kitchen table and began the long walk upstairs, past the landing on the steps and the square window that looked out onto the cold night and faced Lenny’s big white house. A single light shone in the window, all the other windows of that enormous house black. 

She and I headed towards the bedroom where my mom, dad, and brother were watching TV, our first boxy, black and white set placed on a dresser. I knew my words would seal an unfathomable reality and as my sister and I crossed the threshold, I blurted out to my family, “Lenny died,” and began to sob. My mother gasped. My father rose from the bed and turned off the TV then put his arms around me. My mom sat on the bed and leaned against the wall, wiping away her own tears. 

I perched on the edge of the bed holding my face in my hands. Lenny and I would have no more time together. He would never get the chance to live up to his full potential. He would never see another play or write another song. We would never get to look back on our childhood shenanigans, and I would never get to tell him what he meant to me, less Merv Griffin, as I came to realize later in life, and more Atlas, a friend who supported me year after year. It wasn’t true—I didn’t want to say goodbye to Lenny, and it wasn’t fair that Lenny had to say goodbye to life.  

* * *

 I’m Emily again and Lenny is holding the script, watching.  

“It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back – up the hill – to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-bye, Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover’s Corners…Mama and Papa.” 

And then Emily says the line about the clocks ticking and all the other little things she’s going to miss. For a moment I’m out of the scene and in my own living room and I take in a few of the objects near me. The yellow couch. The Chagall print above the green chair. The piano. I pause and look at Lenny. 

“Oh, earth,” he says, prompting me, his eyebrows arching up at me, his dark eyes looking at mine through thick lenses. 

“Oh, earth,” I remember now, “you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?”

Lenny takes over as the Stage Manager who says the next line in the play. “Maybe saints and poets do. Maybe they realize.” 

* * *

Like Emily who wants to go back to earth for one more day after she dies, I bet Lenny would like one more day. What would he choose to do? I’m still vain and I like to think he’d want to spend it with me. I know his day would include music. We’d turn on the record player and we’d dance to Elton John. We’d eat bowls of ice cream. It’s possible he’d remember the scene we performed together from Our Town and we’d both really look at one another. Maybe I’d say I’m sorry, like he did to me when I came knocking on his front door. Maybe I’d hug him and say it’s OK, I forgive you. Maybe maturity would surface from my heart and I’d recognize that I wasn’t better than him, but that we were both two people just looking for love. Maybe—oh glorious maybe—we’d just ride our bikes.