When Dana and I marked our silver anniversary last month, it was recognized that a separate milestone we’d failed to observe had passed us by a couple months earlier—
thirty years since we’d first met. About half a year after my abrupt departure from Chicago, kind Fate placed us in the same small basement office in Wright State University’s publications department. Life as a freelancer in Dayton hadn’t worked out very well, so it was with a measure of keen anticipation that I sat down one afternoon with the classified section, a Cassano’s thin-crust pizza, and a pitcher of lousy beer. I don’t remember applying for any other full-time job during that summer of ’77. To be guardedly candid, if it were not for my journal and the extant artifacts of my creative meanderings, I would recall even less about those months at J’s INN.
Ah, yes… J’s INN. Even the sound of it on my mental tongue conjures a mix of both exhilarating and disturbing sentiments. Thirty years later, J’s INN is less a set of recollections than it is a reservoir of emotions and sensory vignettes. Jeffrey’s scheme to rent the sprawling compound near the airport in late 1976 was just the catalyst I needed to make my escape from that metro-leviathan which bear-hugs the southwest corner of Lake Michigan. I returned to Ohio. Chicago was, and still is, “my big city,” but I knew I couldn’t live there with any level of mental peace. It was just too big. I had this nagging idea that I really needed to reside some place where I could see a cow now and then. J’s INN would be the place. J’s INN would be the perfect environment where I could shake off the city, reconnect with my brothers, and map out a new life as an independent creative professional, and, to a remarkable degree, I somehow managed to do just that. I enjoyed a privileged status. One memory that survives is the time other tenants complained to the INNmaster that he was too lenient with me with respect to our division of duties, and he firmly replied, “What makes you think fairness has anything to do with it?” Although life at J’s INN was conducive to many things, it was far from perfect, and it became too large a phenomenon to fully control, despite Fron’s valiant effort as the legendary INNmaster. J’s INN had its own appetites and its own aura of defiance that could never be tamed. Eventually, one could only betray and abandon it to its own devices. When it finally spent itself and met its match in the bulldozer, it surely left a crack in the hearts of my Clansmen, but it’s difficult to accept that its legacy, as hopelessly scrambled as it is, has not proved to be a good one in the final analysis. To think otherwise is to deny the galvanizing purpose it played in Brotherhood, and to deny its role in drawing me to my lifelong “partner in all things.” So be it, J’s INN— May your forgotten crimes be expiated. May your limestone bones and fallen timbers decay in peace at last.
