Hi-Tops

Chicago, IL

Early in our relationship, I was putting on a suit to attend a wedding with Jessica and she advised me, “Sean, you really shouldn’t wear white socks with a dark suit.”

“I haven’t put my socks on yet,” I said, “that’s the color of my feet.”

That’s how pale I am. Unless you are close enough to make out the hair on my legs, you’d assume I am wearing a set of socks—that are so white and glowing— they have never before been worn.

Everyone loves the sun. It is responsible for life on Earth, and convertibles, and rompers, and frozen daiquiris. But when you are as pale as me and abhor the sun, you hate something that everyone else loves. It’s a bit like hating Tom Hanks; people don’t even believe you dislike it. You, a member of a club so lonely, people just assume that you are making it up.

The sun has been a lifelong adversary: my Lex Luthor; my Joker; except, in this universe, everyone loves the Joker and doesn’t mind that he’s a homicidal maniac. When you are as pale as me the sun emits two kinds of rays: the solar rays (the normal rays of energy we all know of) but also the rays of ridicule, which is the sun’s ability to shine mortification down upon you. When I was young, my mom would pack sun hats that I found to be humiliating and, worse yet, she would never remember that she packed them until the exact moment when I found all my peers at the pool:

“Jeez, it’s getting hot. And where is Sean? Oh, there he is; he’s making friends. That’s great, he often struggles with that. You know, that reminds me: I have a giant, powder-blue sun bonnet I want him to wear.”

My dad was even worse: He would talk about the sun like we owed it money and it was looking for us. “Do not underestimate what he’s capable of!” he’d warn us, pointing to the sky, just before we ran out to the beach. It sounded less like he was talking about a star and more about a crazy, drunk neighbor. My brother Paul was once talking to girls at the zoo, when my dad came running down the stairs of the elephant exhibit, screaming:

“Paul! Paul! Get to shade! It’s a blast furnace out here!”

“Do you know him?” the girls asked. Paul could not speak. He had been petrified by the rays of ridicule.

“Paul!, can you hear me?” My dad was waving his hands for attention while yelling, as though he saw a plane about to crash where Paul and the girls were standing.

“GET TO SHADE! The sun is out! It’s PURE ENERGY!”
 

It was always amazing to me that Irish skin evolved in such a way that it could not even handle a summer in Cleveland, Ohio; not exactly the most Mediterranean of U.S. cities. The older family members who were born in Ireland tended to receive the most sun damage. They would arrive at weddings and be missing an ear or have a new, fake plastic nose where patches of skin cancer were removed and they would point at whatever part was missing and explain: “The sun got me.”

“Got me,” which is something you normally say after a sheriff tickets you for speeding, not losing a body part to melanoma.

Perhaps they were that fatalistic about it because they did nothing to avoid it. None of them used sunscreen and I believe that is because fearing or loving the sun is a lot like fearing or loving dogs: It’s entirely based upon your childhood experiences. They grew up in Ireland, where the sun is docile and well-behaved, so they consider it approachable and cuddly; they do not fear it, nor appreciate the power and destruction it is capable of in other parts of the globe. I was bitten by the sun often enough as a kid to always fear it, no matter where I am on Earth. It was a giant, glowing Doberman as far as I was concerned.

A few years ago, I had two large marks—which I thought to be pimples—just below my lip. I made an appointment with a dermatologist, which I despise doing. Me entering a dermatologist’s office is like a very obese man entering a cardiologist’s exam room. I get a lot of “Oh boy”s and “Cancel my next appointment,” type responses on first sight, then it goes further downhill when they see my answers to their office forms:

“This says you consume more than six drinks a day, Mr. Flannery?” the doctor asked.

“No, it says I average six drinks a day. There are many days where I have less. Today I’ve only had four.”

“Do you understand binge drinking is five drinks in a day?”

(The first three times a doctor told me this I laughed out loud.)

“Well, ‘binge drinking’ must be one of those words where the general population is using it differently than experts,” I pointed out, helpfully.

(Also, I said “experts” with air quotes, showing I questioned that number.)

There was a pause. I felt it necessary to elaborate.

“Like ‘enormity’ or ‘data’,” I went on. “We use it one way, but [air quotes again] experts [end air quotes], use it differently. The people I know, when they say ‘binge drinking,’ they are talking about a lot more than five beers in a day.” I gave a fake laugh, and added, “Are you saying every person I know is an alcoholic?”

The doctor visibly scanned me up and down.

“That’s possible,” she answered.

She looked at the form on her clipboard.

“This says, your family has a history of skin cancer, correct? On which side?”

“All four sides.”

“You have a history of skin cancer on all four sides of the family?”

“Doctor, am I your first Irish patient?”

She laughed at that and started examining me,

“It’s this bump here right?” she confirmed while looking near my lips, then stepped back uneasily,

“We are going to take that out, today,” she said, before adding, “I’m going to use a scary word. But I don’t want you to panic because this looks like something we caught early and it should not be a danger to you once removed. But I think it could be...cancer.”

There was a silence, which she must have interpreted as shock on my part, as she continued, reassuringly: “But you are going to be fine. We caught this immediately and we are going to remove it right now.”

I thought about it for a moment and answered, “Today’s not good.”

“What?” she reacted, a bit taken aback.

“I have some buddies in town.”

There was a pause. I assumed she could deduce the rest, but she could not.

“We have Cubs rooftop tickets.”

“What does that have to do with cancer?” she asked.

“I can’t be on any meds tonight. The tickets include all-you-can-drink beer.”

She tried to understand my intent, but ultimately trailed off, asking, “So you are saying...”

“It’s a no-go,” I clarified, as though I was ground control telling a pilot to find a different airport.

“We have a definite No-Go on our hands here.”

She asked for one or two more confirmations and I explained that, if it was as harmless as she was saying, what’s one or two more days? She eventually relented and told me to schedule an appointment with her staff.

“No problemo,” I pledged, “see you soon.”

“By the way,” she asked while opening the door of the exam room to leave, “what else does ‘enormity’ mean?”

“It means something that is hugely evil. It has nothing to do with measuring size generally,” I explained.

“Really?” she said, surprised, then left, shaking her head.

I collected my sweater and exited the room. The doctor was going over paperwork with a nurse in the hallway. I reached the billing desk and there was a line of people. I gave it about five seconds to move—it didn’t—so I walked straight out of the office and I’m pretty sure the doctor saw me refusing to wait ten seconds to make an appointment to remove cancer.

“Wow,” she must have reasoned, “that is either the world’s most impatient man or the world’s most slowly-suicidal.”

But, “What are two more days?” I thought. Plus, an appointment can be scheduled just as easily over the phone. I murmured all this to myself while leaving the office.

Except, I never made that call. The need to call, to have this operation, left my mind completely the moment I walked out of the building. Not so much because I am that absent minded—though I am very much so—but because, at this stage in my life, I truly believed I was indestructible.

I had survived so many injuries and accidents— walking off a roof; electrocutions (yes, plural); driving off a bridge; ribs pushed in and arms pulled out—that, to outlast all of that, I believed I could not die. Most of us have entertained unrealistic body goals: maybe you thought you could be a circus performer, or outfielder for the Cubs? Well, I thought I could be deathless, so I forgot to call a doctor to have them cure me of a tumorous growth on my face.

Now, I am not sure if it’s because doctors have sworn to help you, or they just want to get paid, but I can say with a certain degree of confidence that no creature on Earth will hound you more doggedly than a doctor who thinks they can perform an operation on you. One time, a guy used my identity to steal a limo from a Florida airport and that airport and its bill collectors called me less regularly than this doctor.

Two weeks later I was at a bar called Hi-Tops near Wrigley Field with friends in town, drinking on a weekday afternoon before a Cubs game. One of my buddies was visiting with his long-term girlfriend and she had not met his high school “friends.”

I put “friends” in quotes because, back when my buddies were a few years out of college and meeting women and considering marriage, the reaction from each of these ladies when they met us was, “That’s how men treat their friends?”

To a woman, the male friendship looks more like fully-reciprocal bullying, than any kind of rapport:

“You guys let him get so drunk, he was vomiting into his dresser and you were laughing?”

“Yeah, it was pretty funny.”

“Those are his clothes! You’re supposed to be his friend!”

Every time I told Jessica a story from back home, about a person falling from a statue we told him to climb or hydroplaning from a flooded road we said his car could handle, or just being straight up abandoned in Hiawatha, Kansas by us, she would ask: “And this person is your friend?” in that tone women use when they aren’t sure if your statement is inaccurate or merely to confirm that you really are that stupid.

I’m not sure how or why but male friends talk each other into situations that, on paper, look like they were designed by your worst enemy.

My buddy warned as much, saying his “friends” were a bit—I think this is the word he used— ”nutty.” We met at Hi-Tops. Back then, I would drink whatever was cheapest so that day I was drinking Jell-O shots. The bar made too many and were looking to unload them at the dangerous and quite frankly irresponsible price of twenty-five cents a pop.

While ordering the latest round of Jell-O shots for the group, I glanced at my phone and noticed that someone had left me a voicemail. We did the shots and I checked the messages.

It was the dermatologist’s office again, reminding me to schedule an appointment to remove the tumors. My friends noticed that I was trying to listen intently to the message, which surprised them since I never checked messages.

“Who’s calling you during a baseball game?” someone asked

“Oh, dude, I forgot: I have cancer.”

They stared at me.

“Yeah, in my face,” I elaborated.

My buddy’s girlfriend who was meeting us did a spit-take, which, when you’re drinking Jell-O shots is less like spit and more like a tiny barf.

“What?” she yelled.

“Yep. Right there, as it happens,” I answered, pointing to the offending area of face.

I excused myself to call the doctor’s office back.

For two weeks I had been putting off calling this doctor’s office back, but this was the first time I heard the message drunk. I have an odd habit where, when I’m day drunk, I go out of my way to prove that being drunk in broad daylight won’t affect my productivity. I end up completing errands I had been avoiding for months. In some ways, it’s an efficiency boost, but, almost always, I complete the errand the way a drunk would and I only create three additional errands in order to clean up the mess.

I dialed and they answered, “Hello? Dr Lundy’s office.” It sounded like Jennifer, who had left the message.

“Hello, Jennifer, this is Sean Flannery, calling on behalf of...well, Mr. Sean Flannery.”

I have a second, terrible habit when day drunk: if I’m talking to a sober person, I use inflated language in order to not sound drunk. I know other people that do this when drunk—try to interface with sober people in stilted language—and the best-case outcome is you sound like a British person with dementia. But usually, the other person just knows you are blasted.

“Mr Flannery? We’ve been trying to reach you.”

“And so I’ve heard! I think my staff has been failing to relay all my messages. But, that’s a conversation for another day. What day should I come in for this operation? This abscission? This, may I call it, miracle?”

“How’s next Tuesday?”

“Beautiful!”

I hung up, got blackout drunk and did not show up the following Tuesday.

Eventually though, I did revisit that doctor’s office, had two small, basal cell cancer growths removed, one under my lip and one under my ear. The growths were tiny; as I recall, I needed only a couple of stitches and was sent on my way.
 

Two years later, I was attending the wedding of my buddy and his girlfriend—the same couple I had met at Hi-Tops that day—in a conservatory in Columbus Ohio.

“Gorgeous ceremony! What a location!” I said to the couple and they both laughed heartily and thanked me for coming.

Much later in the night, I ran into the groom at the bar and while we were talking I learned why they laughed so hard when I complimented the location.

“In a way, you chose the conservatory for us!” he explained. “We had been talking about marriage for a while, before you and the other guys met us that week in Chicago and we always said: art museum or conservatory. Then she meets you guys and—I told her you guys were ‘nutty’—but at that bar, what was it called? Hi-Tops? Yeah, she meets all of you and, if you remember, we got loaded off Jell-O shots and as we are walking to the game she’s like, ‘I think we get married at the conservatory.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, cool, why?’ And she answered, ‘I don’t think we can invite your [air quotes] friends [end air quotes] to a wedding at the art museum.’ And I said, ‘I thought they were OK at Hi Tops.’ And she goes: ‘They just got absolutely loaded off Jell-O shots! And the guy buying most of the rounds had to be reminded he had cancer! We can not have them drinking next to a Renoir. At least trees can survive them.’”

The bartender slid him his drink. We were both laughing—hard—and he finished the story, with, “I think she always suspected my friends were jackasses but, when she met all of you! Hahaha! I think that’s when the full enormity of it hit her! Ha!”

He returned to his guests, laughing. The bar was only serving beer and wine and, at the end of the bar, I saw other friends ordering wine to be filled into espresso cups to be drunk as shots.

“Shot of red wine?” one of them inquired.

“I believe it’s called a rouge-iato,” I joked back, accepting it and shooting the wine.

They immediately ordered a second round and it occurred to me: I don’t think my buddy, the groom, knew the actual, correct definition of “enormity,” but in this context—as we wait for another round of table wine to be poured into espresso cups—he pulled it off.