Good Fella

“You mean, let me understand this…cuz I…maybe it’s me, maybe I’m a little f---‘d up maybe. I’m funny how? I mean funny, like I’m a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I’m here to f----in’ amuse you? Whattya you mean funny? Funny how? How am I funny?” Tommy DeVito, Goodfellas

A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Why the long face?” I tell this joke all the time. It’s the only one I remember, it’s usually not offensive, no cussing or crudeness involved, and I like horses. And quite frankly, it makes me laugh. Not because it’s so funny, though I think it is, but the person whom first delivered it to me was a very funny man, and pretty much any joke or story he told was funny no matter how bad the joke. So when I tell it, because it’s the only joke I know, I always think of him and chuckle because I picture him telling it, with everyone laughing because he’s funny.

Mr. T was a funny man. He was also a good fella. I didn’t know him all that well but I knew him well enough. He was a good family friend and all us kids grew up together, the adults led the way. Now we are all grown with our own families and kids.

Mr. T built a sandwich shop franchise and, while he may not have realized it, was a local celebrity. Everyone from the area knew of him and his sandwiches. He even had a United States president stop in for a sandwich!

He worked all hours, day and night, every day of the week. And with all his hard work and earnings, he was very generous and humble man who always made everyone feel welcome. A quiet man but the headliner of the show. He always had a funny story to tell, such a natural in his delivery, yet so humble he never seemed to want to take credit for being such a great story teller.

The adults spent many nights around the kitchen island countertop of the T's home snacking and sipping cocktails. Heading into the wee hours of the morning, jokes and stories were told with Mr. T the headliner of the show. The room filled with comraderies of families forged throughout the decades, laughter the enduring fabric.

The old saying goes "the show must go on" but it also says "all good things come to an end." Mr. T was diagnosed with cancer. Hard to put a funny spin on that story. This was a very unfunny diagnosis for a man whose life blood seemed to infuse humor into the veins of everyone around him. Fortunately, he was told, his diagnosis was not an immediate death sentence. Medicine would prolong the inevitable for years. So while this horrible black cloud hung over him and his family and all who loved him, there was time enough for plenty of acts. 

Until after only a year of treatment an emergency trip to the ER proved otherwise. The medicine was failing him. After a week or two in the hospital he was stabilized enough to go home. He was acutely aware though that his trip home would be just a visit and a final goodbye. He was terminal. There would be no second act.

He would not go silently into that good night. He had one more punch line for the crowd. On the final leg of his tour, he shared a room with another terminal patient. The roommate, surrounded by family, brought in a reiki therapist. The reiki therapist proceeded to perform reiki therapy as perhaps a last rite sort of ritual. Incense burning, music droning, the therapist proceeded to utter sentences of abstraction and unsoundness, “I release you, continue on your journey, your soul is free like a bird, you are releasing like a butterfly from your cocoon, fly, fly, fly. Lift yourself up. Hum, hum, hum.” Incense burning, smoke drifting. “Your darkest hours upon you, your mind and body but a vehicle, free your soul, free yourself, rise above, feel my energy as I touch you and lift you, release, release, release…”

Mr. T lay in the bed next to his roommate listening to this bizarre affair. With a puzzled glance, he listened and watched this strange performance. When it was over, the reiki therapist grabbed her incense and exited the room. There was silence. Then in true Mr. T fashion, with his wife at his bedside who later recounted the story, he turned to her, paused for a moment, and in a calm and serious voice, a hint of annoyance and expression of confusion, a grimace under his breath, steady and with perfect delivery said, “What the fuck was that all about?”

In a time of immense sorrow and finality, Mr. T put on a brave face and told the crowd that the show must still go on. During even the hardest and saddest of times, he made us laugh and continues to make me laugh. He was a good soul. He was funny.

Mr. T left me, just a little family friend, with a joke about a horse and a story that I would tell to another great headliner, my mother in law. Less than a day after Mr. T passed, she too would pass unexpectedly from cancer.

They say the last of our senses to go before we leave this earth is our hearing. As my mother in law lay in hospice, body swollen, breathing labored, I told her Mr. T's story. I chuckled as I delivered Mr. T's punch line, and I know she did too.