Someone from my old New York City neighborhood felt compelled to reunite friends and classmates from thirty years ago—people who'd not seen each other since Armstrong’s lunar stroll. The reunion organizer's nostalgia no doubt motivated by existential questions that haunt us into middle age. Questions like: "Have they had meaningful lives?" "How many old classmates died?" And, “I wonder if Debbie the cheerleader is fat?”

After a pensive moment, I responded to my sister’s eyebrows. “Why not?”

Soon gazing at geography I’d not seen in three decades, a quick tour of the old neighborhood revealed it still maintained the charm of a Law and Order episode. The immaculate elementary school I attended had become a rundown community center. The house where I grew up seemed slightly larger than a phone booth. And the pizza parlor that spawned my first zits became a laundry. Several stores sported fresh paint, but it amounted to putting lipstick on a corpse.

Reunion headquarters, a large hotel, held hundreds of fifty-year olds in search of friends not seen since puberty. And because organizers failed to attach old photos to name tags, attendees squinted at unfamiliar faces like foreigners emerging from Customs in search of relatives.

As I approached the registration table a large bald man inhaled a Scotch.

"Gimme anudder." He swayed like a palm tree in an offshore breeze.

Barely eight o'clock, new arrivals lengthened alphabet lines. The smiling palm tree undulated by the ‘Ns’.

Pondering the reasons for reunions, my own motivation remained ill-defined. I’d spent a month’s rent in airfare, motel and car rental for an uncertain adventure. Perhaps it had something to do with Thomas Wolfe’s observation about going home again. And how you really can’t. Now at the half-century mark, maybe I was there to see if I could -- to see if it were possible to recapture the past with people I went to school with, played ball with, drank and threw-up with.

"Bill!" A voice called above the escalating drone.

In the swelling tide of humanity I couldn’t locate the voice. Baby boomers congested the lobby the way commuters mob a subway station at 5 o’clock. Blending images of Dion and the Belmonts with the Allman Brothers, the crowd was a collision of tails—duck and pony.

“Bill.” The voice emerged from the crowd attached to a Magnum PI mustache and gunmetal gray hair. I hadn’t seen Johnny Ferilla since high school.

“Hey man, how you doin’?!” No Dick Clark myself, Johnny looked older than expected. Once a star athlete and lady-killer, with thirty years and forty pounds it seemed like he’d spent the afternoon with a special effects artist.

“I thought you looked familiar,” Johnny said. “I saw you in the parking lot.” Flashing a used car salesman smile he slapped my back. “I see you’re still short.”

In the 60s we played ball on the same team, dated a few of the same girls, hung out on the same street corners. A former football immortal for Andrew Jackson High School, Johnny dragged on a Winston and caressed a Budweiser. Stifling a belch he drained his beer then reached for another conveniently kept within reach.

“So, what’ve you been up to?” I asked.

“Ah, you know...” Johnny, it turned out, hadn’t done as well as everyone expected. Blowing an athletic scholarship trying to get by on looks and high school reputation, he switched to real estate. Then flopped as his celebrity faded. Tom Cruise meet Al Bundy.

In typical guy fashion we covered 30 years in 15 minutes. Evidence of middle age concerns emerged. “Yeah, heart attack last year.” And then there were those with nine lives.

Johnny’s uncle Vito had recently survived a descent in an elevator—sans the Otis. “That steel rod in his left leg don’t slow him down one bit,” Johnny said. Vito, I’d been told, kept the troops in line for one of New York’s Families.

“Man, I feel sorry for those guys when Vito finds ‘em.” Johnny brightened.

As we scanned decades of marriages, kids, and jobs, my mind fast-forwarded the faces of those who went in and out of my life like busboys in a restaurant. Turning to the crowd I asked, “Ain’t that Pete?”

“Nah, Pete’s dead.”

“Dead?”

“Yeah. One in the back of the head.”

Not a shocking demise for someone nicknamed “Mad Dog.” Rumors had it Pete had married, fathered kids and mellowed. Evidently a few of his former associates hadn’t.

“Man, I don’t recognize anybody, do you?” Johnny frowned as he inhaled the last of his most recent Budweiser. The can seemed to indent from the sudden pressure change. “Want one?” He fished for a Winston.

“I’m okay.”

Johnny shrugged and waded into the sea of thinning hair and thickening waistlines. If you listened carefully you could hear arteries clogging.

Pondering the passing years I heard my name again. Turning toward the voice I faced a distinguished-looking, silver-haired gentleman with an 18th-hole tan. Corporate boardroom, I thought. Twelve-year-old Scotch ads came to mind. The voice didn’t have a nametag.

“Joe,” he said as if I’d seen his Scotch ad. My puzzled expression produced another prompt. “Joey Helm. Remember?”

And then I saw it. Scotch ads and boardrooms evaporated as he flashed the sly, maniacal grin I recalled from 8th grade when he pummeled a rival punk, Frank Penini, into the schoolyard asphalt.

His next question cinched it. “How’s it hanging?”

Tailor-made suit, country club complexion, and the social grace of a pro wrestler.

Joe looked over my shoulder and seemed to motion for a cab, “Yo Vinny, over here!”

I smelled Vinny before he arrived. Two, maybe three, packs a day and enough cheap cologne to trigger a smog alert. Vinny North, it turned out, was the smiling palm tree who’d been standing by the ‘Ns’. Only by now the breeze had stiffened.

One of my neighborhood heroes in the 60s, Vinny ran with the older, cooler crowd—guys who shaved; guys who smoked cigarettes with sophistication, in other words without coughing. The last time I saw Vinny he was yawning in Technicolor after downing a pint of Gallo Port behind P.S. 52. Room temperature Gallo Port, I recalled with a shudder, tasted like cough syrup. That was the night my room became an amusement park ride. I distinctly remember dangling one leg off my bed in the hope that floor contact might diminish centrifugal force.

Vinny, I learned, drove trucks. “Big ones,” he said with a glassy-eyed grin. Draining his Scotch Vinny braced himself against a wall the way people do during an earth tremor.

Joey Helm, the conversation soon revealed, had turned out severely average but more than modestly criminal. Loading dock supervisor is what he said. His suit and tan suggested otherwise.

“What’ve I been doing?” Helm smirked at the question. “Anybody I can.” The grapevine reported that following expulsion from Catholic school, Helm ran errands for local mobsters. He went on to gain an impressive amount of muscle at the Elmira Correctional Facility. After release he collected for loan sharks. Helm, I’d been told, enjoyed his work.

Borderline sociopaths like Joey were lucky to be alive at this age. His future, no doubt, held an untimely end. Something you’d see on page two of the New York Daily News. That’s where the story about Helm’s partner, Pete “Mad Dog” Scarpitta, appeared. They never identified his assassin. But something told me police hadn’t spent much overtime on his case. During Pete's last arrest he broke a cop’s jaw.

“Elaine!” Joey stepped in front of a woman elbowing her way through the crowd. Her nametag claimed she was Elaine Petrosky.

“Joe!” Elaine joined us.

I told myself her casual nod meant she didn’t recognize me.

“What’s that you’re drinking?” Helm asked with amusement.

“I forgot.” Elaine slurred while hoisting an eerie concoction to her lips. She continued with a tale about abusive husbands, socially mutant offspring and an account of her stay at a residential drug program.

Listening to her tale of woe an episode bubbled-up in my memory like well-cooked chili.

It was a Friday in May, sixth grade at Christ the King elementary school, and I had an acute case of spring fever. I distinctly remember deciding this was the day. My plan was to walk Elaine home from school and declare my undying love for her.

Moments after I’d taken my seat in class, Elaine’s sister arrived with a note from their mother. Elaine was ill. Profoundly disappointed I noticed the message remained unfolded on Sister Reginald’s desk. As class recessed for lunch, I lingered by the nun’s desk long enough to glance at the note while she erased the morning’s history lesson. Elaine’s mother explained, the note said, that her daughter was unable to attend school because she had diarrhea.

Diarrhea! My heart wilted. With that bit of news an illusion died. Elaine, it appeared with disturbing clarity, was human. Not the flawless, storybook vision I’d imagined with Disney-fied hyperbole.

Suddenly it seemed as if that summed up the entire reunion adventure. Illusions wilting left and right like so many unwatered petunias. Maybe, I wondered, it was a mistake to attend. Maybe it was never as wonderful as I recalled. I silently scolded myself, what did I expect? Richey Cunningham and Happy Days? It never was like that, no matter what my nostalgia-laden memory told me.

I quietly slipped into the parking lot. Walking to my car I pondered how it all seemed so real until the reunion. Perhaps memories were meant to remain unmolested, sheltered from the light of today’s reality, air-brushed by time like unearthly magazine centerfolds. Heading toward the airport I wondered how many reunions Thomas Wolfe attended.

Award-winning and internationally-published freelance writer, Bill Asenjo, PhD writes for numerous magazines, websites, newspapers, and anthologies. Bill conducts writing workshops for Barnes & Noble, Kirkwood Community College and Office Depot, and teaches freelance writing online and at Kirkwood. For more about Bill and his published work visit (http://www.billasenjo.com) Bill is from Iowa City, Iowa