What about Friday night?

Earl Fowler

Mostly it was because we were young and stupid and had never known anyone who had taken their own lives.

But also we were young and quick-witted and as beautiful as we would ever be. In my case, those pinnacles were not so much the spires of mountains as the scrubby crests of prairie dog mounds … but while we’re mixing metaphors, hey, you play the hand you were dealt and dance with the one that brung ya. And there was never any danger of Joni getting lost in the shuffle or a conga line.

Joni is not her real name. Annie is not her twin sister’s real name. But I’ll go with those to keep this anonymous, since it turns into one of those dark ethical dilemmas with which one is increasingly burdened as one sees pretty people disappear like smoke.

Or “into the mystic,” as Joni’s obituary read. I’m still digesting that one. And I don’t mean the Van Morrison reference, much as we all adored the song all those years ago.

(By one of those coincidences the universe tosses out to tease us from time to time, this time with an assist from the Amazon Alexa app permanently stationed in the bathroom where my wife is showering, the Everly Brothers are harmonizing on “Bye, Bye Love” as I write this.)

Joni was never my love, but I did love being in her company. She and Annie were stunning, ravishing, both resembling the young Stevie Nicks from mid-Seventies Fleetwood Mac. They were quick with a joke or to light up your smoke, skilled musicians with fabulous folksy singing voices, spoke French lyrically and excelled at sketching and painting. The whole nine yards, times two. Eighteen at 18.

So picture this and iris-in. It’s 1972 and Woody Allen’s Play it Again, Sam has just hit the theatres. The two girls, my friend Michael (also not his real name) and I (my preferred pronoun) are all killing ourselves with laughter, as it were, as Allen’s character (Allan Felix) tries to pick up a gorgeous unnamed woman (played by Diana Davila) who speaks in a hypnotic monotone in the West Gallery of what was then called the San Francisco Museum of Art. She’s seemingly entranced by a painting as he approaches. You might remember the gist of the dialogue:

ALLAN: It’s quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn’t it?

WOMAN: Yes, it is.

ALLAN: What does it say to you?

WOMAN: It restates the negativeness of the universe, the hideous lonely emptiness of existence, nothingness, the predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation, forming a useless, bleak straitjacket in a black, absurd cosmos.

ALLAN: What are you doing Saturday night?

WOMAN: Committing suicide.

ALLAN: What about Friday night?

“What about Friday night?” became a treasured in-joke, a shibboleth, for the two or three years we palled around. Properly deployed, it was a reliable, go-to non sequitur in all sorts of out-of-context situations. Never failed to make us giggle. Did I mention we were young and stupid?

(Oh, and just for the record, no one ever says “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca, notwithstanding the frequent ghost-like appearances in the Allen flick of a Humphrey Bogart character — played by Jerry Lacy —who offers dubious 1940s advice on how men ought to treat women. For example: “Dames are simple. I never met one that didn’t understand a slap in the mouth or a slug from a .45.”)

Unlike me (my second favourite pronoun), a hopeless unromantic, Michael didn’t need any advice when it came to  attracting women. He and Joni quickly became each other’s first real loves.

They painted together. Made beautiful music together. Travelled throughout Central America on a lark back when you could still do that in a post-hippie glow with hardly any cash. Came home only after Joni narrowly avoided being raped and Michael badly beaten in Guatemala.

Annie and I were friends but never with benefits. While Michael and Joni were hiking their way through Honduras, I called her up once, hoping to ask her out on an actual date, but she wasn’t home. I took that as a sign and never tried again. Better no answer than the answer no, and anyway, she scared me a little.

I knew Annie well enough, though, to perceive that she was troubled by how deeply simpatico Michael and Joni were. As twins, the sisters had always been each other’s best friends and closest confidantes. Now it was Michael finishing Joni’s sentences and making her laugh. Annie dug Michael — everyone did — but she wanted her other half back.

Let me tell you about the identically twinned. They are different from you and me.

And then, comme d’habitude, life was what happened to us while we were busy rubbing other glands. I went away to university in Ontario, plunged stupidly into a disastrous first marriage and largely lost touch with old friends the way one did back when long-distance calls were expensive and handwritten letters ever more occasional.

On a trip home to visit my ailing mother, I was dumbfounded to learn that Michael and Joni had broken up. Even more by the reason why, though he could never get it through his head that his sleeping with Annie had been an unforgivable betrayal on both their parts.

According to Michael, Annie popped by his house to seduce him one day when Joni was at work. He didn’t put up much resistance in that gentler, kinder, more polyamorous world. Annie let slip to Joni what had happened — oops — put the onus on Michael and soon had won her sister back. Joni stopped returning Michael’s calls.

I haven’t heard Annie’s version, but even if that’s exactly what happened, it obviously doesn’t absolve Michael of responsibility for his faithlessness.

Over a couple of beers during a visit last year, Michael told me he has never fully recovered from the breakup and can’t understand why it all went south.

I wanted to scream: “YOU SLEPT WITH HER SISTER, YOU BIG DUMMY!” Might not have been a slap in the mouth or a slug from a .45, but it was certainly a shared dagger to Joni’s heart by the two people she loved most in the world.

Being the diplomatic sod I am, what came out of my mouth instead was: “What about Friday night?” Bought another round.

Yesterday, Fleetwood Mac came on the radio as I was driving to a grocery store. Stevie Nicks delivered with that husky, sexy rasp of hers: “Rhiannon sings like a bell through the night and wouldn’t you love to love her? Takes to the sky like a bird in flight and who will be her lover?”

The song was in my head as I indulged one of those common impulses we all have late at night while hovering somewhere between semi-comatose boredom and a box of cheese-flavoured mini Ritz bits sandwiches. First I read the Wikipedia article about Nicks, who turns out to have been quite an Eagles scout. Then I googled the name of a dear friend I suddenly found myself missing.

And that’s how I discovered that Joni died in December. No cause of death was given, but she appears to have been suffering from some form of cancer and possibly Alzheimer’s, judging by the family’s suggestion for memorial donations in lieu of flowers. Her death was facilitated by a physician because Joni met the criteria for medical assistance in dying (MAID).

Her death was an assisted, societally sanctioned suicide of a sort due to a diagnosis of “a grievous and irremediable medical condition.” Which I hope to have myself if I wind up in similarly dire straits.

I checked a 2024 calendar and noticed that she died on a Saturday. My first thought, after I stopped shaking, was: “What about Friday night?”

God might never forgive me, but the Joni I knew would have smiled. It only hurts when we laugh.

The ethical dilemma, of course, is whether I should tell Michael. He’s several provinces west of where Joni had been living and unlikely to hear the news any time soon. They hadn’t been in contact for decades, except for the time she reached out to him after her marriage to a jazz musician had broken down.

By that time, Michael had a wife and a child he loved very much. Judging by her obit, Joni’s career and second marriage were great successes, and she went on to have a daughter. It sounds like she enjoyed the ride until the lousy ending. God, I hope so.

Michael is currently looking after both his wife, who has been fighting a recurring battle with breast cancer that has sapped her strength, and his elderly mom, who has thyroid cancer and was just released from hospital after falling and breaking her hip. He also has an art business to run and a tendency to fall into withering depressions.

So he has enough tsuris without hearing more bad news from me. And what could he do about it anyway? But if I don’t break the news as gently as I can, he might find out in a more jarring, debilitating way.

I tossed and turned while thinking this over in bed last night. Decided to track down Annie and let her decide whether she wants to hear from Michael if I do tell him. Sent an email and I’m waiting to hear back.

Won’t be surprised if I don’t. Once again the line is ringing at the other end. And once again I’m willing to interpret silence as a cosmic instruction to leave well enough alone.

As we all sit on the park bench like bookends, old friends, it’s just another icky, sticky, ambiguous episode from The How and Why Wonder Book of Golden Ager Impenetrable Dilemmas and Indecipherable Moral Quandaries. We’re lost in our overcoats, waiting for the sunset. Long after the thrill of living is gone.

The German word for awkward situations like this is “kankendort,” which kind of sounds how this feels. Also sounds like it should be Yiddish.

And, in short, how terribly strange to be 70.

Funny how the loss of someone you hadn’t thought about in years can make you cry. But honestly, I’m not even sure it’s Joni I miss so much as the promise of that time when “bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.”

Wordsworth was recounting the 1790s and his enthralment with the French Revolution when he wrote those words, but those of us who came of age in the prevailing optimism of the Sixties and Seventies are well acquainted with the feeling. What a rush!

Now in our sixties and seventies, with most of life’s foofaraw and funky folderol disappearing from sight in the rear-view mirror, we sometimes find ourselves playing the part of Margaret in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s great poem Spring and Fall:

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving? …

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

A more recently dead poet distilled this sentiment in a line you might also recall: “Is it for her or myself that I cry?”

Today it’s for her. What about Friday night?