The Rico Rizzos of Long Ago

I attended a rather well-to-do, suburban high school. It wasn't decadent but it was better than the average Columbus public high school at that time. I graduated in 1969. I was a terrible student so there was no college.  I had no trade skills either. I knew nothing about bricklaying, plumbing or carpentry. Of course I had no previous experience in any form of employment. Consequently I went straight into the American workforce looking for any employment available. I found a job transporting temporary manual laborers to job sites. Day laborers. Basically I was driving a van full of men who were all but unemployable, transporting them to various work locales where they would do physical labor for minimal wages. Most of these men were unemployable because of alcohol problems. Some were illiterate. Still others were simply bums. One was AWOL from the Army.

I worked this job as a kind of surreal bus driver for about eight or nine months. It gave me an education like none other. A couple of times, when I was done transporting these sad characters to their job sites in the morning, I would trek down to the local watering hole about noon where I would luncheon with a few of the guys who were not selected to work that day. "Lunch" generally consisted of something like a ham sandwich and lukewarm beer. The watering hole was not exactly a four star establishment. I got to know many of these dubious individuals. Some became friends. Mid afternoon I would drive back to the job sites and pick up the men, returning them to the central office where they would receive their day's pay.

In the fall of 1969, I saw the movie Midnight Cowboy at a drive-in theater. I was accompanied by a girl who I briefly dated at the time. One of the central characters of the movie was Rico Rizzo, a down-and-out man from the Bronx who I could have sworn occasionally sat in the back of the van I drove for work. At the end of the movie, Rico slowly dies. He succumbs to pneumonia caused by his own ignorance as well as social apathy for pathetic individuals like him. He died to touching music while in the arms of a pal, a penniless, young, naïve, Texas man he befriended during his travels as a vagrant of New York City.

The entire movie got to me, but the end scene ravaged me. Rico dying devastated me so completely that the girl I was with noticed the effect it had on me. "Wow, that really hit you," she remarked.

"Yeah." I responded, "I know Rico, or at leas I know someone just like him."

I watched the final scene of Midnight Cowboy on Youtube just a few minutes ago. It still gets to me all of these years later. I remember how I felt, sitting in that drive-in theater that long-ago evening, and the feelings that went through me.

I can still recall a few of the names of those down-and-out men from back then too, but oddly, I can't for the life of me remember the name of the girl I took to the drive-in.