The Man I Never Met Read online

  Jeff realized his friend was right. He sent George an email, and George was grateful that one of Joe’s old buddies had been thinking of him. They kept in touch after that.

  And then there was the one friend who was in such shock that he didn’t think about moving on, because he still didn’t believe Joe was dead. His name was Adam Gordon. His denial was so overwhelming that he had gone to Joe’s memorial service fully expecting Joe to walk in.

  * * *

  Adam Gordon was in eighth-grade math class when he met Joe Maio, and Adam would remember it as one of the seminal moments of his existence, so important that if you ask Adam what his life would have been like if he hadn’t met Joe, he says, “It’s inconceivable.”

  From the start, their relationship was defined by two facts: Joe liked Adam. But Adam needed Joe. Adam came from a dysfunctional family, and he spent the early years of his life feeling unloved. He was too chatty for his own good, and the more masculine boys in school bullied him. Adam did not have many friends. Joe decided he would be one for him.

  They were an unlikely pair, something out of a sitcom or a movie that nobody would believe. Joey was the star that everybody loved. Adam was the wisecracking sidekick that nobody understood. Joe’s other pals were taken aback by their friendship; at best, they didn’t understand, and at worst, they resented it.

  Joe didn’t care. He liked Adam. Joe didn’t need anybody else’s approval. He welcomed everybody. There were no airs, no obvious teenage insecurities, no desperation to fit in, no impulse to prove he was more important than other people, no worries about his image. He did what he wanted. He did not judge.

  When Joe became a teenager, girls started to fall for him, and he knew it and enjoyed it, but he didn’t flaunt it. He just lived. He had an air of confidence about him that was unlike most people. He saw the world differently. He seemed devoid of angst.

  He would tell his buddies to come over to his house and sit by the pool and have a burger off the grill, and they would get there and see his uncles and cousins were there, and they would wonder if they were intruding on a family event. They would say, “Are you sure, Joey? Are you sure it’s OK for us to be here?” He always said yes. Of course they were welcome. Why would it be any different with Adam Gordon?

  Some of his friends had a reason it was different with Adam: They thought Adam was in love with Joe. It was easy to understand why. Joe was this good-looking, popular guy. Adam was this boy who would drop everything to be around Joe, and Adam seemed gay. Adam never said if he was gay, but many of his classmates assumed he was because of his voice and how he acted. He just seemed so obviously gay to them.

  It did not help that sometimes Adam would try on the girls’ clothes.

  One day, in high school, Adam Gordon was walking down the hallway when somebody called him a fag. This was not surprising. It was the early 1980s. The word was commonly applied to boys like Adam.

  The surprise was what came next: Two football players whom Adam had never met stood between him and his tormentor.

  “He’s our boy,” one of them said. “And he’s our boy because he is Joey’s boy.”

  Adam was a fearful child. Joe pushed Adam to take risks. Sometimes they would drive Anthony’s car around town before they had licenses. Joe loved skiing, and Adam had never done it, so one day Joe took Adam to Hunter Mountain, a ski resort in New York, and up a chairlift to the top of Hellgate, a black-diamond trail, and said, “Off you go!” Joe pushed Adam down the hill. The ski patrol had to get Adam, but he had confronted another fear.

  They stuck together the way only childhood friends can really stick together. The two of them would make cinnamon rolls after school. Adam blew off most of a summer camp so he could spend his days with Joey. When Adam’s mother screamed at him, Joe mediated.

  One day in the 1980s, Joe Maio and Adam Gordon sat in Joe’s bedroom, surrounded by gray Formica furniture.

  Joe asked Adam a question.

  “Do you think you’re gay?”

  Adam did not think he was gay. Adam didn’t really understand what gay meant. He had seen gay people in movies, but they were all caricatures. He didn’t feel like one of them. So, no, he did not think he was gay. He assumed he was heterosexual, like everybody else.

  Joe said, “I love you no matter what.”

  * * *

  Most childhood relationships fade. This one did not. Joe and Adam lived together on the Upper East Side of Manhattan when they were in their twenties. Joe gave Adam his leftover clothes; most of them didn’t fit Adam, but he kept some of them, like Joe’s Giorgio Armani ties. They were so close that they would hold conversations through a closed bathroom door when one of them had to use the toilet.

  Sometimes they would go to clubs together, and they would each come home with a woman. Then, the next morning, Joe and Adam would go to brunch, and Adam would wonder why other people seemed to enjoy sex so much. What was so great about it? He was baffled.

  Joe’s favorite restaurant at that time was Il Mulino, a fine Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village. He liked when Adam went with him, but Adam was making $24,000 a year working in retail; Il Mulino was out of his price range. Joe always told Adam, “Whatever you normally pay for dinner, you pay. I’ll pay the rest.”

  Eventually, Joe married Sharri, and Adam married one of Sharri’s best friends … but still, the bond between them meant everything to Adam. Joe understood him in a way that almost nobody else did. One year, Joe sent a Häagen-Dazs ice cream birthday cake to Adam’s office. Adam was overwhelmed with gratitude. It was not just a cake to him. It was Joe’s way of acknowledging that Adam’s family had never really celebrated his birthday, and so Joe would.

  Adam had relied on Joe so heavily for so long that his death felt like somebody had removed the spine of his own existence, leaving him no choice but to collapse. Life without Joe? Inconceivable.

  For years afterward, people knew not to mention Joe Maio’s death to Adam Gordon. He couldn’t discuss it with anybody. He could barely accept that it had happened. He would dream that Joe found him. He would walk down Manhattan streets and be so convinced that he saw Joe’s face in a crowd that he would lose his breath.

  Joe’s death shook Adam so hard that Adam quickly forgot many of the other names and faces from his childhood. People stopped Adam on the street because they remembered him well from when they grew up, and he had no idea who they were. Many of his childhood memories disappeared in the smoke that lingered after 9/11. All that remained was Joe.

  * * *

  The largest circle surrounding Joe’s death included the entire country. Joe did not just die young and tragically. He died young and tragically on 9/11. This made him part of our national story, and Sharri had to reconcile the fact that her personal tragedy was also America’s. There were thousands of stories, thousands of TV hours, and hundreds of books dedicated to the attack that took her husband’s life. She felt this weird sensation of being alone while everybody was watching.

  Sharri had to cling to the spirit and memory of Joe as he really was, instead of just a small character in a larger story or a name in an article. One of the newspaper stories about Joe did not sit right with her. She did not think it adequately captured him. She felt like the times she tried to honor his memory, the words did not do him justice.

  The tributes were well meaning but still inadequate. How can you sum up a person’s life in a few paragraphs, as The New York Times attempted to do with its Portraits of Grief thumb-nail sketches on each of the 9/11 victims?

  You could tell Joe Maio stories all day and night. You could say that when he was in tenth grade, he charmed his biology teacher by crooning an old Paul Anka tune: “Put your head on my shoulder, hold me in your arms.” Or that when he was in college, he and his roommate Cory Tovin would stand in their separate showers in the dormitory and sing an old Mamas and Papas song: “California dreamin’ … on such a winter’s day…”

  Or you could tell people about the night when he w
as a kid and he and his friends decided to go around town, knocking on house doors and running down to the bottom of the driveway. When somebody answered the door, they would stand there and start singing “Happy Trails.” Most people would just look out at them and shake their heads. What are you guys doing? They thought it was hilarious. They were kids and it was summertime, and Joe seemed to know how to have fun and stake his independence without doing anything dangerous. He knew where that line was.

  You could say he held a pool party when his parents were out of town and collected a cover charge at the door as an example of his daring. You could say he took black football teammates into Little Italy in Manhattan for the Feast of San Gennaro to show how he embraced everybody.

  You could say he liked to have a good time by filling bathtubs with bottles of beer on the Jersey Shore, or you could say that his idea of a good time was not always the same as everybody else’s. Joe drank but did not smoke—not cigarettes and not pot. When he was in college, he went to Jamaica for spring break with almost all his Zeta Beta Tau fraternity. When a man goes to spring break in Jamaica with a bunch of fraternity brothers and does not smoke pot, he needs something to do. He and Cory Tovin gave a few Jamaican kids twenty bucks to give them a tour of the countryside, with its ganja and sugarcane fields, while their friends stayed back and got high.

  If you wanted to give people a sense of his compassion, you could talk about the time when his puppy had a cold and Joe slept with him on the kitchen floor in his pajamas, or you could say that when his mother had an aneurysm in 1991, he wrote a beautiful note to her, not knowing if she would survive.

  You could say he had a love of adventure but a firm belief in doing what he felt was right. As a little boy with his parents at a Chevrolet dealership, he took caps off tires and brought them home. Then he felt guilty and told his mom. She took him back to the dealership to apologize. By the end of the apology, the dealer was giving him candy.

  You could talk about his ability to get you to do what he wanted—and make you think it was what you wanted. It was almost funny, the way he pulled it off. This was how he managed to get his close friend Jordan Bergstein to sign off on his close friend Adam Gordon living with them, even though Jordan and Adam had never met and didn’t really have much in common.

  He said to Jordan, “You know, JB, I was thinking…”

  Jordan: “Yeah?”

  Joe: “Ah, forget it.”

  Jordan: “What?”

  Joe: “Never mind.”

  Jordan: “Come on, tell me.”

  Joe: “OK. I have this friend Adam…”

  But what does that story say to you? Does it sound charming or conniving? If you hear that Joe once went inside a packed bar “just to say hi” to some people, then stayed and drank beer while two friends were stuck outside in pouring rain, and then defended himself to those two friends by saying, “Hey, am I supposed to know the weather took a change?” … well, what would you think? He might sound like a jerk unless you heard his friends tell the story, laughing so hard at the memory. They knew Joe far too well to think he was a jerk; that, in fact, is why they love the story so much. Only somebody as caring and purehearted as Joe could get away with that.

  Friends always talk about how women loved him, but the stories make him sound like a player. He wasn’t, really. At any given moment in his life, he was just as likely to be in a serious relationship as playing the field. When he was in high school, he and his friend Lori Sloves would lie in his waterbed together … and read The Great Gatsby aloud to each other. Does that sound like a player to you?

  The allure of Joe was not in a story. It was in how he carried himself and in the feeling he gave people. He made them feel good about themselves. Sharri missed that feeling so much that she wasn’t sure how she would survive.

  * * *

  They had met in a summer rental house in the Hamptons in the early 1990s. Sharri was staying there. Joe showed up one night with a friend and crashed at the house. She found him lying on the couch downstairs and thought, Who the hell is this guy?

  She went outside to lie by the pool. He went outside to hit on her. She was not impressed. That day, he said something that bothered her. She responded with, “It was really nice meeting you,” and walked away. She did not expect to see him again, but Joe Maio was never good at accepting rejection; it happened so rarely that it seemed like it must be a mistake.

  He knew the manager of the rental house, and he got the guy to track down Sharri. He called her and convinced her to go on a date in the city. Il Mulino. Of course. They dated for four years, off and on—two pieces that were undeniably attracted to each other but did not always fit together snugly.

  Joe was self-assured and had been raised in a home where his mother and father had traditional gender roles. Sharri was headstrong and didn’t take any crap from anybody. They each had to adjust. Joe was not a morning person, to put it mildly, and one day he woke up and started yelling at Sharri. She kicked him out of her apartment and told him never to come back. He left, but he called her a day later. He listened and he learned, and he became the man that Sharri wanted to live with forever.

  Joe was ambitious, but he was also tender. Sharri liked the combination. You could throw yourself at Joe Maio and not regret it.

  He liked the finer things in life, and the finer things seemed like they were meant for him. He would spend $2,500 on a custom-made suit and wear it comfortably. He didn’t seem like he was compensating for something. Joe reminded Sharri of Hubbell Gardiner, the carefree Robert Redford character in The Way We Were. He had the effortless cool of a movie star.

  6

  Spring 2006: I sat in the back seat of Craig Esposito’s car with tears in my eyes. Craig’s girlfriend, Heather, whom he would marry, sat in the front passenger seat. They knew why I was on the verge of crying.

  I was lost.

  Thirty-nine years old, single, childless, and lost.

  Craig and Heather tried to comfort me.

  “Adam, you’ll meet somebody…”

  “Obsessing won’t do anything for you…”

  “You have to let this go …

  I pretended to listen, but they knew I was only really pretending. Craig felt like I was agreeing with them just because I was supposed to. I was in such a bad place that I could think of nothing else—so upset I could only think of being upset. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself.

  It must have been a little sad for Craig to see me that way. When he was seven, he decorated his room with sports posters and team pennants to copy my bedroom; mine had a circle of sports teams’ pennants for as long as I could remember—the Knicks and Lakers and Celtics, which I still can envision in my mind today. When he was fifteen, he told people that he was proud to know a professional sportswriter. We were long past the point where he looked up to me. But here I was, pushing forty and falling apart.

  * * *

  How did I get there? Let’s start by going back a few years. I had been married once before, in the 1990s. I met a woman at a party on Christmas Eve, and our relationship unfolded in three acts: We dated for fifteen months, we were engaged for fifteen months, and we were married for fifteen months.

  My first wife was a really nice, sweet, smart, successful woman who was finishing law school when we met. She checked all the boxes. I liked her. I was new to Colorado, but she was from there, so her family became my family. A lot of my friends were getting married, and I didn’t want to lose her. I also wasn’t sure I wanted to marry her, either, but getting married seemed to be the next logical step in life. One day, my mother said, “What’s the difference? You already act like an old married man anyway.” And I thought, She’s right. I might as well try this.

  But in those forty-five months, I never really felt totally comfortable in the relationship. My friends could all see it. They didn’t tell me this at the time, but they were taking bets at my wedding on how long it would last, establishing the over/under. When I finally ended th
e marriage, I felt awful about the whole thing. We were in a relationship that had run its course, which happens—but there never should have been a wedding in the middle of it. I never should have gotten married in the first place. I wasn’t ready for it. It was an unfair thing to do to a good woman.

  I told her she would realize someday that ending the marriage was best for both of us. I said, “Listen, one day you’re going to thank me for this.”

  And sure enough, a few years later, we happened to speak on the telephone, and she said, “You were right. You said it would be the best thing that happened to me, and you were right.” She had gotten married, started a family, had children of her own, and gone on from her job as a public defender to become a judge. I was happy for her and relieved for both of us. It brought closure to the whole issue.

  The truth was that, at that time, I loved my career more than I loved anything. I have always been extremely driven. It’s borne, I believe, out of my fear of failure. The idea of failing, missing on something, is a concept I can’t stomach. When I was a kid, I never missed a day of school. I mean never. I had a perfect attendance record. I took pride in that.

  When I became an NFL reporter, I didn’t have a lot of obvious writing talent, but I wanted to try to be the best reporter I could. It didn’t matter how many hours I had to work or what holidays I would have to skip to report. I was willing to do whatever it took. I knew that family life complements work life for some people, and they find balance, but that was not me when I was in my twenties. My job was everything; I spent my mornings, afternoons, nights, weekends with it. I was married to it.

  Covering an NFL team for a newspaper feels glamorous at times, but at its essence, it is really a blue-collar job. You scramble, make phone calls, transcribe interviews, type your stories, file them, do your best not to get beat on a story—and then do it all again the next day and every day. I loved it. The grind wears some people down, but it energized me. I lived, breathed, ate, and drank it. People would ask how long I could keep going at that pace. I honestly thought I could—and might—spend the rest of my life covering the Denver Broncos. It would have been an honor.