Twilight of a tough guy

MY MEN FRIENDS are dying, one by one.

I will be 79 years old Aug. 30, and of my many boyhood chums and professional contemporaries, I am one of the shrinking number left standing.

I get regular dispatches of death and looming death from the alumni association of the Southern orphanage where I grew up. Charlie “Big Jeebie” Clay, with whom I dug ditches, hoed corn and shared a childhood love of Jack London, died of cancer. His brother Russell -- “Little Jeebie” -- my best boyhood friend with whom I compiled a compendium of smutty jokes and for whom one of my four sons is named, had a fatal stroke. Two brothers, Shorty and Monkey Jordan, with whom I plowed mules, milked cows and played high school baseball, died of cirrhosis.

Snake Driver, Pootie Parker, Greasy Brooks, Preacher Weeks, Cockeye Smith, Cootie and Snoteye Roach, Skunk Bradford and Nutsy Perry, with whom I strung fences, dug stumps, shoveled coal and manure, shucked corn and played football, are all gone. I am one of three male members of my high school class of ’28 still living.

My later male friends are dying too. Bill Roelecke, the caustic rebel with whom I cracked eggs in a late-World War II Navy chow hall, and who introduced me to the pomposity-puncturing journalism of his fellow Baltimorean, H.L. Mencken, died of a stroke. Two of my early and close Newsweek magazine colleagues recently died of lung cancer and heart disease. Two more have cancer. Another has congestive heart failure, another has serious diabetes and another lingers in full dementia.

The ranks of the male reporters (there were few women around) with whom I raucously drank, played poker, told jokes, ritually taped hotel keys to the ceilings of presidential campaign planes, listened day after mind-numbing day to the canned platitudes of the politicians we disdained, and others of our band of brothers who were subjected to threats, beatings and verbal abuse on the Southern civil rights beat are thinning fast too.

I am, it is very clear, at the age when contemporaries are checking out at an escalating pace. This is powerful stuff for me because male friends have played so important a role in my life.

My father died at 54 during the Great Depression, when I was five months old. And after a long struggle to keep us afloat, my mother finally sent me to the Methodist Orphanage in Raleigh, N.C. There, 300 girls and boys lived and worked physically separated at all times, so I was thrust into a tough, root-hog-or-die, all-male world.

I went there a shy and sensitive kid (my early nickname was “Pretty Boy”), but in order to survive, I soon developed the challenging posture and profane vocabulary of my little tough-guy fellows. “If I had a dog with a face like yours, I’d shave his butt and teach him to walk backward” was a typical greeting. The worst thing was to be thought a “sissy” or to appear vulnerable in any way. Our loyalties and unspoken devotion to one another ran deep.

My later reporter comrades bantered at one another and stiff-armed any expression of intimacy. But we were friends deeply tethered. I was a crew-cut, profane, hard-drinking, gruff and tough guy -- or at least that’s what I showed the world. And we guys were to some degree all like that. We may have been afraid in dangerous situations. We had troubles at home, with marriages and kids. We had doubts about our talents and our futures. We understood all that about one another, but we didn’t talk about any of it.

I had my deep secrets, and I assumed my male friends had theirs, though none as shameful as mine -- that when I was 5, I was forced into a sexual act by a gang of kids who laughed at me. I didn’t reveal that secret until I was 60 years old and in a 12-step program into which I’d stumbled because of the booze and drugs I’d used to Novocain the pain of my shame and self-doubt.

After that, the gap between the tough man I impersonated and the tender man I really was began to close. A pivotal moment came about six years ago when, at the end of a long cross-country phone conversation with an old friend, he said, “Karl, I love you.” I was knocked off balance. Saying “I love you” to another man? Unthinkable. I could only reply, “That cuts both ways.”

Then, not long afterward, another longtime, buttoned-up male friend whom I hugged as we parted at my door said, “I never thought I would live to be able to hug another man.” “Me either,” I said.

I have treasured my friendships with men. I miss those who are gone, the laughter, the camaraderie. But what a great ride we had, what fun, what adventure. And it is ironic that in my twilight years, just when I am able to tell my male friends how deeply I love them, they are dying, one by one.