My Life Is Disappearing Before My Eyes

Rick Davison 1948-2023

The first thing you noticed about him was his appearance. He had a large, oblong-shaped head, which he kept closely cropped, small ears, severe heavy eyebrows. I believe I heard that he still had some of his baby teeth, that his adult teeth never came in. He was a big guy, but hunched over a bit when he walked, somewhat simian in appearance. He had long thin fingers. He was extraordinarily pigeon-toed; that was the first thing you noticed about him, and it affected how he walked. Simian might be the word; one time in Middle School, we were doing various indoor races in the gym, and one of the things we did was the bear walk (or run), on all fours. Rick was not much of an athlete, but he was by far the best bear walker in the class. He was world class at that one thing. “That’s real athleticism, fellas,” our gym instructor said, watching him.

They were always trying to find ways to encourage him.

His appearance was just the first thing. He also behaved in odd ways; I don’t know whether he was developmentally disabled, or autistic, or some weird combination; you never knew what was going to fly out of his mouth, including loud laughter. He also talked loudly, like a person who doesn’t hear well. He was a lifer at Shady Side Academy, starting in kindergarten. The school policy was that, if someone was working hard, they would allow him to stay through ninth grade to see how he would do there, but if he couldn’t pass ninth grade he was out. So eventually Rick was out. But he worked as hard as he could until that time.

I entered the school in fourth grade, on a last-minute admission; places opened up in the fourth and sixth grades, and the school liked having brothers in the student body, so they let me and my brother take admission tests in the summer (my father hadn’t planned on sending us until ninth grade), and we got in. Boom. We hadn’t even said goodbye to our friends at public school.

When my mother heard that Rick was in my class, she made a point of telling me to be nice to him. She knew his mother, who was a warm, lovely, gracious woman (as I later found out). Mrs. Davison had adopted both Rick and his sister, knowing that they were what we now call Special Needs children. I made it a point to be nice to Rick, and I hope I was.

My brother Bill found out recently that Rick died about a year ago, though people are just getting around to a memorial service.

Even back in those early days, Rick was known for certain things. He loved Coca Cola, and would drink as much as he could get his hands on. He adored Jack Benny, and knew everything about him. He could do a great imitation of Benny’s sideways glance, and he could tell you all the routines Benny had done (long before the days of YouTube). He was also, like Benny, famously frugal; he was one of those fussy guys—already, at the age of ten—who carried a change purse and worried about every penny he spent.

In fifth grade, we had a program in which we said we hoped to do in the future. Gerry Hughes and I said we wanted to be ministers, God help us all[1]. Rick said he wanted to be a comedian. And in the program he insisted on telling a joke that was extremely unfunny (“What did the monkey say to the elephant? Nothing. Monkeys can’t talk”) at which we all tried to laugh, but after the rehearsals we had no laughs left. He should have told one of his Jack Benny jokes. He had a million of them.

At the end of fifth grade, I invited a small group of friends to come to Oakmont Country Club for a swimming party. I was a popular enough kid, but my birthday was in the summer, and most of my friends were away. On the day of the party, only two were coming, Rick and my best friend, Billy Moorhead, whose father had just been elected to Congress, so they would be moving to DC that year. The morning of the party, Rick called and said, “I’m sorry, David, but I can’t come to your party this afternoon.” I was dumbfounded. He didn’t offer any reason. Now I was down to one guest. Fortunately, he was my best friend

We moved on the next year to middle school, sixth through eighth grades, and there was a lot of hazing, especially on the school bus. Rick was somehow unhazeable, since people had been making fun of him all his life. I remember one time when a guy asked Rick to give him his textbook, took some gum out of his mouth, put it in the book, and slammed it shut. “Ooooh,” everybody said. Rick opened the book, peeled out the gum, and started chewing it. “You could have left more juice in it,” he said.

I actually don’t remember ever being in class with Rick. In middle school, we were sectioned according to intelligence (nobody ever said that, but it was obvious that’s what they did). In the senior school, the one year he was there, we didn’t take anything in common, so I didn’t see him operate in class.

He did go to dancing school, the stately Mrs. Berguin’s, where the offspring of all the best families went. There we were at age twelve and thirteen, learning how to behave properly, all of us wearing suits, as if we were attending a funeral, which we more or less were (the death of any spontaneity on our social lives). I actually secretly liked it; the girls were good-looking, and I liked getting my hands on them. Mostly we did rather tame dances, like the waltz and the fox trot, but every now and then the little combo would get down and we were allowed to jitterbug. For some reason—maybe he couldn’t learn the steps—Rick went absolutely apeshit in that situation, held his partner’s hand but started doing a wild dance of his own, prefiguring the Sixties that were to come. I don’t know where that came from. The girl would stand there, trying to stay composed and smile. Good training for the Debutante Ball.

He did come out for the ninth grade football team. He was, as I said, a pretty big guy, and being pigeon-toed and simian were not really disadvantages for a football lineman. But Rick couldn’t get it together. We had to supply our own uniforms that year, and my vague recollection is that Rick’s looked rather old, as if he were playing for the Carlisle Indians along with Jim Thorpe. I don’t think he could have had a leather helmet as in the old days, but that’s the way I picture him. Maybe they just couldn’t find a helmet to fit that massive head of his.

Word had apparently gone out through the faculty to encourage Rick any way you could, so when we were doing a tackling drill, and our best and toughest back, Jan Rovelli, would come up, the coach would look around and say, “Okay, men, we need a really tough guy here, I’m looking for a really tough guy”—we all knew what was coming—“Davison, get in there.” Rick would jump in between the two lines of linemen, crouched and running in place, waiting for Rovelli’s approach; Jan would come powering down, there would be this terrific Boom! And Rick would go over on his ass, flat on his back. It was brutal to watch. I don’t know why the coach always did that. It didn’t really encourage Rick. It didn’t help the rest of us, either.[2]

That first year was a bit of a blur. The school was much larger, everything way more difficult, there were all kinds of new routines. When we came back our sophomore year we had a bunch of new students, and some old ones, including Rick, were gone. We didn’t take a lot of time feeling sorry for the guys who had left. We were just glad to have survived.

I believe it was the next year that I got a call from Rick asking if I’d like to go to a Pitt football game. My brother and I had once had season tickets, but as we got older he was on the cross country team, which sometimes had meets on Saturdays, so we couldn’t go anymore. But the week Rick asked me I was free, so I went.

It was the first time I’d ever been to his house. I believe it was on one of those streets below Fifth Avenue, maybe on the other side of Ellsworth. We actually ate in the family dining room, and Rick’s mother—who was a beautiful woman—fixed us hamburgers and French fries. She served the two of us, and we sat in that dining room making conversation. We rode the streetcar to Pitt Stadium and watched the game. Afterwards we rode it back; Rick got off at his place, and I continued to mine. I’d had a good time, I’m sure. I loved watching football, and it was a gracious invitation. But that’s the last time I remember seeing Rick in my youth.

Years later—I mean 25 or 30 years—I was at a movie theater in Squirrel Hill (the Squirrel Hill Theater, in fact, down on Forward Avenue) and saw a man standing in a trench coat, waiting to go to a movie and thought it might be Rick. I wasn’t sure, so at first I didn’t do anything, and by the time I thought to speak he had ducked into a movie. But I spoke to my brother later, and he said he saw Rick all the time. Rick was a fixture at movie theaters, and at the Film festival that Pittsburgh put on every year. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of movies—one of those people who had probably watched everything that was ever on TCM—and also attended every new movie that came down the pike. He always—this was his weakness, I suppose—got some candy from the concession stand, and Bill mentioned that his teeth seemed worn down to nubs, as if they had taken in too many sweets.

He didn’t seem well-dressed when I saw him, though all I remember was a trench coat. If I had to guess, I would say that his family had left enough money that he didn’t have to work, though I suppose there were kinds of work he could do (but he was often at the movies in the afternoon). He spoke to Bill of things he had read in the New Yorker, so he definitely kept up. He had also, apparently, kept up with me, and read at least some of my books. Bill told me he was a font of information about the old Pittsburgh families; he knew all the gossip. I don’t know how, though he still attended Third Presbyterian Church and maybe heard things there. We always wondered where he lived, and how, what kind of life he had, but those aren’t polite questions to ask someone, and Bill never did. It’s possible, of course, that Rick had plenty of money but just didn’t want to spend it on things. He had that frugal streak.

Reading fiction, reading the New Yorker, following movies obsessively. Those weren’t things that just anyone did, or would want to do. It was obvious that he had a certain kind of intelligence, and a strong interest in things. I wonder what had been wrong at school. He obviously wasn’t stupid. He just couldn’t deal with academic life.

But there he was, in the middle of Pittsburgh society. In it but not of it.

Maybe he had what he wanted. His movies, his Good & Plenty and M&M’s, time to himself. Lots of things to read. I shake my head, sometimes, at the loneliness of life. But there it is.

[1] I think I had been influenced by the movie “A Man Called Peter,” about the preacher Peter Marshall, and the book by that name, which I actually read after seeing the movie. I don’t know why that made me want to be a minister, which translated in my mind as a good man. But at least briefly, it did.

[2] I believe I wrote about those tackling drills, and Rick’s part in them, in my first novel, Football Dreams.