There had been a brief meeting in St. Louis in 1986 and I had not seen him since then.

John and I lived together for four years. He was brilliant, much smarter and quicker than I (in everything except mathematics and science). He was trained in classical piano and was an incredible player -- and composer. He wrote beautiful songs, especially love songs and nature songs -- I take it back, all his songs were fantastic.

He and I wrote the music for my cousin, Barbara Zastrow, for her wedding. He also played at honky-tonks in St. Louis -- starting at the ripe old age of fifteen or sixteen when the drinking age was twenty one. He knew all the old St. Louis jazz and Dixieland players, because he played with them.

His father, Martin Franzmann, was a theologian and poet -- many of his best are in the Lutheran Hymnal and in the Episcopal Hymnal. When the Missouri Synod was intent on self-destruction, Martin took a professorship at Cambridge University in England -- where his daugher, John and Peter's sister, Alice, married to an officer in Her Majesty's Navy.

I was, ashamedly I admit this, quite naive politically until I met John. He traced his politics for me through history and philosophy and whatever. He turned me to the Left, and I have never questioned the change, because I was as convinced as he.

His love of music well performed was infectious. His distain for music poorly performed I likewise share with him. I learned the names of Vivaldi, Buxtehude and Brahms through John -- and enjoy them to this day. I learned to love the New York Philharmonic -- and to shudder at the stupidities of the Philadelplhia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. Cleveland Orchestra? good. St. Louis? bad. Cincinnati? off the map, man!

Ron Diener

From time to time, when he turned on me, I told him to watch his ass, because I was the only - the ONLY - friend he had in this here cruel world. Cross me and he would face a lonely journey through this here life, because no one else but I could stand his arrogant ass. It was close enough to true that he always pulled back, always apologized to me. I was the rarest of all! he apologized to me!

His frame was thin and fragile -- over six feet tall (maybe six feet three inches) -- he never weighed more than one hundred twenty. His arms were the thinnest spindles. The line of his legs was broken by his bulbous knees, so thin he was. He smoked much and ate little.

He could be leveled to the earth with a single blow (it happened three times, in my presence: at Charley Howard's bar when he called Ruthie, the wife of a "Regular," a whore [she was, of course, but it was none of John's business dammit!], at a valet-parking restaurant he had taken me to in Milwaukee when the car [one of those Thunderbirds with the retracting hardtop - always the show-off, John was] was returned with a smudge on the driver's side fender and he accused the valet of carelessness, and at Fat's Gritzner's Bar [east side, Watertown, Wisconsin, he had insulted Jake, the piano tuner, and Jake's friend, a former prizefighter and confirmed life-long drunk named Comet, as in "Comet" Kazinski, landed a right cross to John's chin]).

He would be broke -- John, that is -- but he would always bum a buck or two for a book (unlike yours truly, who would have borrowed it from the library). He was into debt to me for tens, then hundreds, over those college years. "I can get this six-volume set for only twenty bucks, Ron - you got twenty bucks?"

I might come up with ten or eleven and he would come up with the rest. Over time, this cumulated into an enormous debt (I did not document the exact numbers, but it was "lots" - but remember, the minimum wage was still less than a buck.).

Then, one Friday night, at Charley Howard's tavern (Charley always tended bar, his bar, and he never checked ages -- we were nineteen or twenty years old at the time) on a late Friday night (we were sober, the Regulars were not) there was this poker game.

I got into the game with about four dollars (minimum wage at the time was $0.85 per hour). I was drinking boiler-makers from my winnings (plenty of em, too) and I was up over fifty dollars. I wanted to quit. God in Heaven! please let me quit! But the Regulars were getting restless (you gonna walk outta here with fifty bucks, asshole? no way, asshole. Deal.) And it went to sixty. Seventy. I could not lose. Two times in succession I drew into a five-card straight (we are talking major, make that MAJOR odds against it happening even ONCE! and I have never drawn into an inside straight since then and that is forty-five years of poker playing since that night.)

I am itching to leave.

I try to take money from the table to my pocket, but I am caught by the Big Guy in the red plaid jacket (don' wannta fool with Jack, do ya?). And suddenly my luck goes into the crapper. Fifty. Forty. Twenty-five. Ten. Suddenly I am back to four bucks. Then no bucks.

John, lend me a fiver to last me.

John gives me the fiver. I lost it too. I ask for five more, and John says there is no more (this is, obviously, before VISA and MasterCard).

We go back to the college dormitory (had to sneak in, after midnight, you might have known).

So Monday evening, after dinner, John and I are studying in our room and it is about 10 pm. John says, "You got my five bucks that you borrowed on Friday night?"

Listen here, buddy, I am saying, YOU are into ME for five bucks times twenty-five. And are you ready to pay up?

John is nonplussed. He says, five times twenty-five bucks -- how'd you come up with that number?

Books, I say, books! you buy books and you take my money to pay for them.

Oh, he says, that's different. The money I gave you was for gambl.ing and the money you gave me was for books. Don't you understand? are you a dim-wit?

So I paid him the five dollars.

I loved John. Always. Still do. Love him to the core. And more.

Several matters remained unsettled. He knew that. He took the easy way out. He died. That shit!

He goes and dies and now he does not have to settle the unsettled matters between us. I resent it. I resent it mightily. He got away with the book-money ploy, and now he gets away with it with the death ploy. I am not buying it.

Listen here, John. You out there? Anywhere? We got problems to settle and they will not get easier if you just go ahead and die. Listen up, John. You got responsibilities! like telling me about the difference between book-debts and gambling-debts. And why in the hell would a poor graduate student purchase a new Thunderbird with a hard retractable roof? What was more important than finishing the concerto you talked about so often? I do not buy it, not one bit. But I still love you, my friend. I hate it that you cannot answer. Now I have to do both parts of the dialogue and I find it to be an unreasonably difficult burden.   Next time, I will try to walk out with the fifty bucks in my pocket. Got it? Twenty-five for books. Twenty-five for the next time at Charley Howard's. So how did you find out that Ruthie was a whore, you rascal?

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