A Perfect Friend

So, who was this Al Dimino and why should we care?

Al Dimino played football for the University of Delaware. Until flunking out after his sophomore season, Al Dimino was the starting middle linebacker. Al Dimino could do one hundred pushups in one minute. The night I met him, he tackled a tree. Later, after regaining his eligibility, he played for Western Kentucky University, where I was studying to be a journalist.

Al Dimino was a killer. Al Dimino was my roommate.

The first time I ever saw him was in the shower room at Barnes-Campbell Hall. From the neck down, Al Dimino looked like one of those old Charles Atlas ads—mounds of shiny rippling muscles. From the neck up, Al Dimino thought he resembled Paul Newman, but in fact he looked—well, not so good, but a lot better then than when I last saw him.

Which brings us almost up to date.

Two months ago, I got a collect call from Dimino. I hadn’t heard from him in nine years, since we’d shared a one-bedroom apartment on State Street in Bowling Green, Kentucky, for one semester. We didn’t room together after that because, well, Dimino could be a very scary guy. One time, suspecting his chick of going out with some other dude, he roamed all over town looking for her. In the middle of the night, for reasons known only to him, he decided that she was in the dark house whose locked front door he ran through.

Only it was the wrong house.

Another time, Dimino locked me out in a blizzard for an hour while he entertained his latest flame. When he finally let me in and I complained, he shoved me into the kitchen, slammed a skillet on a burner, and lifted me by the throat into the skillet. Dimino explained that he did not like being disturbed. At that moment, I caught a glimpse of just how disturbed Dimino really was.

Such memories flashed by as I accepted the charges and waited to hear that Joisey accent of his once more. Dimino had called from the Delaware State Hospital. Before I could ask what was ailing him, he began telling me of his adventures. He had worked in a lab for a firm developing a guided missile project. He had received top security clearance, which had involved him with the Central Intelligence Agency. Dimino had been in Cuba working for the CIA. He had been trained as a para-legal counsel. His job was to go around getting political prisoners out of jail.

He was doing the same thing in Mexico when he “developed health problems” and had to be flown out of the country. Chemotherapy had taken care of a malignant cyst on one of his lungs. Dimino talked nonstop for five minutes. He seemed more coherent during this monologue than he ever has since. Al was okay now, except for being “financially embarrassed.” Dimino needed money. The touch didn’t surprise me much. Al Dimino was always borrowing things in college, few of which were ever returned. As for the rest of his improbable tale, with Dimino anything was possible.

When I asked how much, he said three hundred dollars.

Now I am not a wealthy man. I’m a journalist with mortgage payments and a family to support. Nor am I in the habit of lending money, and to my keen reckoning three hundred bucks was a lot of money—especially if I didn’t expect it to be repaid. All this was on one side. On the other, here’s this guy I haven’t seen in years, he’s in the state hospital for who-knows-what, and if he’s had to call on me then he must really be desperate.

Moment of decision.

I can hear his raspy breathing on the other end. What the hell, I think, he was my friend. I’ll send him what I can, the actual amount to be decided later, under less duress.

But when I ask for his address, Dimino starts thanking me for saving him, helping in his hour of need, and tells me what a great guy and true friend I am, and I know I can’t tell him I’m sending less than the full amount.

I had not made up my mind. Al Dimino had made up my mind for me.

Now I was trapped. I couldn’t turn him down even if I wanted to. A more cynical mind might have recognized Dimino as a con artist and gone no farther. But I went over to the bank and sent him a check.

This wasn’t the worst.

The worst was that Dimino saying he was coming for a visit to “start over.” Now that I’d bankrolled him, what could I do but offer him my hospitality for a week or two? My wife Grace easily thought up alternatives. But it did her no good. Al Dimino was coming to Louisville as our house guest. At least I’d had the presence of mind to insist that he write ahead of time, so we’d know when to expect him. And he did, too. Unfortunately, his letter didn’t arrive until three days after Dimino:

Dear Pate and Grace, he wrote. I am very happy that you two have found a good life together. Grace, Pate and I shared some good times before he met you. I was always the bullheaded one. Pate, you remember that apartment we lived in? That’s what I have in my mind as I write this letter. You know the situation I was going through in those times. But keeping to my goals, I was able to play ball and graduate.

Things were going good for a few years, then a few health concerns, and this year it hit its peak. Thanks a million for your assistance. This hospital trip took me back $2,500 and I had to pay in case another incident occurs. Thanks to your generosity I have enough to get back on my feet and come to see you in about a week.

Teaching is one route I may take. It depends on a certain situation about my security clearance that started simply as a security guard for a corporation but snowballed into para-legal positions. It’s not hard to get in, but problems getting out. My health problems were probably bad food and water.

My mother has remarried, and everything is fine with her. The money will be repaid as soon as I can establish a nest egg. So, good health to you both and good luck in everything. Your friend always, Al. PS Sorry for the change in writing utensil, but this place is a little unorthodox—when you put something down, somebody picks it up.

Need I say that that Al Dimino’s letter raised more questions than it answered?

For instance, was he really only paying his hospital bill in case “another incident” occurred? And what sort of incident? What could his security clearance have to do with teaching? More ominously, what did he mean by problems getting out of the CIA? Was Al Dimino involved in some spy caper? Was his life in danger? Would ours be? Did he have cancer—or Montezuma’s Revenge? Why was he in the hospital? What kind of hospital took away a patient’s ballpoint pen? What had happened to Al’s father? And what of his lab job?

Between the phone call and the letter, I had hoped to make sense of Al Dimino and his picaresque life. But the myth and the man could not be separated. And I was not at home when he phoned Grace from the Greyhound Bus station, wanting to be picked up. He told her to look for a checkered sport coat and blue suede shoes.

At the terminal downtown Grace searched and searched for Al Dimino. Finally, she saw a man who fit the description—except for being about twenty years too old. Sure enough, it was Al Dimino, thirty going on fifty. He was wearing the kind of crummy work pants they issue in jail. The pants were held up by a piece of rope. Seedy is the word that came to Grace when she described him. Nevertheless, she bravely lead him to our Toyota and brought him home ALONE.

When I got home, tired and bleary after a hot July day of drinking and scuba diving at Dale Hollow with my buddy Alan Montana, Ginger and Al Dimino were sitting at the dining room table going through the newspaper ads looking for jobs. I was stunned. It was definitely Al Dimino but he had aged unbelievably. He was smoking and wheezing, his big hands were shaky, and his fingers were stained black from nicotine. The Al Dimino I remembered was a fitness fanatic who shunned tobacco, bench-pressed twice his own weight of 175 pounds, and was nicknamed “Mad Dog” for the way he’d sacrifice his body. All that was left was a rind of flab, a new stiletto moustache, thinner shorter curly black hair. Grace told me later that he reminded her of Brando as the Godfather, which if not Paul Newman was something, I suppose.

But old Al rushed right up to me, shook my hand while I was still in the kitchen, gave me a big smile, told me how glad he was to see me, how glad he was to be here in Louisville, on and on, faster and faster. Then he started to tell me about his “machine,” which had something to do with parapsychology and behavior modification. Al Dimino was inventing this machine. Lie the cavalry to the rescue, Alan Montana grabbed Al Dimino’s large hand and struck up a conversation.

This gave me a moment to come out of shock and help poor frazzled Grace upstairs. Dazedly, she described her hour-long ordeal with the monster from my past. She told me about asking Al Dimino if he would be interested in working as a waiter. He didn’t know about that but wouldn’t mind being a maître d’. The point of finding him a job was to get him out of our house FAST, she said. I left Grace swooning in bed and manfully went back downstairs.

Miraculously, Alan Montana had soothed the savage breast of Al Dimino, aided by a cold Falls City beer. Montana seemed fascinated by Dimino and even went so far as to invite us over to his house for another beer. This, I reasoned, might give Grace time to recover, so we went.

I wanted to ask Dimino about a million questions, but somehow the time never seemed right. He dominated conversation, informing me that he had graduated from Western finally with a 2.0 average. He had been a biology and chemistry major, I recalled, wondering how he had done it. But before Montana could park his new red Dodge, Al Dimino had shifted into politics. He had already run on a platform of legalized marijuana and prostitution. After he got a job, he was going to run for mayor of Louisville, too. And by the way, could we turn him onto some grass?

Disappointed that we couldn’t, Al Dimino sighed, “There is no hope without dope.”

As we drank our way through a case of Falls City, Al Dimino told us about SANE, an organization he belonged to that believed in legalizing all drugs. This astonished me, since in college he had never done drugs at all. But now Al Dimino believed that people should be free to do whatever they needed to become tranquil and happy. Al Dimino himself was on Thorazine—or had been in the hospital, which was why he’d been so jumpy, being out of the drug. Smoking and drinking helped to calm him down, he said.

Alan Montana wanted to know more about Al Dimino’s machine. Dimino said he would keep on building his machine no matter what to control people’s minds and make them peaceful and calm. Montana asked where Dimino kept his machine. Al Dimino grinned and tapped his temple. Evidently his machine would consist of computers and drugs and some very special books—beginning with B.f. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity.

Hearing this, my ever-generous pal Montana whipped out his brand-new hardbound copy of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and lent it to Al Dimino.

I could not find a way to prevent this folly, and Cosmos presumably became part of Al Dimino’s special reading list, since that was the last Alan Montana ever saw of it.

Having borrowed his book and drunk all his beer, we could impose no longer on Alan Montana’s hospitality and thus were forced to go back to my place. It was already dark. Grace, somewhat more composed now, had prepared a meal for us. Al Dimino wasted little time devouring his food as if to keep it from being snatched away.

Afterward, he instantly seized the telephone book and my old Western yearbook, The Talisman. He looked up girls he knew ten years ago and tried to find a local listing. Half a dozen lucky ladies received calls from the past over the next half hour. The calls were painfully short. With each attempt to rekindle the past, Dimino’s voice would begin charged with optimism, then fade, finally settling on a resigned, “See you around.” It was pitiful, especially since most of these girls had been willing to do anything for Al Dimino, football player, once upon a time.

“Even cowboys strike out sometimes,” Dimino grinned sadly.

He told us about his last love, who ran off with another man while Al was in the hospital. He sounded bitter but tried to shrug it off.

“Once old Mad Dog gets himself a job, everything will be cool again,” he said.

I doubted it myself, though I wanted to believe it badly. I lay awake for hours that night. Had he used my $300 to bribe his way out of a mental hospital? And if he had, could I turn him in?

We woke late Saturday morning to find him missing and wondering if something had happened to him. But Al was soon back from a walk around the neighborhood. Feeling relieved but also ashamed for fearing someone had seen him coming here, we were ready to do penance.

But Dimino said he’d been looking for a job and had a possibility at nearby Air Devils Liquors. Having him so close on a permanent basis was unthinkable. We had to find him a job somewhere else.

Even though it was Saturday, Dimino and I went job-hunting. He wanted to check out some places in the new Bluegrass Industrial Park. When I tried to suggest delicately that perhaps he should borrow some of my clothes, he wouldn’t hear of it. Dimino was going into the oil business wearing the same crummy clothes he’d arrived in. Our next stop was a blood bank on Bardstown Road where Dimino was interested in a technician’s job. While he was there, he thought he might as well sell some blood.

I dropped him off and drove downtown to Louisville Gardens where Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band were playing a concert tonight. Ginger and I already had our tickets, but Al Dimino was a Springsteen fan (no reflection on Bruce) and obviously wanted to come along. So, I bought him a ticket. But when I returned to the blood bank, he was gone.

He wasn’t at my house. We had a talk and decided that Al had to go right away. It would be hard to turn him out as he’d tried to be a perfect gentleman and stay out of our way. But everything he did seemed bothersome. He was extremely polite—too damn polite, thanking us all the time. Grace hated his chain-smoking. While he was on the phone last night, he had burned a hole in her antique sewing table. That was the last straw for her.

Even if we had to pay his rent, we felt it would be worth it to get him out of the house. We had to find an apartment for Al Dimino pronto. First, though, I would have to find Al Dimino.

He showed up as soon as I left, chauffeured by some Good Samaritan he’d met at the blood bank. The ride had cost him a buck and a beer, bought with his blood. Tougher now thanks to Dimino, Grace quickly rousted this second scourge. When I got back, she and Dimino were poring over the help wanted columns again. We decided to forego employment temporarily in favor of housing and set off at once. I wanted to set Dimino up where he’d meet lots of people—especially girls because he “really needed a woman bad”—and have access to public transportation. The Cherokee Road area seemed perfect, offering large, interesting apartment buildings populated by young adults at reasonable prices.

The first place we visited seemed promising.

“Out a sight!” in Al’s estimation.

But the fussy, gray-haired landlord kept glancing nervously at Dimino and claimed he already had another interested party. He said he would call Dimino, but Al pressed him.

“Can’t you tell me something tonight? Can I come back later? Can I call tonight?”

No, no, no, said the old man.

Dimino had blown the apartment.

At the next one, the landlady, who wore pink curlers in her hair, asked Dimino if he had a job.

“Sure, at the liquor store on the corner,” he told her, which was certainly news to me.

Pink curlers wanted $25 a week, in advance. When she showed us a modern kitchen that Dimino could share with her other renters, things were looking up—or so I thought.

“You’ve got to be neat in the kitchen. See this sign? ‘Anybody who can’t wash his own dishes is not to use the kitchen. This sign is not to be taken down.’ Another thing, I don’t want any women up here. I have five rooms, and I could have women in and out of here all the time if I wanted to. The neighbors wouldn’t stand for it.”

As we went back to the first floor, she found a speck of dust on the stairs and said she didn’t know where another of her renters was working to get so dirty, but she’d warned him before.

“He’s not neat, and he’ll have to go. And if you aren’t neat, so will you.”

Dimino seemed unperturbed about her rules and bad temper. Pink Curlers seemed uncertain about him, but three of her rooms were empty and I had cash in hand, which she accepted. All we needed was for Dimino to stand her for a week until we found something better.

When Grace heard about all this, she was so delighted that we took Dimino over to Kroger’s and let him buy all the food he wanted, including beer. Since Dimino was never going to get a job dressed in rags, we filled his lone Army surplus bag with my older but still decent clothes.

After dinner together, we were off to the Springsteen concert, which I’d been anticipating for weeks and feared that Dimino would ruin it for me. Fortunately, the main floor seats I’d bought for him were far away from ours. The only one problem was that the concert started forty-five minutes late, which meant that we had to cringe and hide until the lights finally went down. It was awful. The poor guy was all by himself. But the seat next to mine was empty and he’d have sat there for sure. We could see him from the balcony as he wandered around annoying people. When the show finally started, it proved one of the greatest ever. Bruce belted out lyrics about everybody having a hungry heart and nobody wanting to be alone and of course I thought of Dimino.

We’d avoided Dimino during intermission, but after the concert found him again in the lobby surrounded by a group of angry looking teenagers.

“Hey, Al, what’s going on? Let’s go, man.”

Dimino was staring at one of the guys in that old Mad Dog way.

“C’mon, let’s go,” I said.

Dimino shrugged.

As we walked to the car he said, “I was trying to put the moves on this chick and this dude she’s with gets all pissed off.”

As if to illustrate the point, he began approaching every female he met on the street.

We edged away, pretending we didn’t know him.

On the way home, Dimino, “I’ve been smoking some dope and having a real far out time.”

The next day was Sunday. We stayed home and took the phone off the hook.

*

On Monday morning, as promised, I drove over to Cherokee Road to take Al Dimino job hunting again. I was a minute or two late when I found Dimino walking down the street, having already given up on me. He looked marginally better in my old clothes, though he had stopped shaving. I tried to gently suggest this might hurt his employability, but Dimino ignored me. With each rejection, he trudged back to the car, head down, looking miserable. 

At noon, we had coffee in Al’s kitchen. Afterward, we made sure to wash the dishes and clean up. Sunday had been “a washout” for Dimino. When he phoned his old Western teammates, everyone had an excuse not to see him. He knew they didn’t want him around.

Leaving Dimino behind, I drove downtown to get my weekly allergy shot. When I came back to my car an hour later, Dimino was standing beside it. He’d walked five miles downtown and just happened to see my car. Had to be fate, I decided. Dimino got in and I began to sneeze.

When I got home, the letter he’d promised to write to me finally had arrived. After reading it, I decided to grill him on some troubling points. However, when I picked him up Tuesday morning, he once again did all the talking. Dimino’s own crummy wardrobe was back but his five o’clock shadow was gone. 

“I’m going into farming,” he said.

Dimino explained that he’d seen an ad and called up the farmer who placed it. Now we were going to meet this farmer in person.

I took I-64 to Indiana and then a two-lane highway into the knobs that ended at a rutted gravel road. When the farmer said he wanted to make his land more productive, Dimino told him that he’d lived on a farm in Delaware and knew how to grow soybeans and corn. He could also handle machinery. 

This made me smile, thinking of Dimino’s machine.

“Then he said, ‘What about pot?’” Dimino said. “I laughed and told him I knew all about that business too and could even make some contacts in Louisville.”

“What contacts?”

“I get free room and board, two dollars an hour tax-free, plus twenty-five percent of all the marijuana I can sell. How are the dope laws around here?”

By now, we were approaching the farm. Although too befuddled to make sense out of all this, I knew for sure I was not getting mixed up in any dope ring. But Dimino already owed me over four hundred dollars, and how else would he pay me back? While I was debating with myself about what to do, Dimino revealed that he was being evicted from his apartment.

“Evicted? Why? What did you do, Al?”

“It was for having coffee with you,” Dimino said.

“What?”

Pink Curlers was claiming Dimino had broken their agreement about having no visitors—even though we both knew she’d said no female visitors.

“Don’t matter. I’m out twenty-five dollars. I got no job, no money, and no place to stay but this farm.”

If this wasn’t enough to make up my mind, the farmhouse coming into view did. It was perfectly respectable looking and so was the farmer’s wife, whom Dimino chatted with on the porch.

“Take that dirt road,” he said when he came back to the car. “The farmer’s cutting cord wood.” 

I drove through fields full of tall corn until I heard a chainsaw whirring.

“Stop here,” Dimino said, and went into the trees. 

I waited in the car. In a moment, the whirring stopped abruptly. I thought this looked like the last place on earth for a dope operation. Then I realized that was probably why it was chosen.

Dimino wasn’t gone long. When he returned, he indicated we should depart. 

“The farmer told me I’d have to sleep in the barn, that he usually hired winos for this kind of work. Can I borrow your sleeping bag?”

It seemed pointless to try talking him out of it. “You can use my sleeping bag but I’m not driving you back out here.”

That’s when Dimino told me about his Porsche, which he’d bought the car while working for the C.I.A. 

“It handled like a dream. Chicks fell for it every time.” 

When Dimino was hospitalized, he gave the car to his kid brother, who was trying to make it on his own as a dishwasher at the beach. Now that Al was out of the hospital, he didn’t want to call upon his brother and be a burden. 

Which took my breath away.

“As a last resort, I could always sell the Porsche,” Dimino said.

Perhaps sensing he’d made a mistake, Dimino talked faster. The part-time liquor store job he’d mentioned to Pink Curlers was real. The two transplanted New Yorkers who owned the store said they remembered what it was like to be down on their luck. 

“Hey, while it’s still early, there’s a couple of construction sites I’d like you to take me to. If I work construction, I can keep my liquor store job and accumulate savings quicker and pay you back sooner. That might even be better than working on the dope farm.”

I thought so, too. 

Feeling fatalistic, I took him to pick up his belongings and dropped them off at my house before continuing the job search. At a new housing site on Westport Road, Dimino was hired to begin tomorrow morning at three dollars an hour. 

After a celebratory high-five, he said, “I won’t need to stay with you guys tonight, either. I met a chick.”

She lived next door to him, and that’s where he wanted to be dropped him off. He could catch the bus or hitchhike to work tomorrow, he said.

I went home feeling hugely relieved. I was explaining why when the phone rang. Dimino needed the sleeping bag after all. Some of his food, too.

“I don’t know what’s going on, Grace, but something obviously has gone wrong.”

“You know we’re having company for dinner,” she sighed, and started fixing some sandwiches for Dimino.

He was standing in the front yard with a pretty teenager when I got there. She immediately came around to my window and asked if he was a friend of Al’s. What could I say?

“Can he spend the night with you?”

Dimino came up. I could smell his whiskey breath from five feet away.

“Can I just sleep in your back yard?”

She said no.

“You’ve got problems, you know? You’ve got problems of your own,” Dimino yelled.

The girl ran into the house.

Shaking his head, Dimino climbed into the car. “Take me out to the construction site. I’m tired. I’ll just rack out there.”

I didn’t want to do it. “You might get arrested for vagrancy.”

“They feed you in jail, don’t they? That’s not so bad.”

He looked at me.

“I don’t want to be any more of a problem for you. I know what I’m doing. I’ve bummed around before. I can make it. I just hope there’s no poison ivy around that construction site.”

“Me, too.”

“Well, what are you going to do about it, cry?” Dimino said when I let him out at a wasteland of half-done foundations, mud holes, and brush piles. “You just got to get up and keep going.”

He staggered off into the deserted building site with my sleeping bag in one hand and sandwiches in the other.

I was not home when he came by the next day to gather up his meager belongings. 

“He made a big production out of promising he would send us our money right away. He said he was going to find a job that would help him finish his machine—he said you’d know what he was talking about.”

“I’m not even sure he does.”

*

Yesterday, I got this letter from Dimino:

Dear Pate and Grace, I hope everything is going all right with you. I hope you don’t think I forgot about you. You are both great people and I never will. After I stayed with you, I moved around a while getting my head together. I was a dishwasher until a few complications, then I moved back home.  I remember the sum I owe you was four hundred dollars.  I’ll be sending it to you as soon as possible, probably a hundred at a time. I’m starting a job in a greenhouse that has a good future.

The Bruce Springsteen concert is still fresh in my memory. I heavily enjoyed myself at that concert. I hope you were not disillusioned by my wandering, but everything looks better now. It was good to see you, Pate. You are a perfect friend and person. I will be keeping in touch for a lot of reasons. Thanks for reuniting our friendship—especially because I was on the short end of the rope. This job pays well and if you ever come to the coast, it will be different. Your friend always, Al. P.S. My kid brother totaled the Porsche.

*

Al Dimino has indeed kept in touch. The collect call came today. Dimino recalled our adventures together, raved about his machine, thanked me for being a wonderful friend, and apologized for all the trouble he’d caused. Then he tried to borrow some more money.

I hung up on him.

Nobody’s perfect.

© 2025 Rick Neumayer

“A Perfect Friend” was first published in 1983 in River City Review and will appear in the forthcoming THREE FOGGY MORNINGS: Stories by Rick Neumayer. If you liked the story, I’d love to hear from you.