McSorley's Old Ale House is a storied, sawdust-floor bar where Rawitz liked to gather with friends when he was in Manhattan. People are pouring in all afternoon and into the evening, fresh from the memorial service. It's June 17, four days after his death.
A man is more than the sum of the stories his best friends tell about him, but maybe, years from now, Rawitz's daughters will hear an echo of him in the lore exchanged amid the sounds of laughter and beer mugs slamming on nicked wooden tables.
They'll hear about the time Rawitz stuck some of them with a $2,000 restaurant bill because he'd secretly ordered top-drawer tequila shots for the whole room. About the way he watched pro football as a young man and insisted he'd be a pro himself someday, with such conviction it was impossible to know whether he believed it. How he insisted on playing 100-point games of one-on-one basketball, because he could win by outlasting you.
And maybe they'll hear how John Cunningham went around the bar distributing T-shirts that read "Genovese Sucks — JR," Rawitz's friendly beyond-the-grave dig at his best friend, a New York real estate man named Joe Genovese. They'll hear how he would have approved of all this, and how, if he were here, he would have tried to raise the stakes, to go bigger.
Rawitz had envisioned all 10 godfathers at the bar, toasting. He gave explicit instructions to do that, in fact. Seven of them have managed to make it.
It's not the kind of thing to say aloud just now, but some of the men privately wonder how long it will last, this godfather business. How many of the others will keep their promises five or 10 years from now.
Amid the clamor, reserved, scholarly Warrington Parker, a San Francisco lawyer and a former editor of the Harvard Law Review, sits against the wall spitting tobacco into an aluminum can. When they met at the U.S. attorney's office as young prosecutors, Rawitz liked to call him King of the Nerds for his bowties and science-fiction paperbacks, and Parker wondered how a guy he barely knew felt he could enter his office and insult him.
Then Rawitz shocked Parker with his generosity in helping him prepare, question by question, for the cross-examination of a murder defendant. "That was the moment I knew this is someone who is as close to me, if not closer, than the people in my family," Parker would recall. "He taught me what a friendship could be."
Tonight in the bar, watching all these pieces of his friend whirl around the room, Parker is surprised at the instant familiarity he feels with the other godfathers, men he's linked to for life.
He's meeting some of them for the first time and it's happening without sliced palms or solemn ceremonies. Instead, among the beer-soaked reminiscences, there is talk of mundane logistics: how to coordinate visits to the girls, in the same way they took turns visiting Rawitz in his last months. "We should get an e-mail chain going," Parker says.
Later that night, Parker thinks about it and says, "You'll never see all 10 godfathers together. It'll never happen." He thinks Rawitz would have been OK with that, because they'd taken their oaths in their own ways, and because the man knew life is always messier than you could prepare for. "That's what was beautiful about him."
