Numbered.

Terrell Tannen remembers Harrison in Michigan ...

The day we were scheduled to return to Lake Leelanau, an early November blizzard hit the upper peninsula in which six deer hunters died. We started across the peninsula at the height of the storm, with visibility not much further than the front bumper of Jim’s Subaru. We were essentially driving blind, but Jim carried on because “We said we were leaving today, so we’re leaving today!” He explained it is Midwestern tradition to always follow the plans you lay. Changing plans creates confusion.

Certain we would end up stranded and probably dead in the bleak landscape, I begged him to turn around because I didn’t want to die in this god forsaken terrain littered with scraggly pine and timber wolves. Either that or let me drive. Not only was he blind in one eye, Jim wasn’t a particularly gifted driver, either. Finally, after he admitted that he had no idea where the road was, he asked me “We’ve already locked up the cabin. Where would we go if we turned around?”

The answer was simple. “Dunes Saloon. We’ll wait it out all week if we have to.”

So, he turned around and we made it back to the bar, which harbored an animated crowd of frustrated deer hunters locked into the same plan. Jim and I found rooms to rent at a small hotel at the end of the block by the shoreline, and when not gorging on saloon whitefish and bourbon, we spent the next day and night listening to the fierce and relentless roar of gale-force winds and crashing waves pounding the rocky cliffs beneath us. I had been in ocean storms on sailboats, though never a hurricane, but this was a unique sound of power unleashed, alarming yet mesmerizing, somehow otherworldly. The volume and intensity made it hard to conceive that all this noise emanated from a lake, even one called Superior. In the last verse of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Gordon Lightfoot wrote, “Superior it is said never gives up her dead, when the gales of November come early.” Understood. When the weather eased, we drove home.

Jim was becoming a revered author in Hollywood, but at the Dunes Saloon, no one cared, which is how Jim liked it. He called from the saloon most nights while he was writing at his cabin. The bar phone had a long cord, and the bartender normally perched it right next to Jim’s reserved seat so he could talk to his friends around the country.

Jim was one of the more entertaining people you could hope to talk with, and at least during the get to know phase, a phone call with Jim would at minimum educate you about at least two topics you knew very little about, make you laugh several times, and leave you with at least one memorable insight locked into your brain.

And in Dope-ville ...

A better dinner companion one could not ask for, because Jim was not only entertaining to dine with, but he always had a very generous studio expense account, and he wasn’t shy about testing its limit. Over the next several years, we ate at some of the best restaurants in L.A.

I clearly remember my first dining experience with Jim, at an exclusive French bistro on Westwood Boulevard. He had the studio make the reservation for us, and as soon as we were seated, Jim took out a cassette recorder (which he did at every restaurant,) and sat it upright on the table. He then called over the waiter for questions about the entrees.

A lesson in priorities that, if we’re lucky, or maybe unlucky, we all get at least one opportunity to learn.

Noticing the recorder and the open menu, the waiter leaned over to Jim, careful to keep clear of the starched white tablecloth. “Would you like another menu to take with you, to refer to our offerings?”

“Why don’t you just bring us all your appetizers, and these six entrees. I’ll make notes as we go.”

“Absolutely, sir. May I ask what publication you are with?”

Jim arched his chaotic eyebrows as he looked up at the waiter. “Most all of them. New York Times, LA Times, Esquire, Paris Review, New Yorker. I write a lot about food.”

“Very good, sir! Would you like a larger table for your dishes?”

Indeed, we would. We were immediately moved to a table for six, which could hold all that we ordered.

Dinner with Jim was an adventure in not only a gastronomic sense, but with intellectual and emotional discovery. His New Yorker essay titled A Really Big Lunch detailed a meal prepared by French chef Marc Meneau that Harrison shared with Mario Batali and several other guests. It included 37 courses consumed over a period of 11 hours. That was extreme, but the man liked to eat, then talk about it. As Jim mentioned in his essay: “Your meals in life are numbered, and the number is diminishing. Get at it.”