Two-Headed Boy

The first thing the survivor of a suicide—which isn’t an oxymoron, because those nuclear and immediate family members of one who terminates his life may indeed be said to have undergone acute trauma, and are therefore survivors—the first thing one thinks of is oneself. “How could he do this to himself” is a question that comes close on the heels but on the heels nevertheless of the question “How could he do this to me / us”. On the train home to Syracuse there were all matters of solipsistic-type reasoning running through my head when I stopped reading long enough to allow the thoughts to so run. This phenomenon, which Webster’s opines to be “a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing”, is going to be at the very center of what I have to write tonight, because I’ve got to get straight what my motivations are in writing down what I’ve been thinking / feeling / being today, firstly, and secondly my plans, which I’ll probably make good on, to post this on Disruptive Juxtaposition where any and all browsers and good friends may review and consider the precise ramifications of what I still feel is going to be a highly indictable grappling with the nature of the Event of December 17th.*

Because anyone who’s known me for at least a week knows, I can out-fence-walk anybody: I am the Great Equivocator: I am Janus-faced (although I am not the Two-Headed Boy of this post’s title). I could wear a full-body sky blue anti-Kerry flip-flop outfit and mean it, although not in its political sense, naturally. I see Pro and Con simultaneously and equally. Example. In this case, I see the need I have to take notes on and set down in some sort of lasting record those transient thoughts and correspondences of thoughts and external images and phenomena which, taken in sum, articulate something about the Event that I couldn’t. I also see some potential overcompensation in my need to record and publish (in a very limited sense, and mainly to close friends and new friends made via this site) the nitty-gritty of what's happening with this family, what's happening with me, and what was happening with Jon such that here we are now. The Pros of sharing vs. the Cons of sharing - and here and for the moment I mean sharing in all of its varieties - are involved and not yet completely resolved, but by post's end I think you'll understand where I stand, if you haven't figured it yet by virtue of reading this in the 1st place. That the medium I choose to set down this record upon is public rather than private says a lot about me, true. I suspect however and want to suggest that it says a lot about what people in general and Young People my age** need in times of trial that are kindred to the Event.

AN ASIDE.

I use the definite article because I feel sure, even at this early juncture, that this event is going to be the defining event of my life to this point. Capitalization and definite article usage should therefore make sense and at least be excused, if not condoned. Although here of course I have a wheelbarrow load of guilt about spending the time and verbiage about explaining why Jon’s suicide deserves a certain term, which term needs certain explication to make sense to those who don’t know me, him, or what his death means to me or to others.

A LIST OF THEMES THAT SHOULD BE SET DOWN NOW AS A SORT OF GUIDELINE TO MAKE SENSE OF THESE PARAGRAPHS, WHICH PARAGRAPHS EXPAND CONSIDERABLY ON THE THEMES MENTIONED, AND SO THE THEMES’ DESCRIPTIONS SHOULD THEMSELVES BE CONSIDERED IN NO WAY DEFINITIVE IN REGARD TO EACH THEME’S TITULAR SUBJECT.

COMMUNICATION. Once you cross the Hudson and head west from Albany, the Amtrak train lines are lousy with old telephone crossbeams and poles that are perhaps even older, as in telegraph-line old, staved in by storm-tossed pine boughs and plain old unsexy neglect. This vision made a handy counterexample or cautionary tale for me as my cellphone buzzed with texts and VMs from those friends of mine I’d left VMs for last night in a sort of desperate paroxysm of calling and message-leaving, i.e. “Hey, it’s me – haven’t heard from you in a while. Just letting you know… [short description of the Event] … So right. Hope you’re well.]

GUILT. I’m a recovering Catholic. Already there’ve been professions of guilt on the parts of certain members of my family, i.e. If only we’d known X or If only we’d done Y, responses that even I who’ve have next to 0 direct experience with such matters can recognize to be the most pernicious type of thinking when it comes to an event such as the Event. Guilt’s one of the absolute worst, worst thoughts here. But on top of the guilt about what could / could not have been done to keep Jon alive, to bring him home safely in that truck he’d recently bought and driven to Colorado, there’s the additional (and self-imposed) guilt of what I’m doing even now, which is to put all of this in writing for others to read it.

SOLIPSISM. Is there anybody else than myself? When the answer seems to be no, you might be in a position that’s kin to the position my brother was in yesterday morning. But issues concerning solipsism and self-concern and self-preservation are way more involved than I’m going to be able to address here right now.

SERENDIPITY / SYNCHRONICITY. Melissa my sister and my cousin Jen are watching a late show of Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump’s just saved Lt. Dan as well as Bubba, hauling ass out of the jungle before a wall of towering orange napalm. They collapse in the paddies of the LZ and present-day Gump narrates, “If I’d known that this would be the last time I’d talk to Bubba, [mentally garbled and / or unintelligible]”. I have no firm recollection of the last time I saw Jon, let alone what we said to each other. I know the vague dates and the situation—I was home for a few days of summertime R&R sometime in July ’05—but could not under threat of torture or death remember what it was we said. Plus, the album I’ve just finished listening to, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea ***, features these lyrics in “Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2”:

Brother see we are one and the same
And you left with your head filled with flames
And you watched as your brains fell out through your teeth
Push the pieces in place
Make your smile sweet to see
Don’t you take this away
I’m still wanting my face on your cheek ****

Whatever your musical inclinations, try and listen to this album sometime soon. Jeff Mangum, if you’re reading this, thanks for this album.


RETURNING TO THE POST PROPER.

There is no protocol for a situation like this. Not as far as I’m concerned, and not as far as my family is concerned. The closest thing to it—and understand that I understand how VERY apples and oranges this is—is that time back in, oh, ’96 or ’97 when our first Golden Retriever took ill with lymphoma and had to be put to sleep. VERY VERY apples and oranges here. But the way my family dealt with that grief was to pad up the beige carpeted stairs in as innocuous and silent a way as possible, close bedroom doors in like fashion, and cry or otherwise Deal as our various emotional constitutions variously deigned. For my part, I read Calvin & Hobbes strips in collected volumes. Looking back on it now, there’s neat correlation between the loss of a beloved dog and dealing with that loss by losing myself in the hermetic adult-proof world of a precocious six-year-old whose best friend was a stuffed tiger. As to what correlations might exist between this Event and my impending coping, it’s way to soon to tell. On the train however, I did draw up a list of things to research. They include: 1) Guns: make and model; 2) Housing: where Jon and Emily were living in CO, in what kind of domicile, etc. etc.: what was the layout to the place? What does it look like? I’ll need to see this place; 3) Fireplaces: Jon had taken work as a sales associate with a fireplace sales and installation concern; apparently fireplaces are big business in Ft. Collins (a few hours’ drive up U.S. 25 from Denver). Some fireplaces can run $20,000 USD and due to their incredible complexity need to be the very first elements installed in new homes—the rest of the house is built around the fireplace—which is a nice throwback to or continuation of tradition to how homes were originally built, which is to say around a hearth.

To follow up on the Communication, Guilt, and Solipsism themes in one fell paragraph: When I received the news last night I did a little bit of keening and then went right into calling every person in my cell phone’s address book who could possibly lend an ear and / or a word. After grabbing a hold of a few people and leaving about an equal number of VMs, I realized that there was a universal awkwardness to what people said or to what people would feel on listening to those VMs. Apologies to all of those I called. I know that such apologies aren’t required and might even be deemed daft, and even I deem them daft: I did what I had to do. But was it Right for me to do so? It’s excusable, but was it Right? By Right, I mean, Was I acting solely out of self-interest? Were my actions of desperate outreach and dogged, multiple-calls-placed Communication efforts indicative of a Solipsistic “I have this Pain regarding this Event” sort of self-obsession, about which I should feel a crippling Guilt? To what extent did I consider the ramifications of my calling? I don’t want this paragraph to become an extended rumination on the second-guessing I sometimes do regarding the perceived tenuousness of those friendships of mine. Just as I’ve learned, finally, after 2 dozen years, that I need people and love to have them around, so too I might have to learn to trust that those friendships aren’t going away. That, if these friendships could withstand non-Communication for many months***** and still pick up as though just yesterday we’d split a Papa John’s and whiled away the afternoon playing Quake 3 with greasy fingertips, I could place a great deal more faith in those friendships than I’d allowed myself to. On an intellectual level I know that that’s the case, i.e. that these friendships are steadfast and inexorably supportive-type friendships, and that they have and will continue to stand the arms-out-with-teeming-buckets-of-water endurance test of time. But really believing this fact is another and a dicier matter. Also easy to 100% admit in an intellectual sense but impossible to admit in a 100% emotional, heartwise sense is that there’s nothing for me or for members of my family to feel guilty about about Jon’s final action. I expect that edging closer and closer in a mathematical approaching-the-limit sort of way constitutes a disproportionate share of the grieving process.

It’s after 1 A.M., and I’ve lost track of my beverage count. Not very much, considering. Drinking isn’t a part of my family’s grieving process. That’s a plus. I think it stands at 4, my beverage count tonight. But I didn’t get to the whole issue re: the more people the better, the lifesaving nature of words and sentences as strung together to form thoughts for the purposes of efficiently transmitting information to another, or for personal catharsis (see COMMUNICATION), let alone the story of Uncle Rick and his tale of trying to ski with a ruptured Achilles tendon – in the middle of an orthopedic surgeon’s convention, no less. (It was while convalescing in the ski lodge’s bar that Rick found out about his being surrounded by doctors who would surely mock him right out the rustic doors if they knew about his folly [I was in stitches, listening].) (See GALLOW’S HUMOR – To Be Composed.) And then there’s the critical Is He Lying Or Not Game played by certain passengers in line at Amtrak’s Penn Station this AM. Not to even *mention* this complicated issue of what it means to “allow yourself to feel”, as K—exhorted me to do: When I am self-preserving by thinking of something other than Jon, eyes open, against a wall of unknown color, the back of his neck and his lower cranium (I can only imagine) explosively red and fragmented, and when am I self-preserving by thinking of EXACTLY this? What’s confrontation / dealing, and what’s avoidance / failure to grieve? How can one know the difference? How can I know what sort of controls it’s OK to exert over my own thought processes, and what sorts of controls are way too superegoish and destructive to let my mind exert upon itself?

Upshot of all of this is that there’s still a lot to say and get down, somehow someway, as quickly as I can.

QUICK PARTING NOTE FOR READERS AND COMMENTERS.

As allies go, you’ve all been incalcuably helpful and generous and concerned, all of those Basic Human Decency things that you might skim over if you’re reading about them but which floor you if you’re on the receiving end and able to see them, the Basic Human Decency things; they transcend their cliché nature and become the graceful acts of angels disguised as your oldest friends, and distinctions between angels and old friends become moot. Questions of ethics and Guilt and Solipsism aside, the Communication issue holds dominion over me at the moment, and as such Disruptive Juxtaposition will be a sort of primary nexus or node for updates on how I’m doing and what’s happening here. Keeping up with everyone directly is the ideal, but it’s going to be hard to make good on as far as ideals go. This sounds like it runs counter to my (uber)pro-Communication stance, but it really isn’t: it’s more a matter of setting out a plan for broadcast Communication via this site and VMs and actual conversations for more particular Communications efforts. Idealism v. practicality.

FINAL ASIDE FOR THE NIGHT, REALLY THIS TIME.

I’m talking at such insipid length about Communication because it’s the thing I’ve only recently figured out I need in a terrible way: not Communication solely in a “Hey, how’ve you been” sort of way but also and more importantly the “I understand and identify and even empathize with you on X and / or Y issue” sort of way. I talk about it also because Communication – in both its “Hey Ya!” and it’s “I hear you and Get you” incarnations – is what I keep thinking could have kept Jon here, with us, getting off the plane in a week’s time, bitching bitterly about some colicky baby or smelly John-Candy-from-“Planes Trains and Automobiles”-type fellow sitting next to him on the plane from Ft. Collins, CO. ******

* My decision to deem the Event the Event deliberately recalls that one comedian in The Aristocrats, who, after a whole lot of 9/11-related discussion of the Death of Irony and attempting to answer the question Is there a place for comedy in the contemporary mainstream anymore, got to waxing philosophical about the utterly crucial role of comedy in sum especially after the Events of January 22nd—upon which the interviewer, Penn Gillette of Penn & Teller fame, interjects “What tragic events of 1/22?”, and the comic replies that that’s the day he lost his American Express card while running errands along the Santa Monica Blvd. Just as this comic both described and utilized the redemptive power of comedy simultaneously, I am going to have to try to employ a similar degree of gallows humor in here, and while I’m not looking for anything like carte blanche here, I suppose I still want to convey the fact that it’s in this “The Aristocrats” spirit that I may here and there occasionally crack wise.

** Like as not, here loosely grouped together under the unhandy designation of Generation Y

*** The brilliance of which is well-documented and pretty much unassailable by those who know—on a par with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Maybe not Pet Sounds. But it’s very very good.

**** You might as well know that Jon did the Hemingway, the Hunter S., the Kurt Cobain, which clearly lends these lyrics even more eerie poignancy. I don’t yet know what sort of gun he used. I imagine it wasn’t a shotgun. Wow, he’s really dead. I was just picturing him there, slumped against the wall of some room I’ve never seen, his mouth O’ed to admit the fatal barrel. I want to know what his eyes fell upon in this moment, and did he see what his eyes saw.

***** I think here of guys like Shane Donahoe and Rob Bowes, friends of mine who’ve allowed months and years to elapse without Communication One passing between us—and I’ve done exactly the same thing—but then when we do finally meet up for a beer or a round of golf at downtown Syracuse’s own steep, brown-hilled Burnet Park, it is as though no time’s passed. I’d been starting to think of my relationship with Jon in these terms. In fact, I’d drawn up a list of Thing To Do When I’m Home for the holiday break. These are the items I’d placed on it, in their original order:

o Spend a day driving around and chatting with Missy.
o Go to a dive bar some night with Jon and split at least one pitcher between us.
o Have cigars with Mom and Dad.
o Sled with M, J, and Bailey (the current Golden Retriever).
o Cook dinner for the whole family.

****** Jon was an artful bitcher. Remind me to tell you his rendition of Dr. Death and the Boy Who Couldn’t Look Down on Patience Day, Patience Day being that day and night of pre-Navy Boot Camp training in which new recruits are screamed at, woken up, trotted about, and generally traumatized to the right gilt edge of the law, and then deposited back home. Jon’s retelling of his Patience Day was epic and hysterical simultaneously: standing around the kitchen island w/ Mom and Missy, I was reminded how deeply funny my brother could be. Like, w/ voices and imitations of the BWCLD's vocal quaver and Dr. Death's lumberjackish frustration with wussiness - all of it captured, I like to think, to Ts.

******* SPECIAL EXTRA LYRIC FROM IN THE AEROPLANE OVER THE SEA!!! From “King of Carrot Flowers” – “And Dad would dream of all the different ways to die / Each one a little more than he could dare to try.” Inferences and dark ironies are here yours to draw.