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I took the J_____ R___ entry private when I noticed it had gotten literally hundreds of hits and thought to myself, Wait a minute. The man has children. Is this the type of thing you’d want his children to read?
But Google had already linked to it.
And so, a number of strangers have actually ended up emailing me about it. People who knew him, who were as perplexed and disturbed as I was. Basically asking, What the fuck happened?
As if I knew.
###
Once, several years ago, I wrote a public entry about someone who’d lived a really crazy life and then died. Naming names. Again, not someone I knew terribly well but had observed closely enough to bear some sort of witness.
One of his kids stumbled across it. A kid in his 20s.
The kid thanked me. He hadn’t known his father at all, he wrote me. But after reading what I’d written, now he felt like he did. And it had given him some sense of closure.
But who knows how old J_____’s kids are?
Maybe as an adult, you’re prepared to learn about your parent’s secret life, but as an adolescent you’re certainly not. And I would speculate further that if you had any sort of real relationship with your parent in which they actually acted in the role of a mother or father, you never want to learn about their secret life. Psychologically, you have a need to see them as a stabilizing force. Any behavioral aberration becomes a source of anxiety, which you respond to either with annoyance or inappropriate embarrassment.
###
(Of course, since one of my own parents was a sociopath and the other was suffering from undiagnosed borderline personality disorder, neither of them was a stabilizing force, and I would LUV to find out anything I could about their secret lives. Alas! Neither of them left trails.)
###
This kind of reminds me of McIntire’s even more grisly suicide – McIntire actually handcuffed himself to his steering wheel and then drove his car into a bayou in the Florida Everglades. McIntire had been Lucius’s college roommate, and for years Lucius and I refused to believe McIntire was guilty of what he’d been accused of doing or even that he’d committed suicide at all. For years, the first subject Lucius and I would fix upon in one of our marathon phone calls was how we were gonna clear McIntire’s name!
And then we stopped talking about McIntire.
Because we’d both – without acknowledging it to each other – accepted the inevitability of the truth.
###
People with double lives are very scary. And obsessively compelling, at least to me.
###
McIntire continues to haunt me from time to time. I’m not sure why. I remember him as a gentle, brilliant, compassionate man, filled with self-loathing – he was morbidly obese – and so, it’s very difficult for me to wrap my mind around the moral abstraction: He was a monster.
###
I suppose J_____ will continue to haunt me, too. It honestly feels as though a spectral penumbra is reaching out from the underworld: Please. Please. Tell my story!
But, of course, that’s crazy talk
But Google had already linked to it.
And so, a number of strangers have actually ended up emailing me about it. People who knew him, who were as perplexed and disturbed as I was. Basically asking, What the fuck happened?
As if I knew.
###
Once, several years ago, I wrote a public entry about someone who’d lived a really crazy life and then died. Naming names. Again, not someone I knew terribly well but had observed closely enough to bear some sort of witness.
One of his kids stumbled across it. A kid in his 20s.
The kid thanked me. He hadn’t known his father at all, he wrote me. But after reading what I’d written, now he felt like he did. And it had given him some sense of closure.
But who knows how old J_____’s kids are?
Maybe as an adult, you’re prepared to learn about your parent’s secret life, but as an adolescent you’re certainly not. And I would speculate further that if you had any sort of real relationship with your parent in which they actually acted in the role of a mother or father, you never want to learn about their secret life. Psychologically, you have a need to see them as a stabilizing force. Any behavioral aberration becomes a source of anxiety, which you respond to either with annoyance or inappropriate embarrassment.
###
(Of course, since one of my own parents was a sociopath and the other was suffering from undiagnosed borderline personality disorder, neither of them was a stabilizing force, and I would LUV to find out anything I could about their secret lives. Alas! Neither of them left trails.)
###
This kind of reminds me of McIntire’s even more grisly suicide – McIntire actually handcuffed himself to his steering wheel and then drove his car into a bayou in the Florida Everglades. McIntire had been Lucius’s college roommate, and for years Lucius and I refused to believe McIntire was guilty of what he’d been accused of doing or even that he’d committed suicide at all. For years, the first subject Lucius and I would fix upon in one of our marathon phone calls was how we were gonna clear McIntire’s name!
And then we stopped talking about McIntire.
Because we’d both – without acknowledging it to each other – accepted the inevitability of the truth.
###
People with double lives are very scary. And obsessively compelling, at least to me.
###
McIntire continues to haunt me from time to time. I’m not sure why. I remember him as a gentle, brilliant, compassionate man, filled with self-loathing – he was morbidly obese – and so, it’s very difficult for me to wrap my mind around the moral abstraction: He was a monster.
###
I suppose J_____ will continue to haunt me, too. It honestly feels as though a spectral penumbra is reaching out from the underworld: Please. Please. Tell my story!
But, of course, that’s crazy talk
