RIP Jayson Rome

[mallorys_camera]

Jayson Rome committed suicide.

Jumped out of an 8th story window at the Country Inn & Suites in Long Island City on Sunday afternoon.

I am beyond stunned.

‘Cause if someone like Jayson could only deal with it by pulling the plug, there ain’t no fuckin’ hope for the rest of us.

Seriously.

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Jayson was RTT’s math and homeroom teacher in the 10th grade. That was a turbulent year for RTT (and for me), and Jayson was one of the few bright spots. Super-brilliant guy: Street kid who discovered he had an aptitude for math and ended up at Johns Hopkins where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in biomedical engineering. Went on to get two graduate degrees: one in computer science from NYC City College and one in Technology in Education from Harvard.

Also – literally – one of the handsomest men I ever laid eyes upon. (This photo doesn’t begin to do him justice.)

He’d been on Wall Street for several years running Standard & Poor’s quantitative modeling division when he walked off in disgust. Moved to Ithaca. Helped found New Roots, the charter high school RTT graduated from, whose mission was sustainability and social justice for all. If Jayson naively thought the bullshit quotient was less in the public service sector, he was mistaken. All bureaucracies are steeped in bullshit, but some are better paying. Much better paying.

I forget exactly when Jayson left New Roots and Ithaca, but I want to say at the beginning of RTT’s junior year. There was a marriage and children in Ithaca, but there was a beautiful woman in New York City. I think Jayson moved in with her. At least for a time. Got a job with McGraw-Hill doing quantitative model development. At the same time, did portfolio management at Standard & Poor’s. At the time of his death, he was a VP at Morgan Stanley doing credit capital and ratings analytics. (This I learned from spying on his Linkedin profile.)

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Of course, when I heard the news today, I hadn’t thought of Jayson in some time, much less seen or talked to him. In a way, that makes my emotional reaction to it a kind of rubbernecking, no? A need to associate myself with a tragedy that isn’t really my tragedy. Kind of like those people who lie about having had friends or relatives in the Twin Towers.

And it wasn’t like I knew him all that well in the first place. We’d been FB friends, and then one day I noticed we weren't and thought, Huh: Too bad. I had a kind of mild crush on him; he was so devastatingly good-looking. But he wasn’t the kind of guy who’d see much utility in social media.

I get suicide.

I don’t get jumping from the 8th floor window of a marginal hotel in Long Island City.

Bad drug trip? Humiliating encounter with a sadomasochistic rent boy? Diagnosis of 4th stage pancreatic cancer? Pangs of conscience after watching The Big Short?

I am struggling to understand this.

Is that a voyeuristic impulse?

I honestly don’t know.

I suppose, in the end, that all I really do know is that life is very short. And hard for everyone.