They didn't tell us that Jack's dad had killed himself. We had just finished third grade, me and Jack. Best friends and by far the most unpopular kids in school. We were nerds, it's true. We liked to play with figurines (not just action figures -- though we had those too), but Smurfs, for example. There wasn't yet a Smurfs TV show, just these figurines we'd set up entire villages out of. We thought it was cool that they came all the way from Belgium.
They told us that his dad went kayaking by himself, and then on the drive home he fell asleep at the wheel and hit a parked car. Jack withdrew immediately and forever. I had a million questions. Why'd he go kayaking alone? Why didn't he drink coffee to keep himself awake? How did they know he'd fallen asleep? I found out years later that during the autopsy they were able to determine that he had in fact been pressing down on the accelerator at the moment of impact. Anaesthesiologists are at high risk for depression and addiction. He'd apparently battled both.
The summer that followed was a hot Texas nightmare. Jack's mom stayed in her room on the edge of her bed crying, or worse, not crying, just staring. Jack's 16-year-old brother Carl locked himself in his room with an enormous pile of porno mags. Jack and I didn't get it. He had posters all over his walls and everything -- what if a real girl came to visit him? Would he hide all that stuff? Then there was Jack's 14-year-old sister Emily. I loved her and her Split Enz records and her straight hair, and her explaining to me that John was the good Beatle and Paul was the lousy Beatle.
Since the rest of the family members had barricaded themselves in their bedrooms, Jack and I had the run of the house that summer. One hot August afternoon we wound up in the room over the garage that his dad had used as an office/storage space. It hadn't been touched. We came across a collection of cassette tapes his father had used for dictation. We put one into the player on the desk and listened as Jack's dad described administering anaesthesia to a patient. His heart rate. His breathing pattern. Blood pressure. He'd gone under easily. Jack called it boring. He yanked the cassette from the player and began pulling tape out of it.
Unspooling.
It made a web as he ran around the room with it. Quite a mess. He wrapped it around boxes and furniture. It was like that one cassette contained miles of tape. He unspooled one after another. I joined him. Eventually we were just holding the tape and throwing the cassette so it would unspool in mid-air. When we'd finished the box was empty. The room netted and tangled and impassable. We sat there for a long time, partly because we couldn't get to the door. I remember thinking we were waiting for his mom or brother or sister to come discover us. But nobody came and the sun went down and we crawled through the mess and went back inside to play with Smurfs and listen to Emily's records through her closed bedroom door.