My cousin died. I didn't know him.
Maybe that sounds impossible to those of you who find yourselves drowning in family this time of year. I'll admit it felt weird to me when my mother told me, a couple of weeks ago, that this man I'd never met had died, presumably of a heroin overdose, in a cruddy crack hotel somewhere in strip-mall Florida.
Mom assumed I knew who she was talking about when she told me the sad news. I had to stop her, back her up and ask "who?"
"J.D., your Uncle Roy's son," she said somewhat impatiently, like I was was supposed to know.
Uncle Roy was a famous hermit; my only memories of him are from the early 1960s when he seemed vaguely dangerous and dashing. He rode a motorcycle and had been an Army paratrooper, honorably discharged after he broke his neck in a parachuting accident. At the time I didn't understand how someone could survive a broken neck. I thought the injury was invariably fatal. When I was very young I somehow conflated him with Elvis Presley; the two fused in my preschool head.
There is a scar on my right calf that connects me to him; when I was about 10 years old my Uncle Mike (who was only about a year older than me) and I "borrowed" Roy's smaller bike, a Honda 250 with a gas tank painted to look like a Jackson Pollock dripped canvas, to go riding up and down the dirt tracks and county roads of rural Georgia. It was a moment after I'd noticed the cooking smell that I realized my bare leg had contacted the motorcycle's exhaust barrel. (Roy had removed the steel guard plate because it didn't look cool.)
I nearly passed out, not from the pain but from the sight of melted flesh. Mike ripped off part of his T-shirt and wrapped it around my leg and we rode back home. I assume we told someone and that the wound was properly cleaned and rinsed with antiseptic but I don't remember that part at all. That's the way we were as summer-released children--free to do ourselves and others all sorts of damage, operating under the premise that if the poison didn't kill us it might make us stronger. We wrestled and fought and jumped off roofs. We stepped on rusty nails and swam naked and unsupervised in the Black River. We stole our uncles' motorcycles and raced--helmet-less and underage--around Bulloch County.
We did other things but I'm not sure the statute of limitations has fully run out.
If Roy ever knew about my calf-burning incident I've forgotten his reaction. By then, people rarely saw him, and within a few years he'd gone full recluse. For 30 years he'd rarely leave his trailer, parked on my grandmother's property some distance behind the "new" house my mother and her sisters built for her in the '80s. When Karen and I visited my grandmother 16 years ago, we could see the tip of his cigarette glowing a flushed eight-iron shot away.
All his surviving brothers and sisters were gathered there that night, but he would not make the walk across the gray lawn to see them. It was his way. They all respected it.
"Roy had a son? I thought he never married."
"Well, he didn't--but, you know."
Mom goes on to tell me that J.D., who I calculate to be about 10 years my junior--born about the time I was burning my leg on Roy's bike--had endured a lot during his short life. Apparently he'd had problems with narcotics for years and that he'd bedeviled our extended family in Georgia with his junkie ways. Just recently, however, there had been some hope. Two weeks before he was found dead he'd written his aunt Lois (my mother's sister) to announce that he'd just gotten out of rehab and was clean for the first time in years.
"He asked her for addresses for all the family. He was going to write everyone a letter of apology. And now--well, I guess he just couldn't keep away from the drugs. It's so sad."
My mother is not naive about substance abusers. It's difficult to imagine anyone of her generation who has lived an engaged life in America not knowing a little bit about them. She may not understand what comfort they derive from "that mess," but she knows that it's not easy for them to resist their hunger, even though she quit cigarettes cold turkey in her 20s. She knows that junkies will lie and steal and that they are not quite in control of themselves when they are in thrall to their demons.
Maybe I never heard of J.D. because my mother never had good news of him and she didn't want to repeat the bad. More likely it's that the Georgia branch of my family is large and tangled and I was--except for a few summers in the '60s--raised far away from my aunts and uncles and cousins. Mom always assumes I know more than I do, but every time I visit her, new introductions are in order. What I think of as family is a small knot, not constrained by blood. But my mother surveys a sanguine empire of relations.
"When a writer is born into a family, that family is doomed," Philip Roth once wrote. And yeah, I consider these stories mine to tell. I don't imagine I am much different than my dead cousin; I imagine that I had better opportunities and better luck.
Maybe that's good to remember in this season of Thanksgiving. I can picture myself in a crummy hotel room, weighing the chances that I might never wake up against the possibility of briefly escaping myself and figuring that either way I might come out ahead.
All of us do what we feel we must, whether from duty or desperation. And while I'm arrogant enough to believe I deserve my happiness I suppose I've retreated from plenty of things in my time, just like my Uncle Roy and his son J.D., who I never knew.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 11/27/2016