SUNY Potsdam

Shaun graduated from the SUNY Potsdam Creative Writing program in 2007.  Originally from Central New York, Shaun moved to the state of Maine to complete his Master's Degree in Creative Writing in 2009.  Shaun served as fiction editor for the 2009 Stolen Island Review and will be entering a PhD program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in fall 2010.

About Jack

    I spent fifteen years wondering what happened to Jack.  We had been so close back then.  After graduation, Ray went to trade school and became an electrician.  Tim went to college for pre-law.  Me?  I stayed right here and married Jen, my high school sweetheart.  I became a teacher.  I had so many good ones (and bad) that I knew it was what I wanted to do since I was eleven.

    None of us were really sure what happened to Jack.

    We tried to stay in touch after high school.  It’s hard, you know?  We changed.  I still called Ray on Sundays, and once he moved back to town he’d sometimes come over and watch the game with me.  Then Ray developed a drinking problem.  He’d start getting louder and more belligerent after a few drinks, to the point where my wife felt uncomfortable.  I started keeping my beer in the garage fridge, and told Ray I quit drinking because of the calories.

    I’d get cards from Tim on the holidays, and he’d usually give me a call around my birthday.  I don’t know if it was that he was busy, or just felt too worldly for his boyhood friend who never left the hometown.  Our conversations became more strained over the years as we struggled for a common ground to talk about.  I haven’t heard from him in a while, but my birthday is coming up soon.  We’re still friends, just a different type I guess.

    I haven’t heard from Jack in fifteen years.

    Jack was always the outsider of the group.  Tim, Ray and I met in kindergarten, and Jack moved here in junior high.  I never considered him less of a friend than the other two, just different.

    Jack was always the dangerous one.  He came from a family pretty much like mine, but there was always a hard edge to him.  The man liked to carry knives in school.  I mean, I don’t want to sound like a wuss, but it made me nervous, okay?  There was this unnerving glint in his eye as if he was constantly planning something.

    Look, it’s not like Jack was a psycho.  He wasn’t.  Jack was just different.

    I asked Ray about Jack, maybe ten years ago.  That was when Ray was still drinking at my house, and we’d gotten a little maudlin.  We were talking about ‘The Good Old Days’ and Jack came up.  I had wondered aloud where he had ended up.

    “I don’t know, and I don’t give a damn,” Ray snapped.  His ferociousness tone startled me.  I mean, we were all friends.  I never heard any animosity from him towards his friends, even when Tim stood us up at another holiday.

    “Jesus man,” I said to him.  “Chill out.”

    “Do you know what that bastard said to me one time?” Ray’s voice came across as little more than a slurred hiss, like a teakettle boiling over.  “He said to me, ‘Ray, if you don’t wanna bang that girl of yours tonight, I would be happy to step in for you.’  That’s what he said to me.”

    That was Jack for you.

    I could see it steaming Ray at the time.  It seemed a petty thing to hang on to for all these years, though.  That was Ray, he loved a grudge.  And, this was before I recognized his “problem”.

    I tried looking Jack up a couple of times over the years.  There was one summer where Tim flew into town for the weekend (working in Atlanta by then, partner in a firm) and the three of us had a reunion of sorts.  It would have been perfect if the four of us could have gotten together.

    It was as if he had dropped off the face of the earth.  I briefly considered hiring someone to find him, but then the moment had passed.  I turned to the everyday complications of life, such as hunting for our first house, and finding out that I was going to be a father.

    My daughter was six when I next tried to find Jack.  Her blue eyes and sharp cheekbones were a mirror image of Jen, and it made me think of when I first met her.  I remembered the moment – it’s so clear in my mind – when I first told Jack about her.

    He got a faraway look, and took a thoughtful puff of his cigarette.  

    “Man,” he said, “there are some women who are put here to look at.  There are some who are put here to screw.  And there are a few that are put here to make us really happy.”  He took another puff of his cigarette.  I remember this, because he blinked his eyes a few times as he did it, as if he was coming back a long way.  

    “She’ll make you happy.”

    And that was how Jack was.  Sometimes, the dumbest, raunchiest stuff would come out of his mouth, a torrent of filth with which his friends could never hope to compete.  Sometimes he would come out with the most perfect little pearls of wisdom.  It may not sound like wisdom now, but when you’re sixteen, that’s pretty damn deep.

    In the end, he was right.  She did make me happy.  Still does.

    After graduation, Jack told us he was going to California to live with his uncle for a while.  He had some job lined up, though for the life of me I can’t remember what it was now.  We hated to see him go.  Ray’s trade school was in town, and Tim’s undergraduate college was only two hours away, so Jack was the first of us truly to leave.

    ‘It’s not a big thing,’ he said to us.  ‘I’ll come back.’

    He never did.

    Jack called me once, about two months after he left.  Told me it was paradise.  His uncle let him smoke and drink in the house.  We made vague plans to visit one another at some point.  We said something about Spring Break, and left it at that.

    He never called again.  I had the number for his uncle’s house, and left a number of messages for Jack.  Finally, I got the old man himself on the phone, Jack’s uncle.

    “I don’t know where the hell he is, but he ain’t here no more.”

    That was the last I heard of Jack.  He was always the glue of our group.  He’s the reason, I think, that we all stayed friends through the years.  Despite knowing each other first, we all became best friends with Jack.  Jack had this presence about him.  His triumphs were greater than those of us mere mortals, and his tragedies – few and far between as they may have been – were lower than we could fathom.  Being around Jack made life more vibrant, more real.  Without him, well, it was just life.  The evidence is right here; I mean look at us now.  Hell, I don’t care what any of us have said, Jack was the glue.

    It was hard not to miss him.  

    So, it had been a few years since I had really thought about Jack.  I had a job, a family, a life.  High school was a pleasantly glossed over memory.  I had new friends, not the same kind of friends as the ones from the ‘Good Old Days’.  It’s the kind of friends you get once you’re married.  Married friends.  Couples.  You probably wouldn’t be friends with either of them separately, but together they form some kind of ‘friend-conglomeration’ that is equally acceptable to you and your spouse.  Strange, but true.

    So no one could have been more surprised than I to come home from work and find Jack sitting on my front porch.  I first noticed the smell of cigarettes as I came up the walk.  I figured it was my father-in-law visiting, with his two-pack-a-day habit, despite being sixty-seven.  

    I didn’t recognize Jack when I first rounded the hedge.  In fact, I was downright afraid for a moment at seeing this stranger on my porch.  He didn’t look well.  He looked fifty, rather than the thirty-four he was.  He was wearing a worn pullover with a dusty white tee showing around the collar.  His corduroy pants were worn slick at the knees.  There was five-day growth on his cheeks.

    “Hey man,’ he said, grinding out his cigarette on the step and standing up.  ‘How’s it going?”

    “Jesus,’ I said, ‘Jack?”

    “Hey, I told you I’d be back sometime.”  He coughed, a deep wrenching cough that made me wince in with sympathy.

    “Jesus,” I said again, because sometimes there’s nothing wiser to say.  “Jesus, Jack, you okay?”

    He grinned at me.  His teeth were stained and pitted.  That was the awful part of it, for me.  His clothes said he was down on his luck, but his teeth said it had been that way for a long time.

    “What’s it been, man?  Twelve years?”

    “Fifteen,” I said.

    “Wow.  Fifteen years.”  He pulled another cigarette out of his pants pocket and tapped the filter against his yellowed index finger.  “I can’t believe you’re still in this town.  I mean, you never left.”

    I shrugged.  “I married Jen and we settled here.  I took over for Mr. Wensel when he retired.”

    “Man, he was a mean old bastard.”  He squinted at me.  “You’re a teacher?  You always said you would be.”

    “How about you?  What are you doing with yourself these days?”

    “Not a whole hell of a lot!”  He laughed, a dry, unpleasant sound.  ‘I do a little bit, now and then.”

    “What are you doing here?”  I winced as soon as I asked the question.  It was not the kind of thing you said to a long absent friend after not seeing them for a decade and a half.  Still, I was in shock.  I mean, fifteen years is fifteen years.  I had slotted Jack into the annals of history, a chapter from the past.  And suddenly here he was.

    He shrugged noncommittally, unfazed by the question, and kept tapping his cigarette.  “It’s been a long time; I thought I’d stop by.  Where’s Jen?”

    “She’s with my daughter at ballet class.”

    Jack raised an eyebrow.  “You got a daughter, man?  Wow.  That’s wild.”

    We stood for a silent moment in front of the house.  Jack had been one of my best friends for the better part of six years, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him.  Finally, I realized the question I wanted to ask more than anything.

    “What happened to you, Jack?”

    He slowly stopped tapping the cigarette and stared past me, into nothingness.  Almost everything about Jack seemed to have changed, but that look was familiar.  Sometimes, Jack took these little moments to organize his thoughts.

    “I had to go,” he said softly.  “It was life out there, you know man?  Life.  The pure thing.  I could see it out there, and I knew it would bite me in the ass, but I had to go for it all the same.  I could have stayed and done the expected thing, but I just couldn’t bring myself to.  So I went after it.  I lived, man.  I really lived.”

    And that’s when he was truly Jack to me.  The profound stuff he would just pull out.  It may not sound profound, but trust me, at thirty-four, that is pretty damn profound.

    “And what happened?” I asked, my voice as soft as his.

    “It bit me in the ass!”  His laugh quickly turned into a cough.  

    I put a tentative hand on his shoulder.  “Do you want to come in?”

    He waved me off.  “Nah, man, just stopping by.  I gotta keep moving.”

    “Where are you headed?”

    He shrugged.  “Wherever I end up.”

    I hesitated.  “Listen, Jack, you need some money or something?”

    He grinned at me again, that same used up grin.  “It ain’t like that, man.  Just stopping by.  You take care of yourself.”

    And he was gone.

    I didn’t realize what was different until I watched him go.  When I had known Jack, he wore the world like a cape.  Now I could see it was just dragging him down.  He looked drained.  Hollow.  His vibrant presence was gone.

    So I don’t think about Jack much anymore.  It may sound callous or harsh, but I don’t.  He’s gone.  I saw it all in that smile.  I lived, man, he had said.  Past tense, right?  I’m an English teacher, and we notice these things.  Jack is gone.

    I never told Ray or Tim I saw him.  I don’t know why.  Maybe I just wanted them to remember the Jack that was full of life, not so used up.  Hell, maybe he stopped by and saw them too.  Maybe they were trying to spare me.  Who knows?  All I can say is we never talked about him again.

    I do miss Jack, though.  I miss him.  He was the glue, you know?  And somehow, in little ways, it all fell apart when he left.  Maybe I miss him for selfish reasons.  I find myself, sometimes, wishing he was here, but I know it can’t happen.  I remember that smile, that used up, empty smile.  And his voice echoes in my mind.  

    “I lived, man.  I really lived.”

    I miss my friend.