Jumpers
by Bob Hall
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Jumpers
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by Bob Hall
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I've recently ended two entirely different story lines with major characters leaping to their deaths. This was not conscious duplication and I deny poverty of imagination. So why this fascination with the long, last jump? Three reasons: first, I dread heights; second, it's a good visual; third, I've known two people who committed suicide, both of whom were jumpers.
The first was Brigitta, who was at one time married to my best friend. I still feel disconcerted not only by her death but also by the way I heard about it. I received the news on a picture post card. The front was a typical color photo of Wall Street. A small figure, drawn in magic-marker, was shown falling from a sky scraper. The plunging speck screamed "AAAIIIEEEEEEE." On the back the message from Brigitta's ex-husband read in its entirety:
Dear Bob,
Brigitta just jumped off a building and killed herself.
Andy
Because Andy always dealt with acute grief through black humor, this macabre message was not entirely inappropriate. Nevertheless, it remains the most bizarre piece of mail I have ever received.
News of the other suicide came ten years later and its delivery was equally astonishing. I was a theatre director then and while working at a new plays festival in Philadelphia I met a man named David Juaire. David, the artistic director of a New York playwright's organization called New Dramatists, was forming a directors unit to do work with writers. Would I be interested? I certainly would. We shook hands and promised to meet again after I returned home to New York City.
Two weeks later I unlocked my apartment, plopped down my luggage, opened a beer and turned on the tube. Channel 7 News had raw footage of a Holiday Inn in the West Forties, smoke pouring from a window on the sixteenth floor. Zoom in. There was a guy on the ledge of the hotel window. Zoom in more. The guy looked a little like David Juaire. Zoom in further and, no question now, it definitely was David Juaire.
As the room continued to burn, David calmly puffed a cigarette. There were fire trucks and police and newsmen shouting at him but David leaned against the wall, eyes far away, trousers flapping in the wind, until his cigarette was done. After carefully snuffing it against the wall, he stepped nonchalantly off the ledge. The camera mercifully avoided showing the splat, but only because crowds were blocking the shot.
They finished the news and were fifteen minutes into a rerun of Gilligan's Island before I found the strength to move. What had I just seen? Suicide? The man I'd met in Philly had been a charmingly buoyant purveyor of optimism. What's more, he had an honest-to-God steady job in the theatre, paid work at that. How bad could his life have been? Maybe he was only trying to escape the fire in the room. (And why did that seem somehow preferable?)
The next day's mail brought suicide notes to the senior staff at New Dramatists, confirming an intentional and well-planned demise. Presumably David had set the fire in order to discourage rescuers -- and to dissuade himself from a last minute change of heart.
David's colleagues told me he was depressed. Well yes, he must have been. Had Brigitta seemed unhappy? I'm not sure and my memories have become skewed. There may be some comfort in retrospective discovery of suicidal hints and tendencies, but the probable truth is that while most people manage to endure life's pain, others simply can't. Some of life's most desperate victims have seemed to me happy as clams in their despair.
For my part, no more reminders of these events are needed. I promise to avoid the portrayal of suicidal characters. Unless, as sometimes happens, they insist on being written.
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from Armed and Dangerous Arc2 Issue 4
published by Acclaim Comics, Inc.