A Way With Words - Chapter 45b
July - December 1987
Around the time of Joe's visit to tell us about Barney Frank, Jay suggested I visit the INS detention center and interview the political asylum seekers that the Quakers were helping. She thought I could submit the story to one of the weekly, leftie papers if not the major Boston dailies. She was always pushing me to write, to use my journalism degree. When water pressure is weak, a tiny leaf can block the trickle in a creek. Jay thought a little nudge would unblock my flow of words. How was she to know about the goddamn beaver dam upstream?
To humor her, and because I didn't have a good reason not to, in July I went down to the Naval Base on Boston Harbor that housed the detention center, along with a woman from the Beacon Hill meeting. I sat in on her meeting with some detainees from Iran. Because of the American hostage drama from my high school years, I was expecting wild-eyed terrorists but these Iranians were nothing like that: undefiant, shuffling into the room in slippers and identical orange jumpsuits.
I went a second time the following month to see a group of Afghans. What was most memorable about that visit was meeting the Episcopal priest who was officially the detention center chaplain but unofficially acted as an advocate for the political asylum seekers. When I was introduced to her, she looked at me strangely. I later learned that her first husband had left her for a man. I've never really understood how she sussed me out, but I've come to accept that there are people in the world, like Reverend Beers and Jason Fell, who are able to sense delicate webs of connection that are invisible to most people. They possess a sensitivity that enables them, like a spider that feels the vibrations of a struggling fly, to look at a man and know he is stuck. Elliot was the spider king.
I made a third visit in September, but alone because the man I was meant to accompany fell ill. I would have canceled, too, and never gone back - I was losing what little interest I'd ever had in writing about these refugees. But the man had promised to take some documents from one of the detainees to his lawyer, and asked me to go and pick them up. If George hadn't gotten sick, I doubt I would have ever laid eyes on Jack. I would have met Kaj, but the visit would have gone differently had I not seen the men alone. You can trace your life's course back to certain choices you made, some of them seeming so minor at the time. I could have mailed the documents to the law firm Jack worked for, or I could have dropped them off on the way home from work instead of in the morning; either way I wouldn't have seen Jack sitting at the front desk.
Jack says that the instant he first laid eyes on me, he wanted to kill me, but the next instant he was afraid I was there to kill him. Jay had just cut my hair very short, very badly. I hadn't shaved in a few days and I was wearing an old black leather jacket. My face reminded him of the first guy he shared a bed with - and who happened to be his freshman year college roommate. We still laugh about that, though Jack doesn't laugh as hard as me: unlike his first crush, mine is still in my life. I point out that at least he got a bit of sexual relief with his roommate whereas I was in torment for four fucking years. But all the while they were fooling around at night and playing straight during the day, the roommate was applying to transfer to another college in September, and didn't tell Jack until the last day of the school year.
The old roommate had wanted to be a doctor; to Jack I could have been his thuggish high-school dropout brother, and when I said I had a package for John Twist and asked to deliver it to him personally, he just wanted me out of there. The receptionist's name, Randy Malone, was on the nameplate on the desk and when I addressed Jack as "Mr Malone" he didn't correct me.
Jack was working as a paralegal for the firm of the lawyer representing one of the Sri Lankans and had been charged with interviewing Ravi when they accepted his case. Ravi had assumed Jack was his lawyer and addressed the packet of papers, which his wife had sent from Germany, to John Twist. The morning I showed up to deliver the envelope, Jack was filling in at the front desk for Randy Malone, who was late for work.
Jack had a heavy beard in those days, and rarely smiled - a grouchy old thirty-something, I assumed him to be, though he's only a year older than me. A few weeks after that encounter, I ran into him on the street near South Station and he still pretended to be someone else, even referring to John Twist in the third person. A third, even stranger meeting occurred one evening in early December in City Hall Plaza, and on that occasion he didn't recognize me, he says now, though I wasn't sure at the time.
By then I had been visiting regularly three Sri Lankans, members of the minority Tamil community that had been locked for several years in a fierce civil war for independence for the northern end of the island. I was no longer maintaining even the pretense of writing an article about the detention center. I had become attached to that group - to one of the men especially.
I had given all of them my phone number, but Kaj was the only one who ever called me. He came from a wealthy family with a tea plantation, and had some English blood so he looked slightly different from his two compatriots. Undeniably handsome - am I shallow to say that? Or disloyal? I wish I had a good photo of him. I had forgotten until now what his full name was, but Jack reminded me recently. I'm not surprised he remembered, because after I got to know Jack much later, he always referred to Kaj by his full name: Karunarajav. Names are important to Jack. There was a time when, if you angered him, or caused him deep pain, he would take your name away, though you would never know it. He would make sure that your name disappeared from the story of his life even if he couldn't erase you as a character.
So, Karunarajav. I looked up Tamil names yesterday and learned that Karun means "merciful". I hope his Hindu gods have granted him mercy and allowed him at least some contentment, if not happiness.
Kaj began calling me several times a week to relieve the boredom of detention. When Jay noticed and grumbled about these calls, I didn't ask Kaj to stop phoning but gave him my work number instead, and he would call me after six o'clock, when Don had left and I was alone in the office. I still visited the men at least once a week, but neither of us revealed to the others that we had extra contact. Kaj was hiding his privileged background from the others so was cautious around them - a challenge for a born storyteller.
One cold evening early in December I was returning from the detention center, walking through City Hall Plaza, when I came upon a candle on the pavement next to a photo of John Lennon. It was the seventh anniversary of his murder, which I remembered well. On the picture someone had printed, Miss you so much, John. As I was looking at it, someone came up and stood next to me, and I recognized "Randy Malone" from the law office. I remember Jack had tears in his eyes but maybe it was only a trick of the light because he claims he wasn't crying.
He turned his head to meet my gaze and startled me by recoiling. He didn't recognize me, because I was wrapped up in a heavy coat, hat and scarf. But my maroon and gold striped scarf reminded him of someone he'd found impossible to forget, and the scrawled message to John Lennon created the illusion, in Jack's mind, that that person had not forgotten him, either.
Later that month I went to an East West Christmas party with Jay, and there she met Lureen and got on famously with her. I remember seeing them sitting on a couch together talking, their legs stretched out and ankles crossed, heads propped on their hands the same way, and thinking how similar they looked, and yet so different. In the car going home, Jay told me more personal details about Lureen than I'd ever gleaned from her at work, including the news that she was separated from her husband, whom she'd met in college in Texas. They were still good friends and continued to live in the same two-family house in Somerville that she'd bought with her inheritance, but in different apartments. Jay told me his name was Jack, but of course that was one of the most generic names a guy could have. I never shared any of this information with anyone at East West, because Lureen was so circumspect about her personal life. I was sure that Jay was the only person she’d taken into her confidence.
A week or so later, the mysterious lawyer John Twist sent me a fax at East West when I was working late, putting my papers in order before flying to Kansas for Christmas. It concerned Ravi’s case. The irony is, just before it came through I'd been looking at a picture of John Twist. While searching for a pen in Lureen's desk (I'm sure I had an innocent reason for rummaging through her top drawer) I came across what looked like a wedding photo of Lureen and a handsome man. What startled me about him was his likeness to the image I'd built up in my mind of Jack Tornado back when I was listening to his show every Sunday night in high school.
At the end of the fax Jack had added "PS - MERRY CHRISTMAS”. When I'd started visiting the Tamils in the fall, I'd left messages for him at Ravi's request, trying to spur on his lawyer, unaware that John Twist was only the paralegal. He'd become curious about me; Jack had a "type" he was attracted to back then but didn't realize it. Something about me reminded him of not only his freshman roommate but also the man who had broken his heart and his spirit years later. It's no wonder he approached me so slowly and cautiously. He says he’d been so lonely that night, staying late at the office at holiday time, that he’d written his little greeting out of desperation. It had been a great consolation to receive a reply immediately, even if it was only one word, because it meant he wasn’t the only sad sack working late on a Friday night.
I sent Jack a postcard from the Wichita airport the next day, wishing him a happy New Year, only because I had an extra stamp after mailing cards depicting tornadoes to the Tamils. But Jack seized on that. It's pathetic how the most trivial gesture could assuage his loneliness back then.
I returned from Kansas before New Year's eve, mainly because that night is a special one in Boston. The whole of Back Bay and Boston Common is one big outdoor arts festival, with fireworks at midnight. Joe was in town that week and he and Jay and I went downtown. At one point, Jay left Joe and me to wander around taking pictures of ice sculptures. There she ran into Lureen accompanied by Jack. I remember her scoffing afterwards about Jack's complaints about the cold. For his part, Jack thought Jay was intense and was intimidated by her piercing stare. He had the irrational fear that she could see into his soul.
It was a bad time for him and Lureen. For the past eighteen months they had thought they were both HIV positive; they had vowed to stay together as long as they were both alive, to take care of one another since neither had any family support. The night I saw him at the John Lennon shrine, Jack had just learned that only Lureen was infected.
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