16. Hell On Earth
The Year of Paying Attention
My cousin Michael’s body was found yesterday, by an off-duty cop hiking in the woods, not a mile from where he’d last been seen two weeks before Christmas. My sister emailed me, and I made what I imagine is my last entry about him on Facebook, so the friends and acquaintances and strangers I’m connected to there, some perhaps wondering about Michael, will know how it ended. The news felt inevitable, once it arrived. The local paper’s website quotes Michael’s niece as saying “we’re all relieved that it’s over, but sad it had to end this way.”
Now I see missing person flyers posted on poles and surfaces around New York as markers of tragedy and helplessness — ‘Have you seen my sister? My son? My roommate?’ No, I’m sorry, we haven’t. Most likely we won’t.
***
I had my latest six-month cancer follow-up scan today. At the first one, the surgeon, a short, meticulous and serious-faced man usually surrounded by young doctors-in-training, called the results “pristine.” I like to quote this, as if I’d earned a high score on the LSATs. I came home after today’s scan and commenced drinking the lake of water recommended to flush the nasty ink out of my bloodstream, then called my old friend and post-college roommate Don in New Orleans.
I wasn’t aware of it when Don’s picture appeared in the Times-Picayune last year, right after he was arrested on child pornography charges. It was months later when JC, our fellow former roommate, called from his home near Washington, D.C. to tell me what he knew. As JC described what had happened to Don, I froze, unable to take in what I was hearing. How could a good friend of ours be the man in the newspaper? My lifelong pal — a sex criminal? I hung up and went online to find the story, and there it was, old news by now, Don arrested after authorities traced illegal, explicit videos to his computer. The article mentioned an undercover operation. It said bond had been set at $10,000. It mentioned a potential sentence of five to 20 years for each of ten counts. I sat stunned. Child pornography? Is anything more despicable? More shameful, more unforgivable? I didn’t know what to do. I thought about it for hours, for days. I reviewed mental files of our time as roommates, the many visits to New Orleans, Don’s occasional trips to New York. I tried to remember if there’d every been anything weird, anything suspicious… I realized I needed to call Don.
He picked after one ring, and immediately got into it, telling me what had happened, how he had been on a peer-to-peer internet site, like Napster, each computer linking to other online users to create a network. Decades earlier Don and I had both been avid internet collectors of pirated jazz broadcasts, rare performance tapes, music you couldn’t buy or hear unless somebody gave you access to the files. Don had found another community, trading porn videos. He’d told me he’d left his computer on overnight as files were downloading. He didn’t realize that network was making child pornography available to anyone who logged on. And he certainly didn’t know Louisiana investigators were monitoring his internet activity.
“I was definitely downloading porn, but I had no idea there was child porn involved,” he said. It didn’t matter. The law was clear, and his ignorance made no difference, he said. He’d hired a lawyer, along with a forensic computer specialist to make the case that he was not a child porn collector or trafficker. Don said most of his friends had dropped him as soon as they saw the news story. Even his brothers were keeping their distance. I recalled my own first reaction to the news, which was to treat him as radioactive, someone whose crime, whose shame would rub off on me. He had spent the past year in social isolation, he said, with only a few close friends, JC and me among them, who were willing to believe him. And I did believe him. But. But how? It still didn’t make sense. Why would law enforcement put so much time and trouble into ruining the life of my friend? Child pornography is contemptible, the sort of crime a good person doesn’t think about. Now I was thinking about it.
I was thinking about our mutual friend JC, too. In the months after he’d called me about Don, JC had fallen into his own private hell. JC and Don have always been very close, like brothers. I imagined them regularly on the phone talking music, debating college basketball, reviewing the places and memories they shared. I talked with each of them now and again, but they talked to one another a lot. I’d gotten over the shock of Don’s situation by the time he called again, now in limbo, talking to his lawyer and the forensic computer expert, waiting for the case against him to begin. But he wasn’t calling about any of that. “When was the last time you talked to JC?” he asked me.
Don and I both knew JC was planning to leave the D.C. area and move to Georgia, to make a change, restart his life. He’d gotten through a painful divorce, and a friend had invited him to move into a place outside Atlanta. I didn’t keep the dates straight in my mind, figuring JC would be in touch after he got settled. Now Don was filling me in, about how JC had relocated, and a short time later was having some health problems. He’d already survived a fight with cancer, but in his new community he didn’t have a local doctor. Don urged him to find one, but JC put it off, waiting for things to get better. Things got worse. For days Don couldn’t reach him, and when he did, JC was in the hospital. An abscess in his back has worsened, resulting in nerve damage to his spine. JC was partially paralyzed. Don drove from New Orleans to JC’s hospital in Athens, Georgia. A few days later, after the long drive home, Don called to fill me in on this new, terrible news — it felt impossible.
Weeks later, JC’s condition improved enough for him to move into a rehabilitation facility. His resources were scant. Having seen online appeals for people in financial trouble because of a health disaster, I told Don I’d set up a fund-raising site for JC. I contacted everybody I could think of, telling them about JC’s plight, and what we were trying to do. People began responding within minutes. Friends from public radio and the jazz world and from Harvard offered help. JC’s friends, and my friends, showed up.
I haven’t laid eyes on either of my former roommates since their terrible troubles began. They’re both trying to help one another, and I’m trying, too, while experiencing steady, gentle waves of guilt, feeling undeserving of my good fortune, just as my friends don’t deserve their bad luck. Those guilt feelings are a waste of time, I know. With so much trouble surrounding two guys I love, I feel powerless.
[The Year of Paying Attention is a record of thoughts and events from 2017. Next week: We Clamor For The Right to Opacity!]
