Untouched by Suicide

We're playing a benefit for the Atlanta chapter of American Foundation for Suicide Prevention tomorrow night. Details here. Since signing on for that gig way back in December, I've been thinking about the subject of suicide and suicide survivors a lot. I wrote this essay some time back as a response to being asked to say something about why I was participating in the event.

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Asked to say how I’ve been touched by suicide, I thought: I have not.

Unless you count Tommy when I went off to college. He sat alone in the cab of a friend’s pick-up back home, with his Remington and several boxes of ammo. While the cops closed in on him, he turned the gun around. It was a horrible death, and although I’d given him up with Tonka trucks, I wrote his mother how Tommy had been my hero once.

And before that there was Mr. Free from our church basketball league. Kevin came up to my house when his father, the pastor, had to go into the woods with Mrs. Free to claim her husband. Kevin guessed hanging, but it was a new shotgun from Service Merchandise and no note. Their oldest boy went running through the neighborhood all night shouting for his daddy, was what we heard.

Then there was Sarah, who showed up at Youth Group sometimes. Once I asked her out, and she smiled to say yes, but on second thought she made up some excuse. That was a week before she sat all night in the family station wagon, with the engine running and the garage door closed. Parents found her in the morning. After that they aged considerably, always trailing a sad happy-hour smell.

My friend Greg came home from college with me one weekend, and it turned out our dads had known each other at the same school. Dad was smiling graciously when he greeted us, but there was an edge to his joking, and you could just tell he and Greg’s dad hadn’t really been friends. Your daddy was the advisor on my hall in Winship. A real son-of-a-gun! Wrote me up just for having water in my sink. How is the old rascal?

Greg put on a smile and a bit more accent, just shy of sardonic. Why, I don’t rightly know. My daddy put a pistol in his mouth and shot the back of his head off when I was five.

Breaking an awkward silence, Greg went on. After that, my mom got us a puppy. Sometimes I’d throw it down the stairs, just so I could pick him up and comfort him.

People just hurled into shock and pain in the wake of this violence, and me thinking I’ve dodged that bullet. Well sure, I haven’t been hit hard like that dog thrown down the stairs. But by the simple calculus of the thing, I don’t suppose any of us can claim we’ve been untouched by suicide.

Good Old Days

Have you heard this radio commercial for ice cream? A brand that's supposed to "taste just like the good old days"? The ad consists entirely of a slick country song that starts out, "I remember our old country home. . . ." The song is in line with a lot of what's coming out of Nashville, what I've been hearing on commercial country radio when I listen. There's a great deal of misty nostalgia in these songs, and I gotta tell ya, a hell of a lot of it rings laughably false.

In the ice cream song, the speaker reminisces about "simpler times," and sets the bucolic scene with mama in the kitchen and the kids down by the swimming hole. At the climax of the song my family just laughs out loud: "Mama hollerin' through the screen / 'would you kids like some home made ice cream.'" Now, anyone who knows anything about home made ice cream, or the past, or mamas, should find this image comical in several ways. We've got the kids down in the creek while mama is supposed to be churning ice cream up at the house, presumably in the kitchen, just like she might bake a peach cobbler. And she's going to surprise our apple-cheeked kiddies with that yummy chilly goodness when it's all finished and ready to serve.

For starters, making ice cream is messy. Rock salt is dirty, and when you mix it generously with gobs of ice, you get a messy, corrosive run off. So you churn ice cream in the back yard, preferably on some patch of dirt where theres no grass to kill, or even better, where there are some weeds downhill you been meaning to get rid of anyway. And what's more, in the gauzy past of my youth, ice cream churns were mostly hand-cranked, so I'm sure that in this "simpler time and place" of the song, mama ain't got no fancy electric churn. If you've never taken a turn at hand-cranking an ice-cream churn, let me tell you something: it's bursitis-inducing, back-breaking, mama-pissing-off work. You get as many people over to help as possible and you take turns.

If mama had been busy up at the house making ice cream for the kids, we're talking about cooking up custard, wrestling ice, handling dirty rock salt, turning that ass-whupping crank, and dealing with the messy run off. After all that, she ain't fiddin to sally over to the screen wiping her hands on her apron like Aunt B and sing out a friendly, "you kids want some ice cream?"

On the contrary, mama is stomping out onto the porch, hands red and hair flying, and she's hollering, "If you kids want some of this ice cream I'm a-churnin', you better get your sorry butts up outa that water and come help me! You think I'm doing all this for my health? Tell your daddy to come in from that barn and bring me some more ice or this isn't gonna set up. And somebody's gotta take a turn at this crank! I'm up here sweating like your aunt Edna at a square dance, and y'all just playing in that mud like you don't have a care in the world!

Silly as it is, this song would be right at home alongside some big country hits. Why, I'm surprised there're any farmers left in the fields; to listen to country radio, you'd think they've all pulled up stakes and moved to Nashville. Every time I turn around there's some song about "I'm a farmer like my daddy and his daddy before that / And I love Jesus and the flag, and you can tell it by my hat." I heard this song yesterday that was all about how great it is to be a Southern man because of our traditions of farming and respect for women and family and love of Jesus and all that. And I was thinking, hmm. I'm a Southern man, and all the men in my family are Southern men, and I gotta tell you, I have to look pretty long and hard to find someone like the gentle, faithful character this song describes as the stereotype. Don't get me wrong: I love my family and I'm proud of my heritage, but you gotta take the crunchy with the smooth, folks. It's true that we southerners are not all a bunch of nine-fingered, cross-burning, wife beating hayseeds. It is also true that I have been to a family reunion where a man was wearing a klan t-shirt (not a blood relative), that I have heard shockingly bigoted statements uttered by people I love, that I have seen families torn apart by neglect and ignorance and even violence on the part of men who probably see themselves as good Christians. There's nothing especially southern about the flaws in the people I know, but for some reason Nashville has decided that the South needs it's own special brand of flawlessness.

Happy Birthday to Us

Shelle and I are turning 40 over the next couple of months. We're celebrating with box seats for REM. We just bought them with the help of a friend who (through some mysterious means) had access to advanced purchasing. The last time we saw REM they were touring Monster, and the acoustically dubious Atlanta Omni still existed as a rock venue. We waited in line before daylight at a Publix store out in the sticks with a bunch of friends to get a low lottery number, and still our seats sucked.

Of course, we'll have to sell the kids for scientific experiments to pay for them, but sacrifices must be made. Well, that will help with the babysitting, which will put the cost right over the top. Actually, our oldest will be jealous when he learns he's not going: he loves REM. Especially Document and Life's Rich Pageant. And the middle child loves their cover of "Superman." But alas, they will have to remain at home.

Speaking of concert costs and of the Omni, I remember paying $17 to see Van Halen when I was maybe 15 or 16, and we lamented then the rising cost of live music. Ha. These tix were >$80 each before all the usury fees. Well, we haven't had a big splurge show since Shelle bought Paul Simon tickets for me at double face value for the Surprise tour, which turned out to be worth every penny, so here's hoping!