I’ve been thinking about Jesse a lot lately. I walk around these Paris streets and get this overwhelming sense of peace. I can breathe here. I am left unmolested by the police. Nobody looks at me sideways. Nobody asks me why I am in my own fucking neighborhood.
And that makes you think of Jesse?
Yeah. None of my cousins got to experience this sort of peace. But it’s Jesse that came so fucking close.
After you died, he got out of prison for the umpteenth time. He got sober, got a real job, and started a family. He was still in the barrio living in the projects, but he was doing better and on his way to actually doing well.
You should know, dad, he absolutely loved you. He understood that you were the difference between me ending up like him. We sat outside of Homeboy smoking, talking about our lives, the parallels, and ultimately the divergence. The difference was you.
Where I had one useless parent, he had two. That kind of math adds up to no kid having a chance. That he achieved anything at all is nothing short of a miracle. But even standing there smoking, talking, I could feel it - that restlessness, that constant looking over his shoulder that comes from a life just trying to survive.
He told me writing helped. Showed me a story he was working on about the night Joey was killed. It was heartbreaking. It was raw. It was really, really good.
A few weeks later he called me up and said he was acting in a play. It was a play about an immigrant woman coming to LA and all the shit she had to endure just to get here and then all the shit she had to endure just to be allowed to even exist.
“Yeah, fool, I play a shitty, abusive boyfriend.”
I was amused because of all of the things he was - that was never it. As long as you never fucked with him or his people he was sweetness personified. And being a dick to a woman was anathema to his character. But on that stage in LA, he was an Oscar worthy asshole.
He had it - that thing the French call je ne sais quoi.
We went out and celebrated and he was floating the rest of the night. I felt like he finally made it. He started with the deck stacked so high against him and fucking made it, if not all the way out, definitely on his way.
It wasn’t long after that performance that the Air Force moved us across the country to Florida. So I wasn’t there when Jesse lost his job. We talked on the phone, sure, and he played it off like it was no big deal.
“I can find another job.”
I think he got high instead. The mind of an addict.
His number stopped working and he disappeared. His wife didn’t know where he was. I was an entire continent away. He ended up in a hospital.
Then he wasn’t.
I really don’t remember how long after that I got that call.
As I walked through Passy towards the 6 line I thought, “I wish Jesse could have seen this.” And I took the metro the opposite way one stop - just happened to be the stop on the other side of the Seine. And I rode across the Seine taking it all in, wishing his life had been something different than it was. I thought to myself, this place would have healed him.
He was one of the sweetest, best humans, but he started from so far behind the start line that it didn’t even become visible until the race was almost over.
I got off at the next stop, walked to the other side of the track, and went back over the Seine on my way home.
Man, this is beautiful. Thank you. As a fortunate person in recovery, I’m glad to get the opportunity to keep living … and wonder why some of the ones I love did not. Shout out to my buddy Sterling. His heart full of love too, yet he vanished into those badlands too. Much appreciation for your writing!