FIND YOURSELF DANCING
Chapter 3: Wet Paper Bag
Grand Terrace, CA • Saturday, July 21, 1990
John Wright was born in 1945, and for as long as he could remember, he was obsessed with finding out the way things worked. Ever since he could hold a screwdriver, he would take things apart and put them back together to various degrees of success. As he grew up, his parents nurtured this behavior by bringing him junk he would disassemble and repair.
May Linke was born in 1947, and raised in an abusive household down the street from the Wrights. Her mother hurt her with words, while her father preferred using his hands. John was one of her neighbors, and he would witness first hand the problems she went through while growing up together.
“Once I’m ready,” he would tell her, “we’re leaving this place. Forever.”
John began working at an appliance repair shop, saving his paychecks to eventually move away. As he saved, everything looked like it was going to work out between the two childhood sweethearts. Before John could take May away, his plans were dashed into pieces by the US Government.
John Wright got drafted to fight in Vietnam.
Fortunately, his knowledge with electronics and appliances kept him off the front lines. Most of his time was spent repairing military hardware or driving officers from place to place. Still, it kept him away from May.
As soon as his tour was over, he flew home, took his childhood sweetheart, got in their car, and left their hometown in Washington forever. John Wright and May Linke got married in Las Vegas a day later in 1964. Both of them realized their mistake almost immediately.
Up to their wedding day, John and May had never lived together. Never dated. They had not done much more than walk home from school together. They moved away from both of their families and settled in southern California, their only support an old man who gave John a job in a warehouse moving boxes.
They were together, but they were both totally alone.
Wanting to fix their mutual loneliness, they tried having a child. Maryann was born in 1965. Having a child didn’t help their relationship, so they did what so many other couples did in the 60s: they had another. John Jr. was born in 1967. To nobody’s surprise, he also didn’t help.
After six years of being alone together, John and May decided it would be best to be alone and separate.
For years, Jack and Maryann were shuffled from parent to parent while divorce paperwork was finalized. Arguments were made over everything. The custody of the kids. The savings account. The house. The refrigerator. By the time Jack was eight, it was settled: John got full custody of the kids, half of the savings account, the pets and the refrigerator, May got the other half of the savings account and the freedom to do whatever she wanted. Before the ink dried on the divorce papers, May left California for Texas to start a life of her own.
The divorce hit their son Jack especially hard. Despite John having full custody of the kids and May leaving to be a thousand miles away, Jack always wanted to be reunited with his mother. The young man was not a fan of his new stepmother-to-be. One day in tenth grade, Jack left class in the middle of the day, grabbed a couple of sets of clothes from his house, and hitch hiked to Amarillo, TX where May lived. It took three days. By the time he got to where his mom lived, John and Grace were able to reach out to May and tell her what was going on. Jack’s three parents made a deal with him that he could stay in Amarillo as long as he could hold down a job and help his mom with her bills. The fifteen year old agreed.
For Jack, the next few years were a cycle of looking for work, getting bored with said work, going out to party almost every night, partying way too hard, losing his job, falling into a depression, getting frustrated with himself and his life situation, punching a few holes in the wall at home, getting scolded by his mother, leaving home, breaking down, spending a few nights homeless, coming back home asking for forgiveness, and going back to looking for work again. For Jack during these cycles, eating was optional but drinking was mandatory. During one of these loops, he was twenty two years old and working at a convenience store when he shared a shift with Kymberly.
Kym would tell Jack stories about her childhood, and Jack would listen. He would listen to her talk about her time in school, her abusive childhood, her dog she had while growing up, her favorite band. He could listen to her all day.
One day at the store Jack and Kym were both working. a customer started arguing about the price he paid for gas. Jack tried explaining the math of his transaction, but the man kept stopping Jack from finishing a sentence. Kym got in between them and told the customer he needed to shut up and leave. When the customer didn’t, she started hitting him with the business end of a toilet plunger. Disgusted, the customer left.
A few minutes later, the doors opened again. The owner of the store walked in, with the plunger-assaulted customer behind him. The owner explained to Jack and Kym that this customer was the owner’s nephew, and demanded an apology.
Kym didn’t give one to him, and was fired.
Jack quit in solidarity. With that, Kym lost her first job and Jack lost his eleventh.
When Jack went home to tell his mom the news, May was not happy about it. She told him she was tired of looking at all the un-patched holes in the walls, and that he’ll have to start putting them in someone else’s house. Jack grabbed his things and drove to see Kym. Her parents gave her a similar dressing down. She stood outside her house, carrying a navy blue backpack over her shoulder.
Having nowhere else to go, the couple used the last of their money to drive west to Jack’s father and stepmom. They took the poor young couple in, with the promise that the Texas-style partying had to stop.
While in California, Jack quit drinking. He kept mostly to himself, his old high school friends all either forgot about him or moved away. To pass the time, he traded a box of dirty video tapes for a friend’s Atari 7800 video game system. Jack asked his parents if they needed help with the family business, and they hired him to help with deliveries. For the first time in what seemed like forever to him, Jack started to feel like he had a family.
Kym did not take to the move in the same way. She wasn’t happy in Texas, but California didn’t seem to be much better. She missed her friends, and knew literally no one in the Golden State. Her frustrations would often be taken out on her boyfriend. She would start an argument with Jack, scream for a while, then leave the house for hours. While Jack drank less, Kym started drinking more. The twenty year old couldn’t find a job, mostly due to her arriving to interviews drunk, hungover, or upset over her current situation in life.
Kym’s anxiety came to a head when the family went to the grocery store together. Jack went to one side of the store to grab milk and cheese, and John and Grace asked Kym what fruits and vegetables she would like to have at the house. The question combined with being without Jack made something in the young woman snap. When her boyfriend returned to the family, he found a group forming around the skinny young woman curled up under a display case for bananas. She was hyperventilating into a paper bag that she had also thrown up into. Kym and the wet paper bag was one of the last times Danny saw her before John led the boy into the car.
When Jack’s brother and parents left for the first day of the Galaxy Star Ball, Kym took her backpack of possessions and left the Wright house. After a day, Jack started to worry. He called Kym’s parents and May to check if they heard anything about her going back to Texas.
Nobody knew anything.
On the last night of the Ball, Kym called the Wright’s house. Jack answered the phone. Kym told him about how she had been spending the last few weeks talking to Ryan, one of their old friends in Texas. She explained that the two of them had planned to get her picked up and taken back home. She said that she hated it in California, and she wanted to start over. To drive the point home, she said that her and Ryan had started sleeping together.
Jack sighed, hanging up the phone. He walked to the window and lit a cigarette, his first in months. His worldview shattered. Every breath he took in, he thought about Kym. Every thing he was doing he felt that he was doing for her. Every breath out, he thought about how she left him. How everything she was doing she had also been doing for herself.
After a minute, Jack’s could feel his chest begin to cave in on itself. His eyes sting, but he didn’t cry. He looked at the walls of his room; he hadn’t put a hole in anything in six months. He clenched his right fist, and took aim at the wall separating his and Danny’s room. Jack pulled back his fist, then relaxed it. Why start now? He thought.
The young man walked to his bed and reached under the box spring. His finger touched a rifle that was gifted to him from May as a “Welcome to Texas” present when he was fourteen.
Jack sat on the bed and looked at the rifle in his lap. Sometimes when he was stressed, he took a page from his father’s book and disassembled his rifle down to its smallest possible parts, then reassembled it afterwards. He tilted the long gun skyward and places the butt on the floor between his feet. He moved it from hand to hand, feeling his balance shift as the gun moved. For a moment the young man thought to himself, what would it be like to pull the trigger on myself? What would I feel? Would I feel anything?
Jack placed the barrel under his chin and calmly rested his head on it. Looking down, the gun had completely disappeared save for the feeling under his chin. He thinks about where the trigger would be from this angle. He reaches down to feel for it, unable to see with his chin over the business end of his rifle. It feels so far away, he thought to himself, how in the hell do suicidal people make this wo--
Jack’s fingers caught the trigger. The bullet zipped through the barrel and worked its way through the center of Jack’s head. Brains, blood and skull explode out from his crown onto the bed, walls, and ceiling. Jack’s body fell backwards onto the bed, while the gun toppled forward onto the floor.
Hours later, the rest of the Wright family arrived home. Grace opened the door to Jack’s room and found the scene of the young man and his rifle. She backs away from the door and cries out.
All she could do was cry.
Introduction
Chapter 1: Last Night
Chapter 2: Anywhere But Here
Chapter 3: Wet Paper Bag
Chapter 4: Harry, Cliff
Chapter 5: The Morning After
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