Roger’s Reality: Crazy Jack

By Roger Owens

Jack was called Crazy Jack because Jack was, well, crazy. “As a shithouse rat,” he’d say, after introducing himself as Crazy Jack. In 1972, at the age of seventeen, Jack had been sent on an all-expenses-paid vacation to Southeast Asia, courtesy of the US Army. The things he had seen and done there had permanently rearranged the contents of his head, and definitely not for the better.
    Apparently, Jack had come home, married, had kids, and tried to lead a normal life, but his demons had followed him home, as they so often do with our service men and women. He began drinking heavily and taking hard drugs, and was unable to hold down a job. Eventually the marriage failed, the kids no longer spoke to him, and he sank into a life on the street.
    Jack was now sixty-five years old and had been homeless for the last twenty years or so. He’d never received a dime from the military for his problems; they’d left him twisting in the wind all those years. Now, Crazy Jack was crazy, but as the old joke goes, not stupid. He was living in an extensive patch of woods near the small shopping center in our neighborhood, where our gym was. Jack got enough from Social Security to pay for a gym membership, which was a very smart move. Gyms provide, as my father joked from his time in the Navy, a place to “shit, shower, shave and shine your shoes.” It was a place you could keep your kit in a locker, as well as a place to work out, and Jack did. Jack was in great shape. Average size, maybe five-foot-nine, wiry, but buffed. He would be over lifting free weights with the big boys and my wife Cindy, who was a bodybuilder for about 25 years. No big muscles or anything, she was slim and trim, but very strong. At five-foot-two, she was much stronger than me, and a lot of the younger guys too. She was one of the “big boys,” and they all loved her. Me, I’d be over on my little machines where the kiddies play in gyms; treadmills, stair-steppers, that sort of thing. Not one of the big boys.
    I had some ideas about being homeless. I’d never been there, but someone very close to me was, and told me you don’t want to be way out in the woods. Most of the homeless don’t have a car, so you want to be near some town where you can get food, water, use a bathroom, and charge your phone. Almost all the homeless people I’ve known had phones. It may seem like an extravagance, but it’s difficult to function without one. If you ever hope to get a job and keep it, get out of the rain, out of that life, get a place to live, you must be able to get in touch with people. Employers, family, friends, even 9-1-1 in some cases. It’s a rough existence. This person I was close to said they preferred being called “urban outdoorsmen” rather than “homeless”; not sure if that was just humor or humor and a way to feel a little better about yourself. Likely both. We often don’t really notice, but most towns have sections of woods, sometimes right in the middle of town, which are havens for urban outdoorsmen.
    So Crazy Jack was well-groomed and shaved, and his clothes were clean because there is a laundromat right next to the gym. Very convenient. His irrationality, isolation, and occasional hostility did not make him a candidate for many friends, but gyms are places where the high and low alike get together with a common purpose, and for many, like Cindy, it is a big part of their social life. If Jack wasn’t exactly welcomed with open arms, he was tolerated, and Cindy, loving soul that she was, had befriended him, which made some others take less of a dim view of him than they might have otherwise. Everybody loved Cindy. Even Bob, the great unwashed asshole that owned the gym, loved Cindy.
    Only once did Cindy express doubts about hanging around Crazy Jack. She told me he’d asked her to do something that involved calling someone on her cell phone so he could talk to them, as they would not pick up when he called. She told him no, she was not comfortable with fooling someone like that, and he “changed.” Crazy Jack had a rather goofy-looking face, kind of dorky really, and the coke-bottle-bottom glasses didn’t help that look at all. He reminded me of the scene in Fargo where a local tries to describe Steve Buscemi’s character to the cop. “Just kind of funny-lookin’, ya know? Even more than most people….” She said in that instant she saw a furious, seriously deranged man looking out of that face, and it scared her. Just for an instant, and then he was just Jack again, but she always took the “crazy” part a little more to heart after that. I did too; I was at the gym regularly and I kept an eye on him, and asked some of the big boys to do so when I wasn’t there.
    Now, I would be remiss in not introducing the main “big boys,” the dramatis personae, so to speak. There is Willie, or now Will; we met him when he was 19 and still dreaming of the NFL, and Momma Cindy could call him whatever she liked. Six-four, a massive prison guard with that particular black body type where the upper body is like a barn door that tapers to slim hips and even slimmer legs. He always envied Cindy’s calves, which were world-class, just like her ass. I don’t mind saying, she had a great body. Then there is James, also a treetop brother, retired Fire-Rescue guy and certainly buff, but not like Will in the upper body. And finally, we have Russell, who is from Trinidad. He was Mr. America in his weight range at fifty, is now over seventy, and rides his bike five miles to the gym six days a week, and back, after an always-impressive workout. Looks like a pocket Hercules at about five-six. Any one of these guys would have broken Crazy Jack or anybody else who messed with Miss Cindy in half in about three seconds, so I figured we had that covered.
    At this time the US military seemed to be getting off their asses and taking care of a lot of guys that had been left out in the cold after serving, especially Vietnam vets, the Agent Orange scandal having slapped the wigs right off a lot of bigwigs. And so, it came about that Crazy Jack began receiving back benefits from some thirty-five years when he should have been receiving them all along. Had he been, he would never have been homeless, could have gotten the treatment he needed, and could possibly have lived some semblance of that normal life, the one denied him by the demons created by the DOD long ago in a teenager far from home.
    Instead, he was showered with money all at once. Things did not go well. I knew this when he asked me to inspect a house in the neighborhood for termites, in preparation for him buying it. We met at the local tavern, and Crazy Jack was already three sheets to the wind. He’d told me himself he was an addict and an alcoholic, and didn’t dare take a single drink. Now here he was, shitfaced and buying rounds for the house. Oh, he had some friends now. Or the vultures were gathering, more like. He’d bought some kind of Dodge muscle car and drove like a maniac, nearly putting it in the ditch more than once on the way to the house. Inside the empty place, he laid out a bunch of lines of coke on the kitchen counter and offered me some. My refusal didn’t stop him; he went at it while I got on with the inspection.
    I told Cindy about it, and our concern that Crazy Jack would crash and burn, one way or another, was shared and growing. He bought the house, and soon Cindy said he’d given her a key. He asked her if we hadn’t seen him for a while to please check on him, in case he was sick or dead, and said she was the only one who had ever given a shit about him. I was disturbed by that and told her never to go there alone. I needn’t have worried, she knew better and told me so. I think it annoyed her I felt I’d needed to say anything.
    It wasn’t very long before we really didn’t see him for a while, so we went to check. The house was empty, and a For Sale sign graced the front yard. I called the realtor, who said Crazy Jack had died, his son had come from somewhere up north and collected the remains, and that was that. No obituary, no funeral, nothing. Like he’d never lived, never existed at all. No cause of death either; I figured that after he went back to his days as a serious doper, the coke had exploded his heart. He was then sixty-seven, and at that age you can’t do that garbage like the old days. Robert Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers died from it at sixty-three, and Billy Mays, the guy that promoted Oxy-Clean, bought the farm from it at the tender age of fifty.
    Crazy Jack slipped and slithered his way through this life silently, like a Ranger on recon patrol, never making waves, never drawing attention, never settling down. He told me once that he only stayed in any given town for a few years, as he usually wore out his welcome after very long in one place. The cops would get on him, or be sicced on him, and he was best advised to find another jurisdiction to inhabit if he knew what was good for him. He was never really recompensed for the life the military had stolen from him, not given proper treatment, not paid disability. When they did try to help him, it was decades late and the “help” only made things worse. Crazy Jack wasn’t a bad man, but he was certifiably crazy, and a true testament to the wretched condition of our mental health system, particularly for vets. He deserved better from us, and we failed him.

Copyright © 2023 by Roger Owens