There used to be a comforting anonymity about Tom’s Place, a smoky and moderately seedy bar on the waterfront in Jacksonville, Fla., where the barstools were invariably occupied by men and women who liked to drink a little and forget a lot. Corinne Silverton, who was studying to be a stockbroker after years as a part-time teacher in a series of nightmarish public schools, was a more-than-typical customer — divorced, tired, unhappy and broke, she had a liking, entirely understandable, for nursing three quiet beers in an evening, hoping that while she was doing so the world that she felt had treated her so ill would leave her well alone. A companionable bartender named Doug helped to see that this was so: he made sure that Corinne’s stool was always empty and ready for her, and that any unsavory characters — who might well relish the prospect of an evening with an unhappy and vulnerable divorcee — were kept at bay, or at least at a respectful distance.
Early one evening during the winter of 1993 — not that winter has very much meaning in the hot concrete wasteland of this unappealing north Florida port — Corinne came in to Tom’s Place for her usual solace, only to discover that on her stool was sitting a shabby-looking and gray-bearded man, with a shot glass between his hands. He looked, she says now, like nothing so much as a retired and broken-down mailman. He was badly dressed and had a weary, lined, lived-in face and the red and rheumy eyes of a long-term drinker. She was about to protest the impertinence when Doug hushed her. You ought to meet this man, he told her, with a quiet insistence that she realized she should take seriously. ”You’ll find him interesting. His name is Jay Martin Adams.”
And so Corinne Silverton sat down beside the unanticipated Jay Martin Adams that steamy January evening, and through the next many hours, helped by a few more beers on her part and by many more whiskeys on his, she listened patiently to the stories he had to tell.
Of course it is axiomatic that all the drunks in all the waterfront bars the world around have stories to tell, all of which are long, most of which are incoherent and many of which are curious. Yet this particular story, ably related by this obviously well-educated stranger, while every bit as curious as expected, was also moving, poignant and, to some listeners perhaps, including Corinne Silverton, rather enviable.
Jay Martin Adams was not the mystery man’s name, for a start. He was actually called Julian Nance Carsey — this he confessed to Corinne a few days later — and until one extraordinary moment some 11 years before he stepped down from a Trailways bus here in Jacksonville, he was known by that name to a wide and loving circle of family, friends and colleagues. But then came a moment — an epiphany to some few, the start of an unfolding of a nightmare for many others — that had its climacteric on the morning of Wednesday, May 19, 1982.
As goes the cliche, the day began with its ordinary-enough routines. Julian Carsey, known as Jay, then the president of Charles County Community College in the corn-and-tobacco country of La Plata, Md., had his usual breakfast, said a polite goodbye to his wife, Nancy, told her that he was off to the dentist and remarked casually that he would see her later. He omitted, Nancy would later recall, to give her the usual obligatory peck on the cheek. He drove off in his black Chevrolet Caprice, pausing only to grumble at the yardmen who seemingly weren’t cutting the lawn to his liking. He drove away from his impressive and historically designated house in Pomfret, Md. But he did not go, as was supposed, to his faux-colonial office in La Plata nearby, nor indeed did he call in at the dentist.
Instead, he telephoned his secretary and asked her to cancel his appointment. He told her to tell Nancy that he might have to go to Philadelphia to see his sister. He went to the bank, withdrew $28,000 and converted it into traveler’s checks. He drove to what then was still called Washington National Airport, parked his car and put his keys carefully into what is still quaintly called the glove compartment, dropped five already-written letters and one postcard into the mailbox, walked casually up to the check-in counter for Pan Am and bought himself a one-way ticket to Houston. He went into the Clipper Club, poured himself a handful of vodkas and, an hour or so later, having met no one he knew, poured himself onto the plane.
The letters and postcard duly arrived and were duly read the following day. To the chairman of the college’s board of trustees, Jay Carsey announced his resignation. To the college dean, he sent an enigmatic five-word note with a postscript that said, with magnificent economy, ”pls handle.” And to his wife, by now distraught and frightened and horrified by an event of which she had no more expectation than an asteroid strike, he wrote: ”I am leaving because I know you can’t. I am a physical and psychological disaster.”
He directed her to a tape recording he had left in his desk, which explained nothing, but gave her some details to make the practical consequences of her abandonment less trying. And that, effectively, was that. Thirty-odd hours had passed, and the former college president and community pillar was now buried deep in the vast dusty wen of Texas, having for all intents and purposes vanished off the face of the civilized earth, transported as far from the groves of academe as if he were on the surface of Mars.
Nearly fifty years ago Philip Larkin wrote what remains the most classically insightful poem about the seductive powers of running away. It includes the line: ”He chucked up everything and just cleared off.”
What haunts most of those who read it is the undeniable approval that Larkin implied and that he suspects, with a poet’s wisdom, all of us feel — a visceral approval for what he termed this audacious, purifying, elemental move. Moreover, Larkin writes, ”I’d go today,/Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,/Crouch in the fo’c’sle/Stubbly with goodness, if/It weren’t so artificial,/Such a deliberate step backwards/ To create an object:/Books; china; a life/Reprehensibly perfect.”
Jay Carsey chose to try to make a life for himself that was just that — reprehensibly perfect. In trying to do so he made a gesture that must seem quite wonderfully bold and courageous to the millions for whom, as Thoreau once said, the quiet desperation of their humdrum lives has become too much. And it was because Jay Carsey tried, and because those remaining millions did not, that so many seem to find all that he did so desperately fascinating.
Only Corinne Silverton knows (or thinks she knows) the story of Jay Carsey in full — since she lived with him until the end of the tape that was his life, or his lives. Nancy Carsey — now remarried and living in Baltimore — knew only the years that ended when her husband, who was then 47, drove off in his Caprice that day in 1982 and drove so brutally out of her life. And Dawn Carsey, who was to become his second wife, in Texas, three years later, knew only the second act, since after seven years of relative contentment he went on to leave her as well. But Corinne Silverton, who befriended him on that night in Florida, has now heard the entire story; and with her unique benefit of a singular lack of bitterness about the man — for when he left her in August, it was most certainly not of his own choosing — she seems able to look with the kind of disinterestedness of which Philip Larkin would approve at the phenomenon that was Julian Nance Carsey and his barely explicable career of serial disappearances.
The mechanics of that first evanescence are suggestive of desperation and perplexity. Jay Carsey spent only a short time in Houston. He thought at first about going off to Australia — he and Nancy, who as a couple had been inveterate travelers, had been there before, and he had always loved the place. So he flew off to San Diego, from where he thought, unaccountably, that he might get a trans-Pacific flight. But in fact all he did there was go ”trolling for women,” as a 1989 book, ”Exit the Rainmaker,” had it, and then spend an entire afternoon sitting on a bench at the zoo and cutting up his 28 credit cards — making it all but impossible, he then found out, to rent a car and drive to Tijuana. (More than a few of Jay Carsey’s decisions like this call into question the widely held view that he was highly intelligent: those who met him, however, insist he was, and say this merely showed his panic and bewilderment.)
By the end of his stay in California he had more or less consolidated an exit strategy that had, in a sense, now been forced upon him. Without a home and, moreover, now without any plastic to his name, Jay Carsey had become, in American terms, a nonperson. He converted the traveler’s checks back into cash by fibbing to a San Diego bank that he was a yacht broker needing sudden liquidity. He chose a new name (selecting the middle name Martin in a nod to a lawyer relation from Dallas who had managed to keep one of Bonnie and Clyde’s cronies out of the electric chair — a nice touch, he thought, given that he was now part outlaw himself). And he gave the title Jay Martin Adams its first airing by using it (before the days when airlines needed photo ID’s) to fly east again, this time to one of the more insalubrious towns in Texas: El Paso.
Here, among the dust and the shanties and the cockroaches, this Social-Security-number-less droog checked into the Y.M.C.A., found himself a bar, stopped bathing and changing his clothes and began living the new life with all the frantic nostalgie de la boue that one might expect — a reaction, some would say, to all those years of respectability and stiff-necked socializing back in Maryland. He started chugging the vodkas and the whiskeys by the vatful, experimenting with whores in Chihuahua, teaching English to indigent Mexicans, lending money to win friends, smuggling gold, getting himself thrown in jail, eventually buying a share in a bar among the strip clubs and gin joints conveniently close to the local air base. A college president brought to this, he would doubtless say to himself, and would laugh and feel liberated and delighted in equal measure.
But lonely too. The temporary comforts of purchased one-night stands had, inevitably, a steadily diminishing allure. By the end of that summer he had encountered in the bar a woman as needy as himself — a tough, thrice-married pool-playing city worker named Dawn Garcia. And over the coming months he placed his affairs in sufficient order to enable him to marry again — largely by making two trips back East to be divorced from Nancy, neither speaking a word to her when they met in court nor even exchanging a glance, and offering little explanation or comfort to those old friends he saw.
His new marriage lasted seven years. While by most accounts it was stormy — with strong drink playing its usual corrosive part — during this period Jay Carsey did begin to claw himself back up the ladder of respectability. True, when matters became tense between the pair he ran away again, briefly, and then returned, prodigal, his tail between his legs. And then an article duly appeared in People magazine /- ”a quiet college president solves job stress his way: one day he just disappears” — and Dawn and the down-at-heel barflies with whom the couple liked to associate and who recognized him from his photo in the magazine had to accept that he was something of a celebrity. But none of this stopped him from getting a new job back on the periphery of his old profession: he was offered, by an obviously very trusting president, a post teaching math at the El Paso Community College. Soon afterward — since his students adored him and his staff colleagues found him charming and impressive — he was offered an even more established post as an assistant dean. But this, smacking of the kind of stability that he no longer seemed to want, he smartly turned down.
What he did take was a job with the United States Air Force, working as a temporary teacher on a series of overseas bases. He and Dawn thus spent three years, until 1988, traveling between Greece and Germany, England and Turkey, Holland and the Azores, shuttling relentlessly between officers’ quarters and living with government furniture and art, living a life that was no more than they both seemed to want — a federally financed hymn to utter rootlessness.
Then they came back to Texas and to the veneer of permanence once more. And with this next period of fixity, so the fights and the arguments set in — until just before Christmas 1992, when Jay Martin Adams drove to the airport, dropped his car in short-term parking and put the keys in the glove compartment, took a plane to Miami, spent a few sick, spiritless days in a cheap hotel by the sea — and then boarded the northbound Trailways bus up I-95.
Corinne Silverton met him at Tom’s Place a few days later. He took her to an opera for their first date. Within a month, bowled over by his charm, his yarns, his exotic past, his intelligence and his beguiling helplessness, she had invited him to live with her. It was a replay, uncannily precise, of what happened with Dawn Garcia 10 years before — except that this time he was being welcomed not into a small frame house in the old flyblown barrios of South Texas but into a flyblown but book-filled home in the modern cement wilderness that is downtown Jacksonville.
And from that moment on, this melancholy, world-weary middle-aged woman, disappointed in her life and her loves almost since coming down to America from her birthplace on the high plains of Saskatchewan, began to preside over the remaining seven years of her strangely nomadic new friend’s final phase of grounding. Corinne Silverton looked after Jay Carsey with a kindness and sympathy that seem to have been repaid by only brief moments of happiness and by long periods of despair. She watched with pride as he took jobs in a succession of local schools, she glowed in his reflected glory at the good reports he received, she took singular pleasure in the evident fondness that students and staff had for him, she happily traveled down to Mexico, on what was (since both were teachers) the pleasing respite of a school holiday for two. And all the while she watched with terrible sadness as the relentless chemistry of alcohol poisoning steadily stripped him of his health, his dignity, his ability and, eventually, his life.
Julian Nance Carsey died of cirrhosis of the liver on Aug. 20, at the age of 65. For two weeks no one in his immediate family claimed his body. (Corinne, being unrelated, felt reluctant to do so.) The sister whom he had said he would visit on that day he first vanished, back in 1982, never surfaced to express either regret or dismay. One good friend from Washington eventually paid for the funeral expenses, and early last September the man the residents of La Plata and Pomfret had all called Uncle Jay was reduced in a gas burner to a few ounces of gray ash.
Corinne Silverton is certain now that she knows just why he behaved the way he did. She largely discounts the psychiatrists’ suggestions that he was internalizing his resentments — that the budget cuts he was expecting at the college and his first wife’s expensive tastes and the requirements of his social life were generating pressures on him about which he felt he could not talk, and with which he was mentally unable to deal. She also does not believe that he was ill — other than physically, and such physical illnesses as he suffered came about entirely as a consequence of his heavy drinking. She rejects such modish notions that he was at the time of his vanishing in what psychologists term a ”fugue” state, harmlessly divorced from reality, relentlessly irresponsible, incapable of dealing with the complex expectations of normal society.
Yet she will not say, specifically, what she believes it was that tipped Jay Carsey over the edge. She hints darkly that there were sinister reasons behind his decision to chuck up everything. Yes, she repeats — sinister reasons.
And in saying so, the tone of our conversation subtly shifts. Her body language changes — her breathing gets a little faster, her face gets a little closer, a rime of perspiration appears on her upper lip — in the way that you’d expect it to change if you were listening to a rant late at night in a waterfront bar, even though this conversation takes place over breakfast in the Jacksonville Hilton.
”He worked with the C.I.A., you know. He worked at Indian Head Naval Station, doing mysterious stuff. He traveled all over, for years, working for a program that was supposed to set up community colleges in strange places / Iran, Russia, countries like that. He knew some very strange people. He knew who Deep Throat was. And there were people gunning for him. People were out to get him. He told me — he told me much more than he ever told Dawn or Nancy.”
I have little doubt that Silverton is a shrewd and sensible woman — sad and brow-beaten maybe, and no doubt very gullible, but kind and courageous too — and that she believes implicitly in what she has been told. Trusting Jay Carsey, or Jay Martin Adams, was for seven years a very cornerstone of her life. His claims, however bizarre, may well have served to fill a need in her — to provide the vicarious thrill of an existence so much more satisfying than the dreariness of what otherwise stretched ahead. She scoffs at the idea and will offer only hints of other unspoken reasons.
”People like to say that he did what everyone dreams about — he dropped out of society, he ran off,” she explains to me. ”It is much easier for everyone to believe that Jay simply liked to disappear, that it was all about a problem deep within himself. But in his case there was more to it than that — much, much more. His story is so much more fascinating than you will ever know.”
By SIMON WINCHESTER
Note: There is a Jay Carsey in all of us. i dont think that he ran away from his situations.
Everyone of us deserves a right to start off fresh and new;
