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At my age, with 2.7 billion heartbeats (and counting) above my belt and 26,598 days (and counting) marked off my calendar, I’m not surprised when I learn that one of my highschool classmates has departed for “that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.”^[1]

A couple of weeks ago, for example, news that my junior-and-high school acquaintance Roanld Pinkney had died appeared on Facebook.  Ronald was one of the pioneering Blacks who integrated Summerville schools years before wholesale integration. No telling what indignities he suffered in silence. I’ve likened these pioneering Blacks to Jackie Robinson, intelligent, thick skinned stoics courageous enough to subject themselves to abuse for progress’s sake. Ronald was a genuinely good guy, and I toyed with the idea of attending his funeral, but didn’t, of course, because I’m selfish.

However, this Wednesday when I turned to the obituary pages of the Post and Courier and saw the name Adam Martin Reiley Jacobs VII, I was taken aback. Although Adam and I lost touch after he was drafted and I left for college, he was one of my best friends in my last two years of high school. I often stayed at Adam’s house, or we’d hang for days at Jerry Locklair’s beach house across from the Washout. 

The thing is, even though I hadn’t seen Adam since his Uncle Sammy’s funeral a quarter century ago, I’ve been hanging out with him over the past few years because he’s the inspiration for the character Will Waring in my novel Today, Oh Boy. Perhaps that’s why I’m taking his death so hard.

Right now I’m in the process of writing a sequel to the novel set in 1972 when characters from Today, Oh Boy return to Summerville for Christmas after their first semester of college.^[2] Will has just been drafted, has received orders to report to Fort Jackson in early January.  

Last Wednesday, the morning I learned of Adam’s death, I had just finished writing a scene where Rusty’s visits Will at his place. For Christmas, Rusty gifts Will his beloved blue jean jacket with the rolling paper icon Mr. Zig Zag silkscreened on the back. ^[3]  Will had openly coveted the jacket.

“Damn, Rusty, you scared me!”

“Sorry, man. I knocked, but those headphones make you as deaf as Helen Keller.”

Will stiffly rises from the sofa, and they shake hands.

“I guess you’ve heard the news,” he says.

“God, yes. I’m so sorry, man.  Whatcha gonna to do?”

“Bite the bullet.  I thought for a second about going to Canada, but I’m just gonna bite the bullet and hope like hell I don’t end up in Nam.”

Will looks – what’s the word? – haggard – though 20-year-olds aren’t supposed to look haggard.  In their friendship triad, it was always Will who preached chill to AJ and Rusty, chastising them for what he dubbed their “reel-to-reel anxiety.”

Rusty extends his arm that holds the present. “Merry Christmas!”

“Man, looks like whoever wrapped this was on smack.”

“Guilty but not guilty,” Rusty says.

Will removes the paper and sees that it’s the Zig Zag jacket. He pauses, holds it out at arm’s length to admire the silk-screening.

“Wow, man, thanks, but I can’t accept this. Though really appreciate the gesture.”

“But I want you to have it.”

“When I wear it, people behind me will mistake me for you.”

“So you’re planning on dying your hair red?”

“You mean like a dick on a dog?”

They both laugh.  

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After Today, Oh Boy was accepted for publication, I worried that Adam might read it and get pissed off I had partially based Will’s character on him.  I worried that Adam might not appreciate the scene where he and AJ share a joint or how I portrayed his mother, a source of comic relief, though she’s really not his mother (and I find her sympathetic). 

There’s a bit of solace in that no one in the novel comes off worse than Rusty, the character based loosely on me. Wesley Moore III probably has the strongest case for a lawsuit. But the thing is, even though Rusty and I had red hair and both our parents smoked like fiends, he’s not really me. He’s much stupider than I was, but also much nicer.  When an interviewer once asked my pal Josephine Humphreys if any of the characters in her novels were based on her, she said, “No, but I sometimes let them wear my sweaters.”  I can relate.

When I posted news of Adam’s passing on Facebook, I was surprised by how people seemed to be moved by his death even though their constant refrain was “I haven’t seen him in 50 years.”

Here’s my brother David’s response, “This has affected me more than I would have thought.” Mutual friend Susan Wallace Hoppe, though she hadn’t seen Adam since the 1970s, wrote, “This death has really hit hard.”

Why? Why are we so moved by his death when he’s been absent from our lives for a half century? 

I believe it’s because Young Adam was handsome, charismatic, kind, modest and came to be a sort of icon in the early days of Summerville’s rather tepid counterculture.  He was an artist, a drummer, a rebel, a sympathetic friend.  In our minds, he’s the avatar of our youth, so to speak, a sort of immortal. But, of course, he wasn’t immortal. If dashing Adam is dead, we can’t be far behind. 

I was expressing all of these sentiments to my wife Caroline, and she said she thought that Adam would be grateful to be in the novel because he’ll come to life whenever someone reads the book.  

I don’t know if Adam would have liked Will, but I’d like to think so. I created him to be likable like Will. He’s, in a way, the most humane character in Today, Oh Boy. 

In fact, at least in the novel, I’d rather be Will than Rusty.

Anyway, goodnight, sweet prince.

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^[1] From Hamlet’s 3d soliloquy.

^[2] Those of you who have read the novel will be happy to learn that Ollie Wyborn’s dream of attending the Air Force Academy has come to pass. 

^[3] The jacket actually belonged to Tim Miskell, and Adam, who was an artist, had done the silkscreen.