Dan Kempner
My friend Jonesy used to write articles regularly for Legacy Magazine, as did I. We would read one another’s pieces – just to give ‘em a once-over, make sure they were up to snuff – before hitting our respective ‘send’ buttons.
Those buttons put our stuff directly onto Jim Ellis’s desktop, and we were each likely to get a lusty reply like, “Wow, great stuff, Jonesy!” or “I love it, Kempner! You’ve still got it.” He was fond of exclamation marks, was Jim, and from a writer’s point of view, he was a great cheerleader, a teaser, a man who could coax you to write something even when it was the last thing you wanted to do. He was a marshmallow, so far as I was concerned.
In the scheme of things, we barely knew one another. West Coast/East Coast, for one thing. But, we’d worked on some programs together over the years and stayed in touch. When I had questions about getting my own book published, we’d talked more than once, at length. Helping others write and publish is what he did for a living but, despite hours of his time, reams of good advice, and dozens of useful questions, he never charged me a cent.
I was among the first to hear that he was gone, from a man in California who had it from one of Jim’s teammates. I learned immediately that Jim’s team – knowing he was pretty far down in the dumps – had piled on over to his house when he failed to show up for their meeting.
How typical, right? And how fucking awesome. When he didn’t appear, these men – just regular old MDI dudes – bagged their meeting and drove to Jim’s home to make sure he was alright. He wasn’t, of course: he was already dead, having taken his own life on the way. They were standing with his wife, wondering where he was, when the cops gave them the news.
So, being a gossip, and a shocked one at that, I played my own part in the game of telephone, and called Jonesy right away.
“HOLY SHIT!” he said, followed immediately by, “Fuck! I bet there are men all over MDI who are beating the shit out of themselves right now that they didn’t stop him from doing it.”
True that. They had done everything a team could do, and had shown the hell up… just a little too late. And right or wrong, they were fucked up about it. Pretty soon that fucked-up feeling spread around MDI, as the ridiculous number of men whom Jim had known, had touched, had impacted, learned he was gone.
And that’s how the suicide merry-go-round goes, I guess. Shock. Grief. Pain. And then, at some point, what the fuck, Jim!? How could you do this to us? And more grief.
Anyway, men grow up, they live and they die and, if they’re lucky, they manage to make others feel good about themselves, help others improve, make a mark for the better on the lives of those they know. Jim did that, for sure.
The West Coast men I know tell me he was a real hard-ass, a stickler for the truth, a man who demanded their best. He may well have been that but I never saw it. To me he was a goof, a marshmallow. An editor who loved his writers and his readers and the work he did for both. Which just goes to show how much more there was for me to learn about Jim, if he’d given me the freaking chance.
Meanwhile, someone has to fill his shoes at Legacy Magazine. For the moment, that person is me. And as I write this, and find it inadequate to what I really feel, what I really need to say, I wish that ol’ marshmallow was there to read my piece and say, “Wow, Kempner! You really nailed this one! How do you do it?”
I don’t know, Jim. But I know I have to do it without you, and that sucks.