Danger Will Robinson

The Christmas after I turned seventeen, my ex-Y began courting me. He showed up at my house unexpectedly with his best friend. While we had become friendly in school and he was a good friend of my closest high school friend Denise, I found his showing up at my house on Christmas day odd, particularly with his best friend in tow. Eventually we started hanging out like the friends we were becoming; mostly because he had this uncanny knack of showing up wherever I was. And I think Denise had something to do with that. Long before we ever held hands, Y and I were already considered an item to others in our social circle.

Months after we started holding hands I was invited to his home for dinner. His was a family that sat down together every evening for a full course meal followed by a homemade dessert. They epitomized normal to me. And I needed normal. My father worked nights most of my life and we sat down to eat as a family one night a week, and I missed that family time the rest of the week. Before long, I became a weekly fixture at my boyfriend's dinner table. Mostly I felt welcome, and that was a good thing because I was drawn to that dining table like bees to honey because my ex-MIL is a fine southern cook.

Though it was 10 years after the last show aired, as far as I was concerned, I'd entered the land of Leave it to Beaver (a warm-hearted television sitcom that ran from 1957 to 1963), where a stable Mom and Pop, the big brother Wally (my boyfriend) and a younger brother, nicknamed The Beaver, lived in almost perfect harmony. The Beave, who was 12, took an instant liking to me. The liking was mutual.

Over the course of the next five years, whenever I visited Wally's home, The Beave added much comic relief. Much to my delight and dismay--delight because he was hysterically funny and dismay because he reserved his humor for me alone.

We'd be sitting at the dinner table and at just the right moment when no one was looking, The Beave would make a face at me. Not any old face because this kid was the master of comic looks. No one was better. Not William Powell, not Peter Sellers, not Jim Carey, who is mostly goofy. The Beave was anything but goofy. At twelve he could raise his eye brow and move it around like an antenna and mimic anyone with his facial expressions, and worse he could exaggerate it ever so slightly to make it screamingly funny. All while no one else was looking except for me.

There we'd be at the dining table and I'd burst out laughing. All faces would turn to me, including The Beave's (innocently), and I'd say, "It was The Beave; he's making faces at me." It was torture. Or I'd be sitting in the living room and The Beave would get up and walk into the hall only to stop and turn and pose like male models in the Sears Roebuck catalog, staring off stupidly into space, arms awkwardly held, torso twisted oddly.

No doubt Wally and his parents eventually believed me that The Beave was intentionally torturing me, though I think they thought my sudden eruptions were a bit over the top. And then, when The Beave was about seventeen, an odd thing began to happen, parents of his friends, running into his parents at The Beave's soccer games, would say things like, "It must be nonstop laughter in your home with The Beave around." Slowly, he was revealing his comic genius to others.

The Beave received his first bottle of cologne from me for Christmas that first year when he was 12: High Karate. You'd have thought that I'd given him gold. It was obvious (to me at least) that he had begun to notice girls. Gone were the days where he had to be reminded to take a shower or comb his hair. In fact, for a while there, until he learned to make his hair behave just so with relative ease, you had to force him out of the family's only bathroom. Not having a younger sibling, I felt privileged to be in The Beave's life and watch his transition into adulthood as I was experiencing my own.

And like the long dance into the humor spotlight among people who knew him, I became The Beave's confidant; ours was a slow dance that required in-person communication. Unfortunately, after Wally and I left home for college, we always lived nearly four hours away by car. The Beave would bring up a topic as if it didn't apply to him to suss out what I thought, and I would attempt to handle the topic delicately and evenhandedly, and then the next time we'd meet, he'd talk to me about how the topic applied to him and I'd offer him validation, support, and guidance where appropriate. (While The Beave and I might have been doing the dance for years, I didn't catch on until he was in college, and that's when I began to make a concerted effort to make sure I was evenhanded whenever The Beave raised an issue for "general" discussion.)

For me, an open book, this two-step was a frustratingly slow dance, plodding really, but I understood it as The Beave's way for now and so I let him lead. I had confidence that over time, he'd learn to skip the general, introductory discussion--the getting to know you "first step" in our two-step--and head right into the heart of the matter just as he'd learned to trust everyone around him with his humor.

Indeed, one night as the last of the party goers gathered on the front porch of the apartment Wally and I shared while he was attending grad school, The Beave broke into an impromptu comic display in front of a group of our friends, some of whom he'd only just met. The entire bit, lasting about an hour, used a simple aluminum lawn chair as a prop. The. Entire. Time. You name it and he managed to fit it into his performance. From a rendition of the worst song ever performed by a very popular band to Lost in Space, a TV program that ran from 1965 to 1968 about the family Robinson who--you guessed it--was lost in space along with a robot and a self-centered scientist, Dr. Smith. The robot (called "The Robot") looked out for the youngest Robinson, Will.

About the time The Beave put the aluminum chair over his head like robot armor and began frantically flip his ineffective tubular arms about while shrieking "Danger Will Robinson! Danger!" I thought everyone would bust a gut or tackle him to make him put down the freaking lawn chair. People had been leaking tears with their laughter, holding on to their hurting ribs, and begging him to stop for at least 15 minutes. The next morning we arrived at a friend's house--someone who had only met The Beave the night before--to go out for brunch, and when the friend opened the door and saw The Beave in our company, he promptly closed it again. Right. In. Our. Faces. He would not open the door or come out unless The Beave promised not to be funny. The physical workout the night before had been too much; his ribs couldn't take anymore.

Today, I was reminded of The Beave's humor when a FB friend noted his three favorite comics of all time: The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, and Bloom County. My top three favorite as well, with each reminding of someone I've adored more than most. The Far Side reminds me of Wally, my ex-Y, Calvin and Hobbes reminds me of Tom--who is without a doubt Calvin--, a wonderful man who became a friend of mine in college, and Bloom County, which will always be associated with The Beave. Wally and I owned a stuffed Opus, the large-nosed penguin in Bloom County, and for giggles we'd sometimes put a pair of cool sunglasses on him to give him a bit of personality. When he visited last, The Beave commandeered Opus and played comic dress up, using props from around the house, to place him in all sorts of outlandish situations from popular movies and television shows. The Beave, normally laid back and a wee bit shy, dazzled Wally and me with a spur of the moment, frenetically paced opus that only a comic genius could perform.

You see, early on in our confidant dance, back when The Beave was a teen, I missed an important cue--one that probably contributed to the two-step that The Beave and I danced when it came to my being his confidant. And the last time I saw him, he engaged me in another getting to know you first step in our dance about a topic of general concern to him, and I thought we had plenty of time to follow up with the second half of the dance the next time I saw him. There never was a next time.

The Beave committed suicide. He was only 25 years old and the rest of the world had yet to know this comic genius that more than rivaled John Belushi. Worse, we, his family and his friends, lost a dear, dear soul.

Before The Beave died, I'd experienced death of someone of great significance to me. My father died of a stroke three years before. After Wally and I married and by the time my father died, my family and Wally's family had become one large family, celebrating every Thanksgiving and every Christmas together. There's not a holiday while we were married where you won't find photos of both families.

When The Beave died, the photo in my mind showed our family with a neon outline of where my father had once been, and where The Beave's image belonged there appeared a violent rip instead. Suicides devastate families. Don't do it.

Last week was Suicide Prevention week. Learn the signs. In The Beave's case, between the first step in our last dance and the day he committed suicide, he had been let go from a job and hadn't told his parents. He faked working. His parents learned of his firing and called us to express concern and ask our opinion about what they should do. It was decided that The Beave must have been embarrassed and buying some time. And given the family's closeness, it was assumed he'd go to his parents or come to us when he was ready to talk about it. What he did was travel from his parents home toward ours and half way in between he killed himself.

Follow your gut if you ever become concerned about a friend or relative's odd behavior. Don't favor logic over your gut. A life might hang in that balance.


Dedication: This essay is dedicated to The Beave, one of my all time favorite people who shall remain in my heart forever and always. This essay is also dedicated to my loving father whose death certificate was signed on this day, September 14, in 1982. (He’d had a stroke four days earlier on September 11.)