Graham Shelby - The Man on TV

 

When I was a kid, I loved TV. I really loved TV. I was an only child, and other children made me nervous. The people I trusted most tended to be on TV. I especially enjoyed detective shows like The Rockford Files, and Murder, She Wrote and Magnum, P.I., because they were so smart. You know, you'd start off with a mystery, and there'd be some suspense and drama and then at the end, they worked it all out. It was great. 

 

Life was pretty suspense free. But there was this one mystery I wanted to solve. It was my father. I'd never met him. I didn't know where he was. I didn't really know what had happened to him. I grew up with my mom and my stepfather. He was the one who picked me up at kindergarten, and grounded me sometimes and taught me how to tell a joke, and catch football and stuff like that. But I was always curious about this other father I'd had, especially because nobody wanted to talk about him. 

 

Now, over the years, I had put together a few pieces of information I'd asked or overheard. I knew his name was Jimmy. I knew he was tall. I knew he liked barbecue. I knew that when he would get really tickled about something, he would fall on the ground and grab himself and kick his feet in the air. I knew that because apparently, I did that too. I also knew that he had been a Green Beret in Vietnam. When I was still a baby, my mom left him, took me and we didn't come back. 

 

And at some point, after she remarried, Jimmy signed some papers, so that my stepfather could adopt me. But I wanted to know why all that had happened. It was hard to get a straight answer out of anybody. And so, I did what the TV detectives did, which is take the facts you have and then try to come up with a story that explains them. And so, I just went to my mom one day and said, “Mom, was Jimmy a bad guy?” And she said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, was he a bad guy? Was he mean? Was that why we left?” She said, “No. No, he wasn't a bad guy. He was just messed up by the war.” And that was all she really said. 

 

I’m like “What does that mean? Why would the war make it so he couldn't be my dad?” I was secretly mad at all of them. I was mad at Jimmy for screwing up whatever he'd done to make my mom want to leave him and I was secretly mad at my parents for not leveling with me about what was going on. I didn't know how I was ever going to get any answers until I was 12. And that's when Jimmy showed up. But he didn't show up in person. He showed up on TV. Apparently, how it all happened was in Vietnam, he had this friend. And the friend asked him, “If something happens to me, write a letter to my mom, okay?” And Jimmy said, “Sure.” And the friend didn't make it home. 

 

It took Jimmy 13 years to write the letter to his friend's mother. But when this lady got it, she was so moved that she contacted this reporter she knew and somehow there was going to be a story about the two of them on Memorial Day on the CBS Evening News. Jimmy called my mother, first time in years to tell her all this. My mom's explaining this to me and inside, I'm going, “What the heck? This is crazy. This is really cool. This is crazy.” But I'm also like, “I'm finally going to get some answers.” And mom says, “So, do you think you want to watch it?” And I'm 12, so I say, “Yeah, I guess.” 

 

But as we get closer to the broadcast, I realize I do not want to watch this with my parents. That would be really, really awkward. So, I go over to my grandparents’ house and actually sneak into this little room in the back of the house. I turn on the TV. It's like this little black and white knob. I'm listening. There comes Dan Rather. He says, “The story of two soldiers who fought side by side in Vietnam. Only one came home. And now, their families find peace of mind years after the agony of war.” And then, there's this footage of men running around in a compound, and there's explosions and then I hear this voice. It's Jimmy's voice. He has this deep, raspy voice. He's talking about his friend and he says, “The real battle was after I came back.” And then, they show his face right there on the TV. 

 

I've never watched a moment of TV more closely than I watched that. I leaned in. I was inches from the screen. I can barely process what he's saying. But I'm just looking at his eyes, his nose and the shape of his chin, because I want to see if I can see myself in there. There's something, but it's not 100% clear. And then, the scene changes, and the lady he wrote to, she comes on and she talks about how this letter that she got from Jimmy really helped her, really solve this mystery that she'd been struggling with of what had really happened to her son. She says, “I feel peaceful now. I can put that at rest.” 

 

It shows the two of them, they go to a church service, they go to a picnic and then they're standing in this graveyard next to a headstone, their arms on each other. Jimmy says, “You know, writing that letter was one of the hardest things I've ever done. But I'm really glad I did, because I helped this lady who really had been searching.” And then, they hug and they smile and they disappear. And I'm like, “What was that?” It was like the emotional equivalent of sensory overload. I couldn't really put it all together in my head, but I would try to just pull chunks out and was like, “What did I just see?” I felt like I got an impression. 

 

For one thing, Jimmy was impressive. He came off looking impressive. He was strong and noble, reached out to help this lady. So, he was good. But I was also jealous and confused. He reached out to help somebody from his past. It wasn't me. So, if Jimmy's not a bad guy, maybe I'm bad. Maybe it's me. Maybe he saw that and that's why he let me go. He fought for his country, he fought for his friend, but he didn't fight for me. 

 

Time passed. We didn't hear from Jimmy. Then about three years later, I hear about this movie called Platoon, which is supposed to show a realistic vision of what the war was like. I go see it, and it's amazing and horrible and confusing and I decide, I'm just going to write to Jimmy. I'm just going to do it. I get the address from my mom and I write him a note. I just introduced myself, I think, like I said, I'd taken karate. I was trying to sound impressive. [audience laughter] I write him. He writes me back. So, he says, he glad to hear from me and we can meet sometime. We keep writing for a while, and we send each other mixtapes. Eventually, we start talking on the phone. He has this voice, he talks like, “Hey, kid. How you doing?” Eventually, we meet in person. 

 

When I'm 18, I say, “All right. I'm ready. Let's meet in person.” It's like when you meet somebody you've only seen on TV, only it was my father. We're in this parking lot, halfway between his house Indiana and my house in Kentucky. I can tell he's staring at my face the way I stared at his on TV, looking for himself. We have a little awkward hug, and we go sit down in the hotel room and he says, “Is there anything you'd like to ask me?” And I freeze. All the questions that I've had, “Where you been?” I can't think of any of those. Partly, I think I'm afraid of hurting his feelings, afraid he might disappear again. So, he talks. 

 

Then he tells me some stories, and I learn a few things. He takes out this picture album, and he opens it up. I don't really get much out of any of the pictures, his family and sometime of the war, till I see the very last one. It's a picture of him in his soldier uniform. He's about 21, and he looks exactly like me. I know this is my father. So, after that, I go home, talk to my mom about this. She opens up, tells me some stories. Jimmy and I keep talking. He tells me some stories. And eventually, I learned the truth about us. 

 

The truth was there was nothing wrong with me. The fake stories that I had made up to tell myself were worse than the real story my parents were trying to keep from me, to protect me from. The real story is that Jimmy grew up with an alcoholic father who beat him up and then Jimmy went to war. And one night in the war, he asked his three best friends to go wait for him in this one part of the camp until he got off duty. The last thing he said to these guys was, “I'll be there in 10 minutes.” Two minutes later, the mortar started dropping. 10 minutes later, Jimmy found their bodies. He said, it was like walking into a butcher shop. 

 

And the truth is also that in the brief time Jimmy was my father. He changed my diapers. He sang songs to me like blackbirds singing in the dead of night and Rockabye, Sweet Baby James. He drank a lot and he smoked a lot of weed. When my mom asked him to stop, he said “No.” He said, “This baby is not going to change my life.” When she said, “We were leaving,” he cried. When she asked him to stay away while I was growing up, he agreed. 

 

So, knowing all this, I asked myself like, “Should Jimmy have fought for me?” But when I think about it, he was already in a fight inside himself. I still though would have liked it if maybe at some point he would have said, “I'm sorry kid, it wasn't your fault.” But he didn't say that. He did one time say, “You were better off with your mom, stepdad than you would have been with me. But I missed you kid, every day of your life.” I knew Jimmy the rest of his life, and he always thought of his moment on CBS as one of the proudest times of his life. 

 

When he died, we showed it at his funeral. I have three sons now. And someday, I'm going to show that video to them and I'll tell them about Jimmy, even though I know that for them he'll always just be a face on TV. But I won't. For my kids, I'm not mysterious. I'm dad. I'd like to better at that than I am, but I'm decent. I'm flawed, but well intentioned and loving like my parents, including the man who let me go. If I could say one thing tonight to Jimmy that I never said, it would be thank you. Thank you for letting me go.