Please consider giving to Nifty. If you're not sure why you should, please read this story to the end, and peace be with you.
Every word of this is true, including my cousin's real name. His parents are long dead, too. If anyone holds the rights to this part of his story, it's me.
I have a picture of Jacky as he went through the buffet line on a cruise ship, circa 1963-64. I would've been 9 or 10. He's wearing an Hawiian style shirt, standing between his mother and a younger brunette woman clearly there by circumstance going through the same line. He's the only one in the frame looking straight at the camera, eyeballs to lense, and even though the print is in black-and-white he's beautiful, like I remember him in real life. Somewhat under 6 feet high, mostly blond, mostly. I don't remember his eye-color, but it was probably blue. I know it wasn't brown. He had a high forehead and thin, expressive lips, like in the picture. Oh, sorry.
But this story starts earlier, when my dad lived from ages 2-9 in a mining town in Bolivia, where his father was general manager. His first readers were in Spanish. He attended primary school in a Spanish-speaking Catholic school, and played with neighborhood friends until he was sent to the States when he was 9.
Jacky was born in '46 or '47, so 6 or 7 years older than me. He was an only child, while I was the oldest of four siblings. His dad was my dad's older brother. Both of them had been raised abroad until a certain age then sent to the States for schooling. Jacky pioneered the exception to that. His dad, 10 years older than mine, worked for the State Dept., and spent his entire career in Latin America. He and his wife spoke fluent Spanish. Unlike his father, Jacky was allowed to remain with his parents as his father moved to various State Dept. jobs, among them Costa Rica and Guatemala. He'd grown up speaking Spanish to his neighbors and friends on the street, though he was schooled in both English and Spanish.
I first met him when I was 7 or 8, and desperate for a surrogate older brother. He was about 13-14. I can remember sitting on the couch next to him, looking up at him. I was intimidated by his age. He'd looked up as I came into my grandmother's living room and had remained silent as we were introduced, though he'd nodded his head. After I sat down we were totally ignored by the adults and I think he was bored and wanted out of the room, and still didn't say anything. Finally one of us said something, I don't remember who or what, and the ice was broken. Neither of us was shy after that. He showed me the pocket knife he'd just been given for his birthday, and we escaped out back. This was a small mining town and the house was very modest. He was very gentle, I think in deference to our age difference, and never dismissive of my inferior status in that regard. In other words, he was both perfect AND beautiful. I was devastated to learn his parents wouldn't be staying, as mine had just arrived. Thus ended our first meeting. I may have cried in front of him. I wouldn't see him again until I was around 13 or 14.
The cruise ship picture is in a sort of card I guess one could send to friends and family while one was cruising the Pacific in the late '50s and early '60s. The card was probably sent to my grandmother. I got almost all her personal papers and photos after she died. It made sense because the family knew I cared about that stuff. Otherwise it would all have been thrown out, but it wasn't, and this picture survived. The card itself is for a cruise line that doesn't even exist anymore. They ran two trans-Pacific passenger liners between LA and San Francisco to New Zealand and Australia. Each accommodated about 350 passengers, all in first-class cabins. Looking at his smiling expression in the picture, I've wondered who took it. Maybe a beautiful Polynesian girl, as was typical of ritzy Pacific cruise lines of that day. His look seems purposeful, sparked with youthful energy. Maybe that's just me. I place his age at 16.
My family had lived in Florida for a couple of years when Jacky applied to join the Air Force at age 18. He lived with his parents in Guatemala, and they all were coming to Miami to get him through part of the application process. They stayed at the Fountainbleu Hotel on Miami Beach. Think "Goldfinger", circling from the air above a hotel as a diver jumped off the swimming pool diving board into the water. That's the Fountainblue. I was agog as we drove onto the hotel grounds to park while visiting. By now I was 11 or 12. Through some act of God, Jacky collared me and excused us to go meet some of his friends who either lived in Miami or had flown there from Central America to party in Miami Beach. All of them appeared to be his high-school friends, and natives of Guatemala best I can remember. They would have been well-off to have been able to live in or fly to Miami, of which I was oblivious at that age. There were four of them plus me and Jacky. They were all extremely nice to me, but the itinerary was to cruise for chicks, so the guy who was driving started off to cruise the strip. I spoke no Spanish at that point but I knew a few words and phrases from listening to my father talk, trying to read some of his childhood books, and having an hour of Spanish every other day in 4th grade in California. Jacky and his buddies were laughing and joking in Spanish and a little English for my benefit, and pointing at big butts on girls we passed. It got pretty loud, but they were having so much fun it was infectious, and I was sorry when we had to return to the hotel. I also felt sorry for Jacky being separated from such good friends. I could tell they loved each other, and because of Jacky I also felt loved.
There's nothing on the back of the picture except "6400", written in pencil. I assume it's the number the photographer used to identify it in order to sell Jacky's parents this print. Or maybe they didn't buy the print, but the Polynesian girl just gave it to him anyway because she was in love with him on sight like I was.
A year later, maybe less, Jacky stayed with my family in Forida when he had to fly to the States for an Air Force physical exam. By now I was 13-14. He slept on our couch in the living room, poor kid. The dog and cats were not pleased. I was pleased, though. I got to see him before he woke up in the morning. The animals knew I wanted quiet. I just sat on the coffee table and stared at him from head to shoulders above the blanket that covered him. He wasn't wearing a shirt, and his nipples and biceps were showing. Finally his eyelids fluttered, he opened them, and he smiled at me. Not like the way he looked at the photographer on the cruise ship. When he saw me his guard was down at just past sunrise, in an unfamiliar "bed", with no other frame of reference except that he looked at me and smiled. Not an embarrassed smile, but a big happy smile that I knew wasn't directed soley at me, but it sure felt like it. Maybe he was just reacting to morning wood, but that wasn't evident in his briefs when he pulled the covers off, and I never left his side for the rest of his stay with us, except to give him privacy in the bathroom.
He stayed for two nights. That first morning he got up and let me look at him in his underwear without the slightest indication that my interest bothered him. His body was lean and muscled. After breakfast Jacky asked me if I knew any girls his age. The only girls I knew of his age were from when my family lived on another street. Our neighbors there were a large hispanic family with lots of girls. He "asked" me to take him there so he could check them out. I started to whine but whatever he said was enough to make me forget whatever my objection was then or ever might be, and we set off on foot. He tried to give me a pep talk along the way, but I was too scared to say I liked boys better than girls. I just tried to switch gears and seem more enthusiastic, in order to please him, and it seemed to work. Like before, he was very gentle and showed me respect by not calling me a twerp or worse.
We got to my old street and sure enough several of the sisters across from my family's old residence were out on their porch. That whole family was a little scary to me, mostly because almost all the siblings were older than me. But the older sisters had never teased me THAT much. And like I said, Jacky was beautiful. Even more beautiful than our first meeting, and more beautiful than the cruise line picture. I don't think he was particularly shy about his looks, and now that I was hearing him try to charm the sisters he was talking to, I realized he was something of a Don Juan. My gosh he was Romeo in the eyes of every girl he spoke to. And to a certain (cough) boy. But their brothers came out of the house, seriously ruining the atmosphere Jacky had conjured up out of a hot summer afternoon, and although everything remained friendly and I wasn't pointed out to my cousin by my former neighbors as some sort of pathetic loser, I was glad when we left. I think Jacky was, too. He never spoke the words cooch or pussy in my presence either, which shows what a class act he was. Not that I'd have known what a cooch was, anyway.
That was the end of his only full day with us. He left the next morning. My recollection is fuzzy, but I think he left before I was even awake, so it must have been a weekend. Once again I was devastated, this time for having missed his departure. I didn't know it at the time, but it had been our last meeting.
A few months later my parents got a phone call from my grandmother. Jacky had been home on leave after Air Force basic training, "home" being Guatemala. He'd gone to the beach with his friends, maybe some of the same friends I rode with in Miami Beach. He was swept away in the surf and never seen again.
I've been reminded of his beauty with the help of a picture, but nothing was ever more beautiful to me than his kind heart.
After I eventually kick the bucket the only thing standing between Jacky S.'s memory and oblivion is Nifty.org. Please do what you can to help make sure Nifty continues. https://donate.nifty.org/