In my early days at KGO Radio, I had a very close and dear friend named Duane Garrett. In the summer of 1995, Duane—a big, funny, gregarious fellow—jumped to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge. As in most cases of this type, everyone who knew him was shocked. We hadn’t seen it coming. He was a successful entrepreneur, lawyer, radio-talk-show host, and politico. He managed the U.S. Senate campaign of Dianne Feinstein and was a friend and confidant of then-Vice President Al Gore.
Duane was the official historian of the San Francisco Giants and a partner in a large auction house that specialized in rare sports memorabilia. He had a loving wife and two daughters who adored him. His home rested atop a bluff in Marin County and it had a picturesque view of San Francisco and the very bridge that he would one day use to end his life. By all appearances he had it all.
As the wisdom that comes with age teaches us, appearances can be deceiving. After his death, it would come to light that Duane was having serious financial difficulties. His entire monetary situation was a facade, built precariously on a house of cards. A house of cards that was about to come tumbling down.
When you live a life as public as Duane’s was, it’s a double-edged sword. While your successes, accolades, and accomplishments are lauded to the masses, so are your failures, faults, mistakes, and faux pas. Just as the spotlight magnifies the positive things, it also intensifies and blows out of proportion the negative things. There’s an old joke on the subject.
Q. How come all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again?
A. Because he fell from such a high place.
As a man who had grown up “the fat kid,” who worked his tail off to achieve success and thus had his very self-image tied up in those achievements, the thought of the public humiliation of failure was unbearable for him.
When Duane died, the universal refrain was, “What a selfish thing to do.” I disagree. Suicide has nothing to do with selfishness or “taking the easy way out.” Suicide is the result of pain. It is the culmination of an anguish so great that you will do anything to make it stop.
Imagine that you have a blade sticking in your shoulder. Once the blade has penetrated your flesh to the bone, it’s being twisted—slowly, excruciatingly. You can’t see straight. You can’t think straight. All you know is the pain and you don’t know how to get the blade out of your arm. If you were in that position and somebody said, “You can make it stop. Just drink this bottle of strychnine,” trust me, you’d use your free arm to grab the strychnine. That’s why people take their own lives.
Fortunately, most people have the resources to remove the blade, be it family support, therapeutic support, or spiritual support. They have a coping mechanism by which they can make the hurting stop or, at the very least, find a way of dealing with it. It is those who lack such systems who commit suicide. The truly sad thing is that lots of those people do indeed have resources to help them. They don’t realize it because of isolation, the clouding of the mind that accompanies depression, or, as in Duane’s case and mine, pride. Pride doth indeed go before a fall.
Had Duane Garrett told his friends that he was in trouble, had he confided in the multitude of people he had helped and nurtured over the years, had he simply asked for help, there isn’t a person who knew him who wouldn’t have done something to assist in rectifying his situation. Any one of us would have pulled the blade out for him. That’s the true tragedy.
There were people who would have gladly taken out my blade, too. All I had to do was ask. My own pride and hubris wouldn’t allow it. I was a lone wolf, the only one of my kind in the universe. There was nobody I could turn to, nobody I could trust but me. Not my wife, not my friends, not Grandma or my sisters. If there was a problem, I would find a way of dealing with it for myself, by myself. Anything short of that would have been a sign of weakness. I had spent a lifetime learning that the world is an ocean full of sharks looking for black meat. The second I showed myself to be a wounded animal in their waters would be the very second that they’d devour me.
The interesting thing is that this attitude makes me more of a “genuine black man” than I realized. Black people aren’t depressed. They don’t talk about it or deal with it. They can’t show weakness and they damned sure can’t lie on a shrink’s couch lamenting their woes. If they can’t take the blade out by themselves, damn it, they’ll leave the motherfucker right where it is.
During my worst days, I would take Duane’s walk. I’d park at Vista Point by the Golden Gate Bridge and walk to the spot behind one of the towers where I figured he must have jumped. It’s a place that can’t be seen by passing motorists. I’d stand there, sometimes for hours, looking over the railing, crying and pondering my life. I thought of going over the side many times but it was just too damned high. My fear of heights trumped my fear of life. Eventually, I’d make my way back to my car and head home or to the TV station to prepare for the next morning’s wacky antics. The tears of a very sad clown.
For me, every slight, every indignity, every reminder that I was “not like the others” was a twist of the blade. I ignored it and used mental tricks to block out the pain. I bit down on the bullet as long as I could until I finally reached for the strychnine.