Missing!

Right after my friend’s husband recently vanished without a trace, I
saw a big bare foot and part of a blue-jean leg poking out of the bottom
of a car trunk at the end of my street near the super-market parking
lot. Cautiously, I came nearer and bent down to get a better view. Boy,
was that foot pale.
Must have been dead awhile, I thought, starting to feel like I was gonna
lose my lunch. Turned out to be one of those realistic fakes, a rubber
joke prop, something a frat-boy prankster or S.L. Goldman would probably
appreciate. Me, I wanted to vaporize the car owner for such a criminally
twisted sense of humor. Yeah dude, that was, like, really funny; I mean,
yeah. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Later on, we were driving around Philadelphia’s biggest park Sunday
evening — my friend the esthetician, her friend the tealeaf reader, and
I — searching for the missing husband, or his car. Every time she sees
an older white automobile with a license plate beginning with ‘B,’ my
friend gives a
start, because there are a lot of them.

This was one day after the small plane novice pilot, JFK Jr., was
flying disappeared near Martha’s Vineyard — another heartbreakingly
reckless and arrogant installment of the “Kennedy curse” — so I had
been doing a lot of thinking about how if famous people vanish it’s a
national tragedy, while
with an ordinary guy, it’s hard to even get the local police to pay
attention.

So is America a great Moron Joke of a country or what? We spend
millions of dollars searching 9,000 square miles for the Coast Guard to
get a drowned dead Kennedy out of the ocean, only to have the Navy throw
him back a few days later for burial at sea. Couldn’t they have left his
body down there, where they found it? You could say it was already in a
metal coffin any boy would have been proud of– a coffin shaped like an
airplane. Seems logical.

When someone is missing who isn’t a Kennedy, or a criminal, or
mentally ill, there’s not much the police actually typically do,
according to a Philadelphia Police Department detective, because it’s
not against the law for adult-type people to … simply vanish from
their lives. What a notion! Strangely enough, that’s their right, to
disappear, says this detective. Which to me sounds like an abdication of
responsibility and abrogation of contractual obligations, since work is
a covenant and marriage IS a contract, but what do I know? Moreover, the
detective adds, if the missing person is not clinically depressed, or
mentally ill, or a drug addict, or on prescription drugs, or if minor
children are not involved, the police tend to steer clear of involvement
in such cases.

My friend’s husband vanished Friday, July 9, after calling in sick to
work at 4 a.m. That simply wasn’t like him. Mainly because he was the
kind of person who took care of other people. At his job he was union
shop steward. Every day he went over to his 87-year-old mother’s house
to give her an insulin shot for her diabetes. He left without saying
goodbye to his wife, or his mom, or his boss. No note, just a check made
out to my friend for $2,000. “The check was his note,” police say. That
was it. He never contacted his boss or his wife or his mother or his
cousins or his brothers. They are STILL
waiting to hear from him.

My friend and her husband had recently celebrated their 9th wedding
anniversary with their traditional trip to Niagara Falls, and he had
given her a beautiful oversize card emblazoned “TO MY WONDERFUL WIFE.”
The last night they did something together was Wednesday, July 7, at 1
a.m., when he was up late working on a grievance case and she made him a
pot of spaghetti, which they shared with gusto. “He ate two bowls,” she
recalls, adding, “I’m glad I have that memory.”

The police mentality in disappearance cases like this is — for me —
hard to fathom. First off, they might think there’s another woman. If
not, then, the wife herself might become a suspect for offing the guy
for his insurance, if there was a large insurance policy taken out on
him. But not in this case; these are, were, simple people. And finally,
even within a week, with no hard evidence, police detectives might
suggest the missing person must be dead, if they haven’t used credit
cards or left any kind of visible trail. In police experience, they say,
statistics show for this kind of situation, suicide is typical, that he
must have just checked out on his life, did away with himself, for
whatever reason. Sometimes, the detective says, people just get fed up
with their lives, disgusted, and leave. And then, sometimes, they end it
all.

Sorry, something ELSE is missing here. Besides official compassion.

Suddenly my friend started getting hang-up calls and at first she
worried it was her husband. “Maybe he’s testing the waters to come
back,” she says. But would the phone company put a trace on? Nooooo. Not
unless there are five or more harassing calls, they told her; that’s
their official policy. Besides, the phone company said, it probably was
just someone trying to sell her something. Well, my friend is too
emotionally exhausted to beg the police department to twist the phone
company’s arm. Telemarketers, the police keep telling her, it’s just
telemarketers calling.

This is one of those perplexing cases where you are a helpless
onlooker shaking your head. Her
husband is a really
nice fella, my friend says, sweet and kind and caring, a trade unionist
who marched and picketed and protested for nearly every cause and
crusade that came down the pike, is a burly bearded balding guy who
lifted weights and smoked cigarettes, 51, 5′-10″, 200 pounds, brown
hair, blue eyes, a dark mole on his right cheek. He drives a white
4-door 1986 Mazda, license BGX-1268 with bumper stickers that say East
Timor Land Mines and Underground Railroad. He worked as a building
painter at a residential home for the physically challenged, where his
job is “being held for him” and his status is “on leave” in case of his
return.

“He’s a good story-teller, loves to eat, drinks beer from his own
mug, and always takes vitamins, especially large doses of vitamin C,”
his wife says. “He is left-handed and his handwriting is elaborate,
forward-slanting. He practices karate, runs, and lifts weights.”

He is, she says, a Truth, Justice, and the American way kinda guy.

---

A week after this column appeared, the missing man turned up
alive.