Uncle Gerry's Family Fun Zone

I didn't know Will could draw, I remember thinking as my friend's hand quickly moved across the page. And then I looked more closely at Will's impromptu sketch, and I immediately regretted it. I tried to unsee it. I shifted my attention to other things around me, anything at all that wasn't ink on the page: the blur of Will's hand, the beads of sweat gathering at his temples, the gentle autumn breeze creeping through the crack of the window.

Don't look at the page. Just don't look at it.

But I knew I had to. So I looked. And it was worse than I expected. Much worse.

Will had sketched a near carbon copy of those wartime Uncle Sam posters, except not quite. The suit was there. Bow tie, check. But no Uncle Sam head.

The Uncle Sam body had the head of a goat.

The animal flashed a welcoming, toothy smile. A hoof pointed at me, nearly coming right out of the page. But it didn't want me to join the U.S. Army. No, this goat-headed creature had something else in mind:

I want your kids.

Under that declaration, in slightly smaller letters, it read: At Uncle Gerry's Family Fun Zone! Opening soon!

I'd never heard of Uncle Gerry's Family Fun Zone before yesterday. The place, I quickly learned, played host to a significant moment in Will's childhood. And although I'd been good friends with him for fifteen years, he'd never told me the story. But today, he'd opened up.

I wasn't trying to reopen any wounds from his past. I'd just wanted him to tell me a story. Any story. I'd been listening to a lot of NPR, and being inspired by their storytelling segments and slices of American life, I purchased some professional recording equipment and setup a makeshift studio in my house. My goal was to capture and archive the stories of my friends, relatives, really anyone who had something to say.

Call it boredom. I was a widower with a seven-year old son. Besides doting on my kid, I needed something productive to fill the time.

My recording area was cozy – just a couple microphones, a small table, a few chairs. I'd sit a few feet from my interview subjects. The intimacy would induce real honesty and emotion. That was the plan, and it worked a little too well.

I never thought my storytelling experiments would go so wrong, so quickly. And it wasn't just Will's story and his sketch of the Uncle Sam human/goat hybrid thing. Before I'd interviewed Will, I heard another version of Will's events from the other person involved in the Family Fun Zone incident: Will's wife and my good friend, Caroline.

Caroline and I dated for a little while in college, a stretch of time we now joke occurred in a "parallel universe." We were never supposed to happen, we decided – instead, there was some sort of a cosmic hiccup and different universes intersected for the briefest of times. Our relationship was over before it started. Caroline then began dating Will, the two lived happily ever after, and the three of us have been close ever since. Caroline and Will's history predated our collective existence in college – the two went to high school together. But I never knew exactly what they'd experienced as classmates and friends. Not until I set up my little recording studio.

I interviewed Caroline first, and Will's interview occurred the following day. Both of my friends requested I not tell the other about the contents of their respective interviews. I'm certainly not planning on it. Both interviews were long and free-ranging. I'll just transcribe the relevant portions of their stories, the stuff about relationships and about Uncle Gerry's Family Fun Zone. It's important that these stories be shared in some form.

____________________________________________________________

Excerpt of Caroline Interview