Hogarthian Lines
Soulful grace neither intended nor implied.
Loss
Last week a colleague of mine was arrested after admitting to planting a camera in a bathroom at his place of work. He was released on bail. His institution severed ties to him before the first news report appeared, and records of his existence there and elsewhere were expunged from websites. Last Thursday afternoon he ended his own life.
I met Jack Conrad in late Spring of 1999, just as I was finishing up my PhD research at University of Chicago, and just before he started his there. We shared an apartment and got to know one another a bit. I was struck by how sweet and unfailingly polite he was, in that southern sort of way, and I was impressed by his knowledge and enthusiasm for herpetology. He was also a surprisingly messy flatmate, which provided a nice counterpoint to his southern decorum. At some point that Summer, I read over a paper he had written and offered some comments. He thanked me with a wonderful pencil illustration depicting fleshed out versions of the five sauropod dinosaurs whose skeletons I had recently reconstructed in an SVP Memoir. He titled the piece “Long-Necked Bad-Asses,” which made sauropods seem way more metal than they ever had in my hands.
July 27, 2016
Jack and I lost touch with one another, as people do as they relocate and go about their lives. But I followed Jack's research on fossil and living squamates. We co-authored a paper. I referred to his papers in classes I taught as well as in my own research. I chatted with him at meetings. I heard snippets about a falling out he had with another researcher, and maybe something about a bad breakup, but nothing out of the ordinary. From my perspective, he was doing well: he had a job and was recognized as a leading paleoherpetologist. So as I look back to pick up the thread of the Jack I knew in the Summer of 1999 – young, happy, optimistic – and try to splice it to the thread leading to the last few days of his life, there's a disconnect. It's unbridgeable. It's time apart, certainly, but there’s this gulf that naturally emerges between the real person and the persona one reconstructs from odd fragments of interactions, received notices, gossip, etc. Jack's crime was serious, and it wasn't victimless. I don’t know the depth of it, and I don’t really care. Whatever it was didn't add up to the price he extracted from himself. It takes so much to form a person. I think about the energy, love, hope, resources poured into this person. Thirty-nine years of surviving illness and close calls, like the Land Rover plus trailer he and my brother Greg flipped in Niger (Jack’s seatbelt was a frayed stub dangling from the hanger). All the hours devoted to research, the expertise earned, help given and received. And the sum total of this group investment voluntarily and irreversibly deconstructed one Thursday afternoon in New York.
In the days following his arrest, I thought about contacting him just to say "hey man, you fucked up, but you can get help and put your life back together" ... "The scrutiny will be intense for a while but it will fade." But I didn't. I didn’t think I knew him well enough to say those words to him. Perhaps that’s true, but I could have let Jack decide that for himself. Who knows if it would’ve made a difference, but small gestures sometimes do—especially when it feels like the world is caving in, as it must have felt to Jack. He was so quickly fired from the university he served, which seemed to have retreated from him like some embarrassment-filled grenade. Scrubbed him from their website. But he was a member of their community. He needed help and support.
Jack and a buddy with a night’s haul. Note the GnR tee. 🤘
“Long-Necked Bad-Asses” by Jack Conrad. Pencil sketch on paper 1999.
(L-R) Scincus scincus, Cylindrophis ruffus, and Mosasaurus hoffmanni: representatives of three groups central to snake origins. From Jack’s influential 2008 paper on squamate relationships.
At some point when we were both at the University of Chicago, Jack casually mentioned to me how he liked to go frog giggin' back home. I gave him a sort of side-eyed, drop-browed look, and before I could say more he gleefully launched into a story about how he and his buds in Mississippi used to go out at night and collect, and then eat, bullfrogs. I don’t remember more of the story, but I won’t forget the way his face beamed when he was telling it.
