Jerry Vincent in Kalamazoo Draft 2

             Jerry Vincent in Kalamazoo

Woody Tauke

1083 words

New York Times Magazine

Many of us consider home to be the place we were raised: the place we grew up and learned about the world in.  The reality of life though is that we only spend a small portion of the time we have on this Earth in the place our parents chose to raise us.  Many of use spend the rest of our lives in transit, caught between the time and place we assume home is, and the place we are looking to call home.  Some of us are lucky enough to search for and realize our true home and appreciate it as such.  Many others though will spend the majority of their lives in one place; their home, and not even realize it.  They are too fixated on the nostalgic notion of the place they grew up to stop and consider that that is not where they truly belong.    It’s rare to find someone who is born where they belong, someone whose narrative is dotted with places and things but is marked by the place they, like the rest of us so inaccurately, call home.

 Jerry sits in his office, a crowded painters supply closet, surrounded on four sides by ceiling high shelves, covered with years and years worth of paint cans, on the campus of a tiny liberal arts college in Kalamazoo, Michigan.   Today, like most days, he’s flecked with paint and dust and is wearing white painters pants and a grey “FacMan” t-shirt.  He isn’t tall but he isn’t short, he hasn’t kept his crew cut from his years in the service, and he doesn’t have greying greasy shoulder length hair, like so many Hollywood archetypes would have us believe.  Jerry smokes almost constantly, is quiet, and looks like he likes to read a lot.  Jerry likes to read a lot.  His skin is tanned from the sun and his hands are broad and calloused, he works with his hands.  He uses them to wrench open paint cans, to light cigarettes, to trim ceiling tiles, and to rip up carpet.  Jerry is always clean-shaven.  He carries himself with the wisdom of his years, smiles often, speaks very slowly, and closes his eyes to tell me the stories of his life.   One marked by a medium sized city in southwestern Michigan: Kalamazoo. 

In 1970, at 19, as the reality of the Vietnam War was just beginning to permeate US culture, Jerry Vincent enlisted in the Air Force and left his home.  The idea of enlisting in the Vietnam War, in retrospect, seems reckless, foolish, some might even say suicidal yet Jerry spoke coolly of the decision,

“I was on the verge of being drafted, I’d received a notification and at that point you can either be drafted, or you can join and I said ‘Well, I really don’t want to be cannon fodder at this time because if you were drafted at that time you were in the army.  You were a bush beater.  You were canon fodder.  So I joined the Air Force.”

 After his enlistment, Jerry was packed up and shipped off to Texas for basic training.  After four months of being taught to obey commands having to,

“learn all these forms and requirements and regulations regarding the process and the means to do the shipping of people and things”

 he graduated and, in May of 1971, was shipped away.  Jerry was sent to war.  Maybe war is a stretch, but he was sent to the “tropical paradise” of Thailand, where he spent his service,

 “—moving people and their personal household goods around the world.” 

Four years later the war was drawing to a close and the Air Force didn’t need Jerry Vincent anymore.

Jerry found himself in California, just outside of San Francisco, and spent his time driving up and down the state, going in and out of the cities.  Decompressing from his formative years in the Air Force, Thailand, and the Vietnam War.  He spent nearly a month with friends in Denver: Jerry finally relaxed.  He had time to himself, and the opportunity to live with little responsibility, freely, like most young men in their 20s do.  Instead, Jerry returned to the place he truly belongs, a place he calls home, a place that many of us find ourselves away from in that time of life, but a place robbed of him. 

Later that year, shortly after his reunion with Kalamazoo, Jerry met Hans, his now partner of 38 year, a German immigrant and hairdresser.   Having just spent the past five years shipping people and things around the world, Jerry found himself a job in the, then booming, travel industry as a travel agent.  For another four years Jerry packed people up and shipped them to places like San Francisco, Texas, and Thailand.  Exhausted by the frustrations and tedium’s of the industry,

“I said fuck this.”

and Jerry quit in 1979.  Out of work and with Hans breathing down his neck Jerry begrudgingly went to look for work once again.

            At a cocktail party one night, after a month of floating around, and Hans getting madder and madder, Jerry met a member of the,

“Foreign Study Program, ya know? which is CIP now”

at, Kalamazoo College, who promised him a secretarial job.  Jerry came to K College and settled, but not with either the Foreign Study Program or with the CIP.  Instead, Jerry found a niche with Facilities Management as a dorm painter.  Jerry’s father was a professional painter, and Jerry spent his childhood working on and off, with him.  At FacMan, in the summer of 1990, Jerry developed the student worker program and took twelve student employs with him to renovate Harmon Hall.  For Hans and Jerry, the rest is history. 

            Jerry left the place he grew up around the same time that most young people do, and had his share of adventures.  Jerry could have settled anywhere, but he didn’t.  He settled here, in Southwest Michigan, because this is where he belongs.  Jerry still employs students and keeps that tiny campus in Kalamazoo looking fresh, and Hans now owns his salon just up the street.  They smoke a lot of cigarettes and live happily together.  Jerry’s mother still lives in Portage, and he helps take care of her several times a week.  Jerry is at home here in Kalamazoo.   You can call this uninteresting or boring, but it’s a rare and beautiful thing in life; when you find someone who truly belongs.