This picture captures the real him. The 'active smile', almost aggressive and shark like. The smile is completely genuine, but you look at this person and you know that behind the smile is twenty snarky comments he is exploding to say out loud to whomever is within earshot. Even if he was only my height, this is a man determined to command every room and able to do it. He claimed he was 5'6 1/2, which is about as likely as his lie to me when I was six that he won the Tour de France three times, but if inner size were manifest outwardly this guy was as tall as Robert Wadlow.
I will never hear another Jack Tucker quip that fell out of him twenty-five times a day as easily as the rest of us eat breakfast. They were often cruel as hell, and yet they also revealed a kind of warmth. He always compared himself to King Lear, but everybody knew what Shakespearean character he was: he was Jack Falstaff, only a foot shorter and (sometimes) two-hundred pounds thinner: witty in himself and the cause of wit in other men. To be in his company was to be constantly put on the spot: you either could take his needling or you couldn't, and he forced you to always be on your toes: intellectually, emotionally and humorously. If you didn't make fun of him first, he would gobble you up with a bullseye on your weakest point. He could be a... well... he could be a bit of an assh*le, but he was a hillarious assh*le.
Yet within that Falstaffian wit was concealed all the seriousness of Shakespeare's Henry IV with all Bolingbrook's fatherly disappointment in his Prince Hal, and on top of all that, the temper of Harry Hotspur. It is almost impossible to convey a person that large: who on the one hand could have so much contempt for others yet also so much affection and even at times compassion. To call him one of a kind is insufficient to just how distinct he was from other people: he was four or five people, each of whom were one of a kind. Funnier than everybody, smarter than everybody, more practical and competent than everybody, meaner than everybody, yet also more generous than everybody.
I don't know if he'd be diagnosed, but there was something bipolar about him. At his highest, the eyes could almost literally burst out of his head with the animation of a million watts. At his lowest, the look on him of pained anxiety seemed almost permanent. When feeling confident, his body could grow so animated it could command rooms as large as Oriole Park, when insecure, he could also fold into himself as though anticipating death at any moment decades before death came to him. He was a divided man: like us all, only moreso, and the tension between all his sides made him quite a bit harder to know than he probably seemed to people who thought they knew him.
He was an extravert's extravert, yet much of the extraversion was a mask, a performance, the presentation of a deeply insecure man who secretly doubted everyone's love. Such doubt is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and his doubts made it a bit more difficult to love him than it should have been, but he earned people's love thousands of times over, then thousands of times over again.
I know you doubted my love for you as much as I doubted your approval of me. But whether or not you ever approved of anything I did, I love you Dad. I have always loved you, I always will love you, and all things being equal, being your son was an enormous privilege.
Do I miss you? I'm sure I will, but as far as I can tell, you're still here. It's been nearly five months, but I keep thinking you're just around the corner. Your voice is lodged in my head forever and I'm pretty sure I know what you'd say about literally everything.
And in my nephew, Eli, it's as though you're still there. Five years old, just as brilliant, just as articulate, just as funny. All it takes is a little bit of sugar and Eli has the exact same maniacal gleam in his eye that you'd get after you take too much Paxil. And just in case I wonder if I'll miss you, Eli yesterday, knowing my stomach ailments, told me "I bet that your metabolic age is over eighty." So it's exactly like you're still here.
Whether through my nephew or just in my head, you will always be with me. and like the rest of the world always knew, I couldn't ask for better company.
Love,
Evan
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