Jack lost his virginity with the day manager at Bojangles’. She was on break; he was supposed to be cleaning the store’s grease trap, though it could easily be argued that’s exactly what he was doing.

Women always did like Jack.

Five years later, his life is a shambles of convenient lies, tawdry romance, cheap cigarettes and designer drugs, like a straight version of Andy Dick.

He’s always the first to see what I make; nothing is so debauched that he can’t look at it objectively. It’s hard not to see beauty when most of your time is spent defiling yourself.

He would disappear for months at a time. I could never bring myself to show anyone what I painted while he was gone, until the time he disappeared and never came back.

As it turns out, Jack was getting clean when the woman he was staying with shot him, and then herself.

That made sense to me.

Women always did like Jack.