Everybody Has a Story: Haunted by the Jan & Dean mistake

Many years ago, when I was in my early teens, an odd family experience reunited my cousin with his mother, who lived in a nearby town. This cousin had been living with our family since I was of preschool age. I never knew why this living arrangement occurred, and it was a frequent question among neighborhood kids. “Why aren’t you living with your parents?” “Where are they?”

When it became public knowledge that my cousin’s parents were divorced and that his mother lived in the next town, the questioning became more personal. “Don’t you want to live with your mom?” “Do you have brothers and sisters?” “Don’t you miss them?”

I didn’t think about it much, but this must have been difficult for my cousin. He lived in a house with his cousin (me), his aunt and his uncle (my parents) for reasons he may not have understood. To the best of my knowledge, he did not resent living away from his mother and siblings (he had four, plus two half-siblings), and it is possible that, although he did not arrange this living situation, he may have actually embraced it. That embrace lasted until he was 15, and I was 13.

One day it was announced that my cousin was going to live with his mother (and her family) in the next town. This happened around Halloween. He would be leaving our high school and enrolling in his new local school, near the house where he would now reside. This announcement caught my family off-guard, but maybe it shouldn’t have surprised us — for, although my parents provided every kindness imaginable to him, I don’t think he felt emotionally attached to them. Although we were only two years apart and essentially raised as brothers, we did not share a close bond, either. We lived together but we hardly knew each other.

That Christmas Eve, the first in which my cousin had lived apart since we were toddlers, I made a crucial mistake. It was completely avoidable, and I shame myself for not being alert to its possibility — and I have recounted the events that led up to this mistake so often to my own children that they know it by heart. I use it as a warning to them, and the trigger phrase to alert them is merely to say “Jan and Dean.”

My cousin and I were asked to walk down to the local family-owned grocery store to retrieve some crucial food item for the Christmas Eve meal served prior to gift unwrapping. As we walked down the alley toward the grocery store, my cousin asked me if I liked Jan and Dean.

Jan and Dean were famous singers in the early 1960s. They were part of the Southern California surf music craze; they sounded quite a bit like the Beach Boys and many of their songs focused on similar beach and car-culture ideas — but somehow the magic of surf music never took root with me.

I told my cousin that I didn’t like Jan and Dean much. As our walk continued, he told me a little about living with his mother and how he was now forced to share a bedroom with two older brothers, neither of whom he knew well. I told him that I hoped things would work out, but if they didn’t, he could always return to live with us. I had no stake in this situation. I didn’t miss him, but I also didn’t wish ill for him. We were strangers walking down the alley.

After dinner, it was time to open gifts. The two younger cousins were most impatient, as was expected. As he had always done, my former live-in cousin proudly presented gifts to both of my parents: A pipe rack for my dad and a set of sweater hangers for my mom.

Then he gave me a nicely wrapped gift containing what was obviously a vinyl record album. I eagerly opened the gift without realizing the doom contained inside the wrapping paper: “Jan & Dean’s Greatest Hits.”

Nothing I could say would change the outcome of this moment.

Not quite six years later, my cousin took an overdose of prescription medication and died, quietly, in a flop house hotel in the old section of the nearby town — one week shy of his 21st birthday.

I continue to be haunted by this mistake. It is said that we are supposed to learn from our mistakes. If that is true, then today, on my 69th birthday, I’m proud to say that I am very, very learned.

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