Robb Armstrong

   The creator of Jump Start made me weep today by talking about his life — by the way he talked about his life.

  Upfront, he was funny. Just funny and talking over sketches of his characters as he drew big marker versions of them on an easel tablet. The way he told us he had been on a book tour for his autobiography suggested he was tired of talking about himself and would just be amusing as heck. 

“Just buy the book, OK? Been on a book tour for a year. I have nothing more to say about it.”

   But the story is compelling and not so much about him as about his family and why he is who they made him. Once he started telling it, he became compelled. He went way over time. It seemed hard for him to stop.

   I didn’t want him to stop. I have an intellect. I am not a sucker for a story. And I was not the only weepy person in the room. 

   His poor mother! She was up against it, with five kids, as any woman would be, but this fatherless family lived in a violent time in a bad part of a big American city. 

   His older brother became a scary dude in defense of his family. Armstrong was the youngest. His 4-year-old sister drowned him in the bathtub when he was 18 months old. He had to be resuscitated. That older brother, who he described so comically and vividly I wanted to meet him, he was killed at age 13, his body ripped in half when a conductor got mad at some other black kids that had jumped a turnstile and so shut the door of an El train just as he was stepping aboard. 

   His mother got them the hell away from the El, in a row house in a better neighborhood and somehow got her youngest, who she was determined was a genius, into a private school — a private girls school. White girls were the first kids he ever saw who were fierce about education, and scary competitive. 

   Another older brother, age 16, was beaten nearly to death in a case of mistaken ID by some police who eventually, years later, were acquitted. 

   Racial injustice and just the stupidity of a system — life — that kills the people we love and need, the strong, necessary people of vision, like his mom — is too sad to bear anymore without tears. What the hell can anybody do? 

   One time, into a microphone, my Irish Great Uncle John said it: “We laugh so we do not cry.”

   But how stupid is a stupid system that kills our necessary people just because they are alive? His mother died of cancer at 49, having told him about it on the day he got into college.

   All kinds of people, maybe everybody, has lived a great story, but hardly anybody can tell it, and it’s the telling that makes it a story and great.