The petite figure clothed in the black pajamas of the Viet Cong, slinks his way through the foliage and smoke.  A bridge burns in the background.  All manner of destruction sizzles and whizzes around him.  He’s the only survivor of his gang.  But he won’t survive.

One man, face painted and body clad to blend with his environment, steps from the backdrop of vegetation, slips a knife under the enemy’s jaw and pulls upward.  The man in black folds to the ground.  “Cut!” the man with the knife yells, walking over to a camera the size of a Pinto and pressing the stop button.

Jesse James Jones Jr. was the best director/action hero/friend I had in the seventh grade.  Almost as cool was his dad.  His dad drove a Delorean at a time in our nation’s history when teenaged boys liked nothing more than Deloreans – especially boys who watched lots and lots of movies.  The only movies Jesse and I liked more than Back To The Future involved U.S. soldiers single-handedly killing dozens of communist-allegiant Vietnamese bad guys while uttering fantastic one-liners.  And, lucky for Jesse, with a few props and zero dialogue I made quite a convincing communist-allegiant Vietnamese bad guy.  And I died very very well.

In high school, Jesse and I remained friends.  Both in the band (he played baritone).  Both in an accelerated art class for kids who hoped to be artists for a living some day.  Both enjoying our daily sketch assignments in the class immensely – at least for a few weeks.

You see, we didn’t like our teacher Mrs. Lillianstern. (I called her Mrs. Lilliansperm behind her back because, well, I was a seventeen year-old boy at the time.) Every day, when she wrote the sketch word on the board, we had some fun with her and a little competition with each other.  The word for the day might be “swing” and then we were supposed to draw the most creative representation of the word in no more than five minutes.  It was an exercise to warm up the creative part of our brain.  But it was more fun to utilize the diabolical areas instead.

So, for a word like “swing” – that’s way too easy – I might draw a guy swinging an axe to lop another guy’s head off and Jesse – much more creative than I – might draw some torture device with a swinging chain saw attached and a small kitten strapped to the conveyor belt below.  We were actually good kids, I swear: went to church, never broke any (major) laws, etc. (We did commit arson once, but it was mostly an accident.) More relevant, we were completely sane, no matter what evidence to the contrary our sketches might have been.

But Mrs. Lilliansperm didn’t know that did she?  And that was the fun – to hand in our sketches and watch her face crinkle up into a million lines of disturbed and then ask us how everything was going at home.  My thirty-four year-old mind feels sorry for the woman today but my adolescent mind hummed with anticipation all morning until sketch time arrived – it was the best time I had all day – even better if my sketch was more warped and vile than Jesse’s: a hard thing to accomplish.

The fun didn’t last. Mrs. Lilliansperm sent me to the counselor’s office to “meet someone you can talk to if you ever need to.” Jesse, to my knowledge got away uncounseled.

After graduation I fell out of touch with Jesse and about a zillion other people I swore I’d keep up with.  I heard from people in our hometown that he was shooting video for weddings at one point, maybe in the military before that, but that was more than a decade ago.

Then, today, while checking some messages in my much-neglected Facebook account, I found him.  Jesse James Jones Jr. is still a brilliant artist.  He does art direction stuff for Prologue Films.  If that name rings a bell it’s because they single-handedly turned film credits into mini-features, into an art form of their own.  (I’m a nerd.  Somehow I know these things.) You’ve seen their work on flicks like the Spiderman franchise and Across The Universe.  And more recently on Tropical Thunder, that flick about guys pretending to fight communist-allegiant Vietnamese bad guys while uttering one-liners.  Jesse is doing exactly the kind of thing I imagined and hoped he’d be doing after all these years.

Don’t know why I felt like sharing this today.  I really don’t.  Maybe it’s just good to hear about people who grew up to do what everyone always thought they were made for – it’s re-inspiring I guess.  Maybe I wonder what Jesse figured I’d grow up to be – probably not what I am.  Or maybe it’s just good to remember parts of our story we’ve forgotten and who all had a hand in making us who we are – and giving us that bullet wound scar.  Or maybe I’m just hoping Jesse finds this post some day, feels guilty about the whole shooting me thing, and let’s me die in one of his big time movies…or drive his Delorean.  I’m certain he has one.