why i jumped off the bridge

a sincere review of a sincere american novel

Queensborough Bridge, Edward Hopper, 1913

“You’re naïve, face it. Why do you think we took you in? We saw an innocent, protected kid, wishing, praying to God he could belong to something.” The Crew, pg. 204.

At fifteen, I dipped my toes into teenage recklessness for the first time.

I guess I can’t say I only got my feet wet, however. I almost drowned.

Entering freshman year, my friend introduced me to a bold upperclassman with a vast network of older friends. I viewed this girl as an entryway to the wild, unbridled adolescence I was itching for.

At this age, I felt an unfulfilled drive within me; an untapped reservoir of chaotic energy that threatened to overflow from my unfledged body. I yearned for spontaneous late night adventures, to sneak into tightly-packed venues, to drive fast across wide-open roads. More than anything, I wanted to forge iron-clad connections with people who understood me.

With these new friends, I felt understood. We all suffered from the same affliction: aching to be free; hungry for all unknown sensations, burning together like wildfire.

At least, that’s how I liked to think of us.

While I achieved some of these goals with Taylor, I carry more regrets than fulfilled fantasies. I was reckless for recklessness’s sake. I didn’t know my own motivations, didn’t consider the motivations of others, nor understood my limits. I’d only know that I’d gone too far once I looked behind me. 

When Taylor asked me between classes if I’d jump off a nearby bridge with her and a couple of our friends, I laughed. She didn’t.

The bridge she referred to was a few blocks down from our high school campus, standing 27 feet above a rushing river. In spring and summer, locals would jump from it to cool off; it’s especially brag-worthy to jump off the very top. However, we hung from its lofty iron framework on a rare sunny day in February.

It took me a while to work up the nerve to let go, swimsuit-clad and shaking from a mix of windchill and fear. Letting go was exhilarating in itself: I’ll never forget being suddenly air-bound; how I anticipated the water’s embrace, yet only kept on falling.

When the water finally caught me, it was a cold, hard, and unforgiving embrace. The river flash-froze me. In the disorientation that followed, I missed the designated ‘drop-off’ point, where a sturdy oak branch kept swimmers from being swept away by the current.

I swam hard against the surging waters, reaching frantically towards the branch, but my muscles were rapidly stiffening. As my friends screamed my name, I tumbled downriver fast.

If I hadn’t washed up onto a tiny clearing of sand, barely substantial enough to stand on, I don’t know what would’ve happened to me. It took a full hour to cross a neighboring hedge of sticker bushes, a preferable route to the unforgiving river.

Completely beat up, I finally met my friends on the other side. On the drive home, I internalized the solution to the embarrassingly common phrase: if your friends jump off a bridge, don’t follow them.

Only now can I see the underbelly of my motivations: I wanted acceptance from my new friends badly, and wasn’t about to reject their invitation. Worse, I sought self-acceptance in the form of an anecdotal souvenir from my ‘wild teenage years.’ These flimsy motivators blinded me to the fact that I could’ve lost everything in a single afternoon.

In picking up Sincere American Author Michael Mohr’s new novel The Crew, centered upon a teenager in the Southern California of the 2000s, I was reunited with this spirit of willing recklessness. I found the book to be an engrossing character study with a convincing underlying moral: who do we follow, and why?

I couldn’t help but juxtapose my bridge-jumping with the moment that Jack Donnigan, the 16-year-old sheltered narrator of The Crew, gets hazed by his newfound anarchist friends with a trial-by-fire. They literally set him ablaze:

“Fire ripped off my body like crazy magic illusions and the orange-red flames licked and popped. I smelled the stench of burning clothes, singed cotton. Desperately, I tried to stand up but fell right back down. I was powerless” (pg. 12).

While Jack survives the attack unharmed, he’s undoubtedly altered as a new recruit. As he describes, “It seems I had crossed some threshold, some boundary which bonded me to them… There was no way I could walk away from this: I felt the hook through my lip already” (pg. 13). 

The Crew is rife with double meanings and anxiety-inducing ambivalence. In the above quote, Jack is both the catch of the day and an addict to this new environment. Having been he’s nicknamed ‘Dog’ by the group’s leader, Cannon, this ambiguity continues. In derogatory terms, he’s being called a blind follower, a tagalong; expendable. However, ‘Dog’ could be simply endearing, just as it could be rude. In this whirlwind of acceptance, Jack doesn’t consider how he’s being viewed; he only cares that he’s been viewed at all.

‘Dog’ is also the inverse of ‘God’. Noting this explicitly, Mohr points to a fundamental theme of the narrative: Jack’s pursuit of truth between good and evil.

Jack knows that the truth he seeks doesn’t dwell at home, nor in the halls of his Catholic prep-school. It certainly can’t be found in the innocence of his childhood. He’s drawn to this clique of punks for their anti-establishment sentiments, their ‘cult-hero’ authority, their lack of fear for anything or anyone. The Crew is the opposite of everything he’s ever known, an anarchic parade of bravery and disregard; the closest thing to wisdom he can find.

However, it becomes glaringly obvious through the course of this rollercoaster-read that Jack didn’t free himself from authority in joining this Crew; he only traded allegiance to a new leader. He sees that Cannon abuses power—he even calls his friend a ‘fascist dictator’. Despite how Jack continually tests the limits of his and Cannon’s friendship, threatens his authority and tries to steal ‘his girl’, Jack never willingly leaves. He believes they’re still ‘like brothers’, having yet to learn there’s only so much time one can spend in a lion’s den before being eaten.

The novel’s frequent religious allusions emphasize the danger Jack’s in: immediately after his hazing, Jack asks Cannon if he’s joined the ‘New Church’. A friend called ‘Demon Delorean’—D.D for short, is the reason Jack joined in the first place. The ever-seductive Sarah and unpredictable Cannon flash ‘devilish’ smiles. A pusher named Johnny tells Jack that heroin is angelic and offers salvation, leading to one of the most harrowing scenes in the novel. Running away from the life he once knew, Jack finds himself in a daring dance with multiple devils. This dance is so exciting, he doesn’t notice he’s being closed in on.

I liked The Crew’s conclusion most; a sequel remains ripe for the picking. It’s made clear that Mohr believes, especially as a Substacker and independent publisher (with ‘no teams’ and ‘no loyalties’ in his bio), that following a crowd is useless at best, and damning at worst. The ‘Dog’ we shut the book on is forced to blaze an independent trail towards freedom, truth, and success. The Crew pushed him deep into a harsh reality, and to survive, he must swim against the current. 

Check out Sincere American Writing, and click here for The Crew if you want to read on. I’d like to give a big thank you to Michael, for prompting his readers to look within:

Who are you following? Why?

Until next week,

Constanze