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“I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it.”
- Janet Flanner |
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Aftershock: Book Revives Sensation Over Carsey |
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| September 6, 1989 |
On a weekday just over seven years ago, Jay Carsey boarded a plane from Washington D.C.'s National Airport and left behind a life most people would yearn to live: a coveted college position, a beautiful wife, an historical home full of worldly treasures.
Dropping out of sight, never to return, 47-year-old Carsey's move shocked friends and colleagues, and perplexed many who had known him in Charles County.
But 19 days ago, Carsey, former Charles County Community College president and one of the county's most infamous figures, spoke from an office telephone where he now works in dry, hot, El Paso, Texas, where the pace of life is slower. He told of the startling decision and move that changed the course of his life instantly and endlessly - proving Julian Nance Carsey is not most people.
"The lifestyle finally did it. I finally realized I didn't want to spend my life like that," Texan-born Carsey said in the Aug. 25 interview, his voice distinct and melodic over the phone lines. "All of a sudden I got in my mid-40s and I said, 'I don't want to do this the rest of my life.'"
His life has changed. There is his present position with EI Paso Community College as assistant to the academic vice president; and tours in Greece, Turkey, England, the Azores, Holland and West Germany where he taught graduate courses on military bases. He has gone from living at a YMCA in EI Paso where he first settled with an assumed name after leaving here, to living with his second wife, Dawn, as Jay Carsey.
"Once you decide to do something like that, you either do it or you don't do it. You don't go home again. It's one thing to sit and think about it, and one thing to do it."
One thing to do it. Another, to be left behind.
"The trauma of it is not something you get over easily," said CCCC President John Sine
and long-time friend of Carsey's in a recent interview when hinting about the pain he believes Nancy Carsey, now Carsey's ex-wife, went through. "I am told that missing someone is worse than the trauma of death, because there is incompleteness."
Recently, Nancy Carsey was contacted by the Maryland Independent for an interview, but it wasn't until 11 a.m. yesterday that those phone calls were returned. A media consultant called to say she had been hired by Nancy to help arrange that Nancy's side of the story is told. Now, the Maryland Independent is waiting to hear when and if Nancy Carsey will grant a personal interview.
The book "Exit the Rainmaker" has now driven to the surface of people's minds the day Carsey left Charles County in a quandary, a move that has been speculated over for years. "I don't know if we'll ever recover the reason for his leaving," Sine said. Sine's use of the word recover, instead of uncover, seems to symbolize the effect Carsey's departure had on the county.
John Thomas Parran, insurance man and former state senator, said, "Again it's a complete mystery to me. Jay was always quick on his feet when it came to doing things. I'm not so sure that something didn't pop in his mind and he just went." Parran, on the college's board of trustees, was one of those called in May 1982 to listen to a tape Carsey left Nancy.
He continued, "When you can't explain something that is so dramatic about somebody, it's difficult to pinpoint what was in his mind."
After Carsey's disappearance, there was bewilderment coupled with theories: murder, suicide, embezzlement of college funds, another woman, a desperate move brought on by excessive drinking and money worries about the college. All of them, as it turned out, were later debunked as causes - only two of them, the college's financial future and Carsey's penchant for drinking, even bearing any truth.
Carsey laughs when questioned about how people postulated on his departure, especially about the notion that he was lying dead, of his own accord, somewhere. In fact, he said, when he dropped five letters and one postcard - short messages to Nancy and college cohorts - in the mailbox before his flight, he felt "elation, a real sense of freedom:"
That simple act, sending off a group of farewell notes, Carsey calls, "the point of no return. ... I didn't have to go to any more board meetings, any more graduations, any more Southern Maryland parties. I could do whatever I wanted to do."
What he wanted to do was begin a new life, something that would later involve living incognito when he first came to EI Paso (he moved back to that area last year), venturing into the bar and grill business and living in what he describes as an experimental stage - a time of uncomplicated bachelorhood during which he met Dawn.
That phase, however, came to a sudden halt when People magazine ran an article in September 1982 about Carsey's disappearance. "That blew my cover," Carsey recalled. "The game of my false identity was over. I had to say, 'The hell with it.' I am who I am.'"
So, he does not ask for understanding; he doesn't fret over whether people agree or disagree with what he did.
On several occasions during the interview, Carsey referred to what he did as "severing" - at one point making an almost trite comparison when he said it was while vacationing at his and Nancy's time-sharing units in Florida months before he left that he decided to "cut bait."
"There are times in your life when you really have to sit down and decide what the devil you're going to do with it. I thought, 'If I don't do it now, I'm not going to do it when I'm 57.'"
What he did, though, he says was a reaction to many things, not just one. "If all I wanted to do was get out of the marriage, I wouldn't have done it that way," he said. There were a multitude of reasons - all fitting into a complex "mosaic," Carsey said. In addition to leaving the lifestyle, he said he also was going back to his roots and leaving a role in which he was always president, never himself.
He said, pausing between words, he was moving on.
It was during a previous brief discourse with a reporter from the Maryland Independent (there had been one earlier contact) - and the later conversation - that Carsey perhaps let down his guard about what he did years ago when discussing author Jonathan Coleman's book. "I would have to say No.1, I never thought it ["Exit the Rainmaker"] would come out and No. 2, you go through some feelings reading about yourself.
"It can be a traumatic situation to read about yourself. ... I'd be happy if nobody read it until the year 2020 when a bunch of monks found it in the Library of Congress when they were writing a dissertation."
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