Jamie Wyckoff

Character Analysis

I'll Be Taking Those Apple Products Off Your Hands

First things first: Jamie will happily bash you in the head with a clock to steal your iPod. Let's just get that out of the way right up front.

"He would give me twenty bucks for every iPod," says Jamie of Fat Larkin, the guy he worked for in Portland. "I would jump joggers in Forest Park which is this big woodland preserve with all these trails and tons of trees" (1.17). And how did Jamie end up in Portland? He went AWOL from Buckner, the military academy his parents sent him to after he as busted stealing electronics from a Service Merchandise in Cincinnati. Yeah, our main man's got some sticky fingers it seems.

Jamie goes from stealing for kicks to stealing for survival, though. If you're a teenage runaway with no life skills, neglectful parents, and an incomplete education, what are you going to do to feed yourself? We'd like to think there are other options besides knocking out joggers, selling drugs, or doing sex work, but this just doesn't seem to be the case for Jamie. His only other source of income is scamming strangers out of spare change by pretending to be collecting for the family of a kidnapped girl.

What's crazy, though, is that despite all this he's totally likable. After all, whose parents haven't misunderstood them at some point? It's just that Jamie's parents really misunderstand, and putting his life in danger every day seems better than living with his dad.

At Least There's My Big Gay Brother

The one good thing in Jamie's life is his brother Peter, a.k.a. P, who also escaped their Cincinnati homeland. Now P's a playwright in Memphis, where he lives with his partner, Jorge, and their cat, Carlos. He's thirteen years older than Jamie—definitely the cool big brother—and he's indirectly responsible for Jamie's nickname. As Jamie writes to P:

I know a lot of that scene happened way before I was born, but I still relate to it thanks to your rock-n-roll teachings. Somehow Fat Larkin knew about my musical taste probably because I was always talking about punk rock. He even started calling me Punkzilla which everyone in Portland called me too. (1.25)

Even though their dad and brother flip out over P's homosexuality, Jamie couldn't care less. P's the only person who gets him, and the only person who ever asks him questions about himself like he's an actual human being. Of course, some of P's questions are hard. Jamie writes:

In your letter you asked me what I want to do with my life which is a mad serious question P the kind of question that makes you want to lie down and take a nap. I could be in the middle of a busy street and get asked that and I'd fall asleep because of the pressure. (5.17)

Since part of being a good older brother is offering some much-needed guidance to Jamie, though, we're thinking that P's willingness to dig deep is only a good thing (even if it freaks Jamie out). In the same letter, P tells Jamie he's dying. The fact that Jamie hops on a bus alone to go say goodbye is proof of two things: He's just about the bravest fourteen-year-old on the planet, and he's fiercely loyal to his one family member who doesn't stink.

Not Pregnant, Not a Lesbian

Jamie's big issue in life—okay, one of them—is that he looks like a girl. As if it's not hard enough being a teenage runaway, everybody thinks he's a female teenage runaway. As he writes to P:

I mean I LIKE girls like in a SEXUAL way but I don't want to BE one! Does that make me like PART LESBIAN or something? Because I LIKE girls AND I LOOK LIKE ONE? (8.37)

Well, someone seems a little touchy today… Jamie suffers from an age-old straight-boy malady, which is the belief that he'll never have a girlfriend and will never even see boobs unless he pays (and maybe not even then). He doesn't want to hear that he has "an androgynous beauty," and he definitely doesn't want to be asked if he's knocked up. Unfortunately for him, then, both those things happen.

Given his loner status and his anxiety about being recognized as the hormonal young man he is, it's not so surprising that when Jamie meets Albertina on the road and loses his virginity to her that same night, he's convinced he's in love. She's gone the next morning, but she leaves her hairbrush behind, so Jamie takes it, hoping that someday he'll hear from her again and get to give it back.

Our hero is two things, though: (1) a romantic, and (2) a teenager (though he'd probably cringe if he heard us calling him the former). As teenagers do, he moves on (no really, we promise, it's possible) from his first one-true love, telling P:

I might also try and get in touch with Albertina at some point but in some ways that whole experience feels sort of like a dream like one of those perfect dreams that could never be experienced in real life so I'm not sure I want to mess with it. (21.24)

The important thing is that to at least one girl, for at least one night, he was all boy. More than this, though, while Jamie's willing to leave Albertina in the past, nothing stops him from trying to get to P. Bros before… well, nice young ladies with lupus.