Смерть Собутыльника
Received word a couple days ago that a guy I knew in Sakartvelo killed himself, giving me much pause for reflection. I find myself stymied from the word go… “a guy I knew” seems blandly impersonal and anonymous, yet what else to call him? He was a “friend” only in that anodyne American sense that everybody you know who is not explicitly an enemy is your “friend.” But if a friend is, at a minimum, a person you’d trust and rely upon, then he certainly wasn’t ever that. And yet I knew him better than some people I’d call friends. In fact, I realize that I likely knew him more intimately than I know anyone here in Beijing.
So I’ve settled on собутыльник—a drinking buddy or “boon companion,” though with the Russian nuance that drinking is serious business. God knows, drinking with Jarrod was: it’d be a rare tipple that didn’t feature: a) Nietzsche b) ultra-Traditionalist Catholicism c) Phenomenology d) Early Modern European history e) (most likely) all of the above. He was an intelligent guy, deeply read…but narrowly. Only one of his many contradictions: a great talker, an awful listener; generous, yet impatient; pretentious, yet outwardly indifferent to others’ approval; aloof, yet sincerely eager to share his particular enthusiasms with anyone on his wavelength. (Much of the music I acquired 2005-2006 is courtesy of Jarrod, who scoured his collection for things he thought I’d enjoy. From now on the gorgeous heartbreak of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea will have an extra measure of sadness for me. ) Women found him magnetic…and repulsive: physically attractive but psychologically off-putting.
So, he had his dalliances, romantic and otherwise, but for the most part he very deliberately kept folks at arm’s length. A loner, yet one who could be the life of the party if he chose (as he sometimes did choose). An extremist. Disturbingly intense. But also a truth-seeker, profoundly interested in the fundamental questions. (If the foregoing seems a bit unvarnished for an obit, J. wouldn’t have minded; he was nothing if not blunt, one of the most direct people I have ever known.)
It’s unlikely I’ll ever know the particulars of his death, still less whether it was carefully thought out or the impulse of a moment. Both seem equally plausible. (We all found out from a typically vague, insipid e-mail—“I remember his smiling face…”—sent out by PC Georgia to current volunteers, and forwarded to us by the latter. Yes, no one at PC seems to have thought it at all important to notify Jarrod’s actual group. Don’t get me started.)
Wherever and why-ever you are, though, გაგიმარჯოს, ბიჭო. I’ll remember that liter of Bombay Sapphire and all-night Final Fantasy session; that time you treated Duri and me at Tokyo; the unintentionally silly, sonorous voice you’d adopt to read aloud from that (incomprehensible) essay you were forever writing; your delight at that ridiculous flick about the Earl of Rochester; long dinners at that strange, empty (Georgian Mafia?) Chinese place in Bat-town; that time you shocked (shocked!) the masses by suggesting that just maybe egalitarianism isn’t the only approach in the classroom; the sly insincerity with which you manipulated the PC apparatchiki; the way you always reeked of patchouli (worse than b.o., imho); and a good deal more.
Everyone’s a building burning with no one to put the fire out. Standing at the window looking out, waiting for time to burn us down. Everyone’s an ocean drowning with no one really to show how.
“Blame It on the Tetons”
(Jarrod’s favorite song on MM’s Good News for People Who Love Bad News.)
