Recently, I randomly googled an old friend, Jason Briscoe. I can't even recall where my friends Kathryn and Rebecca (a.k.a. "Trucky") and I discovered him when we were twenty and he was an ancient twenty-eight. In those days, we collected all sorts of peculiar friends. I suspect that we came upon this one at the Republik, our favourite haunt.
I was surprised, during my google search, to discover that Jason had passed away from cancer in his forties. We had lost touch years ago, but I'd assumed that while I hunkered down to a career, and a marriage, and to a life filled with small folk with dripping noses, mismatched socks, and peanut butter fingertips, he would continue his perpetually charmed life of coffee shops, music, cigarettes, and Mass.
What surprised us most about Jason was that we couldn't surprise him. Our exceedingly (and wonderfully) eccentric friend Rebecca could surprise most anyone. She once lit a fire on the dance floor. She actually tossed an ice cube into a cluster of attractive men and went crawling in amongst their ankles and Doc Martins to retrieve it, much to their astonishment. And yes, on one occasion she dropped into the fetal position and started rocking when a young gentleman put his arm around her in an attempt to woo her. (I suspect he is still in therapy.)
Typically, while Rebecca pulled off the impression of being completely unstable, Kathy and I would play the "nice" role: wholesome, sweet girls with a bright future ahead. The key was to appear normal and completely oblivious to the fact that our friend's antics were, well, insane. Young gentlemen who wished to court us would end up being completely baffled, to our great amusement. [I recall one man actually jumping out of our car while Rebecca was still driving, so scared was he. He started to get nervous when she carefully parallel parked right up against the window of a fast food joint, apparently failing to notice that she was on the lawn. A few minutes later, fully unnerved, he made a dash for it while the vehicle was still in motion.]
But back to Jason . . .
When we met Jason for the second time, he was unperturbed when Rebecca informed him that he appeared too healthy and then proceeded to apply some green eye shadow to his cheeks and forehead. Though he had known her for a total of one hour, he calmly accepted the vampirish makeover. Our friendship was sealed: we had found a companion as crazy as we, and that was intriguing.
Jason, at this point in our friendship, was the sort of man who could appear exceedingly cool and fashionably indifferent one moment, and then melt over the sight of a cute kitten the next. He was at once worldly and innocent. I fondly recall a time when he was living at his mother's and slowly working his way through all of her canned goods (she was elsewhere at the time). He called his mother's portly cat into the house, rummaged through the cupboards, and pulled out a can of oysters, which he generously forked into a bowl and placed on the floor. The cat ate with great pleasure.
I discovered soon after that neither Jason nor his mother owned a cat. A few weeks later, the neighbours would complain, asking him to please stop feeding their already corpulent feline.
Jason was probably the coolest wannabe priest you'd ever meet. He loved women, once telling me that if I wouldn't date him, the least I could do was walk around with him in public. That way, he explained, other women would label him "safe" and he would have a much better chance of dating somebody. He loved his music--Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Orange Juice--and he spoke of living in Europe, modeling and riding his motorcycle along cobbled streets. He referred to Jann Arden as his "friend." Still, he aspired to join the Franciscans and spoke passionately of the Children of Medjugorje. He legally added "Mary" to his name. He loved angels and longed for visions.
Unfortunately, visions were a reality for Jason in his ongoing struggle with schizophrenia. He despised his medication and, like so many others, immediately stopped taking it when his mental condition improved. And so once, in the basement of his mother's house, he heard mocking, sinister voices singing "Happy Birthday" to Jesus. And his delusions led to his hospitalization on at least two occasions, and his arrest on another. He even crashed my birthday party one time, only to accuse my mother of trying to poison him by putting alcohol in my cake.
Through the years, our paths would converge again and again. At one point, when Jason was living in Vancouver and the rest of us in Calgary, Kathy and I took a road trip to B.C. Thinking we could save a few dollars, we contacted Jason and asked to pitch our tent in his backyard. Always amiable, he agreed.
We discovered, upon our arrival at his residence, that he lived with other men. These men were not priests, we quickly ascertained. Something was a little off. Nor was Jason his normal self: he had grown comparatively plump and moved slowly, as if underwater. Eventually we figured out that we had pitched our tents in the yard of a halfway house and that Jason's normally animated spirit was being subdued by medications. We did not sleep well that night, especially when one of the household residents opened the flap of our tent and said what sounded to us like a sinister, "Good night!" It is likely not a coincidence that I discovered, in that very tent, the first white hair ever to appear on Kathy's head.
When in a good frame of mind, Jason was always a reliable source of entertainment. We attended my first cat show, and visited a Great Dane farm where puppies as big as ponies frolicked through the fields, flecks of spit flying. He took me to see Father Black, a priest who came dangerously close to slaying me in the Spirit when he concluded that a ring I'd picked up in Hawaii somehow resembled a serpent. [I wasn't about to have any of that, of course. There were places I intended to slay him should he touch me.] We went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where I saw the most beautiful and broken people share their stories.
Jason always had a way of making himself present even in his absence. During a trip I took to Seattle with my friend Julie (to see Mr. Nick Cave live), a city bus passed us by.
"There's my friend Jason!" I said. He wasn't on the bus: rather, his grinning image was sprawled across the entire side of the bus. Julie snapped a photo of the advertisement for pajamas. Jason would later chuckle when I mentioned the ad, pointing out that his belly wasn't as flat as it used to be (for he was now in his thirties), and that you could certainly tell in that photo.
Just today, Jason popped into view once again while I was trying to rescue treasures from my parents' crawlspace (my dad is on a cleaning tear). I found a fisherman's cap he had given me many years back, my last memento of him.
Jason is undoubtedly looking down at Kathy, Rebecca, and me right now. He probably wants his hat back. He will no doubt want me to write a blog in his honour. And he will certainly saunter off once I have, perhaps to bum a cigarette off of the nearest angel or to feed some saint's poor cat a can of celestial oysters.
Good bye, Jason. I will never forget you.
