I lost my brother... no we weren't brothers by blood, we were brothers by soul and by mind and in saying that maybe were we brothers because we were lost souls trying to make sense of this fucking merry go round we just happen to be on... for those who've been around the lounge you might recognize the name Gulfboot Johnson or The Limey... the former his moniker and the latter given by me as a joke many moons ago... to say my head's been swimming since the Saturday (May 2) i got the news would be putting it mildly... i wasn't ready for my brother to go... though what i want really has fuck-all to do with how the universe operates but the fact was that over the last few months we had gotten back to our old selves, the way we once were, trading ideas and quick-wit and enjoying the way our minds worked when we were communicating with each other, be it in person, on the phone, in the modern day method of texting... in fact it was this last one that we had began to really enjoy, the ability to be able to be sit in our respective rooms on different continents and take our time as we thought about our responses, conversations that would extend off an on throughout the night... and there were still things i wanted to tell him, needed to tell him...
And so as i'm apt to do i took a dose and sat in a dark room to think about my friend... to ponder our almost thirty years of friendship and the ups and downs that came along with it... it's difficult for a relationship spanning decades to avoid conflict or disagreements and Gulfboot and i butted heads on many an occasion for various reasons that all seem rather trivial now... i guess the beauty of it was that before he was gone we had gotten back to where we started... two brothers who loved each other unconditionally and had come, through years of experience one could say, to understand each other better... though the tough part for me is i realize i may have missed some things... and having missed those things i wish i could call my brother up and tell him how much i loved him one last time...
It's been hard to write anything since he passed but there have been numerous conversations with his friends and family and the thing that hits home the most, that gets me every time i dare to think about, that makes my eyes well with tears, is the fact i may have missed just how much my friend loved me, how much he, in a way, looked up to me as this big brother, this male figure who accepted him for who and what he was, that he never really got in his life... to be clear he was a far superior writer than i, a talented painter, managed to turn one of his manuscripts into a movie and is the reason i'm typing here at the lounge at all... he was the one who set this site up as i think he got tired of reading my long emails filled with stories, many of which now populate the back catalog of the lounge... but that's misleading... way back in those mid-aughts, the time when the "blog" was gonna make us all rich and famous writer types, Gulfboot had said the emails i had sent were too good to for just him to see and so he set this up, oddly enough I had no idea what a fucking blog was but almost twenty years later here we are... and what he really told me without saying it was that he believed in my ability to write... the one thing we both wanted to do... and honestly how precious is it to find someone who believes in your ability? yes some will say we have to believe in ourselves first and foremost but the truth is nothing bolsters the spirits more than the belief in those you respect in your chosen medium... it was his gift to me and in some ways i never realized it until he was gone...
In speaking to his cousin, one our other friends and most importantly his ex-wife (the two were still friends and though the marriage had dissolved they still cared deeply for each other) i realized just how much i had meant to him and couldn't help but wonder if i hadn't failed in my holding up of my end of the friendship... thought it's really not as cut and dry as that... and if there is one thing the mushroom does it guides you, gets you to look at things from a different perspective and can lead to insights one may not have thought of otherwise... and taking all the things i'd learned from those conversations it did...
His cousin had gotten a hold of me through social media and then we connected on the phone... he said that i was one of the first people they tried to reach as they knew how important i had been to him... our old friend, now living down under, had said to me that he remembered way back when he had first met Gulfboot and how the first person he had ever heard about was this tall, ex-weed dealing Yank who was half nutter half sensitive lug... but it was his ex-wife who really had me thinking and made me go back to dwell on the things i may have missed... don't get me wrong, she had no idea as we were just talking about a person we both loved dearly and i was glad i got her to laugh a few times as her grief was fucking overwhelming but she gave me some insight into my brother that i may have missed or been too wrapped up in my own shit to see... so what did i learn..
The relationship that Gulfboot had with his father was a complicated one... on some levels they were very much alike, both highly intelligent, both strong-headed (see stubborn) with convictions and opinions that they defended and argued passionately... but there was a tension between the two and sitting in the dark and thinking back i realized just how much my friend just wanted his father to accept him for who he was which i understand completely... i was lucky, Pops let me be exactly who i wanted to be as he explained it wasn't his life it was mine... and i also understand how parents sometimes who want "what's best for their children" really mean they want their kid to do what they want and what they think is right for them while forgetting the kid has a say... that said i realized how much mental and at times physical abuse my friend had to endure, particularly the psychological part... on speaking with his Ex she told me how his mother had called her recently and asked for help, asked to talk to him about therapy to try and heal the wounds inflicted by his father... what stuck with me most was she talked about how much pain he was in, not so much in the physical aspect, but in the mental aspect, pain that stemmed i feel from never being truly accepted or really loved by his father... his old man always seemed to be ridiculing, criticizing, disparaging even when Gulfboot did something worthy of praise... fucking two books and a movie later you'd think he could at least get some respect but these wounds ran deeper than that, his father was a tradesman and i think a lot of what was hurled at my brother was aimed at his "manhood" so to speak, that he was soft and not tough or rough enough in his father's eyes, i know from our conversations over the years that there were physical altercations that took place and his old man was bigger and stronger and usually got the better of it but it was the psychological damage that really took its toll...
Enter his friend, aka El Kono... when he met me i was this weed slinging hood who worked manual labor, and in some respects there were elements of his father and i that overlapped... i guess one could say i'm physically imposing in a sense, back then i was slinging boxes in warehouses, it kept me strong and in shape, i went home and became a criminal and ran a business where being physically bigger than most people helped my cause... when we began hanging out it didn't take long for us to become good friends though Gulfboot would say it was my first trip to England that really cemented what he thought of me... but in the beginning there was Bukowski and the Stone Roses, my love of the whole Madchester scene and my Anglophile bent on music, back before the internet one needed to be a real nerd to find this stuff and he was a bit taken aback by my love and knowledge of such, then when he saw my bookshelf he was stunned, built of stolen cinder blocks and lifted lumber there were two shelves dedicated to Bukowski, there was Burroughs and Celine and Orwell, there was Hunter Thompson and John Kennedy Toole... a veritable list of madmen and weirdos... what i came to realize is that, consciously or more likely subconsciously, i in some ways reminded him of his father... a laborer (albeit one whose real job was selling contraband), a rough around the edges hard partying maniac who seemed to have a somewhat intelligent head on his shoulders... the difference was that i accepted him for who he was, enjoyed who he was, even the parts that could be less than enjoyable at times and hence loved my friend unconditionally which is something he never got from his father... i realized in a way that i had somewhat supplanted the male acceptance he so longed for from his dad that he never got... which hurt cuz i know there was a stretch where our communication was sporadic and strained and i realized how that must have hurt him, how that feeling of rejection could have crept back in from the one guy who had always accepted and loved him for who he was... i won't say i was a father figure to him, more a big brother who in some respects he looked up to and who gave him what his father never did...
Sitting there in the dark all these things were in my head and it was then that i opened the phone and looked back through our texts... and then one of those texts practically knocked me over, we were discussing the state of the world and the way we didn't understand certain aspects of it and he wrote this... "thank you for making me not feel alone in the world for the last thirty years..." i must have read it a dozen times... i repeatedly wiped the tears from my eyes... how is it that sometimes we miss what is right in front of us? how do we not realize how much someone might look to us for acceptance or approval or love? knowing what i know now, how he was doing his own research on his health and he understood that he was not long for this world, that he knew his time was shorter than he let any of us who loved him know, that in a way he was telling me how much i'd meant to him and maybe, just maybe, he was telling me goodbye... he was thanking me for my friendship, for the love, for the wonderful cosmic accident of meeting someone who thought and looked and felt about this madhouse in much the same way he did... there is part of me that is incredibly sad i didn't realize this sooner, though i did realize it but i just figured that's how shit was... and i think my friend understood that, it's one of the things he loved about his fucked up friend, his brother (me) didn't worry or analyze shit too much he just got on with it, he accepted and loved you for who you were and didn't worry about it, didn't worry if people told him his friend was a pain in the ass or out of hand, the big lug just loved him anyway...
And what really struck me there in the dark was something that i had talked to him about before but didn't really grasp the root cause of ... as i've said Gulfboot was a ridiculously talented individual who did accomplish more than the average bear... yet he never seemed happy, sitting back and thinking about my friend i realize now, the antics and drinking and clowning were his defense mechanism, his shield to hide the pain he felt from a childhood, a lifetime, of being told he was a failure by one of the people he looked to, maybe the one he most looked to, for some semblance of approval and support... he seemed to always want to be famous and while i understand that's a popular dream among this particular type of primate known as the modern human i feel it had more to do with his father than anything else... if he somehow had achieved some sort of fame or notoriety for his art, or any of his other endeavors (like managing bands and such) that his old man would finally accept him, show him the love that he so longingly craved... and while i could go into the Freudian bullshit of how his father felt he was competing with his son for his wife's affections (Gulf was extremely close to his mum) there was obviously more layers to it than that... maybe it's as simple as some people just aren't built to be parents... and while there's nothing wrong with that the fact is those same people become parents and fuck up the poor kid who doesn't have a say in the matter and is stuck with someone who doesn't want to fulfill their obligation...
I know in his passing i've thought about all this... i've thought about how Gulfboot looked at my father and i and saw the type of relationship he wished he had (though to be fair many of my friends over the years have spoken about the same thing) and about how we'd talk about our fathers, about the things passed on to me from mine, the wisdom of my life being mine and i had to live it the way i wanted regardless of what anyone else thought... it was the freedom my father gave me, the unconditional love that came with it, and while he wasn't saying go out and be a complete fuck-up what he was saying was go out and be a decent human and do what you want... it's something Gulfboot never got from his old man... and it's a fucking shame cuz his father missed out on an absolutely brilliant son... luckily his friend did not... and even in his passing my friend is helping me, teaching me, getting me to think about the relationship i have with my own sons and how i understand they both look to me for approval, for love, for knowledge... and i try, i fucking do, they're both different and while i worry about them both i worry about them in different ways... but that is for another time, what really matters is that i'm aware and think about it and think about how much damage a father can cause to his son... and so i try to do the best job i can...
So what now? as the esteemed and wise Kid said the other day about the passing of Gulfboot, he's gonna write for all those who can write no more... that statement helped to shake me out of my stupor... helped me to realize that i need to do the same, hell maybe even send out some of these stories into the world, maybe sit down like Gulfboot and crank out the book that is already there, not for some long shot at fame or money but for my friend, for my friend who is gone and can't do it anymore, can't spin his weird and wonderful tales into the world and so in order to keep our little band of weirdos creating i'll do it... in a way it's the best way for me to honor the memory of my friend, of my brother... because though i may have lost sight of it he never did... so to Gulfboot, wherever you are, thank you for making me not feel alone for the last thirty years... i love you brother.
(above painting by Gulfboot Johnson from l-r Kono, Gulfboot, Paddy... that Oasis song sung many moons again in the back alleys of North Oakland)
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