Josh’s Last Hurrah
Last Tuesday, my best friend, Josh Shaw died. But this is not a ‘gee, a good friend died and I’m bummed’ post. No, while Josh’s passing was quite sad, he managed to do it in a way that blunts the grief with a healthy dose of the perversely absurd, which deserves to be shared.
Now, to appreciate this, there are two things that you have to understand about Josh. First, is that while he assured me that when he was younger, he was quite skinny, for the past 15-going-on-20 years, he has been quite overweight. Indeed, for years I've been describing him as a ‘seedy, disreputable-looking Santa Claus’. Either that or a combination of two or more of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers melded into one man.
Second, by a strange blend of Nature and Nurture, Josh had a remarkable streak of the Contrarian in him. His parents were both Communists who had disavowed the Party after the Stalin-Hitler Pact, and while Josh’s diapers may not have been Red, they were definitely a vivid shade of Pink. He was a very verbal man who loved conversation, debate, and even flat-out arguments. Josh was an Ashkenazi Jew who wanted for a Viking Funeral. He was a New York Jew/ practicing atheist who married the daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher. He identified with the Irish Catholics in their struggle, but was still an ardent Anglophile. In the early 70’s, just before Kent State, he worked for the Youth International Party (or the Yippies, if you must), who later joined (and quickly quit) the Republican Party. He was the kind of Leftie who signed the ‘country of origin’ space on an ID as ‘The United States of AmeriKKKa.’ He loved guns and several times traveled to Nevada for the thrill of shooting off fully automatic machine guns, but in the over 30 years that I knew him, I never once saw him raise a hand in violence to anyone. He loved to sing, despite the obvious fact that even _I_ sing better than he did, and I can barely carry a tune in a bucket. He was an ardent book lover whose apartment is still at the time of this writing crammed with too many books, who was also a massively kinky guy who loved S&M/B&D. He was once a president of the Society of Janus, an organization for S-M/B-D aficionados, back before that sort of thing went mainstream. When I first met him, he first had his (then) girlfriend Karen, a very well-turned out woman with (as Woody Allen put it) ‘Vast Tracts of Land’ lift her blouse to show me her new nipple piercings. A little while after that, in the same encounter, he had her sit in my lap. Many years later, while we were working together, we were ‘encouraging’ a young man in his late teens or very early twenties, who was sleeping on the sidewalk to move along. The kid, who could have been a SitCom actor portraying ‘a snotty young affluent kid disaffected with his upbringing, traveling the hostel circuit and looking for meaning among the disenfranchised’, was clearly looking to be oppressed by someone; he screamed at us that we were fascists. He obviously had no idea what a fascist was, but he’d heard the buzzword and was aching to use it on someone. To which, Josh snapped to, gave a Nazi salute and yelled “Sieg Heil!” He was that kind of guy.
Early Tuesday morning his (now) wife Karen got up and tried to wake him up. He was cold to the touch. Uncharacteristically, it seemed that Josh had gone gentle into that good night that awaits us all.
Or so it seemed.
While sad, it was hardly surprising. Josh was, as I said, badly overweight, he was 65, when young he’d been the kind of Leftie who saw using strange drugs and drinking too much as means of defying the Establishment, he had a bad knee that made the moderate exercise of walking a torture (and not the fun kind of torture, either), he had Type II diabetes which he scarcely paid attention to, he was on an ever-changing blend of medications, and he’d survive three heart attacks, and had a triple bypass for one of them.
When the Neptune Society came to pick up his body at 8 in the morning, he had problems getting the gurney into his apartment. Josh’s apartment is a Victorian-style row building, of the sort for which San Francisco is famous (yet there are fewer and fewer of), and the hallway is very cramped, and as I said, his place is still, as of this writing, packed with way too many books. Josh was something of a book hoarder When they tried to turn the gurney in the tight hallway, Josh’s body tipped off the gurney, spilling corpse and gurney. Going down the steep, high flight of stairs from the door to the gate, the gurney slipped again, with both gurney and body rattling down the stairs, depositing both in a heap at the gate. And when they got him out the gate, and were opening the back of the van, the gurney got away from them again, and went rolling down hill towards Market street, with a half-naked dead Santa Claus strapped to it. But what really makes this story worth telling, especially if you knew Josh, is this: by some strange providence, when Josh had gone to bed the night before, all that he’d worn was a T-shirt. As Josh’s body seemed to try to escape the men who were trying to take him away, all that he was wearing was a T-shirt that said: ‘FUCK AUTHORITY’
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