For your consideration, the following eulogy

FOUR CLAIMS ABOUT JON & A PRECEDING JUSTIFICATION FOR THEIR INVESTIGATION

This past June, for the Graduating Writers’ Reading, I had the opportunity to provide an introduction for my friend and fellow poet Michael Davis, way out in lush, distant Oregon.* I gave this introduction for Michael Davis by weaving an elaborate and completely falsified account of his made-up life: I managed to claim with a straight face that Michael had been born in a crevice of the Parthenon in Athens, Greece, had been raised as a street urchin skilled in cadging drachmas from tourists by reciting lines from Homer’s poetry, and had toured the world on a yacht owned by a Rupert Murdoch-sort of media titan. All of which was of course not true.**

The Oregon introduction was my most recent public speaking engagement. As for today’s engagement, I’d intended this speech to be quite different. Since there already exists such a long list of Jon-stories that are literally incredible, stories that few of us know the full number and character of, it seemed at first that the best thing to do would be to thresh the wheat from the chaff, to pull out what I view to be the Objective capital-O truth about who my brother is and what he’s managed for himself over the past one score and two years. To set, in short, the record straight.

Then it occurred to me how bored that would make Jon.

There are a few reasons for this. For one, Jon’s interest in odd and incredible stories now seems to be a foremost and even a defining trait. Usually taciturn, Jon’s stories when he did deign to tell them tended to ramble on in the best, most hilarious way. His storytelling method was a kind of two-steps forward, one-step back approach, which he used with a comic’s sense of timing in order to maximize the number of times you heard the funniest parts.*** Another is that Jon was, well, easily bored. As I said. And he was himself a below-the-radar kind of guy. But the stories that fascinated him were larger-than-life type stories. The kind of person he always secretly was was colossal in terms of heart-size and financial shrewdness and, let’s admit it, smartness of mouth. When he chose to appear on your radar, at a party or at the dinner table, it was with an outsized persona that commanded the full sum of your attention and imagination. Exaggeration, embellishment, B.S.-ing—writers and poets call this poetic license, but I think I’m beginning to see Jon’s affection for the Very Big in a new light: he was himself innately bound up in the Very Big. Thus his astounding, brother-dwarfing physique. Thus his love of big-box warehouse discount stores like your BJ’s and Sam’s Club. Thus his knack for dangerous feats.****

So if I embellish, if I pull at the truth, I ask for the benefit of the doubt in that such pulling and stretching is the best and perhaps the only way to get at Jon himself. In short, this means that I’m in the tough position of wanting to tell the truth about him, and having to tell unbelieveable stories about him to do so.

Nevertheless, let’s away: let’s investigate a just a few Claims you might have heard about Jon, and find him.


CLAIM #1: JON DISLIKED ATTENTION.

VERDICT: Half-true. One of the chief ways in which this is true is Jon’s style of dress. He tried to dress as simply as possible: board shorts, T-shirts of solid color. His shaved head, which pre-dated the Navy, was also a step toward simplicity. In fact, I stand here as a sort of half-proof of this Claim of Jon’s simplicity and anti-attention stance; I told myself that I wouldn’t wear something to this Event if Jon would have disapproved, or would have made fun of me. As Jon would have avoided a suit if at all possible, I’m avoiding a suit on his behalf. So Jon’s dress and composure did indeed seem to indicate his wish that no undue attention be directed his way. It’s amusing, therefore, that many of his anti-attention efforts actually brought way more attention down on him than there would have been otherwise. Consider the early morning, in winter, in a snowstorm, when Jon wanted to wear shorts, a T-shirt, no coat, and just forget about his wearing a hat. All of which resulted in a long-term standoff, the car idling, Melissa and Jon’s best friend Phil silently watching a Battle of Titanic Will play out between my mother and Jon in the battlefield of the family car. This is really my mother’s story: as one of the chief players in the scene, she tells it best. Ask her sometime to do the voices. And plus, to further consider the opposite side of the attention-issue, one has to consider the photographs on display at this event; Jon’s Mr. Universe-esque poses and “You love me, don’t you” faces were late-blooming, but he made up for this fact with a gregarious and even a dedicated love of the camera, as though he were making up for all of the snapshots he’d waved away in the past.


CLAIM #2: JON WAS A MISANTHROPE.

VERDICT: Largely untrue. Sure, Jon hated crowds. He thought trips to Carousel Mall, especially on Saturdays when we tended to go, were forms of earthly punishment he never believed he’d have the strength to survive. For you to step uninvited inside Jon’s considerably-wide sphere of personal space would be akin to my approaching you with an armful of just-born and very poisonous sea snakes. But if you were admitted into that circle, if you were the kind of person whose hand he wanted to pump and who deserved a good strong one-pat-on-the-back sort of hug, he would make his affection for you known in unexpected ways. I think of two small vignettes here: Jon lighting what I believe was my first cigar, when we were I believe at our cousin Mary’s wedding—at the glass doors to the reception hall Jon watched me manipulate the mouth-end of the cigar, and all the while he offered such encouraging counsel as “Ya gotta inhale!” and “Inhale now!” When I coughed a blue streak—which is embarrassing for an older brother in ways I can’t begin to describe here—Jon unleashed his Movie Villain laugh,***** which of course only goaded me on to the eventual cigar-enjoying success story you see before you today. And then there was the eighth-grade dance at Camillus Middle School when Jon and an accomplice took a set of plastic eyedropper-type pipettes, which they’d filled with Stolichnaya vodka, and used in the CMS bathrooms to enliven the drinks of those few kids who’d gotten wind of the opportunity before the authorities discovered and collared him. Now, I realize that these two mini-stories, however much I share them in an affectionate, “You rascal you” sort of way, both center on smoking and drinking. Which are both what’s known as vices. And offering these stories up now here in the House of the Lord might not be the kosherest thing I’ve ever done. Still, the fact remains that Jon wouldn’t have done these things if he didn’t, you know, sorta care for me, or for those gangly 12-year-old pals of his who before his help had been too square to dance. When you come right down to brass tacks, he was trying to help. So I submit to you now that these acts, when considered in the light of larger hierarchies of potential sin, are proof of Jon’s profound, if idiosyncratic, loving-kindness.


CLAIM #3: JON WAS A GOOD AMERICAN CONSUMER.

VERDICT: True, true, true. Rapid-fire snapshots to drive this point home:
o Jon sitting with the family on the wicker furniture that abuts our dinner table, it’s Sunday morning, Jon’s leafing through Best Buy circulars and Sharper Image catalogs with the verve and efficiency of a Consumer Reports editor;

o Jon at 6:30 AM on a weekday, changing the channel from my preferred Warner
Bros. cartoons (although we’re both middle-school age) so he can watch the last few wee-hour infomercials for OxyClean, Ginsu knives, and Radar Detectors ‘R Us;

o Jon emerging from his room upon hearing the plastic-bag ruffling of Mom
returning home with groceries, and asking her why she didn’t get the Emperor-sized bucket of beef jerky, and informing her that these two gallons of milk would likely be gone within 48 hours;

o Jon unwrapping a Nintendo 64, joy on his face;

o Jon unwrapping a Nintendo Gamecube, joy on his face;

o Jon unwrapping a you get the idea already.

None of which is meant to suggest that Jon was too overly bound to material goods. I think that these items, if they did bring him any happiness—and I believe that they did—did so mainly because they gave Jon the opportunity to share his enjoyment with us. Goods weren’t ends; they were means for communicating with others. To wit: the catalogs featured fantastic bargains and rip-offs he’d tell the rest of us about. The infomercials were for products the Lobko family couldn’t bear to not own. His beef-jerky consumption skills were, I can only conclude, supposed to be abilities in which we could all take deep pride. And if I turn (back) into a video game junkie, it will be because I’m playing against an everpresent, phantom opponent.


CLAIM #4: JON TENDED TO DO THE UNEXPECTED.

VERDICT: Obviously the case. Many of the photographs you’ve seen of the recent Jon have him squatting on an Alaskan peak—in shorts and a T-shirt, you’ll notice. It may seem a drastic juxtaposition with those photographs of Jon as a flaxen-haired wee lad about [REMEMBER TO GESTURE] yay high, dressed in some sweater or fleece get-up I surely myself had a matching version of.****** And while there is a way to draw a linear line along Jon’s life day-by-day such that these photographs are strung together like pearls on a string, I prefer to look at these photographs differently. I see them as though each photograph’s a mountain-peak to which Jon has incredibly, Supermannishly leapt, and at the top of each one Jimmy Olsen just happened to be there to take the picture. You couldn’t be sure to which mountain-peak he’d leap next. You might therefore say that he lived in the air. That they were big spaces he leapt through. This non-linear way of thinking seems to better represent how we each remember, and how we’ll end up remembering Jon: in assorted, individual ways as jumbled as they are vivid. It’ll be a little bit like the way Jon himself told stories—two-steps-forward, one-step-back, revisiting the best parts—and it’s in that spirit that I leave us with the multiple images of a smiling coatless Jon, Jon squirting millimeters of vodka into drinks, Jon with Phil packing a mound of snow beneath the backyard swingset, Jon saying “Awlright” when impatient, Jon turning the pages of ads, Jon with Phil then climbing to the swingset’s roof, Jon wiping the virtual floor with me in this or that video game, Jon laughing his staccato-laugh in a cloud of cigar-smoke, Jon atop the swingset regarding the awesome pile of cushioning snow he’d amassed, Jon with his arm around Emily, Jon watching TV from the floor, Jon throwing footballs in unfairly perfect spirals, Jon downing gallons of milk, Jon just appearing upstairs without sound, Jon on the swingset, Jon up there, Jon looking down, Jon leaping, Jon aloft.


~ FIN ~


FOOTNOTES BELOW

* Pronounced “ORYGUN”. Which I take the time to mention only because we Lobkos have contended with pronunciation-type issues all our lives. Here I can see Jon mockingly pantomime our chosen manner of demonstration, which is to say “Like ear lobe” in a grossly exaggerated way, because Jon didn’t really care about the pronunication-issue, but he thought it was hysterical that we (or I) did. One of his favorite varieties of humor was gross exaggeration, as in his running song-and-dance impersonation of Arnold Schwartzenegger, Benito Mussolini, and Sylvester Stallone, SIMULTANEOUSLY.

** I’ve since trumped this story by weaving an even MORE elaborate lie via voice mail for my friend Dan Graham, a high school friend I’d not been in touch with for some years now. In my lie, I told Dan that I was knocking around Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a local man-on-the-street for the Wall Street Journal, interviewing local rickshaw-companies and following the stock prices of chicken in the alley bazaars. Dan Graham, who is here today God bless him, bought this completely over-the-top fake bio, and even went so far as to call joint friends of ours to relay the details my outlandish biography.

*** Example: Jon’s first official Naval obligation was an engagement nicknamed “Patience Day,” for which the Navy rents out like a Holiday Inn, and for about 24 hours the new recruits are put through physical and mental tests deliberately designed to test the constitutions of those young men who dare think they’re up to the military life. On coming home from his Patience Day Jon stood revealed to me as one of the funnier storytellers I’d had the pleasure of listening to: he circled and recircled around the central event of the Frankenstein-like head M.D., whom everyone there nicknamed Dr. Death, and the Boy Who Couldn’t Look Down due to some obscure previous neck injury. Jon did voices and everything. Dr. Death: “LOOK DOWN!” Boy Who Couldn’t Look Down [miserably]: “I can’t!” Jon told the rest of the day’s stories as well, but kept coming back to that mini-scene like a sprinter doing a shuttle run.

**** Of which there are too many to mention. But by way of brief example, Jon loved, with his best friend Phil, to pile together a huge pile of snow in the backyard just below the swingset. They’d spend the afternoon jumping into it—from the roof of the swingset.

***** Which is something like this: [Breathlessly and staccato in pace]: “HAHahahahahahaha!!”

****** We actually did the brothers-should-match thing for a while. His slingshot was red, mine blue. One of my favorite sweaters was a gray deal with a black Vee pattern. His was, again, red. I think most siblings go through such a stage—or they’re MADE to.