Jason Batzer was my friend. After a long battle with depression, he killed himself last week.
I guarantee that if you met him, you remember him – he was funny, sharp, and just a little too over the top to be real. When he was at the height of his powers, reality seemed to bend around him. You could see it warping, turning into an impossible caricature when it got close to him. He repelled it and all of it’s structure. I’ll never forget watching him napalm his typewriter while dressed as a nurse and feeling like I’d been pulled into his world for just a little bit. And I liked it in there.
And if you met him, there’s a good chance you have a story like that, too. At least one. Cutting bread with a jawbone, showing you how zippos work, or confounding you for an evening, only to evaporate into the night without saying goodbye. He always made an impression.
He was also a total pain in the ass much of the time. So, you know – the complete package. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten him farting like a Gatling gun, screaming inappropriate gibberish, violently sucking the mucous back up his nose (“skorking” was his term of art), pissing everywhere, and generally making a nuisance of himself. And if you got past those first impressions and wanted more, you could look forward to endless marathon phone calls in which he repeated the same stories over and over even after you’d pointed out that you’d heard it a dozen times – once he started telling a story he had to finish it, out loud. You’d be treated to bad behavior on the regular, obsessive behavior just as often, endless chatter about minutia you don’t care about, constant insults, and belches where he mouthed the word “BELCH” just in case you didn’t know what he was doing.
Putting up with that was the price of admission, and his friends paid it gladly. Because what you got in return was worth double and more.
Jason was a gusher of creativity. Even though I knew him well, he was constantly surprising. He could do things with language that nobody else could. The way he put a sentence together and the words he used to construct it outlined the entirety of the world he lived in. Everyone I’ve talked to since he died has at least one phrase of his stuck in their head. “Nobody can take your dignity from you, you give it up willingly. I learned that from women. I learned a lot of things from women, all of them bad.” “Coeds: the other white meat.” It goes on all day.
You couldn’t get him to do something creative on demand or actually work at it or god forbid revise it, no matter how much you encouraged or cajoled. I took a stab at starting a band with him because it seemed like a natural fit (he had phenomenal taste in music), but it never quite worked out, and when we had an actual show on an actual date with an actual time we needed to go on stage he panicked. He made it up on stage, but tried to cut every other song so that we would be done sooner. Eventually we relented and cut the set short, ending the band in the process.
Because that wasn’t how he worked. If he was going to do anything creative or funny, it had to be immediate and off the cuff. Pure improvisation. Editing, revisiting, rehearsing – all of those things filled him with panic.
Perhaps his finest medium was the answering machine. Jane and I burned out a motor or two (back when answering machines existed and not voicemail) playing Jason messages back for each other or friends who’d come over or just because. I wish I’d saved every single one, but it always seemed like an infinite resource. Here are a few I’ve managed to save:
He was also a master of notes left behind, postcards, and the occasional package (usually preceded by several months worth of telling you he was going to send you a package). Quick gestures that captured their moment: that was his forte.
I realize that the person I’m describing comes off as a drunken lunatic whom you should avoid at all costs. And that’s as true a picture as it is incomplete. There was more to him than that, maybe most importantly the fact that he was a great friend and indiscriminate about it. Anyone willing to stick by him, well, he had their back no questions asked. That was his only standard: accept him and you’re friends. Unpretentious, open to everyone who was open to him. I wish I were more like that.
He was also the smartest person I’ve ever met. It seemed like he knew everything about everything. For a while in the ’90s there was a trend of non-fiction books that explored the history of mundane objects – History of the Zipper, History of the Screw, etc. Jason could have written any of them, which would have improved both the research and the prose. He was a walking talking farting history of everything. He could go into great detail about faucets and fixtures or the uniforms of Austrian officers from WWI or quote from memory from the Watergate tapes; He could tell you everything you could ever want to know about the Butthole Surfers or the Oliver Typewriter Company. He just knew. All of the inscrutable details that make up history were there on the tip of his tongue.
Now all of that’s gone.
It seems like for the last decade he’d been waiting out an inevitable decline in all aspects of his life. He was trying to hunker down and hold on, hoping against hope that if he ignored trouble it’d go away and not get worse. But inevitably it did get worse. I wish someone would have hired him to just sit around and be funny all day. I think he was hoping for that as well. It seemed like it should be so easy to harness that talent and knowledge – as a history professor, a radio host, a voice over artist. He had the sort of mind that could have succeeded at almost anything. He had so much raw talent it seemed like success should have been like falling off a log for him. Instead, he was a security guard for years. Then, he found out that his dream job was hiring: the railroad. It took him several years to churn up the will to apply, but they were looking pretty regularly, and when his will and their need finally coincided, he was hired.
And he hated it. The hours were horrible, the bureaucratic structure was oppressive, and much of his time was spent walking around in the rain. He wanted to leave from almost the first week. Even after he got some seniority and could start choosing his shifts, the oppressive dullness of the work made him miserable. For a while he was laid off with pay, and even during that period he couldn’t get it together to start sending out resumes.
In the same way he would freeze when he was expected to edit or revise, looking after the details of life would completely ankle him. Writing his senior thesis at college involved months of anxiety being ratcheted up, followed by a few weeks of not sleeping or eating (but still not actually writing), finally culminating in him banging it out at the last possible moment and hating the result. The same overwhelming anxiety hounded him in all aspects of life. He’d wait until just before his phone got shut off to go down to the office and pay the bill. The rent was always paid on the 5th of the month, the last day he could legally do it without getting a penalty. And if there wasn’t a deadline, nothing would happen, so taking the time to type up a resume and send it out to potential employers was all but impossible. Something about deadlines and expectations absolutely destroyed him – he would completely unravel with anxiety.
But enough of my armchair Freud routine – more stories. Once, back in 96 or so, he fell into a terrible funk. I didn’t hear from him for a few days, and my repeated calls weren’t returned. I was worried. After a week he finally picked up, and apologized for not getting back to me. It was all he could do to go to his job he said in a voice that sounded like it was a huge act of will to push air out. I felt completely incapable of helping him, but wanted to try to distract him. I went down to the store, bought a big log of cheddar and some aerosol cheese and fashioned it into a bust of him. It looked nothing like him – I’m not a sculptor and cheese is an unforgiving medium – but when I showed up at his place and gave it to him (after leaning on his buzzer for 20 minutes to get him up off the couch) he smiled bigger than I’d ever seen. “Thanks, baby.” It’s no panacea, but a fine Tillamook can part the clouds for a few hours. He kept it in his fridge and gave me regular reports on it’s level of desiccation.
In 2007, while he was trying to get off of effexor so that he could switch to another antidepressant, he experienced a horror known as “effexor psychosis.” It was ugly. He was house sitting for Jane and I when it started coming on. When we got back into town, he told us he hadn’t left the house because private detectives hired by the railroad were following him. I told him private detectives hired by the railroad were not following him and why the hell did you eat an entire half-pound bag of pistachios? He knew they were following him because he kept seeing them everywhere, and one of his union brothers had confirmed it by signaling him with a lantern as he drove away from his place towards ours. There was a lantern by his side on the table, I assume for signaling back if need be. He ate the pistachios because he didn’t want to leave the house and they were the only ready-to-eat item in the pantry. He went home instead of staying here, figuring they’d watch him wherever he was anyway.
A month later he was taken into custody in front of his apartment building, carrying a loaded gun to protect himself from the witch that lived down the hall from him who was trying to control everyone’s mind with TV. He was taken in on a 5150 (involuntary psychiatric hold) and put in the county mental health facility (John George). None of his friends knew what had happened, but he left all of us enough creepy answering machine messages that it was clear something was up. I was working a few blocks away and went over to his place to glean whatever I could. The building super told me about the gun and the police and how they’d taken him away in a cruiser late that night. A little more digging and I found out where he was and when the visiting hours were. A couple of friends and I drove down to see him.
He was sullen. They’d put him on Lithium, which had gotten rid of the mania, but left him in this horrible facility with it’s fluorescent lighting and poly-blend sheets and rules and schedules. And no TV or books. He was miserable, like a caged animal, wanting to demand that he be let out immediately, but knowing that was pointless. I told him to stop worrying about the thread count and take some time off, about as close as I could come to a joke in the moment. He didn’t even crack a smile. I knew that meant it was bad. J often quoted his friend Doug: “I know you’re really depressed right now because your suicide jokes are even funnier than usual.” But now there weren’t even jokes. No self-aware comedy, no prolix rants. Just grim, unblinking eyes, floating on an expressionless face. That’s what depression looks like.
There was an orderly at John George who was glad to see some of Jason’s friends drop by. Like us, he’d been charmed by the guy from the moment he came in (strapped to a gurney and gibbering – a classic Batzer first impression). There wasn’t much he could tell us, he explained, because the law in California is very explicit about patients having the right to privacy. “People get fired immediately if they say anything. And worse, nobody would insure us and we’d have to close down.” But he could legally tell us what he saw and heard personally, and did so eagerly. The cops had told him they’d decided to search J’s apartment after picking him up, and were taken aback when they saw the arsenal of weaponry therein. Granted, much of it was decommissioned historical artifacts (landmines, hand grenades, artillery shells, all with the explosives taken out), but they didn’t know that when they came in the door. They assumed that J was a potential mass murder (the Virginia Tech massacre had been earlier that year), and that they had walked into the bunker of a psycho. “Then,” (and you could actually hear the hair on the back of the orderly’s neck scraping against his collar as it stood straight up) “they opened his fridge… and there was a head in it!” He looked around at us, expecting to see shock but instead only got me stifling giggles. “I guess it was carved out of cheese, but man – they were convinced this guy was a psycho.”
The orderly insisted on writing the number of the payphone in the hallway down for me, even though I already had it. He was adamant – he absolutely had to write it down for me and he had to do it on an 8/5″x11″ sheet that he pulled out of a binder and folded up very small. I didn’t understand why until I unfolded the sheet of paper he’d written it on the back of. It was J’s intake form, full of detailed notes about his state when he came in. Manic, shouting, worried about the CIA. It was so cliche part of me wanted to believe it was a bit – he probably called out “agents of the pope” but maybe they missed that. It wasn’t a bit. He had quite clearly gone around the bend.
He’d always make light of his “skewed brain chemistry,” but I finally understood how serious it was. I teased Jason mercilessly up until that point, the way young men do to encourage a sense of camaraderie. But I stopped after that. I wanted to do everything I could to help him make sure that he never ended up in there again, and belittling him even as a joke wasn’t the way.
*
Jason and I had a falling out a few years ago, in large part because things didn’t improve for him, and I was convinced that there was nothing I could do to help. I don’t know whether that’s fair of me, still think about it a lot, and still don’t know how I feel about it. At the time, I knew I was watching him kill himself passively, and there was nothing I could do to stop it – that efforts to stop it would be resented. That’s a tough situation to be in, and I chose one of the many bad options available to me and cut him out of my life. Still, I’ve always secretly hoped I would run into him some day, and we’d have a chance to patch things up. Or else I’d see him out on the town with his fabulous new girlfriend, or at a bar entertaining a few dozen friends. Even if he looked at me as if to say, “See – I’m fine without you hanging around,” I’d be grateful for that. Because I always – always – wanted him to be okay. Unfortunately, that’s not how it ended.
Mutual friends always kept me updated on what was going on, and it was never good. He’d been struggling for a long time, not able to find steady work after being fired by the railroad, not able to afford his medications, and not able to come to grips with his profound depression. A doctor had misdiagnosed him as being bipolar, and was giving him speed as a treatment, and part of our falling out revolved around this. That situation had progressed to where Jason had Shrinky giving him larger and larger doses in an attempt apparently to make up for his misdiagnosis. His mother, whom he loved dearly, passed away a few months ago, and in the end he couldn’t escape the depression that brought on.
I don’t know how he killed himself, and won’t go out of my way to find out. Part of me is curious, if only because I’m sure whatever implement was used had great historical significance. But I also know that those kinds of details really only bring a false sense of closure. And as grateful as I’d be for any kind of closure right now, I’m okay without it. Things can stay unresolved. What I do know is that it’s a goddamn tragedy that this great, great person felt like suicide was an acceptable option. I can’t imagine that windowless world, and I wish he couldn’t either. The fact that this happened makes the how of it irrelevant.
***
Some day, some brave citizen of the future is going to want to know about Jason Batzer. I don’t know why or when, but I know this to be true. I’m leaving this here for you, future person. Hopefully it all makes sense in your time, because it sure doesn’t now. Hopefully this stands as some kind of memorial to this amazing character.
He was my best friend for a very long time, and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. My friendship with him was inspiring and infuriating and defined a huge chunk of my life. But he just wasn’t made for this planet.
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- Jason floating in space.
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- Jason’s got moves.
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- Percussionist.
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- Jason P. Batzer.
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- Jason.
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- The end of the evening.
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- The look says it all.
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- Jason P. Batzer.
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- Jason P. Batzer
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- Karaokeee wonder machine.
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- The rare Batzer smile.
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- Jason at Mr. Lee’s barber shop.
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- Jason at Mr. Lee’s barber shop.
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- Jason at Mr. Lee’s barber shop.
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- Jason at Mr. Lee’s barber shop.
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- Jason at Mr. Lee’s barber shop.
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- Jason at Lake Merit.
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- Jason at Lake Merit.
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- Jason at Lake Merit.
Adendum: Rupe sent along some more photos and video. I remember how excited he was about Rupe coming out to Wyoming to visit, and what a relief that had been for him. It shows in the Wyoming pics. Thanks, Rupe. It’s good to see him smile.
Adendum 2: Dave B. put together a video as well. You can find it here.
thanks colin. this really helped.
Thanks for sharing this, Colin. I didn’t know Jason well, but like you say, he definitely left an impression, and I remember him very well.
Thank you Colin. I wish Jason could’ve felt the love we all felt for him.
Oh! Such tragic news. Your beautiful post brought me right back to when I first met Jason in Buffalo in the 80s. What a force! Thank you for describing so well all of the many facets of him. This is a real loss.
Thank you Colin.
Well spotted, Colin. Am I your only hirsuted manic-depressive friend now? Wish I had had more time to spend with him.
[…] Colin Frangos wrote this great piece ~ Jason Batzer Will BE Remembered […]
I was Jason’s friend from the railroad and I would love to meet up! You guys have totally shamed me by writing such literary masterpieces about him. I hope to do the same when I can get it all together to do so…but I am hoping we could have a sort of memorial.
It’d be nice to meet you, Robert. I don’t think I ever met any of his coworkers.
Shoot me an email! We can all get together!
I met Jason while working on a seismic crew in Wyoming back in ’95. I was roommates with him before he left for California. He wanted to become a lawyer at the time. I always hoped it would work out. We worked all day, it was a physical job, at the end of the day we would get two double cheese burgers from McDonalds and the walk over to Wendy’s and get a huge Cesar chicken salad. I didn’t even feel the first cheese burger go down that was how hungry we were. We had scored some beer and every night we said we would drink it but after eating we lacked the ambition to ice it down and always said we would drink it the next night.
We had a crew of 4 plus Jason because we liked him for the entrainment value. He would come on the radio saying he was having gastriointestinal problems meaning he had to take a dump. Goes out gets lost, the helicopter is coming to pick up the equipment, and he is out wandering around in the sage brush and then spontaneously stumbles back on the equipment bag just in time to hook it up to the helicopter and fly it back to the staging area. Maybe you had to be there but that was Jason and he was a riot.
We always stayed in touch telling each other stories and leaving funny phone messages. I lived in Oklahoma for 7 years so he really enjoyed the stories I had for him about the locals. The last couple of years though he would go on these rants and go on and on, I couldn’t get a word in so I let him go on just to see how long he could last. His record was an hour and a half. I got to were I couldn’t take it anymore and started avoiding his calls and kinda lost touch with what he was doing. I just thinking I should call him when the sheriffs dept. showed up on my front door at 5 in the morning. He asked me if I was BroJon, I didn’t know what he was talking about at the time and if I knew Jason Batzer. I thought wow they are looking for him. But then he told me Jason had committed suicide. I felt physical pain like someone has sucked something out of me. Jason had left a contact list and listed me as BroJon along with my address. I had a post card from Jason I had saved and on it was Brother Jon. He always called me his brother and brojon was just short hand.
R.I.P Jason my brother from another mother.
Jon O.
I’m very sorry you found out that way, Jon, but I’m glad you found this and reminisced. Thanks.
I simply have had too many feelings to commit them here but I really appreciate what you wrote Colin. Quite insightful and accurate and emotionally resonant. I found out a little late about all of this and while, I suppose, I didn’t feel the sense of shock that you get sometimes when someone you love that much dies without warning, the news has none the less rocked me with an inescapable sadness.
The last few times I talked to Jason on the phone in Oakland he alternated between the best Jason B Period there ever was and the Jason that thought I was working with the cops and took about 20 minutes to convince that I was legit.
I don’t know why I drifted away from talking to him. I didn’t mind him thinking I was working with the FBI or the pigs. It was just as lovely to hear him spin that out as anything else that was materially correct and, since I loved the guy, it never really mattered anyway. I suspect that I stopped calling him because, at least partly, I am, as Jason once famously said, “fifty pounds of shit in a ten pound sack.” Technically, he said I looked like fifty pounds of shit stuffed in a ten pound sack but I think it works as a personality metaphor as well.
I was also struck by what Jon O. said in a reply on August 23, 2013, “Maybe you had to be there but that was Jason and he was a riot.”
Nope. I didn’t have to be there. No one who knew Jason had to be there. Anyone who read what you wrote knows precisely what you mean. But sure as shit I loved reading that anyway. I always love hearing about other people understanding Jason the same way I do. It makes me feel good to know it.
God damn he was great. I’ve been missing him for a while now and, unfortunately, like everyone else, I’ll have to go on missing him. I don’t know anyone else who is such a consistently wonderful brilliant damaged amazing pain in the ass that anyone who meets him and likes him doesn’t immediately see him exactly the same way as every other person who ever liked him does.
He is the most imperfectly perfect human I ever met and I’ll never meet another.
Thanks to Colin and Jon O. and Robert H. for saying things about Jason that make me feel like so many, many people loved him the way he deserved to be loved.
–Kevin
I feel like I have to tell another story: At the railroad we have a number of obnoxious rules we deal with on a daily basis…One concerns reading materials, and in part it specifically prohibits reading newspapers while on duty. It is in the first section of rules, since it is considered essential generic safety stuff. “Take the safe course…” and all that kinda crap. Anyway, Jason’s regular arrival at the railroad at about 2:45 PM would consist of rolling out his newspaper wife on the table and then eating some of the horrible 7-11 hot dogs and hamburgers he loved while complaining vociferously about how aweful they were! He would continue relaxing in the shanty in this manner until I would start really insisting we go out and work about an hour later. At that point he would start making excuses for 15 to 30 minutes as I went out to start the engine. Oddly, I am not implying he was one of the worst employees there…The railroad has WAY worse employees. Instead I am just setting the stage for what came next: One day Jason came in later than usual, but not actually late. He arrived at 2:55 or something and said something like, “Oh God, I couldn’t find a paper on the way in!!” I think I said something like, “Oh well, I guess we can get to work a little earlier then,” but Jason didn’t hear this because he was so quick to wheel around and take off. About 20 minutes later he arrived back with the paper. What happened next was classic Jason: He walks in, sees me talking to our assigned manager, and tells him loudly, “Oh, I’m not late,I just had to go out and get the paper!!!” The manager (knowing Jason and not really expecting anything different) turned and said in a rye voice, “Rule 1.2.1 mean anything to you?!” After that Jason say down quietly in front of him to read his paper and eat his terrible 7-11 burgers and the manager sighed at me and then walked out. That was the effect Jason had even on the supervisors. Everyone understood that nothing was going to change him. He was simply a true original, built to work in only one way. I hope this story doesn’t work out to be one of those “had to be there” ones, but I will say I have never seen someone as blatantly disregard management with as much impunity as he did.
I am touched by this, thanks for writing it. I knew Jason in college, and tried to contact him when he was living in Oakland but he never returned my call.
There are many moments I can recall, but one that always sticks in my head was his idea for the “Chia Christ”. I absolutely cannot recall what context it came up in but he had us rolling on the floor with his plans to grow chia plants on a crucifix… it might have been a birthday present for someone, or something.
I didn’t know how things had gone downhill for him after college but it echoes a story I’ve heard too many times. Such a sad outcome for a much beloved guy.
I was at Bard in the late 80s, early 90s (’92), and knew him, and didn’t know he was gone until I found this via a Bard facebook group.
I remember him playing the blues at high volume to get through hangovers — he lived across the hall from me on North Campus in one of the dorms that was supposed to be quiet, and I’m not posting anything about what happened with that publicly, but you can imagine it didn’t go well. I remember the others in that (otherwise!) sedate dorm getting a bit horrified at him taking what I think was a still from Eraserhead and sticking it on his door, writing “Salvador Dolly” underneath.
another quick bit of classic Jason I want to share — after a few run-ins with campus security, Jason decided to run for an elected position in the campus government. The campaign slogan — I can still hear him saying – “Hand The Sword of Justice To Someone Who’s Seen The Business End”
I am deeply saddened to learn of Jason’s death. I was not a close friend of Jason’s, and I knew him only briefly in the 1980’s, yet I do remember him – his intelligence and mostly his innate decency – and wish I’d gotten to know him better.
Jason and I were classmates for a time at SUNY-Buffalo. I had one class with him in the fall of 1986 and another in the fall of 1987. Immediately I could tell that he was a brilliant young man, adding to class conversations in ways that no other student could. He was really nice to me – I remember that even more. SUNY-Buffalo was a cold, lonely, and quite frankly toxic place at the time. It was a cold, desolate campus, and most things about it were soul-destroying. Though I don’t know for sure, I sensed that Jason felt it too. We would sometimes chat before or after class, and as I wrote above, even more than his intelligence I felt his decency. He was off-beat, but not in an arrogant way. He was a fellow traveler on the road of Those Who Get Kicked. I don’t know why I didn’t make it a point to be a closer friend of his. It’s common to keep strangers at arm’s length, in part for safety concerns, but in a tough world one needs friends. I wish I’d invited him out for a drink and talked to him more.
It appears he eventually left SUNY-Buffalo (good for you!) and went to Bard. It’s also quite clear that others recognized his intelligence and decency.
Those were hard days, and I don’t like to go back there in my mind. Yet those days link the now with a past I can hardly tell is even my own. Jason was part of it, though a small part. Over the years I’ve thought about Jason from time to time and wondered what became of him. Just today February 25 2014 I think of him at the computer and type his name into Yahoo search, and am alarmed to see “suicide” fill in automatically after “Jason Batzer.” I sensed it was him even though I hoped it wasn’t.
Hey Jason, sorry for having been too shy and chickencrap to talk more, even though I wanted to. You were one of the few decent people in that cold, hyper-competitive place. I wish things had gone better for you, and I pray you found some peace. In the words of my favorite philosopher Van Morrison, “It’s a hard road, daddy-o.” Thanks for having been kind and decent to me when few others were. I join your closer friends in missing you and wishing you peace.
Colin,
Rereading this again as Jason B.’s birthday was yesterday. I’m grateful that you were able to put down your thoughts so clearly and help tell Jason’s story. It’s a relief to remember his better days and not reflect too much on his final years.
At the memorial service we had for him in Buffalo this summer, I kept feeling impossibly inadequate. If it was a service for one of his friends, Jason would have undoubtedly pulled some kind of drunken performance stunt that would have shocked and challenged all those in attendance. More likely, he would have claimed that he had a “shit attack” and not come at all.
I keep finding reminders of him around my house: postcards of animal scrotum; mummified bat carcasses; a note of “advance praise” for the book he never wrote. I’ve barely sorted the things we brought back from Oakland, though most were distributed to friends.
A few weeks ago, I saw an article about a new line of chocolate: edible delectables in the shape of a human anus. Anyone who knows J. knows that, “tongue fuck my asshole!” was one of his favorite expressions to blurt out when displeased–particularly in public.
Within seconds, I was on the chocolate seller’s website ready to send a box for Jason for his birthday with that expression written in the card. I was flush with excitement that: 1.) The chocolates were of European original (Jason hated American chocolate) and 2.) he would be on the phone screaming with joy/agony as he plowed his way through the box within minutes of receiving it.
Then I remembered that he was dead.
I still haven’t worked out all of my feelings about that, but I do know one thing: the outpouring of love, remembrances, and respect I saw after he passed proved that he made an impression on many, many people. I just wish he had stayed around long enough to realize it.
I am very sorry to hear of Jason’s death. I lived 2 doors down from him on Euclid in Kenmore, NY back in the 70’s and early 80’s…we did a ton of stuff together while growing up. I had tried performing a google search for him a few times but had no luck until today. Thank you for the information and the world will miss him.
-Andrew
I just found out today that my friend for years ago is no longer here. I have tried for decades to find someway of contacting him, but alas, i am too late. Jason was extremely smart, funny and blunt. During the summer of the junior/senior year in high school, jason and i made napalm, went to see erasure head while stoned on Valium and made midnight visits to female friends. The one phrase that will always stay with is “God! her tongue tastes great!” (this was after an evening of sneaking into my then girlfriends parents vodka stash and jason being getting frisky with her cousin. We snuck back to her house at 2 or 3 in the morning only to be run off by her mother). i have far too many fun memories of jason (and his pet rat T-Balls) to ever write down. to hear that he has passed saddens me to the core. Jason was not always a angel, but yo always knew where you stood with him and knew how to make you laugh. I wish i could touched base with him one last time.
This brave citizen of the future thanks you. I knew Jason before he was born and didn’t know he’d returned.
Strange to read all of this, especially when you remember the man in these pictures as your 9-year old childhood friend. Like Andrew, I too was a neighbour of Jason’s in Kenmore, NY, back in the late 1970s, and we attended school and played together all the time. His father, if I remember correctly, was an editor for the Courier-Express, so it’s no wonder that Jason was exceptionally intelligent, and his mother, I cannot remember… but I think she might have worked. What I do remember is that Jason’s dad spent a lot of time in his LazyBoy recliner, reading, while his mom worked in the kitchen. His room didn’t have the back-then typical posters of souped-up cars and vans with depictions of flames coming from chrome wheels – instead, Jason had maps of Europe, toy soldiers, a ton of toy tanks and infantry vehicles, a Märklin train set (which he was extremely proud of), and a WWII German infantry helmet (which he was also extremely proud of). Oh, yes, and a hamster – Heinrich the Hamster… German name, of course… everything seemed to be German for him… of course, with the subject of Nazi Germany.
But Jason was “strenuous” at best, forgive me for saying that. As a child, he could be incredibly sociable the one moment, and horrible the next. Andrew (see above) and I were always in his grip – Jason had the best ideas – he back yard of his house suddenly became Omaha beach for the D-Day landing, or the scene for the hoisting of the US flag on Iwo Jima. But Jason also had the uncanny ability to be derisive and destructive. It was quite saddening, because, when I think back to it, a milder form of his would have been a great help for him.
Once, I remember how we were down in my basement, playing with my Lionel trains, and he suddenly took the throttle and turned it all the way up so that my new diesel locomotive derailed and flew from the table onto the concrete surface below. I was so furious at him that I ended up chasing him out of the house. Actually, it kind of surprises me that he ended up working for the railroad…
Just a few notes here. My parents moved away from Kenmore a few years later, so I don’t know what happened to him afterward. But to see the pictures of him as an adult are quite saddening. It seems clear that he wasn’t at all happy about his life.
I’m not sure if anyone is still following this link but I wanted to add my own story of Jason Batzer. I was living in Green River, Wyoming in about 1994. I was one of 4 people working at the county museum. It was located in the county courthouse. I was in charge of exhibitions and collections. I knew Jason’s sister who was a lawyer and worked in the courthouse also. One day she told me that her brother was moving to town. She introduced me to Jason and we immediately hit it off. After living in Green River for a year I did not have any friends in town. Until I met Jason. It was a weird time for us both. Jason worked in his sister’s office as a receptionist/helper. Their relationship was sometimes rocky. He lived in her basement and she complained about the noise from time to time. Her giant Chow dog always tried to bite us. We were both fish out of water in Green River. We drank heavily at a place called The Embassy Tavern on Railroad Avenue just across the street from the railroad yard. It was a dive that filled up with workers from the nearby trona mines, railroaders, broken down weirdos just passing through town, drunks taking a break from the topless club across the street from the courthouse and county employees doing shots of Jack Daniels after getting off work. The inevitable greeting from Chris the owner/bartender was always a friendly “hello, how about a shot of tequila?” We often said yes, took our seats at the bar and waited for the floor show of down-at-the-heels citizens as they drank themselves into well deserved oblivion. We never hit up the drunk women we knew only from the Embassy. They were too far below this pair of aesthetes and their discussions of WW2 uniforms and hardware, Richard Brautigan, and Wesley Willis. We lived in a world of our own. We were so close that the other patrons began to think we were gay.
I visited Jason at his sister’s office from time to time. He was always sullen at work. He sat behind a desk with a calendar blotter in front of him that he had marked with just the word “comply” on every date Monday through Friday for the entire month. I got a DUI for drinking boiler makers out of 32 oz plastic to-go mug as I was driving through Riverton, WY. Spent a night in jail and had my license revoked. Jason drove me around in my Jeep Wagoneer. We took a trip to the old prison in Rawlins, WY once. The prison was long closed and somewhat preserved as a historic site. There were no guides they just let you wander around the place on your own. We each took turns sitting in the gas chamber with the door sealed and tripped the handle that had dropped cyanide into a tank below the death chair. I remember watching him through the thick window of the chamber as he tripped the handle, a tight-lipped smile on this face.
We spent a lot of time at each other’s apartments, just drinking beer and wondering at the bizarre situations we both found ourselves in. Again, it was a weird time. Eventually, he had had enough of working a his sister’s law office and got a job in the oil fields setting up seismometers to measure the vibrations from “thumper trucks” that sent sent out seismic waves to locate oil deposits. At least that’s what I thought he was doing.
I received the hour and half long phone calls from him from time to time after he moved on to California. He said he had joined a band but I never heard anything from this venture until today when I heard Jason and the Agronauts. WOW, that took me back. It was like sitting in his basement room listening to him tell stories through as half-drunken haze. Thanks for that connection Colin! It may have been short-lived but that band really captured his essence. I notice that on the Bandcamp page it is described as “experimental, hirsuitcore and noise.” That’s fucking perfect.
He had always talked about working for the railroad and then once he finally got a job he hated it as is mentioned above. He thought about law enforcement which sounded highly improbable to me. Jason driving around Oakland with a gun on his hip sounded like a very bad idea. He had his own ideas about law enforcement that probably would not be appreciated by the citizenry. His methods, as he would say, were unsound.
I did not hear from Jason for a long time. Years went by when I got an e-mail from his sister out of the blue asking me to call her. I did. Jason had been dead for a few years by that time and she assumed I knew all about it. I told her I had no idea and she told me the horrifying story. It was a kick in the stomach that still hurts. On reflection, I can’t say that I was all that surprised at the means by which he made his exit. He did it on his own terms, one final, earth shattering performance.
I remember some of the names on this page from our very lengthy discussions in Green River. He talked about you, Colin and Rupe and his days in Buffalo. I am glad to know that his friends still think of Jason. He was a madman but I can honestly say that I am a better person for knowing him. I still love that crazy bastard.
Still here. Thanks for sharing – that whole Wyoming era is kinda a black box to me, and I’m glad to know a little more.
And I realized the answering machine messages had disappeared. Fixed.
I want to add my memories of Jason as well. Michael Fox’s account of that weird time in Wyoming omits the fact that he and I were in a long-distance relationship, so we were driving back and forth between Cody and Green River every other weekend–300 miles each way. When Michael got thrown in jail in Riverton for drunk driving, he called me to come get him. In any event, we spent a lot of time in Green River with Jason, who was endlessly entertaining.
The last time I saw Jason, he spent the night at our place in Cody. He had quit his oil field job in Wyoming and was on his way to California. He had just barely started to recover from the sleep deprivation of that job, but we sat up far too late talking that night. We finally gave it up when we all starting laughing so hard that we woke my dog, Belle, up, and she gave Jason a dirty look and went off to her bed in a huff.
All that said, Belle loved Jason. That was good enough for me. I miss him. Thank you for keeping his memory alive, Colin.