Sure, I had read about the deaths of high school classmates over the years. They were people I didn't know well, or with whom I had little or no contact. I didn't connect to any of those death announcements. Until now.
I got the call from my mother last October. John Kochansky was in the hospital, in intensive care, in a coma, in Monmouth Medical Center. She received word, an email message I assume, from my sister-in-law.
He never emerged from the coma. He died on October 14, 2005. He was forty-seven years old.
John Kochansky was one of my brother's few, close, high school friends - as far as I knew. My brother could be secretive.
My brother Scott and I were in the same grade, all the way from first grade. I joke that Scott skipped kindergarten. When we were children in Okinawa, my mother told me that it had something to do with the cut-off dates of our birth years. Scott and I are "Irish twins," less than a year apart. I was born in January, and he was born eleven months later that same year. They put Scott in the first grade with me.
In high school, John was a year ahead of us. He was enigmatic to most of his fellow classmates. His talent was enormous. He drew, all the time. Inasmuch as we would sit and stare at the creatures and landscapes that poured - as if in a dream - from his pencils, in contrast, his words were terse. He said little, and whether it was a pose, a protection, or just John, it created and maintained a distance between him and the rest of the school.
Which was smart. And John was smart.
I have two pieces of John's artwork. One is a cast iron cat sculpture (see above). The other is, as he told me, his "doodle pad." He said it covered his desk, and he would draw on it when he was talking on the phone. It hangs, framed, in my loft.
In time, I grew to realize how open he was. But back then, in the mid and late-seventies, John looked to me like another of the long-haired, pot-smoking, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, but most of all, Frank Zappa-listening, cool guys. On the fringe. They were not ostracized the way they might be in today's high school culture. They existed, as I remember them, outside of sports-playing, cheerleader-dating fray.
When he spoke, and he spoke to me often in the years after high school, and after college (he did a year at Syracuse University - I came the year after and made it through the necessary four years, that full scholarship obligated me), his voice and speech patterns still echoed Frank Zappa's. He could describe in detail, in a deep, lilting, low-registered timbre, interspersed with pauses and rhetorical questions, one subject after another. So many subjects fascinated him.
I liked inviting him to my parties. He would talk - at length - to a guest, who would later find me and tell me, eyes wide, about John's conversation, or to be more precise, John's soliloquy.
I remember he cornered one friend - at a party in the late eighties - a micropaleontologist (yes, earth sciences again), not to discuss ancient bacteria deep down under the ocean floor (which is pretty esoteric on its own), but about the use of a musical instrument called a gamelan. From there, he described African musical traditions, one in particular, of dream-sounding female incantations used in the former Upper Volta, now Ouagadougou, during ritual female clitorectomies. The micropaleontologist made a good audience. I expect that his hard-science brain was less horrified than perhaps any of the other party guests would have been on that, or any other night.
John was a hemophiliac. I wondered often if that made him fragile. He worked light construction when he wasn't doing his art. He married. He fathered a daughter.
On October 18, 2005, I drove to his funeral, held at The First Baptist Church of Long Branch. Was John a First Baptist? The church was packed to almost overflowing. I stood at the back, listened, and watched. It was hard.
I spied my brother and his wife among the congregation. After the services, I stood there, rock still, hiding behind my sunglasses. Scott approached me, we exchanged three civil sentences, after which he stated, "I have to get out of here. I need air."
Scott left through a side door. I didn't follow. We're not close, not right now.
For more on John and his work, see Gregg G. Brown's blog, News Transcript, Farmingdale, New Jersey, and Gallery 31.
The afternoon was sunny. I drove east to the ocean, the place where, in my teens, I would skip school, smoke pot, and ride the waves. It's built up with condo high-rise apartment buildings. The shoreline is artificially hard-armored. One huge hurricane, and all of it will be washed and blown away.
thanks for your tribute to john kochansky. He was a good friend of mine and will always be dearly missed-
best wishes-
-DZ
Posted by: doug z | Tuesday, February 26, 2008 at 02:25 PM
this is johns daughter karly i googled my dad and found this and thought it was very touching. personally to me it made me sad but i was glad to see that someone was so kind to take the time and write a biography or something like it of my dad. i want to say thank you.
Posted by: | Friday, April 07, 2006 at 04:14 PM
I think you should make up with your brother. whatever it takes.
Posted by: Seawall | Wednesday, February 08, 2006 at 10:18 PM