I “met” Jesse Friedman in 1997, on the prehistoric bulletin board alt.books.kurt-vonnegut, in the course of an argument about Nirvana and the Pixies. Some years later, we were simultaneously editors at our respective college papers, UC Irvine’s New University and UPenn’s Punch Bowl. And some time after that, we actually and serendipitously met in person at Harvard, where we were both students en route to becoming dropouts.
He was funny as fuck, and smart as fuck. If you knew him, chances are you’d describe as the smartest, funniest motherfucker you knew. I lack the humor and eloquence to provide the remembrance he deserves. In its absence are these assorted anecdotes. He will be missed. Fuck.
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Circa 2000, Jesse organizing an International Conference of Jesse Friedmans. His outreach to the Jesse Friedman community brought him into contact with, among others, the Jesse Friedman featured in Capturing the Friedmans, some time before that documentary’s release. The two had a brief acquaintanceship, although Jesse was always quick to qualify himself as not-the-guy-imprisoned-for-child-molestation.
Jesse commissioning me to write a letter of recommendation to his first college crush. Reviewing a draft of the letter, he removed the gratuitous Jew jokes and added a line about the girl’s then-boyfriend, Brad Moore, being “an anagram for DRAB ROMEO.”
Jesse writing a treatment of his memoirs, entitled “Stop Laughing, What Have You Ever Written? (Oh, Leaves of Grass? Carry On, Mr. Whitman),” and concocting a scheme to get it into the hands of Dave Eggers by attending an Eggers reading while wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Jesse himself wiping his ass with “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” The scheme fell through, with Jesse subsequently threatening me with violence should I mention to anyone the existence of “Stop Laughing, What Have You Ever Written.”
Jesse announcing with great fanfare that he’d devised a “fool-proof” plan to turn the tables on Chris Hansen of “To Catch a Predator,” and his fool-proof plan consisting of telling Hansen that he knew it was a sting all along and just wanted an autograph.
The unresolved, intractable debate Jesse and I had about who he resembled more: Richard Alpert from “Lost,” or Charlie Day from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”
Jesse’s idea of a Twitter joke: “Tupperware should make sheep costumes. Tupperware brand tupper wear.”
Jesse brutalizing me in Scrabble even when I cheated outrageously.
