Several days ago, my friend Joe Wahrhaftig died.
I met Joe in 2002, because he and I went to the same stand-up comedy open mic at A Cuppa Tea (near the Berkeley-Rockridge border), and he came up to me after and complimented me thoroughly and told me about other open mics.
Joe was a bit older than me, a fellow UC Berkeley alum, a user experience designer with a taste for watching and performing stand-up. For the next few years, we hung out frequently. He kept encouraging my stand-up. From 2002, when I decided to audition for a local Apollo amateur night:
Joe, my latest fan, seems to have great faith in me. (Sure, my sister and mom and boyfriend have had faith in me longtimenow, but as Aronson points out, new compliments seem to mean more than repetitions of old ones.) I ameliorated the nervousness a bit by remembering his compliments, even as college actors next door auditioned for some play where "Chopped onions!" shows up in the script an awful lot.
We went to the same open mics and rooted for each other; I don't remember how many times we both performed at A Cuppa Tea. Joe suggested I should start recording myself to listen to later to help me improve, and gave me guidance about local venues. From 2003:
Tonight I did not-too-badly at The Brain Wash, that laundromat performance venue restaurant in SF. I’d never been, but Joe fully acted as my text adventure help/hints screen. “The man over there runs comedy classes and will tell you about them…Press Control-H for more help.”
And Joe loved showing me the great history of San Francisco's cultural landscape, introducing me both to the hungry i and old lavish grand venues I’d never been to. He loved finding and appreciating spectacular art and sharing it, and telling me all the backstage gossip I’d been born a decade or three too late to catch. He and I saw so many shows together: the Ditty Bops and Dresden Dolls, Patton Oswalt, Mike Daisey, Greg Proops, I think Mort Sahl, and Johnny Steele. (I assume I introduced him to the work of Will Franken but did I? I just had that “oh I should ask him” reflexive thought and then felt the pang that, of course, I can’t.) We spent how many nights? at Cobb’s Comedy Club. And it wasn’t just live performances. We went to a talk by Phil Zimbardo together, we saw Shaun of the Dead and Adaptation and probably several other films together; his old LiveJournal is down, else I could find a lot more than the ones I happened to blog.
So many conversations about every topic under the sun: jobs, dating, history local and national and international, politics, the tech industry, family, art, mental and physical health. One chat included him asking “So you know about the Tibetan monks’ tradition of ritualized debate?” and me replying “I was just reading about that today!” Those years I got so many hours in the passenger seat of his car or across a restaurant table from him, us making each other laugh and think.
Joe had other interesting artist pals that I sometimes met and always heard about. (Instagram post mourning him, from one friend of 45 years' tenure; Imginn proxy viewer.) The one interaction I particularly remember: in 2005, when I salvaged some mannequin parts that an Old Navy near my office was discarding, we got them to Joe’s friends Morrisa and Jamie for eclectic decorating. And I introduced some friends to Joe, and we all floated around together in the greater SF crowd of oddball nerds who loved creativity.
He was so careful to be proper in how he interacted with me, a woman in her twenties, in ways I think I probably didn’t appreciate. And he always had a deeply mordant sense of humor, one I sometimes struggled with, especially when he made deadpan jokes about death.
In early 2006 I moved to New York City and wrote:
Joe is one of the friends I’m going to miss. Last night we saw a whole show of good comedy, in which none of the four comics disappointed; how often does that happen? It started with stand-up and so it shall end.
We stayed in touch with emails, calls, texts, and visits when I came back to SF. Last year he had a plan to come visit New York City, but it fell through. He was generous – buying me an album he wanted me to hear, sending me photos from the memorial service when the bookstore I’d worked at (Cody’s) closed, donating to causes I raised funds for. When I ran group videocall rehearsals for my stand-up comedy sets, he came, laughed, and gave useful feedback. I told him how my life was going, sympathized with his eldercare struggles, commiserated about the job market, speculated with him about the ups and downs of national politics. He was so unfailingly supportive, believing without question that I was brilliant and talented and could do anything I put my mind to.
In the past few years, my plane travel decreased in frequency. The last time I saw him was a few years ago; I chatted with him and another East Bay friend in the friend’s backyard, then he drove us to Berkeley. I remember us sitting in the Berkeley Rose Garden together. He was going through a lot, with his ill mom, with the job market, with the state of the world. And, as ever, he apologized for dumping on me.
I miss him telling me his (totally reasonable) laments. I miss his nose. I miss his wit and his care and his love of beauty.
You know how it is. I am still getting used to using the past tense. It hurts that I’ll never get to share another bit of stand-up with him.
And – he was so comfortable joking about death. I hope that he died without pain or fear. And I harbor a further hope that, if he recognized it happening, he found a morbid joke to make.
Thank you for 25 years of friendship, Joe.
I was right. Joe is one of the friends I’m going to miss.