My Dinner with Jubal Brown

            The wi-fi from the donut shop downstairs was off on Thursday from around noon until I went out that night and so I managed to get a fair amount of work done on my review of Shab-e She’r.

            On January 22, I got a message on Facebook from Jubal Brown, inviting me out to dinner on February 1. I’ve known Jubal for 25 years and he was still in high school when we first met at a Christmas party in the Sanctuary Church at Yonge and Charles. Jubal’s father, Les Brown was the drummer for a Christian band called Red Rain that hosted a dinner and open stage for the disadvantaged four times a year. I went because there was an open stage there for me to perform on and I also wanted to promote my own weekly open stage for writers called The Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy. Red Rain would perform first, doing mostly cover tunes, and then they’d stay on stage as back up for anyone that wanted to do something on the open stage. They were actually pretty good at improvising. Case in point, when I took the stage to perform my song, “Instructions for Electroshock Therapy”. In those days I didn’t know how to play any of my songs on guitar and so with me singing acapella on a very unconventional song, it was pretty impressive that they could follow along, albeit in a conventional way. Afterwards, Jubal approached me and told me that he’d liked my song and I invited him to come down to the Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy.

            Jubal did come to the Orgy, at least a couple of times, and since my policy was that anyone that performs twice at the Orgy could become a featured reader, he got a showcase. I recall though that on that occasion he didn’t bring any of his own poetry but rather read from a child’s scribbler that he’d found on the street.

            At one point a few years later, when I needed a drummer for my band, Jubal played at least one gig with Christian and the Lions. It didn’t work out though because Jubal didn’t feel compatible with my music, plus he wasn’t a very good drummer.

            Then Jubal started going to The Ontario College of Art and Design, where he was studying video, so I used to run into him quite a bit and it was around this time that he started becoming infamous for radical art performances and events. He also got into trouble with the school administration over controversial things that he said and did. He tried to explain himself but a lot of people didn’t get it.

            One day we met by chance on the street downtown while I was with my daughter, Astrid. I think she was about five or six at the time. He told me about an event that was happening later that day in which people would get together to destroy a car in an abandoned lot on Bathurst. My daughter was excited about it so we went home to get my hammer. It turned out though that Jubal hadn’t been able to get hold of a car and so they just staged the other half of the event, which was a book burning. What books? Any books. This was a Po Po event, and Po Po, Jubal explained was post-post Modernism. Jubal had gotten hundreds of books from Goodwill that would have been tossed into a dumpster anyway. The fifty or so people that had gathered for the event were given the opportunity to go through the books to salvage what they found interesting before the pile was set aflame. Astrid and I took a few but I don’t remember which ones, though I probably still have them. The idea was that creativity can only take place after destruction, which is something that I’d thought to be true for a long time. It was a fun and interesting event and probably one of the only times in history in which books were burned without malice.

            A couple of years later he had the run of a gallery belonging to OCADU and organized parties there. At one of them he’d gotten hold of a whole lot of mattresses. I arrived and saw a bunch of twenty-somethings sitting around on mattresses. It seemed boring to me so I started building things out of the mattresses. I made a maze tunnel that people could walk through, until some guy destroyed it. I also built a mountain for people to climb and then roll down. People seemed to like it but it wasn’t a crowd that seemed to want to be caught having fun.

            From the late 90s on I only ran into Jubal sporadically. I would see bits of his video work online from time to time but we didn’t hang out, so it was a surprise to me for him to invite me to dinner after all these years. I was looking forward to it though.

            We were scheduled to meet at The Federal at 1438 Dundas, which was not far away. I gave myself fifteen minutes to get there. It takes me about four minutes to get to Dundas and Brock but the numbers on Dundas are not parallel to Queen. If they were the restaurant would have been almost directly north of my place. At Brock, Dundas is already in the 1500s so I had to ride east. I went too far and doubled back but I was still there before 19:00 and just as I was locking my bike, Jubal arrived.

            The Federal was crowded and noisy. As soon as we walked in, there was a couple there that knew Jubal. When the guy with the beard shook Jubal’s hand he affectionately placed his face against Jubal’s arm.

            Jubal and I sat at a small table near the door and chatted about how long we’ve known each other. I ordered a pint of Steam Whistle and Jubal had a house made non-alcoholic root beer that was served in a jar.

            I learned that Jubal has been a vegetarian all his life because his Christian parents were vegetarians. When he was older they started eating meat again but Jubal continued with a lacto-vegetarian diet.

            He told me that his parents have broken up and that now his dad has gone extremely right wing Christian and he’s into medieval martial arts in armour. I looked at his father’s Facebook page and it looks like he’s into a kind of armour up for Jesus Knights Templar thing.

            Jubal opined that my interactions with Cad Gold Jr. on Facebook are hilarious. He asked if I meet with Cad at all these days and I answered that we usually see each other once a month at the Shab-e She’r reading series but he didn’t come last time, I speculated that it was because he was watching Donald Trump. Jubal asked incredulously, “He’s joking though, right?” I broke the news that Cad is indeed a diehard Trump fan but then again he also likes Mussolini and despite being a Jew, he thinks Hitler wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d only killed all the left wing Jews. Jubal couldn’t believe it.

            Jubal thinks that someone should shoot a documentary on the dynamic that exists between Cad and I.

I had a greasy piece of fried chicken, served on top of a honeyed waffle with an avocado and slaw salad and dip. It was kind of a bizarre combination flavourwise.

            I learned that Jubal is studying to be a social worker now at George Brown. He wants make use of what he’s learned from his own survival experiences to work with drug addicts. He recounted how he’d almost died as a result of abusing drugs and alcohol and actually spent a week in a coma. So now he wants to help free them from the rut that he fell into but managed to climb out of.  It sounds like a noble endeavour.

            We shared stories of traveling in Europe. I was trying to become a fashion model and he was featuring his work at film festivals. I went in 87 and he went in 97. I was alone but he had a girlfriend with him. We both ran out of money. I hitchhiked and he jumped trains. I slept in the park and in bus stations, Jubal and his girlfriend spent a night in Cologne in a church that had been bombed during WWII and never renovated. The next morning they were exploring the wreckage, walked through a door and found themselves standing in the renovated part of the church, behind the minister and with an entire congregation staring at them.

            Jubal is working on an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novel in three parts. He declared that he would stop writing after it’s done because he only had three ideas left in him. I doubt that last part very much.

            When we shook hands on the sidewalk I asked Jubal if there was anything about our conversation that he didn’t want me to write about. He laughed.