JBD

The email from oldest brother Eric was succinct: John-Bryan had passed away, quite unexpectedly. Both Eric and Brian had been in contact over the previous few weeks, and John-Bryan gave no indication that he was ill. John-Bryan’s friend, David, delivered the sad news to Eric via phone.

Eric on the left, and John-Bryan

I racked my tenuous mind for a memory of my first meeting with the dude with two first names, and came up with nothing. The reason for that would be that by the time I actually met him in the flesh, I had been corresponding with him on paper for four months, from Missouri at the outset, and New Jersey at the end. This would have taken place between February and May of 1972.

We were beyond just casual acquaintances by the time we first came face-to-face; we were good friends. Though I had never met him, John-Bryan quickly had his finger on the pulse of what made me tick, in order to get through the nightmare known as Military Madness: home-town comics, home-town sports trivia and home-town news. 

Red-haired, gregarious and conscientious, JBD, as he was often referred to, liked to drink gin. In point of fact, he consumed more gin than anyone I ever met, though he held his liquor well. The more he drank, the funnier he got, and he had this way of always keeping one’s drink “refreshed.”

Before I ever met him, he sent care packages containing items that were hard to get on post, featuring chocolate and snacks, especially appreciated later on when I was  overseas. Those were days when parcels routinely went astray, taking three weeks or more to make the journey. Meanwhile, letters from home teased me by asking how I liked the most recent package.

The question arises: Exactly who was JBD and how did he and I hook up? He entered the fabric of our family through Eric, who had recently signed up for the Peace Corps, and was in New Jersey, receiving training, in the fall of 1971. Specifically, Eric was to take up residence in The Republic of South Korea, for the purpose of teaching English at the university level.

John-Bryan had also been admitted to the Peace Corps program, and had similarly been trained in New Jersey, where he and Eric became friends. The time-frame is irrelevant, except to say that JBD’s experience in South Korea was challenging and brief, and he returned to his home in San Diego while I was enduring first basic training in Missouri, and then Advanced Individual Training, in New Jersey.

Dated December 5th, 1972, a typical note
from John-Bryan, filled with upbeat news from
home, and tales of his travels around town.

Through Eric and my brother Brian, John-Bryan learned of my being drafted/bummed out, and being a compassionate soul, he began a personal campaign of support. Who was I to argue? I took his kindness at face value, a byproduct of his pleasure at not only being accepted by my family, but embraced.

Hailing from San Diego, John-Bryan took to making the two-hour commute up to La Puente on a regular basis; he rapidly became friends with the entire household. In March of 1972, everyone in the family who was on hand, except Mama and Kevin, spent a few days down in Baja, Mexico, at the old travel trailer that we kept ensconced at a local campground. It cost Papa a paltry fee of $35.00 per year.

I heard from every member of that entourage, about the antics of this goofy, warm-hearted individual, who was back from a noble effort to acclimate himself to a most challenging culture. At one point when I visited Eric in Kwangju, where he was stationed, I was informed that he was one of six Americans living in Kwangju at that time, a city of 500,000 people. John-Bryan had just been unable to adapt.

I had the mustache;
therefore I was older than Eric,
who was 26 years old, to my 19.

As Eric and I walked through the city streets, at one point in time, we were surrounded by a small group of urchins, all laughing, pointing and chanting, “You look like a monkey.” Eric informed me that Koreans who encountered us, would assume that I was the older of the two siblings, because I wore a mustache. In the Korean culture, only the oldest was allowed facial hair, until maybe sixty years old.

I mention this primarily to convey the sense of homesickness John-Bryan might have experienced, would not have been helped by this sort of unwitting treatment, by those he was purportedly assisting. I think his inability to adjust to life in Korea, made him double his efforts to provide support for me.

John-Bryan was an educated man, cultured and refined, with a natural flare for style and fashion. He was meticulous, even fussy, and he was infinitely polite. His sense of humor was exquisite, and could either be bitingly sarcastic, or subtly suggestive.

A most complex individual, there was one other minor detail that I immediately picked up on, the first time I actually met him, that had never  cropped up before: John-Bryan was gay.

Next: Travels with John-Bryan