Jill Simonsen
LA, March 19, 2011, 11:00 PM
I tried to find somewhere to go out tonight. SXSW has been a distraction for a week, and I have been holding on to distracting myself for another day until the service, but I guess it’s not going to work. Sometimes time presses on you in ways you can’t control. I haven’t lost anyone close to me in… well, I can remember it explicitly. It was 1996, when my dear friend Val Mulford passed from bone cancer, at the age of 24. Jill Simonsen was 40 years old this year. It’s a curious age for someone to die, and it catches friends off guard. I did not live a… shall we say… safe young adulthood. A lot of people died, some close to me, some not. There was a time when going to funerals was almost routine. But now, I’ve only been to one in the last decade and a half. There seems to be a lull in funerals in your 30’s, and I fear all too much this marks the end of that lull.
I remember the day I met Jill. Isn’t that amazing? I can even pinpoint the month and the year, actually, through logic, real estate, roommates and photography. It was the spring of 1996. May. I remember her walking up to my porch. She was with Katie Friend and Collage. They knew my roommate, Nick, who, oh lord, probably doesn’t know yet. Jesus, even as I write this, I think of more people that probably don’t know yet. The three of them were a sight to behold. Staggeringly beautiful, every one of them, but also so absurdly kind, sassy and funny. Nick, ever cooler than me back then, took them in stride, hugged them all, knew them all, in that way that I know I can do just as well now, but at the time this country boy was amazed, intimidated. I have photos from that day, still. I was shooting infrared back then, and Nick was shooting Land Camera film in an 145 body. Why do I remember these details? Because it is Jill, and I have met no one like her since.
That summer was so fun, and I met so many amazing people, thanks to Jill, who was like a one woman army of introductions and party coordination. More amazingly, though, by the end of the summer, as our lease was running out on Arden Street, Jill asked me if I wanted to move in with her and the cool kids on Higgins Street. So Jussi and I took her up on it. And we were introduced to an amazing world of people that, 15 years later, I still count as amongst my best friends. It seems like it was right after I moved in to that house that suddenly a party scene was being shot in my house for an independent film. I spent two hours in the background as an extra talking to two friends of Jill’s, two beautiful twins Rachel and Elissa, who I have loved like family ever since.
Jill was like that. Across the fifteen years I knew her, I would hear her say dozens of times “I have the best friends.” And she was right, she was always right about that. That summer she introduced me to her boyfriend Fitts, who played in a band I had worshipped from afar for years (The Elevator Drops) and the entire posse from the coolest band in Boston at the time, The Ghost of Tony Gold. Within a year I had an amazing group of supportive, happy, enthusiastic, creative and nurturing friends - something I had never had in my life before. We Alaskans tended to equate creativity with moodiness, and these friends effortlessly obliterated that stereotype. I was constantly intimidated by them, in awe of them, ever thankful for them, ever trying to be cool enough for the artists and writers and filmmakers that were all attracted to Jill back then, as they have been ever since. This talent of hers spanned the decades - later, in LA, I was totally thrilled to meet The Brian Jonestown Massacre and people who worked on Futurama. It even continued through to her wedding last fall, when she introduced me to David Yow.
Fitts had a summer house on Lake Winnipesaukee and it became our friend group’s own little paradise. We headed up there multiple times a summer. It was a magical realm, and everything there seemed as if in another another world. Even to this day, my friends group for all of these people is named “Winnipesaukee,” in memory of those days.
Then, through a series of coincidences, suddenly I was Jill’s boss, and we were working together, also with our friend Kris. It would seem like poison to live with someone and work with them too, but it wasn’t, and I can only think of a few times Jill and I ever fought. Because she was Jill, and she was one of the kindest people on the planet. We’d drive to work in the morning listening to Howard Stern, and the evening listening to music. I can remember one particularly beautiful summer day, we were driving back from work listening to Yo La Tengo and Jill just shouted out “This is so awesome!” Nothing was happening but us driving down the road on a summer day, listening to “Autumn Sweater.” But she made it seem like the greatest thing in the world. Because it was. We spent our days at work designing CD covers and printing film - actually printing film, with an imagesetter. We used photo chemicals. Old school. And we had the best job in the world because we were designing album covers - a dream we both shared our entire childhoods.
Jill moved out, eventually, to Fitts’ apartment, which like Winnipesaukee became, through Jill’s supreme hostessing skills, the center of our little social life. I can remember champagne in the hot tub on the roof in Cambridge (I bought Jill a bottle of Dom Perignon for her birthday, a grand gesture for one of my best friends when both of us could barely afford Frexinet). I remember taking E till the wee hours of the morning with the Drops and the Ghost and the Twins and Mark Sandman (also too short of this world) and Chris Brokaw, both of whom I worshipped, but of course, Jill just knew, and they were, of course, just as nice as everyone else Jill knew and connected together. A photo exists somewhere of some ten of us, maybe 8 in the morning, having been up all night, a wonderful night. The twins birthday. I bought them shoes.
Even by this time in our friendship, I knew that knowing someone like Jill was never going to happen again. I’ve learned so much from her, and tried to be that person to other people - introducing good people to good people, trying to help, being excited about the things that my friends have done. But even then, by 1998, I knew that I’d met someone extraordinary. I wrote a song about Jill, that my band recorded. It remains one of the songs I’m most proud of having written, thanks mostly to my best friend at the time Aug, whose sister later went on to marry Fitts, having met at Aug’s going away party at my house. Connections. Friends. Family.
When I wrote it, I was going through not a breakup, but, shall we say, relationship drama. Later, when the girl and I had reconciled, she made light of how I never wrote a song about her. I tried to pawn off “Paled and Disappeared” as being about her, since it referenced our relationship strife. The girl, ever smarter than I, immediately called me out on it, and stated flatly it was obviously about someone else. It was. It was about Jill, who had helped me make it through that period, and shepherded my life into the promised land of good friends, and good times, like she always did.
Tired and worn
Tattered and torn
Paled and disappeared
But feel no fear
Wasted and used
Battered and bruised
Embarrassed and confused
But I’ll see it through
Look back on the things I’ve done I’m amazed that I survived
All the things we’ve been through and all the crazy nights
Now I know I love you all no longer paralyzed
And I know it’s just begun we’ll always have the time
We’ve got time….
And when the darkness takes me murder on my mind
Her decisions kill me and her bombay sapphire eyes
You reach out and take my hand and I’ll break down and cry
I know no matter where we are friendship for all time
For all time…
Look back on the things I’ve done the photos don’t tell lies
Not just the summer of love but the rest of our lives
And now we’re headed everywhere but no need for goodbyes
We’ll come back to this place it’s a matter of time
Matter of time….
Transcribing that, now, obviously, is incredibly painful. But it was true. Jill moved away, but in the end, my predictions were true, and she stayed a huge part of life. That third verse refers to an incredibly traumatic time in my life, around 1998, when Jill and much of our friend group up and moved to LA. It seemed like it was never going to happen. It seemed like the fantasies we all spout about how we’re all going to grow old somewhere. But happen it did, and thanks no doubt to Jill, in large part.
When Jill, and the collection of amazing people she had amassed, all moved, it tore a hole in my heart that has never been replaced, really. I am a social guy, of course, but I still never feel as if I had friends like those. Those of us who remained in Boston literally lost our social center when Jill disappeared. When they first left, I would routinely visit them. Monthly. I’d stay with Jill in her beautiful little apartment in Silverlake. I never wanted to stay with anyone else. I had concocted plans to move out there. Jack and Bruce had an extra room and I was going to take it. Plans were in motion. And then Mr. Benjamin Palmer came up with a really good idea, and I could tell it was a good idea, and I elected to stay in Boston and found The Barbarian Group with him. A few years went by, and it was painful how little I saw Jill, though the friend group as a whole survived remarkably well. Rachel came back to Boston and moved in with me for a while, and her boyfriend Zach followed her back from San Diego to woo her, eventually marrying her. I’d see Ivelisse and Al a lot, Rachel a decent amount, even after she left, thanks to one of my clients being in San Diego.
But a wonderful thing started to happen somewhere around 2004 or so. Jill moved to New York, and many of our LA compatriots followed her. I was also going to New York a lot for work, and it wasn’t long before I moved in with her and her new boyfriend Chris, in the Lower East Side. It was then, really, that the prophesies of “Paled and Disappeared” began to manifest themselves. Five years had passed where I had only seen Jill occasionally, on my increasingly rare trips to Los Angeles, or her trips to New York that happened to coincide with mine. But when we moved back in together in 2006 or so, our friendship proved to have never faded even a little. And, of course, when you’re friends with Jill, you get to be friends with all of her friends - she’d never have it any other way. It was like a wonderful gift - not just seeing Jill again but seeing Vicki again and Collage, Kelly Bray or Elissa and all the people I’d not seen in so long. And of course, everyone remembered you, everyone was still nice - it was unspoken, but I think we all knew that the friends we all made through Jill were special. I’d come to my New York home from a long day at work or doing work networking, arriving tired and exhausted at 10 PM and oh, there would be Vicki or Jon K or Jack or Rosie or some other amazing person that I used to know 7 or 10 years ago. It was like Christmas all the time. It helped get me through some of the hardest years of my life.
Jill and Chris broke up, Jill and I moved to another place, I broke up with my girlfriend, I was single, I dated, Jill dated, I found a new girlfriend. There were tough times, there were tears. We both worked hard, but we made that neighborhood our kingdom. We’d always meet up for a drink and catch up and bitch about our lives. We’d go to bars and Jill would flirt with bartenders and I would flirt with bartenders and we’d get each other’s back and we’d invite friends out and we lived a little part time life in a 600 square foot, two bedroom apartment on Clinton Street that I count as one of my favorite homes ever.
Then there were her paintings. Most of our apartment was her studio - our tiny living room that somehow she managed to paint monolithic canvasses in. Virtually every person that’s been to my apartment in SoHo asks the same question before too long: who painted that big painting? Jill’s paintings were so different than Jill. They were measured and controlled and ultra fastidious. At first blush, they seemed devoid of the passion with which Jill lived her life. But in many ways, they were so, so like Jill. They are their own little universes, passionately committed to accuracy and truth, a representation of reality that is simultaneously hyper realistic and deeply representational. And while Jill was passionate, she was usually in control of things. She was not prone to hysteria, even in times of depression - a recurring symptom with which we both suffered, and we bonded over our constant struggles against it. We both matter-of-factly dealt with our depression most of the time. We never shied away from doing the right thing. We were pragmatists, even in our illnesses. In many ways, as I write this, I see more in her paintings than I ever did at the time. For I had spent a decade watching her style evolve to where it ended up. I naïvely viewed it as similar to the ever-reductionist evolution of Brancusi or Malevich. But in fact I think it represented something more: passionate execution, attention and care, but control and the appreciation of beauty in the overlooked.
Then one day I moved to New York full time, my own apartment, and Jill moved across Clinton Street to her own place. Before too long Jill had gone to LA for the weekend, and then strangely she just didn’t return for weeks. Two months went by. When she finally got back, we met up at 151, our bar, and she told me her secret: that on her trip she and Sebastian - an old friend of ours, her ex from fifteen years earlier, a great man we’d both known for over a decade - had fallen in love. And it was the kind of love that you don’t see very often. That on the first trip back she was telling me that they were going to get married and they were already decided that they were going to have a baby - and it just seemed so awesome. Jill was moving back to LA, which was sad for me, but that sadness was pretty rapidly diminished when I went to the wedding and oh, hello, here it was, 15 years later, an amazing friend group - so many of them I’d known forever. All together. It was a magical weekend, not so very long ago. We were all in awe, I think, of how great everyone still seemed, and the wedding - not 90 seconds long - was one of the best we’d ever been to.
And then this Thursday night, at a SXSW party at Mugshots, amongst friends I see annually, having a great time, a text from an LA friend - one of the many who Jill has touched, and I’ve known so long in so many different ways, but originally through Jill’s amazing brother Corey. A text that I needed to call her. We have some business dealings, this friend and I, so I texted if it was important. She said no. I figured it was something money related. But the next morning, when I had two other friends tell me I needed to get in touch with them, I knew. For the only cross section on a venn diagram these three friends had in common was someone that had, her whole life, been a connector of friends. I stupidly called while walking through the lobby of my hotel for a work meeting. Maybe it was something else. An accident or something less extreme. But in a horrible conversation, both of us just balling, her at work, me walking through the Four Seasons lobby, I learned the truth. I had to be on stage some two hours later, in front of 500 or so people talking about advertising. I made it through by swigging Pepto Bismal and two shots of Fernet. I was numb. Throughout the week, I held it together mostly, but, even in the reaches of SXSW, I’d run across people who were touched by Jill. I’m sure that most of my New York friends who read this would have been great friends with her had she not moved to LA, and those that I’ve known for even a few years had met her. I came across several people even in the tech world that had met Jill. In many ways, SXSW was a horrible place to learn of the death of so close of a friend, but in others, it was helpful: many of my friends were around to support me and distract me, and those who I came across that also knew Jill reminded me of the astonishing extent of her friend making abilities. Also, stumbling around incoherently is not considered too odd.
And here I am, one week later, In LA. It seemed wrong to only go to the New York memorial. So many of our friends still live here, so much of my life was touched by Jill.
I can’t imagine a life without Jill. I can’t imagine not meeting more exciting people through her. I can’t imagine not hearing her squeal with glee when something is exciting. I can’t imagine her telling me another fantastic story. I can’t imagine not ever hearing her say “we have the BEST FRIENDS IN THE WORLD” again. I can’t imagine not sitting with her in Donnybrook making fun of Rory’s accent. She was the first friend I had that I just knew would be with me my whole life. I can’t imagine her not meeting my children or me meeting hers. I hate every minute I’ve spent not telling her how great I thought she was - I know I didn’t do that enough. I never though we would run out of time. The monolith of the length of our friendship and its durability often seemed to be enough - a proxy for the affection we didn’t talk about enough to each other, but always talked about to others.
The minute I heard, I ran to my room, ran to Emma’s arms and cried. I held it in all week, but I’ve been crying the entire hour I’ve been writing this now, and I can’t stop. I’ll never meet another person like Jill Simonsen, and I will never forget her as long as I live.
