A eulogy for the weird kid in the windbreaker
by Jack Neely
Our former editor left town this week for Manhattan, and I know some big shots are grateful for that fact. He was never quite as agreeable as local honchos have grown to expect reporters to be.
Eight, maybe nine years ago, we were both freelancers for Metro Pulse, back when it seemed like something less than a respectable full-time job, and we knew each other only by our articles. I didn't know whether "Jesse Fox Mayshark" was male or female, but this person's articles seemed unusually clear-headed and acute. When Lee Gardner introduced us, near a keg in somebody's South Knoxville kitchen, I didn't expect to meet a young kid in a windbreaker and a middle-parted hairdo; he looked something like a high-school senior, class of '73. A younger guy in older styles, Jesse was an inversion I found a little unsettling. In our first conversation, he maintained that cloak of standoffish irreverence that Northerners tend to keep their first few months in town, and sometimes forever. He gave me the impression, in short, of a Yankee smartass.
I knew lots of Yankee smartasses. Some of my best friends were Yankee smartasses. But I'd rarely known a Yankee smartass who was all that smart. That's why Jesse made me a little nervous. I was probably relieved to hear that he'd left MP's stable for a job at the News-Sentinel, which I thought might be better fitted to Yankees in windbreakers.
But a couple of years later, Joe Sullivan, for reasons of his own, hired Jesse Mayshark to be an editor at Metro Pulse. Somehow through a complicated falling of dominoes, a spare office with a window was promised to both Jesse and me. It was decided that we would share it. I was skeptical about how it would work out.
He tacked up posters having to do with rap stars I'd never heard of, including one Slim Shady, and Donald Duck. He saw no call for explanation.
One thing we had in common was a spontaneous filing system, but our cycles of messiness never lined up. Depending on deadlines, one or the other of us would get on a neatness jag, get everything in stacks, and then, for a neat week or two, look scornfully at the other side of the office. The whole office was never orderly at the same time. But we got along somehow.
Over the next few years, Jesse made it his business to keep bewildering me. He's a guy who listens to early, primitive country music more than I do, with a special affection for Appalachian banjoist Dock Boggs; but who then closes his door and blasts his office with Eminem's latest outrage. (For the record, we never came to an agreement about rap; the fact that Jesse likes rap is my best evidence that it's better than it sounds.) And then goes downstairs to the MacLeod's patio to play his guitar, mostly mild top-40 oldies.
He's a guy who wouldn't harm a crustacean, and who took his cat to a cat psychologist, but who was a fierce basketball, tennis, and poker player, and manager of the Metro Pulse softball team. He is a guy who prizes his collections of Carl Barks duck comics, but who doesn't a bit mind going on overnight trips to remote Appalachian towns to interview convicted Satanic killers and their families—or, which may be tougher, to attend public meetings and stare down public officials he had gutted in a recent editorial.
He's a college guy from up north who always brushed his teeth at work and routinely said "frigging," a word which I had never heard except on TV; but he also drove a stinky, un-air-conditioned pickup and lived for a spell in a tin-roof shack in South Knox County.
He's a vegetarian, even at times a strict milk-avoiding vegan, but one who loves Scotch, strong ale, and a good cigar.
He knew he wouldn't stay in Knoxville for long, but he came to know and care more about the place than most of us lifers seem to. He became WATE's chief local-news pundit. He organized a couple of lively, popular, and maybe unprecedented public forums on downtown development. He was the motivating force behind last year's Knoxville Music and Heritage Festival. It was fun, but without Jesse to prod it along, it's unlikely to happen again.
Of course, he wouldn't see any contradictions in any of the above. He's probably wondering why I've gone to the trouble of juxtaposing these attributes as if there's something peculiar about it.
Jesse has a reputation among Knoxville's big shots, especially those involved in massive development projects, as an annoying conspiracy theorist, or at least an impertinent kid without a proper respect for previously unquestioned authority. I thought about listing here all the times Jesse was seriously skeptical about an overinflated project that later went flat. Suffice it to say that whenever someone says, "If we'd only known," you can look up a back issue of Metro Pulse and find out that somehow Jesse did know, back when it wasn't too late to turn back, and tried to warn us. We could easily fill an issue with a story: Things Jesse Mayshark Was Right About. Maybe we'll do that someday.
I didn't agree with him about everything, but I'll miss him for several practical reasons. He lived here only a quarter as long as I've lived here, but he knows the ins and outs of this town's Byzantine political networks much better than I do. If I forgot the name of any of 300 public officials and community leaders, I'd just ask Jesse, and he'll give me a phone number, a synopsis of their resume, and a briefing on their alliances.
What he'll do with this knowledge in Manhattan is a mystery. I hope it won't hold him down.
September 19, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 38
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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