A Meditation on Jon Yevin at 45
I Know A Man by Robert Creeley
as I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, — John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.
I’ve always wanted an older brother, an impossible ask as the first-born, but Jon Yevin, who I first met through the Jewish Community Center of Paramus when we were barely out of diapers, would come to stand in for that role. He’s three years older and the actual older brother to my friend Shira, who once saved my life in rural Austria, after finding me on a train, asking what the hell was wrong with me and insisting that I go to a hospital, not knowing my appendix had just burst. One emergency appendectomy and two years later, Jon and I reconnected in NY, where I was an aspiring magazine entrepreneur and Jon was a published magazine writer known for gonzo stunts like getting Christian universities to incorporate “Goldstein” into their name by pretending he was a widow with a large potential endowment.
Speaking of endowment, the first thing that you notice about Jon, ladies, is that he’s tall and handsome, two ridges in a skeleton key that unlock adventures around the world. You wonder if Jon would be able to get away with his swashbuckling, whether in Swahili, English, Spanish or Portuguese if he wasn’t so damn attractive and the answer is no. He looks like a Semitic Alexander Skaarsgard who can hoop it up. He wears it so well that he was once given a modeling contract in Brazil to pose for Kenneth Cole.
With his height, strength and long wingspan he has a physique that lends itself to playing ‘ball. There is nowhere that Jon would rather be than running with an assortment of streetballers and former D1ers, defying his age, keeping limber with exercises from YouTube wellness gurus like Knees Over Toes. He shoots, he passes, he can Eurostep to the rim. Once upon a time, Yev even played pro basketball in Zanzibar, leading them to the Eastern, Central, and Southern Africa championship tournament.
Jon speaks like a beat poet who was raised on MTV. In conversation Jon’s got a ratatat style with modulating intonations: Papo, you’ve got to check out this cabaret party jumping off at the Navy Yard right after Calamity Chang’s Asian burlesque but not before we pop to this new exhibit at BAM and then hit up First Saturdays. To Jon, Papo, is what “cat” was to Bebop. At some point, Jon started calling all of the guy friends in his life Papo as a term of endearment. In Jon’s parlance, Papo! is not just a greeting but a clarion call, a contraction of “yo my man what it is and how we doin’”. Papo invites the receiver to match or raise the intensity of the Papo on offer:
Eh Papo?
PA-POOOOO!
All of this PAPO talk has earned Yev the nickname, unsurprisingly, of Papo.
Jon’s written history across texts and emails reveal a merry prankster who loves language, loves playing with phonetics and drawing connections between ideas and concepts like some kind of synaptical freak. It’s not a conversation with Papo unless he references stories you vaguely recall when you were in layered states of inebriation. You remember my buddy Spike who once snuck across the Turkish border to fight in Syria? [Shot out to Spike!] Years later you’ll be out with Yev and you’ll realize that the unassuming person across the table is the hero from one of Yev’s long ago stories, which at the time you thought was totally apocryphal, about his buddy who was doing a first descent on the Amazon River and fought off a hippopotamus, and there he is, with the large scar on his arm, here to corroborate the tale.
Papo exists as a node in a vast Gallatin-ized creative network of comedians, charlatans, aerialists, sonofabitches, tech entrepreneurs and academics. They’re often referred to by their first name and their occupation like we’re in the Middle Ages — Rocco the Mason, Dangerlist Will. Unsurprisingly, he’s no more at home than at Burning Man, the vortex where all of these energies beautifully collide. Burning Man is the world as Jon wishes it to be, and walking around the Playa feels a bit like walking around Papo’s mind, which sparkles at the discovery of new facts, artistic expressions and experiences. Jon once shared that he often becomes indescribably sad when he visits a bookstore and it occurs to him how much knowledge he’ll never be able to ingest. Get this man a Neurolink, stat!
To love Yev is to accept that he’s allergic to plans. As a person with a regimented 7a — 8p Monday through Friday calendar life, I appreciate that his seat-of-the-pants style is one of his most frustrating and endearing qualities. There are some friends who go extreme in the other direction and require Google Invites for a simple afterwork hang [in douchey voice] if it’s not on my calendar it’s like it doesn’t exist for me. Or you’ve got guys who treat their significant others like social secretaries such is their monomaniacal focus on Work: Oh I don’t know about next week I gotta talk to The Boss. Talk to The Boss. Talk to The Boss. Jon is like your sitcom next door neighbor; he just shows up, unannounced, with an earnest intensity that is hard not to applaud.
Chacun cultive son jardin and well, Jon cultives all the gardens. He parlayed an accidental visit to a horticulture lecture on NYU’s campus 15 years ago into a thriving landscape architecture business that he operates from his phone. To know Jon is to know that he’s a master Android user. He develops 6-figure garden contracts and dictates entire books into this beat-up device, which is also home to a massive archive of photos and videos both from around the way, and all over the world.
Jon treats business like an art project. For Jon, commerce requires flow not process, which serves him because he delivers superior work, ensuring that the phone always rings. He happens to own a business as opposed to being a practicing capitalist. As Pico Iyler once said, sometimes making a living and making a life point in opposite directions. Jon optimizes for cash and like a little boy from the shtetl, he stashes it away in a series of safety deposit boxes. He once drove cross- country with a million dollars in cash strapped to his body like a drug mule. Jon often feels the tug towards leading a more conventional life. At one point, Jon thought about getting a staff writing job and when he sent me his resume, the first line read “At 16 Jon was considered a genius….”. Not wrong but all the more reason that Yev works for no Man. As he once wrote, “I was fired from every job I ever had and kicked out of summer camp, Hebrew school, AAU basketball, high school, and Egypt”.
The impermanence of the seasons, the no Matter Out Of Place philosophy of Burning Man has previously served as a post-hoc rationale for not settling down or owning an apartment for fear that it may put a crimp in his go anywhere, do anything lifestyle, lest he become another shmo with mortgage. Take Jon’s van, for instance. Jon’s van is a site gag, it’s a beat-up Scooby Doo kidnapper van filled with gardener shit lacking in seats and seat belts. Before that, his car was his mom’s Jaguar, a perfectly nice luxury vehicle that he subsequently totaled and in Yev fashion, walked away unscathed. A Rule Of Yev is that if you give him something to hold on to, it is certain that it will be creatively and fantastically destroyed. One time I hired him to take photographs from a work event and within 24 hours, not only was the CD with all the photos cracked, but Jon tried suing the venue after breaking his nose on their front door while high on MDMA. He’s like Chunk with the water cooler in Goonies (“I hope it’s not a deposit bottle!”).
But in his most surprising move yet, Yev is evolving into his version of adulthood. He bought the space of his dreams and he’s committed to a loving partner who matches his fierce intelligence and complements his chaotic energy with a groundedness that suits them both well. It creates the perfect cocoon in which to welcome a new baby into the world. It’s also perfectly fitting that the breaker of a thousand swooning hearts gets to nurture a little feminine spirit of his own.
My entire experience in NY, and in the world generally, would be impoverished without Jon Yevin’s constant merrymaking. You often stand next to the people you can never be and for the last 20 years I’ve stood next to Jon, admiring his approach to life as a main character in a massive open-ended game, traveling luggagelessly, sampling abundantly and living fearlessly. He’s a Gen X Kerouac, fueled by many of the same molecules, a psychonautical pirate Huck Finn, part motor, part sail, no apologies.
I love you dearly and I can’t wait to experience this next chapter of our lives together.
