Men Alone

Jonathan Joss, 1965-2025

I had not seen Jonathan Joss, the King of the Hill and Parks and Recreation actor who died this week after being fatally shot by his neighbor, in more than 20 years. I learned of his death from my daughter, who later posted, “Goodbye uncle,” on her Instagram, using the familiar common to Native (and other?) folks, which we saw sweetly parodied on Reservation Dogs

@fxnetworksProtect Uncle Brownie at all costs #ReservationDogsOnFX

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I had no reason to think Jonathan’s death was anything but as reported - a senseless killing by an irate neighbor - and I did. Reading details of his recent past made me seize with a recognized sadness, too many men I have known traveling alone to hard ends. Other than perhaps a random brick falling on your head, practically nothing comes out of the blue. We walk to where we get to, we create situations, we clean out the wound or let it fester. Some people, and I am thinking here of men, ignore the festering; maybe they don’t see it as dangerous, maybe history tells them not to expect better, maybe they feel as though they are supposed to be able to withstand suffering, to ignore it, to laugh at it, to drink or smoke or shoot it away. Police reports, eyewitness accounts tell us certain things, but they cannot tell us about the pain a man feels and what he will do to not feel it.

“I’m leaving,” I said to Tim, my daughter’s father. It was 11am and he was still in bed.

“When?” he asked

“As soon as I find a place. You and your friends can stay in the house.”

While he said no more, just rolled over, it was impossible there was not a cyclone in his chest, knowing I was leaving with our not-yet three-year-old daughter.

Tim living on a sailboat in Marina del Rey with Jonathan was some years in the future, years in which he and I watched different men barely hang on, you could see them half-listening to you, half to the siren song, where they were going all along.

There are too many of these men to properly remember. I can tell you about Josh Drum, who I recalled very sharply after watching Sterlin Harjo’s movie Mekko.

The movie made me remember a lot of things that happened in Hollywood, when Tafv was a baby and Tim and I lived in a house with a yard shaded by a big avocado tree. It was the era of Dances With Wolves and a lot of young guys, and fewer girls, were coming from the rez to try to get into movies. Eight or so of these guys were at the house a lot, they helped each other out as they could, just as two characters did in Mekko, helping a young guy new to the streets. The character reminded me of Josh, whom I had not thought of in a long time. Josh showed up in Hollywood in maybe 1991. He was tall and beefy. Many of the guys drank a lot and so did Josh. He was around 30, smart, shy to come inside. He and I would stand at the curb in the sun and talk about art and music and what he wanted to do, but his eyes were almost always just past my shoulder, as if there were an insinuation there, a destination telling him, take your time but hurry up.

The antagonist in Mekko put me in mind, too, of people I knew back then, but I figured it was because I’d seen actor Zahn McClarnon in a lot of other shows. Then I ran into him at a Rez Dogs party — he plays the goofy wise cop in the series — and realized he looked familiar because he and Tim and a few other Native actors lived together after Tim and I split up. As a honky tonk band played eight, Zahn and I talked for a long time and then he asked, did I remember Josh Drum? I did, and how he was always looking at a star, and that star was death. Yes, said Zahn, and that one of the last times he saw Josh, Josh lifted up his shirt to show him the dialysis tubes, that Josh had laughed and said, he poured the vodka directly in there.

Josh knew where he was going…