There was the time Jack helped Richard and I move out of our apartment. We had a balcony running the length of the place that hung over parking spaces that backed onto the alley. The guys were running boxes of this and that, stereo equipment, bits of furniture – you know. All that kind of stuff.
Then we got to the couch. It was a tight squeeze and a narrow stairway down to the truck, and while the guys were all looking at each other trying to figure out the trajectory, Jack hollered up from the truck bed. “Toss it over the railing.” So they did. And it worked.
At least that’s how I remember it. Now that I think about it, maybe taking it over the railing was Brandon’s idea. Brandon was the brains of the outfit. Brandon was Jack’s running buddy, his Tom Sawyer to Jack’s Huckleberry Finn. When I first met Jack, the two were inseparable.
Jack and Brandon both were romantic heroes to me, a landlubbing girl from the flatlands. They were crab fishermen, who sailed the Bering Seat, hauling in pots of king crab for the seafood restaurants at home in Seattle and everywhere else. The Bering Sea. The Alaska Straits. Kodiak Island. It was all as romantic as Timbuktu to me. I was fascinated.
Have you ever read books by Jack London? I asked Jack one time? No, he said. What did were they about. Oh, you know, I said. Tough times in Alaska. There’s one about a boat. Yeah? I had forgotten most of the plot of Sea Wolf, so I just said that it was about a cruel captain and bad weather. Jack he looks at me and says, Yeah. Sounds about right.
I was to later come to the sad conclusion that I didn’t think Jack had read a book since Dick and Jane, and I wasn’t entirely sure he finished that one. But I wish I had had a tape recorder on when he told me his fishing tales. I remember one where he had managed to break a foot – at least he thought he had broken it. But a storm was coming up and they had to lift the pots. Foot or no foot. So he shoved that foot into a boot and went out on deck, and there is no way I can write anything that can capture his tale, but it involved stormy weather and slippery decks and heavy crab pots and various metal objects that kept slamming into his foot … and I was laughing so hard it was a while before I could catch my breath enough to tell him that sorry for laughing about your broken foot. But Jack was grinning all the while, as if it had been the funniest thing that had ever happened to him. He loved telling stories. “Did I ever tell you about the time we was crabbing and I almost went overboard?” he would ask. And then he would be off.
Jack pulling me onto dance floors where he was an enthusiastic, not to say good, dancer who boogied away to his own rhythm. I gave up trying to follow him and boogied to my own. Worked out perfectly.
Jack taking us all out on his fishing boat, the Michael (he told me nobody had known how to spell Michelle), inherited from his dad, I think, after a Kuli Loach gig on my birthday and making me drive. “Just don’t make a wake,” he said. “Don’t want to bring the Harbor Patrol.” So we cruised around Lake Union at a snail’s pace in the early morning hours. One of my favorite birthdays.
Jack sitting on a tent canvas in a pile of tent poles right outside my tent asking if I can help him put up damned tent. With both of us drunk and high on LSD, I told him to lie down and go to sleep. You can come in if it rains. It didn’t rain.
Jack coming to the rescue when my daughter Caroline was arrested for socking her housemate in the nose (he was pounding on her door threatening to kill her because she had caught him and his girlfriend stealing stuff from another housemate who was out of town – or something like that), and we moved Caroline’s stuff out of that house lickety split.
How he always called Caroline, “Carolina, the dancing machine.” How we never figured out where he got that, since I don’t think he ever saw her dance and she was anything but a machine. It was just Jack.
How he stole a puzzle piece off my jigsaw puzzle table one time, but his girlfriend Theresa made him give it back. He wanted to wait until I was done and then come to the rescue. Very funny, Jack.
And speaking of Theresa, how they got a dog (that she inherited in the breakup) that they named Louis Bulis III. And how they all rolled out onto my front lawn after a Neil show in Portland yelling, "Call 911 Pizza!"
How he came to every single one of my parties, especially the big yard parties where he insisted he had to stay to finish the keg, and he was always the last one to leave. Sometime in the middle of the next day, after he had passed out at the bottom of my bed, with me curled up on my pillow, and the two of us picking up keg cups and restoking the fire pit and talking and laughing until he really did have to go.
Esther Bulis, his sister-in-law, recalls him as a “funny, loving, loud and boisterous brother.” He was that to me, too. Always introduced me as his big sister.
I loved him, though. More than a brother, but never a lover. I don’t know why – just was always a little happier when he was around. I think he felt the same way, in a way. It was my fault that I messed that up by asking him for a goodnight kiss, after we had been at a show at the Showbox. Poor guy had no way of knowing that I had decided that it was a date – but not just any date. It was my last date. I never wanted to “date” anybody again = I was in my 60’s, 22 years older than Jack - so it was somehow appropriate, in my squirrelly little head, that my very last date would be Jack Bulis. Because I never wanted to take him home or anything. So neither one of us had anything to fear from that.
But he didn’t know that, and when I saw him again at a Kuli Loach gig, he danced attendance on me a little bit – maybe he thought he was supposed to or something. So I asked him to take me out to the boat, when I fully intended to tell him that I was looking forward to dancing at his wedding some day – anyway, to make it clear that I didn’t expect him to act all boyfriendy just because I’d asked for that kiss, but somehow I mentioned the word married first (totally forgetting that he already had a kid and that it hadn’t turned out well) – as something I thought he might want to do some time (he was always talking about his family – I think he loved them and you all very much) – and he immediately panicked and wouldn’t let me get another word in edgewise as he assured me over and over again that no, he never wanted to get married (at this point, I realized that he probably thought that I meant married to me) and anyway - if that scene were in a movie, it would have been hilarious. In real life, I think I had managed to bungle a wonderful friendship that had worked for us both.
How could I forget Jack’s complete inability to understand metaphor?
I know what we will all hear is how he died an alcoholic, how that was what killed him, one way or another. But I want people to know how much more he was. He was, as I have said, a crab fisherman, almost a super hero to me, who lived a life I had only read about in a book by Jack London. He was a union member, a longshoreman, who worked the port of Seattle, one of the busiest ports on the West Coast. And he was, importantly, a Deadhead, one of the happy few like me who lived at the same time as Jerry Garcia. And to top it off, because otherwise I would never have met him, he was a Blue Mooner, a special little tavern in the north end of Seattle, on the west edge of the University District, where people like Jack and me and so many others found a home.
Where we would often hear someone play Robert Hunter’s “Boys in the Barroom.”
Does God look down on the boys in the barroom?
Mainly forsaken but surely not judged.
Jacks, Kings and Aces their faces in wine.
Do Lord, deliver our kind.
I hope he finds a heaven with a camper van, a quiet fishing hole, a case of beer and a good dog. And somebody to tell his stories to. “Hey, have I told you about the time me and Brandon went fishing in a snow storm?”
He was a simple, good-hearted boy, and so many of us loved him.