When Sasquatch drops by

My heart thuds in my fingertips as I scroll, suddenly awake, searching for Jason. Facebook, Twitter, Google. I have to talk him out of it before he goes through with the plan.

But I haven’t contacted him in years.

The last time was in that Edgewood bar where he chugged three beers faster than I’ve ever seen. Otherwise I can’t do this, he said, then got onstage with his electric guitar and assailed the instrument. He jerked and strutted and yell-sang into the dark of the crowd.

I wasn’t sure why he wanted this old man, 15 years beyond his age, to come to the show. Or why Jason was my friend. Co-worker at Creative Loafing, yes, in an era when people waited by the boxes for the tape to be ripped off bundled stacks of Atlanta’s inch-thick alt-weekly.

But at what point did I become friend?

Newspaper composing rooms by then were no longer zones of light tables and rollers and Xacto knives but still existed as a separate area. You had to walk to the back of the building, where dwelt a mix of bustle and quietude. Some workers flapped page galleys around, ready for editors to inspect. Others hunched at typesetting rigs and squinted at screens. (You might witness Chuck, asleep at his keyboard mid-task.) A few smoked on the loading dock, refuge from doldrums where we all gathered under the corrugated tin roof one purple-sky afternoon to hear hailstones the size of human fists bang down, a string of firecrackers or gunshots.

Jason’s area: the composing room. There he often performed for us his Sasquatch lope – an hilarious, precise replica of that woodland stroll by the apparent beast in 1967’s video from Bluff Creek, Calif., made by probable hoaxers Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin.

I remember it was important to Jason that I hear him at the Edgewood bar. That I undergo teeth-rattling music in a venue where I would never otherwise find myself. I remember his motorcycle, his pride. Jason’s pals, scruffy but jovial.

I wake in the wee hours desperate to locate him, plead with him to cancel the deal. He had agreed to raid a small establishment, a coffee shop I think, terrorize everyone in it on my behalf, and possibly kill people. He would then of course be nabbed by authorities, would give me up to them, and both of us would land behind bars.

The dream seemed so real that, even fully conscious, I believed.

Is Jason alive, still? I dimly recall a social media post of him on the bleak Tybee Island shore, toothpick-boned, leaning on a cane. He had been sick.

If he’s dead, then he cannot carry out the mayhem. I hope he’s not dead. But if he is, I’m off the hook.

The obituary says he passed away in 2022 at home. No cause listed. My relief dissolves as fast as it arose.

What was this?

I stare at our cat, Lolly, in the window, staring at the underlit blue of the pool, five floors down.

The setup itself wasn’t new. A perpetually recurrent dream is that I become involved with shady characters plotting one kind of diabolical scheme or another. I know that we will be arrested sooner or later, and I want to turn them in, somehow without consequences for me – yet realize that if I do, they will implicate me and I’ll end up in jail with them. Until this morning, though, the dream has not given me the identities of my cohort(s).

Why Jason? Why now? Feels like a visit.