Jack Crosbie

Harry was carrying a pine branch attached to a chunk of sweet-smelling wood through the 14th street and 7th avenue subway tunnel. He said he was homeless and asked for $1600 so he could purchase GoPro cameras from a friend on 39th Street to start his own reality TV show. He was born in Israel in 1971. Last night he fell in love with a transsexual woman in a bar who gave him a menthol cigarette. His favorite drugs are espresso, hot chocolate, cannabis sativa, mushrooms, and Jameson whiskey. He carried a shard of the bottle in his pocket, the Jameson logo mostly intact. There were bloodstains on the inside of the hat he wore over his yarmulke.  He had a cut above his eyebrow and one on his nose and a black eye. He sang Beatles lyrics to strangers on a downtown 1 train, told them he loved them. He said he was a physical therapist. He was headed to Crown Heights to a Yiddish music party, or maybe to stay with a friend on President's street. He said he was sick of the sound of his own voice. He said he was sick of talking about the violence in his life. He said he was sick of what his body wants. He said it disgusted him. There was a copy of the Torah in the bag he carried. He hugged me goodbye, pulling the fragrant branches behind him through the doors of a Brooklyn-bound 3 train. December 8, 2014. 14th Street and 7th Avenue 1/2/3 subway platform. ©Jack Crosbie, 2014. 

"One of my favorite Hondros stories takes place in 2003 on a bridge in Monrovia, Liberia, that separated encroaching LURD rebel soldiers on one side from government defenders on the other. Chris and his colleagues had spend days covering this horrific civil war on the government side, photographing child soldiers who brazenly  pranced out onto the bridge to fire volleys of ammunition toward their enemies, only to saunter slowly back to cover, as if daring the rebels to take their best shot. 

Eventually, even the fighters grew weary of this dangerous back and forth, and one commander suggested to Chris and some of his colleagues that the photographers walk to the other side of the bridge -- in the middle of the battle -- and find out why the LURD rebels were shooting at them. 

Naturally the suggestion was dismissed as crazy, at least at first. But -- as I heard Christ tell it so many times -- the idea nagged at him. 'Why not?' he thought. Didn't he have an obligation to tell the other side of the story as well? Why were they fighting? By the time he began looking for material from which to make a white flag, it was no less crazy of an idea, but it seemed doable. So he and a couple of colleagues shouldered their cameras waved their crude flags, and stepped onto the bridge, walking into oncoming fire. 

Although he gave it the proper dramatic treatment, the enormously dangerous walk from one front line to the other wasn't the point of the story -- the point was that when he got to the other side, he found a group of rebels who were just as puzzled as the government soldiers about why the two sides were shooting at each other. For me, the story provided a perfect, personalized coda to the seeming insanity of the Liberian war, as apt as anything that could have been told by Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller. No one knew why they were fighting, but they were determined to continue with the death.

Hondros the storyteller shared this experience with so many people that it has practically become part of the unofficial oral history collection of his life. Every time I hear it retold by a friend or a colleague -- or sometimes by complete strangers -- I pick up different details and emphases, all of which allow me to add more texture and nuance to the event and, as a result, to my memory of Chris.

This is the purpose of storytelling -- to refine memories through a variety of perceptions and recollections. The best is when this dynamic interaction between teller and listener reveals subtle new truths, some of which can even rise to the level of messages from Chris that were overlooked in previous tellings.

That happened to me the last time i heard the Liberia story retold, by a mutual friend who hadn't allowed Chris to skip over the part he tended to minimize -- the mind-bogglingly complex risk-benefit calculus of choosing to walk, under heavy fire, between two battling forces, unsure of what sort of reception awaited at the end of the bridge.