A dear friend and personal mentor died suddenly last week, in a road accident on his bike. I’m still shocked and sad about it. I’ve known Elephant all my life and he was one of my first employers. He was an absolutely unique person with a unique personality and unique way of communicating and I used to serve as a sort of translator between elephants and humans (his words) because I had learnt how to understand his nuances better than most and to communicate that to other people.
He was a friend of my dad’s I saw occasionally and didn’t really get to know until I was a young adult. My first adult interaction with him was when we went and stayed at his house in country Victoria and he invited me to come and stay for a weekend to learn about compound interest, and how to make an income by loaning cash to cafes to buy coffee machines. This was the first of a never ending series of schemes he would cook up - I even followed through on a few of these schemes but he was never offended when I declined almost all of them.
I worked for him on and off for nearly a decade and he helped me to set up my first business as a handyman and odd job guy. He got me to do all sorts of odd jobs, fitting out their retail shop in a factory in Fitzroy (tiling, painting, cleaning, carpentry, heavy lifting), staying at his house in Allansford for a building project, and working on his house in Clifton Hill - I fixed the stumps, replaced weatherboards, installed a skylight and cleaned the place in between tenants. He believed in me as an 18 year old working on the tools with no prior skills.
The people I worked with were a completely varied lot too. Some different friends of mine who I brought in, wwoofers, and random people who met Jon and owed him favours. My best friend Ben and I did a heap of work for the Elephant together. Ben would want to talk about philosophy while we worked and Elephant got such a kick out of showing off the two labourers replacing weatherboards while discussing ethics or the social construction of gender.
Elephant worked very hard all the time - I don’t think he knew how to be unproductive. When he wanted a break he would cook (he taught me how to make israeli salad), go for a bike ride, or play checkers with his wife Marion (also known as the Bird of Paradise). He valued his time and made sure that his clients did too - often they would call him desperate for some help and calm before an exam, he would happily work in the middle of the night. He used to get me to come and do heavy lifting for him very early in the morning until I realised that I too could charge more for the times I’d prefer to be asleep.
He respected my needs, and didn’t expect anything from me that I wasn’t happy to do. In our working relationship just as much as in our friendship. He didn’t do ‘friends with obligations’ - if he got to catch up he was happy and his hugs were great. When he could he would come and visit me and was always happy just to enjoy a chat before he got back on his bike and rode somewhere else. Usually before coming he would ring up and ask if we need any milk or bread, you could ask for any random groceries or some dip (which he made in copious quantities), he would have it with him when he arrived.
He chose his identity and played it to the hilt. He was Jewish, an absolute back of a napkin schemer, didn’t understand “Humans”, and got very angry when he got stuffed around.
The anger stuff had been a big problem for him when he worked as a bankruptcy lawyer, he got super stressed and eventually drama went down and he was wrongfully disbarred. A decade later he was vindicated but chose to stay out of the profession. The more stress was removed from his life the more fun he was to be around. Though I must admit I always enjoyed being the calm one when he let loose with a tirade in Arabic (he spoke German, Hebrew, Indonesian and I don’t even know what else) on someone who had wronged him.
Being Jewish was important to him and also something that he would perform as a joke. Going down to the ghetto (Caulfield) to pick up Israeli backpackers to work for him. Often we would go out to lunch on Brunswick St in Fitzroy and once he came back with pizza to which he tucked in with gusto, when I pointed out that the pizza had ham on it he practiced conjugating Hebrew verbs as penance for his mistake. He visited Israel many times to study Hebrew, and almost never worked on the Sabbath, and if you saw his hair because he forgot his hat, he would apologize like he had walked in on you in the shower.
His schemes were all about making money or making the world a better place, or both. He was committed to making the world a better place, with a focus on affordable housing and the environment. I remember one of the more recent ones had him talking to the state minister for housing about building super energy efficient affordable townhouses on some land in the country - sadly I don’t know if this was finished or not.
I learnt so much from him. Most importantly that I could do anything, he would always say “I don’t care how you do it, as long as it gets done” his other catchphrase when we were taking on a new project was “you’re an engineer, you can do it” -- I am in fact not an engineer, I was an engineering student and I never completed a professional engineering qualification. I learnt that for most things if you had a crap go, you would probably get a good enough result and if it didn’t work you could always try again or fix it when it broke. Since then I’ve learnt more about using the right tool for the job and how a bit more planning can get you a better result but I needed to learn to just try first.
Jon was my friend, he was the Elephant, and I miss him.
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