My Friend David

David Jouris, my good friend for the last forty-six years, died on the fourth of August 2026, the day after his seventy-seventh birthday. When I got the news from David’s brother Max, I went outside to commune with David’s spirit. And the moment I intoned David’s name, a hummingbird zoomed down out of the sky and hovered a few feet above my head, her swiftly beating wings telling me David would appreciate my writing something about him.

I met David and his brother Max in 1979, the year my first novel Inside Moves was being made into a movie. Herb Caen mentioned my novel and movie deal in his column in the San Francisco Chronicle and this prompted an old high school chum to invite me to her thirtieth birthday party at a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco.

It was at this party I met Max and David, co-proprietors of a black-and-white postcard company called Hold the Mustard. As it happened I was just about to launch my own card company Wild Olive. I asked David and Max if I might take them to lunch and pick their brains, which I did, and we became long-distance friends, I living in Sacramento, they living in Berkeley.

My card company was a flop, as were several subsequent creative ventures of mine, and by 1995 my first marriage had ended in divorce, my writing career was on the rocks, I had very little money, and I was desperate to leave Sacramento and live somewhere near the ocean. I had completed a novel entitled Ruby & Spear but no longer had a literary agent and my publishing and movie contacts were kaput. Desperate times.

Enter David. I sent him the manuscript of Ruby & Spear. He loved the book and showed it to the literary agent who had sold David’s book All Over the Map featuring thematic maps of the United States. She agreed to represent me and eventually sold Ruby & Spear to Bantam. With that 25,000-dollar advance, I was able to move to Berkeley a few miles from David’s house. He and I became close-range friends for the next eleven years. By then Max had moved away from the Bay Area and was living on the east coast with his wife Kate.

 

Also by then I was good friends with David’s pals John Grimes and Robin Chin who lived in San Francisco, and the four of us frequently took trips to the beaches of Point Reyes and celebrated our birthdays together.

David was tall and slender and a neatnik when it came to his public appearance. However, his houses, the two he occupied when I lived in Berkeley, were so crammed with his accumulated stuff no one other than David was permitted to enter. Save for one affair spanning many years with a woman in Germany, David never had a partner and lived alone for all the years I knew him.

When I moved to Mendocino twenty years ago, David and I resumed our long distance friendship via snail mail and occasional phone calls, and every few years he would come to Mendocino for short visits. Then seven or eight years ago he began to experience symptoms that would be diagnosed as Parkinson’s and his life became more and more challenging, eventually necessitating his move to a senior facility in Mill Valley where after some years of slow decline he died.

I will always think of David as a great connector of people and a zealous fan of my writing and performing. He connected me with an agent who sold my book. He connected me with John and Robin who became my good friends. And best of all he connected me with his brother Max who is one of my very best friends and makes me feel much less alone on my particular creative journey.

And now for you, David, feeling maybe your spirit is hanging around the planet for a while before you zoom off to whatever comes next, I will recount your favorite joke, or I should say the joke with your favorite punch line.

So there’s a priest sitting on his side of the confessional hearing confessions. An old man enters the other side of the confessional and says, “Bless me father for I have sinned. I’m eighty-years-old and I’ve been married for sixty years and never once even thought about cheating on my wife. So yesterday I’m sitting on a park bench and this gorgeous young woman comes up to me and says she’s got a thing for much older men would I like to come to her apartment and have sex. So I go. I can’t believe I’m doing this, but I do. We get to her apartment and what I thought was dormant forever turns out not to be, if you know what I mean, and we have the most fantastic wild sex for hours and hours. This is what I wanted to tell you.”

The priest clears his throat and says, “How long has it been since your last confession?”

The man says, “Oh I’ve never confessed.”

“Never confessed?” says the priest, shocked. “You’re Catholic and you’ve never confessed?”

“Oh I’m not Catholic,” says the old man. “I’m Jewish.”

“You’re Jewish?” says the priest, flabbergasted. “Why are you telling me?”

“Tellin’ you,” says the old guy. “I’m telling everybody!”

fin

Lounge Act In Heaven a piano/accordion duet from Todd’s album Lounge Act In Heaven.