When you get older, your life naturally splits into separate social compartments. You have your family compartment and your work compartment. Your friends are segmented into separate categories: old friends, college friends, and forgot-how-we-became-friends friends. That sort of thing.
Most of us keep all of these social silos in separate group text chats. That’s the only way to keep all the elements of your life from mixing together and causing mischief or mortification.
You don’t want everyone to know everyone else. Don’t be tempted, even once, to mingle your family group chat with your work group chat because one of your cousins makes fun of they/them pronouns and one of your co-workers is an HR snitch. And why look for trouble? Also, your very old friends remember when your nickname was “Dumper” (long story), but your college friends all know you as “Kent.” See what I mean? Keeping everyone separate and walled off is the way to go.
I’m trying to keep the tone light and fun, but the truth is I’m feeling low at the moment. I lost a dear friend of mine a few days ago, and I want to tell you how remarkable he was as a person, how generous and loving he was as a friend, and the best way I can express that is to tell you that in one of my (many) group chats, a person I don’t know very well posted a lovely eulogy she had written about him, but up until her post, I had no idea he was our mutual friend. He was like that. He cast such a large net of love and friendship (and food) across an ocean of people that when he died suddenly on Jan. 26, a lot of us discovered we had this heartbreaking loss in common.
His name was Pableaux Johnson, and he was born Paul Johnson, but when you’re from a big family from New Iberia, Louisiana, it’s sort of inevitable that you’ll acquire a nickname. He spent most of his working life in New Orleans, and no one has ever loved that shabby, elegant, generous, and tragic city more than Pableaux. In a city filled with artists, he stood out. His joyful and electric photographs of the people who make up that richly weird place were so vividly energetic that you’d swear his subjects were about to jump off the page and dance in your living room.
Treat yourself, if you have a moment, to his photo essay on Mardi Gras Indians — the black New Orleanians who march in Carnival parades in resplendent costumes. Or dive into his online treasure chest of images from New Orleans’s famous second line marches, the “jazz funerals” that helped shape American music and culture.
His public memorials have tended to focus on his creative work, but equal to his photography was his mastery of the art of hospitality. Every Monday, Pableaux hosted a traditional red beans and rice dinner at his cluttered and cozy New Orleans bungalow. The food was prepared following his grandmother’s recipe — red beans, potato salad, cornbread, and rice — but the real treat was sitting there with whatever assembly he had gathered. Sometimes it was old friends, and sometimes it was visitors from out of town, and almost always there were a couple of near-strangers, folks he had just bumped into somewhere. The only rule was absolutely no phones. Pableaux waged a one-man war against the group chat syndrome. At his table, we were all in it together.
While the rest of us — or me, anyway — try to keep our worlds separate and siloed, Pableaux mixed everyone together. While the rest of us — or me, anyway — sometimes have different versions of ourselves depending on the group chat, our friend was always gloriously himself in every context. Pableaux Johnson lived life as if it was one big group chat, in person, around a table, feasting on red beans and rice. “Anyone can do this,” he said to me once when I marveled at his ability to gather a bunch of wildly different people around the table. That may be true. But the man who did it the best is no longer here to remind us.
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Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.