How a Podcast Helped Save My Friendship
by Rax Will
I didn’t know who Jason Stewart was when I sat down across from him at a dinner a few years back. My friend Mario won a random giveaway to a fancy press dinner graced by L.A. food personas and invited me.
At the time Mario and I met Jason we were in our binge-drinking apex. We would regularly go to Akbar on weeknights, hoping someone, anyone, would make eye contact with us while we clutched our $5 specials in the corner. We would easily guzzle three or four specials at Akbar, cushioned by a few cups of Charles Shaw as a pregame. The next morning we would tumble into work hungover, sleep deprived, and smelling like the previous night’s antics.
During dinner Jason and I caught eyes and made small talk while nibbling on foie gras and foam-topped dishes. He was funny and inoffensive for a white guy. Mario quickly Googled him under the table and showed me his phone.
“That’s Them Jeans,” he whispered inaudibly. “The DJ.” I nodded in affirmation though I still had no idea who he was. I could garner from his ease, in the most glamorous setting Mario and I had ever been in, that he must be very cool.
As tiny charcoal ice cream cones were served to the table, Mario and I boldly suggested a nightcap at the rooftop bar. To our surprise, Jason acquiesced. Little did I know at the time that his presence would help repair my and Mario’s friendship.
Mario ordered a round that we could barely afford. The three of us discovered that we all shared vanilla upbringings in Orange County and got out as soon as we could. We all lived on the East Side of Los Angeles. I might have made fun of Jason for living in sleepy Atwater Village at the time. We talked music, design, and food. I chimed in where I could, careful not to seem too eager, too earnest.
I said I was bisexual at the time to let Jason know he had a shot. Full disclaimer: I am a lesbian but Jason Stewart absolutely has a shot.
Somehow Mario convinced Jason to join us for one more drink in the Chinatown dive, Melody Lounge. There, the energy shifted as we were forced to integrate with the proletariat of Los Angeles. After we ordered our craft beers we were interrupted by another drunken patron.
“How do you guys know each other?” said the drunk guy, facing the three of us.
“We met tonight,” I said. “But we’re gonna hook up.” I added for comedic effect.
“Oh yeah?” said the guy.
“Yeah,” I said. “Jason is gonna fuck Mario in the ass and then I’m going to eat Jason’s ass.
“Whoa,” said the guy, somehow killing the mood of our wayward threesome. Jason laughed.
After we finished our beers Jason made moves to go home. We pleaded from one more drink but he said he was getting up there in years. We ended the night at Silver Lake’s neighborhood gay club Akbar, sans Jason, but with all the pride of having interacted with a low-level L.A. celebrity.
*
Are all best friends who’ve known each other since middle school destined to become unfriends? I still remember when Mario instant messaged me from the screen name isitbcuzimmexican in eighth grade. I thought it was so ahead of our time, then and now. My screen name was sadly some iteration of a White Stripes lyric.
I saw a meme recently that says closeted people gravitate toward one another. Mario was one of the “out” males at our high school. I was a closeted bitchy honors nerd. We mercilessly teased each other while also drinking directly from the morphine drip of music and culture beyond our suburban upbringings. After college Mario checked out the food world working for David Chang’s restaurants in New York. I tried to make it as a travel writer based in Southeast Asia. We eventually found ourselves back in Echo Park—broke, lonely, and gay.
As these codependent friendships go, we were destined for an end, or a pause. Night after night of drinking and feeling like losers started to wear on us. Rejection at Akbar. Inability to make the ‘gram immaculate. Overdrawing from our checking accounts.
The Valentine’s Day after meeting Jason, we went to a queer event at an ice cream shop. I met a girl who actually talked back to me. We migrated to a nearby restaurant for more beer while Mario tried to make inroads with her friend. She announced she was leaving so I announced I was leaving. Despite Mario still chatting up her friend, I ordered the Uber for us anyway.
In the Uber home, Mario and I bickered about the night, but more obliquely the problems with our friendship. I was on cloud nine from the attention of a woman. He was trying to sound out his feelings.
“I wasn’t ready to leave,” he told me, eyes starting to tear.
All I could hear was the silent refrain, “This isn’t working.”
Alcohol was preventing us from communicating about small things cropping up in our unhealthy lifestyle. These little things were becoming bigger things. But neither of us knew how to discuss them. Instead we fought in the back of an Uber.
He didn’t text the next morning or the morning after.
After a week went by I was desperate to rekindle. I texted Mario that Barack Obama follows Jason Stewart, not aware that Barack Obama also follows about 500,000 other people.
Mario never texted back.
I had a short-lived relationship with the girl from that night, but when that ended my life felt even emptier than before. My go-to for fun and drunken nights wasn’t responding to my texts and I was nursing a broken heart.
A few months later, I dined at a Korean fried chicken restaurant O.B. Bear (RIP) with a friend from out of town. We ordered the requisite fried chicken, a seafood pancake, Korean beer. A party of two was seated next to us. One was Jason Stewart. I mustered up all my courage to say something in the most casual way I could.
“Jason Stewart, right?” I said piteously. “We met at a dinner with Mario?”
Nothing registered on Jason’s face but he was friendly nonetheless.
“Yeah, we went out for drinks after!” I added.
He was nice like a low-level L.A. celebrity might be.
That night I DMed Jason on Instagram to affirm our connection and the night that briefly catapulted me from L.A. normie status to someone who had drinks with Jason Stewart. He responded politely, entertaining my DMs about restaurants and intermittent fasting. When I courageously asked him to hang out he never responded.
*
I left L.A. to move home for grad school. Somewhere in that fever dream first year of being back in Orange County, while being so acutely aware of how I had transcended the experience of being from Orange County, Mario texted me out of the blue. He asked to meet for coffee.
It pains me to admit that part of me also thought I had transcended Mario. I was sober nursing a recent breakup. I was jamming on my personal trauma in therapy. I had just been accepted to grad school.
We grabbed coffees and walked along the beach and he told me of a short-lived relationship gone awry. He told me how he’s been thinking a lot about relationships and friends and queerness and families. He told me about how he saw Jason Stewart DJ at Los Globos and texted him “Hey BFG (Big Friendly Giant).” Jason responded asking him where he was. Mario was too drunk to respond. Throughout the whole conversation neither of us could muster an apology to the other.
That week he responded to one of my Instagram stories in his usual deprecating way. He texted me something funny. I wrote back.
But then I wrote a big unwarranted message that I wasn’t ready to be friends again. Something about how I couldn’t support him emotionally at this time. The guise of a few years in therapy made me think I needed to protect myself from the way we related to one another. I associated Mario with the drinking, the stingy jokes, the lonely rejected nights—when really I was just as culpable.
He never responded.
*
We will always remember the Christmas before “the Rona.” My high school friends gathered at an establishment in our hometown deemed worthy of our worldly life. We didn’t know how good we had it breathing each other’s air, tasting each other’s sours. Yes, I had started gingerly drinking again.
When Mario entered the warm, golden glow of the tasting room I felt myself get a little excited. Truth be told, I had been missing him, the funniest person I know, the only person who could so acutely roast me that it made me feel seen.
We sat next to each other and immediately began gossiping about a mutual high school friend. I had changed since I last saw him. I was at the tail end of graduate school and felt like I was really out and actualized with my writing. He was working for g*op and had endless Gw*neth stories to tell us. He even brought us a sack of shiny polished rocks good for different things like creativity and romance should you keep them close to your body—just don’t insert them in your pussy.
When quarantine hit we organized Zoom catch ups with our high school friends as our worlds crumbled around us. These hangouts allowed a casual resumption of texting and playful meme trading. Of course, we talked about Jason Stewart. Mario shared that Jason had a new podcast, How Long Gone, and that it was good. I devoured episodes as I drifted to sleep in my parent’s suburban home in Orange County. It reminded me that L.A. was a place and that Erewhon was expensive and I was still a loser.
The podcast isn’t just good: it’s really good. Jason has teamed up with fellow inoffensive white guy trend-forecasting creative Chris Black. I’ve thought a lot about why the podcast is so consumable. It follows a traditional interview format with shop talk before by the boys. But after you’ve listened to a couple of episodes the humor becomes self-referential, the jokes become inside, you feel like you’re part of the roast-y friendship of Jason and Chris. It’s like a listenable reminder of the good parts of friendships. It reminded me of how Mario and I used to engage.
After that night, we easily fell back into our old ways with each other. But this time it felt different. We weren’t manically sharing screenshotted text conversations about our crushes and drinking to forget our middling lives. Mario had started therapy too and there was an understanding between us, an understanding that we had both arrived in our lives at places we wanted to be.
And just like that Mario and I were texting everyday again. Dumb memes, Tweets, news of the world ending. It felt like we were friends again—we just weren’t able to go to Akbar.
I moved back to L.A. last fall. With the podcast, Mario and I have unlimited text fodder as soon as new episodes drop. I mentioned to Mario that I thought it was time we financially supported the pod (that has brought us back together, gotten us through quarantine, improved my media digest) as a gesture of appreciation. Mario texted that he already does.
“Real fan hours who up!!!!”
“Jason do you remember US???”
We will be front row at the live taping when the pademmy is over.
*
These days, Mario and I hang out in my backyard from time to time. Some things haven’t changed: we drink tall boy Sapporos and roast one another about our outfits. Other things have: we’re both 30 now and meet with an emotional maturity not seen in our last decade.
From time to time, Mario sends me writing that he thinks is good to support me. Recently he sent me a Spike Art Magazine column by Kaitlin Phillips that oozes detached coolness. I could never. I told Mario that it was fodder to start my loser L.A. column.
“Pls do!” he texted. “I wanna be in it, that's all I want.”
The texts paused for a moment.
“What is it about?
“Being a loser in L.A.” I deadpanned.
“Lol.”
Rax Will is a graduate of UC Riverside’s MFA in fiction with words in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, L.A. Review of Books, Into, and POPSUGAR. They are currently at work on a queer coming-out novel set in Los Angeles. You can follow them on Instagram @existentialrodeo.