When the boogie passes on

An ode to Jae, my dear sister from another mister.

I began writing this tribute to my beloved, wildly unique friend, Jae Hentz, almost immediately following his shocking death in 2021, just over a month after his 38th birthday. I posted it on Facebook, but Jae’s memory deserves more than the rapid disappearance of an infinite scroll. If even just a few people who stumble across this ode, read it, and get a taste of Jae’s magnanimous spirit, the effort will have been beyond worth it.

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I met Jae when I was seven years old on the hardwood floors of the Kitsap County Country Western Line Dance Club. We were both wearing cowboy boots and bolos – which would be a funnier image if recent fashion trends didn’t in retrospect make us look like visionaries (perhaps we weren’t nerds after all; we were just ahead of the style curve by 30 years). I remember being intimidated by Jae’s assertiveness. Even at seven, he carried himself with an air of confidence that seemingly sought no approval from anyone. He knew how to draw people into his orbit and, once you were there, make you feel like it was a much more fun place to be than where you were previously. At that time, he went by his given name, Jesse, and Jesse (like Jae) expressed himself most fully and freely on a dance floor – whether in cowboy boots or high heels, whether to country music or house.

I lost track of Jae during our adolescent years, with the exception of one important moment during my freshman year of college. During those days, gay.com was where you went to meet other gay people. It was one of the only sources of connection we had, long before the days of apps and dating sites. I somehow ran into Jae on that site, and over chat we discussed our respective stories of coming out and accepting ourselves as gay. Meeting someone from my childhood who was also now openly gay was a significant moment for me, helping me weave together periods of my life in a way that made the earlier periods of confusion and closetedness feel more seen and heard. While that gay.com conversation between 18-year-olds ultimately revealed that we were in very different places in our lives, it is a moment I look back to as one of those serendipitous encounters that proves Jae and I were supposed to be friends, that we are part of the same soul tribe.

After I graduated from college and moved back to Seattle, I got a job waiting tables at Elephant & Castle Restaurant downtown. Unbeknownst to me, Jae was working there. Discovering this was, I think, for both of us a turning point, as it just seemed too fated to be random. Soon after we started working together, Jae and I made the observation (or perhaps remembered) that we were born on the same day: February 26th, 1983. We were also, it turned out, born in the same hospital in Bremerton, Washington. After realizing this, there was rarely a new friend who came into our orbit who was not fully debriefed on our unique friend fact (yes, there have been a few loving eye rolls as friends heard our origin story for the 3rd, 4th or 7th time). To make the fact more interesting, we also playfully added that we happened to be twins separated at birth, the un-claimed offspring of Whitney Houston – a claim all the more fun given its many levels of absurdity.

That was the beginning of several years when fun was the local currency, and we had a lot of it. I can confidently say it was one of the most fun and outrageous periods of my life, thanks to Jae being one of its central characters. Because, as anyone knows who has had the pleasure of being around Jae, he brought energy and laughter with him wherever he went. He easily attracted others to him because of the joy he had the capacity to exude and draw out of others. He was not always an easy person, and we certainly had our share of juicy fights, but no one can deny the energy that he brought into a room and the light that shined from him, especially when he was on a dance floor.

As everyone knows, Jae loved EDM and house music. It might even be said it was his spiritual practice and dancing to it was almost certainly his therapy. He treated the DJs he loved like cosmic messengers and honored what they offered like sacred gifts. The message, of course, was to get down. The gift was to let go and merge with the music, never forgetting in the process to “pas de bouree’, pas de bouree’, kick-ball-change, and turn!”

In those years, I wasn’t informed enough to notice the signs of mental illness, nor to know how to help someone as outwardly self-assured and independent as Jae. And anyway, I had my own pain I was grappling with and my own tendencies to self medicate; I was in no place to help. And whatever the early signs, Jae always managed to ultimately keep it together and to get his full dose of dancing in the process. Our support for each other at that time then was in the form of non-judgment and presence, which we weren’t always successful at offering (me perhaps more so than him) but which supported our ability to remain close friends despite our differences.

In recent years, life got heavier and more difficult for Jae to carry. As his resilience waned, his health issues became more severe and he spent several moments in the hospital close to death. As a result of one such experience towards the end of last year, Jae’s vision was strongly diminished, making it nearly impossible for him to work in the service industry as he had done for most of his life. It was yet another cinderblock tied to the feet of someone already struggling to stay afloat. From my perspective, tragedy after tragedy, loss after loss in his personal life led to a burden too great for even the strongest of individuals to manage – and Jae was certainly strong in many ways.

After a period of some silence between us, we connected a couple times towards the beginning of this year. He was seeming much better after the last hospitalization, undergoing treatment, and we were re-committing to being more present again in each other’s lives, talking and catching up more on the phone. It was clear, however, that the impact of COVID-related circumstances had taken a toll on him, for reasons not least of which being that it took away the social connection and physical proximity that so many of us need to survive. It took away his work. And, of course, it also took away the dance floor – one of his greatest sources of happiness, expression and fulfillment.And then last week he called me, twice, and I was too busy to pick up. I hadn’t called him back, too swept up in the busy preoccupations of blah, blah, blah. Acknowledging this was the first aching burden on my heart when I heard of Jae’s passing. I know that it is taking too much responsibility to imagine that all he needed was for someone to pick up the phone, a friend to show up for him, but currently I can’t kick the regret that I didn’t answer and will perhaps always live with the sadness that I missed one last chance to hear his voice and his laughter.

Even though he was obviously not my biological twin, I think from the moment we created that shared mythology of our birth, an energetic link was forged, or perhaps it was always already there. So when I found out that Jae had passed away yesterday, I had a panic attack. It felt like a piece of me had died. Maybe this is always the case when we lose a close friend who has made an impact on our lives. But, whether fantasy or reality, I choose to believe that that link is still there, that Jae can hear me as I spend this day devoted to him and his memory, and that this link will carry on into the next lifetime, when the conditions and circumstances of life will be more supportive of his soul’s ability to thrive.

So, Jae, I love you and will miss you so much. I will miss the dancing and reciting the ridiculous lyrics of your unpublished and extremely gay EDM album (“mentholatum, chapstick, burt’s bees, and lip gloss and WALK... and WALK...”). I will miss seeing the sparkle that accompanies you when you walk into a room and observing the excitement you stir up in those around you. I will miss calling you on our birthday and arguing over whose birthday it actually is, and I will miss giving each other shit when one of us forgets to make that annual call. Most of all, I will miss your company and the delightfully unusual friendship that we shared.

I hope that, wherever you are, you are dancing to the best house DJ that the cosmic nightclub has to offer. I hope that that heavenly nightclub looks and sounds a bit like Sunday nights at Re-Bar – “Flammable” –, the weekly ritual that you once loved so much. I will learn from your passing that the busyness of life is never an excuse not to pick up the phone, but I will take comfort knowing that our conversations are not over, merely changing channels to something more subtle and intuitive. I will look for you in music and think of you every time I hear a sick new house track. I will try and celebrate your life by never under-appreciating the joys of good company, nor the reality of how fleeting those moments can turn out to be.

And, of course, I will always see you anytime Whitney Houston is playing.

Rest in peace, my beautiful friend. You will always live on in our hearts and in the great memories that you shared with so many.