He gave a lot of opportunities to a lot of writers

I’m tired of writing eulogies. How many eulogies can a man write in a year? In a lifetime? And now I’m getting closer to fifty. I can’t begin to imagine how much worse it will get. 

“Let’s not kid ourselves, it gets really, really bad,” as the song goes. 

I think maybe this is why I had such a visceral reaction to watching The Long Walk the other day. Recognizing that that is simply what life is. 

I know that man. You don’t need to tell me that. 

You start off not really believing that it’s ever going to happen to you though. You suspect it will but you do not accurately grasp it. Then, if you’re lucky, one by one everyone else around you falls. They say in the movie, and in real life, that it’s the memories you share along the way that make the suffering all worth it. The friends you spend time with. The love that is created out of nothing. But I don’t know if I believe that now or if I ever fully believed it. 

I don’t really have a choice though do I? That is the best deal we have ever been offered. It doesn't stay on the table forever either so you’d better take it soon. 

I don’t know how old Jeff Lawrence was when he died sometime this week. It’s a funny thing that happens over time. You all sort of catch up to each other. It evens out and no longer matters. A person is either a little bit younger or, like him, a little bit older than you are. Until they die that is and then we all go oh my god that is too young. Too young to be dead. Too young to have died. 

Jeff founded a magazine called Shovel in Boston in the 1990s which later became The Weekly Dig the legendary alt-weekly in 1999. For most of its run it wasn’t just the alternative to the Boston Globe and Herald it was the younger, hipper alternative to the other venerable alt-weekly the Boston Phoenix, all of which I would write for at one point or another. It outlasted the Phoenix too, finally closing up shop after changing hands a few times in 2023. 

24 years old isn’t bad for a publication. Still too young to have died though. To have been killed I should say. We are all so much poorer for its loss and for the loss of alt-weeklies everywhere. Places where old fuck ups who thought they had missed their chance or young hungry idiots with no bylines to speak of could get a start. Not in spite of those things but because of them. People who weren’t yet turned and twisted by working in the normal media. Who hadn’t yet sold out. I know we don’t really say that kind of thing anymore but maybe we should start again. 

“I have memories when the Dig was the publication I hated to pick up,” a former Globe editor just posted on my Facebook. The place we all pretty much only go now to talk about the dead. “And yet I always picked it up. The mark of a good thing and a legacy to be proud of.”

In those early internet days, pre-Gawker and so on, before everything we take for granted about social media now, alt-weeklies like The Dig were the only place you could go to see the major media being taken to task. Local scumbags being brought down a peg too. Or promoted depending on the kind of scumbag they were. But everything we wrote back then was so fun, and so funny, that people still often wanted to see how they were getting burnt. A kind of honor in a way. 

Not to mention they were the best or only place to learn about bands and artists and books and restaurants that wouldn’t ever get coverage anywhere else. I never would have become the writer, or person, that I am today if not for picking up the Boston Phoenix at my suburban convenience store when I was a kid. A kind of community was built by papers like these and a kind of community was lost when they went away. 

A lot of that in Boston was due to chances taken and gambles made by Jeff. Oftentimes very stupid ones. Sometimes ones that paid off.

"My grandmother died, and she left my father some money," he said in this oral history of the Dig written by Barry Thompson a few years back.

"I got $40 grand. So I went swimming at the Somerville YMCA – I love to swim – and then afterwards, I was sitting in a hot tub. I was still really trying to find my place in this world in my mid-20s, and was like, 'I need to do something.' Shovel had become successful insofar as people were calling me up and buying ads, but I had no clue in terms of publishing. I had a background in journalism and working for a college newspaper, but I didn't know the inner-workings. I don't have a degree in business. But all of a sudden it just hits me; 'The fucking Phoenix has no competition! I need to start a weekly!'"

He hired me for my first real job in journalism at the Dig as a books editor and then the music editor in the early 2000s. I must have been around 23 or so. He fired me from my first real job in journalism too. I will never forget he and Joe Keohane, the editor at the time, who I was just emailing dark jokes back and forth with a moment ago that I think Jeff would appreciate, walking me over to Foley’s on East Berkley St. and saying it was time to let me go. I had been calling in all the time and staying up late partying and partying all day in the office and it was taking its toll on my focus on the job. Never mind that a lot of that partying was done with Jeff in the first place! It was that kind of office. Kegs on tap. Clouds of weed smoke. Sex workers loitering around trying to place classified ads. Me leaning out the window to rip butts. The smell of the industrial bakery next door permeating the neighborhood – a sort of no man’s land of not-quite-Southie at the time. I can only imagine how many more high rises have gone up around there by now. Luxury condos. 

“I had my first internship there in 2001 and it made me feel like the coolest person in the world, like I was walking onto a TV show set when I came in,” another friend just posted. “I remember Jeff as well and the Dig, and thus him, really shaped my life.”

It was a job I was being paid $20,000 a year for with no benefits by the way. 

That’s probably a good call I said when they fired me. Then probably asked if they wanted to go to the bathroom. 

It was a good call. I wouldn’t have gone on to many of the things I went on to do if Jeff hadn’t given me that first opportunity to work and that next opportunity to go figure out how to do it elsewhere. Dozens and dozens of people in both the Boston and national media are saying the same to me this morning. 

“I am in absolute shock,” another friend just posted. “Jeff was a friend, editor, boss, and someone who brought me into Dig Boston which really ended up being a turning point in my life. There was no one like Jeff and I just can’t believe it right now.”

“He gave a lot of opportunities to a lot of writers and creatives, including me. His legacy is large,” another wrote. 

Aside from Boston journalism he was an early force in cannabis activism in Massachusetts, working on various advocacy groups and throwing yearly conventions, as well as helping to spread the word on craft beer back when that wasn’t really a thing. Beer Advocate was born in the pages of the Dig back in my day thanks to the support of Jeff and others. 

Oh fuck my doctor’s office just emailed with some test results. 

Hm. I guess nothing bad jumped out at me but I don’t know how to read these numbers. Now I have to wait for them to explain to me what they mean whenever they get around to it. Tell me what I need to do. The thing I already know. The same thing Jeff tried and failed to do for many years. 

I talked to or texted with a bunch of other friends and colleagues this morning and we all basically said the same thing about our old boss: He was a pain in the fucking ass but we cared about him anyway. All these years later. Even after he fucked a lot of us over. Fired us or didn’t pay us what he owed. I remember him trying to pay me for work with gift cards, sometimes expired, for a while there when I started freelancing for the Dig again years after being fired. I know my experience wasn’t unique. I’d say fuck you pay me and he’d say he would and then we’d laugh about it and get a beer and bullshit about the Patriots. Then I’d get pissed off again and nevertheless still keep going back until I didn’t anymore. 

It sounds abusive but it wasn’t I promise. I don’t know what it was though. How does that work? Charm I suppose. But his wasn’t some kind of typical magazine publisher’s slick charm. It was something else. Kind of like a fuck up older brother maybe. A guy you would often think “come on man get it together” about while still wanting to impress him. He was a figure with a considerable influence in the Boston media for a time but a person who was himself harmless. 

Unless he was harming himself. Which I gather is how he came to pass. Too young however old it was. I’ll miss you man. Thank you for everything. I’m sorry for all of our losses. Fuck you. Pay me.