Kerran

Today, I want to remember Kerran Brady.

In 1992, when I found the poetry slam in Johnson City, TN, on that first night, the winner for the evening (and never again) was Kerran. He walked in and, despite the rule that you had to memorize, read his poems on paper. I guess they didn’t think he’d do that well, or more likely there weren’t enough people signed up. Kerran William Francis Brady (a good Irish name, he’d tell you) became a regular in the scene, but he was a really strange anomaly for the poetry world. He was a retired vet who had served in cryptoanalysis in Korea during the Vietnam war. He had drank hard and worked hard, and gods, he was complicated. When I met him, he had heart disease, and I knew him for a really long time after that first night.

Kerran and I started talking a few months in, especially after I took over the helm of the slam, since he was always involved. He was single, with a sister he hated and practically nobody else until his nephew was older, and his sister’s family didn’t live close. He’d been married, but it was long over. When I met him, he was extremely lonely, and that didn’t change. He had a flat affect, a body that was going to kill him, an intense love of jazz, and a very conservative outlook on politics. He called me regularly, and we’d talk about the slam and all the stuff going on in it. He was my sounding board for the drama, and we’d talk for a couple of hours at least weekly or more; his loneliness pushed to keep hearing someone else’s voice, and I found a father figure there that was more accepting than my own father. Kerran was willing to drive to other shows in the region, and we were regulars in Asheville and Knoxville and Boone. He never scored well, but he wasn’t there to win. He also wasn’t there to watch; he closed his eyes during others’ performances so he could listen to what they were saying.

There was a point where we both were writing poems that were good-naturedly teasing Asheville emcee Allan Wolf, and we went to Asheville to read them on stage. His humor was wickedly smart. One of his collections of poetry was about the modern life of out-of-favor Jesus in the Johnson City area, near Watauga; it was titled The Watauga Lake Scrolls, and it was always my favorite.

I helped him move when nobody else were friends enough to do the same. I listened, and we were friends. He was always there. When I met Judy, the woman who got me to move to Dayton, he drove me to Corbin, KY, while she drove herself. It was the halfway point. He dropped me off for the weekend, then drove back and picked me up, because it was a future I didn’t have in Johnson City. I was figuratively drowning, and he helped me escape. Judy and I didn’t last, and Kerran came up to Dayton to visit (more than once). At the end of the relationship with Judy, he gave me the money to buy a car (a $2k Acura Legend) and enough money to start again on my own. Years later, he would give me much more to keep my family afloat as I struggled with finding work. He never asked for anything, and I had nothing to give other than my attention. He was so kind in so many ways.

Kerran had an amazing way with words. He had cryptic sayings he’d drop into conversations regularly, and he could swear very creatively. He would explain some of the phrases; one I remember was “the game isn’t worth the candle,” which (he said) came from the days before electricity, when rich people would have servants hold candles while they played cards. If a game was going badly, the loser might say that quote. He also used to say, “Now we see where the bear sits in the buckwheat.” I was totally lost on that one for months, until we were driving and he pointed out a cop hiding his car in the tall grass and said it again. Ah.

When I met him, he had long gray hair and a full beard. A few years later, he cut his hair and stayed clean shaven. He once brought an issue of Poets & Writers to a reading to show me the cover photo of poet Edmund White, who someone told him he looked like. He really did; I did a double take. He had no real concept of what he looked like, so he bought the magazine to see if we agreed. Later, he brought a camera and a few rolls of film so I could take pictures of him while we talked, so he’d have photos of himself.

He swayed me politically for years. I went conservative for a few years because of him. As such, after he died, especially since politics has become so polarizing, I felt somewhat embarrassed to have voted Republican. He loved Rush, Gingrich. He read National Review heavily. I was swayed by his logic. He got me to read books like The Camp of the Saints, which was ridiculously isolationist and anti-race mixing; he thought it was an amazing book. I liked it as fiction but didn’t buy into the philosophy of it.

Kerran died on July 4, 2012, when his heart finally gave out. He didn’t have or want a funeral. He asked that his friends get together and drink and remember him. By the time he passed, we were all states away from each other, and that meetup never happened. I ended up with his car, his cd collection, his poetry, a tub of VHS tapes. And when I visited everywhere I lived, back in November, I stayed with another slam poet from the Johnson City days. As we reminisced on people from back then, she mentioned Kerran. I said I had his poetry, and she said she’d love to read it again. I devised a plan that I finally got through, to make copies of all five “books” (stapled or spiral bound collections) he made back in the day. I got in touch with another friend to see if he wanted them, too, and he did, so I asked for two copies of each book. The copy place at my college made three copies (and charged me for three), so I asked another friend if he wanted the spare set. Jody not only wanted the set, but he wanted to send me a cd he’d made from years ago when he sat down and interviewed Kerran. Tracking says it’ll arrive in two days. I get to hear him again. I don’t know how to feel about that. I do know that I’ve spent too much time not thinking about him. As Jody said, Kerran was both woke and a little racist (in subtle ways, and I’m certain he didn’t believe he was at all). He was well read. He believed in karma. He was a good man in many ways, with so many human flaws, and he was my close friend for so long.