Remembering Jen Chen, onetime Pitch Night Ranger and all-time KC friend

The Night Ranger left at dawn.

That cruel fact — fabled Pitch nightlife columnist Jen Chen dying at 6:37 a.m. March 6 as her husband described the sunrise to her — is the only aspect of her departure that’s even remotely appropriate. The rest is wrong. The cancer discovered less than a year ago. The infection that hastened her decline. The death of her own mother last fall. Jen being just 46 and leaving behind a family, a 6-year-old daughter.

Absolutely wrong. The sheer, galling stupidity makes you cry.

So does losing Jen, whose gift to Kansas City was to see more of it than most, understand it better than all but a few, and judge it almost never. It’s not a coincidence that the friends who said goodbye to her a week later said essentially the same thing about our relationships with her. She was a singular listener. She got us, effortlessly. To talk with her was to be bathed in a gentle glow. She could laugh with us at our mistakes in a way that encouraged us to keep telling on ourselves but allowed us to forgive ourselves faster. 

Under her byline, both as Night Ranger and, later, as a Pitch staff writer, Jen was KC’s friend, its vodka cranberry–sipping wingman, recording local experience by the happy, sad, or absurd jiggerful. And as she conveyed the grinning one-liners and shitfaced non sequiturs of third-shift drinkers and foamy-lipped regulars and glossy cougars and wide-eyed recent college grads, she captured a community. 

It was a different place then. Our city’s downtown was on the weird cusp of gentrification, and the country was at war. The comedy of George W. Bush’s presidency had given way to brutalist folly. There was no Facebook yet, so friendships still required effort and yielded in-person awkwardness. Life was already internet-saturated enough that it was getting easier to dislike most people and things, and the new century seemed to suck out more energy than it generated.

In the face of this entropy, though, Jen motored from bar to bar, notebook in hand, “Research Assistants” in tow, and chose to filter what she saw through the rosy lens of a 1980s-FM-loving suburban overachiever who has sneaked out the night before senior skip day. She was still doing her homework, but her paper would be about something not discussed in school: how actual people cope with being actual people. She was there to transcribe our collective pre-hangovers, but her writing reminded us that we’d stepped out in order to feel off the clock, slightly freer. 

Along the way, she discovered that proximity to liquor was rarely an end in itself. Some of Jen’s most piquant work involved nights away from Plaza glamazons and the reduced-calorie seductions of the metro’s various anybars. I’m remembering her chronicle of a fetish troupe’s get-together at Davey’s Uptown Ramblers Club (“Whip Cream,” November 2005), which veers from coy to blunt without a hint of leering. She wraps up her dispatch this way: 

Pounding techno music started, and a shirtless guy got onstage. As he bent over a table, another guy tied him up and started whipping him. In the meantime, a woman in a quasi-French-maid outfit and knee-high black fishnets climbed onstage, sat on a chair, and spread her legs. Another woman who was similarly dressed stood behind her and unbuttoned the first woman’s top a bit to reveal a leopard-print bra. After the second woman teasingly caressed French Maid’s exposed skin, she pulled out a razor blade and made two thin cuts on French Maid’s shoulders, then bent down and started licking the blood.

They were soon joined by a lithe guy wearing a sleeveless, diaphanous dress with a silver, sequined spider-web pattern radiating from his crotch. (He wore black briefs underneath.) Mr. Spider Web (aka Asmo, the bassist for Vibralux) got on the other shoulder and started lapping up the blood, too.

We weren’t too shocked or grossed out; the whole thing seemed surreal. Afterward, a DJ put on some music, and everyone danced.

That’s Jen: part Jane Austen (the aboveness whose superiority is ironic), part Joan Didion (the participatory matter-of-factness, the blood), zero Bukowski (to conjure beautiful losers, someone would have to lose; that’s not how Jen processed us). And her writing was no less involving or humane when she moved beyond the column to cover the city at large — or later, when she rejoined local journalism as a producer at KCUR. 

When I started writing this, I got in touch with Catherine Frazier, who worked on The Pitch’s retail side just before Jen started writing Night Ranger and became — as “Cat” — one of the column’s most frequent Research Assistants.  

“When I went out with her for the column, she never made it feel like we were at whatever random bar for her work,” Frazier told me recently. “We were both in our early 30s, and she was kind of over the party scene, so she was able to be observant, introspective, and empathetic when writing about people on the hunt for a hookup or on an all-night binge. We’re both pretty quiet and introverted before drinks, but we both loved to people-watch and make up stories about strangers. Observe and snark. Who doesn’t love to do that? It was like being a part of the filming of Drunk History or Mystery Science Theater 3000.”

 But Night Ranger was also full of compassion: “Even though she may have made fun of a group of people or a bar,” Frazier added, “she was your older sibling who’s like, Girl, I know how it is. I’ve puked there. I’ve kissed that rando myself.” 

In the office, Jen was quiet except for a robust, post-Beavis and Butthead giggle that could also compound into a brassy HA! Her workspace was on the dark side of the moon compared with the staff writers’ cubes and the editors’ offices. Her view was of the elevator landing, where no natural light fell on the secure vestibule or the two generic armchairs where visitors, mostly uninvited complainants and tipsters, waited to be seen by an editor or a writer. If a staffer brought beer to share, though, this was where it was drunk. And at the high counter that separated Jen from the foyer, everyone stopped and tried to get her to laugh. We started our day there and ended it there, too. 

She saw and heard everything but betrayed nothing. She kept even the secrets she overheard. On the right side of her aural field, out of her line of sight, was a cove of disappointing vending machines. One for beverages, dully reliable but peddling Cokes to a beer-thirsty staff; one hand-cranked candy dispenser, giving out palmfuls of stale, defeated red hots by the quarter; and one gallery of single-serving salt and sugar programmed by grifters. This last could, and often was, tilted back and forth on the uneven old plank flooring by those whom it had cheated, a rebuttal that was never conducted without loud profanities. Over her left shoulder were the most acoustically unforgiving bathrooms in the history of local architecture, used by people who consumed only cola, beer, dusty Hot Tamales, and Doritos. 

She never even wore earbuds.

She closed her tab at the paper just ahead of this town’s cocktail renaissance and microbrew overflow. This was probably a relief to the person whose Night Ranger summary of Mission’s departed Clarette Club — “a sleazy good time” — was added to the servers’ shirts as a slogan and was an easy epitaph for the column itself.

The last few times I met up with Jen, we drank coffee. She helped me pick out pants at a Plaza store once, suggesting, in her deadpan voice, that the ones I liked were not “assy” enough. Then and other times, we talked about our old days and her new ones, as a mother. Our relationships were without drama, so we indulged some unmalicious gossip about other people. The time always passed easily, and we knew, when we said we needed to do it again soon, that we meant it. On these occasions, the sun was always up. I got over missing the Night Ranger. But the daylight Jen Chen, the calm and wise and gracious friend, is an impossible loss. 

♥

Scott Wilson joined The Pitch in 2001 and was its editor from 2011 through 2017.