Contributing Source - Steve Rosse

Steve Rosse knew Tristan Jones at the end of his life in Phuket Thailand.  He saw the broken Tristan Jones, the penniless double amputee who never fit in with his surroundings.  The following is from correspondences I had with Steve when I asked him for information.

Source: Steve Rosse
from personal correspondence, August 2001

Names, addresses and other personal information
has been removed as indicated by the ...

When I asked Steve what Tristan was really like - who was the real man behind the wonderful sea stories - Steve said:

I knew Tristan in the early 90's, on Phuket. He and I were the island's only two working writers, and unfortunately, a misplaced sense of competition made our relationship cold and distant for the first several years. But then my children were born; I took a job as a public relations manager for a very fine little hotel; Tristan was invited to be the guest of honor at the opening of a new exhibit in the hotel's art gallery; and as the PR manager I hosted our guest to dinner after the opening. We got along very nicely, and after that Tristan was my guest for lunch at the hotel almost every Wednesday until he died. He always brought me a book, on loan, so that it wouldn't look like he was taking charity. The week he died I had his copy of "Riding the Iron Rooster" by Paul Theroux, and it stayed in my library until I left the island in 1997...

... You do realize that the "real man behind the wonderful sea stories" was, by the time I knew him on Phuket, a bitter, angry, friendless, penniless, and very, very sick man? He was, in those last few years, a pitiable subject. And if there was one thing Tristan could not tolerate, it was to be pitied. I have often thought that while he loved being the center of attention, he would have rather slipped away into obscurity than have anyone ever say of him, "Oh, the poor, poor man." And if you knew him at the end, that's all you could say of him, unless you said, as many people did, "That rotten old bastard."

I said that regardless of what people thought of Tristan Jones the man, weren't they touched at some fundamental level by his stories.  Steve's response was:

...Yes, he touched people, all right. He touched them so deeply that somebody once threw a beer bottle at Tristan from a passing pickup truck as he was driving his three-wheeled motorcycle down the highway. It was not uncommon for people to shout abuse at him as they passed, so that at one point he had a big cardboard sign on the back of his sidecar saying, in Thai and English, "I know every cop on the island and I'll give them your license plate number if you harass me." 

Mostly, he was disliked by the Thais because he lived there for years without making any effort to learn the language well, or to learn how to respect their culture. He was hated, absolutely hated, by the yachting community on the island because of his caustic remarks about dilettante sailors. He wrote at least three letters a week to the Editor of the Bangkok Post (they published about one every couple of weeks) railing at everything from the yachtie community on Phuket to the Thai government to the British government to his village neighbors. 

There is a huge yachting regatta on Phuket every year, called the King's Cup. It began as a very small event, really just a PR stunt for the newly opened Phuket Yacht Club, and Tristan was invited to speak at the first one. I was not present, but I've been told that by a half-hour into his talk Tristan was alone in the room. He did not stop speaking, however, so the story goes. But he was never invited back to any subsequent regattas, although there was never a boat in the bay (and now there are hundreds that show up for the races every year) that did not have at least one copy of a Tristan Jones book on board. 

After we began having lunch together he was always decent to me, though invariably cranky and rude to the waiters. (He once told me "I've never had a Jewish friend before." I took it as a compliment.) I think that his orneryness can be forgiven if we remember that he spent the vast majority of his adult life alone at sea, without much chance to develop the social graces, and that he never expected to end his days flat broke, a double amputee confined in a wheelchair on an island full of tourists and prostitutes. 

His bedroom, which was where he lived for weeks or months on end, had windows that looked out on the mountains, not over the sea. Isn't that sad?...

...Everything about Tristan's last decade of life is tragic, including the fact that I seem to be the only person who saved his last published words. Me: a guy from Iowa who hates boats with a passion and who never read any of Tristan's books until after his death.