Where Does the Good Go?

I remember it clearly, a sunny afternoon down in the grey area between Verdun and Point Saint Charles in Montreal. I was catching up with Edward ‘Teddy’ Kardos. The last time we’d seen each other he’d given me a bunch of MP3s — he had introduced me to Against Me!, shared a bunch of Mogwai albums I was missing. He had also tried to convince me Peter Bjorn and John were good and failed but he had managed to get me into Tegan and Sara.

“I love the tweeness.” I said. “Full of heartbreak but ironic.”

“Oh yeah?” He said with a half smile, spoken softly.

“Yeah, the song where they go ‘Where do you go with your broken heart and toe’.” I laughed. “Classic line.”

He paused and looked at me, he uttered a laugh, half giggle/cough that reminded me of Muttley from the old Hanna Barbara cartoons. I was confused.

“The line.” He said quietly, still half smiling. “Is ‘Where do you go with your broken heart in tow’.”

“That makes a lot more sense.” I admitted.

“Your line is better though.” He said reassuringly.

I first met Ed when I moved to Montreal in 2005. He was part of the first suite of people that started testing in the office I’d been sent to help set up the functionality labs for.

I don’t think I realised how young he was, he already carried himself with a quiet confidence that made him seem older. I didn’t know at the time but there was a reason for that.

He set a couple of things in motion without really meaning to. One night while we were in a bar he asked me if there was anyone I was interested in and I pointed to a girl. He then turned to me, several years my junior, and calmly explained:

“Hey, you just wave at her, if she waves back, go talk to her.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

He looked at me for a brief moment, and then broke into what would become that familiar laugh.

“It really isn’t that complicated. You are overthinking it.”

He was not wrong.

I remember him coming over and introducing me to a fruit flavoured malt liquor that proceeded to rot my insides. He confided:

“Where I was from you drank this because it would fuck you up, and the flavour hid how bad it was for you.”

Kardos approached me at work not long after the rot gut incident. He was in trouble in his hometown and he wanted to know if that if he were to go to jail for it, if he’d have a job afterwards. There was honest and earnestness that really threw me, I was disarmed by someone being willing to share a vulnerability like that with me. He ended up talking to the CEO of the company and was assured he could come back.

That was one of the many sides to Kardos to me, able to talk with an open heart even if you were uncomfortable with it.

The other side was his ability to organise and focus. I still remember working on Hitman: Blood Money, and Kardos building an onboarding document that taught anyone new how to make sure that Io Interactive didn’t send any more abusive emails. The opening page had a picture of a baby in tears with slogan next to it ‘Don’t make the Hitman baby cry’.

The other thing he taught me, that I guess I’d not properly appreciated was the importance of contact. Small gestures can have a huge impact, I saw it surmised by a writer as ‘You might think it isn’t much to let a friend know that you are thinking of them, but when they are down, or alone, that might be all they need.’

Kardos did end up going away, I heard his version of the story and I believe it. His girlfriend at the time asked me and a few people at Babel to write him a letter. It seemed like such a throwaway thing for me and kind of dumb as I wrote about work. Why would someone going through one of the worst experiences of their life want to know if Geoffrey got promoted?

When he showed up much later looking incredibly ripped (“there isn’t much to do there just eat and work out, I had to use garbage bags filled with water, because they won’t trust you with actual weights”) and a twinkle in his eye, he thanked for me that letter.

There are things he told me about the deportation process that will stay with me for as long as I live. The inhumanity of the US government, ripping families apart over bureaucracy. Grown men crying themselves to sleep because they couldn’t see their wives. The separation caused by their passport having a stamp for a country that no longer existed. These were incredible stories that he recounted with the demeanour of someone ordering breakfast.

“If that Tom Hanks movie The Terminal really happened in the US — they would have had conned his ass out of the airport and into a cell in minutes”

Kardos was quick to smile, or deliver a snorting laugh as a punctuation. But if you could break him, make him laugh uncontrollably, it was a delight. He’d bend his shaved head as he snickered, bring a hand over his mouth and as he tried to get it under control before cracking up again.

Despite his understanding of programming there was deep humanist streak to him. It was clear to me that he cared about people. I think that if I hadn’t been so thoroughly irony poisoned it would have broken my heart, when he turned to me, almost unblinking, and said:

“The prison system only teaches you to not be afraid of being incarcerated. It makes criminals.”

He implied that resorting to crime was no longer a fear to him. I remember making some lackluster argument against it. He politely waved it off:

“Yeah, I am not saying I would. It’s just that prison is no longer a threat.”

And he got out! Each new year I would see that he was practicing martial arts, developing as an authority on automation processes, or just being a chill, awesome guy. Our last conversation 3 months ago was me asking him for advice on integrating automation. He was busy but took the time out to talk me through it and offer me practical advice — a small gesture that I massively appreciated — as well as to tell me he was now working with some people I’d known. Knee deep in technobabble and he still looked for the human connection.

He travelled all over. I am a wanderer myself but I struggled keep up with where he was next.

There were too many missed connections, he’d be in England, I’d be in Poland, I’d get to England and he would be in Spain. I’d check Facebook and wonder: Is he in Cyprus now?

There was always a feeling that it was okay though, there’d would always be a chance for another beer at some point…

The next time for that beer was cut short last Friday on the 16th of June.

I don’t really know what happened, but I do knowhe was more than the events in his past, bigger than them in every capacity. To know that his time on this planet has been cut short breaks my heart and toe.

Kardos currently has a GoFundMe, to help with expenses and his family. His dog is taken care of thank goodness.

For posterity, tell me you can’t hear it:

Where Does the Good Go — YouTube

But also I think he’d appreciate it if I didn’t have him remembered for Teagan and Sara:

Against Me! — Even At Our Worst We’re Still Better Than Most — YouTube