Remembering Chez

Eight years after his death, Chez Pazienza’s writing lives on.

Chez Pazienza.

by Ben Cohen

I have a calendar notification that pings me once a month reminding me to pay my old friend and colleague Chez Pazienza. I haven’t turned it off, even though he died over eight years ago.

I’m not exactly sure why I haven’t canceled it — I think on a subconscious level it helps me to remember why I started The Banter in the first place. Chez was integral to the early days of The Daily Banter, when he, Bob Cesca and I, would post thousands of furious words a day in a bid to make a name for ourselves.

Chez was not only supremely talented as a writer, he was absolutely fearless. So fearless he would take shots at me on the site. He once got in a public spat with an ex-girlfriend of mine, and despite my pleas for him to stop, he escalated and then blamed me for it. Our agreement was that he could say what he wanted on The Daily Banter — even if it meant throwing me under the bus.

Chez published the Charlie Hebdo cartoons on The Daily Banter. He went after Salon.com with so much venom I’m amazed they didn’t sue us. He called me late one night saying he wanted to cover the protests in Ferguson — so we printed him a fake press pass and crowdfunded a ticket for him to go the next day. Upon arrival, Chez got pepper sprayed live on TV, then went back to his hotel to file the story.

Bob and I would send each other the same message after Chez posted something we knew would get us in trouble: Fucking Chez.

Not again.

We put up with it because Chez was brilliant. But more than that, he was loyal. The Daily Banter was at its lowest point in 2015 when it became clear that our business model was not working. Facebook controlled our distribution and half of our monetization, so minor changes to their algorithm would destroy our income for months on end. We didn’t have enough paid subscribers to keep the site afloat, so I had to let several people go and drastically cut the salaries of those who wanted to stay.

Chez took the salary cut without complaining. “Fuck them,” he told me. And he kept on writing.

So after he died in February 2017, I never turned the payment notifications off. To me he is still part of The Banter and one of the reasons I keep writing. When times get tough — and they frequently do — the ping reminds me that I owe him the continuation of the fight we started.

My wife and I with Chez in Los Angeles in 2016.

While I made sure to preserve Chez’s work at The Daily Banter (you can search for his work here), Chez had a personal blog ‘Deus Ex Malcontent’ that was taken over by a gambling scam site in Indonesia after the domain expired.

This site had some of Chez’s best work — it was the reason he was fired by CNN, the reason why Gawker tried to hire him, and the reason why I brought him on to the Banter all those years ago.

Bob and I worked with another friend of his on retrieving his archives, but had so many technical difficulties transferring them to a new site that we gave up. But Bob took the task up again recently, and through some tech wizardry way beyond my capabilities, managed to get all the content back up onto a new site. The ‘Deus Ex Malcontent’ archives now live here, permanently:

http://chezpazienza.com/

I can’t tell you how relieved I am that his work is publicly available again. Chez was an important voice in America and I’m glad we can all hear him again.

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