Island profile: Jason Shields, proof you can go home again

“It’s a million tiny pieces” that fell into place to create the happy life now enjoyed by Jason Shields, the recently married building contractor and gifted nature and fishing columnist for the Reporter.

Jason came to the Island from Brooklyn at age seven with his mother, Maria Loconsolo, when she left her husband Ray Sena. She knew the Island well because her parents, Jean and John Loconsolo, had a summer home on Ram Island.

Much to their annoyance, Maria and Ray had been hippies, taking Jason to rock concerts and losing Ray’s 14-year-old brother for days among the crowds and the mud at Woodstock.

Ray worked in his family’s olive oil business “and hated it,” Jason said. “I loved him; he loved me. He did the best he could, under the circumstances,” which included a drug problem, Jason said. Ray died in 2003 at age 54 of an overdose.

Shelter Island “was a complete culture shock,” Jason said. “You really feel like an outsider, back then especially. The kids all seemed related somehow or had been born on Shelter Island.”

For “a guy used to the scene at Fifth Avenue and 86th Street” in Brooklyn, “it was like ‘Green Acres,’ trying to figure it out.”

Today, after both good and bad times, Shelter Island feels more to him “like one big family,” filled with kind people who join ranks to help “when somebody needs something or is in a bad place.”

Four years before Jason moved here, a celebrated and successful artist known for his three-dimensional collages, had fallen in love with the place and planted roots here.

Alan Shields was a towering man who used his fingernails as tiny canvases for paintings and wore one of his creations draped over his chest, a colorful strung-together assemblage just like a Plains Indian’s breastplate. “People looked at him freaking sideways,” Jason said. “And who’s chasing my mother around the aisles of George’s IGA but this bald-headed weirdo.”

Maria was in the IGA shopping for her new employer, the ancient Caroline Weber, in whose vast house on Nostrand Parkway Maria and Jason were living, Maria as her live-in chef. Among its gothic oddities was a stuffed alligator standing on its hind legs, supporting the family silver set.

Alan saved Maria from that gloom. They were married in 1979 at the Loconsolo house on Coecles Harbor and moved to their own place on Hudson Avenue.

Jason already had discovered his love for the outdoors. Born and raised to a farming family in the Midwest — a family that welcomed Jason with open arms whenever he went to visit them in Missouri — Alan had a passion for the outdoors. “Fishing, hunting, splitting wood and traveling” with Alan highlighted Jason’s later childhood.

“This guy was so interesting, he really distracted me,” said Jason, whose own father “wasn’t really available.” Still, he took Alan with a grain of salt. “Back then, I basically thought his art was bulls–t,” Jason said. There was resentment, too. For a while, “It was a rocky relationship.”

But he remembers spending six weeks when he was 10 or 11 in India, where Alan had a commission to create art in a textile tycoon’s workshops. “I ran around chasing peacocks” and, because he was missing school, Maria tutored him.

He remembers a month-long visit to Mobile, Alabama where Alan’s art was unveiled in a building lobby. “We were hanging out with the high society of Mobile and these women were all agog” with Alan “because they wanted to be the next one to get their fingernails painted.”

Alan adopted him eventually, which is why Jason took his name. He has a sister, Alan and Maria’s daughter Vicki, who’s married to Ian Weslek.

Despite all the distractions, all was not well. He had “cool parents” but “I was very stoic” in those days, Jason remembered. “I didn’t want anybody to think anything was bothering me.”

Drinking hard became part of the fun he shared with his friends. He worked high school summers in the kitchen of the Pridwin Hotel and the summer after graduation, ready to head off to Syracuse University, he was at the wheel after work when he lost his best friend n a single-car crash.

“I didn’t have the skills to cope,” Jason said, even though everyone on the Island was compassionate and supportive.

Getting in fights, having blackouts, he was asked to leave Syracuse after his freshman year. Living on the Island, he got an associate’s degree in English at Suffolk Community College, returning to Syracuse as a senior. He “was doing great, with a perfect GPA,” on track for graduation, but “I got into more trouble,” sabotaging his success with a drunk driving arrest and jail time.

His grandfather put him to work as an estimator in his painting business, which handled the city’s bridges and buildings including the World Trade Center. Living in Brooklyn with a girlfriend and a great job, he “self-destructed” again and quit.

“My introspection, my self-awareness, are all based on fear,” he said. “There I was, living away from Shelter Island, realizing consequences existed in the real world, too. You can’t escape.”

There was a brief stint as a cold caller for an investment banking firm, but he couldn’t stand the lies that kind of selling requires. Back on the Island, he joined the staff of the Reporter, where his mother was working, and went on to win awards from the New York Press Association for his writing.

He wanted to get his college degree and needed better money to do it, so he left the paper, took a job with a building contractor, won scholarships and grants based on his writing, and completed a semester at LIU Southampton. Then “again I totally sabotaged myself” with another DWI arrest and 60 days in the county jail.

He was back in the construction business when he was offered the job of editing the Reporter, which he did for a little more than a year. “It was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it,” he said, leaving with “no hard feelings” but going because of disagreements over policy matters.

He went back into construction and had “one more hiccup,” another DWI, “and my mother said I needed to do something. That took courage. She was so afraid she’d lose me if she gave me an ultimatum. For me, it was like a gut punch.

“A few days later, I was working a job and a man in the neighborhood was walking by and he asked me how I was doing. For the first time in my life, I answered honestly.

“‘I think I can help you,’ he said. At age 34, it was the beginning of my new life.”

That was a decade ago. Jason, who has been sober ever since, started his own construction firm in 2003 and last year married Karena Johnson.

Alan Shields died in 2005. Jason and his sister have formed an LLC to manage the vast collection of artwork he left behind, coordinating with the Van Doren Waxter gallery to mount shows all over the world.

Jason, who bought Vicki’s share of Alan’s Dinah Rock Road home, hopes to work on a biography of Alan. Meanwhile, he will publish a collection of his own fiction this summer, when he and Karena are also looking forward to the birth of their son.