A date with Carol and Cosmic Judy (June 15, 1975)

June 15, 1975

Jimmy told me he needed a ride. But not to Quick Chek this time.

Carol wanted to meet him at a bar on Paterson Avenue in West Paterson, and he needed me to drive him there from Passaic.

It was a kind of date, he supposed, although Carol technically was still John’s girl, even though she was living with somebody else near Bleeker Street in the Village.

How she got back to the old digs in West Paterson I didn’t find out until we got to the bar and found Carol waiting with her one-time best friend, Cosmic Judy – a girl I had last seen in an apartment in Verona where Jimmy and had gone to cop pot once or twice. At the time, I was startled by the face that Judy had a swing in her living room, and a switch that allowed her to turn off the volume on the TV set when the commercials came one.

Jimmy cautioned me not to call Judy “Cosmic Judy” since it would like offend her, a description others had for her because she was something of a space cadet – and not from drugs (though she did those, too.)

I had just bought a 1960 Chevy impala, but it had a few quirks.

The dashboard light did not work so in order to check on the speed or the gas gauge after dark I had to turn on the dome light.

That night, I had only an eighth of a tank of gas. But I figured the ride from Passaic where Jimmy and I lived to West Paterson wouldn’t put too much a strain on it, and I could put some gas in the car the next morning.

I wanted to save money to buy drinks and perhaps food, if this was a double date as Jimmy seemed to suggest.

When we got there, we got drinks, but Carol – who was in a randy mood – wanted to go someplace else, only she didn’t tell me where, she said she would direct me as we went and she directed me to drive out Route 80 west, while she had Jimmy cuddled in the back seat.

Cosmic Judy said in the front side passenger seat.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You’ll find out when we get there,” Carol said.

“I don’t have a lot of gas.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I don’t want to get stuck anywhere.”

“I said not to worry about it,” Carol insisted, sounding preoccupied and I glance in the rearview mirror showed her dark shape cuddling with Jimmy’s.

I turned on the dome light and saw the needle on E.

“Will you stop that!” Carol snapped. “Can’t you see we’re busy back here.”

Jimmy said nothing, but I got the impression from the odd looks Judy gave that he was half undressed.

“It will help to know where you want us to go,” I said.

She mumbled something about Stokes Forest – a regular destination for our gang.

“I don’t have gas enough to get there and certainly not enough to get back,” I said.

“That’s fine with me,” Carol said, voice muffled as she pressed her lips against Jimmy’s neck.

Judy giggled.

I wanted to kick Jimmy for this. Guys are supposed to be the ones coming up with the excuse about running out of gas.

When we got to the exit to Route 15 north, Carol directed me to take it.

Darkness swirled around us, thick with woods that had not yet been cut for development, the narrow lanes plunging under their extended arms.

I kept thinking about running out of gas – about getting stuck out here, having to sit in the front seat while Carol and Jimmy made love in the back, or worse, having to make love with Judy just to occupy ourselves till the police arrived to rescue us or morning came so we could walk to some gas station somewhere.

There were not a lot of gas stations around that part of the county, none on Route 80, and only a handful on Route 15. I didn’t know if we had gas enough to reach one.

We passed a few stations, but they had already closed.

I mentioned the gas situation to Jimmy, he only mumbled back at me.

Finally, I saw a glow in the center island of a still open station and started to turn off.

“Don’t!” Carol yelled.

“I have to. We have no gas,” I yelled back, and then pulled up to the pump, directing the attendant to put the amount of gas in the gas-guzzler I still had money to pay for. When finished, I asked Carol if she still wanted to go to Stokes.

“Never mind,” she said. “Just go back. You ruined the whole mood!”

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A matter of money? (Nov. 27, 1983)

Nov. 27, 1983

Money matters, even when Jimmy pretends it doesn’t.

Our agreement when he moved in with me is that he would pay $40 towards the rent and half the utility – which took me a while to realize doesn’t nearly cover the overall expenses we incur.

At the time, I was working more or less part time at the Fotomat; Jimmy wasn’t working at all. He asked me to get him a job, and then set up shop while waiting for me to accomplish it, sipping his morning coffee or puffing his evening joint.

Finally, I gave him the job I had and went back to baking up in Willowbrook Dunkin, a far harder, but better paying job, but also an increase in costs since I had to pay for gas and upkeep on the car.

Still, Jimmy complained, and somehow managed to shift the bulk of the bills onto me – I guess assuming now that I had a better paying job than he did, I could afford it.

He frequently ran out of money early in the week, asking me for small loans he conveniently forgot to repay when he got paid.

This week I realized that he arranged for me to do shopping a few days after his payday, managing to put off paying his share of that until the following payday, often paying me less than half on the claim he needs to pay other bills.

If I complain, he looks at me as if I’ve offended him, as if I’m greedy, as if I value cash more than our friendship.

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The emptiness inside (Nov. 19, 1983)

November 19, 1983

Jimmy complains about the cats just the way he used to complain about Clayton before Clayton left, snide remarks about how destructive these beasts were.

I mostly don’t take him seriously though I know he really means what he says, obsessed with creating a world for himself which he can control all the elements – godlike.

Although I often sided with Clayton at times, I always felt sorry for him, and sometimes thought Jimmy went to far in his abuse – even if Jimmy always couched it in sarcasm.

Sometimes listening to Jimmy, I am reminded of the old Biblical story of Eden, and the whispering temptation of the surfant, a kind of playful mean-spiritedness that plays one person against another, in one case, me against Clayton, and once, Garrick against me.

“Look at him,” Jimmy would say referring to Clayton in the other room. “What do you think he’s listening to in those headphones. Not anything good, I can tell you.”

I actually did listen to Clayton’s tapes once when he was out, and Jimmy was not around, hours of dry rhetoric that might have made a communist proud, attempted brainwashing, not political, but religious, making sure that Clayton kept the faith.

Jimmy never actually listened to the tapes and only glimpsed the books out of which Clayton was always reading, building his case against the boy based on what Jimmy supposed the tapes said, though his guess was close to reality since Clayton’s faith was as close to fascism as anything I could imagine, how to control people under his command, how to convince them to dedicate their lives and their finances to the church.

But for Jimmy, Clayton was the epitome of evil, that dark force always on the edge of our lives waiting to swarm in on us – when in fact, Clayton was just one of those helpless saps dragged into a faith that promised to fill a vacancy inside him he could find nothing else to fill it with.

A vacancy we all have, including Jimmy.

We’re all making choices in our lives, some of which turn out to be completely wrong. This does not make us evil – only hapless.

We all seem to be stumbling aimlessly through our lives, an idea that appalls Jimmy who seems to want to have total control over his own reality, and doesn’t, can’t possibly have, and doesn’t even know how impossible such control is for anybody.

Now, he bitches about the cats because they wander through the house at will, sometimes knocking things over, but I think Jimmy needs something to blame things on, people or pets to divert attention from the real situation – a kind of emptiness he seems to feel.

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Jimmy wants a lizard (Nov. 11, 1983)

November 11, 1983

Jimmy told me to meet him at the Fotomat booth so I could drive him up to the mall to buy a lizard.

I knew he was lying – Jimmy always says one thing when he means another – but it was such an interesting lie I agreed if only to find out what he was really up to.

I figured he just didn’t want to have to walk in the dark in the rain and wanted me to drive him to the bank with the night’s deposit and then drive him home again.

The problem is when I got to the booth, he wasn’t there. I drove up the road to the bank, then back, and to the bank again in case I missed him, but didn’t see him coming or going, and so I was shocked to find him at the booth when I got back and hear him complain how little he could trust me to be on time when I was there early.

He was dripping just enough from the rain to convince me that perhaps he had walked to the bank like he said he had, and I had someone missed him in the dark.

When he got into the car, he surprised me by insisting we drive to the mall.

“For a lizard?” I asked.

“Of course, for the lizard,” he said.

I suppose there is something wrong with me, my getting angry at what are Jimmy’s typical antics. I should shrug these off, but rarely do, and so driving, I got into a mood I couldn’t get out of even at the thought that Jimmy needed me to help him buy a lizard – which I knew he really didn’t want, and that he would soon unveil his real intention a moment or so before we reached the place where he really needed to do – in this case Pearl Paint for supplies.

Later, he would try to make up for this deception by giving me the painting of a lizard he said he did just for me – though oddly enough, somewhere down deep in that twisted maze of his mind, I knew he really did want a lizard.

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Sanctuary (Oct. 10, 1983)

October 10, 1983

You can hear the cries of sea gulls above the collage of sound I hear even before I climb out of bed.

Winter comes to the city and the river.

Last week, the geese made their passage through this place, a wedge in the sky honking as they made their way south.

The gulls stay here, braving out the winter with the rest of us.

I am cold, trapped beneath this blanket like a child, filled with memories and hints of the upcoming holidays.

Clayton is leaving tomorrow for parts unknown, Austin for certain, possibly San Francisco before that, in search of peace he cannot find here.

I feel more than a little guilty for the way Jimmy and I have treated him during his brief stay here.

We should not have given him such a hard time about his beliefs.

Jimmy has a tendency to decimate anything that interferes with his personal plans, and I was his willing accomplice, even though I got nothing out of it in the end except grief.

I was once a victim of this tactic back in 1975 when I was Clayton trying to live with Jimmy and Garrick here, and Jimmy orchestrated a similar scheme to drive me out.

I hear the gulls again, reminding me that I must soon rise and face the cold day, and the approach of winter – still reveling in Fran’s visit yesterday, and our hours of love-making, before we ventured out and made the trek to Bear Mountain to glimpse the first sprawl of changing leaves, yellows and reds that have not yet had time to reach here, contrasted against a backdrop of evergreens and the sharp shimmering surface of an almost pristine Hudson River, the glimpse of other lakes between the sprawling limb whose names I did not catch from the road map.

Neither one of us thought to bring a camera so the image must remain fixed in memory instead, finding peace closer than Clayton can, although a bit alarmed by the sound of gun fire as hunters made their way through the woods not far from where we stood.

We saw deer fleeing below us, trapped in the sanctuary of federal preserves.

Sometimes I feel trapped like that, pursued by realities I am helpless to otherwise cope with.

Standing there on top of that mountain made me realize just how Jimmy must feel having been cast out from his garden of Eden in Towaco where he had puttered around in his own private sanctuary, only to return to Passaic where he had to confront a harsher world.

Perhaps this is why he is so bitter and so angry at Clayton, envying Clayton’s ability to carry his own sanctuary on his back, hiding in his books and tapes the way the deer do in the federal lands, while Jimmy and I live on the edge of a world where there is no sanctuary.

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All bets are off (1974)

(1974)

We drive down from Hamburg, New Jersey on a road nobody’s heard of except for Frank, Jimmy bitching at me in the back seat from his usual soap box in the passenger seat, warning me not to distract Frank while he’s driving or we might wind up in Oshkosh, wherever that might be.

Jimmy says the last thing he needs is to have a giggling Frank driving in this remote place, and that if anything sets him off, he’ll murder Frank to shut him up.

Jimmy, as usual, is in a hurry, although today he might actually have a good reason, since he hopes to reach his sister’s house before she leaves for work.

He’s broke again and needs to borrow some money.

But Frank, who Jimmy’s once described as “the most careless careful driver in the world,” takes a route where he rarely as to exceed 25 milers per hour and seems particularly attracted to 20, pumping up Jimmy’s outrageous with each painful mile.

We all know that when we get to Jimmy’s sister’s place, she’ll be gone, and Jimmy will be so pissed he won’t be able to speak the whole trip back.

We only pretend like we might get there until Jimmy gets pissed thinking about it and yells for to pull over, and when Frank does, Jimmy gets out and starts to walk.

We have to beg him to get back in the car by which time, he’s come up with a new scheme and tells Frank to give him $50.

This puts an abrupt halt to Frank’s giggling.

He sees nothing funny when it comes to money and demands to know why he should give Jimmy anything.

Jimmy’s say Frank owes him $100 and Jimmy being a kind soul is willing to settle accounts for half if Frank pays it right away.

Naturally, Frank asks how Jimmy came up with such a debt, and frowns even more when Jimmy mentions the bet the two of them made at 16 that suggested the sickly Frank wouldn’t survive until age 25.

A relieve Frank giggles again, and points out that he isn’t 25 yet, but 24.

At which point, Jimmy says that’s why he’s willing to settle. Jimmy doesn’t trust Frank to leave the $100 in his will when he does kick the bucket next year.

Things are about to get ugly between the two of them when I point out that we are lost.

Jimmy blames me for distracting Frank, then orders Frank to pull into a gas station where he might get a map and make a phone call. He says he’s got to have his sister check the news paper’s obituaries to see if Frank’s name is in them yet.

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Jimmy: man of habit (Oct. 1, 1983)

Oct. 1, 1983

Jimmy is a man of habit – and faith.

Faith not n the ordinary or traditional way – the quiet paganistic motivations of the world, relying on mother earth or Gaia to give him support.

Remarkably, Jimmy is not dramatically different from Clayton who he despises (or appears to), and by habit, I mean, he and Clayton both do things in specific ways, and that the universe – as in Medieval times – tends to revolve around him.

(Here I need to be careful as to not project onto him characteristics which are not really his and I suppose some measure of example is in order here.)

Perhaps the most annoying of these habits is how Jimmy manages to obtain rides. Years ago, when many of the Garley Gang lived in this apartment complex in Passaic, Jimmy made a point of contacting each and every one of us, getting each of us to promise to give him a ride (usually to Quick Chek), lining us up just on the off chance one or more of us crapped out at the last moment.

This might seem like a reasonable precaution, except for the fact that each of usually went out of our way to accommodate him, assuming some urgency to his request – especially when at times he “needed” to go the library (we assuming he would pay some late fee if we did not rush him there.)

On one such occasion, Jimmy arranged for a ride to the library and as it happened, I was the only one available, and he made it clear it would be a terrible trek to take the ten block walk in the icy rain. Since I knew Jimmy often had little money to spare, I assumed that if I did not bring him, his pile of books would be overdue.

After nearly a half hour scraping the ice off my car, I drove him the ten blocks to the library. He did not have books to bring back, and he took none out when we got there.

I’m still uncertain as to why we went at all.

But I believe this may be his need for attention.

Last week, James refused to go to work 15 minutes early in order to accommodate my schedule, even though he’s the one begging me for the ride, the result of which, he arrived on work at time, and I arrived at my jobs 15 minutes late.

Most often, he has another purpose for his rides, often getting me to take him to John Ritchie’s house on Totowa Road in Paterson for the purpose of getting pot – John is kind, always trading pot for a painting Jimmy has made, and perhaps has the largest collection of anyone.

Sometimes, we go to Patty Joyce’s house in Little Falls for the same purpose, although he prefers John to Patty, because Patty wants cash.

Jimmy has habits in the apartment that so resemble Clayton’s that I sometimes confuse who is whom if I only hear them moving around, each caught in a strange dance, as one does this and the other does that, but always with the same gestures and steps, putting this here or that there, putting on or turning off music, mumbling about this or that, or about me or each other.

They could be twins. Perhaps in another life they were.

But from the way Jimmy feels about Clayton, I suspect they might have been Cain and Abel in the previous incarnation.

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