6- Stop the World I want to get pot

When Stop the World opened in Paterson, kids gravitated to it from all the surrounding towns. It was as if a piece of Greenwich Village or Haight-Ashbury had fallen in the midst of New Jersey's most middle-class world, settling into the ghetto where kids could come and see it for themselves.

It was literally honey that drew flies.

There were two places to buy dope in those days; Paterson was one of them and New York was the other; neither place was safe.

Jimmy in his whole history rarely took a chance by buying dope from people he didn't know.

During one trip to Paterson, however, back in 1968 may have been that only time.

He kept telling me how he scored a nickel bag outside the “Stop the World” head shop and then went up to the newly opened parking deck behind Grants and Woolworths where he smoked it.

 I don't think you could actually buy any dope in “Stop the World” at least Frank never got anything there when we went. But the fact you could buy rolling papers and pipes, drew dealers and put together those dealers with kids from the suburbs.

 Just who it is who did the bulk buying that supplied LSD, marijuana and other drugs to Jimmy, Bob and the others I still don't know

But there were a number of risk-takers in the fringes of the Garley gang who made the trek to Paterson and back or went to New York City where there were always opportunities to buy in bulk.

 There was generally no shortage of drugs in West Paterson and Little Falls. But there were dry spells, times when the people could not find what they wanted, and Jimmy and others had to scramble to find alternative sources.

Many of our more memorable Journeys through the hinterland involved searching out people who knew people who had pot.

 I always suspected that Jimmy use the band as a cover to have access to pot and that it was half the reason, he kept going back to the music scene even when he's vowed to give it up.

For a time after the band split into two segments. John Ritchie, the guitarist, became Jimmy's principal source, someone accommodating enough to allow Jimmy to pay for the pot with paintings.

Patty the girlfriend of the sound man at that time also became one of his chief dealers and since she relied likely on the sound man to deal with the criminal element on the street their breakup forced Jimmy to scramble to find another regular source.

Most of the dealers Jimmy dealt with in the 1970s and 1980s lived on the fringes of Paterson, people willing to deal with the more dangerous element Jimmy and the other middle-class kids like him would not.

There were always several degrees of separation between them and the forces that prowled the underworld and even at his most desperate Jimmy never made that trip.

 While some Garfield would come over to buy drugs from 3rd street in Passaic while we live there, Jimmy never went there and always sought out safer sources further in the suburbs.

A huge part of our relationship during the 1970s was motivated by the search for pot.  if Jimmy heard even a whisper that someone had pot, he called up me or Frank to transport him to that place.

There were occasions when Frank mentioned someone might have pot and Jimmy forced Frank to go to that person. This was particularly true with a barmaid from Kimberly’s bar who suddenly found Frank and Jimmy at her door at 3 a.m.

Even later when Timmy moved to Lake Hopatcong, he relied on sources closer to Paterson and sometimes had me or Frank pick up a delivery and bring it to him.

By the 1990s one or more of these dealers had moved closer to him and he no longer needed us as transport.

And to my knowledge these same dealers supplied him all the way to the end of his life. It was the kind of Nirvana that allowed him to rarely have to leave his trailer or even interact with anybody except most remotely through the internet or by phone.

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5- Don’t bogart that joint

Had the ceremony of pot at Bob Warren’s house that day involved any other group of people, I might have felt obligated to partake.

Jimmy and his gang had no interest in forcing me to do anything I didn’t want to do; when they offered me the joint, I declined, and it went on without me.

They were engaged in what turned out to be a never-ending dialogue that had started long before my meeting any of them, and to which I was privy to a tiny part, a dialogue that drew on their common experiences in a stream of consciousness I could not possibly understand without having been with them as long as they had been together. Names flew by me without context and from points of view that changed depending on who was speaking or how many tokes of the joint each person had.

When someone mentioned “John” they all knew which John was meant even though there were two prominent Johns associated with the Garley Gang. Frank, alone, seemed as confused as I was, since he’d only been admitted into the inner circle a short time earlier.

I was desperate to follow the twisting threads of conversation but did not want to embarrass myself by saying anything that they might find completely out of context.

Frank felt exactly the opposite and insisted on talking, and took his tokes in turn, holding the smoke in longer than anyone else as if he had something to prove when in truth nobody took notice of this or what he said, except perhaps to draw laughter.

Frank laughed, too, although his was different than theirs. People who smoke pot eventually build up a tolerance and lose that early euphoria that comes to people just starting out, and so his laughter sounded silly, and theirs more seasoned, not mean, but aware.

Eventually everybody started to nod off like the junkies I would later see in New York, some began to hallucinate, still others like Jimmy just kept on talking, unaware that for the most part others had stopped listening. But eventually, he started paying more attention to the music coming from the stereo.

Frank smoked and giggled, and like me, seemed confused, and eventually, his giggling seemed to annoy Jimmy, who didn’t like the interruption when he was talking or the laugh track to music, he considered sacred.

“Will you quit that!” Jimmy kept saying and Frank would take a deep breath and try to contain his mirth, failing each time, breaking out into more giggles and loud declarations about how hungry he was.

Each time Jimmy assailed him, Frank tried to hold his breath longer to keep from laughing and at times held it for so long I thought he would explode, eventually exploding in yet another gush of giggles.

Although none of us knew it as the time, this moment foreshadowed what would become the dominating feature of their future relationship, a kind of Laurel and Hardy friendship that shifted unexpectedly from humorous to serious and back again – although the seriousness would almost never get so serious as to destroy their friendship – except once, much later in the 1970s, when Frank tried to steal Ginger – a woman Jimmy made of goddess out of, and, undoubtedly, loved until the end of his life.

During this pot-induced conversation as in many of those followed over next few decades, Jimmy would take on a parental tone when talking to Frank, begrudgingly enduring the outbursts of a clearly wayward child.

When it became clear that Frank had ingested much too much pot, Jimmy nodded at the others and they ceased offering him the joint.

Then, when Frank got confused at where the conversation was going, Jimmy halted the stream of thought to help unravel it for Frank, explaining who was who , and just what they were talking about, as if talking to a child.

This clued me into some of the back story without having the embarrass myself the way Frank seemed to be, and so by staying silent, I learned a lot more than I might have by asking questions.

From this and other such conversations, I soon learned Jimmy’s side of his meeting with Frank, and the other stories associated with those early years of the Garley Gang, stories I later collected into manuscripts in order to preserve them – although in some cases, they sometimes seemed to fantastic to be real and often contradicted other versions of the stories I was privy to later. Although I didn’t always believe Jimmy’s version, I needed to trust it most because everybody had their own agenda. And so, it is largely Jimmy’s version of the back story I wrote down.

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Frank arranges for me to meet Jimmy

Long before I actually got to meet Jimmy, I had to hear tales of his exploits from Frank – who had become obsessed with him.

Frank could talk about little else, even during our forays to Manhattan where we previously had searched for the soul of old Greenwich Village.

During one trip to Central Park, Frank showed me a photograph of the two of them, holding his thumb over his own face at first in order that I might consider how much Jimmy looked like him.

“We could be brothers,” Frank said, convinced that in a previous life (an early allusion to the Buddhism we would later embrace thanks to Ginger Jimmy’s future girlfriend.)

I remember how elated Frank became when someone stopped him on the street of Little Falls mistaking him for Jimmy.

I didn’t see the resemblance. Although they were both wore glasses, had long hair and generally had the same build, Frank looked like a scarecrow, and Jimmy like a rock star.

Frank, however, altered his appearance to enhance the similarities, wearing similar clothing, and letting his hair fall down over his shoulders in the way Jimmy’s did.  Frank also changed in other ways, taking a preference for the Beatles and the Stones rather than Simon & Garfunkel, and even started to criticize his friend Abbie Hoffman after he heard Jimmy do so.

Jimmy’s influence on everybody amazed me.

He and Ritchie Haas managed to talk hundreds of people into lying down in the center court of Willowbook Mall on its opening day in order to take a picture of them as if they were all dead. Jimmy had convinced them he was doing a spread for The Rolling Stone magazine.

Frank was also thrilled to meet many of Jimmy’s friends, who he later called “The Garley Gang,” and did his best convince me that they were his friends, too – which eventually they were.

Yet for all of his boasting, Frank seemed reluctant to introduce me to Jimmy as if he feared I might steal Jimmy away the way best friends sometimes steal away girlfriends.

For some reason, I still do not understand, Frank or Jimmy arranged our meeting to take place at a dry cleaner up the hill from the Little Falls Laundry.

Frank was extreme agitated when Jimmy did not make an appearance at the time expected.

The store’s clerk kept asking us what we wanted and when we told him, he suggested perhaps we should wait outside. Her persisted. We resisted. By that time, Jimmy had finally arrived.

I was seated in the phone booth. I had the door closed pretending to make a phone call to avoid the clerk’s constant complaints, slipping a dime into the quarter slot so, it kept dropping into the coin return.

Suddenly someone yanked open the door. I thought it was the exasperated clerk.

But when the voice said, “I’m Jesus Christ; I’m here to hear your confession,” I knew I had finally met up with Jimmy.

Close up, undisguised by the blurriness of the photograph, Jimmy looked even less like Frank except superficially. They were roughly the same height and build, and Frank had let his hair grow to the same length. But where Frank’s face resembled a jigsaw puzzle, Jimmy had the rugged handsome features I would later see in his father, Basil, which would only later seem strange to me when Jimmy became a hermit and pretended to be a wizard.

Whereas Frank was always quick with a clever retort, I was tongue-tied, unable to respond to this odd introduction, and so I assumed Jimmy immediately pegged me as stupid or shy, although he also immediately adopted me as a member of his gang – a group we would shortly set off to meet up the street in the local playground.

Jimmy actually thought I looked like Alf, another member of the gang – a mistake many other people would make for many years later. I didn’t see that resemblance either when we finally met him waiting impatiently near the nearby bicycle rack.

Alf was a stocky, moody character with whom I would constantly be in competition, many times dating the same women he did, or being mistaken as him by one or more of the women had abandoned.

A few moments later, Bob Warren appeared, a frizzy-haired boy with an IQ above 200, who Jimmy had drawn as part of his odd-ball collection of followers and cast outs during his senior year as Passaic Valley High School, people who would cling to Jimmy for decades later.

Parents, of course, saw Jimmy has a cult figure equivalent to someone like Charles Manson, someone they needed to keep an eye on – and at least one local police officer, named Calpabo did.

As if from the Alfred Hitchcock film, The Birds, the school yard attracted other Jimmy followers – Nick, Charlie, Jeff, Ritchie – all of whom agreed to make the trek up to Bob’s house (at Jimmy’s suggestion) to listen to records and smoke some weed.

An as if a cold wind stirred them up, they flew off to their respective houses before making their way to Bob’s house, while we –Jimmy, Frank, me, Bob and Alf slowly make the trek up the hill to get ready for what was to become my first pot party.

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Frank meets Jimmy at Little Falls Laundry

Frank’s father told him get a job or get out.

While Frank’s mother would never have allowed her husband to kick Frank out, Frank got scared enough to seek one out.

He had just graduated high school and needed spending money in order to keep up his weekend trips to the village. So, when he saw the ad for a job at The Little Falls Laundry, he went to apply, dragging me along with him for moral support.

Frank got the job loading trucks with packages of laundry to be delivered to various businesses and people.

It was Frank’s job to take boxes that shot down the various shoots and stack them in the appropriate trucks as part of prearranged routes. During the most hectic moments, the job involved a non-stop jog from shoot to shoot and truck to truck and to make sure that none of the shoots backed up all the way to the tops and the windows through which the workers in the laundry itself shoved them.

For the first few days, Frank worked alone, while could goof off during slack periods, the rush was driving him crazy. He unwound during the slack periods by doing what he called “The Spiderman.”

This meant he would climb the beams that supported the shoots and hang there like a monkey or conduct any number of aerobatic routines.

He was hanging upside down when the boss came into the delivery area, leading a new employee, Jimmy.

“Glad to meet you,” Frank said, his upside-down face nose to nose with Jimmy’s, greeting the man that would change all of our lives in a fashion that became a bit of Garleyville lore.

Over the next six months those two would treat the warehouse as a kind of performance space where they would sing and dancing during the slack times, often pulling pranks on the boss. Jimmy liked taunting the boss, who was a good-natured guy, and so put up with the taunting much in the way the fictional manager of the Beatles did in Hard Day’s Night.

Jimmy not only looked a little like John Lennon, but acted a lot like him, too.

Jimmy would have Frank go across the street to get coffee, cake for their boss’ breakfast, and then help him eat it, while helping him work out the crossword puzzle from The Times.

Since Frank was a fan of Broadway musicals, he encouraged Jimmy to make up imaginary musical plays, a kind of perverted Hair or Godspell, Jimmy taking the lead in creating such classics as

“In the bathroom with the guys, telling all their duty lies,”  or a play Frank claimed would be a master piece and whose name I can not recall, but remember some of the lyrics which seemed to defy the previous generation’s efforts in the great war and completely political incorrect.

“See the red sun rise in the west/the Jap zeros coming in with their best/ and we’ll all be dead by 11 o’clock/ Peral Harbor’s gonna get it tonight.”

What the boss thought of all this, I never heard, only I knew that under all his gruff exterior he seemed to care for both of them – especially Jimmy – a great deal, and was sorry to see Jimmy leave when Jimmy went off the art school in Manhattan with his friend, Richard Haas.

Way too smart for his own good, Jimmy had been asked to leave his father’s high school – a catholic school – because had questioned some articles of faith. Some teachers may have actually believed Jimmy in league with the devil.

This expulsion forced him to graduate at Passaic Valley, where he managed to gather a healthy group of followers, who more or less became his friends for the rest of his life, and part of that entourage Frank labelled “The Garley Gang.”

This included Alf, Bob Warren, Tom, Charlie, Jeff Black, Nick Romeo (whose basement they played music in since Nick was rich and owned everything they needed), Alfano, and even John Monett.

The one exception to this was Garrick, who Jimmy knew growing up, his oldest friend and the one who he would continue to be a friend for the rest of their lives.

They knew each other from Paterson and from Catholic School. They both briefly attended St. Brendans, for Kindergarten, a year or so before I started there. Jimmy mother was actually involved with some of the social events at the school. The family was living on Getty Avenue at the time, one of those brief sojourns away from Jimmy’s father’s in-laws in West Paterson.

Garrick complained later about Jimmy constantly pulling stuff on him, taking credit for various projects, and once even borrowed his radio only to return it broken.

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Visions of Garleyville

Frank Quackenbush wanted to write a book about "The Garley Gang" called "God is a Sadist." He never did. But because I kept a daily journal, I wound up doing it instead. These essays are some of those I wrote reflecting my experiences with Jimmy Garland and The Garley Gang. Since I hand write my journal, it will take me time to post them all. Please check back.
I'm dividing these into time periods covered by novels, short stories, essays and journals written over the years. I'm also posting some of the hundreds of songs he performed as videos. I've also started a music link to various recordings over the years.

1 - God is a Sadist

2 - The Inevitable connection

3- Substitute intelligence

4- Garland video page

5 - Music of James Garland

Jimmy's birth

Saturday, January 25, 2020

Jimmy was born in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Paterson on Dec. 28, 1948.

He a strapping 8-pound first child of Basil and Marie Garland, who had married early in 1948 and resided in their in-laws’ house on the corner of Newby Avenue and West 34th Street in what was then called “West Paterson.”

The location was more than a little ironic since it served as hub of Jimmy’s early life.  Frank Quackenbush would be buried a few blocks away. Jimmy’s band would play regularly at a club a block away. Many of the Jimmy’s closest childhood friends came from the enclave of hilly streets.

And even though the family moved around a lot, they often came back to Newby Street for the first decade after Jimmy’s birth, and even after that, relocated to nearby apartments.

Jimmy was named after a hero uncle, who had won the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions over Austria during World War II. Jimmy’s name sake was declared missing in action during one such flight but managed to work his way back to allied lines – only to die a fluke crash during a training mission in Texas a short time later.

Jimmy and Basil were remarkably alike except in one respect.

Jimmy, frailer in frame, never took to sports or the military the way Basil did.

Basil, born in Paterson, was a tough kid, a Golden Gloves boxer in the early 1940s, and once voted as “a manly man” by his classmates at St. George’s School and later St. Bonaventure High School.

But like Basil, Jimmy had the gift of gab, able to talk himself in and out of trouble – sometimes actually talking himself into trouble for the challenge of talking his way out again – such as when he convinced the draft board psychiatrist to label him 4F to as to avoid going to Vietnam in the late 1960s.

Basil like his brothers James and Robert was more than a little patriotic. Yet instead of joining the air corps like James, or the army like Robert, Basil joined the U.S. Marines and served in the Pacific Theater and other places.

At the time of his marriage to Marie, Basil worked as a clerk for Pan American World Airways. Marie, at the time, worked for the Book of the Month Club in New York City.

Basil was something of a jack of all trades and relied heavily on his gift of gab to support his family, often as a salesman.  He recognized some of this in Jimmy and occasionally incorporated his eldest son into one of his schemes such as one where he had Jimmy design a board for a lecture – supposedly something scientific. As Basic mixed some concoction in test tubes and beakers while speaking, Jimmy used a pointer to point to parts of a diagram. Ultimately, it was a joke since at the end what Basil mixed as a drink which he promptly consumed.

When Basil took over operations of wholesale liquidator in the former Sears building on Bloomfield Avenue and Valley Road in Montclair, he hired Jimmy to work there, along with our mutual friend, Garrick.

Jimmy, however, was never as practical as Basil, something Basil recognized.

When Jimmy lost his job as a van driver for Outwater Plastics in Garfield in 1977 and was evicted from apartment he rented from Garrick’s aunt, Basil would not allow Jimmy to live in their apartment in West Paterson unless Jimmy found another job.  Jimmy promptly moved out and moved into the attack room of Garrick’s Passaic apartment.

Jimmy wasn’t lazy. He simply sought to live what he believed was an artist’s life and wanted somehow to make his way in the world as an artist.

This was not something the always practical Basil understood.

Yet as practical as Basil was, life was not easily, and as often as he moved out of his in-laws’ house in West Paterson, he often found his way back there.

While Jimmy started life in West Paterson, his siblings were born elsewhere with each move – Bob (named after Basil’s other brother) soon followed, and then came the girls, born in places like Paterson, Lodi, even Clifton.

Somehow, they always wound up back in West Paterson, struggling to make ends meet.

When I first met Jimmy, Basil and the family were living in a big gray house on Paterson Avenue under the shadow of the Route 46 overpass. When they moved out, they went to a two-family house elsewhere in West Paterson some place up the hill from Browertown Road. At some point in 1972, they moved to Pompton Lakes where Jimmy for a time after his breakup with Ginger resided in their basement.  The year 1974 was particularly tough when Basil lost both family cars to a sheriff’s sale. By the 1980s, the family had moved to Montclair just up the road from where the married Bob lived in Verona.  Basil, who died on New Year’s Eve 1988 lived long enough to see one son and two daughters married. He never stopped being a charmer. Even as he was dying of cancer in Mountainside Hospital, he managed to get me to bring his nurses donuts and sent his final word of thanks to me through Jimmy.

Marie lived early 2010 after having established a career or her own for most of the 1990s, and later, organized trips for Verona’s senior citizens. By this time, Jimmy had managed to charm his way into becoming the director of public library, from which he would soon retire, and finally buy a trailer where he could live out the rest of his days as recluse and artist.

But his impact between birth and death is a tale worth telling, symbolic of our generation, because of how knowing him and being around him, reshaped our lives and allowed us to pursue our dreams as well. Since I was there for much of it, I spent a good part of my life documenting this odyssey, with Jimmy serving as the noble Odysseus.

This blog is about that journey.

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First glimpse of Jimmy

January 12, 1984

It is not how many bands, but the same band with the pieces reshuffled in a desperate attempt to find the right combination to this lock on success.

I caught up with the band at St. John’s community room in Paterson in 1968 – already an established trio that had started out in Nick’s basement – a wealthy kid from West Paterson whose parents had indulged him with every sort of musical instrument, including a full drum kit. And the boys from the neighborhood were perfectly willing to take advantage of the opportunity, moving in on the boy and his basement in their attempt to duplicate the magic they had seen coming out of Liverpool.

Frank had dragged me to the community center in order to meet Jimmy, who Frank worked with at the laundry, but I had yet to meet.

Already, Frank had reshaped Jimmy into a myth.

Since starting work with him, Frank could talk of little else. He ranted on non-stop about what Jimmy did or said, and reported on everything he or Jimmy did or said together – all to the point that I either had to meet Jimmy and find out the truth or kill Frank just to shut him up.

I remember it being a sunny afternoon just after Labor Day – a lingering summer day that had hints of changing season in it, some cooler air blowing up from the twisting riverbed of the nearby Passaic River.

We arrived early and so had to wait, which only allowed Frank to rant on even more about what a treat I was about to get in meeting Jimmy.

Murder became an option again. But St. John’s community center was literally in the shadow of Passaic County Jail and this was enough to keep me from killing Frank, although just barely.

Technically, Jimmy wasn’t a member of this band yet, but was scheduled to perform that day as a guest.

This, I later came to realize, was part of a pattern of behavior that would go on for years, a kind of seductive dance which he and the band engaged in. Each time the band wanted Jimmy to become a member, they would tease him with a taste – inviting him up for one or two songs until he like a drug addict got hooked on the attention.

Calling themselves, Eric Lemon Milkband (a kind of perverted tribute to The Beatles St. Peppers), the band had already become a local legend in nearby towns, drawing thousands of fans to church performances and school dances -- and thus scaring the hell of the adults who were always wary of some youthful uprising that would change from music to revolution. In towns like West Paterson and Little Falls, people lived with a certain amount of guilt, having clawed their way out of the ghetto while leaving behind the blacks and Latinos that had come to Paterson as the new immigrants.

Frank hadn’t seen the earlier performances but had heard reports from Jimmy who claimed the police closed down one of them after a dance/concert meant for two hundred had nearly 2,000 show up.

Many of these people came to St. John’s that day and so the line to get into the hall was long, and noisy, filled with voices of expectation not a lot different from Frank’s.

Although later modified, this sense of awe would accompany Jimmy through the next ten bands he played with (although they were really only variations of this same band, adding or subtracting pieces in a sometimes desperate effort to find the right combination that would allow them to find success – if indeed, success was ever the actual motivation.

Frank’s infatuation combined with that of the crowd infected me, and so I felt the exhilaration at finally seeing Jimmy ahead of us on the line, even though the crowd kept us from actually catching up with him to talk.

The first thing I noticed was how impatient he was. Huffing and puffing on his cigarette with a sense of frustrated urgency, finally crushing the cigarette under the heal of his shoe when finally, the line allowed him to get through the door.

We kept sight of him as we got closer to the doors – he on the inside struggling to get through the crowd and closer to the stage, us on the outside, Frank stirred up by the sight and even more anxious to catch up.

But Jimmy’s attention never wavered from the stage and the music kept him from hearing Frank’s shouts.
Jimmy looked like a combination of Neil Young and John Lennon, but dressed like Lennon, with Lennon-like hair and glasses.

These last were part of the new fad of round, wire frames, Frank would eventually adopt, not because he wanted to look like John Lennon as we all did, but because he wanted to look like Jimmy, who already did.

Jimmy wore a fatigue army-style shirt, but without any symbols of rank or unit. He wore jeans ragged at the bottom where they rubbed against the edges of his cowboy like boots.

Seeing Jimmy in the flesh dispelled Frank’s claims that they looked like brothers, and that they must have been brothers in some previous life. While there was a vague similarity due to long hair and similar dress, when put side by side, they did not look at all like each other.

But even in that brief glimpse and from a distance made worse by the crowd, I could see something special in Jimmy that I had not seen in anyone else.

Then after lighting up another cigarette and crushing it again under his heal, he finally noticed us, and gave an odd smile, showing off the slight flaw in his front tooth, but not betraying how he felt.

Then someone from the bandstand called his name, and he turned and swam through the bodies to get to the stage. Although as tall as either me or Frank, Jimmy looked small even insignificant when he finally got behind the microphone – and totally out of place. At that moment prior to the start of the music, he did not seem at all like a rock star, and even accidentally knocked down the microphone stand sending a wail through the large room.

A few typical jersey guys in leather jackets stood right in front of the stage making rude remarks, looking for trouble the way their kind generally always does.

I didn’t want to be in the middle of a riot – since I’d had too many fights of my own recently at school – and urged Frank to leave.

“No,” Frank insisted. “We have to wait. We have to hear him sing.”

If Jimmy was put off by the punks in front of him, he didn’t show it. He merely picked up the microphone stand, nodded at the musicians and then sang he did.

If he didn’t look like a rock star before, it changed the moment his voice started, and it never stopped, the echoes of his sound filling the room and embracing even the punks who suddenly stepped back in awe.

Jimmy was not nervous now, exuding a confidence that would later become his trademark, as pure talent rained down on us like heavy mist that turned into something hot and all consuming. It fell over us, and turned us hot, too, and the crowd swayed with it, and the mood of the room became something more powerful than anything I had seen in church, filled with some aspect of old time religion, but with a twist, with a sense that this was a private religion and Jimmy was our pastor, inviting us to partake of his gospel.

We never did get to talk to him that day. Jimmy got swept away by the crowd, and eventually, Frank and I headed outside, and finally to the bus to New York City.

Frank did all the talking. I could say nothing I was utterly blown away.

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