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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