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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