Recording Jimmy for posterity (1972-73)

I knew giving Frank a tape recorder would be a mistake.

I gave it to him so he could record special moments, but he wanted more.

His main target was Jimmy and I became Franks’ chief accomplice. Frank had me record candid moments from the back seat of his car with the idea that we would put them all together and give them to Jimmy as a funny gift. But Frank had a change of heart and wanted to keep the recording for some future time, and secret from Jimmy.

I got angry about it and destroyed some tapes I knew I should have kept and would regret not having kept at some future time.

I just couldn’t deal with the invasion of Jimmy’s privacy. A joke was one thing, doing what we were doing was another.

In one lost tape, I remember Jimmy yelling about seeing a horse on the side of the road, only he didn’t say horse and I hoped we might get some noise from the horse, which we never did, so I had to say it for the tape, “There’s a horse,” which made Jimmy look at me oddly as if I was mentally deficient or something.

In this case – we were out in the middle of nowhere, into New York State, and he kept punching the buttons on the radio.

“Don’t these people around here believe in music?” he grumbled, as he searched the AM bans for anything we could listen to, since Frank didn’t have an FM radio in the car, and Jimmy was already sick of listening to the few 8 track tapes Frank did have.

We were still in search of land and were following the trail of a piece of property Frank had accidentally stumbled over in the classifieds of the Village Voice.

We had come equipped with plenty of cigarettes, a few cups of coffee, and the tape recorder – with which we hoped to capture poignant moments, though for the most part we had large gaps of silence and road noise, or when Jimmy did speak, prompted by Frank, miles of foolish remarks and abuse.

“Look at that!” Frank yelled pointing

“That’s a truck, Frank. You remember what a truck is, don’t you? You used to load them at your job?” Jimmy said, this time glancing at me in the rear-view mirror with raised eyebrows to suggest Frank might be crazy. “That, of course, is back when you still did real work.”

This struck a nerve in me since with each job Frank and I worked at together, I generally got stuck doing the bulk of the work, his and mine, and it sometimes got be angry.

This remark left yet another uncomfortable silence, leaving me to stare out at the passing scenery as we drove north, more remote, filled with trees and boulders instead of people and buildings.

I had grave doubts about moving up to such a place where snow stranded people and getting to the store meant miles of driving.

But Frank was consumed with the idea of our finding “Garleyville” and living on it together, all of us, a scary idea the more I thought about it.

I liked these adventures, however, our desperate effort to find something we each secretly could not exist except in our imagination.

Perhaps that’s why Frank needed to record these trips, so at some point in the distant future we could listen to them and recall a time when we still held out hope.

He tells me he wants to be write a book about all of it, and I know I most likely will, but won’t need these tapes to recall it all, since those moments Frank is so desperate to record get etched in my memory, and without all the silences in-between.

Then, on this one trip, it started to rain, Jimmy cursing as he turned on the windshield wiper, Frank glancing back at me to make sure that I have caught this latest string of four letter words for posterity, as if everything Jimmy said is gospel we need to live the rest of our lives by if he manages to evacuate this existence before we do.

 Random car recording (1973-74)

How is the other lane?