Bobblehead Pluto (June 15, 1985)

June 15, 1985

Jimmy can’t stop talking about Jessica.

He’s what my grandfather might have called “being in the duck soup,” meaning he’s so heart broken he can’t think straight.

Smoking pot doesn’t help.

He puffs on the stuff non-stop when I’m with him, like an asthmatic sucking on an inhaler, only the more he puffs, the worse he seems.

And he insists I puff on the pot, too.

But the pot makes me giddy and I keep playing with one of the Disney toys he has lying around, a push-action plastic puppet of Pluto, who head, and legs move whenever I push up on the button on the bottom.

The more stoned I get the more I keep thinking Jimmy’s voice is coming out of the puppet, so, I push the button to move the head as he speaks.

I’m not alone in hearing all this from Jimmy. He spends hours talking about Jessica with his sister, Sue.

I just live close and hear more of it than Sue does, since he calls me to come sit in his kitchen while he tries to work out the mess in his head, medicating himself with pot against the pain.

I don’t know how Sue copes with it, the intense self-pity I never imagined Jimmy capable of expressing.

I feel sorry for Jimmy, but we’ve been through this stuff in our own lives, Garrick with Jeannie, Frank with Cynthia, me with Louise. I just never expected Jimmy to succumb, always believing he was somehow immune.

This strikes me as funny the more stoned I get, this irony from a man I thought of as an emotional Ironman.

How was it possible for this man whom we have followed all our lives to fall prey to the most common affliction love can give – or perhaps more of a self-inflicted wound because we all allow it to happen to ourselves, burning our fingers on the stove after mother told us it was hot, then crying about it as if we need someone else to blame.

These smoke-filled hours in Jimmy’s kitchen listening to Jimmy moan, a twisted justice since we all remember when we were the ones moaning and Jimmy would tell us to stop, Garrick in this very apartment a decade ago, trying to sleep away the pain while Jimmy yelled for him to get over it, and me on the day Louise left having Jimmy tell me to listen to a particular Neil Young song that only made my self-pity worse.

The shoe is not only on the other foot now, but Jimmy’s kicking himself with it, and wondering where the pain is coming from.

And I keep thinking the push-puppet of Pluto is doing the talking and keep moving its head to make it correspond to the sounds I hear coming out of Jimmy’s mouth.

Then, I get mean, I hold up Pluto, push the button so twist Pluto’s head down while saying, “Ah, Jim….”as if in mock pity.

Jimmy grabs Pluto from my hand and throws it into the corner near the closet, and then continues his diatribe, both of us too stoned to laugh or cry, only to exist in this strange limbo of smoke, as if we are the puppets and someone else is pulling our strings.

(update March 2, 2020)

A few months after I wrote this, Jimmy fled Passaic to move in with Ritchie near Lake Hopatcong. Jimmy threw out of lot of things, including some of his artwork, but strangely, I found the Pluto puppet still in the corner where he had thrown it – as if he saw it when leaving but was afraid to touch it. I kept it for many years, a memento of that moment, but eventually lost it through my own various moves.

But now, I think about it, and wish I still had it, if only to push the button and say, “Ah Jim…”