June 1985
Love-struck and doomed, Jimmy sits in my Passaic apartment contemplating
life, acting 17 when he’s 35, and insane with hormonal cravings even he can’t
explain.
I’ve never seen him so confused, high on it, as if has ingested
chocolate or LSD.
For weeks he’s acted out of character, burning up with an insane
passion for a college girl he works with at the Fotomat, with whom he’s been
having an affair.
If I once expected him to laugh it off, I no longer do. He is stirred
to violent thoughts over the fact that she is now seeing another man.
Somewhat frail, even as a teen, Jimmy seems comic in his contemplating
the doom of his rival, as he blurts out thoughts of how he might dispose of the
man.
Jimmy’s reasonable and logical side fights back, making him emit an occasional
bitter laugh, as if he believes he can defeat love with arrogance.
“I’m no getting any of my own work done,” he says, as if he has the
means to halt the whole hormonal attack. “And if this goes on all summer, I’ll
quit the job.”
Then the other side takes over and he grows sad again, pondering his
girl’s desertion with a philosophical air, casting a crooked grin in my
direction and saying, “We had some good times though.”
He seems to finally answer the question that has puzzled the rest of us
for weeks, as to how a pretty 22-year-old girl could fall for a prematurely
gray 35-year-old like Jimmy.
We do not question why Jimmy so desperately needs someone to love since
nearly all of his siblings have already paid their visit to the alter,
expecting him to follow in their footsteps, disappointed that he has not
already done so, disappointed when he broke up with the girl they believe is
the girl of his dreams.
Wiser than any of us, Jimmy’s father, Basil sees Jimmy differently than
the rest, as an odd sheep in search of a folk, doomed to become “Uncle Jimmy”
to his grand kids, but never a father in his own right.
Nobody protects Jimmy. He sort of protects himself, isolating his
feelings behind a cynical wall, keeping that part of his psyche preserved, never
tested or tainted, so never wounded or made tough by experience, the emotional
scars that allow the rest of us to move on with our lives, scars that give us a
thicker skin against future pain.
Hurt by his loss of Ginger, Jimmy exposed this previously unprotected
part of himself to this college girl who he assumed would be sympathetic and
his getting even more deeply hurt when she’s not.
“She’s using me to make her old boyfriend jealous,” Jimmy says, sitting
on my best, his hands behind his head in a kind of Dobby Gillis pose – but instead
of leaning against a statue, he leans against my laundry basket and a bag full
of books. He is at such an angle he looks twisted and tortured. “And I am
jealous, too. Me! I can’t believe this. I’ve never been jealous in my life.
What’s wrong with me?”
He talks to himself, not me, and the other side of him answers.
“She won me with just one touch,” he says, giving me a devious grin,
hand moving to touch his own cheek. “And sizzle, like electricity or atomics.
It’s like a chemical reaction. Even our auras come close.”
He shakes himself and peers at me, squinting in the dim light as if
aware of me in the room with him for the first time.
His eyes show the pain and I wonder if he will seek out the old cocoon,
from those days when he lived in this same apartment but refused to open the
door to our knocking, telling us to go away and not bother him, that he had
work to do.
Then, he sighs, and stands, stamps his feet.
“I know you’ve heard this all before,” he says. “I need to keep busy. I
need to keep my mind off her.”
Then, he bids me good night and stumbles out the door, through the dark
to the apartment next door where he lives – at slightly larger place which for
a short time served him as a love next, but now has become a cage. I hear him fiddle
with the keys, struggle with the lock and finally managed to open the door and
after he slips inside, close it again.
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