A matter of money? (Nov. 27, 1983)

Nov. 27, 1983

Money matters, even when Jimmy pretends it doesn’t.

Our agreement when he moved in with me is that he would pay $40 towards the rent and half the utility – which took me a while to realize doesn’t nearly cover the overall expenses we incur.

At the time, I was working more or less part time at the Fotomat; Jimmy wasn’t working at all. He asked me to get him a job, and then set up shop while waiting for me to accomplish it, sipping his morning coffee or puffing his evening joint.

Finally, I gave him the job I had and went back to baking up in Willowbrook Dunkin, a far harder, but better paying job, but also an increase in costs since I had to pay for gas and upkeep on the car.

Still, Jimmy complained, and somehow managed to shift the bulk of the bills onto me – I guess assuming now that I had a better paying job than he did, I could afford it.

He frequently ran out of money early in the week, asking me for small loans he conveniently forgot to repay when he got paid.

This week I realized that he arranged for me to do shopping a few days after his payday, managing to put off paying his share of that until the following payday, often paying me less than half on the claim he needs to pay other bills.

If I complain, he looks at me as if I’ve offended him, as if I’m greedy, as if I value cash more than our friendship.

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The emptiness inside (Nov. 19, 1983)

November 19, 1983

Jimmy complains about the cats just the way he used to complain about Clayton before Clayton left, snide remarks about how destructive these beasts were.

I mostly don’t take him seriously though I know he really means what he says, obsessed with creating a world for himself which he can control all the elements – godlike.

Although I often sided with Clayton at times, I always felt sorry for him, and sometimes thought Jimmy went to far in his abuse – even if Jimmy always couched it in sarcasm.

Sometimes listening to Jimmy, I am reminded of the old Biblical story of Eden, and the whispering temptation of the surfant, a kind of playful mean-spiritedness that plays one person against another, in one case, me against Clayton, and once, Garrick against me.

“Look at him,” Jimmy would say referring to Clayton in the other room. “What do you think he’s listening to in those headphones. Not anything good, I can tell you.”

I actually did listen to Clayton’s tapes once when he was out, and Jimmy was not around, hours of dry rhetoric that might have made a communist proud, attempted brainwashing, not political, but religious, making sure that Clayton kept the faith.

Jimmy never actually listened to the tapes and only glimpsed the books out of which Clayton was always reading, building his case against the boy based on what Jimmy supposed the tapes said, though his guess was close to reality since Clayton’s faith was as close to fascism as anything I could imagine, how to control people under his command, how to convince them to dedicate their lives and their finances to the church.

But for Jimmy, Clayton was the epitome of evil, that dark force always on the edge of our lives waiting to swarm in on us – when in fact, Clayton was just one of those helpless saps dragged into a faith that promised to fill a vacancy inside him he could find nothing else to fill it with.

A vacancy we all have, including Jimmy.

We’re all making choices in our lives, some of which turn out to be completely wrong. This does not make us evil – only hapless.

We all seem to be stumbling aimlessly through our lives, an idea that appalls Jimmy who seems to want to have total control over his own reality, and doesn’t, can’t possibly have, and doesn’t even know how impossible such control is for anybody.

Now, he bitches about the cats because they wander through the house at will, sometimes knocking things over, but I think Jimmy needs something to blame things on, people or pets to divert attention from the real situation – a kind of emptiness he seems to feel.

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Jimmy wants a lizard (Nov. 11, 1983)

November 11, 1983

Jimmy told me to meet him at the Fotomat booth so I could drive him up to the mall to buy a lizard.

I knew he was lying – Jimmy always says one thing when he means another – but it was such an interesting lie I agreed if only to find out what he was really up to.

I figured he just didn’t want to have to walk in the dark in the rain and wanted me to drive him to the bank with the night’s deposit and then drive him home again.

The problem is when I got to the booth, he wasn’t there. I drove up the road to the bank, then back, and to the bank again in case I missed him, but didn’t see him coming or going, and so I was shocked to find him at the booth when I got back and hear him complain how little he could trust me to be on time when I was there early.

He was dripping just enough from the rain to convince me that perhaps he had walked to the bank like he said he had, and I had someone missed him in the dark.

When he got into the car, he surprised me by insisting we drive to the mall.

“For a lizard?” I asked.

“Of course, for the lizard,” he said.

I suppose there is something wrong with me, my getting angry at what are Jimmy’s typical antics. I should shrug these off, but rarely do, and so driving, I got into a mood I couldn’t get out of even at the thought that Jimmy needed me to help him buy a lizard – which I knew he really didn’t want, and that he would soon unveil his real intention a moment or so before we reached the place where he really needed to do – in this case Pearl Paint for supplies.

Later, he would try to make up for this deception by giving me the painting of a lizard he said he did just for me – though oddly enough, somewhere down deep in that twisted maze of his mind, I knew he really did want a lizard.

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Sanctuary (Oct. 10, 1983)

October 10, 1983

You can hear the cries of sea gulls above the collage of sound I hear even before I climb out of bed.

Winter comes to the city and the river.

Last week, the geese made their passage through this place, a wedge in the sky honking as they made their way south.

The gulls stay here, braving out the winter with the rest of us.

I am cold, trapped beneath this blanket like a child, filled with memories and hints of the upcoming holidays.

Clayton is leaving tomorrow for parts unknown, Austin for certain, possibly San Francisco before that, in search of peace he cannot find here.

I feel more than a little guilty for the way Jimmy and I have treated him during his brief stay here.

We should not have given him such a hard time about his beliefs.

Jimmy has a tendency to decimate anything that interferes with his personal plans, and I was his willing accomplice, even though I got nothing out of it in the end except grief.

I was once a victim of this tactic back in 1975 when I was Clayton trying to live with Jimmy and Garrick here, and Jimmy orchestrated a similar scheme to drive me out.

I hear the gulls again, reminding me that I must soon rise and face the cold day, and the approach of winter – still reveling in Fran’s visit yesterday, and our hours of love-making, before we ventured out and made the trek to Bear Mountain to glimpse the first sprawl of changing leaves, yellows and reds that have not yet had time to reach here, contrasted against a backdrop of evergreens and the sharp shimmering surface of an almost pristine Hudson River, the glimpse of other lakes between the sprawling limb whose names I did not catch from the road map.

Neither one of us thought to bring a camera so the image must remain fixed in memory instead, finding peace closer than Clayton can, although a bit alarmed by the sound of gun fire as hunters made their way through the woods not far from where we stood.

We saw deer fleeing below us, trapped in the sanctuary of federal preserves.

Sometimes I feel trapped like that, pursued by realities I am helpless to otherwise cope with.

Standing there on top of that mountain made me realize just how Jimmy must feel having been cast out from his garden of Eden in Towaco where he had puttered around in his own private sanctuary, only to return to Passaic where he had to confront a harsher world.

Perhaps this is why he is so bitter and so angry at Clayton, envying Clayton’s ability to carry his own sanctuary on his back, hiding in his books and tapes the way the deer do in the federal lands, while Jimmy and I live on the edge of a world where there is no sanctuary.

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