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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