How to (not) fix a scooter (Dec. 25, 2006)

This comic video was made as Susan's house in Verona on Christmas 2006. Jimmy and The Boys decided they could figure out how to fix a scooter than was given to one of the kids that Christmas. To fully understand the implications of this, Jimmy -- as the director of the Mount Arlington Library -- was about to embark on the construction of a multi-million new library building. This would require him to look over and approve plans, deal with engineers and other professionals. 

Making superstars of us all (Nov. 8, 2000)

11/08/00

Jimmy's latest mid-life crisis has made superstars of us. At least, that's what my conversation with him sounded like last night, after he finished scolding me for not calling for so long.

Several weeks ago, he called to enlist my help in a project he had embarked upon. At 51 years old, Jimmy had decided to preserve some of the more notorious moments of our long friendship: the tapes we did while under the influence of various drugs. He actually claimed that these tapes more closely resembled art than the years he put into performances with the more professional bands he played with.

"I can't believe we were doing this kind of thing while I was wasting my time playing cover tunes with the band," he told me last night during a long telephone conversation.

He had managed to put together a collection of our more interesting musical moments, comedy pieces we did using the most primitive equipment. With modern technology, he was able to digitize these pieces and then "burn" them into a CD.  Although he dated the originals from 1972 to 1976, many were made as late as 1981, and include work we did after technology began to change and we could afford to purchase things like a toy synthesizer.

Nearly all of these sessions came at Jimmy's request - though in last night's conversation he made it sound as if I had initiated them. Even though he would not admit it, Jimmy craved these sessions because they gave him something the band could not, a sense of creativity that he now berates himself for ignoring.

These recording sessions actually began long before I got involved with him, when he and others used Nick Romeo's basement in Little Falls to create odd master pieces, things he would later define as "Incredible String Band-like" pieces. I became a member of this circle when he and others decided to record a Christmas message to me when I lived in Oregon. When I got back, we continued the tradition in recording a tape for his girlfriend, and then started recording just for fun.

At their best, these tapes were wonderful experiments in sound, the kind of which other people did as modern art. We were not so arrogant. We merely got together to fulfill a craving each of us had. For me, they were an opportunity to engage in performances I dreamed about but lacked talent and courage to do in public.

Jimmy's selection of material focused on our best friend, Frank, who died in 1995, yet who played such a critical role in our lives. These songs were written around his odd personality and preserve moments of great humor.

"I thought I would be sad doing this," Jimmy told me last night. "I thought hearing him again would depress me. But these pieces were so funny, I couldn't help but laugh."

This is not the first time Jimmy has committed himself to such a project. I remember him making a tape version of this collection in 1989, just as he turned 40. I suppose we'll suffer through such a period again when he reaches 60.

For me, preserving those memories has become a lifelong ambition, something I started many years ago in 1980 when I watched each of my friends turn 30, when I realized that we would not, could not live forever. It seemed important to me that their essence be captured in some venue, if not tape or cd, then as stories of their lives. I doubt if anyone will ever hear the CD, but I hope someone, someday reads the stories and gets a glimpse of them as I knew them.

Life on rewind (Nov. 25, 2000)

11/25/2000

            Every year I think the same thing when I see my friends, about how old they seem to have become, how much grayer or thinner their hair has become, how many more wrinkles seem to show on their faces.

            This is not the definition of old we thought of when we pictured ourselves in rocking chairs on a porch someday. Frank – who would have turned fifty-one this year, making his official transition into middle age, had painted this moment in our minds years ago, claiming we would still haunt each other with the same old jokes.

            How did this happen? How did we grow old without realizing it? Maybe the others in our little troop missed the clues, but I didn't. I caught the implications of this moment back in 1980 when each of us stumbled over the dreaded age of 30. My friends started acting old (at least in theory), pretending as if they had acquired wisdom. I even caught Rick one day lecturing to one of Jimmy's younger nephews and I knew things had taken a negative turn. I remember thinking how foolish that change seemed, how we weren't really much different from the people we were at 29 or 28.

            This impression only grew worse a decade later when we met at Frank & Dawn's house – when they still lived in the Totowa section of Paterson – to celebrate Garrick's turning 40. That was 1989, I had just stumbled out a minor bout of mid-life crisis, and viewed my friends through the eyes of Jimmy's nephews, how we had made the transition between that whacky bunch of Jimmy's friends to members of their extended family. In that vision, we were to these kids what my uncles had been to me.

            No single moment showed to me more clearly how much we had aged – especially linked to the series of deaths had occurred in the previous few years: Frank's father, Jimmy's father, my uncle, Harry.

            In the year 2000, it happened again.

            In 1990 – when Jimmy fell over the marker that took him from his 30s to his 40s, he grew nostalgic for those, happier carefree days of our 20s (which were neither happy for the most part nor as carefree as he imagined). Jimmy seemed to focus on tapes we made, silly, terrible, musical events we conducted during our more boring moments in time. I remember him giving me a collection of some of the sillier songs, as testimony to a time when we still sang for fun, and didn't much care about how awful we sounded.

            Bolstered by new technology and inspired by another decade passing, Jimmy repeated his performance this year, seemingly unaware of his past attempt to resurrect these tapes from the past. Over the telephone, he sang their praise with such intensity I almost believed the songs were better than my memory recalled, and looked forward to his invitation to hear them again on the day after Thanksgiving – when he unveiled this masterpieces for family and friends.

            Over the previous decade, we met less often, our lives seeming to create less and less opportunities for us to gather. Although I saw Jimmy more often than I did Garrick, and Rick less than Garrick, we made a point of catching up with each other around the holidays.

            Frank's death in 1995 altered this pattern when we gathered in March to bury him. His dying brought closer to home the concept of our own vulnerabilities, as it was our contemporary passing on, not a member of the previous generation. Hearing his voice again brought back acute visions of those times in our 20s when we still had the luxury to waste time on such endeavors, though I cringed over every bad note struck on the guitar and every failed harmony, and realized how terribly Jimmy must have ached in repackaging this collection of junk, each moment Frank's ghost haunting him in the headphones, whispering of visions that could no longer become a reality.

            Perhaps Jimmy didn't recall Frank's predictions, of how we would mock each other in our graying days, rocking on the same porch, saying the same sad things we invented in our youth – but I recalled those predictions, and the saddest part of listening to Jimmy's sad CD, was thinking how we could not shape such moments as those recorded without Frank.

Not fade away (Dec. 25, 1998)

December 25, 1998

Garrick called just as we were going to sleep on Dec. 23, the answering machine coming to life before I could find the phone and reattach the cord that had fallen out from the phone in the bedroom.

Later, Garrick said the same thing happened when he called Frank and Dawn, a matter he found puzzling and ironic in a year when all ironies seemed to have become ironed out and boring, as far as the Garley Gang was concerned.

"Am I waking you?" his gruff voice asked.

"No, no," I assured him. We had just moved into the house and had boxes everywhere and our greatest efforts each day came from finding places for the content of at least one more box. It was an exhausting effort, and one that sent us to be earlier than usual.

"I can call back," Garrick said.

"No, I mean it, we're not asleep."

Garrick had called to make arrangements for our annual get together. He had just dropped Jimmy off at is sister's house and was instructed thus to hold our Christmas Eve gathering closer to that location, rather than in the traditional spot further west. The spot varied over time, but generally centered around where Frank and Dawn were living, starting off in 1974 in Haledon, then moving as they moved to two different locations in Paterson and finally to their home in western New Jersey.

An though I missed a year or two since 1974, Frank and Dawn maintained their ritual unfailingly since, inviting us to join them. This was the first year we gathered away from their place. Yet even then, the location had some historic significance to us, the old Golden Star restaurant which as teenagers we had frequented.

We had to pick up Jimmy and bring him, and as usual, had to do some shopping before meeting the others, following Jimmy through the Barnes and Noble as if his kids, to finally meet Garrick, Frank and Dawn over lunch. It was not the same. Frank's mother had died in November, someone who had grown progressively ill over the years, but had managed to make the yearly celebration with us for Christmas. But in some ways, the holiday had changed permanently three years ago, when we held the celebration without Frank (who had died the previous spring).

While Jimmy did his best to be his old self, the table felt empty, as if two places were not filled, and could not be filled. When we parted, I felt a touch of sadness, feeling the passing of time most acutely. Since 1987, this holiday ritual has become a gauge for watching my friends age, something sad, not happy, and I felt that, too. In 1987, I saw Frank and Dawn's kid greet Garrick at the door of their Paterson apartment and realized that we had become like uncles to her, the way my uncles were to me at her age. It scared me. I sank into midlife crisis from which I have not yet fully emerged. This year, that kid got married, one more mark in our passage towards death.

After lunch, Jimmy insisted on some more shopping, and then, dessert, not at the Golden Star, but at Kalico Kitchen, where the old gang spent many many hours a day.

Nothing had changed. Not the fireplace. Not the chairs. Even the same man greeted us, though without the outrage he had when we were all younger. I ordered Pecan pie, which as in the past, they did not have.

Again, I was conscious of missing people, of all those who had sat with us there in the past, people if not dead then too far away to make this spiritual journey with us.

Jimmy sensed this, too, as we left, saying his missed the way Frank seemed to hunker over his hamburger, slapping our hands when we tried to steal his French fries.

I saw that image in my head so vividly, I cannot forget it now: I miss Frank; I can't forget him, even if Jimmy says some of Frank's memories had begun to fade for him.

They don't fade for me, only the people do.

Selling fake flowers in the mall (Dec. 17, 1981)

                                                                                                                          December 17, 1981

 Patty Joyce popped up in the Morristown Mall, a slim cartoon figure whose life revolves around violence and pain. She hugged me with more than the cordial greeting of old friends. She said we had a thing once and her eyes said she wanted it to continue. Things like that frighten me. She called the man she's living with a bastard. Jimmy calls him a nut. But she's been living with the man for three years. Two years ago, she and I hit off heavy. She was looking for a ride down off the mountain-- like Felice had with a cowboy named Tim in Colorado.

 But it stalled and she won't make the commitment to leave her man until she had a replacement. The one time she did she nearly died from loneliness, rolling joint after joint to fill in the space. At least now there's a light on in the house when she comes home.

 It shocked me to see her in the mall though, selling fake Christmas flowers from a tent-like structure in one of the mall's wings. Jimmy and Frank actually discovered her two days earlier, and with Jimmy there's no missed opportunity for scoring pot.

 Though I remember the tarot reading he'd given her the last time we'd been together, sitting in her West Paterson apartment, the word "violence" coming up again and again. Jimmy never mentioned names. Her boyfriend nearly killed her for waking him up.

 Patty tells me that her boyfriend knows about us.

 WHAT?

 I'm not romantic enough to like the idea of dying in my lover's bed. But Joyce seems to be entertained by it. I wanted to remind her that there had never really been an affair, only momentary weakness in which we both contemplated it. But time twists memories making some more significant than they were. Jimmy pulls me aside and tells me not to get involved.

 I'm afraid it might be inevitable.

 Next year seems to be looming over me with portents of change. The women of my past seem to be parading before me with warnings of war. I drive home in silence. Patty is on Jimmy's mind, too. Or perhaps only the discount he's gotten on her pot.

An old-fashioned Christmas? (Dec. 14, 1981)

                                                                                                                                      Dec. 14, 1981

Eleven days till Christmas and not a present bought. It's one of those seasons which hasn't hit me yet, except maybe for the little things of the past popping up. Like Felice. Though others have risen up from the grave, too, like faces from the Shayds. John Ritchie and Marylyn Ryan have become lovers. Two years after my association with them. I guess it's appropriate. It's Christmas season and I've felt naked without some aspect of the band.

 Though in truth, I hadn't really divorced myself from it completely. Jimmy and I still see Patty Joyce, a near-romantic element of my life now married to a man she called as bastard. Jimmy had commented on the affair but has warned me not to get involved. It's hard not to. Things keep pushing themselves into my life.

 I keep hoping the season will fade without major incident like 1972 and 1973, hazy comfortable years of loneliness which one day bumps into the next without clear distinction. All I want to do it hide in my room and write bad rhyming poetry like I did back then. I remember coming home during those years to the cold Montclair house, the boys leaving me off at the door with chores of their own. Ed, Sue, Ellen, Meatball, all off to their own families. Nothing but the unpainted hallways and my cluttered room. Felice was on my mind then, too, a still bleeding wound which would take years to heal. If anything, I remember the pain, and fear this Christmas might become one of those from which the only memory is pain and cruelty and loneliness and despair.

 The years following had more tradition, and I find myself aching for some aspect of them, too, particularly from 1974 on, when meeting Jimmy, Garrick and Frank made up my yearly ritual. They made 1972 seem worse for its lack. No more Felice at Christmas-- the Hollywood boulevard movies in 1969, the radio City movie in 1970, the small tree propped up in the paneled apartment on North Lombard in Portland Oregon. Nor Crooks Avenue home and big living room tree from my youth.

 Now, for the first time, Garrick, Jimmy and Frank have gone, leaving me feeling as empty in Passaic as I did in Montclair, I've started a cycle of loneliness that hits every nine years. Gathering in a Christmas spirit is like trying to catch blowing leaves. You never quite capture all the elements. Perhaps we'll have a white Christmas this year-- as if that means anything.

You go see him, I can’t (March 8, 1998)

March 8, 1998

 Jimmy is peeved.

 For weeks he's warned me about Garrick, the way three years ago he warned me about Frank, his dreadful ability at predicting doom annoying the hell out of me.

 "He's hold up in a room in his aunt's house in Totowa," he told me on the telephone yesterday. "He's depressed again or something. He hasn't been to work."

 Garrick's not going to work was a significant omen. Garrick always went to work, even if he didn't do much when he got there. He was always in the midst of one job or another, for a long as I've known him, doing stuff with rock and roll or polishing stone for his jewelry business. Lately, he's pumped gas and worked at a quality control inspector in a Franklin Lakes factory.

 "Did something happen?" I asked, recalling Garrick's last serious fit of depression when we lived together in Passaic. But that was 1975 and caused by a bitch named Jeannie who used him and then threw him away. We all presumed Garrick had gotten over that, at least, for the painful part.

 "He had cyst of some kind, and he thought it was cancer, but I've been told the test came out negative," Jimmy said. "But he's just lying around, looking for sympathy or something. If I have to come down there and roust him out of that bed, I'm going to kick his ass."

 The worry dripped through his anger.

 "You want me to go see him?" I asked.

 "You live close to him," Jimmy said. "I can't get down there right now."

 Jimmy didn't have to say more. For some reason the fear has been on me for days. I thought it was because of the third anniversary of Frank's death, coming up within days. I had the ache to listen to Simon and Garfunkel again, and was in a general funk over Frank's passing, bringing a photograph to his mother of his last days.

 My moving to Haledon brought it all sharply into focus. My life seemed to have centered around this town, from 1968 when I came here to visit Frank (who grew up here) to 1979 when I came through here on my way to college.

 Jimmy had been talking about Garrick for weeks, saying that Garrick had gained too much weight, growing fatter and more depressed over his inability to halt the growth. Garrick and I had fought the weigh issue during the 1970s, when we both edged over 200 pounds. I fought back and lost weight. He grew more and more fat. He exceeded 290 at the beginning of the year.

 I noticed the weight gain when we had him over to our Jersey City apartment. He seemed unconcerned at the time.

 "Garrick's sister thinks he's been depressed for quite some time," Jimmy told me. "She thinks it’s over his parents getting a divorce."

 "That happen recently?" I asked.

 "Hell, no, it happened 15 years ago," Jimmy said. "That's what bothers me. How could he still be depressed about that?"

 Perhaps he never got over his first depression, when his first love, Jeannie through him out of the house, and every year and every instance made the matter worse, age breaking down his typical defenses, his declining health turning him towards despair.

 "I'll call him," I told Jimmy. "I'll let you know what I find out."