We went west to see the band in what has become a yearly Memorial
Day ritual, something akin to a bad Blues Brothers move in which my old friends
insist on picking up the pieces of their youth, to relive glory days they did
not know where glory days when they were young.
Since our moving to Jersey City, we had grown out of touch
with Jimmy and others – not so much because of distance, but the direction of
our lives.
And since his moving west to Lake Hopatcong in 1985, the
whole area had changed and become less comfortable – largely due to ever
increasing development.
The state had removed the kinks out of the winding road from
Route 80 to where Jimmy lived and worked, and in exchange had allowed
developers to plow down whole mountainsides of trees. Everything looked naked
or posh, far from the resort area my grandfather dragged his kids during The Great
Depression.
My first Garley Gang encounter with the area came in 1972
when Jimmy, Frank and I went there to get drunk to recover from our failed
romances.
We found a small combination bar and liquor store just up
the street from the library and across from what would later become the local
Quick Chek.
The bartender didn’t like us on account of our long hair, and
neither did the rednecks who thought we were trying to steal their girls.
We got out of there with our lives and decided to go find
Richard Haas, who Jimmy claimed was staying at their summer retreat on Bertrand’s
Island.
We got sidetracked by the bumper cars – which was Frank’s idea
– each of us climbing into our own car in the attempt to take out our aggression
on each other. It didn’t occur to me until late that Frank was still recovering
from a broken neck at the time, and still wore a collar when he felt discomfort
or pain.
Still drunk, we left the park, Jimmy decided to find Richard
and we came out onto the slanted narrow streets behind the park where we were
confronted by three large dogs who took a particular interest (or so Jimmy
claimed when he leaped into my arms) in Jimmy.
We abandoned our search for Richard and sought refuge in
Frank’s car.
It would be a whole decade later before I actually found the
house again when Jimmy asked me to meet him there in the summer of 1982 when I
brought back my ex-wife and child for him to meet, all of us wandering down
into the amusement park where Jimmy did his best to keep my daughter amused.
Three years after that, Jimmy moved into the house with
Richard in a move as dramatic as retreat to Richmond by Robert E Lee,
foreshadowing some great surrender I was only vaguely aware of.
I made such frequent trips to the place I might have lived
there as well, even though Jersey City as a longer haul to get there than was
Passaic.
After Frank’s death in 1995, my trips grew less frequent,
partly because my own life in Jersey City became very complicated – I was
taking care of my mother until her death in early 2002, and I had a job that
consumed my time.
Jimmy had settled into a career of his own at the local library,
and though he still worked on art and music, he seemed content – even after he
got put out of the Haas house in 1994 and lived in an old house near the
library he was convinced was haunted.
Jimmy got nostalgic for strange things – including old tapes
he and I did (sometimes with others) while high and kept trying to convince me
to do more. We never got around to it.
I always ached for the reunion of the band – the real band –
in whatever configuration they could arrange.
Two years ago, we went to see John, Jimmy and Garrick perform
at the fire house. This year, Jimmy told us, John assembled a whole band
including drums, base and keyboard.
And under a tent in a field, the band played although only a
handful of locals sat with us, perhaps the volume being too loud, a far cry
from the more acoustic version than won praise two years ago.
I liked it, although I could feel tension among the band
members, bringing back the glory days when they were always fighting. Some of
it had to do with John moving in with Jimmy’s sister, but it was more than that
– something I still haven’t put my finger on.
Jimmy drags me to Bob’s bookstore
in Boonton to help Bob close up shop – a big disappointment for Jimmy because
for the previous two years he could almost always trade books with Bob for pot.
It doesn’t really occur to Jimmy why Bob was upset when we get there.
Bob complains about Jimmy’s being late and that we have every little
time to pack up all the books – what Bob intends to do with them after that was
anybody’s guess.
The volumes he deals with are hardly best sellers or if they are, they
made the New York Times list sometime prior to the fall of the Roman Empire.
Jimmy, of course, owes Bob for a life time of favors that include
additional out of the way trips such as picking Jimmy up at Ginger’s Towaco
house, dropping him off at the library, Quick Chek or shopping mall, while
in-between buying lunch (Jimmy’s version of Whimpey’s “I’ll gladly pay your
Tuesday for a hamburger today,” with Tuesday not coming until today, and today
being Sunday leaving us one day to clear out the store before the landlord
sweeps in with a bulldozer to clear out the junk and cobwebs to make way for
some boutique or antique shop or some other high fashion place the landlord
aspires to have an a tenant.
Bob claims yuppies don’t’ read anything but self-help books that won’t
help them anyway because they are too far gone to be helped.
“They all hate us aging hippies,” Bob says. “They’re just waiting for
us to die so they can take over.”
“Take over what?” I ask.
Neither Jimmy nor Bob has an answer.
Inside, the store smells of rotting paper and with good reason. The store
front has bookshelves along every wall, and across the intervening free space
with aisles so narrow even the always skinny Bob struggles to get through them.
And all the bookshelves sag, overstuffed with ancient tomes on whose leather
spines the print has worn away to dust.
The heat makes it worse, cooking the old paper so that each breath
seems as thick as beer in my lungs.
“What’s with the heat?” Jimmy asks.
“I don’t know,” Bob says. “It’s always been like that. Must be the way
the air circulates.”
“Or doesn’t,” Jimmy says. “Maybe you should open some windows.”
“They are open. They are always open. Even in winter.”
“Maybe you should have opened a nudist bookstore where people could
leave their clothes at the door,” Jimmy says.
“I don’t think the town would like that,” Bob says. “The mayor hates
hippies, too.”
“Well, the sooner we get this over with the better off we’ll be,” Jimmy
says. “Where exactly are we moving them to?”
“My apartment.”
“All these books to your apartment? I thought you had another location
in mind.”
“I can’t afford another location. I dumped all my inheritance in this
place – I was sure Boonton was the perfect location – I mean will the college
graduates who live in the towns around here.”
“So, what happened?” I ask.
“I told you, yuppies don’t read – I should have opened a comic bookstore,
something on their reading level. I made a huge mistake investing in classics.”
Jimmy examines one of the books.
“I would hardly call these classic – these things are so dull nobody
read them even when they were in print, which is nearly a century ago or more.”
“It’s TV,” I suggest.
“If it is, then it’ll only get worse,” Jimmy says. “There are things on
the horizon that will make TV out of date.”
Jimmy is up on a lot of those things, always predicting amazing things
we will see – not like the Worlds Fair a decade ago, but stranger. He and
Ritchie Gordy sometimes talk about what’s on the horizon. Gordy builds Heath
Kid computers, and attaches them to phone lines, tapping into some strange information
world I still don’t understand.
“It’s America,” Bob mumbles. “I should have opened my store in Paris.”
“Where nobody reads English?” Jimmy asks.
“Some people do.”
“I’m gonna suffocate,” Jimmy says. “There must be some way to let more
air in here.”
“There’s more windows in the back I’ve never been able to get open,”
Bob says.
Bob hands Jimmy a screwdriver and somehow, we manage to wedge the back
windows open.
Fresh air from an early spring pours through the opening though not
enough to dispel the scent of cooked paper and the sense of age inside the
storefront.
Bob doesn’t seem to mind the smell. He has lived with it his whole
life, not just for the two years he’s operated this store.
Maybe it reminds him of his father – the old man I always used to see
seated in the living room of their house on the hill, newspaper or book in
front of his face without which I might not recognize him.
He and Bob are so much alike they might be twins – except that Bob has
become enamored with Jimmy, the way we all have, sending him in a far different
and less practical direction, selling books in Boonton nobody wants to buy.
Bob tells us we can choose any book we want as payment for helping him
move since he can’t possibly afford to pay us in cash – though Jimmy wants something
other than a book.
I look over the spines of books I can barely read, even if the gold
lettering wasn’t as faded as it is, volumes about subjects so obtuse I need a
college course just to learn how to peal open their covers – though Bob assures
me I might fine one or two amusing.
Jimmy grumbles about the fact that Frank isn’t here yet.
“He promised to help,” Jimmy mumbles.
I tell him I’m sure Frank will get here. I have my doubts, having heard
from Frank about some new romance with some younger woman who none of us have
yet met.
I ask how Bob expects to fit all these books in his apartment.
“I’ve seen your apartment, Bob, it’s half the size of this place,” I
say.
“I can’t keep them all,” Bob mumbles, sadly, looking down at his hands
like a father who must choose between his offspring, which shall live, which
shall die, which does he love the most.
Bob tells us another collector made an offer on some of his books, but
only the good ones, the rare ones, the books Bob intends to keep.
“Maybe you just leave the books here that you don’t want,” Jimmy says. “Let
the landlord figure out what to do with them.”
“I would. But I want my deposit back,” Bob says. “I leave a mess the
landlord will keep it – besides, he’ll throw them out.”
“Isn’t that what you’ll end up doing anyway?”
“I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t look my father in the eye if I did.”
Jimmy sighed.
“I always thought running a bookstore part time on weekends was a bad
idea,” he said. “But I have an idea. But I wish Frank was here. We’re going to
need more hands to do this.”
“What did you have in mind?” I ask.
“First let’s separate the books you want, Bob, from the ones you don’t.
After that, I’ll tell you what we can do.”
That alone is a chore, a military operation that takes us through the
store one bookcase after another, creating piles near the front door – the largest
of which is the pile we have to somehow dispose of.
Jimmy is in the back of the store when he gives a yelp.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Come here and I’ll show you,” he says.
Bob and I converge on Jimmy who has just finished emptying a bookcase
at the rear of the store. He points to the wall.
“You know what that is?” he asks.
Bob squints through his glasses.
“It looks like a thermostat?”
“Exactly. And do you see what it’s set at?”
I look. the line points to the number 90.
“It’s been on that high since the day you moved in two years ago,”
Jimmy says. “No wonder it’s so hot in here. And no wonder your landlord wants
you out. He must be paying a fortune in heat. But no point in turning it down
now. Let’s just pack up the books you want in your car and get the hell out of
here.”
“What about the other books?” I ask.
“We’ll take them up the street to the library,” Jimmy says.
“The library is closed,” Bob says. “Besides, they won’t want most of
these books and won’t take all these if they did.”
“They’ll have to do something with them if they find them piled on the
front step,” Jimmy says. “Today is Sunday. We have the rest of the day to get
them up there and then get the hell out of town.”
“That’s not going to be easy,” I say. “There’s a hell of a lot of books
to move.”
“Then, we better get started,” Jimmy says.
Jimmy finds a hand truck; Bob stacks books on it; I wheel this up the
hill to the library where I put the books near the door and when I run out of
room there, on the steps, leaving just enough room between them for someone in
the morning to make their way to the door with the key.
It is tedious work and we are overheated even outside, Jimmy
complaining the whole time about the number of books Bob manage to collect over
the years.
“Has anyone told you that you are not the Library of Congress?” he asks
Bob.
Then he bitches about how unfaithful Frank is.
“He promised to be here,” Jimmy says. “I though I could rely on him.”
“When it comes between being loyal to you and being with a woman, the
woman wins all the time,” I said.
“I’ve seen the kind of women Frank goes with, he’s better off with us,”
Jimmy says.
Then, he stops, stares up the street.
“Cheese it, guy, it’s the fuzz!”
I glance up the hill just in time to see the patrol car turning the
corner near the library.
“If he looks at the books on the library steps and then sees us, we’re
doomed,” Jimmy says. “Quick, pull everything inside.”
So, we drag the hand truck full of books through the door, stacks of
books Bob has ready tumble like the center of San Francisco during an earthquake,
one pile falling into the next until there is nothing but rubble.
Jimmy stares out at the street.
“What’s he doing?” Bob asks.
“He’s going slow,” Jimmy says. “Do you think he’s on to us?”
“Maybe not,” Bob says. “There have been a number of burglaries.”
“On Sunday?” Jimmy snarls. “Those cads!”
“It’s getting hot in here again,” I say. “Can you open the door more.”
“Not without the cop seeing us when he passes.”
“Why should that matter?” Bob says. “We’re not burglars. This is my
store.”
“Precisely. Tomorrow the library is going to see those books and call
the cops. If the cop sees us in here today, he’ll remember that tomorrow and
then come looking for us. Do you really want to go to jail for illegally dumping
books?”
“If we’re going to get arrested, I wish he would do it soon, jail
couldn’t be any hotter than this,” I say.
Slowly, the patrol car makes its way down the street, the officer
inside inching long the curb to stare into each shop as he passes, coming
closer and closer until we’re scared, he will see us even with the door closed.
Then, he passes us, and moves down the hill, and then is gone from sight.
“We need to get this over faster,” Jimmy says.
“It would go faster if you did more than supervise,” Bob says.
“With you two somebody has to supervise,” Jimmy says. “But if I must, I
must.”
And so, he starts stacking books outside for me to collect with the
hand truck, and I roll them up to the library only to find twice as many stacks
on the sidewalk as when I left.
“Don’t they ever run out?” I ask. “The books I mean.”
“The store is almost empty,” Bob assures me.
“It is. I’m running out of room in front of the library. I’ve already
filled up their return book bin, too.”
Eventually, I get to the last stack and roll it up to the library, and
leave it on the sidewalk there because there is no place left to put any, piles
of books as tall as I am, waiting for a good wind to knock them all down into
the street.
I get back to the store to find Bob standing in front of is with Jimmy yanking
on his sleeve to make him leave.
“I’m going to miss this place,” Bob says.
“Yeah, yeah, but it’s over now. We have a long way to drive to get the
rest of the books to your house.”
“I suppose,” Bob mumbles and turns away.
“I get the passenger seat,” Jimmy tells me.
“But the back seat is loaded with books.”
“You’ll fit if you squeeze.”
“I can squeeze better in the front seat with you.”
“With my trick knee?” Jimmy says. “Forget it. Speaking of which…” Jimmy
addresses Bob. “You won’t forget what you promised me for helping with this
will you?”
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.
Jimmy’s career as a library director was doomed even before he got promoted to it.
The town had grown too big with all of the yuppies moving out to bulldoze virgin land upon which to construct their McMansions or even less prestigious townhouses.
Once the county straightened the winding road from Route 80, life as a quaint village ended, and for the most part, the founding fathers loved it.
Jimmy’s acquiring a part time job at the library in 1986 was a dream come true.
Libraries and bookstores were always central to Jimmy’s life, regardless of what he lived. In Montclair, he had taken over the Children’s book department. In Passaic, he hounded the rest of us for rides to the library even in the foulest weather, and on fair days when none of us were around, he even walked.
It was an even longer walk to the library in Towaco, although he apparently hitched a ride with Ginger’s mother who worked there.
While the Mount Arlington Library was no an easy trek from where he lived with Ritchie on Bertrand’s Island, it was significantly closer than the Fotomat or the Dunkin Donuts he worked at previously, and he much preferred coming home smelling of dusty books than of greasy donuts, he said.
And he could still ride his moped to the library in fair weather and he did, only later acquiring a car and all the associated bad habits that entailed.
The library played a pivotal role in the community, it largely served kids, seniors and bored housewives
The kids love Jimmy and so do the parents who bring the kids there, and teachers, and lonely housewives, all who come to that magical place, getting entertained by this book-loving director as well as informed.
Even though the community was growing in leaps and bounds, the library remained a tiny space on the second floor of a building most people pass by without noting.
Then building started out its long life as a fire house, then became a one-room schoolhouse, and finally the town’s library in 1968, serving about half the population of Mount Arlington’s 4,000 residents.
During my family trips to the lake in the 1950s and later my own in the 1960s, the street level part of the building served as the town’s police station – where off season the two-man police force resided.
Then, in 1996, the library board began to make expansion plans under then director Jeannette Donnelly. At that time, the board looked to take over a two-story brick building built in 1932 which has served previously as a telephone switching station and were looking to accomplish this using a variety of grants.
Jimmy, who worked as a part time jack of all trades, had helped expand the library’s media and computer resources, but did not then know that plans would drastically change over the next few years, putting him on the road to forced retirement.
“Libraries are going to have to adapt or die,” he told the local newspaper when asked about the expansion plans.
Jimmy had already had a huge impact on the old library. In 1994, he was credited with training staff members of Morris County library on how to use a new computer system he had helped install.
Naturally, when he demonstrated the MORENET system, he delved into some of his favorite subjects, hooking the library up to a system in Finland to explore UFOs and space. After which, he attempted to take the library via the internet to France to explore genetics. When he could not get into that system, he changed course and took off for the NASA system to look at press releases on the space shuttle Columbia.
“Garland maneuvered his way through the Interest with mind-boggling dexterity,” a story said at the time.
A year later in September 1995, Jimmy created a webpage for the tiny library in his role as the library’s technical director, making Mount Arlington the first library in wealthy Morris County to have a webpage of its own.
“People might read this and never come near the library,” Jimmy told a local newspaper.
Jimmy wrote the program and scanned all the pictures, setting up an email system that allowed the public to contact the director as well as the mayor.
When Jeannette in early 1998, Jimmy was appointed director – only because everybody else who could have replaced Jeannette had retired before her, leaving him the last man standing.
In the years that followed, Jimmy as director, set up a number of innovative programs such as summer reading program that used a horse race as a model.
In 2002, I remember him showing off the board he designed on which kids names were posted that resembled a racetrack. Each time a kid read a book, his or her horse advance with the ultimate winner being the kid who finished reading 16 books first.
“It’s neat because kids can’t see who the other kids are,” Jimmy told the local press. “We try not to make it into a competition – kid against kid.”
But the reading series didn’t require specific books or themes.
“The sky’s the limit,” he said. “The children can read any genre and they seem to love that.”
Any kid who participated got a certificate and a prize. But those in the winner circle got a special prize.
Jimmy also established story hour, which according to another news story was “masterminded by Garland in 2001.”
But Jimmy also created reading clubs for adults and had enough interest even in a town as small as Mount Arlington to have two clubs running.
During his tenure, he also expanded the DVD collection and offered the public “family nights” during the summer.
“You can come in and get two DVDs, three videos, five magazines, two software tiles and any number of books … and then all you need is pizza,” he said.
In June, a month after Jimmy’s appointment, the developer who proposed to build townhouse on the place which once housed a historic amusement park decided to donate $200,000 towards building a new library.
“The man is Santa Claus,” Jimmy told the press at the time. “It’s a dream come true.”
I could imagine him choking on every word, even though he more than once bemoaned the fact that the small library – over 100 years old – was too small and inadequate to handle the ever-expanding population of the community.
But this was the guy who bulldozed Bertrand’s Island amusement park and wants to turn it into a bedroom community full of yuppies!
Apparently, this wasn’t part of some kind of political deal that will allow him to overpopulate Bertrand’s Island or plow down the trees of a woods for another of his projects.
The locals see the developer as a generous soul, and perhaps, his erasing of history is the price we all pay for progress.
I still remember how close to tears Jimmy was when we wandered through the ruins of it after Woody Allen finished filming there.
Jimmy’s most extensive interview was done for the Star Ledger in 2005 and had almost nothing to do with the library, talking about his life and his preferences – such as his favorite musicians: The Beatles.
“Is there any other?” Jimmy asked.
“Garland has been playing music since 1967,” the story said. “He says he was one of the many young men who was swept up in the Beatles Phenomenon when everyone was part of a garage band.”
Indeed, Jimmy more than once told me that The Beatles ruined all our lives, because they steered us towards a creative path we could really not achieve, instead of allowing us to spend our lives following in the footsteps of our fathers.”
Naturally his favorite TV show was the X-File which fit into many of his personal theories.
His favorite movie surprised me” The in Laws” with Peter Falk although I recalled after reading this how much he liked the Colombo series on TV.
His favorite book “Lucifer’s Hammer” was no surprise since Jimmy and I had had many discussions about the end of the book from back in our days living together in Passaic.
Nor was Jimmy’s favorite author, James Joyce, a surprise, since Jimmy used to read from Finnegan’s Wake as far back as the Parsippany apartment, and once gave us all a cassette tape of one of his lectures.
Jimmy worked at the library as its director even after the new library opened in November 2006, until he was forced out in 2011 – partly because he lacked the degree necessary to run a library after the 2010 census showed the population had risen to a level requiring a certified library director.
Politics, of course, played a huge role in his demise.
Almost as soon as he became director in 1998, he was required to work to help the Republican mayor and council get reelected. He had to write for their campaigns, help them raise money and other political acts that helped him keep his job.
The changing and expanding demographics that eventually unseated him as director also played into local politics, expanding the Democratic voter base to get a foothold on the council.
A politically ambitious assistant municipal clerk used this Democratic clout and Jimmy’s lack of degree to wedge him out as director, eventually taking his place.
Jimmy, who had already been evicted from the Haas house back in 1994 when Ritchie’s mother decided to move back in, was living in a big house up the hill from the library, a house so run down he called it haunted. When evicted as library director, Jimmy used a portion of his buy out to purchase a trailer and relocated to a trailer park near Route 206 where he lived when he died, isolating himself even more than he had been.
He claimed e disliked being so remote and disliked the conditions he lived in yet failed to make any changes.
I never saw the new library building. It was still under construction in 2002 and later in 2004 when I saw Jimmy perform at the Mount Arlington Memorial Day festivities.
I got the impression – despite the many technological advances the new building offered, Jimmy preferred the library’s old digs, a little town library that fit his personality all so well.
During our travels to the lake in the early 1970s, Frank and I passed the old library many times without realizing what it was since the entrance was up a slanted side road and the door to the library was hidden in the back. The driveway – which had a huge bolder sticking out of it – was so full of potholes that each time we parked it was like making a moon landing.
Jimmy loved this place more than any home he ever lived in and spent more years there than any place else in his life. He knew every crook and cranny.
While Donnelly once complained about the fact that she had to stick a terry cloth towel under the door to keep the draft from freezing her feet in winter, the old library seemed to provide Jimmy with everything he needed, even if at times it was a nightmare to navigate into or once inside around the interior.
The library had two doors facing the parking lot, but each time I came, I always used the same one, rusted hinges and all. To get in, you had to pass through a narrow passage (usually filled with piles of books, a table stuffed with circulars, a big for local periodicals, and other things such as yet to be unpacked deliveries or boxes waiting to be shipped out.
While the configuration of the library changed slightly over the years, the four small rooms bulged with books which were jammed into every corner, often piled horizontally on the top of vertical books on the shelves. File folders were stuck into various spaces in the small kitchen – which could be accessed off a hall from the front door or from another door on the other side.
I remember the circulation desk was the first place I encountered faced into the library that was so crowded with bookshelves it could have served as a maze – with more than 20,000 books.
Jimmy had installed two computers into one of the corners where there was turnstile magazine rack and another holding books on cassette tapes. Despite Jimmy’s best efforts the library had very little in the way of audio-visual equipment. But because of the internet, patrons could order books from other libraries if they could not find one here.
Jimmy melded his artwork with his library duties, and so many of the signs posted around these four rooms showed his handiwork, characters straight out of his imagination.
Although he spent a lot of time at home making music through recording software, he frequently played at the library’s public functions, even if he sometimes had to share the stage with a clown.
The library was Jimmy’s social life, where he – a very private person – interacted with the public. So, when he lost the job, he lost a significant part of his life.
The 2010 federal census was his undoing.
For years, Jimmy had talked about that point in time when the population of Mount Arlington would require the library to seek a director with proper credentials. Increased development elevated the population to a point where the town needed to find a new director.
Another factor played into this. Mount Arlington Library had started its life as a county facility in the 1920s but became an independent library in 1968. In 2010, the county – seeing the new facility as the most modern in the county – once again used it as a county resource, adding more pressure for Jimmy’s removal.
Jimmy was let go in late 2010 – at some point after his mother’s death – and early 2011. Advertisements seeking a new director were published starting in June 2011, and by the end of the year, the politically connected former assistant municipal clerk had taken over as the library director.
Although Jimmy did his best to hide his liberal leanings from a
community that might have seen Atilla the Hun as soft on crime, he could not escape
their seeing him as one of the town’s “odd” characters who just happened to
have a job as the library director.
But if the community appreciates Jimmy as its director – as temporary
as that might be – they seemed less than enthusiastic two weeks ago when he
brought the band to play at the picnic.
The kids, mothers, and especially fathers took more interest in the traditional
festivities elsewhere in the park with only a handful of locals showing up
under the tent with us to listen to the music, and most of these locals taking
cover against the chill of the air.
Even as the band set up, we could see how sparse the audience was going
to be, a sharp contrast to a year ago when Jimmy, John and Rocky played the
fire house as a trio.
If this bothered Jimmy (and I later learned it did) he showed no sign
of it at the time, seemingly more concerned about where band members would set
up on the makeshift stage.
He appeared to be concerned about members of this band wandering off
and kept barking at one or another to set up at one end of the rectangular tent—the
green and white stripes of which making the whole thing feel like a circus.
When John arrived, Jimmy’s expression changed, sourer, testifying to
feelings he had expressed to me during a phone conversation about how uncomfortable
he felt about one of his oldest band mates dating his sister.
“I’ll get used to it, I suppose,” he mumbled at me as I passed near him
in the tent, then he went to help John get his equipment.
The new drummer (whose name I can’t recall) seemed a little lost, too,
setting up his kit on the lift while frowning at the nearly non-stop banter
between Jimmy and John. While neither mentioned Jimmy’s sister Patti by name,
she clearly was the subtext of their dispute.
For more than 30 years these two had fought similar fights in subtext,
not always mentioning the real reasons for their dispute – such as back in the
good old days when they argued about stuff when a girl named Carol was the real
cause neither of them wanted to mention by name.
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…”
I was supposed to meet up with Hank and possibly Jimmy in New York at
the Jerry Lewis telethon on Labor Day three weeks after Woodstock.
I made arrangements with Frank on 42nd Street when he was going down
into a subway back to Lori’s place in the East Village. He had taken acid and
was getting off, asking me to take him home so he wouldn’t get lost.
I was already late to meet Vinnie for the ride back to Fort Dix. We
were both AWOL and I did not want to miss bed check.
I couldn’t find them in the crowd – and much later learned Jimmy never
came.
I assumed Frank might have forgotten in the haze of his acid trip, but
I waited for him, accidentally bumping into Soupy Sales on the sidewalk before
I gave up.
I did not realize that this would be the last chance I would see any of
them for a whole year – even though I got discharged from the Army at the end
of October.
Frank called it a weird dream, me leaving him tripping and then finding
out in mid-November that I had taken off somewhere after stealing a bunch of my
uncle’s money (another run away attempt, but this time with a bundle of cash)
only to have my uncles set up outside the Little Falls Laundry to follow him
and my other friends around, my family assuming Jimmy or Frank or Alf or Bob
were hiding me out just the way they did the last time.
They were like undercover cops waiting outside Lori’s apartment,
watching my friends come and go, following each of them on the assumption one
of them would lead me to where I was hiding out.
“They were armed to the teeth,” Jimmy recalled. “They had those World
War II rifles with them, and they scared the living daylights out of me.”
Then, on the block where Lori lived my uncles saw someone who looked
like me and the chase began. The poor fool thought they were the police, but
didn’t wait around to make sure, he started to run, and my uncles ran after
him, waving their guns.
A brief report of this later appeared in the East Village Other
although no names were used, and no one was arrested.
The guy must have been on speed because he gave a good account for
himself running through the East Village and into the West Village, my uncles
falling back one by one until Ritchie finally tackled him in Washington Square
Park where he discovered the mistake and let him go.
I tried to write Frank from the West Coast but put Lori’s real name
instead of the name she was using to collect welfare on, and the letter came
back. So, Frank didn’t know where I was until I tried another letter, which amazed
Jimmy.
“You put Frank’s name on it, no street number, and somehow he got it,”
Jimmy later recalled. “Strange.”
Life in the Garley Gang went on without me, of course, everybody doing
a lot of drugs, highlighted by a New Year’s Eve bash at the Filmore East on
Dec. 31, 1969.
If I hadn’t been on the run from the police at the time, I would have
likely jointed them in their caravan to Manhattan to see Jimi Hendrix perform.
Frank had missed Hendrix at Woodstock after coming down with pneumonia
while also tripping on LSD and was flown out clutching the arm of the media,
pleading to remain until Hendrix played.
He vowed not to miss him again.
“He started taking drugs before he went,” Jimmy told me later. “All
kinds of different drugs. One drug after another, saying he wasn’t getting off.
We kept telling him to stop taking the stuff until he was sure, then suddenly
he’s off his rocker. He was ok at the concert. But when we got back to his and
Lori’s apartment on East 5th Street he was off his rocker. He just bounced up
and down and all around, bouncing off the walls, then out the door into the
hall. He was naked except for his socks. We started to go downstairs, but when
we blocked him, he ran to the roof instead. There is was naked in the cold
running from snow-covered roof to snow covered roof until we tackled him and
dragged him back to the apartment, keeping guard on him until he started to
come down.”
This incent followed by a few other incidents involving LSD convinced
Jimmy that Frank would not live to see 25 years old, and the five-dollar bet
with Frank that he wouldn’t.
