We drive down from Hamburg, New Jersey on a road nobody’s
heard of except for Frank, Jimmy bitching at me in the back seat from his usual
soap box in the passenger seat, warning me not to distract Frank while he’s driving
or we might wind up in Oshkosh, wherever that might be.
Jimmy says the last thing he needs is to have a giggling Frank
driving in this remote place, and that if anything sets him off, he’ll murder Frank
to shut him up.
Jimmy, as usual, is in a hurry, although today he might
actually have a good reason, since he hopes to reach his sister’s house before
she leaves for work.
He’s broke again and needs to borrow some money.
But Frank, who Jimmy’s once described as “the most careless
careful driver in the world,” takes a route where he rarely as to exceed 25
milers per hour and seems particularly attracted to 20, pumping up Jimmy’s
outrageous with each painful mile.
We all know that when we get to Jimmy’s sister’s place,
she’ll be gone, and Jimmy will be so pissed he won’t be able to speak the whole
trip back.
We only pretend like we might get there until Jimmy gets
pissed thinking about it and yells for to pull over, and when Frank does, Jimmy
gets out and starts to walk.
We have to beg him to get back in the car by which time,
he’s come up with a new scheme and tells Frank to give him $50.
This puts an abrupt halt to Frank’s giggling.
He sees nothing funny when it comes to money and demands to
know why he should give Jimmy anything.
Jimmy’s say Frank owes him $100 and Jimmy being a kind soul
is willing to settle accounts for half if Frank pays it right away.
Naturally, Frank asks how Jimmy came up with such a debt,
and frowns even more when Jimmy mentions the bet the two of them made at 16
that suggested the sickly Frank wouldn’t survive until age 25.
A relieve Frank giggles again, and points out that he isn’t
25 yet, but 24.
At which point, Jimmy says that’s why he’s willing to
settle. Jimmy doesn’t trust Frank to leave the $100 in his will when he does
kick the bucket next year.
Things are about to get ugly between the two of them when I
point out that we are lost.
Jimmy blames me for distracting Frank, then orders Frank to
pull into a gas station where he might get a map and make a phone call. He says
he’s got to have his sister check the news paper’s obituaries to see if Frank’s
name is in them yet.
Faith not n the ordinary or traditional way – the quiet paganistic
motivations of the world, relying on mother earth or Gaia to give him support.
Remarkably, Jimmy is not dramatically different from Clayton
who he despises (or appears to), and by habit, I mean, he and Clayton both do
things in specific ways, and that the universe – as in Medieval times – tends to
revolve around him.
(Here I need to be careful as to not project onto him
characteristics which are not really his and I suppose some measure of example
is in order here.)
Perhaps the most annoying of these habits is how Jimmy manages
to obtain rides. Years ago, when many of the Garley Gang lived in this
apartment complex in Passaic, Jimmy made a point of contacting each and every
one of us, getting each of us to promise to give him a ride (usually to Quick
Chek), lining us up just on the off chance one or more of us crapped out at the
last moment.
This might seem like a reasonable precaution, except for the
fact that each of usually went out of our way to accommodate him, assuming some
urgency to his request – especially when at times he “needed” to go the library
(we assuming he would pay some late fee if we did not rush him there.)
On one such occasion, Jimmy arranged for a ride to the
library and as it happened, I was the only one available, and he made it clear
it would be a terrible trek to take the ten block walk in the icy rain. Since I
knew Jimmy often had little money to spare, I assumed that if I did not bring
him, his pile of books would be overdue.
After nearly a half hour scraping the ice off my car, I
drove him the ten blocks to the library. He did not have books to bring back,
and he took none out when we got there.
I’m still uncertain as to why we went at all.
But I believe this may be his need for attention.
Last week, James refused to go to work 15 minutes early in
order to accommodate my schedule, even though he’s the one begging me for the
ride, the result of which, he arrived on work at time, and I arrived at my jobs
15 minutes late.
Most often, he has another purpose for his rides, often
getting me to take him to John Ritchie’s house on Totowa Road in Paterson for
the purpose of getting pot – John is kind, always trading pot for a painting
Jimmy has made, and perhaps has the largest collection of anyone.
Sometimes, we go to Patty Joyce’s house in Little Falls for
the same purpose, although he prefers John to Patty, because Patty wants cash.
Jimmy has habits in the apartment that so resemble Clayton’s
that I sometimes confuse who is whom if I only hear them moving around, each
caught in a strange dance, as one does this and the other does that, but always
with the same gestures and steps, putting this here or that there, putting on
or turning off music, mumbling about this or that, or about me or each other.
They could be twins. Perhaps in another life they were.
But from the way Jimmy feels about Clayton, I suspect they
might have been Cain and Abel in the previous incarnation.
Jimmy and I spend too much of a free time figuring out ways
to upset Clayton.
It has become something of a hobby with us, seeking new and
novel ways to offend him, or shake the foundations of his beliefs.
Clayton is a born clay pigeon, abused in and out of school
as a child. His father was a drunk and something of a madman who liked to play
mind games on his kids.
Like the game he played the first time I met the man when I
went over to the house and Clifton and watched him intentionally vomit in my
plate.
I don’t know how much influence Clayton’s mother had on him,
but the father apparently was so full of self-pity it tainted Clayton as well.
To say his growing up was traumatic is an understatement.
It left him unable to deal adequately with the physical world,
forcing him to rely on other people for assistance.
Then, he got religion, and not some sensible religion the
way Ginger did (Buddhism has its merits) but a whacko religion called
Scientology that is more cult than faith and relies largely on brainwashing its
members. He has risen into the ranks of the faith so that he is considered a leader
and has a host of books around him that tell him how to manage people (which
the manuals call units). But when he is very stressed, he puts on headphones
and listens to propaganda tapes that calm him down by dragging him back into
the weird reality – this driving Jimmy craziest, though nearly everything about
Clayton, especially his habits.
Clayton is a meticulous man, insisting on taking two long
showers daily, and has amazingly precise methods of grooming himself –
something that annoys both me and Jimmy, yet we can’t stop watching him with a
morbid fascination.
Clayton is full of contradictions. Fanatically religious, he
is obsessed with war games and insists on playing the role of the Nazis. He and
his friend, Rich, are constantly speculating on the possible ways Germany could
have won the war.
From what I gather, Clayton – who is about our age – is a virgin
and has never even had a relationship with a woman (or anyone else for that
matter).
We don’t pick on him in that way – since any one of the Garley
Gang might have ended up like him. Bob almost did.
But we do other things, like move something he put down somewhere
and goes crazy looking for, since he puts everything in precise places and
expects to find them there.
He gets extremely upset when either of us touches his tapes
or looks into his religious control manuals. So, sometimes, we switch tapes. I
put a tape of rock music in his player once and thought Clayton was having a fit
when he put the headphones on and started to listen. He sputtered so much;
Jimmy actually had his hand on the phone to call for an ambulance.
Sometimes, I go into the bathroom just when I know Clayton
intends to take a shower and stay there, picturing him fidgeting outside the
door in his impatience to use it.
We both play music we know Clayton doesn’t like, forcing him
to take refuge in his tapes.
Clayton gets most upset when Jimmy engages in a theological
discussion, always asking “You really believe that? I mean, really?”
Eventually Clayton runs back to his tapes, totally shaken.
I don’t know what we’ll do for sport when Clayton moves out –
as he has promised to do many, many times. I guess Jimmy and I will have to
pick on each other.
Oh well, Jimmy is in, and it strikes me for the first time
how lonely he really is.
Our temporary roommate, Clayton, too.
Last night, Jimmy and Clayton – like 17-year-old boys –
discussed the finer points of women.
Jimmy seems unaware of his ability to love and be loved.
This might explain his problems with Ginger.
Of all the men in the world who can win the heart of a woman,
Jimmy can.
Sometimes it is only for a brief moment in time, that tick
of the clock when he seems the wonder of all wonders.
There are one or two who came close, but none it would seem
had the same impact as Ginger. No one else won more than a token sign of
affection from him.
Now, approaching the age of 34, he suffers the anguish all
men do, frustration and doubt, the uncertainty of his own appeal.
After years of people like me, Garrick, Ralph, Frank and
others envying his self-confidence, Jimmy appears remarkably vulnerable, making
us fools for believing he was any different than we are.
This is the same mistake we make about women, assuming those
we are attracted to are more confident than we are. We foolishly believe others
control their emotions better than we do.
I suspect Jimmy like the rest of us lives with the idiotic
notion that we must present a stoic front, playing roles intended to give the
impression of self-confidence while behind this mask we struggle.
In my case, I play the role of a semi-intellectual. Clayton
hides behind a mask of silence. Jimmy
wears a mask of the genius hermit, a very successful stone wall through which I
could rarely glimpse the real James.
But inside, Jimmy is no more stone than either of us are. He
quakes with the idea of failure.
Clayton admits his weakness; so, he shows his true self more
easily.
I have tougher skin, cemented with bricks of ego, pride and stubbornness,
which takes an emotional earthquake to reveal – which has happened a few times.
But how does one get to the truth inside Jimmy without
damaging the Michelangelo-like façade he has built around himself, without
cracking the artwork?
Ginger helped, creating tiny wedges through which we can
glimpse the real Jimmy, cracks he’s desperate to repair to keep his exterior
intact.
Last night, he could not keep these closed, speaking frankly
and bitterly about life and romance, creating a new façade made out of anger
that would keep us from seeing just how vulnerable he really is.
This is my favorite performance of the band, an outdoor concert at a bikers' picnic in August 1975, which I recorded. I left some of the sidetalk in this version that is not included in some of the other versions I gave out over the last few years.
The day begins with the quiet before the madness of
customers: a container of OJ, a glimpse at The New York Times, and a moment of
reflection.
We seem to have arrived at yet another great moment in time,
a conjuncture of importance that comes with Jimmy’s return to Passaic.
It hardly seems as if three and a half years have passed
since his last being here.
He seemed to live in Towaco for an eternity.
This has much to do with his infatuation with Ginger.
A huge portion of Jimmy’s soul inhabits that large house,
like smoke rising from its chimney into its wooden rafters, embedded permanently
along with the scent of burning wood.
Jimmy and I spent a number of evenings seated in front of
the stone hearth, talking, playing guitars, listening to classical records.
It was the earthiest of places, full of last century’s wholesome
feelings, and yet close enough to civilization to seem practical.
In fact, too close, with civilization creeping closer inch
by inch, hemming in that little hill so that you could not go a mile in any
direction without running into walls of concrete.
I remember one Christmas climbing up that hill with rain at
its bottom only to find the top covered with snow, making me realize that each
visit there was traveling into another time and into another world, a magical
world that somehow defied the temptation of civilization during those years
when Jimmy was there, and is perhaps part of what attracted him there.
And for those three or so years, I often found Jimmy
puttering around outside, digging the earth with his hands, painting in one of
the remote rooms upstairs, tending gardens, clearing stone and glass he found buried
in the slanted back yard.
Each time I visited him; Jimmy was up to something there.
Yes, he and I both understood that it would not last –
everything came to an end eventually.
But at the time, the end of dreams such as this were hard to
visualize.
Jimmy appeared to have found his place in the world,
becoming the Merlin character he so envied from the Mary Steward books, the
aging Merlin who was learning the arts of the earth.
I thought the end would come differently than it did, that Mrs.
Fennelly would finally come to realize that the place was just too much to
handle for her to keep up alone and would sell it back to civilization and the
tide of progress – which always tends to ruin thins like this in the supposed journey
onto better things.
I think this is why Jimmy worked so hard, struggling to delay
that inevitable day, knowing down deep in his heart, even he couldn’t keep it
back forever.
And even though he had minor victories, it was always a
losing battle.
But even the struggle was a delight: the smell of lilacs in
season, the grinning faces of the orange button marigolds, the gray faces of
the dusty millers, and for three seasons, he struggled to grow radishes,
carrots, pumpkins and tomatoes, stirring them up out of the soil like children,
green umbilical cords clinging to them as he gave them birth.
He hoed up the thick black soil, dug, planted and even
begged for those plants to grow, raising them from seedlings in the kitchen
when it was still too cold outside to plant, even after the thaw, they hanging
in pots from every window, he petting them like pets, their green limbs
overflowing their pots, like green rain, sweeping down, creating veils
throughout which he could squint out at the world beyond.
The sunlight through these veils alone created a kind of
magic.
But there had to be a price for all this, and part of this
was watching the woman he loved drift away.
For much of what he did in this magical world involved her
with the presumption that if he created paradise, she might be enticed, he
always assuming that paradise required two people.
Jimmy made Ginger into a goddess long ago, and I fully
believe that he thought of her when he tended his flowers and plants, she the
greed buds he prayed would blossom into something grand, her face in each of
the flowers he tenderly caressed, he holding her at each stage, at 17 when he
met her, and 22, when she left him at Pine Street, and on and on, each a growing
monument to a magical time we all knew could not last.
I like to think he tried to protect her from the inevitable
pain. Oh, yes, there had to be pain – for in the end, even Eden came to an end,
and in fact as much as Jimmy wanted this to be Eden, it was not.
He and she were two souls with differing visions of the
world.
Jimmy was essentially a mystic with a hazy view of the real
world. He was not a dreamer the way many were. He understood the darkness and
evils that could work their way into the deluded dreamer. He simply avoided the
whole issue, pretending such things did not exist when he knew they did.
To me, early on, it was Ginger who attempted to blind
herself to what the real world was about, making awakening all the more
painful.
In Eden, it was knowledge that devoured Eve – ambition for
something more. Ginger seems to want to be something more than she is, and
wants Jimmy to be something, too – and seems to see Jimmy as wasting his
talents.
Jimmy could have become president had he wanted it.
Ginger seemed to learn from Jimmy the rudiments of survival,
but having learned them, began to grow beyond him and away from him, using Buddhism
to obtain something Jimmy could not provide, meeting others who could help her.
She would be something someday with Jimmy or without him.
Now, Jimmy returns here, devoured by Beowulf’s dragon,
learning for the first time that Ginger is not a goddess at all, but a dark
queen whose sin – the need to be more than she is – cannot be erased merely by
Jimmy’s love.
