Something to remember Jimmy by

Saturday, February 1, 2020

I drove out to Jimmy's trailer yesterday because I can't wait for months to mourn.

The Jews are right in burying their dead quickly but there needs to be a kind of place to go for survivors to focus on especially when we have not seen him in such a long time.

There was a reason why people hold a wake within a few days, to give people like me a chance to say goodbye, to have a closure and to understand that the world goes on after we’ve had our chance to say goodbye.

This stretching out of grief is driving me crazy, waiting months to finally deal with an emotion that is prominent now and like an old wound has the potential to get down deep into the bones where it may never get healed.

I keep expecting to see the obituary as proof that this really happened even though I have the word of everyone that it did.

I understand now the ritual that come after death and the closing of a life to that the survivors can move on.

So, I went west to his trailer because it is the closest thing I could come to a wake or a grave.

When Frank died, it all happened quickly, and we got it out of our system so that the pain started to dissipate over time. For the first few months I went to his grave pretty regularly hoping that he really was there in the ether like a ghost, listening.

I also needed to make this trip of Jimmy’s trailer to make up for the fact that I had passed this place so closely so recently and not stopped.

I thought about it at the time, and felt the guilt piling up in me after the news of Jimmy’s death came – I would have, I could have, I should have, but I didn’t.

We all regret things we cannot change and so the next best thing I could do was go to what is still the only grave Jimmy will ever have -- his old trailer  -- before that vanishes and I have no place to go at all.

I also wanted to get a lay of the landscape, to get a feeling of how he lived in his last days what he saw and to see how his universe must have looked like.

In the end of his days, Jimmy had relied on Google Maps for his glimpse into the outer world – even speaking to me about his nostalgic trip via the internet to Ginger’s home in Towaco, where he had lived for a time and perhaps was at the peak of happiness in life.

Me, I get nothing from a distant view like that. I really needed to see it and feel it so I could get a little bit into his head.

I knew that almost everywhere Jimmy ever lived, he had daily rituals like those that he had when we all lived near each other in Passaic, pheromone trails that he created from his front door to whatever place he needed to go each day.

He always had a favorite store where people go to breakfast and other institutions that he would attend to that would help fulfill his needs.

I noticed a string of stores along the highway on my previous trip – highway big box places strewn on either side after I had passed through the more historic Newtown.

Jimmy had no doubt used some of them and in fact The ShopRite is likely the one in which he died.

Oddly enough I paused near his place during my previous trip to take a picture of an abandoned school, and had he looked out the window on that side of his trailer, he might have even gotten a glimpse of me as I passed his turn off on my way north.

His turn off was the first Highway before the major intersection of Route 206 and 15, his road, Route 94 is a kind of side spur that crosses over to Route 15 farther ease near to Sparta where Dawn and Frank live.

I had looked at Google Maps street views to know where the turn off was but the online service could not access the trailer park itself except by satellite which showed that Jimmy Street was a kind of gravel circular road that started and ended inside the park itself. The place had scores of trailers, all in different conditions -- although framing the gate were the fanciest and clearly the best kept.

Jimmy's was neither.

The car that had been parked in the driveway on the google satellite image was gone, suggesting that whatever was of value in the place had been taken and that I was looking at the sad remainders of a life and not its highlights.

It almost literally had become a grave, dark and foreboding, loaded in front with the black plastic bags I have associated with death since having to recover my mother's possessions from the nursing home almost two decades earlier.

What I had thought might have been a park bench from what I saw on Google satellite turned out to be a shed at the rear of the property.

 I did not need to go into the trailer to fully appreciate the struggle Jimmy had with the environment in his last decade of life. Plastic covered some windows and the air conditioning unit suggesting he struggled to keep out the cold.  There was an exterior propane tank on one side of the trailer and a screened in outdoor area now full of black plastic bags and other detritus on the other side.

He had a small porch near the front door where Dawn had written a hasty note looking for John or someone else to provide information, a testimony to the panic that occurred in the immediate days after Jimmy's demise.

I was struck most by the tiny birdhouse that hung off the roof of the front door porch in far better shape than the trailer itself.

There was a host of odd items thrown into the mix of black bags included one or two exercise devices suggesting that Jimmy really did try to keep up with his health in the waning days as he had informed Dawn.

I parked in the driveway and then slowly walked around the trailer trying to get a glimpse of it from every angle noting all of the places where the rust and the rot had started in on the joints.

 It so reminded me of the cold-water flats Jimmy, and I had lived in while living in Passaic, then I came to realize he had recreated that world and relocated it in a rural setting. As with his first apartment in Passaic he set up a world which excluded others when people knock, he said, “Go away! I'm busy!” just as he no doubt here did when Dawn came to visit or anyone else.

He still needed a ride to whatever his equivalent of Quick Chek was although he did not have us to call on and had to drive himself there instead.

Dawn said he had a favorite breakfast spot. I did not search for it.  I just assumed it would be within reasonable distance as was everything else he needed. The highway was just close enough for him to make the trek to the stores he needed and then come scurrying back to the protection of his trailer.

In my head the old scenes of Passaic ran like reels of film. I fully understood what his life was like here in this remote place because we had lived it together in Passaic and he has not changed fundamentally in all that time.

I still have a photograph of him when he was leaving Passaic for the last time in 1985. 

This was a dramatic moment of change when the world would steer him towards other goals and other visions, he would eventually settle on the shores of lake Hopatcong and would inherit a job has a library director before retiring to relocate here.

But standing there in the chilly air outside his trailer I realized for the first time that Jimmy had not left Passaic at all but had packed it up in his bags and brought it with him.

This answered all of my questions and so I looked this way down the road at the visions of what he saw daily and then down the other side and then climbed back in my car for the long ride home.

I understood now how none of us have really escaped Passaic and that it lives inside of us while some of us return there in our dreams others like Jimmy we lived it in reality over and over, a somewhat questionable legacy but at least it is a real legacy.