Not the Jimmy I remember

Sunday, February 16, 2020

Almost a full month after his death Jimmy's Family finally came up with an obituary which had such awful undertones that you would think it was the Catholic Church twisting arms to make some saint seem respectable.

This was the Garland family Council of Narcia where they all had to come to consensus on who exactly they wanted Jimmy portrayed as provided it wasn’t actually who Jimmy really was.

From its tone and from this emphasis you can imagine the infighting that must have taken place behind the scenes in order to make it sound like Jimmy was something other than what it really was.

Not only was the document inaccurate but it implied that Jimmy's primary career was as an executive director of the library and that after his retirement he indulged in his secondary profession as an artist.

“This makes him look like a white-haired old man puttering with paint at his retirement,” one person said.

The portrayal is so exaggeratedly wrong that it largely amounts to a lie and implies that someone or many someone's behind the scenes felt secret shame over the fact that Jimmy foremost and always was artist first, then musician.  He fell into being a librarian by accident after finding working in a photo company and then later in a Dunkin Donut beneath his dignity He was a part-time clerk who after everybody else retired someone named executive director.

 The obituary painted Jimmy as one of those boring bureaucrats that occupy all the corporate offices around the world who have after having done executive things all their lives suddenly putter in the garden with some unimportant occupation like painting.

It is easy to imagine the arm-twisting and political maneuvering that went on behind the scenes to make sure that his obituary did not reflect how wonderfully dysfunctional Jimmy actually it was.

It is clear that others who want to have his image preserved did not want  the general public to see him as he really was a somewhat disrespectful and certainly unconventional character poo wandered through life in the search of something other than the fake respectability his obituary for painted him.

The obituary was written for the survivors not for Jimmy ignoring the fact that Jimmy was a bigger than life character the way some of Kerouac characters were.

You can see the kind of strain behind the scenes in the various aspects of the obituary the encouraging of the public to come look at his art when that was the least part of his life according to this document

Jimmy couldn't care less whether people came over to his website and looked at his work. What he cared about was the creation of it and the continuing creativity that occurred despite the fact that he was stuck in pointless jobs such as Dunkin Donuts or even the library.  He was desperate to turn the library into an artwork and was in the process of doing so when it outgrew him when the bureaucrats forced him out and turn the library back into a library rather than an artwork.

His forced retirement pushed him back into his real love music and is art and in this last days he did what he set out to do from the beginning which is to live his life is he wanted to regardless of what close family members felt or how much shame they had in knowing him.

He was a charismatic character that the obituary largely ignores.  It is an obituary written by bureaucrats for bureaucrats and hardly reflects who Jimmy was in life trying to give him importance that he would not have found important.

Fortunately those who actually know him know how much BS went into this and more than one has said this was not Jimmy, a disreputable character who spend his life tearing down bureaucratic walls only to have one built around him by an obituary like a prison or a coffin he doesn't deserve.

Time Capsule of our lives

Friday, February 14, 2020

I went back to the old neighborhood yesterday having did my 6-month ritual with the dentist in Fairfield.

Remarkably Little Falls has changed very little over the six decades or more from that time when we spent time there.

It was rainy and cold and gray so perfect to fit the mood I was in.

I wanted to rediscover some of the iconic places I remembered and see what was really there.

This included the bridge over the Passaic River where we filmed that movie back I guess in 1975  where Jimmy did his best to be Walter Cronkite or some other prominent reporter and I got to be the criminal that gets busted for the scam because I had a real criminal record and was typecast.

The section of bridge where we actually did the filming had been replaced overtime but there was still a portion of the old bridge further on nearer the canal, and I still remember Jimmy standing there talking about the crime I had committed and pointed to the falls as my means of transport.

The historic train station where my fictional arrest took place was still there all though fancied up since then and now part of a complex transportation system will used by young professionals to make their way to New York City every day.

The brick building looked the same; so, did the lobby but it all looked less abandoned than it did when I was arrested in the name of film.

I think someone saw me taking pictures of the building and called the police because the police car suddenly appeared out of nowhere looking at me suspiciously as I drove off to explore more of the old neighborhood.

I have driven through Little Falls in recent times sometimes stopping off at the Morris Canal Park to look at the Falls there.  But I had only gotten glimpses in passing of the institutions that played role in my young days.

It was cold and rainy when I park the car near the park and crossed over to that place where Jimmy and I sat after our marathon shore experience in the Summer of 69.

I was thrilled to see that the World War 1 tank still stood where it had when we were last there.  Jimmy and his gang used to sit on it and smoke pot and dump roaches inside of it.  They used to joke about filling it up with roaches and then later pined over the possibility of breaking into it when pot was short in supply. They figure they might re-roll all the roaches they dumped inside.

Because of the rain it was hard to linger there, and I took cover under some relatively new wooden structures built over to stone icons that were the foundation pieces of that little village.

The rusted park bench Jimmy and I sat on to wait for my bus to go back to the other end of Paterson was gone but they were marble replacements lingering nearby.

What I never noticed then and what struck me very hard now was the Time Capsule that  I didn't notice them but stood out prominently in the rain, a time capsule installed in April 1968 just about the time Frank and I first came there to get him a job at the Little Falls laundry, the event that started my whole journey through life with Jimmy and the gang.

It seemed to me that it was our time capsule preserving something special and that it would be there to be reopened long after all of us had passed on.

From there I took the stroll down East Main Street to where it dipped and then started to rise up the Long Hill to great notch. Everything seemed stretched out and distance is greater than my memory had made them.  And I understood for the first time why Jimmy constantly manipulated Ralph into driving him around this was not a place you could easily walk around in and get any place fast.

The laundromat where I had spent the night while working in Little Falls laundry was gone replaced by Dunkin Donuts with another similar laundromat facility a few doors down in the same strip mall with a Quick Chek  Jimmy would have loved had it been there when we were kids.

The massive brick edifice that was once the Little Falls laundry still stood there though now subdivided into other uses, a haunting singularity in the middle of our lives weighing us down with memories.

The bar bowling alley across the street is long gone replaced by more modern buildings city fathers assumed were more respectable. The bungalows in which Garrick lived with Jean for a time we're also gone, replaced by townhouses yet strangely they had kept the magnificent trees.

For a time, I just stood on a small bridge near a narrow river in the pouring rain getting splashed on by speeding traffic as it went by and hit the puddles.

Then slowly --  full of memories -- I made my way back to the park and then to the car and then took the slow drive out to where Bob once lived and then through the tunnel that led to the place where the Red Baron once was and then I drove home.

 I kept thinking of that time capsule in the park and understood that I am also a time capsule that someday someone will open and see all this that once was and is no more.

Nothing but the dead and dying (in Jimmy's little town)

Friday, February 7, 2020

No snow remained anywhere I could see around the trailer park. But you could tell from the gray and the withered growth to either side that the world was still embraced by winter.

The sky promised rain and maybe even flurries. And yet, amid this, a dirty yellow Jeep with municipal license plates made its way from trailer to trail, much in the way a honey bee from flower to flower in season, an old man with a tilted hat seated behind the wheel, surveying the landscape with the same diligence.

He pulled up the jeep in the driveway next to Jimmy’s, got out, carrying a large yellow toolbox with the name Dewalt written across its side in black letters. He eyed some of the other trailers and then moved on to another across the gravel road, the toolbox weighing down, tilting him to one side to make him look like a drunken sailor.

Gray hair poked out from under his baseball style cap. He had a large mustache that made him look how Thurman Munson might have looked in Thurman Munson had lived to his age, reminding me of those days when Jimmy lived on Pine Street in Montclair and invited me over to watch the New York Yankees lose on TV.

On the old man’s second trip around the trailer court, he paused to look at me, clearly wondering what I was doing there.

When I told him, I was an old friend of Jimmy’s, he relaxed, but also seemed to grow sad, even weary, as if he carried the burden of Jimmy’s death on his shoulder.

He told me had been there when the police it comes to break into the trailer after Jimmy's death, and then later when Maureen arrived, and a short time after that Patty and John, recalling their ashen faces, and the look of pain each bore.

He said he was likely the last person from the trailer court to have spoken to Jimmy before Jimmy’s death.

He had come over to look at the sundial Jimmy had posted on the stump of an old tree, the old man had cut down some time earlier, but was never able to remove the remains.

“I told him he had installed wrong,” the old man said. “I can tell the time just by looking at the sun and I could tell that the Sundial was wrong. He told me that someone must have been messing with it because had set it right when he put it out here.”

They talked briefly about the struggle to deal with the dead tree, and the trouble stumps cause when trying to move them, at which point, Jimmy said he had to get something from the supermarket and drove off.

That was the last time the old man saw or spoke with Jimmy. He learned of the death two days later when the cops showed up to break into the trailer in order to find someone they could call to inform about Jimmy’s passing.

Like the rest of us, the old man seemed to think he might have said more to Jimmy if he had known at that time that it would be the last time, something wise about the life and death struggle of trees, and how stubborn tree stumps can be in keeping their grip on this world, and perhaps thinking maybe Jimmy’s spirt was like that stump still had roots here even if we could not see them.

Then, the old man moved on, carrying his toolbox to a trailer across the street, mumbling something about always having something to fix somewhere.

Putting the pieces back together

Me reading funnies

 Wednesday, February 5, 2020

Ralph emailed me to ask if anyone had notified Ginger about Jimmy's death

The phone number he had no longer work for her for gingers chiropractic office in Pennsylvania and ginger had not checked her Facebook page since September where I had emailed her to tell her about Jimmy.

I went and did some research and found an ad she had taken out for some kind of conference in which she had placed a phone number.

Ralph got back to me and said that this number was still active and that he had left a message on her answering machine.

I called as well and told her that if she needed more information, she should contact John and they gave her his email account.

All this of course was part of the synchronistic events that seem to be swirling around Jimmy's death.

I had just transcribed a letter that Jimmy supposedly got from Ginger back in 1983 – Frank had read it supposedly and reported to me about what it said.

After that I spent most of the afternoon in the frustrating attempt to rescue a cassette tape that Jimmy, and ginger and others had recorded for me while I was still in Portland that magical night of Christmas Eve 1971.

The ghost of Jimmy or some other being beyond this world kept trying to stop me from making the recovery and perhaps a bit of my own stupidity.

 I originally damage the tape in a cassette player by trying to force it to play when its gears were stuck. At the time I didn't think it was important so I set it aside presuming I would get to fix it at some other point in life.

Jimmy's death made it clear that I needed to have that memory since he and ginger and most of the Garley Gang took part in the drunken referee that was a message to me.

But again, fate plus my own stupidity appeared to be hampering the project.

At one point I did manage to put the fix on the tape, but it was too bulky to get through the rollers. I managed to rewind it to the beginning and play the first half and then hating the idea that I would miss something I again forced it, breaking the tape inside the cassette

This meant that I had to take apart the cassette to make the next repair.

I have done this kind of thing in the past, but it is an incredibly complex and often frustrating effort.

The inside of a cassette is a complicated mechanism and without the cassette to hold the tape in place the whole thing could come unraveled at any moment. And to tell you the truth when dealing with tiny bits of plastic and metal such as this I am all thumbs.

I had to abandon the portion of the tape that I had saved initially, losing precious minutes of the past in order to save the rest.

I had to Scotch tape the remainder on to the now empty other real and hope that I could weave everything through the mechanism to have it work at least one time for me to re-record.

But every time I had one part of the thing corrected another part came undone, and there were times when everything came undone and I had to start from scratch.

Then other parts began to come undone such as the spindles and the complicated tiny spokes that kept them connected to the cassette. One fell out and it took me forever to find the tiny piece of metal in the rug to reattach it.

The 50-year-old cassette could not stand the strain and I realized that I needed to take apart another cassette -- one that had screws in it -- and try to adapt the tape I was repairing to that one.

This proved a much more adequate solution although it's still took me time to thread everything and get everything lined up. At one point I put a piece of tape on the end of the recording tape attached it to the wheel only to have it come undone when I tried to actually play it.

So, I had to reopen it again and realign everything and use stronger tape to connect the recording tape to the wheel.

Everything was perfect; everything was lined up; all I had to do was put the cassette together again.

Then as I reached for the top of the cassette, the heel of my hand hit the other part and the whole thing flipped over sending the entire contents spilling across the room.

 I never did find all the original parts again.

More than once during this process I thought maybe just to give up to be happy with the half that I had managed to recover and let the rest go.

One part of my brain kept telling me that one of the higher powers involved in this whole Jimmy Garland death circus was opposed to my recovering the cassette and had created all of these obstacles to keep me from doing so.

Another part of my brain said this was some kind of test of love from the afterlife and that there was Jimmy's spirit somewhere in the world saying if I did this, I was proving how much I loved him.

But as in life, I was not going to let Jimmy stop me from doing what I had set out to do.  If his spirit was opposing this effort, I was going to stick at it and stick it to him.

If this was a test of love, then I was going to prove just how much I love this man and how much he changed my life and how important this tribute to me back in 1971 was and how much it still means to me.

I put the cassette together again using the parts from the original cassette and to replace those that were lost in the scattering.

Then remarkably the thing worked I was getting sound into the computer as I digitized the contents of the tape only after a few minutes the cassette player stalled unable to make the recording work.  The whole thing warbled has this tape struggled to play.

I switched machines which reduced the warble, but I was scared to rewind the thing back to the place where I had started from and so just kept saving the past that I could and hoped that it was enough.

Only after having accomplished this did I dare rewind the tape hoping to recapture that portion that had been lost to the warbles in the original attempt.

Miraculously this worked and so in the end I only lost about six minutes of that time, precious minutes but I had saved most of the hour of that time when they might not have ever been heard again.

And hearing them stunned me and brought back all of the feelings and the emotions that I thought lost from that time and stirred up the regret at Jimmy's death. And I heard Frank and Jimmy and Ginger and others who voices have been lost to me overtime and it moved me in a way I am still moved.

 This truly was the Ghost of Christmas Past and I admit that in the end I just sat in the chair stunned.

At this point I look down at my phone and saw that someone had called and left a message another voice from the past because it turned out to be Ginger’s.

Journal entry about tape 

A tape for Al in Portland (Journal)

Links to tapes

1971 Xmas tapes Part 1

1971 Xmas Tapes Part 2

Burying our dead

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

The rain comes, more like fall than February but it is a gift on this misty morning, the moistening of the earth that allows the lines of reality to blur.

The Staten Island woodchuck did not see his shadow and so promises us an early spring when we have not even seen winter yet -- at least not much of it.

Today is Louise's birthday; she turns 70, a shocking number for those of us who have spent our lives growing up together and thinking the future would never come and that we would never grow old.

All of this is overshadowed by my best friend's death and the politics of finding a place in the earth to put him or no place at all -- dust to dust which gets lost in the wind and leaves with nothing solid to mourn.

I am unnerved buy it all and this made by the inability of those who survive to properly follow the necessary rituals for burying those who have passed on.

Instead, we get the promise of a three-ring circus with which to mourn his passing months after the excruciating pain of the original loss, tearing open the wound again long after we should have healed, after burying him in the earth for him to heal, bowing our heads, saying our prayers, moving on with our lives.

I do not want to relive his dying a second time.

Yet, I begin to understand the chaos that surrounded my best friend’s life, the insanity of companions that have historically failed to embrace the rituals of living and dying, and how

we need to observe them in order to carry on and to instruct the next generation on how they should behave at these times of loss.

Instead of allowing us to grieve, we will get a sideshow; we will gather and do what we have always done -- play act some ritual that we really don't mean down deep.

Perhaps all wakes are mostly sideshows. Perhaps this is the reason why I have always been on the periphery of this  insane social set that surrounded my friend, watching the insane conflict from the boundary of this friendship, never getting too deeply involved, knowing that it is easy to get sucked up into it and lost forever.

What seemed like comedy in the past turns to tragedy this time of my life, and I do not want to play my part in this Shakespearean melodrama.

Perhaps if I survive, I will look back at this the way I look back at all of the simpler moments the past and see how comic they really are when viewed from the cosmos.

But that moment isn't now, and it won't be soon; I am too busy burying the dead who the ashes cannot be buried and remembering the face of someone whose features have been blurred by ineptitude of the survivors rather than just rain.

if this is a circus let me not be in the center ring.

I will mourn my friend's death in my own way and leave others to mourn him in theirs.

Will Jimmy haunt Passaic?

Monday, February 3, 2020

I keep wondering if Jimmy is going to come back and haunt Our Little World the way Frank did after he died. And if so where?

Jimmy was exponent of the X-Files, a big fan who believed in extraterrestrial stuff and all of this Hocus Pocus many people of the 18th century used to see as real. But he was also decades ahead on the contemporary snake oil that people sell today such as climate change.

He was lecturing me the Holy Grail long before there was a DaVinci Code or even the Last Crusade of Indiana Jones. Part of the tragedy of his dying is that he won't get to see just how wrong he was in some of these theories.

Yet perhaps it is a blessing since we all need something to believe in that will allow us to make this journey from birth to death and not be disappointed with the sights.

My best guess is that if Jimmy is going to want any place it will be the old cold water flat Passaic and that slightly run-down urban neighborhood he was forced to keep returning to in his life.

I'd like to think that when he left in 1985 it really wasn't for the last time,

86 Passaic St 1985

And thinking about the place and looking at photographs that I taken in recent days it seems the appropriate place for his bones to be buried even though those bones have turned to ashes and are blowing somewhere in the wind.

86 Passaic St. 2020

“I feel now as abandoned as each time he left Passaic. Although I also eventually abandoned Passaic, I am still attached to it for other reasons. My family has deep roots in that part of the world, and though one of Jimmy’s sisters was born in nearby Lodi, his family roots harken to Paterson, not Passaic.

But I’m confident if he is going to haunt any place it will be Passaic, since fate seemed to drag him back there again and again while he was still alive.

No doubt, he would still recognize the place since so little has changed there since he left it for the last time in 1985.

Joe's from 1980s

Joe’s, the old man's Polish bar on the corner is gone. But the Polish grocery store across the street from it still exists, a place Jimmy and I frequented, thought Jimmy almost always managed to get the last of the plums before I did.

We kept calling the proprietor “an old man.”

“He’s not old,” Jimmy once told me. “He only looks old because he’s always drunk.”

Polish store 2020

Polish store 1980s

The legendary Quick Chek in Garfield to which Jimmy was constantly begging to get rides to is long gone. So it the bakery where he would get his coffee and buttered roll each morning – though the bagel shop located in that same strip mall would likely suffice or even the Dunkin Donut.

The Fotomat booth where we both worked vanished as soon a digital camera were invented, and even its mark in the parking lot has been paved over, a mere memory.

The health food store we're Jimmy and I both went frequently was gone even before Jimmy a abandoned Passaic for the last time after Mary, the proprietor, came down with cancer.

 the laundromat where we both did laundry is still there although at least three times its original size. The self-service car wash is still the busiest business there on sunny days.

Holy Rosary Church is still there but they have installed a massive statue of Pope John Paul II over its front doors more than a little shocking.

But the ever flowing Passaic River and the old bridge across it still exist, a bridge more than a century old, rebuilt while we lived near it, and rebuilt again since – looks exactly the same.

Pure Foods, the diner where Jimmy and Garrick used to go regularly for breakfast and read the Times is still there but it's no longer Pure Foods and sometimes isn't even open for business.

The post office near the railway bridge on Passaic Street in Garfield is no longer post office but the Polish five-and-dime is still there operating as it always had its windows filled with buttons and thread.

But for the most part, very little has changed from the day any of us moved in in the early 70s. It is the same gray little world with the same unchanged landscape that I dream of at times when I need to return there.

Loretta Swits’ house of course is gone, knocked down and turned into a parking lot after her father died.  But the crumbling garages that bordered the carport still exist, three of them looking out onto the street and a host more lining one wall of that enclosure.

The doorway from the apartment at 86 Passaic Street that steps out into the carport looks exactly the same now as it did then as if we could expect Jimmy to step in or out at any moment,  each of us expecting to hear him call out asking for a ride to the Quick Chek or to the library or to some other destination that he needs to reach urgently.

So, long after Jimmy’s trailer is demolished in that far off northwestern part of the state, the enclave of Passaic remains. So, I expect that if I want to go mourn Jimmy or to embrace his ghost I will have to return to Passaic just as he has so many times before both of us fated to walk those streets in our dreams or perhaps in our afterlife.

A trailer of his own

Sunday, February 2, 2020

 Jimmy may always have been consumed with the idea of living in a trailer or it may have been the next best plan after all the other machinations failed to get land.

Early the 1970s -- right after Frank and I had our car crash -- Jimmy started making plans for what Frank would call Garleyville.

Like most hippies at the time, we were infatuated with the idea of getting back to the land, that old Woodstock illusion that almost didn't pan out for anybody.

We took a number of trips in search of land and the most successful of these was to a site for upstate New York near the Canadian border a farm that had more than a hundred acres. It had woods and it was off a dirt road and near where a lot of other hippies were doing their thing including a group that was making a geodesic dome out of beer cans, one six pack at a time.

“All we need is a running stream with a waterfall 6 ft high or more,” Jimmy kept telling us then. “We can attach a generator and we'll all have power.”

The theory was to use the money that Frank was going to get from his lawsuit after our car crash in April 1972 to either put the down payment on the land or buy it outright.

“The land, Ginger,” Frank said on one of our tapes sent to her during her vacation to San Francisco that summer. “We're going to get the land.”

Jimmy figured if we all chipped in with the payments and maintenance, we could all get our little piece. But we would have our own separate little corners where we could reside by ourselves or with the chosen companion.

While Frank envisioned a communal living situation, Jimmy made it clear that he wanted no part of the rest of us when he wanted his privacy.

But Jimmy did not exclude anybody from the plan, even allowing Ralph to get in on the scheme, after having excluded him from the Nova Scotia trip the previous summer.

This trip happened when Ginger was already on the west coast and so these were plans Jimmy was making in her absence. While we were driving on the dirt road to look at the property, Jimmy – who happened to be driving – hit a bird, which clung to the front grill when we stopped.

It was bad omen, and Jimmy knew it.

“Hey, don’t tell Ginger about this,” he told us.

I think he suspected that these plans would never come to fruition.  Like all communes of that time, personalities and other issues often got in the way, in particular issues like finance. And while we all toyed with the idea of getting land, it soon became clear that Frank was not going to be the bank from whom we drew the deposit.

0Frank got a $10,000 settlement and then squandered it on a recording session for a demo to help bolster a career as a singer. It was almost a complete rip-off from the start and the tapes came out horribly inadequate – even though Jimmy helped sing backup on some of the songs.

The scam artist who was a friend of Frank's girlfriend Rona at the time took off with the $10,000 leaving Frank with a handful of cassettes and a cassette tape recorder to play them on.

We often joked and said how much we admired the $10,000 tape recorder Frank would bring to the Red Baron to record the band.

But I think Jimmy foresaw all this far earlier. In 1973, when he broke up with Ginger (she moved out of the Pine Street apartment and quit her job at Madison’s book store), Jimmy formulated an alternative plan for a mini more personal Garleyville, and insisted on me accompany him to a trailer dealer on Route 22 in Union. He still had the Datsun he later sold to Bob Warren.

I remember how enthralled he was with what he saw, claiming a trailer had everything he could ever want.

This was a few years before our mutual hero, James Garner would start in a TV series that had its main character living in a rusty trailer.

Jimmy, however, did not get the chance to finance the purchase. He lost his job, and moved from Montclair to an apartment in Passaic, he would share with Garrick. I moved into the same complex of cold water flats a short time later, fulfilling my wish to live in a make-shift artist community.

Jimmy briefly found a job with Outwater Plastics driving a delivery van. When he lost that job and could not pay the rent, Stella evicted him. He went to live with his father in West Paterson – which lasted a week – then snuck back to live with Garrick in Passaic again. He moved to Ginger’s house for a time, and when that didn’t work out, returned to Passaic to live with me.

He left Passaic for the last time in 1985 and moved in with Richie Haas at Lake Hopatcong. This was his Nirvana.

It should have lasted forever and perhaps would have except that Richie Haas' mother decided that one she wanted to move back in and later supposedly wanted to sell the place.

This left Jimmy homeless again and he briefly stayed at his mother's apartment in Verona before finding better accommodations near to where he worked at the library in Mount Arlington.

This was an old house he sometimes considered haunted, but it did fit his needs since he could walk to the local coffee shop and to the library where he worked. He did have a car which he used rarely.  I remember him speeding down the highway to one of the local malls in a blue green Saturn.

When he lost his job at the library he had just enough money to actually buy a trailer -- not the great trailers that we looked at long before on Route 22 but a Cheesy one that looked a lot like the James Garner version from the TV show.

Still Jimmy found a place where he could live that strongly resembled that lands that we all wanted to buy back when we were young men.  and he managed to get the isolation he craved, able to tell people not to bother him he's busy and yet still feel like he was part of that community we all had in our heads.

“It's the land, Ginger! We're going to get the land!”

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.