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!”