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.