"Love Letter to Jimmy Jim"
by
Timothy Stillman
Hi Jimmy Jim,
Blithe we were, and young, Jimmy Jim. Fall cool cider bite around us, Jimmy Jim. Running our special love high ways through the town with tin cans anchoring our dreams. Yours of tomorrow. Me of fettle yesterdays. Come with me, return with me when no boy was alone and every day was a song. Sing my heart, Jimmy Jim, and let me recall one fall day when I fell for you and fell the rest of my life, Jimmy Jim. Catch the sunny smile rhythm of those days when I climbed on the stone fence in my back yard of weeds and crescent of grass summer gone and browning beautifully. Still me and find me at the top of the stone fence and you on the other side looking up in the claret of the sun, known vintage that you made just for me. Catch me in the brown wind, the glow sun, the season of plenty, when there were streets of blue to cast down before us in our spectral ghost stories.
And our happy top of roof town where you could breathe deeply and rejoice in multiply cries. All helloing down in the great parachutes where a hand reaches out to morning glories and soft heliotropes and a dimension or two of time warp is planned deep in the heart that grows like tumbleweed in the cowboy movies at the Capitol Theater on Saturday afternoons. Make nothing after Jimmy Jim have happened. Make skinned knees and sinking into the off blue of the municipal swimming pool tickets to ride other horses that clomped so stately in dream and fancy. And you beside me, Jimmy Jim, running faster than I could. Running with alacrity and the speed of cold winds from the north side of town where the windows rang sweet and berries could be picked straight from invisible air. Come the town and dive in the pool and find the vast Atlantis murky and wavery and waiting just for us.
You beside snow white me, you bronze Coppertone without need of artificial aid. The air you could drink and the air that lit the bonanzas in our hearts that dazed with crinkle smile that wet the side of the heather that was growing just beyond our vision, just down the street. Where the rivers brocaded and tapestried and tap danced. When there was more than vision. There was purpose behind it. And poetry in the making where love sang its song of innocence and justice. And it was just so good being in that town with you Jimmy Jim. Where there was no betrayal and no ruse and no lies. Only you and what you spent your coins on when it came to Moon Pies and deflection, when it came to DC comics for me and Marvel for you, and trading bright snap pop colors back and forth on pages that held men who were super powered for cleansing crime from Gothams and River Cities all in our domain. All in the clasp of our eyeballs. That would seem sufficient.
And take the town--the film developing store, the drug stores where we looked at paperbacks and magazines and inhaled the cold medicinal aroma, the news stand where we bought our comics, the houses we ran to and ran past and ditched the lawns and landed on our feet and our elbows and our knees. Where there was the moving hand that was your hand of conjure and conquer and you conquered me, Jimmy Jim. You with your sky blue shirt and your sea blue dreams and your eyes that found clouds in Autumn skies and scanned them with your bejeweled imagination. Where there were harvests and we ran the early Morning grid of streets all sleepy still. All illusion and you and me in a soap bubble of possibilities. You and me before the north winds that we ran to with a certain string of granteds given. With the home movies developed at the film store, and played on the Castle film projector hot and small and wheezing and crackling, but working nonetheless, and laughing our joists and our wrestlings there on jerky film summer lawns with the falling down white picket fence across from us. Ruffle of lace wood at the bottom of the camera frame.
Come home to Dungan's Dinette for an early morning breakfast, skip the curls and breast the waves of Saturday morning, Saturday different than any other day of the week. Us in our zip up jackets and our ears bouncing off the transom of offices that we plugged into in our dreams and imagined us some day far away men and important businesses to run and never forgetting yesterday, merging it all somehow in one fine concoction. Here, Jimmy Jim, feel my heart and hear it thumping. Here, Jimmy Jim, tell me I'm young again and you are too and we never shall part any more than the Red Sea ever really parted. Or your long hair or mine. And discoveries were pennies of days thrust out before us, rusty and rustic and small town and detailed into overseeings by the league masters of the universe which of course would be us. Run into tomorrow and find tomorrow friendly and furry and playful.
Catch me by Speed's TV repair store and run with me up to Lafonte's drug store and we shall cast our nets wide and work in our tomes that were written on our flesh and my secret love for you and all that you stood for, graceful and honest and foursquare and with a clarity of wisdom that never backfired on me. You said things that were meant. You never dissembled. You never deserted. And we ran in the wings of wonder of coming winter through the corridors of fears that we loved like chocolate ice cream on a hot summer's stifle night. And we longed to take the very top of the tallest building down town, a hotel for old folks, and we would in our reality climb up to it on steps and steps of empty air. We would hold our hands up there on the flat tarred roof and we would implore the heavens to stop being so mean. We would wish everyone to be children again. We would wish paraffin bottles of grape juice on everyone, rain them down like soft summer in the last of November.
Give heart and home a name and make the name real. And we walked to the high school where we would be going next year. We counted houses and we took snap shots with our minds of them and imagined growing and glimmering TV screens in the darkened living rooms of flickering shadows off the damp dark porches. We would whistle up witches to take the people inside watching those TV screens and give them scream after scream miracle. We would make everything and everyone puppy dog friendly and as fresh and as new as we were. We were in love, Jimmy Jim. Me with you. And you with the world you were always running to. You were my morning windows through which I watched the day that was you as well. You were Christmas to me, Jimmy Jim, and warm arms I imagined round me. You were the streets of tomorrow you were rushing down while I still foolishly believed you were running down the streets of today with me. Cold wind and cold frost and tomorrow one day closer to winter break and how I wanted to hold your hand Jimmy Jim and pledge my troth. And the day of winter that we trundled out of our beds to see this morning of Saturday which was a whole different animal lurking powerful and fragile and free in the midst of those other days of school and homework and church and boredom.
You made Saturday for me, Jimmy Jim, as we rushed past windows where were people hiding in. Getting close to their TVs, their newspapers, their books, and all wishing to be us as we whooshed past the fire station with its spiffy fresh red fire truck and its brick building that housed the famed firepole you and I so longed to slide down some glimmer day. And the sun was up now and red as red ink spilling over everything. You were my life, Jimmy Jim. Each morning I prayed to you and each night I said I loved you, to my empty small bed that had only me in it. Turn away tomorrow, it does not deserve to come, and make me with Jimmy Jim dashing through the dots of Morse code that got us into the theater without having to pay the dime required. But Jimmy Jim like the 4-D Man, melting through wood and brick and steel. And always on the point of a magical incantation of an answer that was fleet of thought and had to do with mathematics that he understood and which he planned to use to open the door to fantasy.
And Jimmy Jim to the hill outside of town, past October, still beating and fluttering candle to tomorrow that would be my childhood pillow that I nestled down into and dreamed and said my prayers to the lonely god for lonely boys who were to never be as lonely as I was, especially around Jimmy Jim. Who knew where the seas fell off the edge of the flat world. Who knew where there would be monsters. Who I imagined making love to in all manner of ways before I knew what love was. Now that I know what love is, I know love is a lie. But then it was a sweet deception that was more than the thing itself. The cream of the jest. When the cream was milky and thick and full bodied and was more than anything else in the world. Because it hadn't been told it was meant to be so much smaller, which meant it was nothing at all. But atoms danced in the wind as we ran through its zephyrs to the top of the brown grass hill. And we surveyed master of the world spyglass to our eyes as our air ship floated in majesty and grandeur all the splendid whorls of our fingers and the world spread about us in glittering domain.
Climb the hill with me again, Jimmy Jim. And put your strong kind arms around me for I am sore afraid. Let me tell you of gods I made from you and how I cast anyone who came after you. thus, out of your image. Turn the bars of soap to the wall and tell the bathtub it's not to breathe a word of anything I am about to say--and I said it all in my high pitch whisper of a voice. And I loved the way the walking happened. And I loved the precision of clouds that were mountebanks of the blue and then the gray and then the grayer still and long later blue slowly gradually again, I loved the way they moved their shadows over us. I loved the houses and the different architecture and the colors--chocolate and with eaves, red and with curlicues and porticoes, attics of dark and cold and thin and small and low ceiling where boys looked out as we darted passed, and considered how lucky I was to be with the great Jimmy Jim, the only one of his kind, the only friend a guy would ever want to have, and so I would never ever in my life be lonely, because he would be my side. Sleepy Jimmy Jim now on the hill of November morning when the day is beginning to Saturday mourn its cud. When the day stretches out to long infinity and into melancholy late afternoon when the shadows get all mixed up and can't tell their sources, when they tangle in tears wept alone. Because Jimmy Jim would have never understood. Though I always pretended that he would.
Jimmy Jim of jam and doors and screens on windows and a voice across the universe waking me at crack of dawn Saturday and us dressed in ourselves and tickling the street, full run, full tilt, down the middle, with our tennis shoes. And muscles and phones in our stomachs that were always ringing. That were mettle urging. That was the need to get into life and hear an old woman down the distance calling in front of her white box little square home, "Pepe, come in here right now, Pepe I mean it." And her voice trembling a little. The day taken Pepe? The day taken into its center never to let him come back? Only memory and memory lags and laughs and torments the days to come for all time? Then the small terrier barks from around the brown dead bush to the side of her little lawn, and runs to her and she scoops him up and holds him to her chest and she loves on him and she smiles that kind of secret smile that says be with me and I will never be afraid. I shall hold you bundled to me in the cradle that is me and I shall tell you things I never told another soul because you're the one for me and I would fall down dead if you ever went away.
And Jimmy Jim, fall leaves whisking past her, the stooped shrunken old woman in the house coat and blue fuzzy mules as she takes her dream source into her house, and we laugh into the wind because the wind is a good thing. Because, we thought then, the wind takes, but it gives back in time, and that the wind was a good thing. It develops devotion. It summons houses to gather close round it. To tell them stories that have nothing to do with the First Methodist Church a few blocks down from that woman's house. That has nothing to do with the brown brick high school a few blocks in the other direction. That has nothing to do with the Popular Library edition of "War of the Worlds" by H. G. Wells, that I will buy this afternoon at Evan's Rexall Drug Store, and read in one huge scared delighted gulp in my bedroom/sunroom that Saturday night after Jimmy Jim has gone home across the street from me.
It has nothing to do with the houses in which we live. Or the dreams of witches cast from TV sets into the black and white blur of the watchers tilting time and trying to get into an angle of a cross section of a detective show or of "Thriller" or "Way Out" and live there forever more because a good scare, a good deduction by one of Robert Taylor's detectives is worth more than a mile of news print of who died and who lives to die another day.
It has nothing to do with the Dairy Queen and its blizzard of frosty on deliciously tongue dripping hot July afternoons, or with the bus station in the run down part of town two doors down from the film developing store; the bus station where people leave and then come back again, or leave and get stuck somewhere and never come back again as long as they live. It has nothing to do with Jimmy Jim's eyes blazing stormy sky when he is mad, or the car dealership with its flag pinnacles of yellow and blue and green snapping their salutes over and again in the brisk military martial air. It has everything to do with how we perceive all of this. Bundles of life getting by. Bundles of life trying to be happy. Bundles of Jimmy Jim and me done up in our nice neat boy packages come to town to save the day.
And to sit on our brown hill and cast the runes and look at the sky and turn our pivoting eyes round and round it and making our heads swim with the hot chocolate memories of breakfast at the little Dungan's restaurant this morning there in all that hot air and hotter grilles behind the counter and us sweating out our lives on those red stools. While the adults, so called, chattered around us about nothing at all and thought it was everything there was to know. While Jimmy looked at me, nodded, as he picked up his cup, and smiled to me. And we knew. Knowing nothing, we knew everything. But we were far more benevolent about it.
Jimmy Jim with his hail of friends of which I was one. Jimmy Jim who let me have all Saturday morning with him, before he went to see his other buddies that afternoon, then dropping by my house for a while in the evening, all Saturday soaked and cleansed of memory and time and human form, such a proud animal he was. So stately and full of ease. Having played round the grain bins that afternoon with his friends and entangling himself in that farm smell of silos too, and fields they ran. Being the boy I never was. Pieces of grain on his clothes. In his hair. And he could talk about endlessness and all the boy things I've long forgotten. He could get into your soul and walk around in it, and know how to do everything you could not do at all. You would look at him angled on the couch, legs crossed, at his ease, or pitching a baseball in a summer yard against the side of his house or sometimes to me, though mostly to his friends who were far better coordinated. And you would think--that's it. That's as perfect as it can be. That's all she wrote. Enough said for the human race. It has evolved to Jimmy Jim and it can never possibly get any better than him. Oh Jimmy Jim do you remember me? No, no reason to. No reason to remember when you have yourself and others have Jimmy Jim.
You were my carol. My wide wintry streets. You were snow in happy lark December when the freezing dark got close and friendly and comfortable and not scary. You started my heart working when I woke in the morning. You eased me into dreams at night when I most unwillingly fell asleep. You were the October and November hill that was our right, our land, our territory. You were my Boston bulldog when he lived and was so happy to be loved by me even. And you were my Boston bulldog when the doctor had to put him to sleep. You stuck by me then and you let me cry in front of you. You didn't hold me. Boys just didn't do that, especially not then. You were respectful of my sadness. And somehow or other, Jimmy Jim, I forgot to thank you. So right now, I try to make up for that, and I thank you. And this is all by way of telling you I loved you deeply and truly and real before I knew what love is and therefore that love was bigger and shinier and grander and more encompassing and richer and truer, because I was stupid and didn't know it could never exist, and can never be yours, not even yours, Jimmy Jim, because you were like Burt Lancaster in that you were heroic and wise and thoughtful and far larger than life, so grand and more than that not the biggest movie screen in the whole world could ever hold him or you, not if a million movie screens were sewn together and tried their very hardest.
You are my heart, Jimmy Jim. You are my home town. You are the barber shop where I was forced to go every Saturday afternoon for my weekly scalping, a torture you were never made to go through, where I sat in a metal chair and read "Sgt. Rock" comics which I hated, but those were the only comics the barber shop had, so it was either that or "Guns and Ammo," and I had to do something to get my mind off the razor to come. And if I am sad sometimes, it is a sweet melancholy, Jimmy Jim. It is touching home and going back for a visit in mind at least. I run through the streets, not as well as I once did. I look at the buildings much the same as they were, but now with different businesses inside. I run through our old neighborhood and find the houses well kept and really to be better looking than they were when they held us in their cocoons. I rush through the day of Fall and I count the cars and I see the people in them, many cars, big town now, but still small enough, though frenetic, easy to adjust to it though if I had to. How do those contemporaries of ours who still live there, though, stand it, knowing it's mostly gone from them into fall leaves that they have too much propriety to jump into any more?
I'll see you in my dreams, Jimmy Jim. I'll pray to you each morning, and say your name each night right before I unwillingly go to sleep. I'll see you in the high school gym where you were a wizard in all those shadows with a basketball, and I'll see you with me eating our Moon Pies at the swimming pool. And I'll run to the bus station of a midnight moon with its street lamp gleaming and buzzing with summer moths and flies and mosquitoes, and I'll wait by the side of the old building that once was the bus station but now is up for sale, all the bus station seats and ticket window and the smell and sound of far away cleared out, leaving an empty hollow gourd of a room. And I shall wait for some princely bus to arrive some time soon, and you will get off. Boy Jimmy Jim. And boy me. And we will put our arms around each other for the first time ever. And you will say you are sorry my Boston bulldog died. And this time I shall cry on your shoulder. And you shall cry on mine. For by now, we both have need and endless amounts of cause.
And we shall run home in midnight, Jimmy Jim, and you shall run faster than me. And I shall stand and watch you. And think you are perfect. There can be no better. Evolution stopped with you for it had no more need to grow. And then I shall run while you pause to let me catch up. So this is my love letter to you. To tell you that, though you forgot, I never did, and am keeping the candle in the night window burning for you. And if I might be so bold, for me too.
Love,
Barry
- W. College
Willoughby or Homewood (either one is my true address, Jimmy Jim, and always has been)
The End