The Story of Jimmy Gray by Gerald Coleman

 This lonesome dance of the senses became dreaming and dreaming proxy doing. I dreamed I was e. e. cummings. I dreamed I was a bird on a bough. I dreamed there was a wasteland of islands and rivers, and I went to it over a deep ocean.

It struck me the land was unreal, yet I contented myself with what was there. With me was something like a spirit or the oldest man ever lived, who dreamed with me, which made him as real as anything else. He said he was Nanabush—Son of the West Wind, Grandson of the Moon. 

He said my name was Me or my name was George Washington. He bought smoke for us to breathe. When we exhaled, we made Stories. Each breath a memory, each pull a scene, every loop a dream, like on a great river.

He told a story of a Spirit asleep like me in a place not him, who dreamed of ceremonies and drumming and charms, waterfalls and stars on fire.

He said, “Me, it was dark even so. It exists nothing only He, The Great Spirit. Dreamed up the Grand Fathers and Mother Moon.”

His story took a long time. The earth was covered with water, a tortoise raised its back to become land, a tree grew, out of its roots a sprout bore the first man and woman.

 When he stopped, he gave me the pipe: “Tell ‘Story of Me’ to find who Me is. Begin where you remember on the Flowing River.”

I remembered nothing. I blew puffs into the gulf to find a thread into my story. When I went to the Flowing River I told “The Story of Me”—as foreign as someone else’s life told in a history book.

My words revealed that at eighteen I was reunited with the love of my life, Ms. Caprice DiMaggio, after a three-year absence for approximately a month of blissful co-existence. Of our time together, I could report few details. I understood there was a lot of necking during those weeks, but this was probably more deduced in mind than remembered from life.

 What happened next was as swift a descent into my present unfortunate state as I could have imagined. I came to understand Caprice had a girlfriend, Harriet, who was my friend Raymond Hacket’s sister. There was reason to support, after I was verbally abused and dumped by My Angel Caprice, Harriet co-opted me for her boyfriend like one acquires a hamster from a pet store.

“You’re your own worst enemy, Jimmy Gray,” Harriet said.

It was early fall. It was 1965 and I was Jimmy Gray. Pope Paul VI had just celebrated Mass in Yankee Stadium. U. S. Marines repelled an attack by Viet Cong forces at Da Nang Airport. Precisely three hundred years previously, over a hundred Lenape Human Beings were slaughtered by Dutch soldiers

She relied on clichés and canards to pinpoint my flaws. Sometimes I thought she was talking about herself, she had it down in such analytic detail. She felt she was doing me a favor as my girlfriend to chip away, that I was ore to be smelted into something serviceable, that this was what made her my girlfriend.

“You do everything by the seat of your pants, you know?”

Yes, I knew.

“You’re a disaster waiting to happen.”

She told me why. It was because I didn’t write down things I needed to remember. I treated these boilerplate bromides as backhand validations.

I can’t find my wallet.

“If it had teeth it would bite you!”

If my wallet had teeth, what? Nothing. A wallet with teeth would be as unlikely to bite me as a glass of water with teeth. I took these remarks as hall passes to avoid my real problems, which I preferred to keep to myself. But when she said these things, her face, where her cheeks and eyes met, got compressed and wrinkly like she was squinting into the sun. For some reason, even though it made her look like a talking weasel, and I knew she was trying to be serious, I could spin her around until she became hysterical laughing. Of course, I never did.

“Jimmy Gray, do what you believe, not what others want,” she said as her glasses hopped up her nose.

 She wore glasses. Very contemporary with large black frames. Sometimes Harriet’s glasses made me want to be extra nice. It wasn’t a pity thing. Yes, I wanted to make up for the glasses, which, let’s face it, weren’t that attractive. They made me want to see beyond banging my cheek bone into her frames or figuring out where my nose went when I kissed her. On the other hand, her eyes looking out, magnified behind the lenses, had a positive effect because she had really nice eyes. Like a pair of blue gourami swimming around in two little fishbowls.

The sexiest thing was, she’d kiss me with her glasses on, mostly, but if she took them off, if she put them on a picnic blanket or into her pocket— or let them drop—I’d get a lump in my throat I’d have forever

A ghostly Black and White Seagull, flapped-out from a roundtrip to the Caribbean with the family, squatted with its poor hollow wings aching on a streetlamp outside the Sunset Park Pool on Forty-Fourth Street. It was an unnaturally hot Indian Summer Saturday. Harriet Hacket and I banked under the gull on our bikes heading for a midday swim, then down to Shore Road to relax on the heights where we might find a breeze with some autumn in it.

Three hours later, we peddled with rolled towels and wet bathing suits under our seats across Fourth Avenue toward the warehouses and docks along the Brooklyn waterfront.

Breukelen: The Broken Land, Dutch. Lenapehoking: Land of The Common People, Lenape.

Brownstones with stone stairs like miniature, inner-city Aztec temples stood shoulder to shoulder rowhouse style to share laughter, nightmares, and screams of love and anger. On top of the stoops were concrete lion planters with a geranium apiece that smelled like cat pee, depending on the season, with a family in the basement with views of trash cans. Stoep: Stoop, Dutch. Alewihaonink: Porch, Lenape.

I scanned a car window with Me in it as we waited at an intersection. It was Jimmy Gray. We peddled into the canopied darkness of Colonial Road. I wheeled next to her.

 I stood on the pedals of my stripped-down English Racer. Harriet rode a big, red Schwinn—hard to move, fat tires, broad handlebars with an oddly small, silver ringer she worked brrrring, brrrring with her thumb. She angled in front of me, eyes over her shoulder, and wiggled her butt. We were confined and connected to each other in the gears, the distances between, the breathing, and the words of “The Story of Me.” Harriet Hackett and Jimmy Gray in space and time down the sloping heights toward a street we could never reach, caught up in The Paradox of Zeno’s Arrow, toward the Flatlands of Brooklyn and Coney Island.

There was more sky.

Konijnen Eiland: Coney Island. Dutch. Menateyunk Sekaxkte Chemamtak: Isle of Rabbits. Lenape.

 A suspension of narrative rapport occurred while Harriet and I spun our wheels between Ninety-fifth Street and the retreating universe. Nothing was possible, not even motion, until there was the distinct pong of smoldering herbs—hemp or sage. Nothing could be gleaned nor spoken of my story, nor could I tell it, until Nanabush came into the moment.

“The arrow of ‘Story of Me’ is stuck,” he said. He blew a beam of smoke into the scene.    I forgot, or forget, or will forget I was telling my story to Nanabush across the Ever-cycling River. My story was out of tense. Was I telling it in the present about the past? Or in the past explaining to my present self what already happened? Or was I inventing a story to become Me at some future date?

The two figments of my story, Harriet and I, were lost in every relative respect. “Why is that?” Nanabush wished to know. “Why Zeno arrow can’t hit target?”

I told him Zeno’s arrow can never hit its target, because “it has to go halfway, then halfway again, and again … forever.”

We applied the pipe to this problem. We sat with foreheads pressed against each other until Nanabush’s words came out in foggy trails, word-by-word, in this order: “Reason story go halfway, Zeno think too much. Arrow lack courage waiting in air for time to catch up or distance slide back. Either way. Launch words. Okay. Link with Grandmother Moon and Father Sun, finish Story of Me

The Schwinn and the English Racer parted and rejoined many times in the lull of the afternoon. We found a bench in the shade of a sycamore shed of brown bark down to the green under-skin with its leaves rattling at the breeze. The sidewalk was free of mothers pushing strollers, kids, and lost souls, so I put my arm around her to listen to the tree, just in case. I felt like holding her. Maybe she would take her glasses off. Maple seeds twirled in the gaps between the breezes above our heads, each on their course along the chain of life with a one-in-a-million hope at becoming half a sapling. Harriet was sullen, projecting the magic of passive aggression over the iron fence upon the choppy blackness of The Narrows’ waters. It was the emptiest of the faces she had available. She trained a wide un-focus on the clouds. Perhaps it was something I did or said or was.

 I plucked a poly-nose from the air to alter the mazy mood, broke it in half, peeled it at the seed head, and licked the sticky milk to adhere to the tip of my nose.

“And besides,” she said, softening in mid-thought from her bad place

“And besides what?”

“Just besides.”

She turned to me, saw my face waiting to hear what she had to say.

“You have a polynose on your nose,” she said like breaking news

 “It must have fallen on my face from the sky or a Maple Tree.”

No one stayed angry with a person wearing a poly-nose.

 She snorted but smiled her smile and turned her left hand inward to finger my shoulder, like a woman playing a cello, as we looked over the fence into the harbor. And we were happy together among the Maple Trees’ spinning children.

A bunch of guys came our way in studied hostility along the sidewalk. It was getting dark. They cruised with quirky moves in identical black outfits. I knew not to do or say anything. I could tell, the way you can tell, they were from somewhere else. Red Hook or Bensonhurst. One sat down next to Harriet. He didn’t say much either. Three others hung against the iron fence in stern nonchalance

 “Nice nose,” the guy said.

 My chances for a tactical bluff were none. “How much ya got on ya? I’m taking a survey,” he said, leaning over her. I shrugged. The guy smiled. The poly nose unhinged.

“Nice boy like you on a bench with Ginger here must have a few bucks,” he said. He put his hand on her knee. I hated her fat, chubby knees. How she closed her eyes. How she persisted, latent on the bench, trying not to breathe. How I was in charge of her and her knee

 “How about your skanky friend here? What’s she got?”

He squeezed her knee, looping his fingers up the inside of her thigh looking into my eyes. Smiling. I had a left jab my father taught me. He only had a left jab and that’s all I had. There wasn’t anything to think about, so I stood up. What with Harriet, her thigh, and the skank business, I cut a left jab at his face he ducked under. It was more a gesture than a punch. His smile grew tight around the hinges. He blocked another obvious left, then threw round-house combos I slid between. He closed in, grappling, punching my ears and ribs, a mix of boxing and street jujitsu. We began a painful dance. He raised his knee into my nuts several times, which I rode like a hobby horse. We settled into grunting choke holds and standing head locks, his greasy hair in my face, and tripping moves to leverage the other over. I considered the ironies of what we were doing and the sharp stink of his black shirt. We gazed into each other’s eyes as we bounced off parked cars and park benches with our heads and shoulders in each other’s arms. I saw for a split moment what looked like an unfocused Man-in-the-Moon float in front of my face. I launched my previously unavailing right fist into the moon

There was something on his face he hadn’t previously noticed. He stumbled back, probed his nose. Blood came tripping red between his fingers. Slow crimson dots splattered the street like a Jackson Pollack painting on the sidewalk. The others were on me before I could apologize. I hit the concrete. What I lacked as a fighter, I made up for taking a beating. I sang a song to myself to change the tone and interpretation of my situation. I sang a song the family used to sing when we were happy and us kids bounced in the back seat of the car. I used the song trick to distract me getting stitches or wringing out leg cramps.

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me. Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee.

Well into it, one of them decided stomps on my head were appropriate, which compressed my face into the pavement composed of sandstone, clay, gypsum, and little, almost translucent yellow and white river stones. Folding into a warm place under the concrete street, I completed the last phrase.

Sounds of the rude world, heard in the day, Lull’d by the moonlight have all pass’d away.

 I thought I heard Moon Face singing and Harriet screaming or all of us were screaming, until nothing was but the moving away into the sidewalk, expanding into the elemental world. A guy stuck a knife into my left lung through my back ribs, like slipping a plug into a socket.       Sleepy and sweet. Polynoses spun. Harriet’s glasses came off. It tasted warm and sleepy like my mother’s milk. Nebula sweet.

I was at the end. I tried to find more things to say. Someone moved forward to cup the back of my head.

Nanabush blew smoke rings into the dénouement of The Story of Me

“Go Milky Way?” he asked. “Be star. Or want try person again? Find who you are next. Okay? This one not so good.”

“Christians don’t believe in spirits reincarnating nor becoming stars,” I said.

“Don’t believe in Nanabush neither. Want come back two people? No problem for you.”

“One, thanks. Will I remember Me?”

“You need tell story where river flows in circle with the next you to remember Me. No problem for you.”

“Who was Me, anyway? Was Me Jimmy Gray?”

“If you want. You two seem hit it off. Want come back girl? Take your time. Not too long okay?” “Can I still be a star? In the Milky Way?”

“What the people believe is true,” he said. “You find out soon enough.”

Nanabush drew a celestial hit from his pipe that sent embers to his eyes. He sat, crisscrossed, sparkling in the dark.

My eyes opened to a bank of milky florescent lights. The Story of Me was over.

I said “Hello” to a person who hurried away as Jimmy Gray began to reboot. Soon, others came. A woman asked, “Who is President”

“Georgie Washington.”

“What’s your name?”

“Me! Or Jimmy Gray. Either/or,” I said and people laughed.

Saigon had recently fallen to the People’s Army of Vietnam and Secretariat won The Kentucky Derby. The Common People had been removed from the Lenapeoking to Oklahoma by United States soldiers for many years.

Soon, I was reintroduced to my parents, some friends, and a woman who said she loved me truly, times two, kisses squared. I was reintroduced to my parents several times over the next months. My friends were not that interesting. The woman would need some getting used to, if ever. I stared out the window into the night at The Milky Way.

My memories began then. Both forward and backward in time at Twenty-Eight years old. I headed into the future and into the past, to enlighten the gaps, to bridge the missing years at the dawn of “The Story of Jimmy Gray,” both a tick ahead and a tock behind myself

Tik-tock: Passage of time. Dutch. Petawsienk: At this time of our lives. Lenape. And never for the rest of my life did I ever get it right.

Gerald Coleman

Image: A whirl of clocks moving back in time from Pixabay.com