The Story of Jimmy Gray by Gerry Coleman

“What the people believe is true.”
—Nanabush, Son of the West Wind, Grandson of the Moon

I was a story I told myself.

My body required mechanical help with inputs and outputs, causes and effects—the purpose of one function needed to be fitted to the function of a higher purpose, from swerve of nerve to bend of bone, synapse to neuron across the junctions electric.

Body shifts, reflex tests, muscle pulls were performed. Others asked questions neither understood nor answerable:

“Who is President?”

“One plus one is …?”

“What’s your name?”

As my broken brain stitched itself together without me, my emerging mind sniffed like a timid mouse among the gears and hydraulics for hints. I performed inventories: self-awareness—check; internal language mechanisms—check; free will—none; movement—none; operational contact with eye lids, mouth, arms, legs, hands, thirst, time, hunger, ice hockey, erotic desire, sun sets and rises, phases of the moon—negative.

What was my name?

Yet, a slip stream of reciprocity existed between me and the world. Although I could not touch, sometimes I could feel my fingers caressed. While I could not cry out, I noticed the borders between silence and sound, distinguished melodies from the riled waves in the air of someone passing by, the way fronds of a fern might bend to a breath of wind.

This lonesome dance of the senses became dreaming and dreaming proxy doing. I dreamed I was Walt Whitman. I dreamed I was a bird turned to the breeze on a bough. I dreamed there was an island and I went to it over a deep ocean.

It struck me the island was not real, yet I contented myself with what was there. With me was an Indian Spirit or the oldest man ever lived, who dreamed with me, which made him as real as anything else. His name was Nanabush—Son of the West Wind, Grandson of the Moon. He said my name was Me or my name was George Washington.

He said, “Me, it was dark even so, okay, it exists no-thing only He, The Great Spirit, okay, dreamed up the Grandfathers and Mother Moon.”

He bought smoke for us to breathe. When we exhaled, we made Stories. Each breath a scene, each loop a memory, each turn a dream like a Great River. He told a story of a Spirit asleep like me in a place that was not him, who dreamed of ceremonies and drumming, waterfalls and stars, fire and war. He gave me the pipe.

“Tell “Story of Me” to find who you are.”

I told “The Story of Me”—as foreign as someone else’s life told in a history book.

As I spoke, my words revealed that at eighteen I was reunited with the love of my life, Ms. Caprice DiMaggio, after a two-year absence for approximately a month of blissful co-existence. Of our time together, I concluded few concrete details. I understood there was heavy necking during those weeks, but this was probably more deduced in mind than remembered from life. In those days, it was well known Catholic teens did a lot of deep kissing and dry humping like dogs until we got so good at it, we wanted to get married or shoot ourselves.     

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

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

It was early fall. It was 1964 and I was Jimmy Gray. I can’t find my wallet.

“If it had teeth it would bite,” she said.

She relied on clichés and canards to pinpoint my flaws. She felt she was doing me a favor as my girlfriend to chip away the rough edges, 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 things down. I treated these boilerplate bromides as backhand validations. 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. But for some reason, even though it made her look slightly sour like a talking weasel, and I knew she was being serious, I could spin her around until she became hysterical. 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. Sometimes Sissy’s glasses made me want to give a little extra. It wasn’t a pity thing exactly, but let’s face it, they 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 on me 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.

One hot Indian Summer afternoon, we rode our bikes to Shore Road to relax on the heights where we might find a breeze with autumn in it. It was hard work along Third Avenue towards the bay between cars and trucks and bumping into hills and traffic lights and bus stops. We wheeled down Seventy Fifth Street psychedelic through shadows of sun splotched leaves. Hawthorns and elms. Everywhere maple trees shed seeds with fuses set to go off next spring. Children called them poly noses, because they stuck them on their noses like clothes pins to look like parrots. I lurched at one but missed as we rode through a squadron helicoptering in the wind.

Brownstones with stone stairs like miniature, inner-city Aztec temples stood shoulder to shoulder rowhouse style to share laughter, nightmares, radio shows, and screams of love and anger through the walls.

Without warning, everything STOPPED. We were suddenly confined in the gears, the distances between, the breathing, and the words of The Story of Me. Sissy Dolan and Jimmy Gray in space and time down the sloping heights toward a street we would never reach like Zeno’s arrow toward the Flatlands and Coney Island or Achilles hopelessly chasing The Rabbit.

A suspension of narrative rapport occurred while we spun our wheels between Ninety-Fifth Street and the retreating universe. Everything stopped until there was the pong of smoldering herbs—hemp or sage. Nothing could be gleaned nor spoken by the characters in my story, nor could I tell it, until Nanabush came into the moment.

“The arrow of Story of Me is stuck,” he said.

I forgot 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 inventing a story to become me at some future date?

The two figments of my story, Sissy and I, were lost in space, time, and in every relative respect.

“Why is that?” Nanabush wanted to know. “Why Zeno arrow can’t hit target?”

I tried to explain why Zeno’s arrow can never hit its target, which he wasn’t buying. We applied the pipe to this problem. We sat with our heads pressed against each other inside a smothering cloud until Nanabush’s words came out in smoke trails, word-by-word, in this order: “Reason story go halfway, Zeno think too much. Arrow waiting in air for time catch up or distance slide back. Either way. Launch words. Okay. Link with Grandmother Moon and Father Sun, finish Story of Me.”              

Sissy’s Schwinn and my English Racer parted and rejoined several times in the lull of the afternoon. She was pumping to catch up as we got to Shore Road. We found a bench in the shade of a sycamore shed of bark down to its green under-skin, its leaves rattling at the breeze. The sidewalk was empty, so I put my arm around her to listen to the tree, just in case. Maybe she would take her glasses off.

I tried to tease the conversation away from her favorite subject—me. I asked her, “Know what the people who lived along this river a thousand years ago were called?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“The Lenape! They believed people and animals had souls that came back when they died. They checked out newborns for signs whether they were dead relatives or family pets.”

I made that part up.

“They roved up and down for haven among the cold cliffs. Under the freezing stars. Shucking mussels and oysters with the wolves howling. They spied the fires of other human beings along the bluffs and river’s palisades.”

I must have been to a museum in my recently obliterated past.

“Their villages were all along this river and the flatlands. Right on this ridge drums and pottery were found. And there were wolves and animals like bears not here anymore—souls included.”

“A likely story.” Her eyes were getting glassy.

Maple seeds twirled in the gaps between the breezes above our heads, each on its course along the chain of life with a one-in-a-million hope at becoming half a sapling. Sissy was sullen, projecting her wolf-like self over the iron fence upon the choppy blackness of The Narrows to experience once again the bitterness of the Lenape. She trained a wide un-focus on the clouds flying by.

I plucked a poly nose from the air, peeled it at the seed head, and licked it to the tip of my nose.

“And besides,” she said, softening, knowing she could always prevail once again through the magic of passive aggression if she wanted.

“Besides what?” I asked.

“Just besides.”

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

“You have a poly nose on your nose,” she said like it was breaking news.

“A what?”

“Yes, a poly nose, because it’s like a parrot’s nose not because it belongs on yours.”

“It must have fallen on my face from the sky or a maple tree.”

No one could stay angry with a person wearing a poly nose. She snorted but smiled, looked up with her moist, little vagina eyes lashing at me under her glasses and turned her left hand inward to finger my shoulder like a cello as we looked out over the fence into the river and the bay and we were happy together among the maple trees’ spinning children.             

A bunch of guys cruising head to toe in black came our way in slope shouldered belligerence. It was getting dark. I knew not to do or say anything. I could tell, the way you can tell, they were from somewhere else. Red Hook or South Brooklyn. One guy got into us, sat down next to Sissy. He didn’t say much either. Three others hung on the iron fence, their backs to the bay, hooding their eyes and rolling their heads around in studied nonchalance.

“Nice nose,” the guy said. My chances for a bluff were none.

“How much ya got on ya?  I’m taking a survey,” he said, leaning over Sissy.

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 chubby knees. How she persisted, latent on the bench, trying not to breathe. How I was in charge of her and her knees. He looped 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 much to think about. I stood up. What with Sissy’s 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 changed slightly 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 a few 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 jungle stink of his black shirt. He gazed into my eyes as we bounced off parked cars and park benches with our heads 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 plopping dots splattered the concrete like a Jackson Pollack 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. They kicked me with black Converse sneakers with white ovals on the ankles. I sang a song to myself to change the tone and interpretation of my situation, a song the family used to sing when we were happy together and the kids bounced in the back seat of the car. I used the song trick to distract me getting stitches or wringing out a leg cramp. It was my dad’s favorite.

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me.

Well into it, one of them decided stomps on my head were appropriate, which compressed my face into the sidewalk composed of sandstone, clay, gypsum, and almost translucent yellow and white river stones like folding into a warm place under the concrete street.

Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee.       

I thought I heard Moon Face singing and Sissy 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. It tasted sweet. Sleepy and sweet. Poly noses spun. Sissy’s glasses were off. It tasted warm and sleepy like my mother’s milk.

Nebula sweet.

I was at the end of The Story of Me. I tried to find things to say. Nothing doing. Someone moved forward to cup my head in her hands.           Nanabush blew a smoke ring into the resolution—The End—of my story.

“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 coming back 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 long toke of smoke from his pipe that went straight to his eyes. He sat, crisscrossed, sparkling in the dark.

My eyes opened to milky smooth fluorescent lights. The Story of Me was over. I said “Hello” to a woman in white who hurried away as Jimmy Gray began to reboot. Doctors and nurses soon surrounded me. At that moment, time and memory started to tick forward and backward from my two beginnings, the first when I was interrupted from eternal nothingness to emerge from my mother and the second when I sprang up as Jimmy Gray at twenty-five.

I headed from those two, discrete absences into the future and into the past, to complete The Story of Jimmy Gray, to enlighten the gaps, to bridge the missing years with the queasy feeling of being a tick ahead or tock behind myself and everything else.

And never for the rest of my life did I ever get it right.

Gerry Coleman

Image: A pipe of peace Céréales Killer at fr.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 1.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0, via Wikimedia Commons. An ornamental pipe trimmed with coloured beads standing on a wooden stand which is placed on an animal skin