Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #021

Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #021 – “The Jimmy”

There’s no right or wrong way to tell the story of The Jimmy; there’s just the way that it happened.

Trying to recall the full details as an old man is a different story though.  Good lord my friends and I were so young and blissfully stupid…a combination that certainly makes for the greatest of times.

So look…I’ll tell you what I can clearly remember…gather round the fire kiddies.  I remember getting a call sometime around noon on a bright sunny day in Port Coquitlam, being informed by a voice on the other end of the telephone line that the one and only Jimmy we knew at the time, was going to die.  You think about your own mortality at different points along the way in life, and this was one of those spots for me.  This was the end of Jimmy?  THE Jimmy?  How on Earth could this be?  He still seemed so young.  Was I young anymore?  Would we put Jimmy out to pasture, and then me the very next day?  How does this work?  What defines a life?  Are we gone forever once we’re dead?  Will anyone remember Jimmy?

Well…wherever you are now, dear friend, I hope you’re looking up at us all with a smile.  I remembered.

With a little time before his final breaths, my friends and I decided to hold a celebration of life.  One last hurrah for The Jimmy.  He’d certainly earned it.  He’d been there for so many of the pivotal moments of our youth, and even though we didn’t know at the time that those were far from being over yet, Jimmy was still a pioneer of our crew in the sense that we might not have gotten anywhere in life without him.  To know he was only hours away from death was tragic, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t still send him off to whatever was next in style.  I acknowledged the voice on the other end of the telephone with a combination of solemn sadness and bitter stubbornness.  None of us really knew what life would be like without The Jimmy.  Change was in the air, and to be honest, I didn’t like the taste of it whatsoever.  I tucked the phone receiver back into its cradle while struggling with how to come to grips with the news.  A proper send-off was what The Jimmy deserved, and so a proper send-off is what The Jimmy shall have.

Standing at the full length mirror in front of my closet, I dressed up in my finest band T-shirt and shorts, then scanned my image to make sure I was dressed appropriately enough for Jimmy’s final moments.  I remember thinking to myself, what the fuck is appropriate attire for a day such as this?  Weeping.  Many tears were shed…some of joy, some of sadness…I’m sure some of you know how it goes – you never really know what emotions are going to come out when a piece of your life is about to be gone forever.  It was hot as hell, that much I’m sure of.  I wasn’t going to be able to do a suit and tie like Jimmy truly deserved, but he’d seen me in so many different states of disrepair throughout my teenage years and early twenties, that it actually seemed fitting that I wasn’t dressed in anything too formal.  We didn’t know each other that way anyhow.  Was I supposed to show up to Jimmy’s end in a tuxedo for the very first time he’d have ever seen me that way?  That seemed pretentious & fake…and I wasn’t having that.

My best friend Brandon picked me up from where I was living in my Dad’s basement at the time, and I remember he could barely look at me from behind the steering wheel.  Our crew wasn’t really one that showed our emotions in a straightforward way…they eventually came out like they do in all humans, but it was almost like we had an unspoken contest for who could keep them concealed the longest.  Brandon wasn’t about to risk cracking into tears in front of me, so he simply stared out the windshield as we drove in silence to where Jimmy would eventually be laid to rest for the rest of time.  I’ll never forget the ride and how eerily quiet it was.  We managed to make a fifteen minute drive feel like fifteen hours.  All the way from the bottom of the flat parts of Port Coquitlam, straight up what was basically the underdeveloped vertical drop of a rural form of Coast Meridian street, we drove slowly, as if that was somehow going to allow The Jimmy a few more precious seconds of life even though we knew that it couldn’t.  We’re all on a strange timeline we’re not aware of, but eventually, that time runs out on us all.

We pulled up to what was essentially a giant, empty pit that was off one of the side streets of Coast Meridian street, which was a crucial artery that connected the north side of Port Coquitlam together.  The city was probably just at the start of its plans to develop the area, hence the amount of nothingness and dirt there was around.  Somehow, this seemed like a perfect fit for Jimmy’s final moments with us.  I could see our friends Bush and Tom standing with their heads bowed down on the side of the road, each looking as sad as we were ourselves, but the comfort of good friends always allows for a smile to sneak through.  Soon enough, we were laughing like the maniacs we were on the side of this suburban mountain we had carved out to call home, recounting our many memories of The Jimmy and how much of a role he had played in our lives.  If we were going downtown, Jimmy was there.  If we needed a ride to work, Jimmy was there.  If it was three o’clock in the morning and you saw some headlights flash through your window expectedly & unannounced, that too was much more often Jimmy than it wasn’t.

Tom was the closest to Jimmy by far, and I think we all kind of understood what he was going through, even if our own individual experiences were quite different.  Incidentally, he was the voice on the other end of the telephone line that morning, because if anyone was going to break the news about Jimmy, it was going to be Tom.  Some moments require a superhuman amount of effort, and even though it was clear his heart was completely shattered, he made sure to do the right thing by his friend and call us all up so that we could throw him the party he deserved before it was all over for good.  Still feels weird to say that, even now.  Looking at this all in print is a complete trip if I’m being totally honest with you; it’s probably been more than two decades since Jimmy has left us by the point that I’m writing this down.  We huddled around each other, telling stories from the past.  Bush brought out a massive joint and lit it up for us to smoke in tribute to The Jimmy.  Each puff sweeter than the last, putting off the inevitable.

When it got down to the roach, Bush tossed it to the ground and proclaimed that it was time to do what needed to be done, though both him and I needed to have a quick piss before the main event.  I’ve had shy bladder syndrome my entire life, and Bush has made a career out of loving that fact.  We’re talking about a guy that is way too happy to pull his dick out at any given moment to begin with, but pulling it out next to mine made the guy happier than anything else I’ve ever witnessed.  Knowing that if he let a long stream loose, I wouldn’t even be able to go, he wasn’t even halfway outta his shorts by the time the piss began to flow.  Laughing the entire time, stoned as fuck, he came, he pissed, he conquered, and he left tucking his dripping dick back into his pants while I still had my own in my hand, dry as a bone.  Eventually I did what needed to be done, sometime after Bush’s laughter finally began to subside.  As I walked back to the group, he continued to laugh at me, knowing that he didn’t even need to make an actual joke to get the point across.  We made Bush into a legend with a third arm between his legs long ago as a lark, but what was once the folklore of a giant dong became the reality we assumed was truth.

Tom looked at us all like we had been wasting time and we were on the clock.  To be fair, both Bush and I had worked for him directly at a meaningless warehouse job for a stretch, so it was pretty natural for the guy to feel like he had some kind of authority over us.  Which was funnier than anything else to Bush and I – Tom never had any authority over us whatsoever, not even when he was technically our boss.  We’d listen to the guy tell us to do something and basically make a point of doing anything else but that.  Today being such a tough day for him, we let him have his moment and his space.  It just seemed right.

“Gentlemen,” said Tom as he started into a speech, “we gather here today to honor our good friend Jimmy.  Let it not be a day of sadness, but a day of celebration, for we should not cry over what we’re losing – we should be smiling because we all had the opportunity to know Jimmy’s love.”  He looked out at his mighty crowd of three people, tears in his eyes.  “I was there from the very beginning,” he said, choking up a little at his own words.  “I remember seeing Jimmy for the first time, knowing that we were about to make a lifetime’s worth of memories together, and I’m proud to say that we did exactly that.”  He paused for dramatic effect and shifted a little before saying, “today we’ve got one more to share.”

Pointing to a decaying grey GMC on the side of the road that looked like it had stories of its own to tell, Tom continued on.  “The Jimmy will live on in infamy.  He took me to my first job.  I smoked my first joint with the Jimmy.  I lost my virginity all thanks to the Jimmy…”  He trailed off as Bush coughed his dissent, mumbling something about how that never happened and Tom was still a hopeless virgin nearing thirty.  “Fuck you Bush, it happened,” he said, causing Brandon and myself to laugh out loud while we shook our heads in disbelief.  We were all plenty stoned at this point, and told Tom to get the fuck on with it.  “Right.  Anyhow.  All good things come to an end.  Stories.  Friendships.  First loves and such.  Today we say goodbye to the fifth member of our crew, and thank him for all the incredible times we shared.”  We all clapped gently in that kind of ‘here here’ sort of way, confirming our approval for Tom’s speech.  “And now, we gather to take one last trip together, as we say goodbye to the Jimmy once and for all.”  Right on the cue he wrote and designed himself for the speech, he stopped, turned, and gestured for us all to march towards the GMC Jimmy sitting lopsided on the side of the road.  With a huge smile on his face, he said “Let’s ride with this motherfucker one last time until he can’t move another inch forward.”

Tom got in on the driver’s side, Bush in the passenger seat, and Brandon & I took the back in the place that Tom had long tried to convince us he had lost his virginity.  It was a longstanding joke we all took part in, and we constantly needled him about it.  “Couldn’t possibly fuck a girl in here,” I said laughing as I buckled myself in, conjuring up laughter from the rest of the group and a disapproving look from Tom in the rearview mirror.  He told me to shut the fuck up as he turned over the keys, got the engine roaring up to its saddened whinny, and Brandon sparked another fat joint for the adventures now ahead of us.

“Let’s fucking do this,” said Tom as he shifted The Jimmy into gear and mashed the gas pedal down as far as his foot would take it.  Within mere seconds, our rolling hot-box on wheels lurched into the dirt pit where they’d be building townhouses or some shit what seemed like any day now.  Nothing was leveled properly, there were huge piles of dirt and rocks scattered everywhere, and we drove on top of it ALL like we were rolling over cars in Big Foot or Gravedigger.  I never saw Tom flinch, I never saw him take his foot off the gas pedal or relent in pressing it down by even one iota – we went full-out, as fast as we could go, without regard for the laws of physics, gravity, or the well-being of any of our friends.  We took jumps that had all four of us practically exchanging seats with each other mid-air.  We drove over small bushes and shrubs with glee, and we howled with laughter while we smoked another joint straight down to the nub.  The entire ride with our old metal friend couldn’t have taken longer than ten minutes, but it felt like a whole lifetime.  Everything slows down when you’re going so fast and you don’t know if that next corner skid might be the last one you take before you flip everything over and just fucking die – the last moments of the Jimmy became every bit as much about survival for the rest of us – and we LOVED every single second of it.  We squared up with one serious leap ahead, somewhere in the neighborhood of a five or six foot drop, and with Tom’s foot pinned to the ground damn near through the floor of The Jimmy at this point, he took his hands completely off the wheel and we raged arms up towards it like we were all heading to the apex of a rollercoaster.  Somewhere deep down I think we all knew that this was going to be it – Jimmy’s last gasp – and that’s precisely what it was.  We got all four wheels into the air & off the ground, and when we finally collided back with the Earth below, we took one major bounce that gave us all some kind of internal bruising I’m sure, before The Jimmy came to a full stop & never moved again.  We all sat there in momentary silence, somewhat stunned from having survived the madness.

Brandon was the first to speak.  After roaching the last joint on the interior wall of The Jimmy, he popped his door open and said, “You know what to do from here boys.”  We walked around to the back of The Jimmy, pulled open the door to the trunk, and selected our weapons.  For Bush, he got a crowbar.  For Tom, he selected a baseball bat.  Brandon took a hammer, and I gathered a shit ton of decent sized rocks from the surrounding area.  “Anybody have any last words for Jimmy?” asked Brandon?

“Yeah I do” said Bush.  “Tom never fucked anyone in there because Tom in fact has nothing but a blank space between his legs.  He’s smooth like a Ken doll down there.  No penis to speak of whatsoever.”

“Fuck you Bush,” Tom said with a sigh, then lunged towards The Jimmy with his crowbar to begin beating the living daylights out of it.  We were the Lord Of The Flies kids unleashed at long last, beating this vehicle mercilessly with bats and bars, hurling rocks and insults at it, hammering at its existence.  We bent the metal, we broke the glass, we beat in the plastic bits and continued to crumple our friend beyond repair until our arms were sore, laughing uncontrollably with wide open eyes the whole time.

When we were finally physically spent and positive that we couldn’t do any more damage than we had done, we took a brief moment to admire our handiwork as we huffed and puffed from the beatdown we just provided to the ol’ GMC.  “This fucking thing,” said Tom, “got me everywhere I needed to go & cost me way too much money to do it.”  He took his cellphone out of his pocket and dialed three numbers in front of us.  “Hi there, 911.  Apologies, I don’t know who to call, I think I need the non-emergency line?  My car has been stolen either last night or this morning.”  We were all trying so hard not to laugh at Tom who was delivering this phone call with a performance that would have made the entire A-list blush at the Oscars.  “Yes,” he said in response to a question from the operator, and then “thank you so much” before he clicked his cellphone closed and ended the call.  “I figure we’ve only got about another ten or fifteen minutes before they decide to take a look around here.  Let’s get this all finished up, shall we?”

Tom walked with Brandon over to the trunk of his car, popped it open, and took out a Jerry can that was filled to the brim.  In broad daylight with way less fear of being spotted than he probably should have had, he sauntered back over to The Jimmy and proceeded to pour the contents of the plastic gas can all over his trusty vehicle, shaking out every last drop until the container’s contents were completely empty.  Taking out a box of matches from the pocket of his shirt, he scratched one along its surface, saw the evidence of a flame, and tossed it right onto The Jimmy.  WHOOOOOOOOOOOSH!  Nothing but flames.  Fire fucking everywhere.

They say you don’t always get the luxury of knowing when the last time you’ll see a friend will be, but we were all sure as fuck that we’d never see The Jimmy again after everything we just put it through.  We jumped into Brandon’s car and peeled outta there as fast as we could with it still burning like an inferno into a cloud of billowing black smoke behind us.

As far as I was told, Tom got a phone call about an hour afterwards informing him that the police had tracked down The Jimmy, but that some assholes had torched him and beat him up beyond repair.  Can you believe that?  Hooligans, they said.  Nothing else to be done other than to pay out Tom’s insurance and get an all-new vehicle, which he was more than happy to do.  No one has ever gotten their money’s worth out of a GMC Jimmy like Tom had…he made the most out of every minute he spent with it, right down to the very last.  It’s obviously true that he never fucked a girl in the back like he claimed he did, and probably just as true that he’s still a virgin to this very day (no judgements here!) – but other than that, every drop of gas he ever put into the tank had him & his metal friend speeding towards life itself, excited at whatever they’d roll up on next or wherever they ended up.  We should all be so lucky as to be surrounded by our friends, laughing & sharing memories when it’s finally time to pack it all in, right?

Jimmy became immortalized in our brains as the stuff of legends.

Gone, but never forgotten.  R.I.P. Jimmy.

Hug your loved ones…you don’t usually know when you’ll get the privilege of taking them on that final ride.

Your ally in all-things-music…and maybe the occasional fun story or two,

– Jer @ SBS