Sometimes I dream of Jimmy…

Sometimes I dream of Jimmy. His dark hair still smoothes under my hand, his green eyes still sparkle, his face is still wonderfully handsome and I never question that he is twenty five though it is, in fact, now more than thirty years on. In dreams, all things are possible, and if you can bring back the dead, then what does their age matter? All I know is that it all seems right and settled, so that it is very unsettling when I wake up and he is gone again. And I have to have a little mini grieving process for a few minutes.

Jimmy, oh joyous Jimmy, carries his love for me in the Volkswagen beetle that chariots us across a fantastic dreamscape. We laugh and sing in a way that we never did in life, as angst ridden young people. In dreams there is not the conflict that we had in reality.  I never have to go to a restaurant with him and watch him flirt with other men. I never get told that my hair isn’t right, that my head is too flat, or what lipstick I should be wearing.  I never get phone calls of urgent importance in the middle of the night. (Such phone calls made my father demand that I get my own telephone installed in my bedroom.) In my dream the connection we always had is there, but it is not frittered with confusion and high drama. 

You may wonder at this connection. I don’t know what it was… not the joining of two souls, because I don’t actually believe we have souls. I was only slightly aware of the connection on my wedding day, when he unexpectedly called my room in the middle of the night as though he knew I was about to leave. My sister-maid-of-honour answered the red coloured telephone, groggy at 2 AM and angry at being woken by him of all people. She told him flatly that I was getting married in the morning, and then slammed the phone down on him.  It was scary because I hadn’t spoken to him in many months and no one told him I’d found someone else. The worst snow storm in forty-seven years was truly a protection to me that day. I walked in its icy cloak, half expecting Jimmy to hide on the hill overlooking us and shoot me in all my wedding finery, a crimson gift on a white gown. I made my mother swear to never tell him where I’d gone, if he should ask, then went forward into a new incarnation of my life out west.

A year later I dreamed that Jimmy and I were in Willowbrook Shopping Mall, in a cosmetics store where he was buying deep crimson lipstick. Everything around us was scarlet, the store and the mall - everything garishly the colour of blood and gold. Suddenly, as happens in dreams, medics were rushing him out on a stretcher, he held out his hand to me, and he died. I gasped awake knowing, somehow, that he really had died, and then got on a plane and went home.

My friend sought a way to break it to me, I could see she was struggling for the words, but saved her the trouble by telling her what it was she was trying to tell me. She looked stunned at my pre-knowledge and we shared a cup of coffee to ponder it all. She new how much I had loved him, and that he had loved me too, in his own way. We had been together for five years in a very virginal first love relationship of hand holding and lingering kisses. Though it was sexually frustrating at the time, I was pleased about the nature of our romance when Aids was discovered years later. Jimmy had been a big frequenter of the New York City bath houses in the seventies.

          But it wasn’t Aids that got him, though he could have gone on that first wave…the Rock Hudson wave as I think of it.  Instead he died by his own hand in the deepest despair. And when his brother told me, I was so sorry that I’d never left even a crumb of a trail for him to at least call me because I knew we were still connected.

I only saw his grave one time. I didn’t have flowers to put on it, so I took off my flowered earrings, pulled back the grass, and buried them at the edge so as to leave him something. No one else knows I did that, but now you do. The grave stone doesn’t say very much, just his name, and the dates. It isn’t too far from his mother’s grave. She killed herself the year before when he told her he was getting a sex change operation. He’d had a blazing fight with his dad over it (so what else was new?), refused to get out of bed all day, and never knew that his mother was gassing herself in the garage while he dreamed of a new gender. When his father and brothers came home they found her body and Jimmy ran for his life, knowing how much his father had already come to hate him over the years.

          He still went through with the operation, only to decide, a month later, that he’d made a terrible mistake.  By then he was living in New York City, working as a Spanish translator. His translations began to ramble with incoherent thoughts and ravings, which confused the poor Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrants who came to him for assistance and subsequently jeopardised his job.

At home, on his own time, Jimmy began to call everyone and anyone he knew saying that he was Jesus Christ and that people should get rid of their clothing and open their windows to let the light purify them. Most of his friends hung up on him, evaporating as people seem to do, when faced with the unpleasant spectre of mental illness.  It was when he ran into the street, a crazy naked woman that NYPD brought him into Bellevue hospital.

          It wasn’t the first time.  He’d ended up in a psychiatric ward when we were together too. Only the first ward was genteel, expensive, and paid for by his wealthy parents. They considered him cured, but after he was let out I thought he was being especially strange.  I probed and prodded until he finally confessed that his psychiatrist had advised him to marry me and have men on the side. We both sobbed deeply as I took off the engagement ring, the one that had been his mothers, and gave it back to him. I don’t share.

          This time the place wasn’t so nice and he was there involuntarily. His brother told me that he had cried every day begging his jailers to find me. They just laughed at him and went on dispensing pills. It wasn’t their fault really. Bellevue deals with all the crazies that New York can spit out and while I’m sure they do their best, there would be no catering to a woman/man looking for an unmarked path into the west.  They gave him his meds, and released him after a couple of months. Two days after going back to his empty apartment he took sleeping pills and put a plastic bag over his head.  That was the night I first dreamed of him.

Maybe he found the trail after all.