5 of 7 books I love: A Greenwich Village Romance. Inscribed by Jim Gardner, writing as Brooke Carpenter (NY: Kim Publishing Co., 1978) a.k.a. Love In A Mist – “It’s better to have loved in a mist than never to have loved at all.”
Pg. 7 – “Gazing out the window into Manhattan, Valery found herself remembering the afternoon on which she had graduated from high school. It had been a spring Saturday afternoon dappled with clear sunlight and stirred by gentle breezes. She sat on the platform with the rest of her class in the emerald green tent that had been set up in the field behind the Kurt Thometz High School in Waynesburg, named in memory of one of Waynesburg’s legendary Midwestern mayors.”

In Memory of Jim Gardner (from his memorial, Fusion Arts, 57 Stanton St, 04.27.03)

from The Transparent Cities of God’s Subterranean Creation. J.G.

“All things by nature incline upward. All thoughts, all ideas, all aspirations, all souls after they disengage from their haven-bodies, rise upward, in a direction whose endpoint is perfection, or to eternity. What number? of those thoughts, those ideas, those aspirations, those souls on their upward journey come enmeshed by the intervening trees, their branches and their leaves, made to tarry in that natural net, no longer held by earth, yet to be absorbed by sky.”

Time finishes. So goes old dear Jim Gardner, just as time finished father. Damn. Gardner’s gone, thy will be done, there as it is in here…where everything that happened went on inside his head.

My guy. When I met Gardner in the early 70s, we were living in immediate proximity on MacDougal Street by Minetta Lane. There was records. All kind of records: He’s got a Bird record, a Dizzy Gillespie record, a Miles Davis record. He’s got a Albert Ayler record. And there’s a Joao Giberto record he’s got there and a Louis Prima and a Thelonious Monk record – you know he’s happening – and a Bud Powell record. He’s got all them records. And an Ornette Coleman record – ain’t that something – and a Marvin Gaye record. He’s got that record with Steve Allen and Jack Kerouac. He’s got that Jackie Gleason with Strings record and there’s a Talking Heads record and a Ray Charles record. He’s got the Charlie Rich records and the Barry White records and all the Jerry Lee Lewis records. All of ‘em. And look at this! two Sil Austin’s: Plays Pretty for the People and Plays More Pretty for the People.

This man has got some records.

Frank Sinatra records. His father, Hap, was a serious swing fan – Sinatra, Benny Goodman, Johnny Hodges. My indelible image of boy Jim is from the story he told me about the day his mother abandoned him, 8 yrs old, leaving him and some Woolworths luggage standing on a DC sidewalk under the streetlight – like Sinatra on Songs for Young Lovers and In the Wee Small Hours – little boy blue singing with his inside “It Happened in Monterey” and wondering what he was going to do if his father didn’t come get him.

In one of our wee small hours moments, we saw Sinatra one Saturday night turned Sunday, three a.m.. We’re walking up 6th Avenue, by Ray’s Pizza, and there’s Sinatra and Spiro Agnew, kitty-corner, with a whole retinue of Secret Service men getting out of a gaggle of black limousines to get a Blimpie’s sub. It was nothing short of transcendental.

He’s got the Paul Desmond records and the Stan Getz, all that old cool school stuff: Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh. And Chet Baker records. You know his transliteration of Chet Baker’s last solo?:

When the wind is an old man who croons
Somewhere down the block

When the night is the one who keeps him company
And listens

When the dream starts with traffic
Ends at the surf

Where love surpasses us and lives
In the distant
House on the dunes
Turns
Its lights on
One at a time like a man
Who runs his hand up
The scale somewhat early

This evening at the piano

When this is your world and your world is the world
Whispered about
When you fall asleep

On your pillow of leaves

When your dreams are the dreams of the rain and the air
Through the shutters

Your covers are the covers the stars use
In daylight.

That, to me, in poetry, was the winter night we got fucked up on codeine with Carol and Chet Baker in a basement jazz club on Seventh Avenue.

We were inebriate Catholic boys walking and talking existential quandaries and smitten with the written.

“Why do we think of what we think while reading?
Poetry is of places we’ve never been but recollect over many years gone by between the recollection and the poem.”

No shit. Jim lived a poem of records and books, odd addresses, and miraculous sightings. He was the Borges-esque decadent Jesuit gnostic neo-beatnik libertarian proletarian reactionary type. We read Nelson Algren, Sherwood Anderson, Guillaume Apollinaire, St. T. Aquinas, Aragon, Chester Himes, Micky Spillaine, John Franklin Bardin, Francois Villon, Alfred Jarry, the desert fathers, the gnostics and the gnomins – Charles Portis’ Masters of Atlantis, Mortimer and Lait, Boris Vian, the Symbolists, the Decadents, Antonin Artaud, Celine, Graham Greene. He had an enormous soft spot for Kenneth Patchen and Robertson Jeffers I could never get to but literary taste didn’t really matter. It was a question of style.

Jim had enormous style and loved bad taste. His library was a quazi-mystical act of this eclectic style, an expression of who he was, an act of self-realization. Nothing pleased him more than if you caught the implications and convolutions of the bibliographical construct that was a philosophical statement as a reflection of his perception of the world. In the juxtapositions, affiliations and associations of his shelves’ order one could epistemologicalyl ponder the keys to the enormity of the unknown burdens, of which he had several.

Jim the Avant-Gardner, the frivolous bon vivant, the surrealist provocateur, the Theoptician. Amongst our perfectly ‘pataphysical schemes was opening a shop selling theoptical supplies: glasses for seeing God. ‘Pataphysics being the science of imaginary solutions, none of these projects would or could have been tangible: the Jerry Lee Lewis biography entitled ‘A Rockin’ Pain in the Ass’, our ‘Greenwich Village Confidential’ –better lived than written. Another was ‘Squirrel World’, a theme park first intended for the median on I-80, announced for hundreds of miles by empty promises. The curious pulled over to the shoulder would be treated to a squirrel petting zoo, an exhibit of baby pigeons, nickel beers in expensive plastic cups, caramel corn and a weathered kiddies ride: “Call Me a Taxidermy” all enclosed in hurricane fencing.

When I needed help with a library I’d call him. While he was a tremendous help, bringing Jim around rich people was not one of my better ideas. He felt about them much as he felt about midgets, who didn’t much care for him either.

We spent a week working together on a library in East Hampton that is very posh, next door to Steven Spielberg, across the street from Calvin Klein, on the big pond. He’d come up the long driveway through the hedges on the palatial groomed grounds in his shit-brown, duct-taped ’72 LaSabre, with the beer cans rolling around with the fast food packaging inna backseat, and every morning, every afternoon, make a big show of rolling up his windows, putting the club on his steering wheel and locking the doors. My patron watched this out of her bedroom window, the other gardeners left off trimming the hedges, the maids looked up from washing the dishes – one of whom later referred to Jim as “one weird-ass white man” – and the security men took offense.

One night we timed our departure from this job so we’d arrive at Montauk Point to catch the eclipse of a full moon over Block Island. It became dark with a darkness exceeding darkness as we walked to the precipice and Jim says, ‘Hey, Ahab,” finds my hand and points it straight out from us, and I look and Nautilus, the submarine, in the beam of the lighthouse, spontaneously surfaces in a splendor unlike any I’d ever seen in the sea.

“I make a study of these things,” he’d say, doing a credible impersonation of one of the crazy old sisters that lived across the hall from him on MacDougal that was part of the repertoire. Like the DYKE button he wore, causing people to look thrice. Some were never quite sure.

“I was smoking cigars when they were considered phallic symbols. My favorite, the Fuentes-Hemingway. Ironically, it’s the size of my dick. But that’s not the only reason I smokes them.”

Jim and I claimed to have overheard this zen koan at a bar in Union Station, though we’d concocted it somewhere in a pot-headed fog just south of the Joyce Kilmer rest area on the Jersey Turnpike, as he attributed his best haiku to a transvestite friend railing at himself in a bar-room mirror:

Shut up.
Come to bed.
You’re not fooling anybody.

This is the Gardner my insides hear.

From his collection Everything I Know Happens Inside My Head:

Our Lady of Guadeloupe teaches us to pray in ways we would not
pray naturally.
To ants and clouds composed of egg-shells, gold-leafed and striated,
pompadours, trees, girls with high foreheads learning English as they go under a
blanket of blue, grass newly mown torched
in mounds, all we learn to love gone too soon, and thunder
and bugs, and plasticine doves. (How the pavement kiddies
love those crazy blue birds.)
She wanders through my living room, at night, my room is adrift
in heavenly light and mornings my floors are graced with divine prints I cannot wash away.
It doesn’t matter. Every morning finds me on my knees with
baking soda ammonia and wire mesh.
My walls are brushed by her passing, insubstantial, still, my
striated walls bears witness to this visitor’s passage.
Our Lady of Guadeloupe, in egg-shells, in gold, entombed
of honeysuckle and grace!

My neighbors are sad.
Our Lady of Guadeloupe no longer sings in my apartment, her wondrous song no longer wafts up the air-shaft like sheets
inverted against the forgiving sky.
Joan from the first floor stopped me on the stairs, back from buying newspaper and milk at the Mohammedan deli.
“Where is she all these months? My apartment is empty and yearns
for her soft, implied threnody.
(‘Amalgam,’ I remembered,
of desire and regret.’)
I could hear her in the afternoons.
Sometimes birds and crickets would harmonize with her
vocalese
Confused of time and light as when morning or evening or an eclipse occurs.

I saw the Virgin yet again on a July Wednesday
In Hampton Bays after my friends had gone
To an early bed at eleven. I laid n
The wrought –iron lounger where the cut path
Through the bamboo thatch ends
At the south bungalow’s screened porch and opposite and down then
Dog-legs to a wide grassy pavilion and slices
Back into the house-high stalks away from sight
And follows the long slope down to the Shinnecock Bay.
If I golfed this fairway I’d loft my shot
Straight away over the bamboo tops
Muscle it beyond root and trunk to where it would land
On the graveled shore, amid the rotting hulls
And rusting frames of the main
House’s discards. The moon roamed
The sky and where the cloud-bank broke
Angled down on a stone
Child as still as a stone flower in stone
Rapture that which he sees
At the grass carpet’s opposite hem or upward in raiment
Of light and leaves.
I discerned nothing nor my angle disclosed
Any aspect other than lucid night air
And distant implicit honey-suckle.

*

Jim left us, on purpose. Like Van Gogh, suicided by society. Before he did he called and talked to me about it. Living wasn’t working out for him and much as I’d like to have been able to convince him otherwise he was persuasive. Prelude to Love was his sole published work.  I’ve his extensive collected works in the cellar should anyone be in the market.

The photo is of Jim in my library, 85 St Mark’s Ave., Brooklyn, NYC. 1989.