by Ingrid Croce
I couldn’t help laughing at how provincial he sounded.
“Well, I guess I’d be a terrible Catholic,” I said. “Do you feel that way, Jim? Do you feel guilty when we make out?”
“I feel good when we make out. But I could never tell my parents.”
“I’m really lucky to have my dad. It’s wonderful to have someone who really loves me, no matter what I do. Of course he trusts I won’t go too far astray. But talking to him is kinda like going to confession.”
Jim placed his twelve-string on Phyllis’s bed and opened the case.
“Confession doesn’t work that way for me. I don’t confess to anything, unless I’m caught . . . and even then.”
“I’m just the opposite,” I said. “I always try to do the right thing. Sometimes I try too hard. It’s probably because of my mom’s addiction and the way people used to look down on me when my parents were divorced. I always felt I had to try harder than everyone else just to be good enough.”
“I think you’re terrific, Ing. I’m amazed at your openness and your sensuality. You don’t have to try with me, baby. Just be yourself.”
He lifted the twelve-string out of the case, tuned it, and then told me he wanted to sing me a song he just learned from his new Oscar Brand album.
He gave me his mischievous look and started singing an English bawdy ballad:
I don’t want to join the army,
and I don’t want to go war,
I’d much rather hang around Piccadilly underground,
living off the earnings of a high-born Lady.
I don’t want a bayonet up me backside,
and I’d rather not get me buttocks shot away,
I just want to stay in England, merry, merry, England
And fornicate me bloomin’ life away
“Have you played that song for your mom and dad?” I asked, laughing.
“Not lately,” Jim joked.
“I just wish your parents weren’t so hard on you. You’re so good.”
“I’m not really, Ing. I don’t try like you do. In fact I’m really belligerent sometimes. I push things to the limit. When I was young, most of the things I got slapped for, I deserved. I tried everything and anything I could get away with,” he confessed. “I’ve always liked collecting guns, knives, sabers, all kinds of weaponry. When I was about eleven, my father took Rich and me to a pawnshop down on Race Street, near his work. While he went to get his mail, I snuck into the store and bought an old revolver. It was a broken-down handgun with bullets that fit another gun. But what did I know? I hid it until I got home. And then Rich and I went into the backyard when no one was around. I put the bullet halfway in the gun, but it wouldn’t fit. So I took a hammer to it. The motherfucker blew up in my hand! Man, that smarted. But I couldn’t tell my parents. I walked around for weeks with my palm all burnt and bandaged. It was ugly and infected, but I was too afraid to say anything. I deserved a beating. But when my dad found out, all he did was take the gun and bullets away, and he and my mom never said another word about it. But that’s when I was younger. He’s really tough on me now. It’s hard to believe, but he still hits me.”
I was very upset that Jim’s dad used force instead of reason to guide his son, but Jim Senior still seemed like a good man to me. I recognized that from his old-world point of view, as head of the household, he had the final word, and Jim had better do what he said—or else.
To change the subject, I picked up my guitar and asked Jim if he could teach me some new chords.
“Sure, Ing, but how about if we write a song together, too?’
I put down the guitar quickly and reached into my book bag for a piece of paper with a poem on it that I had written for school. I handed it to Jim to read.
“I like it, Ing. This could work!” Then he began to play some chords and sing the words to my poem:
Perhaps I’ll never show this world all I can be
I just can’t sing to any man the song he wants to hear.
“That sounds great!” I said, and he continued:
And I know that some won’t like me
Others try to be my friend,
But I’m all of me,
And that’s all that I am.
We practiced the song with all of the verses a couple times through, and I played my guitar alongside him. Then he put chords to the chorus, and we sang it between each verse. We practiced our parts, and when we got it down just right, I spontaneously put my arms around him and his guitar.
“I’m so excited we’ve actually written a song together. I can’t wait until we play this for my dad!”
“I just wish we had more time together. We could write lots of songs and do lots more things,” he said, raising his eyebrows.
“You know, things might be different if you moved into the dorms or your own apartment. Have you ever thought about that?” I asked.
“Every day!” Jim smiled. “But it’s not that easy in my family. Good sons stay home until they get married or die. My parents are good people, but they drive me crazy.
“You know, when I was five, my parents took me to view the body of an old dead cardinal. He was lying there in velvet robes with these thick fuzzy eyebrows, and his eyes were wide open. I’ll never forget my grandmother picking me up and stuffing my face down into the coffin to kiss the gold ring on his cold, dead hand. The ring of a dead man, for Christ’s sake!”
“That’s disgusting!”
“That’s the way Rich and I were brought up, worshiping saints and dead people. Pretty freaky, huh?”
“Do you believe in God, Jim?”
“You know, after reading about the Crusades, inquisitions, and missionaries, and all the millions of people killed in the name of God, I sometimes find it hard to believe in anything religious. But it certainly is something to ponder. I like learning about the Hindus and the Jains and the different beliefs people have. I like figuring things out for myself, and I’m tired of my parents trying to run my life. I wish they’d just trust me to make my own decisions and choose my own friends.”
“Like Sal and Bill Reid?”
“Yeah, my parents are suspicious of both of them. ‘God forbid,’” he said, imitating his mother, ‘you should turn out like them.’ Sal’s too liberal and educated, and Bill’s too earthy. My folks are really tough to please.”
“God,” I laughed, “I’d hate to ask what they think of me.”
Jim didn’t respond. His parents had a real problem with my being so much younger than Jim and Jewish, but he didn’t want to reveal that to me.
“Yeah,” he continued. “My parents find Sal ‘questionable,’ but at least he’s Italian. Bill, on the other hand, is both Irish and disrespectful. He doesn’t give a damn what people say about him or think about him,” Jim laughed. “Bill’s such a wild card. He thrives on causing trouble.
“The first time I met him on the construction site, he wore grimy jeans, work boots, a big straw cowboy hat, and he was wavin’ his big gold diamond ring on his little finger. He was the foreman on the project directing all these Caterpillars around the job site. He was so full of himself, laughing and cursing and orchestrating these men on these massive pieces of equipment. He acts like a little boy in a big man’s body. But he’s good at what he does.
“You know, Ing, how I’ve been hanging out at the truck yard lately and begging Bill to teach me to drive? Well, he offered me a job when I get out of school for the summer. He’s going to start giving me lessons on the big ten-wheelers! Then I’ll be able to join the Teamster’s Union and get around the truck driver’s Catch-22.”
“What’s the truck driver’s Catch-22?”
“Well, it’s nearly impossible to get a trucking job without a union card, but rookie drivers can’t qualify for a union card without first getting a job. So you need to know someone.”
“Would your parents be upset?”
Jim shrugged. “As long as I’m making money and it’s only temporary, ya know, saving for a r
espectable future and all, it should be okay with them.
“Hey, Ing, Rich and I wrote a song that I’d like to record sometime. Would you listen to this and tell me what you think?”
He placed his fingers back on the guitar strings and began to play and sing “Sun Come Up,” a song he later included on his self-made first album in 1966, Facets.
“I really like it, Jim. Did you write the words and music together?”
“Yeah, well, we were just playin’ around at home, and it just kinda happened.
“Hey,” he said, looking at his watch, “it’s almost six o’clock.”
I rose from the bed and stood in front of him.
He put down his guitar and wrapped his arms around my waist, laying his head on my chest. “Oh Christ, I hate to go, but The Flower will have dinner on the table, and I’m screwed if I’m late for dinner.”
“Yeah, you better go. I don’t want your parents mad at me—or you, for that matter.”
“Can we meet again tomorrow, Ing?”
“We can meet every day,” I told him. He smiled and hugged me tightly.
_____
When summer came, Bill kept his word and began to show Jim the ropes at the truck yard. Learning to drive the big trucks stimulated Jim, and listening to the wild stories of the truckers thrilled him even more. Like a drifter, he wandered around the truck yard soaking up the testosterone. While he was at work, he would take a pen and notebook from his shirt pocket and jot down truckers’ expressions and stories of one-upmanship. In his truck, he would imitate their lingo on a tape recorder, trying to capture their speech patterns.
Many drivers were tough, angry, and easily provoked. They evinced raw masculinity. The truckers spoke their own kind of truth, offered bluntly, and Jim enjoyed the adventures of the truckers’ blue-collar world.
Jim started adding songs to his repertoire by Jimmy Rogers, Merle Haggard, and Lefty Frizzell: American music that he could relate to now that he was doing hands-on labor. He kept gathering the stories of the men he worked side-by-side with and storing them away. The truckers’ hard-driving lifestyle, fueled by drink, women, and every sort of debauchery, was not much different from the sailors’ lives on the high seas and in distant ports that he had learned about in old folklore books, recordings of eighteenth-century folk songs, and raunchy ballads from England, Ireland, and Australia.
Jim and Bill shared this interest and would sometimes speak in dialect to each other, pretending they were sixteenth-century pirates on the high seas. Like children, they played the parts of swashbucklers.
“Aye, me laddy. The wench needs a good foocking,” Bill would bluster.
And Jim would reply. “Aye, and I’m here to give ’er one.”
Jim began to portray the lives of working-class men and women in his songs. One of his first efforts was a simple truck driver’s ode to his semi, “Big Wheel.” For Jim, the perspectives of day laborers and truckers provided a new look at the struggles of humankind. In contrast to his parents’ uptight, provincial concern over what people thought, the truckers’ unbridled behavior and uncensored speech helped him laugh at himself and his rigid upbringing.
After Jim got to know some of the men better, he asked if he could record their stories. The workers were flattered. Jim’s relaxed manner and unconditional acceptance put them at ease. Many talked for hours to the skinny Italian kid, telling tales of wrecks, three-day drunks, and beds full of women.
Excited by the rich, raw flavor of their lives, Jim told me their stories that summer, some of which ended up in the song “Speedball Tucker” and other songs he would later write.
“You should have heard this one guy, Ing,” he said, one hot evening as we were walking to Jim’s VW on our way to the drive-in.
“This one trucker has more than four million miles under his belt, and I asked him what his most hellish experience was on the road. He told me about the time he and his partner were driving a two-ton sixteen-wheeler down a hill.
“Now, his partner was sleeping. And the trucker put his foot down on the brake, but his foot went straight to the floor. No brakes! He headed into one curve, picking up speed, then another, swerving and screeching with sixteen of those heavy fuckin’ wheels roaring right behind him. Finally, he rounded a third curve going so fast he knew he had to barrel off one shoulder of the road or the other.
“On the right was a guy changing a tire on a VW. On the other side was a semi in low-low gear coming up the hill. Then the trucker stopped the story. I yelled, ‘Well, what did you do then?’ ‘I woke up ma partner,’ the trucker answered. I asked, ‘What did you do that for?’ ‘Well,’ he said, scratching his head, ‘Ma partner was young . . . and I know he ain’t never seen a wreck like this before.’”
I laughed. I liked that Jim was enjoying hanging around the truckers. He was more relaxed, and even though he was still under his parents’ roof and their thumbs, he was becoming his own man, finding his own way. The truckers were shaping his personality and giving him some rough edges that I found earthy and sexy.
When I was alone with Jim that hot summer night at the drive-in, I was more turned on than ever. Though I was doing my best to hold back, he had become more and more persistent, and I dreamed about making love. I wanted to make sure we would be together forever, and I was trying to use my head while every other part of me wanted to “go all the way.”
Not all of our dates at the time were to the drive-in. Most included either practicing or performing music.
One Saturday night, when Jim and I were singing at the Italian Club outside Philadelphia, Jim ran into one of his truck-driver friends, Crazy Frank. He was a rugged, lecherous guy with long, slicked-back, black hair and a parade of tattoos up and down his arms. He was known for his free advice:
“Women are sufferin’,” he used to tell Jim. “They need you, but they won’t tell you that. They’ll pretend they don’t want you, but they really do. You got to go fuck them. That’s what they really want.” It was as if Crazy Frank was the real-life version of one of the pirates in Jim and Bill Reid’s debaucherous fantasies.
With a wife and three children, Crazy Frank considered himself a good Catholic, but he felt that the collar of the church was a little too tight. Disgusted by the hypocrisy he saw within the church, Frank prided himself in raising hell and stirring things up. Jim introduced Frank to me that night at the Italian Club.
“Nice to meet you, Ingrid,” he said, in a brusque voice, shaking my hand. “She’s just as good lookin’ as I’d thought she’d be.” He winked at Jim. “Hey, Jim, I gotta tell you this. I just had a run in with my fuckin’ priest.” Frank excused his language to me. Jim laughed at Frank’s apology and watched me closely, to see how I’d respond to Frank’s chauvinistic attitude.
“Now you know, Jim, I’m a loyal parishioner. I take my wife and kids to church every Sunday. I’m faithful. I put somethin’ in the collection plate every week. But ya know sometimes things are hard for us truckers. And I ain’t got a damn cent right now. So last week I didn’t put nothin’ in his collection box.
“Now the father, he knew the way to my house because he had eaten our food and drunk my whiskey lots of times. So he rings the buzzer,” Frank said, imitating the priest pushing the doorbell. “And I tell my wife, ‘Don’t you answer that door.’ She’s cryin’ and doesn’t want to open it because she’s ashamed we don’t have any money.
“You know my wife. She’s a good woman, right?” Jim agreed with a nod. “Yeah, she’s good . . . too good for me,” Frank admitted. “So anyway I get this crazy look in my eye. You know the one, Jim. And she gets scared. I start for the front door, which makes her cry even harder because she’s afraid of what I’m gonna do. And when I open the door and that son-of-a-bitch is standing there waitin’ for somethin’, I don’t invite him in. I make him stand there. So he tells me he’s noticed that the collection plate’s been a little short lately. By this time, I’m ready to strangle the motherfucker. But I’m nice. I say, �
�Father, you can see my wife’s with child. You know work’s been slow, and we can’t put money in right now.’ And then the son-of-a-bitch has the balls to tell me I’m not a good Catholic because I can’t put fuckin’ money in his plate.
“I say, ‘FUCK YOU, Father!’ And the priest goes white, his jaw drops, and he runs away like he’s seen the devil. Well, maybe he had. The way I figure it, none of that shit has anything to do with religion. What does putting money in his fuckin’ plate have to do with being a good Catholic? I’m not buyin’ that shit, Jim.”
“You’re a character, Frank. I’m gonna write a song about you someday,” Jim told his trucking buddy. Frank smiled. “I’d like that, man. Make it a fun one!”
I wasn’t as impressed with Frank as Jim was. His chauvinism and disrespectful comments made me feel sad for his wife and kids. I hoped the violence and attitude of guys like Frank didn’t rub off on him too much.
When the summer was over, Jim took a break from trucking and returned to Villanova as a junior. Though he needed to attend classes to please his parents, his focus was mostly on his music and our time together.
_____
In addition to performing at local coffeehouses and colleges, Jim continued working as a DJ on his WWVU radio show. But he was always looking for a way to play in front of an audience. He wanted to get more practice and earn some extra money too.
His hopes were answered one night, when Bill asked Jim to meet him at the Riddle Paddock, a steak house thirty miles from Jim’s home in Drexel Hill. “And bring your guitar,” Bill insisted.
The Paddock was an old converted racetrack stable in Lima, Pennsylvania, on the highway near the sheep and horse pastures that surrounded it. Inside, gathered around tables draped with red-and-white checked tablecloths, a raucous crowd ate, drank, swapped stories, fought, and stomped to the music. In the center, where the horse corral used to be, was a floor-level stage. Folk, country, and bluegrass musicians played to an unlikely and volatile mix of ranch hands and cowboys; Royal Air Force personnel from a nearby training facility; Australian and Irish sheepherders who had come to Pennsylvania to work on the up-country ranches; wealthy doctors and lawyers with and without their wives; students and professors from the surrounding colleges—Villanova, Penn, Temple, Cabrini, and Swarthmore; construction workers; and anybody else who lived within a thirty-mile radius.
