“It was interesting to watch the transformation,” recalled Ted Winkel, whose psychology class met in the classroom adjacent to Meeks’s. “Around junior year, we started to see another side of Jim. All of a sudden, a very creative side emerged with the artwork and sketches and poetry. Obviously, there was a part of him that was yearning to be free.”
As Winkel lectured on Pavlov’s dogs, Jim filled his notebooks with drawings and verses, and he generally ignored the work Meeks assigned in journalism class. Instead of concentrating on ledes and the inverted pyramid, he turned in poems and drawings, prompting her to incorporate into the course a unit on poetry. “I encouraged his poetry because he was good at it,” Meeks admitted. “He had a good sense of irony, and his drawings contained wonderfully subtle humor.”
Classmates relied on his poems to help them cope with sibling rivalries, parents who just didn’t understand, and crushing romantic breakups—a more productive catharsis than locker slamming. Unpolished juvenilia to be sure, Jim’s limericks and simple verses urged them to ignore the judgments of others, to think for themselves, to fearlessly face both joy and sorrow. Between classes, he surreptitiously slipped the poems among their books and binders, poems he signed Count Malcolm Gridley.
Count Malcolm Gridley was the larger-than-life myth who allowed no sentimental self-pity, a man behind a mask who offered challenge and comfort. Jim named his alias for Malcolm Young, the AC/DC guitarist who, from the shadows just outside the spotlight, created the rhythms that unified the band’s words and music. He chose as his wizard’s last name Gridley, Judith’s family name.
I started to put words together and people actually responded in a positive way. I felt like I was onto something. If people were going through some fucked-up situation, I’d get in my head and write about it. To see the look on their face when I somehow touched on what they were going through—well, you get a little praise for something, you follow up on it.
And being from a family that didn’t communicate very well, it felt good to express myself.
Of course, everyone knew the poet was really the quiet boy in the next row, the boy in pristine T-shirt and freshly pressed Curlee trousers, the boy with the growing collection of cross country and wrestling medals. “He wrote about deep emotions and used dark images, but there was nothing frightening or sinister about his poetry,” Meeks would recall. “Some people might have had that impression, but I don’t think he was ever serious about that. Jim didn’t take himself seriously, but he took life very seriously.”
By now, Jim knew what to expect of a Michigan winter. The incessant blizzards and lake-effect squalls off Lake Michigan might bring days of seclusion along roads impassable with drifts. After stoking the stoves, he listened with Mike in the dark mornings to the radio reports of school closings and blocked secondary roads that even the plowing crews dared not venture down.
On those snow days, he’d curl on his bed, the tangy scent of woodsmoke filling the house, the wind rattling the windows in their frames. Before Meeks’s English class, Jim hadn’t been an avid reader, but now he took from his bookshelf a neglected copy of Cry Geronimo!. He learned of the Apaches’ struggle to defend their land and their tradition, and as he merged their story with his own, the book became weightless and forgotten in his hands.
He ran with them through the Sierra Madres, past the oddly familiar pin oak and prickly pear and saguaro, one step ahead of the cavalry and Mexican army intent upon their women and their scalps. He listened with Geronimo for the voices of earth spirits and mountain spirits, and he understood what it was to call upon them for protection and strength. He felt the cool of nighttime desert beneath bare feet, saw at the horizon boulders red with sunrise. Across canyon and creek bed, he ran through the night to the Cochise stronghold, juniper heavy on the air, the Dragoon Mountains rising dark against the spangle of stars in the Arizona sky.
Jim looked forward to the short-lived January thaws, the crystal-bright days that allowed a drive between towering snowbanks and rivulets of melt to Ludington, the county seat seven miles away. Most of his classmates had by now completed driver’s ed under the severe instruction of Boots Newkirk, and in their fathers’ sturdy Fords or well-tested farm trucks, they chauffeured Jim to town, where he’d rendezvous with one or another girl from his class for burgers at McDonald’s or a showing of Private Benjamin at the Lyric.
When icy winds and whiteouts kept his friends at home, Jim trudged through the drifts to spend an afternoon with his friend Andy Green two houses distant. An evening at the Greens’ meant catching up on The Dukes of Hazzard and Saturday Night Live, and between episodes, a chat with Andy’s father.
Butch Green was an amazing man with great stories. I would pick his brain about how he got his sled dogs to eat from his hand and the time he hitched them up to the sled and went into town for food when everybody was snowed in.
And he introduced me to T. Rex. He would talk about how music, if it really resonates, will beat somewhere right near your heartbeat. That music will make sense to you, he told me, because it’s in rhythm with your soul.
Families and friends filled the bleachers and the folding chairs set in the space usually reserved for basketball and PE class. The members of the high school choir stood in formation on the stage at one end of the gym, their voices blending in Muppet Movie medleys and ballads of Dan Fogelberg or Joni Mitchell.
Jim had joined the choir early in sophomore year, and performing in recitals proved to be more than a pleasant diversion from sports. Director Ann Johnson began at the beginning, teaching her charges to properly breathe from the diaphragm to avoid straining their young vocal cords. She introduced them to the behind-the-scenes tasks required to mount a performance, from placing announcements in the Daily News to the ins and outs of acquiring performance rights, and her choir members collaborated in selecting the popular songs they performed. Jim took his place at the bake sale table and the chocolate bar concession, raising funds for the construction of an acoustic shell and the purchase of sheet music for Oliver, the musical they chose to stage that year.
Cast as the cocky charity boy Noah Claypole, Jim called upon his wrestling skills to add realism to his fight scene with the title character. His vocals were limited to group numbers, but even so, his powerful tenor rose clear among the voices of the ensemble.
“Jim could pick out a harmonizing line and improvise,” Johnson recalled in a 2013 interview. “His intonation was always spot-on. I remember wishing I could hear those internal harmonies the way he did.”
In May, Anne Meeks opened the windows of her classroom to the school courtyard, admitting soft breezes and the muted voices of honor students allowed to spend study hall on the lawn. They sprawled among dandelions and abandoned textbooks, comparing notes on the gowns they’d wear to the upcoming junior prom and speculating on how well the Detroit Tigers would do that season.
Restless with spring, her students were hard-pressed to pay attention to their lessons, but distracted as they were by the just-reopened Dairy Queen down the street, they snapped from their reveries when she distributed their end-of-year gift. She’d collected their work throughout the semester and compiled it in Aurora, the class literary journal. They turned the pages of the little magazine, pungent with fresh ink and still warm from the press in the art studio down the hall, and for the first time, saw in print their verses and stories and bylines. Illustrating Jim’s poems were his pen-and-ink drawings of a small, wiry character he called Maynard.
Every morning, Jim set his cup of tea at the edge of his drafting table, taped paper to the drawing board, and arranged in a line his pencils and Staedtler erasers. He’d discovered in drafting class a way to blend the artistic and the practical and apply the geometry he’d struggled with sophomore year. He still ignored Meeks’s journalism syllabus, but when challenged to draw a 3-D view of the threads and mechanisms hidden inside a machine assembly, he gave his full atte
ntion.
“I’d have a hard time finding anything wrong with his work,” student teacher Kjiirt Jensen would recall. “I’d have to get on his case because he couldn’t do the proper lettering too well. He always tried to do it his own way.”
The most advanced student in the class, Kjiirt had completed every drafting course the school offered, and at a loss over what to assign him next, Mr. Ingraham had enlisted him to assist with grading and keeping his class on track.
Instead of creating a competitive distance, Kjiirt’s critiques only drew him and Jim closer. Ever since eighth-grade reading class, each had always found in the other an empathetic outsider. At the periphery of a party or during a pep rally in the gym, they’d whispered snarky comments and recognized a safe if tenuous kinship. But working together in Ingraham’s class, they discovered their mutual passion for art and a shared drive for perfection, and before long, the two were inseparable.
“They always walked around the school with these little impish grins,” choir director Ann Johnson would recall. “It was as if they were in on something that nobody else knew about. You saw them and thought, ‘What are those two up to?’”
Here at last was Jim’s counterpart, a tall, blond opposite to catch his glance and see with him past hypocrisy and blind conformity, a bright equal with a perverse sense of humor that rivaled his own.
Kjiirt and I saw things differently. We’d read the newspaper or hear something on the news, and go, “That doesn’t sound right. That seems like a very manipulated statement that’s not reflective of the truth. I’m calling bullshit on that one.”
If somebody was all excited and asked us if we were going to the football game, we just didn’t get it. That was the kind of thing we just didn’t line up for.
On prom night, Kjiirt went way formal, like he was James Bond or somebody. I bought a plastic top hat and spray-painted it green and rented a green tuxedo and a frilly white shirt with green highlights. I looked like a leprechaun. I took one of our best friends instead of an actual date. We hung out for an hour and then went to a drive-in movie.
They spent weekends on Darr Road, where Jim took album after album from the big black trunk—the Jacksons and the Bee Gees, Adam and the Ants and Patti Smith, Devo and Kiss. Kjiirt’s LP collection was limited to the lyrical James Taylor and Jimmy Buffett available at Sounds Good, Ludington’s provincial record shop, and he listened, rapt. Jim’s music was a revelation, a portal to a place of sound and color and emotion alien to anything he’d ever experienced in Mason County.
And on Saturday nights, Kjiirt drove them in his dad’s immense Buick to nearby Custer and teen night at Johnny’s. Roller rink by day, dance emporium by night, Johnny’s had been for generations the destination of young people from all corners of the county. Romances bloomed and ended here, jealousies ignited, and hardly a week went by without an altercation in the parking lot between aggressive boys just off the farm.
Inside, Johnny’s was all cavernous shadow, tables set about the wooden dance floor, and clusters of friends daring one another to ask an upperclassman to dance. Presiding over it all was Johnny himself in pompadour and dinner jacket. Little at Johnny’s ever changed, least of all the music. When Jim and Kjiirt stepped inside, they invariably heard the same Village People and Donna Summer that had been popular years before.
But they danced—sometimes with classmates, sometimes with girls from Ludington or even Manistee, girls they found fascinating and sophisticated, if only because they didn’t live next door. The strobes flickered, the DJ replaced “My Sharona” with “Sultans of Swing,” and they moved across the floor, forgetting for a little while the shabby décor, the smell of stale beer and cigarettes, the long, straight roads and acres of string beans outside.
An evening was never complete without the drive afterward to Ludington, the radio tuned to a station Kjiirt’s dad, with a bewildered shake of his head, would have to change in the morning. A ritual visit to the town’s western edge and Lake Michigan was almost mandatory for Mason Countyites. Every departure, every return was marked by a drive along the shore, a glance at the vast inland sea that meant home.
Their visits might include only a spin past the beach and a possessive look at the lake raging with whitecaps or placid in moonlight, the sky awash with stars. More often, though, they’d park the Buick and walk barefoot across the cold sand and along the breakwall to the lighthouse.
The silence and the darkness invited confidences, and Jim and Kjiirt talked—in the somewhat guarded way of teenage boys, to be sure—of synchronicity and mystery, of the wheelsmen who maneuvered the carferries through storm and fog across the lake, of what might lie on its opposite shore.
“One night, he told me a story,” Kjiirt would recall. “He told me about a girl he’d known in Ohio. I don’t remember if he told me her name or if she was still there or even what their connection was.” Kjiirt may not have remembered the details, but he remembered the sadness in Jim’s voice and the depth—uncharacteristic in someone so young, he thought even then—of his words. “He looked up,” he recalled. “And he said, ‘She’s looking up and seeing the same moon.’”
Before long, their walks to the lighthouse came to include another ritual, a ritual of their own making. When the time came to abandon a childhood dream, if a certain girl decided she no longer wished to accompany them to the Lyric, when a friend moved away or proved to be not such a good friend after all, they tossed talismans of ending and beginning into the dark water. Moon and stars their only witnesses, they sacrificed a photo or a letter, a coin, a ring, a stone—silently closing one chapter and opening the way for the next.
Spirit Week was the long-anticipated and over-the-top event of the sports-centered school, the annual celebration of star players and winning teams. All week long, every Scottville Spartan dressed in the school colors of blue and gold, and alumni returned from colleges and careers to attend the homecoming football game at MacPhail Field. In the crisp fall evenings in advance of the game, students gathered in some classmate’s barn to decorate flatbeds with tissue rosettes and papier-mâché goalposts to create the floats that would make up the halftime parade.
They constructed in the school’s corridors elaborate tableaux honoring their team, each class sure their effort would be voted the most creative. The Class of ’82 commandeered B Hall, the long corridor outside Meeks’s and Winkel’s and Boots Newkirk’s classrooms, and erected larger-than-life images of the graduating football players. The mannequins stood shoulder to shoulder on either side of the hallway, identifiable as the real boys by their numbered jerseys. Imposing yet minimalist, the images evoked a walk through the Pro Football Hall of Fame, a tribute to victory and achievement, the embodiment of possibility. They were the handiwork of seniors adept with paintbrush and glue, but the idea was all Jim’s.
Cross country runner Ed Sanders, by then a sophomore, would later recall the display. “Jim had a different vision from what everybody else had,” he said, remembering the crepe paper streamers and foil stars that made up the other class exhibits. “We’d walk down the senior hall and think, ‘Well, our display is going to lose.’”
Students auditioning for the spring musical had much the same reaction to the sudden public appearance of Jim’s talents. Eager to explore yet another artistic avenue, he—rather on a whim—responded to the casting call and arrived for tryouts. He’d enjoyed the movie version of The Sound of Music and imagined performing as he had in Oliver the year before, perhaps as one of the von Trapp children. The pianist made her way through the intro to “Edelweiss” and then nodded toward Jim to begin. His strong tenor echoed across the empty stage with the intensity and heartbreak the song demanded.
The director looked from Jim to the pianist to his classmates, who sat in stunned silence. “They were all looking at each other,” he would remember. “And I’m thinking, ‘Am I fucking this up? What the fuck’s going on?’” No one i
n the church choir had ever commented on the quality of Jim’s voice. His work with the school chorus had been limited to ensemble singing, and his solo abilities had never been singled out. But now, the drama director admitted he’d never heard a high schooler’s voice so pure, so clear, so confident.
As much to Jim’s surprise as everyone else’s, the role of Baron von Trapp was his.
The spotlight and the chance to sing were as tempting as they’d been since he was small, but the rehearsal and performance schedule would conflict with regional track meets and the final conference race of the year. He took his time contemplating his decision—too much time—and when he finally phoned the director, the part had been given to someone else.
Perhaps one day, he’d have another chance to take the stage, Jim rationalized. Another lead role might someday be his. In the meantime, it was probably best to stay the course and complete his final season of track. Abandoning his teammates this late in the game would be tantamount to walking away in the last mile of the race. He’d set his course long ago, and there was nothing now but to see it through to the end, earn one more varsity letter, reach the goal he’d envisioned freshman year—even if it meant delaying another.
The song that would represent the Class of ’82 seemed a foregone decision. Only one song appeared on the ballot circulated by the class council, “Believe It or Not,” the sprightly theme of the television comedy The Greatest American Hero. But Jim believed his class deserved a song of more depth and complexity, and he spent the weeks before graduation petitioning for the more appropriate “Dream On.” He approached student after student, explaining the inspiring lyrics and calling their attention to the innovative musical riffs, until even classmates who’d never before heard of Aerosmith joined his camp. In the end, “Dream On” won by a landslide.
When they decided that the Greatest American Hero theme would be our class song, I hit the roof. I was never so active in student government as I was that month getting signatures for “Dream On.” I wasn’t going to go down as having my class theme song be a bouncy TV show bullshit song.
A Perfect Union of Contrary Things Page 5
