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I Got a Name: The Jim Croce Story

Page 21

by Ingrid Croce


  Cats with the clap, and the crabs and the piles,

  Cats with their bums all wreathed in smiles

  As they revel in the throes of fornication

  _____

  Life in New York was intolerable, and the friction between us increased.

  “Jim, we just got a bill from Moore for my scholarship. We owe them $1,000 by the end of January. Since I didn’t go back to school this year, I have to pay it back.”

  He didn’t respond. I wanted to be supportive but felt angry and trapped. Why was he so afraid to talk honestly with his friend?

  Finally, in late February, Tommy got Jim a commercial for Big Sur Cigars. Jim had no gas money. So he rode his bike through Harlem, in spite of the ongoing race riots, and then through Central Park to a studio on the West Side. After the session, he went out to unlock his bike from the pipe at the front of the building.

  As Jim bent over the lock, a panhandler came up behind him.

  “You got a dime for a cup of coffee?” he asked.

  Startled, Jim jumped back. Before he could reply, the transient said, “Man, I’m sorry. It looks like you need it more than I do.”

  “Let me buy you a cup.” Jim said, leading him into the coffee shop.

  “How did you get so fucked up, man?” Jim asked the guy. The homeless man told his story about living on the streets of New York City. As they left, Jim paid the check with the last dollar he had. Inspired by his conversation with the man, he wrote a new song that night called “Box #10.”

  Well, out of southern Illinois come a down home country boy,

  He gonna make it in the city playin’ guitar in the studio.

  Well, he hadn’t been there an hour,

  When he met a Broadway flow’r;

  You know she took him for his money

  And she left him in a cheap hotel.

  Well, it’s easy for you to see

  That that country boy is me,

  I’m sayin’ how’m I gonna ever break the news

  to the folks back home

  Well, I was gonna be a great success,

  Things sure ended up a mess,

  And in the process I got messed up too.

  Hello, Momma and Dad, I had to call collect,

  ‘Cause I ain’t got a cent to my name;

  Well, I’m sleepin’ in the hotel doorway

  And tonight they say it’s gonna rain.

  And if you’d only send me some money,

  I’d be back on my feet again;

  Send it in care of the Sunday Mission, Box #10.

  Back in Southern Illinois,

  They’re still worry’n ’bout their boy,

  But this boy’s comin’ home just as soon as he gets the fare;

  ’Cause as soon as I got my bread,

  I got a pipe upside my head;

  You know they left me in the alley

  took my money and my guitar too.

  Hello, Momma and Dad, I had to call collect,

  ’Cause I ain’t got a cent to my name;

  Well, I’m sleepin’ in the hotel doorway

  And tonight they say it’s gonna rain.

  And if you’d only send me some money,

  I’d be back on my feet again;

  Send it in care of the Sunday Mission, Box #10.

  A few weeks later, Jim walked up to me while I was toasting a bagel in the kitchen. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go home.”

  I put down the butter knife and turned to him.

  “Where’s home?”

  “Anywhere you want, Ing.”

  “Let’s move to the country, away from this insanity.”

  I called my painting professor, and now good friend, Harold Jacobs. Some of the best times we’d shared together were out at his farmhouse. Though I was Harold’s student, Jim and I had become good friends with him and his French wife, Berenice, while I was at Moore. We’d stayed overnight at their country home while I was studying and Jim was teaching. And we enjoyed the quiet morning walks along the country roads and the delicious French gourmet meals that Berenice had prepared for us.

  With the thought of moving away from New York, I felt my anger dissipate. Jim said, “I feel better already,” as I dialed Harold’s number to ask if he knew of a place near them that we could rent.

  Harold was happy to hear that Jim and I were moving back to Pennsylvania. He told me he did know of a place that their friends, the Kaltenbachs, were renting. It was in Lyndell, a small town fifty miles west of Philadelphia on the Brandywine River, not too far from their home.

  “That sounds perfect! Thank you so much, Harold. Can you give me the phone number?” I knew our checking account had the last of our savings, less than $300, and I hoped that would be enough to make a new start.

  After I hung up the phone with Harold, I immediately called John Kaltenbach, introduced myself, and told him I wanted to rent the apartment, sight unseen. John was kind and told me he would hold it as a favor to the Jacobs until we got there. Then we could take a look at the place and discuss the rent and all the details.

  When I hung up, I was thrilled. “I can’t believe it, Jim. We’re actually leaving New York!”

  “It sounds like just the kind of place we need, Ing. A place in the country away from all this shit! I’ll rent a trailer in the morning. I’m sure Pistilli will help us to load up. I’ll give him a call. . . . Thanks for taking care of this. “

  “See, sometimes being serious isn’t so bad.”

  “Come over here, sweet thing.”

  This was the first time since the attack in Mexico that things felt really right again between us. We were both ready to start over again.

  Together with Gene, Jim and I maneuvered our belongings into the elevator and down to a U-Haul trailer in the parking lot. Before we could finish, the elevator broke down. While Jim and Gene made trips up and down eight flights of steps, I stayed at the door to guard our things. A young woman, arms filled with groceries, hiked up the stairs and asked me excitedly, “Are you going to be our new neighbors?”

  “No,” I said, apologetically. “We’re moving out today! I’m sorry, but it would have been nice. I’ve been in this apartment house for over a year, and I haven’t made a single friend.”

  “Well, good luck,” the young woman told me.

  “You too,” I said.

  Jim’s bike was the last thing to be loaded. He flung it up on top of the trailer to rope it down, but it fell back with a crash, catching his ear in the spokes. He winced, gritted his teeth against the pain, and heaved it back again. Blood streaked down his cheek, and his head began to throb. All at once everything hopeless and meanspirited he had experienced in the building seemed to collapse on top of him. In a fit of rage, he sprinted back up eight flights to the old apartment. Adrenalin pumping, he yanked the heavy, broken air conditioner from the window, and, gaining momentum as he descended, he lumbered to the landlord’s office on the ground floor. In a final farewell gesture, he hurled the air conditioner at the manager’s office door.

  Gene and I stood back, watching the spectacle.

  “Man,” Gene told Jim, “you are a strong motherfucker!”

  Jim grabbed his bloody ear. “Yeah, well, this place upsets me!”

  “Yeah, I can tell, man.” Gene shook his head. “I bet your landlord’s gonna know it, too.” He glanced at the wrecked door and then threw an arm around Jim. “Good luck, you guys,” he offered.

  “I couldn’t have done it without you, man,” Jim told him. He gave him a quick embrace. “You’ve gotta come see us when we get settled in the country.”

  I hugged Gene. “Thanks for your help,” I said, and gave him a big kiss on the cheek.

  Exhausted, we got into the VW with the U-Haul in tow and headed south. As we approached the tollbooth on the New Jersey Turnpike, I looked at Jim in despair. I dug deep into the bottom of my purse and came up with 34 cents. “We don’t even have enough to pay the toll.” We slowed down, threw the change into the basket
, and kept on driving. Mercifully, we weren’t stopped.

  As we crossed the bridge, I saw terrible disappointment in Jim’s eyes. I hugged him and kissed his injured ear. That night, too tired to drive further and too broke to afford a motel, we snuggled together and slept in the VW in the parking lot of a Howard Johnson’s. Embracing, we looked back at the New York skyline. It was the end of a very bad time. But we’d survived it. And out of our sad and desperate departure came the song “New York’s Not My Home.”

  Well, things were spinnin’ ’round me,

  And all my thoughts were cloudy,

  And I had begun to doubt all the things that were me.

  Been in so many places,

  You know I’ve run so many races.

  And looked into the empty faces of the people of the night,

  And something is just not right.

  Cause I know that I gotta get out of here,

  I’m so alone;

  Don’t you know that I gotta get out of here,

  ’Cause New York’s not my home.

  Though all the streets are crowded,

  There’s something strange about it;

  I lived there ’bout a year and I never once felt at home.

  I thought I’d make the big time,

  I learned a lot of lessons awful quick and now I’m

  Tellin’ you that they were not the nice kind;

  And it’s been so long since I have felt fine.

  That’s the reason that I gotta get out of here,

  I’m so alone;

  Don’t you know that I gotta get out of here,

  ’Cause New York’s not my home.

  TIME IN A BOTTLE

  WITH JIM AT THE WHEEL, and U-Haul trailer in tow, the dented Raisin bumped along a winding rural road toward our new apartment in a converted Pennsylvania farmhouse fifty miles southwest of Philadelphia. A cold, early morning mist surrounded the tall pine trees and carpeted the fields of clover. I was relieved to be away from the mind-mugging metropolis. Lyndell, Pennsylvania, population 138, looked like the perfect place for weary musicians to purge themselves of the insanities of the business and start all over again.

  “I hope Bill Reid can flex some muscle and land a construction job for me,” Jim said, rubbing his swollen, bloodstained ear. “We’ll need something to live on, and I’m ready for some hard physical labor. I’m sure you’ll be able to sell your paintings and pottery, sweet thing. That is, if the Boys don’t find out and decide your art is under contract too.”

  “I don’t think that’s a problem Jim. They don’t want my art any more than they wanted my music. They only want you, sweetie.”

  As we neared Lyndell, I read him the directions: “Make a left at Eagle Tavern, and go one-tenth of a mile to Lyndell Road. Then turn left, and go a ways until you cross Marsh Creek Bridge. Turn right, and follow the Brandywine River down toward Frank’s Folly.”

  Finally, in the distance a huge old stone farmhouse came into view. Adjacent to it was a large two-story home. On the other side of the gravel road was another old, plantation-style mansion and, beyond that, a greenhouse surrounded by fields of flowers.

  Harold and Berenice Jacobs told us that the landlords were good people, that John Kaltenbach used to be a professor at Harvard and a colleague of Richard Alpert, who had since transformed himself into Guru Baba Ram Dass. Harold said John’s wife, Ruth, was a Quaker and that a decade ago John became a Quaker too. They had left Boston and bought the place, and they’d been making a living renting out the apartments and raising flowers and kids.

  “This is great!” Jim said, slowing down as we approached the peaceful series of buildings. He stopped the car in front of the old stone barn.

  John Kaltenbach, a giant of a man in overalls and a red flannel shirt, walked over with a trowel in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.

  “You must be the Croces,” he said, lifting the muddy garden tool. “We’ve been expecting you. Here, hold on to these flowers, Ingrid, and I’ll get the key so you can unload. By the way, we require all of our tenants to help with the plants and picking the flowers on the property, so I hope one of you has a green thumb.” He took long slow strides toward the house.

  As a city girl with no prior experience working the land, I was excited by the possibility of learning about gardening. I never imagined I’d have the opportunity to pick flowers as part of my rent payment, and I was hoping I might be able to grow our own vegetable garden too.

  John came back, key in hand, and led us to the vacant apartment in the two-hundred-year-old farmhouse.

  “When we bought these thirty-three acres, this big old empty house came with it,” John explained. “We spruced it up a bit, made three apartments out of it, and have rented them out ever since. Yours is the smallest. It used to be the smoke house.” He unlocked the door and extended his arm, ushering us inside. As we entered the small living room, we noticed an enormous fireplace. “That’s where they used to smoke meat,” John said. “Here’s the kitchen, and upstairs you’ll find the bedroom and bath.”

  I ran up the winding wooden stairs, and Jim followed. A double bed with a metal headboard stood in the middle of the bedroom, flanked by two boxy chests of drawers. There were two large windows; the one above the bed looked out over the barn. The north window opened to the Brandywine River. Though the entire apartment was less than eight hundred square feet, it seemed spacious and romantic after our cramped rental in the Bronx.

  “It’s perfect,” I told Jim as I returned to the living room. Jim hesitated.

  “I’ll be starting work in a week or so. Can we give you the rent then?” he asked our new landlord.

  John gave him an affable smile.

  “That’s fine with me. The Jacobs already informed me that you wouldn’t be able to pay until the fifteenth. Why don’t you two get comfortable, and come up to the big house for dinner around six o’clock? I know Ruth and the kids will want to meet you both.”

  _____

  During our first few days in the farmhouse, Jim relaxed. He took peaceful walks by the river and played his guitar endlessly at the kitchen table. I unpacked everything, cleaned and painted the walls, and scrubbed the kitchen and bath. Two days later, our new home was in perfect order.

  “Today, I start decorating,” I said, kissing Jim happily as I handed him a plate with a big breakfast of eggs, sausage, and homemade blueberry muffins.

  After he finished breakfast and I was cleaning up, he told me he was going out to the old stone outhouse. He thought he might be able to convert it into an office. I set up the table so I could do batik. The apartment’s aging cotton curtains were dingy and boring, and since we didn’t have money for new ones, I decided to use some brightly colored dyes I had and melt some wax in my old battered saucepan. I laid newspapers in thick layers on our prized dining room table, which my parents had given us for a wedding gift, and opened the windows for ventilation. After I completed my batik window dressings, I cut up old white sheets into rectangles for placemats, to match the curtains. In the distance I heard Jim call me.

  “Ing, come on out here!” I set down the placemat I was dyeing and ran quickly to the outhouse to see what Jim wanted.

  “I think this will make a perfect office,” he said. “All we’d have to do is lay a new floor, slap on some paint, and it’ll work fine. Look, you can see the Brandywine through the window.” We peered through the arched window and saw smoke billowing overhead.

  I was heartbroken when I saw the clouds of smoke pouring out the door and windows of our newly painted apartment. As I went inside to turn off the stove, I saw streaks of black waxy vapor running from the pan on the stove. I extinguished the flames quickly, but the freshly painted walls were coated with wax and smudged black and grey.

  “So much for the white walls,” Jim joked. “This time, I bet you paint them even better. In fact, if you keep it up, we can rent you out as a house painter, Ing.”

  When Jim went out to survey the neighborhoo
d, I felt like crying for the dumb mistake I’d made and for all the extra work I’d caused myself. I started cleaning up my mess, and after feeling sorry for myself, and blaming the world out loud, I started to laugh. There was a freedom in the peacefulness of the country, and I felt there was room to make mistakes and time to make changes.

  Once I finished cleaning, I walked outside through the kitchen door and took a good look at the backyard, deciding on the perfect place to plant my garden. I’d never grown anything in the ground before, so I wasn’t quite sure what I should be looking for, but I was hoping it would come as naturally to me as art did and that, as John said, I’d have a green thumb.

  When Jim returned home from his walk, I asked him if he’d help me start our garden. Immediately he went up to John’s to borrow a pick and shovel. I drew out a line in the dirt by the back kitchen door to show him where I wanted to do the planting. I was going to grow zucchini, tomatoes, Swiss chard, green beans, melons, and herbs. According to the farmer’s almanac, the timing was perfect.

  I’d been athletic at school, but neither Jim nor I had been exercising in New York. Jim began to loosen the soil with the pick, and I worked the shovel. We must have looked comical to our new neighbors. Preparing the land for our first home garden was really difficult. It took us all day to ready the hard dirt. I felt a great satisfaction when we were finished, and while I planted the seeds, Jim cleaned up and then went to get some cold beer.

  At the bottom of the hill, along the Brandywine River, stood the large, weather-beaten building with a sign that read, “Frank’s Folly.” It served as a combination trailer park, country store, bait shop, post office, and gas station. Frank was a dour, tight-lipped man, and he and his wife took great pride in their family business. Although Frank complained about the abundance of “hippies” moving into the area, his prejudice didn’t stop Jim from trying to get to know the man behind the scowl. Each morning when Jim walked down to get the newspaper and mail, he prodded Frank for local gossip. The more Jim egged him on, the more Frank opened up, and the more fodder Jim had for new lyrics and raps.

 

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