The Poet of New Brunswick

The Poet of New Brunswick

I. Early September of 2004

The first time I had heard about James was the very first day I moved to New Brunswick.  His name was being angrily shouted throughout the apartment complex parking lot by my friend and new roommate Justin. “They arrested James J. Nemeth! They arrested The Poet of New Brunswick!”

James had been arrested for something along the lines of greeting the morning sun outside his apartment in a star stance, mimicking a pentagram in some sort of tribute to pagan spirituality, in the nude.  This freaked out one of his upstairs neighbors as she stepped out onto the front stoop that morning, and that was that.

I would meet James soon after when I went along for the ride to pick him up from the mental health facility he was placed in after that arrest.  (It would have definitely surprised me that day if I had known that, years later, I would be employed at this very same institution.)  I had no business being on this trip.  He didn’t know me and I didn’t want to go.  But Justin asked me to go with him because he was concerned that after speaking with the hospital staff, they weren’t going to let him leave the facility; a paranoia that wasn’t completely unreasonable.  So I was there to ensure that Justin was not abducted by the powers that be, so he could do what was needed to get James released.

I certainly was not as close with James as some of his other New Brunswick acquaintances.  We were neighbors.  I would help him out here and there, bullshit with him pretty regularly and photograph him from time to time.  At the beginning, I formally asked to follow him around and photograph his daily life.  He agreed, but initially charged me for his time. He framed it as a donation toward his poetry expenses.  It was my rookie year photographing in any real way, so I thought, “Whatever, I will support the cause of poetry.”  But I mostly agreed because his time was affordable.  His requested donation for several days of his time worked out to around $30.  Though this was pushing half my wages for a long night of delivering pizza (on a good night), it would be money well spent.

After that initial round, photographing James became informal and we did occasional, small updates on a-day-in-the-life of James J.  I think he enjoyed being in front of the lens, proudly introducing me to people we came across as “someone who was making a photographic documentary on him.”   After all, he was a local celebrity: The Poet of New Brunswick.

But mostly, I just gave him rides to the scrap yard.

II. Life is mean, but it’s also a lot of things

The following is something I wrote after some unfortunate events in James’ life, which I had the misfortune of being a part of.  I don’t spontaneously write often, but I remember needing an outlet to digest what had happened that day.  Looking back, I am glad I did.  I wish I had done it more often.  The writing is long and rambling, but it meanders through some illuminative details of James’ life.   The writing was done without much editorial thought, but it was serving a purpose at the time.  I am still conflicted about leaving some of the details in this story.  By including some of the specifics, I go directly against the sentiment of James’ particular requests from long ago.  At the same time, I believe including them creates a further understanding and paints a more complete portrait of the poet.  And the reality is people are complicated and censuring would be a disservice to an individual who lived life so unapologetically.  But maybe I’m wrong.  I have since made some basic edits for readability, but it is still a bit raw at some points. It is what it is.

August 27, 2008

The theme of the day today is: Life is mean.

I woke up early today to go to James J. Nemeth’s apartment to offer him my help with whatever he needed in his process of moving out.  He was being evicted.  He had lived with his father Julius for, I believe, more than a decade in Apartment 34 at the Birchwood Terrace Apartments at 272 Hamilton Street; the next stoop down from my old apartment 26.  His father passed away about two years ago now.  He lived with his father for a very long time.  They both had cleaned up from alcoholism together and kind of took care of each other.  Julius was in his 90’s when he died.  After that, James no longer had his father’s Social Security check coming in, which was crucial in paying rent.  James ran out of money.  He is 61 years old and is schizophrenic. 

The last time I saw James, I brought him, like I do every month or so, to the scrap yard in Edison.  I have been doing this since the summer of 2006.  James collects cans he finds in the area and then trades them in for cash at the scrap yard. 

I have photographed in that scrap yard once.  It is owned by two central jersey brothers, Mike and Joe, who over time seem to have taken on some of the hardened qualities of the steel in their lot.  Despite that, they still allowed a character like me walk around their yard and photograph.  I learned through them that their price fluctuations almost solely rely on the Chinese market.  The world is awfully small; both usages of the word awfully apply.  Most of James’ cans get put on a barge and sent to the other side of the world. The Chinese then make it into some bullshit and send it back to us, so can we throw it away again sometime after that.  I bet every other week when people in New Brunswick put out their recycling there is about 5 to 10 thousand dollars in the form of aluminum cans sitting in those green bins. Only people who are broke, really broke, see it in that way.  James would bank anywhere from $48-$75 a visit.  Enough for him to afford to refill his printer ink cartridges so he could continue printing his poems and distribute them to his reading audience: which is anyone he comes across.  It also helped him to buy a little pot, mostly for medicinal purposes.   

Neither of us are what you would call ‘morning people’ but that’s always the time we schedule our trips.  Our exchanges on those mornings to Edison from James’ apartment float somewhere between long silences, confessions, complaints about how shitty a lot of the town can be (especially when under the influence) and schizophrenic banter.  Often, it is James talking a lot and me agreeing with him from time to time, or me asking him questions to break silence or to get him to stop talking to the door.  He became well acquainted with the passenger door of George’s pick-up truck.   I would get border-line jealous of how much attention that door received in comparison to me: his scrap chauffer.  

There are a lot of traffic lights on the ride, making each trip an unbearably long 15 minute drive.  As time went on, I was almost offended at how little he would talk to me on the ride, especially once he got a Discman.  He sometimes would put on his headphones and listen to an Arcade Fire CD Justin had made for him for the entire course of the ride.  Though I felt pretty unappreciated, I tried not to be offended, because after all, he is crazy. 

On our last ride he told me, like he often does, about how he is hit by balls of energy throughout the day so intense they could knock over a house.  He says it is caught up with some extraterrestrial, space-time continuum something or other.  He usually explained the source as some kind of general evil trying to torture and destroy him.  On our last ride he gave the specifics on the source of this evil: British kids who created a video game that could remotely torture people, like James, for sadistic pleasure.  An example he gave of this torture was the feeling of being repeatedly poked in the head all day.  From there he went on to tell me how much he disliked British people and how they are all awful and sadistic. 

I woke up early today to give James my normal one hour advance warning/wake-up call around 8:00ish.  I usually do this in order to get his ass out of bed so I am not waiting on his front stoop for 45 minutes before we depart.  But he didn’t pick up any of my phone calls.  At around nine o’clock, I decided to bike down and knock on his door.  His front entry is covered in poems, a pin-up picture of a former Miss Puerto Rico and a small American flag.  I knocked and he didn’t answer.  I tried a few more times and left him a note to call me.  He was getting evicted at noon, so I had some time to go home and eat breakfast.  I called a few more times while making an omelet.  No response.  I called Justin, James’ unofficial accountant, lawyer, computer technician, etc.  Justin is a good friend and old roommate of mine, as well as my unofficial accountant, lawyer, computer technician, etc.  I told him what was up.  He told me our friend Jose who does maintenance at the Birchwood Terrace apartments said he heard him talking to himself behind the door earlier that morning, but wouldn’t answer his knocking.   While on the phone, I remembered that Justin is in Denver at the DNC (Democratic National Convention) and my hopes for another set of boots on the ground, during what I anticipated to be a most unenjoyable eviction, were dashed.  I told him I would try to go knock on James’ door again.

I biked back down more serious about moving things, something I have plenty of experience with.  I knocked on his door again.  This time he responded in a very high pitched, almost possessed old lady voice, “Who is it?”  I yelled that it was me and he should let me in.  He said in the same voice, “Okay.”  He never came.  We conversed through the door three more times, almost exactly mimicking the first.  It was pretty fucking creepy. I was also starting to worry a lot.  Not because he sounded possessed, but because one of the confessions he would tell me in the truck ride to Edison was that when he ran out of money he was going to kill himself.  He already had the poison. 

I walked away to go find Jose, who is a really good hearted guy who helped us out a lot when we lived there.  He was actually in my old apartment prepping it for the next group of tenants to move in when I found him.  I hadn’t been inside it since I delivered pizza there sometime after moving out.  I toured it real quick and then got down to business about James.  We decided to go over there again.  This time after knocking for a little bit he responded with, “Call an ambulance!”  Jose has a skeleton key to all the locks in the complex so I asked him to open the door.  I walked into his oxygen deprived apartment to find him lying naked on his kitchen floor. 

He was completely covered in what appeared to be mud.  At first, I believed I was witnessing a schizophrenic spell combined with some kind of pagan ritual, which he would at times interweave.  But about 30 seconds later, I realized James could not physically get up.  I asked Jose to call the ambulance.  He did and then never returned, understandably. I asked James what happened and what was all over him?  James eventually mumbled out the answers, “I hurt my elbow badly” and “shit”.  He had fallen and hurt himself and the substance that I thought was mud was actually the result of his colostomy bag rupturing when he hit the kitchen floor. 

I was already in the shit by the time I realized I was in the shit.  I was temporarily unfazed.  I asked him repeatedly whether or not he had taken any poison or drugs.  He said no.  Good.  I tried to help him to his feet like he asked, but he was in too much pain.  Instead, I got him a pillow to place between his head and the linoleum.  I told him to relax and assured him an ambulance would be there soon, like you’re supposed to do in situations like this.  He apologized to me for having to deal with the situation.  I told him it was no big deal, which was only half a lie.

I kept running out to look for the ambulance and then back in to check on James.  He started to fade out, maybe because he knew he was close to being saved and he didn’t have to worry.  It was around this time that I started to think more about my standing in and repeatedly touching shit.  I looked at James and noticed that shit was seeping out of his nose.  I began to gag uncontrollably and nearly threw up on James’ naked, shit covered body.  Life is also messy. 

Then the landlord arrived.  She asked if I was moving James out and where the moving truck was.  I let her know I was going to do what I could, but he was currently lying on the floor injured and had to go to the hospital.  She glared at me as if I was fabricating the story, though the ambulance was just then pulling up behind her.  She then asked if he physically could not move out his things.  I said he was not going to be able to.  She said that she had no choice then but to get a warrant to have all his stuff removed and disposed off.  I was quite enraged.

The medics showed up and they were pretty nice.  They were also clearly grossed out by the shit everywhere.  I gave them the run down about James while I helped to clear a path through the stacks of belongings James had accumulated in his living room, which now impeded his stretcher bound exit.  These stacks were mainly comprised of yellowed books, primarily philosophy, but the overall collection was vast in its subject matter.  James is an unapologetic intellectual with little patience for ignorance.  James was once telling me some story from his life on the road and much of the setting took place around the Allegheny River.  Being completely unfamiliar with western Pennsylvania, I asked him, “Where is the Allegheny river?”  He looked at me indignantly and said, “Look at a god damn map!”

I wrote down James’ information and let the paramedics know his address would be meaningless, because he was being evicted today.  James was barely staying awake by this time.  One medic accidently hit the other with James’ empty colostomy bag while trying to throw it out of the way. The other guy said, “Ahh, dude!” as they headed out the door bound for Robert Wood Johnson Hospital’s emergency ward. 

This is when the theme of today occurred to me.  A 61 year old man, who has had to fight voices in his head throughout his life, who only about two years ago lost the closest person to him in his life, who just last year had his own colon erupt almost killing him (hence the colostomy bag) and in the face of all of that hustled to raise the little money he could, was being thrown out of his home of more than 10 years for not being able to come up with rent.  As much as this guy fought and struggled it was not enough.  His last day in his home ended with him covered in shit, face down on his kitchen floor.  Life is mean.

…

I remembered Justin telling me that James had given him instructions of what to do if something were to happen to him.  I also remembered it being pretty specific and a responsibility I was not looking forward to assuming.  I also knew that in the list of instructions James gave to Justin of what to do in the event of his death there was a highly stressed point to conceal and destroy his extensive pornography collection. 

I called Justin to ask which of his things I should try to save before the orders were given to throw all his belongings away. I was told to look for his father’s war metals and his notebooks, all of James’ nick-knacks that would be on and in his dresser, his pentagram pendants (very important), his written will, and all of his computer equipment, which contained his archive of poems.  Everything else, which would probably fill a 12 foot dumpster, was to be left behind. 

I had never been anywhere in James’ apartment besides his living room and his kitchen. These two rooms, as I mentioned previously, were overrun with piles of books and papers, making them generally uninviting and even somewhat disturbing to most company. James had told me on a few occasions that after his father died he left his room exactly how his father had kept it and the room became a kind of altar to him. 

I called George to ask him to help me move some of James’ things, since I was temporarilly without a car and I really did not care to be solo on this excursion.  Poor George had no clue what he was waking up to volunteer for.  While waiting for him to arrive I used about a whole roll of paper towels to cover the thin layer of feces smeared across the kitchen floor in an attempt to minimize how much shit we got on our sneakers on our way to and from James’ room.  I had just washed those sneakers.  While doing this it occurred to me that I should have told George to bring some rubber gloves just as he pulled up to James’ apartment.  I gave George the rundown of all that had happened.  He was shocked.

We scrounged up some milk-crates, boxes, and trash bags.  George handed me some gloves he found.  I immediately recognized them as James’ father’s winter gloves.  I think they had just been a part of his living room altar, which was now partially disassembled.  I didn’t feel all the way right using them.  It felt almost sacrilege.  It was sad that it was the end of this place. Everything inside of it which held sentimental value, even holy in stature, was instantaneously turned to worthless junk.  Most of it was junk.  Junk that made up the infrastructure of a very deliberately created temple.  We were about to destroy a sanctuary.  I took the deceased Julius Anthony Nemeth’s gloves and we started to go through their home with little concern for leaving our mark. 

It felt pretty bizarre.  Our job was to save whatever we arbitrarily decided looked important enough from forfeiting its sentimental value.  I started to think about the different abandoned houses I used to explore with friends when I was younger and all the random things we found left behind.  I always wondered what made those people leave those particular objects, but pack up and move plenty of other useless items.  Today, we were kind of stand-ins to fill that void.  Anyway, George started taking apart his computer and I started grabbing photographs and important looking or sentimental documents from his father’s desk.

In addition to using gloves in order to avoid touching the thin film of aged filth on everything, not to mention shit, we also wore our bandanas over our faces because of how thick the air was with the stale cigarette smoke and mold.  There must have been only a tenth of the amount of oxygen that should have been in there.  Breathing felt like trying to chew a dusty manila envelope through your nose.  It felt like they hadn’t opened their basement apartment windows since they moved in. James was always pretty careful to prevent a robbery.  I don’t know how the apartment’s toxicity alone had not killed him yet.  It was rough.  The lingering smell of shit on top of it didn’t help either.

We moved into James’ father’s bedroom/memorial.  Everything was in its place.  The bed sheets were rolled down with a few items of clothing left on top. All of his notable things were placed across his dresser, even the radio was still playing on the same station.  He was a really organized guy.  He also had quite the collection suits, shirts and hats.  I probably would have purchased a few if they were on a rack in Salvation Army; which is mostly were those suits come from I suppose, dead guys closets.  We began, in a somewhat ungentle manner, to dismantle what had probably been in place for as long as he had lived there and which had been absolutely unmoved for the last 2 years. 

We grabbed a folded American flag which appeared to have been received at his funeral, some small photographs and nick-knacks.  I came across a folder containing his father’s identification documents, his birth certificate from 1915. No war medals though.  We looked through everything.  The whole time I felt like we were doing a good thing while also defiling someone’s personal possessions.  We were doing both.  I came across his father’s suitcase that he would take on the road when he was a touring musician in a polka band.  They were full blooded Hungarians. The original “honkeys”, the origin of racial slur for white people, James once explained to me.  The suitcase had all his music books in it and on top was an 8”x10” photograph on his wedding day with a woman I assume was his first wife and James’ mom, who passed away when James was young, I believe.  I took that photograph and that was about it for that room. 

***I was intermittently photographing throughout this misadventure.  I didn’t photograph while James was on the ground covered in shit.  A part of me wanted to and, in a way, I maybe could have insincerely justified it.  I had been making something of a broken photographic documentary of his life for the last few years, and this was certainly a critical moment.  I opted out.  The aftermath was documented though, it’s incomplete, but it’s something. We’ll see.  The documentation of James’ life verses intrusion into it; a little good and a little bad.   

James’ room was next.  We gathered some more boxes and trash bags and walked over the paper towel runway, poorly covering the now dried watery shit on the linoleum.  James use to tell me that he was actually a woman stuck in a man’s body.  In fact, he said he was something like 12 or 14 women stuck in a man’s body, and not just women, goddesses.  These goddesses are who he used to speak to on our rides to the scrap yard, not the door.  They all had different personalities and each would make judgments about your character and let James’ know about these opinions.

A few years back, I invited James over our neighboring apartment and I introduced him to a girlfriend I had at the time.  After showing him some of the photographs I had made of him, he began flirting with her quite a bit.  During which, each one of the goddesses expressed their individual opinions of her.  Some thought she was very attractive, some were straight up petty.  He use to let me know that his desire for women was, in actuality, lesbian in nature, being his mind was run by a baker’s dozen of goddesses.  It would end up that my old girlfriend would turn out to be a lesbian as well; irony.   

I believe I met those goddesses when I walked into his bedroom.  Again, in a very deliberate altar-like positioning, James had encircled his bed and a dresser with pornographic magazine spreads.  It was like a playboy mansion party had been moved to a crack house and then two dimensionally frozen in time.  The porn stacked up everywhere and spanned decades, some of it easily older then my time on earth.  There seemed to be virtually no oxygen in this room, none.  We started going through his things.  Much of it lay beneath the porn.  I thought that would be a pretty good name for a song at the time. I am not sure what it will be about and upon reflection, it may be a more appropriate title for a horror movie.

 We found his pentagrams: check.  We started looking in his dressers where, as Justin said, there were all kinds of nick-knacks under clothes that had never been worn: they were still in their plastic wrapping.  Around this time George and I both started getting kind of woozy.  I decided to open a window.  Then I decided against it.  Then I decided to do it.  This window had not been opened in so long I had to break a film of grime that had sealed the window to the frame.  As soon as sunlight had hit the room it made it feel like the place had been abandoned for years. 

We looked through everything.  I found pay stubs from his former employment with Rutgers, I had never known if that was true or not.  We also found his stack of temporary passes from his days working with the carnival.  They were from all over the country and each one had a picture of him from the early 1980’s on it.  They were really cool.  James is a proud former carnie.  He has a Carnie Power tattoo on his arm, as well as a naked man in a pentagram with a snake and some others I can’t decipher, but I’m pretty sure they are pagan related as well.  We also found a bag full of stuffed animals that contained just about every character of from the animation film, ‘The Land Before Time’.  Tucked behind those stuffed animals was a corner full of black mold. 

He had so much porn.  Though we were told to discard it, we saved a handful Playboys from 1968 and 1969, some still in the plastic. One had an interview with Allen Ginsberg in it. We just felt they were of a higher caliber and could even potentially fetch him some cash.  We also found pictures of him from 1969.  He was no hippy.  He had on a suite and looked like a college kid looked in those days.  We also found his wedding photographs and a few more of his wife.  I thought he was in the carnival before meeting her, but it would seem it was the opposite.  That kind of explains things a little.  Justin had told me she left him and his kids do not speak to him.  That he has kids out there somewhere is astonishing.

What I know of his past is patchy.  At some point I should have done a formal interview with him to try and get some of it straight, but who knows what would have ended up being fact or fiction that he believed to be fact.  Would that matter anyway?  I know a woman he loved very much died.  I know he was an alcoholic and I believe a junkie at one point.  He was suppose to be a really good dancer and won all kinds of dancing contests throughout the Midwest.  He also dated some pop singer from the time.  He calls into 100.1 fm to tell them about it often. 

The thing he has been most proud of in the last few years has been his letters from congressmen and governors from all kind of random Midwestern and western states he visited when he was in the carnival.  He would write a poem about that state, which was really kind of an informative essay, like many of his poems, send it to that congressman or gubernatorial office and wait for their return letter.  He used to carry around these reply letters with him on his outings, a small addition to his one man caravan.

I came across his briefcase full of research papers it looked like he wrote in college.  They concerned some of the same spiritual ideologies he rules his life by these days.  It was kind of a mirror of his dad’s traveling music suitcase.

Speaking of mirrors, non-metaphorically, George accidentally shattered a mirror that was laying face down on the floor.  Thirteen years of bad luck, shit.  We pretty much got all we could out of that room, shattering the mirror again and again as we moved out to the kitchen.  We collected some important looking documents, including his will: check.  George took down the poems that served as wall paper on his wall, each leaving a white shaded rectangle against the surrounding sepia toned walls.  I then felt suddenly and intensely, that I needed to get the fuck out of there.  I had had enough.  This was too much.  I expressed this to George.  We gathered the last of his stacks of poems and brought everything we had collected out to George’s truck. 

On the way out the door I noticed his cart full of poems ready to be distributed, the main component of his one man caravan. We took that too.  I taped the locks open in hopes I could get back in if I needed to for some reason.  As I walked out to the truck I started thinking about destroying the whole place, which me and George didn’t do a bad job of by accident, but to destroy it fully and intentionally may end this chapter of the story a little more justly.  Justin had mentioned a few weeks ago that it would be the right thing to do.  We felt like some message needed to be sent about his eviction. But who would that really help?  Our friends in maintenance would be the ones fixing everything anyway.  It would be kind of a stupid act of revenge.  Besides, I likely will not have access to do so anyway and, after everything, I no longer had the will to either. 

James’ Keys; where were they?  He left only wearing fecal slime; they had to be inside somewhere.  Back in.  In his room, I found his pants on the floor under some stuff we had inadvertently thrown around on top of them.  Those pants pockets contained his wallet, keys, cigarettes, lighter, and about a dozen mints.  Upon reentry, after noticing so much change lying around the apartment, George, the genius that he is, suggested we go to the Commerce Bank penny arcade and trade it in for cash to give to him.  We collected a box full by the end. 

We left, headed towards Justin’s house in Highland Park.  He asked that we put James’ salvaged belongings in the loft above his garage, which at some times had been utilized as a quasi-apartment.  We looked around the loft to find a good spot for the all of his shit.  While looking around at how cool of a place it was, we realized that there was a lump of a body sleeping on a couch in the corner.  We decided to just put the stuff downstairs instead, so as not to disturb the slumber of the couch surfer.  George and I had hung out in other people’s houses by ourselves a lot that day.  I told George we should get some lunch.  I was pretty upset and would be for much of the rest of the day. I still am. 

I mean what the fuck, right?    

We stopped at Commerce Bank before getting food.  James J. Nemeth had $150 in change around his house, more than twice as much as we had guessed when asked by Penny, the animated penny arcade mascot.  It would be nice to give him that when he gets out of the hospital, hopefully he does.  By that time we were both starving and didn’t really feel like interacting with people too much.  We decided just to get groceries and go home.  I started to come back to reality a little in the George Street Co-op grocery store, nothing like organic produce to cheer you up. 

After some food, a much needed shower and about a three hour nap, I walked to the hospital to go see James. On the way there a young kid, maybe 11, made the devil horns hand sign to me and said, “Yeah man we should all worship Satan! We all have a good place in hell waiting for us.” 

I knew the hospital pretty well from delivering pizza there frequently.  He was still in the ER.  I don’t care for hospitals.  Who does, I guess?  I just kept walking through all the doors that signs told me were off limits until I found him.  He was unconscious with an air tube stuck down his throat and taped to his face.  He was alive though.  He looked awful.  I hoped he would stay unconscious for a while.  This way he wouldn’t have to think about anything and he would have a place to sleep for now.  Nobody really noticed me, despite that I was clearly not suppose to be there.  It was the intensive medical unit. They had other things to worry about.  I wondered how they managed to get all the shit cleaned off of him.

The man in the bed next to him was an elderly Colombian man.  The nurses had to tie his hands to the bed because he kept trying to pull the tubes out of his nose.  He kept proclaiming he was strong and that he was a prisoner because he wasn’t allowed to get up and use the bathroom.  The man had just had a stroke and even though he was half tethered down he kept trying to get up and walk around.  It is always interesting and a little sad to watch masculine pride hit the wall of reality, and then try in vain to defy it.   

After watching the old man yell at the nurses for a while, I was finally able to flag down James’ nurse to find out what was up with him.  She wouldn’t tell me much because I really wasn’t supposed to be there.  She asked what I knew and I was able to help fill them in on some things they did not know, which, in my non-expert opinion, were fairly important.  Like how he came to be there and may potentially have a broken arm.  Also that he smokes a pack-plus a day and that he’s a schizophrenic.   He has likely been too unconscious to tell them these things himself. 

He was being moved and they invited me to follow him to his new room.  He started convulsing while being wheeled upstairs.  One of the nurses was brand new and visibly nervous.  He did well though.  He also probably recognized that I was standing there more than anyone else. He expressed through his body language that he felt bad. I imagine this outward display of empathy has probably been bred out of the more seasoned nurses in order to survive in that environment.  Nurses are some of the people I respect most in this world.  They are the backbone of the medical field.  Every day they come here and see all this death and near death and manage to stay at least somewhat positive.  I give them a lot credit, today was enough for me. 

I waited in the lobby, like they told me to, while they were hooking James up to the machines.  I sat on a table and watched the DNC with some Haitian folk.  Bill Clinton was speaking.  It all seemed particularly more phony than usual.  The nurse called me in to ask me some more questions about James.  (I forgot to leave my phone number so James could reach me.  He doesn’t even have pants to his name right now.  I will go visit him tomorrow anyway).  I left and walked back to his apartment to get my bike I left locked out front earlier that day. 

The guy lives to hand out his poetry, it is what keeps him going.  He is leaving his name behind in the hands of hundreds, by now, thousands of strangers.  If I were him, I am not positive if I would have it in me to keep living.  I wouldn’t blame him for wanting out.  But at the same time, he does want to live.  Otherwise, he wouldn’t have asked me to get an ambulance.  The guy has a lot of fight in him.  Like he says, “He gives them hell!”   He is usually referring to the terrestrial evil of sadistic, British, teenage gamers when he says that though.  We’ll see.  I still don’t even really know what happened that morning.  I know it was more than him breaking his arm though.  That was the last time he will have been in his home.  He doesn’t know it yet though.

Life is mean, but it is also a lot of things.   

Maybe he would be happy to know I was writing.  He is the poet of New Brunswick.  But then again maybe he would think all of this was, “Nobody else’s damn business!”

…

III. The Aftermath and the Spring of 2013

Following these events, James didn’t die.  After his hospital recovery and a stint in a shelter, he moved into an apartment building for seniors across the street from my apartment at the time.  Despite that, I rarely saw him over those next few years and was only able to photograph him maybe a couple more times. 

After he was initially released from the hospital, he was actually able to return to his apartment one last time before it was cleared out and renovated.  It was still in the miserable shape we had left it in.  Somewhere in processing the state of his lightly destroyed apartment, he began to believe that two lowlifes had broken into his place, robbed him and ransacked the place in the process.  He would come to tell us though, that the police caught up with them in Missouri and like in an old time Cagney film, he formed his hand like a gun and acted, “Pow!... Pow!”  This story was especially regretful and humorous when he would repeat it to me and George, the true, lowlife bandits.  We were bandits of attempted goodwill.

Between the tale of robbers running from the law and James being regularly hassled by drunken idiots in New Brunswick, he developed an increasingly positive view on vigilantism.  He even shared recent stories about brandishing his pocket knife on these young “punks” on Easton Avenue.  True or not, those sentiments lead to a long running tentative film night to watch “Deathwish” starring Charles Bronson.  James had not seen it in ages and spoke fondly of it.  Plus, it would provide some outlet for his vigilante lust.  I had not yet seen it and we happened to have a copy on hand.

Some years later, after not seeing James for months, I got a call from Justin letting me know that James had died, months earlier and none of us knew.  He was buried somewhere, but he wasn’t yet sure where.  Justin was angry.  James’ passing went completely unrecognized.  Justin’s fury provided bookends to my time knowing James J.  I eventually watched “Deathwish” and thought about the Poet.  I am sure his commentary would have been fantastic.

Looking back, his perseverance was something to admire.  Despite all his talk about eating poison when the money ran out, he continued to stay on the move, writing and distributing his work through hard times and poor health.  His life was a bizarre poem to the human spirit and its wide spectrum of complexities, the remarkable and the objectionable combined, creating a complete being.  Personally, Joyce Kilmer is a long after thought of who claims the title.  James J. Nemeth is the Poet of New Brunswick.  A city, full of characters, will never see another quite like him.

August 8, 2019