Growing up, I had a lot of strange characters across my life, one of the weirdest is Old Man Jay. Old Man Jay didn’t have any teeth across my whole life, but apparently used to be normal up till around when I was 4, but I only really remember him as toothless, impossible to understand, and a crack head IV dope user.
He has some strange connection to my family growing up, I had a divided home, with 4 step brothers, and a half brother who was 5 years older then me. The others were 10 plus years older then me, and largely not around, mostly already junkies and bank robbers.
I grew up around my brother and his dad, and Old man Jay was another construction guy that would be around, I still don’t know why, but to know Old Man Jay from my perspective, it starts with this story:
Before he was old man Jay, he was just Jay and had a normal family, Wife, daughter and son. From the late 70s into the early 90s. He worked on many job sites but mostly building houses for contractors.
In the early 90s, Jay’s son was 17 and started to get into fights with his parents, and just had typical young adult high school boy issues. He was talking about dropping out to start working, and Jay was like “Well fine, then you’re coming to work with me.” The Idea was to show his son that he would hate living the same life, and try to make him realize school isn’t so bad.
Jays wife didn’t think this was a good idea, she said not too, but Jay was adamant.
So the day came for Jay to bring his 17 year old son to work on a house.
That first day, his son was supposed to bring something up to the roof, since they were mainly roofers, his son fell off the ladder from the top and broke his neck, becoming a paraplegic and later died.
I have a vivid memory of sitting at the kitchen table, with my brother, his dad, Jay and Lawyer that came to talk about compensation from a legal stand point.
I remember the Lawyer asking the details, first he said how was the ladder staged, My brothers dad said : “Well, Jay said he pulled up his truck and it was based on the flatbed of his own truck”
So fuck, that’s kind of on him, but the Lawyer said “Alright, makes it difficult but we can sue the ladder company, where’d you get it, do you have the receipt from work or anything?”
Jay whispered something to my brothers dad, and he just put his head in his hands and sighed.
He goes: “He stole the ladder”
Lawyer just gets up and leaves. Apparently, this isn’t that uncommon because I have since heard similar stories like this.
That was the last time Jay was Jay, his wife left him from the grief and blame, his daughter was never around anymore. And Jay went hard onto needles and crack.
His teeth fell out by the time I was 8. He was shooting up and smoking crack at my house all the time. I found him grotesque and disgusting, never liked him.
When I was 8 I was separated from my brother as our mother passed.
I went on to live up the street a couple years later. It wasn’t until I was grown up myself and 17 that I started to see Old Man Jay again.
I have a Distinct memory of the only time all my brothers and I were together in the Driveway. I left High School to work on the road at different music festivals and had made a really great, yet chaotic life for myself using a ton of coke, Nitrous, Opiates, LSD, Ketamine and molly.
For awhile I had escaped that whole construction lifestyle to see the world, while all of them had just been around Massachusetts, in and out of prison and stuck on heroin and crack.
But with my own destiny, there I was, 17 and using heroin with a needle, ruining everything I built for myself.
My brother had a weird relationship with Old Man Jay, I fucking hated the guy, couldn’t understand a word he said, but my brother would go out of his way to see him.
Old Man Jay was living in the basement of a crack house, some how owned by a contractor he was still “working for”
The basement was old, musty and insanely gray, he had a cot and the only color around was the brown from his boots.
We would go in from the storm doors, and up the stairs was just a full broken down crack house filled with many junky cracked out tenants.
Old man Jay would constantly bum hits of crack, he would use a plastic spoon and a dixie cup to shoot up.
He had a 9 inch TV that was only black and white, and it became a large mystery to me to figure out what it could be connected to. It was like a time machine, connected to the past.
It was black and white, but not modern shows, and he would drift off into an older world, the one he grew up in.
I would look for a VHS, or anything but there was none. I asked what it was and he said “es mah sadalyt”
there was no satellite, there was no VHS. the commercials were from the 60s and in black and white, Old Man Jay seemed to have had an Anomalous TV.
Old Man Jay would out live my Brother, he passed in 2016, Old Man Jay was not at the funeral.