B.J. Wilson

Jupiter’s Moons

          (for Jim)

          I love the city and the city rain,
          suburban kids with Biblical names. —David Berman, Silver Jews 

1.

Brian DMs me. 

“Have you seen this?”  

It’s a link to Jim’s obituary. He’d died a whole year earlier during Covid but no one knew. One of his ex-girlfriends from way back in high school found the death certificate: alcoholic cirrhosis with ascites. He was only in his early forties. 

With his dad and sister already passed and his mom with Alzheimer’s, there was no one left to tell us.

“He died alone, bro.” 

2.

I dream Jim and I are out front in his yard by the magnolia, back when both his parents were still alive, when we were both in high school. The leaves have scattered from the porch to where we’ve gathered, neighbors too, to gaze at the spectacle: Jupiter in the daylight like a setting sun, except neon pink, reaching across the horizon and all the way up into the stratosphere. Swirling with azure rivulets, gaseous and thick like mercury, like liquid in a record’s clear vinyl. 

I wake up, but Jim doesn’t.

When I first meet Jim, he’s skating to N.W.A, working at Mr. Gatti’s with hands chipped from the dishwater. He’s saving up for his first car: an old, beige Volkswagen Rabbit. Jim will always have jobs. 

The summer right after high school, we cut grass together on a golf course, my first job right after my first DUI. We smoke bowls on the seventh hole hidden by a marsh, mowers off. Red-winged blackbirds calling from the reeds. 

“Lucky number seven,” we laugh.

“Yeh man, lucky number seven.”  

Smoke, wind. Red flash of a wing across Jim’s face.

Right before he died, Jim was working at the Megacavern in Louisville. I never really knew what he did there exactly. I always assumed he was down there filing things away. I never even asked.

Going through photos since I don’t know what to do with the news of his death, I find shots of Jim that I took with my first camera, a Pentax K-1000. We’d gone down to the creek by my subdivision, in the snow, with my dog. It must have been my first year after high school. We took turns taking shots.

For my favorite one of him, I would’ve had to kneel down in the snow: he’s looking up at a white sky, leafless branches fanning out from both sides of his head, blood-red Blackhawks ball cap turned backwards. My favorite photo that Jim took caught me sitting under some ice cycles, where I held my dog in my lap. 

Whenever I’d come home from college, Jim would always break out his old photos. One of me hanging out at McDonalds: jean jacket and white hoody, hoops in my ears. Or the one of us on someone’s couch swinging at each other, laughing with crooked gazes, cigarettes out the sides of our mouths, sixteen, seventeen years old?

5.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Radiohead. OK Computer,” Jim says.

“It’s weird.” 

“It’s fucking awesome.”

“I’m stoned.”

6.

I’d sometimes hang out with his dad in the front room on my way to Jim’s room in the back. And of his mom, Jim would repeat the same thing, as if she might’ve been wrong.

“She loves you, man.”

Once when I was drunk, I got mad at Jim for hanging out more with Dave, who was cool and played bass in The Pennies. So I drove over to Dave’s and went off on Jim in the street. When my car died at a stop sign, I stumbled off and passed out in someone’s yard. I don’t even know how I got home. I just remember one of my friends laughing as he pulled me from the bushes.

Drunk at a party at Dave’s, I slipped Jim’s weed from his pocket after he’d passed out, then I smoked it all with a girl. I didn’t even pretend that it was mine, that’s how it got back to him. 

Didn’t give a shit. 

7.

The summer after high school, we got locked up for underage drinking after smoking opium at someone’s apartment. I had already lost my driver’s license for the second time, two DUIs in less than twelve months, so I had to ride the bus to Twelve-step meetings on the other side of town, court order. Had to walk to Jim’s, one neighborhood over.

We were both growing our hair out. Jim on a brief stint with an amp and guitar learning “Molly’s Lips.” The only way to keep my hair long was to slick it back in a ponytail.

“What’s up, Steven Segal?” says Jim Cobain.

“Annie stood me up,” I tell him. 

“Oh shit. Hit this.”

We hung out less once we both started dating, but Jim was there when I had to fight for my girlfriend. The ex had taken off his shirt at McDonald’s to brandish his tattoos, despite the cold. He’d been saying I was afraid of him. I guess I was, or I was avoiding him at least, but there was nowhere else to go. Lenny tore out one of my earrings when he mugged my face.

“That’s right, get mad motherfucker,” he said.

When he came at me again, I was surprised to find I had him in a half-nelson.

“Let me up,” he said. “Let’s fight like men.” 

After I let him go, Jim lit me a cigarette, someone else lit Lenny’s, then he walked off. It wasn’t over, not at all.

“Let’s go,” Jim said, his arm around me.

We climbed into his old, steel-blue RX7. Serious factory tweeters: I’m guessing Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, but the heavy disc, not the soft one.

In the years close to his death, I visited Jim less whenever I got back into town. He’d break out the same photos, as if all we had left was behind us. But he’d have a fridge stocked with soda, non-alcoholic drinks. I like to think that some of those were kept there for me.

After I moved back to Louisville, he was the only person outside my family who knew I’d gotten into recovery. In a bar by the river, he kept ordering me Dr. Peppers. I remember brown pelicans on the pilings all around us.

Once I started getting better, though, I would have coffee just down the street from Jim’s, but with new friends. I would wonder if he was home, but I never went down. As I was getting better, he wasn’t.  

10.

But the last time I saw Jim, he was confident in the year that I wasn’t. Scrolling through his social media months after I learned of his passing, there isn’t much, but the last pic is the hardest: he’s looking straight at me, with a red L for Louisville on his ball cap. Giving the finger.

11.

Outside Jim’s shotgun house down by UofL, I stand under hundreds of green herons perched in the trees. I linger on the porch, listening before going in: a mass cacophony of squawking as the rain starts. Straight down, all of a sudden. This’ll be the last time. 

Jim plays a CD I brought, and when someone asks if it’s Gang Starr, Jim smiles.

“It’s B.J.”

12.

When his dad catches us taking bong hits in Jim’s bedroom, Jim says it’s just tobacco. 

“Yeh right. Don’t let your mother smell it.”

We cook food from the fridge in his parents’ garage, pass out on our separate sides of Jim’s waterbed to Beastie Boys instrumentals.

13.

When I wake up, Jim’s still passed out, but not the kind from which he’ll wake up. And my beard is gray, and I’m balding, driving down Jim’s old street, looking for the house he grew up in, but it’s gone too. 

All that’s left is their magnolia: black against a pink sky just starting to fade, a blue moon starting to rise.