I love talking to my friends. It’s an important part of my life, one that I have taken efforts to nurture. I like when my friends call. It makes me happy.
Unless it’s Jimmy, because he can be a handful.
Jimmy is an interesting guy. He’s self-employed, although that is debatable at times. I’ll give it to him, though. He has made enough cash to live his life the way he wants. And that is why it can be tough to talk to Jimmy sometimes. He’s just having more fun than most of us every day. There is no work day for him. His office is right next to his kitchen. It seems Jimmy has quick bursts of great productivity, punctuated by plenty of free time for him to pursue his interests, which he does methodically.
Seinfeld's Jimmy. Not my Jimmy, but just as unique.
Here is an example. I’ll often talk to Jimmy early in the day, on the way to work. These days, he is in his recliner, watching The Sopranos. He’ll call to tell me which episode is on. There are minutes of silence between us while I hear Tony wheezing in the background. When a good Seinfeld is on, I get the call and we’ll trade the lines before they are delivered. Good times.
But I can’t always talk to Jimmy.
From June until mid-September, I refuse to talk to him during the day. That’s because he’s on the beach, every single day. I usually just hang up after reminding him I will not speak to him while he is tanning and I am spending the day in an office that has a window overlooking a hallway.
“Jimmy’s getting brown,” he’ll yell, borrowing from a Seinfeld episode in which a one-time-only character refers to himself in the third person.
When we are fishing, and a striped bass takes his lure, he proclaims “Jimmy’s in!”
He’ll also end anecdotes or stories about something that he has said—and he says some crazy stuff—or has done, with, “That’s because Jimmy’s awesome, and you’re not.”
Jimmy lives in the far reaches of a beach community that is not close to anything but the beach. He will only travel out of town to play music on one of his “awesome” guitars, or if he is getting paid. But everyone else is a jerk because they won’t travel to his part of town.
His guitars are awesome, I have to admit it. We have laughs fishing, too. Jimmy is pretty good on the water, and since fishing is about his biggest passion other than getting brown or strumming a classic guitar, it is the best time to hang with Jimmy. He concentrates on the water, waits for the hit and lives for the moment when he can proclaim his awesomeness. In fact, he always waits for that moment.
If Jimmy thinks you’ve done him wrong, he is ferocious and wages battles with Shock and Awe campaigns of insults, threats and efforts to absolutely destroy anyone who is on the wrong end of his mood. If you owe Jimmy $5, your children will wind up owing him double. This is what happens when you have time on your hands like Jimmy does.
It’s even worse to converse with Jimmy from mid-January until April or so, when fishing season is all but gone. This is when he really gets time to think and plot and find victims. He also does some actual work in that time, too. Enough, I guess, to provide plenty of time for Jimmy to get brown when the sands get warm again.
Superlatives are overused in this column. That said, I can proclaim with complete certainty that Jimmy is unlike anyone I have ever known. I also know that writing an entire column about Jimmy will only give him more reason to decree his awesomeness. He is like a tsunami that washes on shore and keeps going until everyone has bowed, or surrendered, to his power.
And if they don’t, Jimmy gets upset.
Follow DryMartino on Twitter at twitter.com/drymartino.
