Jimmy Hayes and the Hunters

I wish I could remember the name of the lake. That’s the thing about getting old. When you’re young, a memory is more like a movie. Events and places and people, they all flow in a straightforward story as they occurred. Of course, like a film, actions and characters are often embellished with heroic perspective, especially if the person remembering is also the star. Regardless, they seem to progress in a chronological order creating a coherent narrative that satisfies the reason for the memory in the first place.

When you have lived for as long as I have, memories take on the appearance of old photographs, sometimes faded and cracked and as if they’ve been placed in an album in no particular order and pop up randomly from page to page. You are left to create form and substance for the whole series from the chaos of time. So, back to the point. I don’t remember the name of the lake, only that it was summer and the year was probably 1971 or ’72. The lake was a large open area bordered by trees on two sides, a highway on the third and between the highway and the water, a tangled line of bushes, weeds, and a few more scrawny trees. It was large enough that I can’t describe the far shore at all. I’m sure one existed, but all I see now is a vanishing point like a Monet painting.

It was close to Chester, New York. That village was my home then. Chester had everything my burned-out, war-scarred, drug-addled mind and body required at the age of twenty-two. Supportive friends, beautiful young women, a working-class tavern with cheap drinks, music, and the Catskill Mountains. My memory got to this lake and Jimmy Hayes through the reflective path of the past. I stop occasionally in the memory of Chester as it was a happy time and the only time in my life when I’ve felt truly and completely in harmony with the two sides of human existence. The great poet, Mary Oliver, once labeled those two sides—leisure and labor. They are natural external forces that we humans reconcile internally. We need both. I am a restless soul who has never been very comfortable unless I’m performing a task. Simply enjoying life for being life has always been difficult for me. It felt comfortable to do that among these people at this time and place, a feeling that has remained ambiguous ever since I left there in 1973.

This day had proved that leisure was possible even for me. The sun flooded the lake with shimmering diamonds forged by light and water. Creatures slipped through the forest almost unnoticed. Squirrels, rabbits, quail, meadowlarks flitted across small open patches of ground beneath the trees around us. Colors were everywhere and bright. Yellows and deep greens, blues and purples from the twisting vines, ferns, moss, and mountain flowers on the forest floor exploded all around the perimeter of the lake. In all honesty, I think the vividness may have been enhanced by a bowl of hash my friend Jimmy Hayes and I smoked as we watched a carload of our female buddies spill out from said car and run across the beach into the water. Their tanned flesh and lithe athletic bodies splashed and shivered through our fantasies in images that would fill this 21^st century politically correct era with an angst we never considered in this morally free one.

Several other people dotted the lake shore, and Jim and I rested joyfully on the beach, our backs nesting in the warm sand and our eyes glazed over reflecting clouds and blue sky. I was in the moment of serene sleep/not-sleep when Hayes bolted upright and spoke loudly.

“What the fuck?”

“What the fuck,” I repeated.

“Do you see what I see?”

“I hope not you crazy bastard.”

“Over there just inside the tree line.”

He pointed to his left and there, about fifty yards from the shore in a tangle of brush and leering out across the water were three guys that from a distance looked to be about our age. They wore camouflage shirts and pants and cradled either rifles, or maybe shotguns, in their arms. It was a little too far away to be sure. They stood erect and motionless.

“Hunters?” I asked.

“Yeah, either hunters or characters from Deliverance.” We were both fans of James Dickey and had recently read his first and only novel, a current bestseller about the sordid adventures of a camping party run afoul of backwoods hillbilly sodomites. “Lets go. This ain’t the season and they don’t look like birdwatchers.”

Jim was right. No one hunted in this area, not even during the autumn when it was legal. The lake existed too close to civilization. Even the amateurs looking to bag a deer, the doctors and lawyers, and stockbrokers from New York City who bought a license once a year and tramped around the woods during deer season in November putting local cows and horses in jeopardy, had enough common sense to refrain from the off-limit areas in the Catskills. The game wardens would not hesitate to confiscate their expensive equipment and level outrageous fines.

It might seem reckless for two unarmed and stoned hippies to approach armed strangers. Actually, it was reckless. But Jimmy Hayes and I had spent the last part of the 1960’s in heavy combat. Vietnam remained very close to the surface of our minds in those days, and while we both relished being alive, we missed the adrenaline rush and euphoria experienced in a firefight as well. It took me years to get over the paradox of fear and excitement that occurred when placing myself in danger. Taking chances can be addictive. We jumped up and moved quickly toward the three strange young men. They, on the other hand, watched us with expressions of confusion and disbelief. The confrontation lasted only a couple of minutes.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Jimmy Hayes asked the young man in front. The other two were a couple of steps behind on the right and left. A triangle of dumbness, I thought, and that dumbness made the situation risky.

“Why is that your business?” The one in front—a tall, thin fellow with short brown hair, a two-day stubble, and a crooked nose—spoke, baring his teeth in what an optimist would call a smile and I recall as a snarl.

“You have guns. It isn’t hunting season and this area is off limits anyway,” said Hayes.

“We got permission from the owner to bag us a few squirrels.”

“What’s the owner’s name?”

As I asked the question, I noticed his weapon was a single shot .410 shotgun, old and cheap, but deadly. Even stoned, I noted the hunter’s knuckles whitened and tightened on the stock as well.  I’ll never know what action was running through his mind. Maybe he wanted to shoot us, maybe he was frustrated because of our presence and felt he had to turn around and leave. I’ll never know because in the same instant, Jimmy Hayes, who was already close enough to the guy to kiss him, shot his left arm out, grabbed the gun, broke the breech open, and popped the shotgun shell out. It fell to the ground. The guy’s two buddies seemed frozen. Their mouths open in disbelief, neither pointed their guns in our direction. The tall one in front looked shocked and took a step back but managed to squeal out a few words.

“Hey, that’s my gun.”

“And, you can have it back when you turn your ass around and move off,” Jim said.

“Hey, why’d you grab it?”

“I didn’t want you to blow your foot off,” said Jimmy.

“Come on, man, gimme my gun back. We don’t want any trouble.”

“Will you leave?”

They all nodded, and Hayes handed him the empty .410. None of them spoke. They spun around and walked off through the trees.

You could have gotten us killed.”

“Nah, they weren’t killers, just wannabe’s.”

Jimmy Hayes was right. He had a certain sense about people, and as far as I know, he never sized a situation up wrong for as long as I knew him, except one. Like all of us when we were young, he misjudged the meaning of mortality. He thought he wasn’t mortal.

The other two had made no hostile movements. They were just kids, really, shocked at his behavior and as scared and embarrassed as I was nervous. Hayes never blinked. The gun owner did. In retrospect, it seems like an old “High Noon” western standoff. But it was more like a “Blazing Saddles” comedy. These fellows were not killers, and never would be, but I didn’t know it at the time. We had both seen stone-cold killers in the past. I had even been shot by one. Maybe Jimmy sensed what he said he sensed. Maybe he didn’t care one way or another. So, you can think of Jimmy Hayes as a brave guy, which he probably was. Or you can think of him as reckless and a little stupid, which he probably was also. He could also be brash and annoying. But what made us such good friends is that I knew he would always do what he believed was right, even if it wasn’t convenient or beneficial to him. That was a rare quality then, and it’s even rarer today in a world full of people who seem to see courage, compassion, empathy, and integrity as weaknesses. They aren’t. Those are the qualities that allow us to have a workable society.

I always felt that Jim Hayes would have made a good senator for the great state of New York, maybe on the order of a Ted Kennedy who was called “the lion of the Senate.” But, the sensitivity required when humans exercise those good qualities I just mentioned can bring sadness with them as well. That’s the other side of the coin because the truth is most people are more concerned with their own rewards rather than the self-sacrifice that is also required in an honest life. When a sensitive person understands this truth, that the dream of a grand conscience raising for all of humanity is an illusion and not realistic, it can lead to self-destructive behavior. I have learned this based on my experience with humans, both good and bad.

More than twenty years had passed since I last saw Jim. I was on my way to a writing conference in Vermont. He lived in Massachusetts, so I made a little detour. And, more than twenty-five years had passed since we raised our beer bottles together at the Chester Inn in a toast to the great hippie revolution and the Utopia that never happened. Jim spent those years in excess, too much alcohol, too many cigarettes, too many lovers, too little love, and a lot of lost hope. Yes, he had finally stabilized his life. He built a home with a good person, and she shared with him a child to raise. He quit smoking, left drugs behind, drank in moderation, and arrived at a peaceful place with his memories and his self. Our visit was joyful, and I drove to Vermont.

At the conference as I talked about line breaks, narratives, plots, imagery, and all the tools we writers use in our search for voice, style, and vision, I got a phone call. Jim, a person who lived all three of those qualities, barely fifty years old, had died of a heart attack. In the grand scheme of things, I suppose his death was no more than a blip on some god’s radar and a minor bump on the road most of us travel. But I don’t see how his early departure from humanity made us better off. In these days when morons, buffoons, cowards, and self-serving assholes pass themselves off as corporate leaders, statesmen, preachers, and even some teachers, and when we seem bereft of ethics and honesty, I wish Jim Hayes was still around.