Elegy For A Potter’s
Field Man-For Peter James Jones
By Frank Jackman
It did not have to end
that way. It did not have to end with Peter James Jones forever known as “Pete”
in a dead-end potter’s field filled with strangers, loners, the poor and the unnamed
refuge of modern society. That was my very first thought when I heard through
his brother Allan that he had passed one night alone and almost forgotten.
(Allan and Pete estranged for decades and not in contact Allan only informed
much later through the Boston Police Department that Pete was no more.) I had
known Pete since childhood in the tough and poor Acre section of North
Adamsville although I had only seen him sporadically after childhood I never
lost contact until about two years ago when I went to his rooming house and
over in the South End section of Boston and found that he had left there one
day in an ambulance and nobody knew where he had been taken, or in that small
isolated beggarly rooming house world would tell.
As I though more about
his demise, Pete, who had so much promise at some early childhood stage, I
thought about the inevitable maybes that broke this man’s life. And that is
what I want to tell the candid world about. Maybe things like being the first
born in a poor working class family, being a father’s pride son and mother’s
apple eye one two was too much for a battered psyche (and by extension apple
eye to old sainted Irish grandmother too
where he stayed many times when the hazards of home beckoned him away from
those dangerous shoals. I am not sure about the grandfather, not sure at all
since he was a demon rum man who may have not liked his grandchildren, hell,
his children if Allan’s words are true at all). All that attention launched his
way before the rest of the brood of four boys arrived to curb those absolute
affections too much for a soldier’s spoiled son. I know when I first met Pete
the first day of school over at “the projects” new school, Sailor’s Harbor Elementary,
put up to service the booming baby crush in first grade, and Allan told me later,
that he had been a Teflon boy, every evil he did charged off to the other
family boys. Pete couldn’t do that, all those apple eyes winked, yeah sure,
Pete couldn’t do that. So that is one maybe.
Maybe if he hadn’t been
me envious (and Allan too when we cell-phoned talked about Pete’s demise) biological
of his father’s handsome good looks, all dark hair, black as coal eyes and
budding Adonis psyche just when that look took the field in Elvis rock and roll
all sex and promise time and he compared to the “King.” More importantly that
the girls swooned and swayed when he glanced their way in drugstore jukebox
mini-Elvis fashion. (He would be vain about his childhood young man good looks
even many years later when mostly bald and potato built checking to see if the
girls, young girls or old, sensed his well faded magnetism.) So, hey, maybe
that is another maybe.
Maybe it was that first
time when he out of the blue maybe fifteen took some United States Saving Bond
given to him at some point from some childhood accident to be used for college
or something good and fled in the night not telling me or anybody that he was
fleeing and blew himself out to Kansas via who knows what route but picked up
for vagrancy was in the county pokey and tired mother (by then the luster of
first born king child well dissipated and luck of the draw turned to sullen second
born boy Allan-for a while) and defeated six way to work, sullen boys, no
prospects Sunday father refused to bail him out and let him do his thirty
vagrant days. Yeah, now maybe we are getting outlaw bandito too many black hat
bad guy cowboy television shows watched somewhere near where his derelict heart
bled.
Maybe it was after he
came back from that Kansas fleeing, hardened at a young age by the pokey time,
felt abandoned and alone against all in the world as he told me one sixteen almost
seventeen year old night while we were drinking wino bought whiskey and he said
he was quitting school to join the Army. That he was too smart for that education
institution, that the place had nothing more to teach him (and me still
hungering sixty some years late to learn some new thing glanced from daily
watch). Could not talk him out of madness and Pete an honor roll student just two
years before. The start of a lifetime of not finishing what he started. No make
that many years instead now that I recall the past twenty years or so he never
mentioned even starting anything new-or completing anything old and so hard to
talk to about much except his love of country music and its ethos, about people
who I could have cared less about and could do him no good).
Maybe that no finish high
school drop-out which led him to young, too young, to join the Army, sign up
for something he did not get, got him a tour in Korea and his infantry unit
heading to Vietnam when he detoured AWOL for many years never clear whether he
ever really went back about ten years later to clear things up during Carter
amnesty times after federal agents grabbed him. (I, we, including father-mother
knowing he was illegal but not saying anything since the Irish neighborhood
ethos was to shun such snitch behavior-or else.) So another no go.
Maybe it was in Pete’s early
twenties when as he told me on another whiskey-filled moonless night that in so
many words he felt the world “owed him a living” as the saying went and maybe
still does since he had come up the hard way as another saying time went. This
to me from the same growing up neighborhood and in a dead heat tie family
poverty-wise. That sentiment he would make good on at first by conning
everybody and everything, including me, he could including stealing stuff from
wherever he could steal stuff. Funny harder work to do this than to actually
work though.
Maybe though work-free
and having conned and stolen from every available source though he finally
after a con-marriage failure and divorce fell down to the lower depths. Found
his forte in soup kitchens, flea bag hotels, welfare lines, Goodwill hand-me
downs, slow death men’s dorms, newspaper park benches (strangely me too when I
had addiction problems), Salvation Army Harbor Light refuge, lowest depths Pine
Street Inn and finally (at least finally the last time I had seen him before he
hospital vanished somewhere) a sleazy, clutter-filled (his) tiny room in a run
down South End rooming house (one of the last remaining before gentrification
which he would go on and on about when in his cups).
I have run out of maybes,
or better I am depressed by all the maybes jumbled into one. Anyway the story
for the last thirty or so years is no story and so I best stop here and let
that idle speculation go.
Yeah, plenty of maybes
could have sent him down the skid rails of the wretched of the earth night but
all I know is that in the end somehow that potter’s field dead-end grave seemed
to have beckoned him home early on. RIP Pete RIP
Come to the next monthly 
The Standout for Black Lives Matters had a lower turnout this month but the rambunctiousness of our youngest members who started (and continued) a chant of Black Lives Matter more than made up for it. Once again besides members of DPP, we had representatives from Veterans for Peace, and local neighbors who had seen us in the preceding months and came down to join us. Honking from cars and trucks, extra roars from motorcycles, thumbs up from bikes and cars gave testament to the urgency of the myriad of concerns that our signs reflect: mass incarceration, education, health care, jobs not jails and more. As we packed up our things, we realized we were mostly in the dark. So next month will be our last. Please join us on November 16 at 5:30 at Ashmont and bring a friend to make it clear that Black Lives Matter.
