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