Ghost signs, ghost ads & other phantoms

Nobody tells you what to do. When the important decisions in life come floating up, sometimes with hands around your neck, it is up to you to make these choices with the hope you will not get dragged down into the swelling eddies and whirlpools life’s rapid river flows your way. Willy tried to make some of these decisions early on when she found out that her memories, some painful, some delightful, were soon to start fading. How fast these memories would fail, she did not know, but she knew they were because she knew something was not right upstairs in recollection’s attic. I got a phone call from Willy one afternoon on my way back from my new job as a middle school teacher in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. I would take Rockaway Blvd towards Woodhaven and zig zag past the cemetery towards that piece of Linden Blvd that leads to Crossbay Blvd hop onto the Belt and when I was within sight of my mother’s building, a 17 story high rise in Starrett City with a terrace that faced Jamaica Bay and JFK, I would call her back and start flashing my lights so she could see me.

I see you! Ring twice and I’ll buzz you up. Willy was proud of her one bedroom apartment in the sky she fought to get. She heard the apartments at Starrett City were being given out as HUD apartments based on your income. Willy scrubbed other peoples floors for a living. She took care of their children when they went on holiday and cleaned, washed and ironed their clothes while they were away. She fed their cats and tended to the everyday demands in the life of a privileged child from Chappaqua or Oceanside NY. There was a seven year waiting list for these apartments so when Willy was sure she was going to divorce her husband Harold Jump, my stepfather, she would eventually leave her spacious three bedroom apartment in a two family rental in the newest part of what was called Old Howard Beach. When her name came up only after a year, she was surprised because whites were made to wait longer since the demand for these apartments often went to African-American families first. When she walked into the office at Starrett City, an African-American woman at a desk with my mother’s application looked up at her lilywhiteness and said, “Are you Willy Jump?” My mother answered, “Yes I is’” and the whole room broke out in laughter. We guess her application got shifted into the fast-lane pile and they expected a tall African-American man as opposed to the 5’8” blonde haired blue eyed Dutch immigrant who still had a naturalized alien card that for many years was no longer green.

I rang the bell twice and got buzzed in with my mother’s constant HEYYY! into the intercom. The buildings at Starrett were well maintained and the population was a carefully measured balance of blacks, whites, and a smattering of everyone else that falls within this sometimes myopically perceived spectrum. I was up to the top floor within seconds and my mom already had the door opened for me, the smell of Mellita coffee brewing wafted down the corridor and some strains of Joni coming from the AKAI stereo CD player I purchased one Christmas for her filled the sterile space.

You know, when I’m gone you have to go through all of this with a fine toothed comb. There’s money in the books and money in the SOS steel wool soap pad box and there’s money in the sock drawer. – Yeah yeah mom. When you’re gone I promise I won’t just throw all of this away. So why did you ask me to come here. Not to tell me yet again that I have to search high and low throughout your possessions for fifties and twenties rolled up with a rubber band. – There are some rolls of hundreds you know. – OK Mom, I guess it’s time Vincenzo and I buy you a safe. Willy’s eyes lit up with the idea of a safe. We can bolt it to the floor in your closet.

So what’s up? Well I went to the doctor and he said I have some issues with my memory. I’m taking pills for it. He says we caught it early. OK. Maybe you need this safe sooner than later, since you have to remember where you put all your money and save the task of Vincenzo and I frantically searching through all your stuff. Yes, get me the safe fast. I need you to become a co-signer on my checking account in case you will need to handle my finances or in the event of my passing you need to make the last withdrawal. I said sure when do you want to do this? How about tomorrow afternoon? So I came by the following afternoon at 2:30 and drove her to Roosevelt Savings on Crossbay where we signed the signature cards and I was officially part of my mother’s checking account.

Willy instinctually knew how to make all of the right moves before she became helplessly infirmed, but Harold was a tougher nut to crack. By the time he had lived alone for several years after the passing of his second wife Anne, and he had fallen backwards from his unsteady diabetic neuropathic feet and hit is head one last time, I had to break into his checking account when trying to sign in the first time online. I knew about most of his previous residences and which cars he bought on credit to answer all of the TRW questions that were asked and managed to take control of his bank account so I could pay the nursing home where he lived out the last eight to nine months of his life. He wanted to die and never wanted to go to the Funny Farm as he called it. I was very fortunate to have gotten my mother Willy into Menorah that November in 2013 when she had fallen and could not get up. Willy had been on the floor for who knows how long as she had pooped and peed herself and could no longer walk without assistance.

I was also fortunate enough to have enrolled her in SNAP benefits and had gotten her Medicare papers underway with the help of a pro-bono social worker from SAGE (Senior Action in a Gay Environment). Normally SAGE helps aging members of the LBGTQ community but my mother was a bit of a star in this community for all of her work she did for P-FLAG for over 25 years and I was approaching becoming an aging member of the LBGTQ community myself. I also dated one of their early chairpeople Ken Dawson (of Dawson & Strub) on a blind date my mother had set up for me in the 80s. We had gotten my mother into Menorah just in time since the week before her fall, she was spotted on the roof of her apartment building and had to be taken down to her apartment by security. Willy Jump could have had an ironic fall to her death. She also claimed she would jump off her terrace if she was to lose her mind.

The previous year we had gone to the Netherlands to say goodbye to her parent’s gravesite and stop the perpetual care she dutifully paid for annually and goodbye to her brother’s widow who lost him to a fall down the stairs three years prior. The images in a separate post with the same title were taken in April of 2012 during my mother’s last trip to the Netherlands. On this day we visited the gravesite of where Willy’s parents were buried and to relinquish the contract with the Nieuwe Ooster cemetery for the upkeep and claim to this burial place.

So much of your life could change in one day. As world events rapidly unfold we witness tragedies of single lives being unravelled by violence or unmitigated circumstances. The beheading of a long-captive journalist by Islamic militants. The loss of a son to unwarranted police actions in Ferguson Missouri. The disappearance and subsequent destruction of Malaysian passenger planes. The disinterment of your parents after over forty years of undisturbed rest. The relinquishing of a long-kept and valued domicile. All of these events have gone by unnoticed – not due to callous disregard or indifference but due to a neurodegenerative disease. Willy has dementia – early onset Alzheimer’s disease – and lives very much in the moment. She no longer watches television and has no reference point as to what day it is or what is occurring locally or abroad.

On April 11, 2012 – we had trouble locating my grandparents’ gravesite. Frustrated, Willy was sure the headstone was laying down and I knew from online images that the stone stood upright. We walked in circles. We talked in circles. A young rooster nearby also traced a circular path. Finally we came upon an outdoor structure, a rectangular room in the middle of what I thought Willy’s parents grave should lie. The door had a mirror reflecting the illusion of passing time in the outside world. I could hear familiar music coming from within. It sounded like a Burt Bacharach song. On closer approach, I was sure it was Dusty’s voice singing the theme to the film Casino Royale- The Look of Love. We entered the oversized shack and the only light illuminating the darkness was from a projected moving image of dancers on a screen and a circling disco ball. We inspected all corners of the room and after silently accessing we were alone with these ghostly dancers, I turned to my mother and lifted my arms and we danced cheek to cheek while being serenaded by the late Ms. Springfield.

My mother’s maiden name is Broekveldt which loosely translates to Pantsfield. She married Harold Jump and became Willy Jump. ‘Jump’ in Dutch is “spring.” Dusty’s name is a hybrid of both of Willy’s given and married surnames. So here we were in the early Dutch spring, dancing together in the flickering light of ghostly dancers in an art installation in the middle of a cemetery.

In the video installation Tonight from the Brazilian artist Valeska Soares, people dance in an empty dancehall with an invisible partner. With the romantic tones of Burt Bacharach’s The Look of Love, glides lonely dancers through an endless reflecting space, sometimes encountering each other and moving immediately apart. It is a poetic, melancholic film that explores the loneliness one experiences following the loss of a loved one. They dance with the invisible partner, which is present in the memory. A memory that makes one happy. Tonight is filmed in the ballroom of the famous complex Pampulha in Belo Horizonte designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1943.

The song ended and we emerged from this phantom-shrouded love shack to continue our search for my mother’s parents interred remains. We made a right turn, walked fifty feet towards plot number 42-3-0304. There they rested together- liefe Oma en Opa. For that moment, all recurring memories of Willy’s turbulent relationship with her father seemed to be erased- starving during the war, being raped at 13 by an acquaintance of the family and my HIV diagnosis.

April 11, 2012 © Frank H. Jump

On a recent trip to the Netherlands, Vincenzo and I parked our rental car in the parking lot adjacent to my grandparents’ gravesite. We walked in a circle around where I remembered they rested and accessed the online grave database for the plot number. As anticipated, they were disinterred and their bones were incinerated since I was last there with Willy. We further explored this beautiful cemetery where my grandparents once were laid to rest.

July 26, 2014 © Frank H. Jump

When we returned from our vacation, we continued to empty my mother’s apartment and on August 20, 2014 – 861 days since my mother and I traveled to visit the place of her birth one last time, I handed in her apartment keys to the rental management office at Spring Creek, Brooklyn. Willy is currently residing in a lovely nursing facility in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn – overlooking the mouth of Jamaica Bay, Breezy Point, Sandy Hook and the hustle and bustle of jet-skiers, yachts, sailboats, fishing boats, cruise ships, tankers and other vessels en route to the New York Harbor or the Atlantic Ocean the method of travel Willy chose when she emigrated.

Harold’s ashes have since been scattered at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Center. Willy wants her ashes spread there as well.

UPDATE:
Sadly, Willy died on 4/22/2020 of complications related to COVID-19.

Donations in the name of Willy Jump can be made to:

PFLAG NYC
130 East 25th Street, Suite M1
New York City, N.Y. 10010

Checks made payable to PFLAG NYC

or online @PFLAG NYC
or http://www.pflagnyc.org/donate

Where donations can also be made in the memory of Willy Jump