My old friend Jim Martinez went west last week.
We got the story from his brother, Larry. Jim had an episode at his cigar club: it escalated; he was hospitalized; it was bad. There was nothing to do but let him go.
He was 73.
Jim played a large role in my life. Hey, he was a large fella, nicknamed Jethro, the tallest in his immediate family — father Lawrence, mother Lucy, brother Larry, and sister Betty — and the joke was that the Martinezes must have had a very tall mailman Back in the Day®.
Jim lived large. too. While Larry and I and the rest of our gang were in college at the University of Northern Colorado in the early Seventies, Jim was working for a living.
He dressed well; fashionably, but not ostentatiously. Drove a Volvo. Your money was no good in his presence. And he loved a good party.
More than a few erupted at “El Rancho Delux,” Jim’s three-bedroom, one-bath, ranch-style rental on a rare handful of undeveloped acres in the Denver metro area. Hardly any neighbors to speak of, or to. A pub within walking distance. It doesn’t get any better than that.
The annual El Rancho Delux Welcome Back Summer luau in particular became legendary. Those free-for-alls recalled the parties in Jack Kerouac’s “The Dharma Bums.” I swiped Jim’s copy, which I cherish and am leafing through right now:
“Japhy kept wandering to all sections of the party with a big jug in his hand, his face beaming with happiness. For a while the party in the living room emptied out the bonfire clique and soon Psyche and Japhy were doing a mad dance, then Sean leaped up and whirled her around and she made as if to swoon and fell right in between Bud and me sitting on the floor drumming (Bud and I who never had girls of our own and ignored everything) and lay there a second sleeping on our laps. We puffed on our pipes and drummed on.”
The Martinez brothers, always a persuasive pair, moved into politics, working with the likes of Ed Graham, Monte Pascoe, Michael Dukakis, Ted Kennedy, and Denver Mayor Wellington Webb. I stumbled from one newspaper to the next until I realized that they were all the same newspaper, which is even truer now than it was then.
More than once when I went overboard it was Jim who threw me a line. El Rancho was like Motel 6; Jim always left the light on for you, sometimes for days at a stretch. If the spare bed was spoken for, there was a couch. The couch was taken? Plenty of room on the floor. No, your money’s no good here. You need some? How about clothes? Jesus, Shady, you look like hell. More chins than the Hong Kong phone book.
In 1983 Jim really went the extra mile — miles, actually, and plenty of them — after I broke an ankle as I was preparing to leave one newspaper in Oregon for another in Colorado.
I had a start date, an apartment to empty into the truck, and no way to drive a five-speed manual with one foot in a cast. It took several friends — hey, you know who you are; there’s only so much room on the Internet, y’know — to get me boxed up and shipped east, Jim among them. He caught a flight west and drove my truck, me, and my dogs back to the Ranch(o).
We hit Denver just in time for the party.
Jim was one of the many good Samaritans who put me up, and put up with me, after I burned through that gig in Pueblo and another in suburban Denver in five years.
He had his own problems by then, but found time to school me on the ROI of a creative hair stylist and a small quiver of pro duds, because looking like a werewolf with the mange was not helping the job search any more than my résumé, which had more holes than the Albert Hall.
I finally found another newspaper job, my last one, about a week before I ran out of unemployment insurance and Jim ran out of Christian charity.
Then time passed, and things changed, as they sometimes do when you’re not paying attention. Our paths simply diverged. We traded abrazos at our respective weddings, reminisced with other members of the club in ones and twos, here and there, and enjoyed a few those-were-the-days chuckles during a reunion of a select few of the El Rancho mob at Larry’s place outside Denver in 2009.
That was the last time I saw Jim. I thought of him now and then, recounted the legend of Jethro — maybe embellishing just a bit here and there for literary effect — but I didn’t know that he had a son, or that his marriage had ended. For a so-called newsman I wasn’t exactly up on current events.
In Jim Harrison’s novel “Warlock” a character who lives in the real world says to another who doesn’t: “Don’t you know everyone’s life is shit? You’re smart enough to do something about your own. Don’t be such a drag-ass.”
He also said, “Every time I pass the cemetery on the way to work I get the feeling we don’t live forever.”
I’ve read that book a dozen times. Own two copies, one of them autographed. Paid for them and everything. You’d think I would’ve gotten the message by now.
The most recent images of Jim I’ve seen show a smiling, silver-haired gent in glistening casual athletic wear, hobnobbing with various powers-that-be. La Eme meets the Sopranos with a side of Corleone (Mikey always dressed better than Tony). On social media, former mayor Webb mourned his old friend and assistant as “family,” dubbing Jim his “Luca Brasi.”
Jim knew about family, blood kin and the other sort. His father passed far too early, in 1984, but his mother, now 92, is still with us. He visited her every day.
Larry says there will be a celebration of his brother’s life once this unusually cold Colorado winter takes its foot off the throttle, a posthumous and perhaps premature Welcome Back Summer gathering.
Not at El Rancho Delux, though. Our old outlaw hideout is long gone, entombed beneath a jumble of “apartment homes,” though the pub remains.
And now its proprietor, the host with the most, is lost to us as well.
I miss my brother Jim Martinez. Peace to him, his family, and his many, many friends. Leave the light on for us, homes. We’ll be along directly.
