I met Cajun Jimmy through Furry George.

Furry told me that he knew the best car mechanic in the world. I needed one because I always owned beat up vans or muscle cars that required a lot of attention. There was always something wrong with my vehicles. Instead of just buying a better car that didn’t need to be fixed all the time I figured it was cheaper and more fun to have a private mechanic. Theoretically, Jimmy was going to be my savior. In theory, that is.

When Furry George took me over to Jimmy’s house, I noticed he had an engine hanging from an Avocado tree. I thought that was pretty clever. His place was a real mess though, with engine parts all over the place, a bumper in his living room, and greasy tools in piles on the floor.

Jimmy had these two little mangy twin boys, around five or six years old, who were always crying or getting into trouble. He had this white trash wife who didn’t have a name. He never introduced her to anyone and she never spoke. Not once. It was a scene right out of Cops.

I kinda knew it was a red flag, even during that period of my life when I wasn’t too on the ball. I sorta wanted to say something and be nice, but with Jimmy, it was best not to take any chances. He was the king of his castle and I didn’t want to piss him off and risk being held hostage indefinitely with him NEVER finishing my car.

Jimmy was a good ole southern boy from Louisiana. He’d tell you that he could fix your car for cheap, and then he’d go to the junkyard and get parts and micky mouse the situation. That means he could do a better job for less by using a sledgehammer or a welding iron to modify parts that didn’t quite fit. He’d do things like rig my car just long enough to make it pass the smog test and then put it back to normal so I’d have more horsepower. Jimmy was real good at stuff that was a little sneaky and below the radar. That’s how I kind of lived my life and I surrounded myself with people like that.

Jimmy’s little sales pitch and philosophy sounded good at first. But the problem with Jimmy was that he would inadvertently break something while he was fixing something else and the problems usually grew and grew and grew. Then, he would get overwhelmed with other customers and put your car on the back burner and it would take weeks, sometimes months, for him to finish.

He was a scary kind of guy, the kind that intimidates you and that you DEFINITELY didn’t want to get on his bad side because then you would literally NEVER get your car back.

He wasn’t that big but the strength of his forearms and his intensity made it so it didn’t matter how big you were because he could make you feel like he would fuck you up in a fight anyway, and it was best to NOT go there with him, at any cost.

I spent years going to this guy and I mean YEARS. At this time in my life I wasn’t making wise choices about who I associated with and Jimmy was just par for the course. I probably wasted thousands of hours just waiting for Jimmy to finish telling his old stories about the south to all the other customers who were stuck over at his house with those two mangy kids and his wife, what’s her name.

The only way to get Jimmy motivated was to give him pot. So I would go over there on my bike, every day, and bring him some great pot to try and get him to actually do something with my messed up car. At first, he’d start out with good intentions and then something would happen (he would get too stoned) and he’d get caught in some spider web of a tangent and get lost somewhere and the whole day would be a waste.

I’d tell myself that I would NEVER go back to Jimmy once I got my car back, but I kept going anyway, like a broken record, and I must’ve been literally insane because he would ALWAYS waste my time or break something else on my car so I’d end up paying more than just going to a regular place.

But Jimmy had this southern good old boy charm about him that was infectious and hard to resist. He was a really charismatic guy and should have gone into show business and not monkey business.

I brought my friend Charlie over to Jimmy’s one time. Charlie used to drive his dad’s beat old Saab, which you could start with a screwdriver.

Charlie and Jimmy were talking about MOPAR cars and parts and crap and Charlie name-dropped a Dodge Charger from 1970. Jimmy got all quiet and serious and looked Charlie in the eye and said, “that’s a heavy duty piece of machinery” and Charlie felt all special and in the loop because he knew a teeny-weeny bit about white trash folklore and that the Dodge Charger RT was the one model that had the extra heavy suspension and the fat tires and the big air scoop and all that cool, guy stuff.

I think Charlie now owns four cars: a 1970 Dodge Charger RT, a 69 ‘Cuda, a 2005 Dodge Hemi Station wagon and a Ford Aspire. The Ford Aspire is the “runner” car he uses mostly because it gets about 60 miles per gallon and never breaks down and he can drive it like a skate board and beat on it and do curb grinders. Jimmy sold Charlie a shit box old white Cadillac with a 500 engine. I don’t know what the 500 meant, maybe horse power or cc’s, but it was a ridiculously large engine. I think it was literally the biggest American made engine ever built, or something stupid like that.

It got seven miles per gallon. The day Charlie bought it, he was so impressed and psyched that he was driving literally the worst gas-guzzler ever made. It was quite the pimp mobile. It broke down half a block from Jimmy’s house and I don’t think it ever ran again. Charlie yelled at me for introducing him to Jimmy, like somehow it was my fault. As if.

Jimmy told me one time that he went to the Hollywood Police auction and bought a beater 60′s station wagon for $50 and that he made it last all summer. All he had to do was put gas in it. I was very impressed by how thrifty he was. But I bet he was lying and that the only way that he got it to run was because he knew all the tricks of the trade. Or, maybe he just lucked out for a summer. Then again, maybe driving around in a $50 car wasn’t all that cool and more than likely a fire hazard.

One time, I had a big party up in the hills in my bachelor pad, pot dealer penthouse. It was a really big and fun party and lots of Hollywood people were there. Of course Jimmy was invited and he was always a gracious guest. He had all the great stories about car crashes and people’s bones being broken and great old stories about back home in Louisiana.

Jimmy was a masterful storyteller; all animated with lots of action. Plus, he was an excellent cook. He was a much better cook than he was a mechanic. Much better. When I would have my big parties I always had a BBQ grill going on and Jimmy was always there, marinating the shrimp and making gumbo with all his secret family recipes. He should’ve gone into the culinary arts instead of being a gypsy car mechanic.

Everyone was always impressed by Jimmy’s cooking. Plus, he had the apron on and had all the attitude of a snotty French Chef from like on one of those TV shows where you just want to punch the guy.

So, my party was going great and I had a band playing on the roof and there were hot chicks everywhere and free beer and everything was just grand.

For a while, that is.

Someone showed up with some LSD and started giving it away for free to random people. Somehow, don’t ask me how, Jimmy ended up getting some and he started tripping. Hard. Now, the thing about tripping is that you never really know how someone is going to react because there are too many factors to calculate the outcome. Too many variables. Plus, it was Jimmy, which is too big of a random factor already because you never knew what he was going to do in the first place when he was STRAIGHT.

Nothing really bad happened that night, which was a miracle, considering the massive amounts of illegal drugs and loud music on the roof echoing all through the Hollywood Hills. Eventually, the cops showed up like usual and told us to stop the music and the party slowly dispersed at about 3 a.m.

Everyone had split, but Jimmy was still there, tripping his mind off, running around on my roof deck with his stupid BBQ apron on, howling at the moon. He wanted me to give him a ride home. I was too drunk and stoned so I told him to walk home and just leave me alone. He only lived less than two miles away.

But he didn’t want to walk. He wanted a ride. When Jimmy makes up his mind, that’s it, he’s a one-track kind of guy. He wanted a ride and that was that. So I crashed, locked my bedroom door, and went to bed. Jimmy spent all night in my parking garage downstairs, trying to hotwire my van. He was tripping his mind out and needed something to do to stay busy. Sometimes, with tripping, you just need a fun project to keep your mind going, especially if you’re the kind of guy who’s a one-track person. Jimmy stuck a screwdriver in my door lock, broke that, and then ripped all my wiring apart and literally destroyed the electrical components in my already raggedy old beat up van. Nevertheless, he still couldn’t hotwire it. I guess Jimmy wasn’t as smart as he tried to make everyone think he was. Or maybe the acid was too strong or maybe my van was too whacked to be hotwired.

At 10 a.m., Jimmy called me from the intercom outside.

“Hey Cliffy, can you PLEASE give me a ride home? I just tried to hotwire your van and I can’t get it started. Don’t worry, I’ll fix everything later.”

I just rolled my eyes back, sighed and said, “no problem Jimmy, let’s get you home to your family. So I gave Cajun Jimmy a ride home and he was still partly tripping out of his mind, but it didn’t really matter that much to me because I was so used to being around eccentric, strange, odd, drug addicted and mentally ill people that I actually was partially entertained by the whole thing.

In a bizarre way, it was all mostly funny to me and I thought I had the coolest and most interesting friends. Now that I’m sober, if I were to meet someone like Cajun Jimmy I would offer to take him to an AA meeting and have nothing else to do with him. Every person from my early days of living in Hollywood is either dead, in jail, or in the psych ward. I have permanently left them all behind in the dust.

I actually heard a few years back that Jimmy had gotten sober and was starting to clean up his life. Then I heard that he had died in a motorcycle accident and that his wife and twins moved back to Louisiana. Cajun Jimmy was just another colorful, tragic, lost soul who got caught up in some shit he couldn’t get out of — just another casualty of Hollywood.