IN Our Time, to borrow the name of a Hemingway book—in our time fun was truly interactive. It was an interaction of the commonplace cruel world around you and the world of your imagination.
In that world were small kingdoms, somewhat like 15th-century Florence in mental energy and occasional talent—but squalid. It looked rundown even on opening night. But it was a lot of fun.
Among such dominions were Black Angel, Cocobanana for transgenders, and a place out of Tolkien, The Hobbit House.
In that house were little people, reaching no higher than tabletops, William Branigan writes in the Washington Post. They served customers under the kindly, knowing eyes of the proprietor, or prince, if you will—the light-haired, rubicund Jim Turner.
Jim was darkly rumored to be CIA. But if he was, he’d gone so deep under cover as a counterculture icon that it was impossible—however hard you searched among his many kind deeds, in the warmth he spread, and under the protection he extended to misfits; it was impossible to find anything, anything at all, that could set him apart from his cover as anti-establishment. Worse, he kept up this impenetrable cover for over 51 years.
Jim, of course, wasn’t CIA. He was what he was on the face of things—an Iowan from Notre Dame who’d done a brief stint in the Kennedy White House.
He arrived here with the first batch of Peace Corps volunteers. Call them The Kennedy Youth, spreaders of the paling American dream.
They followed a call, not to arms, but to open arms to those the Iron Lady in New York harbor once received: the oppressed, the neglected, street-sleeping social rejects and seeming mistakes of nature.
From the first two midgets he picked to be doormen of a theme café he opened in ’73—calling it The Hobbit House, Turner’s small following grew, but never in size.
They came from slums, wandering circuses, and off the streets to join Turner’s diminutive kingdom. There they found not just a home, but a world of their own to which, for once, it was they who welcomed so-called normal people—the kind who’d not receive them in their homes. My editor Chuchay Fernandez, who always leads with her heart, recalls Jim telling them, “You are not different so you can be made fun of; you are different because you are special.”
Hobbit House was, in Jim’s mind, Kennedy’s Camelot on the cheap, even if it carried an expensive price tag for him in running afoul of the martial-law regime. It was to his place that those eluding curfew found safety. A few weeks short of his 78th birthday, Jim Turner died. He was already emeritus king, for he had long ago turned over the reins of the kingdom to a small person.
I am not sure where he is to be buried or his ashes to be scattered, but if anyone from the martial-law years truly deserves to be buried in Libingan, it is him, Jim, a kindly friend. It is him, Turner, to those with no one to turn to. First and last, he was Lord Jim to his diminutive companions—and to his loyal customers who were strictly limited to those with a heart so big, it could accommodate little people in equal esteem.
Good-bye, Mistah Turner, unfailing friend of the small Filipino. When you think of it, if Jim did it for these, the least of children, Jim did it for Him who said that. Keep well.
1 comment
Teddy, your brilliant mind and imagination will serve you well in NYC UN NWO headquarters. Here’s wishing you well and best of luck. I’m sure it will be quite an adventure, … assuming, that is, that the current dreams and visions circulating around youtube and the internet are NOT entirely right: namely, that the world will collide with a giant asteroid before the end of the month. – a nice means of escape, if you know what I mean.
:^)