The life and death of Jimmy Reject

MARSHFIELD -- Three weeks after the punk rock writer and drummer known as Jimmy Reject jumped off the Tobin Bridge, his apartment still smelled of cigarettes.

His CDs and tapes and records were gone, and so were his stereo and most of his furniture. But the coffee stain on the kitchen counter and the lingering scent of tobacco, and, in the bedroom closet, the black jackets meticulously adorned with metal studs and safety pins and buttons from bands like the Dead Kennedys and Blondie, lent a ghostly aura to the nearly empty unit.

James Harrington died Aug. 14 at age 35. Diagnosed in his early 20s with schizophrenia, he'd been different -- excit able, socially inept -- since childhood, and in high school he found refuge in the defiant music of outsiders and rebels. Despite the inner turmoil that prevented him from keeping a job as menial as cleaning bathrooms, Harrington was a passionate, driven devotee of punk who made a name for himself with the glam-rock Dimestore Haloes and as a prolific contributor of reviews and interviews to fanzines online and off. A memorial posted at thenoiseboard.com generated pages of tributes from friends and fans. His family calls him their hero.

``When I see what he managed to accomplish in spite of everything, I'm amazed," says his mother, Deborah Harrington-Podbelski, 58, a special needs teacher from Marshfield. ``He was very brave."

``You don't choose to be punk rock. It chooses you," says Harrington's friend, Damian Saiz, a 32-year-old account associate from Woburn. ``Nobody exemplified that better than Jimmy. The perpetual outsider. Never did anything with any kind of mainstream thought behind it."

``Punk," Harrington wrote, ``is playing music for pogo masses of spiked hair, realizing you weren't playing the music, you were the music."

In high school, Harrington painted ``Reject" on a coat -- ``thumbing his nose at the world," his mother says -- and formed a band called Social Status. He also recorded songs with his sister and illustrated album covers. ``His whole life was about creating," says his sister, Emily Harrington, 25, an accountant in New York.

That Harrington was psychotic emerged in the early '90s. He'd sit in an empty house, knife in hand to guard against imagined intruders. He'd panic that Boston had burned. Convinced the CIA was pursuing him, he drank toilet cleaner and overdosed on aspirin. Eventually he settled into a regimen of psychotropic drugs that for a decade controlled the delusions but not the anxiety that plagued him or the periodic crises that landed him back in psychiatric wards. True to his unforgiving illness, he never fully recovered from each setback. He dulled his pain with alcohol, but, until several months before his death, had been sober for a year.

At his best, Harrington was funny -- ``somewhere," his father, Peter, says, ``between Mad magazine and ` Beavis and Butt- Head ' " -- and engagingly conversant on all matters of punk.

He was a big man, 6-foot-2 and 250 pounds, an intimidating presence with his gruff voice and eye liner and leather. ``You got the feeling he was someone you don't want to mess with," Saiz says. ``But you come to find out he was a softie inside. He was very sensitive."

In 1995, Harrington joined the year-old Haloes, an underground punk band whose songs of lonely losers were catchier and more melodic than the harder edge sound dominant at the time.

``Jimmy wasn't a great drummer, but he added soul to that band," says Joe Spallone, 23, of the band Red Invasion. ``He really lived the lyrics."

``It was clear Jimmy was different, but in punk rock most people are," says Haloes leader Chaz Matthews, 35, a supermarket supervisor from Somerville. ``We were an incredibly dysfunctional band. All of us were on some kind of antidepressants. Jimmy was more so."

He was also, Matthews recalls, the band's most ambitious member, the one who made flyers and sent e-mails.

``You stumble home shamefully through the late-night streets, thinking that the rest of the world is too successful to fathom how you feel."

Harrington's demons continued to haunt him. Uncomfortable around people, he'd struggle through rehearsals. ``He wanted it so much he could push himself through it," his mother says. Finally, in 2001, two years before the Haloes disbanded, Matthews fired Harrington. ``He would have panic attacks at rehearsal," Matthews says. ``The last show we played with him was at Bill's Bar on Lansdowne Street. He was so unnerved the show was a train wreck."

And so Harrington turned from making music to writing about it -- and about his life. His writing could be raw, disturbing, angrier and darker than the shy, gentle person his family and friends knew. His writing could also be clever and richly descriptive. ``A lot of people knew him through his writing," says Jay Hale, editor of the punk magazine Fat City.

In one review, Harrington credited the Bee Gees with teaching him ``that music could have color, qualities, and potential." About the Jabbers he wrote, ``Sweaty drunken rock shows have met on those dingy surfaces where the law is bent, reality is skewed, and the whole room steals the carte blanche to soar like a rocket ship into the unknown." In ``The Ballad of Richie Wretch," he wrote, ``I'm filled with hate; so much so that it consumes me like a raging riptide." He ended ``The Enemy's Within," one of his two self-published books, with a barb against his high school tormenters: ``Have you found heaven? Greetings we are the people you never talked to in high school and we're waiting for you."

``I asked him, `Jamie, are you really that angry?' " his father says. ``He said , ` No, but I want people to wonder what will happen when they get to heaven. ' "

In clubs, listening to the music he loved, he'd slip out to smoke. ``Escaping the crowds," speculates Vinny Bratti, 39, a database worker from Abington. Another friend, Brian Mosher, 43, an insurance company worker from Carver, remembers Harrington leaving a Blackjacks' show mid-set for a cigarette, then rushing back in when he heard a La Peste song begin. ``He came charging in through the crowd to the front, pumping his hand," Mosher says. ``That was typical Jimmy."

``Prozac and conformity will not grant you a perfect life."

Much as he railed against the conventional, Harrington also yearned for normality. ``There were times," Bratti recalls, ``he'd say he wishes he could get a regular job and be a functional regular guy."

Late last year, Harrington stopped taking his medication. In April, delusional and psychotic, he slashed his wrists and overdosed on Tylenol and lithium. Back in his apartment in Marshfield after a month in the hospital, a visiting nurse administered his meds. His family could not find supported housing for him.

``I made it to 35," Harrington wrote in his suicide note, ``achieved most of the goals I set for myself despite adverse odds and have nothing left to look forward to except the ravages of middle age with the same list of mental disorders that don't get any easier with time."

At his funeral, Jimmy Reject's stud-bejeweled leather jacket was on display, and as the sounds of the Ramones' ``I Wanna Be Sedated" wafted through North Community Church , Jimmy's two sisters and mother sang along. ``Hurry, hurry, hurry, before I go insane." The service ended with one of his Dimestore Haloes favorites, ``Hot Pink Stereo."

Today his mother and sisters will bury their share of his ashes at Couch Cemetery in Marshfield. Peter Harrington spread his portion of ashes in the sand of a tiny, rocky island visible from his Squantum porch. ``It's such a small island, and it's very peaceful. That's all my son ever wanted," says Harrington, 58, a retired insurance executive. ``It's exposed to the northeast, and in a storm the waves wash over it. Yet it's still there. That reminds me of my son."

In his own words

Excerpts from the writings of James ``Jimmy Reject" Harrington

``Come with me if you will to a place called Thrill City Crime Control. It is a place dwelling within the tender time of our souls. It's a place where you walk for hours under the nocturnal glow of neon and street lamps, slightly rainy, you're trying to get lost."
-- From ``The Enemy's Within"

``They say whenever you light a cigarette alone and it's only half lit, that means that someone, somewhere is thinking especially of you. My cigarettes are always fully lit."
-- From ``I Was a Teenage Antisocial Misanthrope: The Ballad of Richie Wretch"

``This is a band that can bring back your teenage years in a three chord flurry of black leather nostalgia. And if your tender years were led under the tutelage of the Ramones in particular, then tape your yearbook picture on the CD cover and etch the lyric on your big class ring. Because the hormone addled intrigue with girls, three chord pop, and Converse hi-tops are waiting here, ready to haunt the rueful archives of your adolescent dreams."
-- From review of Meat Depressed's ``I'm With Stupid"

``I loved Electric Frankenstein's first album; it sounded like a petrol crazed Dead Boys, like the Dictators driving Sky Saxxon's old Camille down Route 66 at high speed. . . . With its 70s mainstream rock influence, `Super Kool' also sounds like the band that covered `Black Betty' having a five martini lunch with Stiv Bators."
-- From review of Electric Frankenstein's ``Super Kool" in Fat City