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much of his spare time studying legends of the giant squid while decanting his favourite spirits. ‘Architeuthis,’ he would say, ‘is no myth. One hardy restaurant on Canal Street tried to cook a three-foot-wide suction cup.’ When I told him I was writing poetry he set for me this simple exercise: ‘Write four rhyming couplets, if you can, about four different squid (save architeuthis). You may have to go to the library. The couplets should say something factual about the natural state of the squid, that most misunderstood of species.’ Loligo forbesi is what we like to batter, Found in most seas of Atlantic waters. The opalescent squid’s white as a ghost Found mostly off the California coast. Loligo vulgaris depends on weather: It shrinks and grows with the temperature. The Caribbean Reef squid lives beneath all light Its large side fins are as large as kites. ‘Nonsense!’ he wrote. ‘But good amateur verse!’ In one of the soaps I watch, Ryland, the wastrel son of Thomas Pressleton, swims free from a town car, run off into the ocean by Houghton Canning, who was to marry Ryland’s true love, Amy Summerland. Ryland fights his way to the suburban wedding ceremony. Dripping wet, he screams, ‘Amy! Amy!’ Now, I find it hard to return phone calls and I brush off requests from a lawyer. My students often come to talk to me, sensing I’m a washed-up outsider and I might have something to say besides ‘I can only judge you by your work.’ I don’t. I’m one bad day away from fuck off. I have my own problems being loved; what could I tell General Gabler’s daughter? How can I sink without sounding like I was the saga’s tough cap’n, like Leontes assuring, ‘Let us be clear’d of being tyrannous’ before sending Hermione to her unkind death? Weekends, I’m entranced by a Richard Simmons infomercial where the greased-up star sidles up to desperate fatties who have lost hundreds of pounds with his help. He’ll ask things like ‘What was Evelyn like on the inside?’ and he’ll hold her thinned hands while she speaks of herself in the third person. ‘Evelyn was lonely, near dead inside.’ He’s like Mother Theresa for the fat, the St. Jude of the morbidly obese. I knew two-minute meals and twelve-hour shames; oh, how could I tell Dr. Miracle my hero was no strange squid or Oscar Wilde but a five-hundred-pound oaf in a half-hour ad? I lived just above a late-night gyro stand in an apartment with mice and a neighbour who just loved to play the opening licks to ‘Over the Hills and Far Away.’ I saw the end of life: the Ventolin, the monitoring of high-blood-pressure pills, the little TV in the semi-private room. Students say they never watch what’s on, not even the buoying love of Ryland, shaking off a lily pad in the aisle. I did not think of how it would work out, never took the time to remind how their students would learn to laugh at them.
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