in some of the respected literary
journals.
then after a couple of early books
out came a little volume, a sweet
novelette, and he was truly
famous.
it was a tale about high society and
a young girl and it was
delightful and charming and just a bit
naughty.
Hollywood quickly made a movie out of
it.
then the writer bounced around Hollywood
from party to party
for a few years.
I saw his photo again and again:
a little elf-man with huge
eyeglasses.
and he always wore a long dramatic
scarf.
but soon he went back to New York and to all the
parties there.
he went to every important party thereafter for years
and to
some that weren’t very
important.
then he stopped writing altogether and just went
to parties.
he drank or doped himself into oblivion almost
every night.
his once slim frame more than doubled in
size.
his face grew heavy and he no longer looked
like the young boy with the quick and dirty
wit but more like an
old frog.
the scarf was still on display but his hats were
too large and came down almost to his
eyes;
all you noticed was his
twisted
lurid
grin.
the society ladies still liked to drag him
around New York
one on each arm
and
drinking like he did, he didn’t live
to enjoy his old age.
so
he died
and was quickly
forgotten
until somebody found what they claimed was his secret
diary / novel
and then all the famous people in
New York were very
worried
and they should have been worried because when it
was published
out came all the dirty
laundry.
but I still maintain that he never really did know how to
write; just what and
when and about
whom.
slim, thin
stuff.
ever so long ago, after reading
one of his short stories,
after dropping the magazine to the floor,
I thought,
Jesus Christ, if this is what they
want,
from now on
I might as well write for
the rats and the spiders
and the air and just for
myself.
which, of course, is exactly what
I did.
my friend Tom, he liked to come over
and he’d say, “let’s go get a coffee.”
and my girlfriend would say, “you guys
going to talk that literary stuff again?”
and we’d go to this place where you paid
for your first coffee and all the refills were
free
and we’d get a seat by the window and he
would begin:
Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos
Passos mainly but others got in there
too: e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, Dreiser,
Jeffers, Céline and so forth.
although I will admit I was mostly a
listener and wondered what he was
really getting at, if anything, I
continued to listen and
drink coffee after
coffee.
once he said, “look, I’ll take you to the
place
