There was once a time when everything seemed to make sense. My friends and I were pleased with ourselves, and convinced that we’d live forever. But now, by turns that one can only call natural, reality and the absurdities of that notion of pleasure driven erudition have long-since given way to grief and frustration with the world.
We once thought that we’d make our careers as we imagined them, and that everything would fall into place just like our grandparents had told us in times of strife when we were young and down on everything. But, it has become blazingly clear that we are nothing more than the very beings we wished to avoid becoming. The three of us are now southern “Colonels” living in a single house and wearing nothing but the color white to hide our many years of debauch. At the ages of 84, 85, and 87, we all have grey mustaches, eat chicken on Tuesdays, and drink bourbon until we fall asleep. This is what we’ve become. And many days, I have a hard time with this fact.
*
I met Frank and Jerry in New York City in the summer of 1951. It was the place we’d ignorantly chose to carve out a living doing the things we thought we wanted to do at the time. We were all southern transplants. Frank’s gig was journalism, and he was pretty good. Jerry’s baby was music, and I saw him play some excellent shows (and I don’t just go around throwing out complements like that). My trade was the poetry. And boy what a sham that turned out to be. You can either do it, or you can’t, and I couldn’t, but I did anyway, to spite myself, for many, many years.
It was a good summer though. We all got a lot of things done. We ran in to each other pretty regularly, and usually we made a time of it. But then the days kept going. People stopped flinging and got girlfriends, everyone found routines, read too much or drank too much and just got generally tired and unreliable. But, yeah, up until the end of September, it was a pretty good time.
By the early 60s, we’d all managed to keep in contact. I ended up chasing a girl to Dallas. We didn’t work out, but I had stayed because it was easier that way. The day I reconnected with my old friends I was on the Knoll when Kennedy got shot. (Right before it happened; I’d just got off the phone with Jerry, who was holed up in New Orleans, and only wanting to babble about jazz and life. He and I were going through our respective hard times then.) I think I was happy just before I heard the commotion. Now it’s nothing more than my blurred smile in the Zapruder film to remind me of the time.
Frank, as it turned out, had made a name for himself working for the New York Times, and when Jerry had made it known that I was on the scene, we all had a connection: I was there and they wanted to be too. And just like that, we had a reason to be back together.
For close to three weeks Jerry and I watched and recalled the facts as we knew them; Jerry, provided more inspiration than inquiry, but helpfully. Those three weeks in ‘63 were golden. All around us, things were happening and we were participating whether we liked it or not. Until a few years ago, I thought that those were the best, worst years of my life.
In the end, Frank got a Pulitzer for his Kennedy coverage but continued to drink heavily; Jerry did the same—without the prize—and ended up buying a house in South Carolina from the royalties of a single he’d sold, called Jazzin’ My Baby. I was still in Dallas, writing conspiracy poems, milling about, wearing too much black. But we talked often for the following years and, a decade later (after the war in Nam that we’d all avoided), decided that we needed to take ourselves off the map; reconfigure ourselves, maybe form a commune.
*
Now, here I am, sitting on a porch in South Carolina; old. I am bored, and I am overly expectant of the dark (I go to bed at 8:30 usually to ensure my safety and sanity). This morning I watched Jerry, drunk, kill a chicken with his bare hands. He laughed for several moments, in sheer delight that he’d accomplished the feat—and won the bet between me and Frank. The whole bargain was: Was he, at 87, still spry enough to catch a bird? Ten dollars said no.
After it was completed we all laughed, set the chicken to roast, and settled back with our Juleps, it was pristine. But when I’d laughed my due and noticed that I and Frank’s white shirts stood apart from Jerry’s bloodstained v-neck, things became much worse for me. I had to admit it. I was sad, and had been for many years.
I looked at the blood on his shirt, and I hated him for it. Sure, I’d paid my five dollars of the bet, but I was feeling as if I were just another old Colonel wearing white on a porch and slurring out my last speeches and recitations. A permanent fixture of the Deep South, echoing the sadness and strife of my days throughout the swamps and willows; I knew that this was not me, but then again, it was.
I was once proud of my home life:
November 8, 1978
-For my first wife
Time and a half,
I’ll take it!
For the money I burn
Is like bacon—
And boy, do I love
That scent from above
When I’ve brought it
Home, and we’re makin’ it!
That was when everything was going well. But now, now things are just pathetic. It’s almost funny how terribly odd life has turned out. I’d never imagined in a million years that I’d end up an old frail alcoholic who’d taken up a false, but honorary rank in a society in which I didn’t participate anyway.
Tonight, the night of the chicken murder, I can’t sleep. It’s well past nine o’clock and I’m terribly perturbed. All those happy years spent; put away on paper. I suppose that’s all I can do to chase a smile these days. Just write it down and stow it away.
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