In the Hell Hotel With Memphis Jack

Painting of Harvey Goldner by Crysta Casey


In the Hell Hotel with Memphis Jack


Having squandered all his inheritance
of medium-quality counterfeit money, having
lost his place in the plush pink dream rooms
of the Yellow Flower Condos, Jack paced
that night the greasy red hallways of the Hell
Hotel, forced to face for the first time the fact
that even his being had become an affront. He
walked until he wept (across the street, tigers
burned bright in the cheap furniture store)
and he wept until he felt his weeping wash
away his crime and the cancer in his mind.

He returned to his room, to his green plastic
curtains, to his green plastic bedspread and the
cracked mirror above the sink. Jack washed
his face, and in the cracked mirror he saw his
shame, and because he didn’t look away from it,
he saw that Lady Shame carries a big diamond
in her hand. And in her diamond he saw the
children: children like a rainbow revolving
the Maypole; children sitting in a circle
in the summer dust, playing marbles beneath
the branches of an oak; children’s faces laughing
around a campfire; an arc of children wrapped
in wool, skating on ice through fast-falling snow.

And then, from the cracked mirror above the
sink, the woman with the big diamond in her
hand (she was wearing a muu muu!) spoke: “Jack,
if you wish to find your original mind, speak kindly
to the child. Forget God: seek the guide, the goad.
See him! (his grin and grime) a cowboy Indian
driving a diesel truck, towing a yellow bus east
across the floating bridge, a broom straw between
his teeth, an eagle feather in the yellow band of his
hat, his mind like a hovercraft moving quickly over
stumps, yet responsive to the contours of the swamp.

“See, beneath the blue-black surface of the lake, the
slender princess (her green eye shadow the green of
lovely new American money) asleep in the glow of
the dome light, in her yellow car sunk in the
mud, far below the blue-black surface of the lake.

“See your mama in her kitchen, baking her
brain cells with bonded bourbon while daddy’s in
the broom closet, calculating compound interest—
blood on the algebra, beyond sugar or anger.

“See the garbage pickers and the poets
poking through mountains of gray garbage at the
dump, searching for gold, finding copper
wires, aluminum cans, rags, tires, souvenirs.

“See the sportsfans sucking on cans.
See the sportsfans being sucked
into the concrete stadium mausoleum.

“See the human monkey in his spacesuit
in his spaceship in space, playing with
weightless ravioli—as stupid as a computer.

“See skinny Jimmy Walker wrapped tight in a
woolen blanket on the desert floor, halfway between
Hell and Memphis, under a night sky ripe with a
million stars, stars naked and without nametags. See
Jimmy truly safe in the dry and rocky hand of Mother
Goose, safe from the rattlers and the roulette wheels
in the brains of the coiled coral snakes. See Jimmy
waiting for his best old friend, the rising sun.

“Jack, brush your teeth, and lay you down
to sleep. And if you should awake into the
evergray ooze of Seattle dawn, remember
what beauty the cracked ones can bring you.”

Harvey Goldner

Companion Piece
From Bobby Byrd’s Blog

14th May, 2007

This last week I learned that my growing up friend Harvey Goldner is in the hospital. He had a tumor removed from his tongue, and in removing it the doctors removed most of his tongue. This is what his daughter Emily (her e-letters are so clear and straight­forward, a satisfaction to read good writing even as the sadness surrounds her and her dad) wrote me in a letter:

He will get radiation in his mouth but no chemo right now. Apparently it takes time to see if cancer has spread to other part of the body…His tongue was reconstructed [they used muscle from the abdomen] but it won’t feel or act like a tongue. He will get speech therapy and they are hoping he’ll be able to eat food and speak again.

Hard stuff for a poet who fiddles with language by speaking words out loud. Hard stuff for anybody. I talked to Harvey the Sunday night before his Tuesday morning operation. He said he wasn’t afraid of death, but it’s the getting there, especially if the journey is going to be like this, that’s freaky. And afterwards he has to lie there in his bed without his cigarettes. Emily said they’ll stick a nicotine patch on him.

Harvey was born in January 1942, me in April of the same year. Our big sisters were best friends, so I bet we’ve known each other from at least since the 3rd grade. He lived on Reese Street one block over from Prescott where I lived. We had a secret path that went through the backyards my house to his house. He gave me my first cigarette, a Camel. We smoked it in my bedroom. I got green sick but I loved the smoke.

Harvey’s new book The Resurrection of Bert Ringold will be published by Cinco Puntos in October. I think I’ll go up to Seattle to deliver it to him. I’ve not seen Harvey in over 30 years. Shit. So get well, Harvey.

4th July, 2007