Dead Friends

Dead Friends


Jim Carroll was like my friend Jimmy Walker.
Carroll (b1949) started doing cocaine
on the streets in NYC at the age of 13.
Me (b1942) and my friend Jimmy Walker (b1941)
started drinking together when we were 13.
Different places, different times.
Another difference, it seems,
was that Jim Carroll had a father,
a bartender in a conservative Irish neighborhood.
Both of Walker and I were fatherless,
me literally, Jimmy figuratively.
Harvey Goldner, another founding member
of our drinking club (aka "gang" or "pandilla"),
had a figuratively dead father
who was happy enough to come home from work
and get drunk. And a little bit later
Jimmy Douglas, who like me had a father
they had put into the ground.
All of us fatherless one way or another.
We drank hard and often
all the way through high school.
I’m not proud of that. It’s what happened.
We were lost and shy and foolish.
Booze was our shield.
We battled against the world with our booze.
It could have been cocaine very easily
but cocaine wasn’t an option in 1954 East Memphis.
After high school Jimmy Walker--
who like Jim Carroll was easiest the craziest
of us all--quit school and went off with the carnival.
Then he joined the Army and before long
he had jumped off some tower in Germany
(the Army said he fell,
Jimmy Walker would never fall /
he loved climbing the tall trees
in his Friday night drunkeness)
and he came home packaged in his uniform
lying inside a box.
But Michael Clemmons was first into that void.
I know because Jimmy was with him.
Another of the fatherless.
They were floating on a log in the Mississippi--
Mike and Jimmy, my little sister Patsy and Harvey
and somebody else.
(I was elsewhere, saying goodbye to a girlfriend).
The river swallowed Mike whole. We were 18 then.
Mike was a sweet-faced boy who wanted to be a poet.
Surely he was gay but it was before that time
when he could say, "Sure, I’m gay. What of it?"
I hope we would have understood.
They found his water bloated body the next day
snagged into some eddy on the banks of the river.
The undertaker fixed him up fine for his mother.
Next in line was Bert Ringold.
He put his father’s shotgun in his mouth
and pushed the trigger with his toe.
And there were others--Horace and Kemp
and red-headed Bobby.
In the 70s tall David Telder bought himself
a gun at an El Paso pawnshop
and went into the desert. He was a good friend.
I never guessed at his sorrow.
It’s happening more often now. Dead people.
Jimmy Gardner from AIDS.
My little sister Patsy from viral pneumonia
and obesity and struggles
with depression and addiction.
My big brother Bill from alcoholism
and a heart attack and depression.
Steve Sprague from meningitis.
Harvey Goldner from cancer.


Bobby Byrd

Posted over on his site White Panties & Dead Friends

Line breaks by Glenn Buttkus