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By Root 1923 0

who he was. Everyone did. He was built like a linebacker—he had played high-school football in Ohio—but he had a perpetually oversensitive expression on his wide face. “The hothouse flower inside the Mack truck” was one phrase I had heard to describe him. He had survived bouts of alcoholism, two broken marriages, and losing custody of his children, and had finally moved to New York, where he had sobered up. His poems, some of which I knew by heart, typically dealt with the sudden explosion of the inner life in the midst of an almost fatal loneliness. I particularly liked the concluding lines of “Poem with Several Birds,” about a moment of resigned spiritual radiance.

Some god or other must be tracing, now,

its way, this way, and the blossoms

like the god are suspended in midair,

and seeing shivers in the face of all this brilliance.

I had repeated those lines to myself as I waited tables and took orders for salads. The fierce delicacy of Burroughs Hammond’s poetry! On those nights when I had despaired and had waited for a god, any one of them, to arrive, his poetry had kept me sane. So when I spotted him at Freddy Avery’s, I introduced myself and told him that I knew his poems and loved them. Gazing up at me through his thick horn-rim glasses, he asked politely what I did for a living. I said I waited tables, was an unemployed actor, and was working on a screenplay. He asked me what my screenplay was about and what it was called. I told him that it was a horror film and was entitled Planet of Bugs.

My screenplay had little chance of intriguing the poet, and at that moment I remembered something that Lorca had once said to Neruda. I thought it might get Burroughs Hammond’s attention. “ ‘The greatest poet of the age,’ ” I said, “to quote Lorca, ‘is Mickey Mouse.’ So my ambition is to get great poetry up on the screen, just as Walt Disney did. Comic poetry. And horror poetry, too. Horror has a kind of poetry up on the screen. But I think most poets just don’t get it. But you do. I mean, Yeats didn’t understand. He couldn’t even write a single play with actual human beings in it. His Irish peasants—! And T. S. Eliot’s plays! All those Christian zombies. Zombie poetry written for other zombies. They were both such rotten playwrights—they thought they knew the vernacular, but they didn’t. That’s a real failing. Their time is past. You’re a better poet, and when critics in the future start to evaluate—”

“You,” he said. He lifted his right arm and pointed at me. Suddenly I felt that I was in the presence of an Old Testament prophet who wasn’t kidding and had never been kidding about anything. “You are the scum of the earth,” he said calmly. I backed away from him. He continued to point at me. “You are the scum of the earth,” he repeated.

Everyone was looking at him, and when that job had been completed, everyone was looking at me. Some Charles Mingus riffs thudded out of the record player. Then the other guests started laughing at the show of my embarrassment. I glanced around to see if I could detect where Giulietta had gone to, because I needed to make a rapid escape from that party and I needed her to help me demonstrate a certain mindfulness. But she wasn’t anywhere now that I needed her, not in the living room, not in the kitchen, or the hallway, or the bathroom. After searching for her, I descended the stairs from the apartment as quickly as I could and found myself back out on the street.

Now, years later, I no longer remember which one of the nearby subway stops I found that night. I can remember the consoling smell of New York City air, the feeling that perhaps anonymity might provide me with some relief. I shouted at a light pole. I walked a few blocks, brushed against several pedestrians, descended another set of stairs, reached into my pocket, and pulled out a subway token. In my right hand, I discovered that I was still holding on to a plastic cup with beer in it.

Only one other man stood on the subway platform that night. The express came speeding through on the middle tracks. The trains were all spray-painted