Henry has called himself or been
called “Pussy-cat” before, so that’s him. And poor Pussy’s not in very good
shape today, is he? I have a memory from college days of the morning after my
21st birthday. The night before, a group of friends had been
profligate with their wallets and took some kind of malicious glee in pouring
me a wide variety of pretty serious drink. (This beer tastes funny—oh there’s
two shots of whiskey in it. Huh. I’ve never had a martini before. My dad used
to drink those. What’s the difference between Scotch, Irish, Canadian,
Kentuckian—let’s find out! I have a snapshot memory of having climbed up the
ladder of a fire-escape and someone helping me down. That kind of night.) Next
morning, looking in the mirror, miserable hung-over, asking my reflection: Is
this what you want? Fool. This is what it’s going to be? Poisoned, sick, an odd
pale grayish-green color? Eyes like a cross section of smoked kielbasa and sauerkraut?
Head a red and white Cote d’Ivoire bongo of pain? The answer was a fairly sick nope—puke—ugh—then
back to bed to sleep it off. Day wasted. I suppose there’s nothing
extraordinary or all that shameful about an isolated occasion like that. I give
that guy a pass because he was young and stupid, and there’s nothing
particularly wrong with that as long
as you don’t kill yourself or anybody else, and if you eventually outgrow it. I
hate the feeling of hang-over (“waking like death”) so badly that I’ve only
ever had a few of those mornings of ill, alcohol-triggered soul searching. And
I’m not so enamored of the drunk itself that it’s even much of a temptation. I
don’t mean to brag. Whoever my demons might be, alcohol isn’t a member of that
contingent. But that memory helps with this poem, a description of the severe alcoholic
in action.
It reminds me how blasé we can be
in health. Something (we do know what it was) drove the man, and that thing was
bad enough that the long “sleeps & sleeps & sleeps” are worth the
waking like death. Sheesh. Or maybe that’s just what got it all going, and the
simple fact of addiction took over from there. This matters from a broad point
of view, but when you’re looking in that mirror, you’re just sick. “Wastethrift”
and “hoardy-squander” both describe the overall tension between health/success
and addiction. This reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s “mixing memory with desire” in “The
Waste Land” actually—forward or backwards? Which is it? Neither and both.
Whatever that mix amounts to, it’s not whole nor unified, and not of the
moment. A metaphor for existential dis-ease. Hoardy-squander is like that. B.
isn’t going for a major existential pronouncement à la Eliot, just describing
his hard and sickening predicament. But we’re a society of individuals. If we
were all misanthropic hermits, then we’d be a society of misanthropic hermits. If
we’re all wounded alcoholics, then that’s who “we” are. We contribute our
condition, stir it in the mix, and it colors the world. Broad, sweeping, existential
whether we like it or not. That’s why we read autobiographies and confessional
poets. This poem isn’t in a happy place, but the lessons can hit home and teach something
to even the healthiest happy-head if he only pays attention. The world in all
its outrageous complexity.
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