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trench coat wandering the streets of New York, trailing the smallest leads, until he found your girls. But all efforts failed, and eventually we fell back on the prevailing wisdom of all searching people, eventually we decided that if we stood still, if we stayed where we were, your girls would come to us.
    For my part I was preoccupied with the room in which you died. Often in dreams I found myself in the lobby of that hotel, and it was a grand place, the kind of place in which Henry James might have lived, with oak-paneled walls and birch logs crackling in a marble fireplace, with satin-upholstered armchairs. In my dreams the hotel lobby had a black-and-white-tiled floor whose patterns shifted beneath my feet, forming whales and clocks and chess pieces, coming together and breaking apart, kaleidoscopic. A fine place indeed. But when I spoke to the lobby attendant—an old man encased behind glass, glowing yellow in his booth, much like a toll collector—he couldn’t hear me. “I want to see a room,” I said. “I want to see the room where Mike Beaudry died.” But the attendant only shrugged, shook his head.
    I wanted to see you again. The thought of you alone in that room was something I couldn’t bear to think about, and yet something I couldn’t help but think about. I think of it still. I see a Cutlass or a red-haired girl, the doorbell or phone rings at a strange hour, I hear a song on the radio ( He blew his mind out in a car… ) and it all comes back, all of this in a rush, and how I wish I had been there in Brooklyn with you, calling your name from across the street, how I wish you hadn’t been alone. Even now, across this distance between us, I want to call out to you, how desperately I want to call your name and have you answer. Just once I want to hear you say: Shut up, fool.

Elegy for
Elwood LePoer
    (1971–1990)
    E lwood LePoer, your head was a brick, a block, a lollipop. You were dumb as a stick, a sock, a bag of rocks. Your lot in life, it seemed, was to go through it unawares, your folly a perpetual amusement to others. In our dead-end school you were the village idiot, and we stood around talking about you, your latest foibles, like the weather. “LePoer, you wouldn’t believe what he just did. Walked right into a glass door, fell over backwards, that dumb shit.” We called you everything we could think to call you. Dipshit, Shithead, Shitheel, Shit-for-Brains. We piled on every last cliché. You were a few sandwiches short of a picnic, a pancake shy of a stack, a board short of a porch. You weren’t the sharpest knife in the drawer or the brightest bulb on the tree. Your screws were loose, one of your boots was stuck in the mud, your elevator didn’t go all the way to the top, you were all foam and no beer, you had lost your marbles, your lights were on but you weren’t home. In ironic moods we called you Professor, Einstein, Sherlock, Your Excellency. What a knuckledragger you were, what a mouthbreather, you didn’t know shit from Shinola, your head from your ass, what you didn’t know could fill a book.
    A number of unfortunate events marked you early, made your reputation, and for better or worse you enjoyed throughout your life a certain amount of local fame. As a toddler you once ran naked through the neighborhood, all the way down to the shops on Plantation Street, and stood smiling on the street corner while a stray dog licked your balls. Cars honked as they passed. People came pouring out of the shops and stood around you laughing, someone even taking your picture, before some kind soul, rare among us, picked you up and carried you home. In grade school you fell into the habit of trapping and torturing small animals, singeing their fur with lighters, something you bragged about at school ( You shoulda seen this rabbit, man, it went fucking crazy! ) until one day a cat got the better of you and scratched your face, a