The Boy with the Golden Arm (in progress)

for Judah.


Beware of phone calls that come in the middle of the night.

It was far too dark to drive out to Judah’s farm that night, but the urgency in her voice brought me through the snaking roads of old Route 13 during those first glimpses of summer. I remember there was an electrical storm on the rise somewhere around Horseheads, New York.
So, this urgency that I am talking about would come one night when an old friend called and with a hush of her voice so softly said, “If you want to see Judah again before…you should come soon”. It is the very phone call I’d been dreading for years and by now, my heart was beating as fast as a sparrow’s.
I already couldn’t sleep because I’d been sobering up and the nightmares that come along with this process occupied a rather large corner inside my brain for almost a week now. I remember I couldn’t tell whether or not it was, in fact, one of these nightmares or a hallucination of sorts – another side effect I believe to be part of the process of drying out.
Since all these terribly dim thoughts were keeping me up at night and with the inclination to get into my car at quite an unreasonable hour, when it was too dark to drive out to upstate New York, I suddenly remembered that Judah meant more to me than most people ever will.

* * *

I could never remember his lady friend’s name. I suppose it is because I’ve never actually said her name out loud or spoke of her. Never could. But then again, she never noticed. This skinny little girl who brought all that junk to my darling asks the same questions. Questions like, “Do you know what time it is?” or “Wait, how do you know Judah again?” – all in her stupid slow heroin-logged voice. And she wasn’t too quick to pick up on my chronic roll of the eyes because she kept talking and asking those same fucking questions. The questions that I’d eventually have to pound out of my head like a drum, along with all of the things that Judah and I spoke about that night of the electrical storm.

* * *

Judah is making lunch for us and his lady friend is going into town for the night. Judah called all meals lunch.
“Dammit!” He shouted. “I forgot the ice cream!”
“It’s okay, I don’t really need any” I said.
“Of course nobody ever really needs ice cream…It’s just nice to have some in store for my July company” he says under his breath.
We were half way through a rather silent lunch until an almost silent tone, he muttered, “I remember you used to really like ice cream.”
I laughed and ashed my cigarette.
“Pistachio!” He exclaimed as he clamored along with the plates and the coffee pot.
“See…I remember”.
“That’s all you used to eat when you were on all that speed”.
“Remember all those bottles of wine you used to have to drink to go to sleep?”

“Yes” I said.
I remember I just sat there strumming my cigarette along the bottom of the cemetery ground of Camel lights in that old ashtray I brought back for him from Mexico.
There was something in me that was just so fearful of him. His addiction, his arm, which was bandaged up, his face that seemed so vacant. He looked like a hangman fumbling with a noose with every little chore he tried to do around that old farmhouse. Yet, the words that came out of his mouth off a little ease. Obviously, it was the phone call.
Still, there was this looming doom that seemed to have just reached the surface.

The place was a mess.

“Remember you used to just wear panties when you wrote? You would just sit there at that computer bare-breasted and all”
I laugh again and tell him I still do.

* * *
“At least I’m not drinking anymore” he says after a long while of silence.
“Don’t you think heroin might be a little bit more severe than alcohol, Dahlink?”
“Depends” he said as we sat there folding his laundry.

We always called each other dahlink. And if I can remember correctly, it was from Norman Mailer’s The White Negro, a novel that we both used to really like and quoted often.

And we’d tip toe around on blow and bourbon, disappear in my room on Plain Street until someone found us.
That’s how we got through the winters.

I remember the one night we almost fucked. I called him a pussy and he called me a prude. And we just laughed and touched each other for a long time.
I remember after that night, I always thought about making love to him. I would think how much it would’ve meant and how all the sex that I would have that came after would never come close to the meaning and understanding of our one night of love. It would have been a sweet sweet something that would eventually bring into a focus a picture of a sweet nothing- where that saying might have really started to make sense, accordingly, making it a little easier for me to walk away from the half-assed lovers that I just so happen to fall into bed with. And Judah, in one night, could have curved my vulnerability, but Judah always liked to talk vulnerability. In fact, he preferred me this way.

I told him about my ways of getting over a lover.
He wanted to hear about him, but I couldn’t tell him how everything happened.
“It's all for copy” he said.

He would be dead in less than a week.