Poem: “John Berryman is Dead” by Kit Andis

Etheridge stopped the car
near the end of the bridge
on Washington Avenue
below yellow rectangles in campus windows.
It was late
so there wasn’t much traffic.
Nobody even started honking
til we got out
and carried our beers over to the railing.
“Right here,” he told me.
“He got out of his cab,
waved to someone
and over he went.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Who what?”
“Who’d he wave to?”
Etheridge scratched the scar on his chin,
and started to grin,
“Shit, man, you got no respect.”
“Not for death,” I told him.
Back in the car
we drove on in silence
drinking our beers.
“So… what? You think poetry
killed him?” I finally asked.
Etheridge looked at me,
one eyebrow going up.
“Kit, you’re not makin’ any sense
at all. Poetry brings you life,
not death. It was white-boy angst
did him in. No offense.”
It was now my turn to give Etheridge the deadpan
at that crack,
so pregnant with irony.
Again I saw him grin.
I have thought of this often
over the years—
in Philly, where I got him a gig at a jazz club
and he no-showed,
in Memphis, in his house
with no electricity or gas,
wife and kids gone, filled with abandoned
baby cribs—on
and on.
It was like a center of gravity
for a dozen years
of conversation—driving him to a bank
or a methadone clinic
or detox
or a liquor store.
“White-boy angst?” I’d say. “C’mon, man!”
He’d shake his large head,
“Kit, just ‘cause you ain’t no square tight-ass
don’t mean it’s not in your blood.”
And he’d grin.
He was at a university
signing books
the last time I saw him.
He jumped up from the table,
showed me those big teeth,
and then hugged me. “Man, where you been?”
We gossiped—so and so, this and that.
He lit a Pall Mall, shook one out for me.
“I got the lung cancer,” he said. “Inoperable.
Six months, maybe, they say.”
He wasn’t asking for anything,
just telling me.
I didn’t know what to say. I said,
“That’s rough.”
He sat back down
and started to sign more books.
Then he looked up and winked. “Hey, I saw one of your poems
in—and he named the magazine.
“Kit, you did good, man,
you did good!”
I said, “Etheridge,
remember that night on the bridge?
You were right. You were right
about everything.”
He shook his head, and I saw him grin. “Man, Kit,
you are so full of shit—you know it,
too.”
I didn’t go to the big shindig
they threw, just before he died
I didn’t want to see him all skinny
all skull.
I still don’t. I want to picture him
leaning over the railing of the bridge on Washington Avenue,
a cigarette in one hand, a beer
in the other,
car horns honking,
drivers giving us the finger,
and Etheridge taking his sweet time,
considering the irony.