Elegies for the Brokenhearted by Christie Hodgen Page A

and the smell was so bad I almost puked…I saw him just a couple days ago, I was walking to work and he was driving around and he honked at me and he yelled out the window, What’s up, motherfucker! …I saw him in the library just sitting in one of those big-ass chairs, and I said what’s up and he said he was just there for the air-conditioning…) The nature of our talk had more to do with fear—with the feeling that death had swept down and taken you and we’d been standing right there, more or less right next to you, it might just as well have been us—than with grief. “That dumb bastard,” people kept saying, looking down, their hands stuffed in their pockets. “That dumb fuck.”
    At no time did anyone mention that there was something more to be considered, that factoring into your death was not only a large measure of stupidity but also of trust, of faith. To take a friend at his word, to position oneself on one’s back, in the dark, in service to that friend, to do this knowing that if your friend was wrong, if the tank wasn’t completely dry, it meant your life—there was something sadly noble about this, something beautiful. But we were too small to mention it.
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    A week later I went off to college and for a long time I didn’t think about you. Then in my junior year I came across your name in a French literature class, given to a hapless, doomed character much like yourself. Le Poer, a variation of le pauvre : the pathetic, the pitiable, the poor. By then I had seen wealth and had realized at last that we were poor. You, me, that whole miserable city, that godawful place, bleak and ugly as hell, we were all poor. We could hardly be otherwise. Our city was a landlocked settlement that had failed long ago, that had built its factories—dozens of them, red brick, leaning smokestacks rising up from their rooftops—without taking into account its lack of waterways and the added cost of transportation this made necessary, all of its exports—wire, textiles—having to be carted out by horse, and so it was only a matter of time before these factories folded to their competitors, the city folding soon after. And of our ancestors, the people who chose to stay behind after the factories shut down, what could be said of them except that they were foolish, stubborn, hopelessly stupid, what could be said of them except that they were poor? By the time we came along, generations of decay later, the place was falling down, a third of its population jobless and walking the streets, drunks and drug addicts, crippled veterans, raving lunatics. We were poor, our lives filled with the stupid things that poor people did, the brutalities we committed against each other, the violence, the petty victories we claimed over one another, crabs topping each other in a basket instead of trying to climb out of that basket; the desperate, impulsive lurches we made at love, no matter what the cost to those around us or how fleeting we knew that love would be; the indifference; all that we drank and smoked, the serums we shot into our veins; the hours we spent at grueling, mind-numbing jobs, one day after another, how, in order to survive these jobs, we scraped our minds clean like plates, cleared them of all thought; our prayers, if we prayed at all, sent off in rages, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus goddamned Christ. We were poor.
    There wasn’t much chance for you (or Bill, who killed himself a few years after your death) to turn out much differently than you did, the pathetic, the pitiable, the poor. In order to turn out any differently one had to leave that place. One was, for a time, glad to do it, one was free—free!—one felt oneself weightless. And yet something about being poor stayed with a person and managed to trouble that person’s new life no matter how far away she traveled. If a once-poor person, say, was taken to a dinner party, and