Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

I met him in 1995. We were in a bar on the south side of town, talking deconstructionist theory after too many drinks. He had compared Derrida to Lewis and Clark, Van Gogh, and James Brown in the same sentence. I was hooked.

   At last call he ordered two shots of Cuervo and a pitcher of Bud Light. Before the limes could get there, he swallowed both shots and started chugging the pitcher. He got about a third down, slammed it on the table, and sat up straight.

   "Nothing ever falls apart," he said, "it just rebuilds on the floor."

   I stared, clueless.

   "Nothing ever..." A smile lit his face and he shook his head. "Fucking Derrida," he said, then slipped off his barstool.

   His face slapped the ground, a dull, flat sound. A laugh drifted up. He lifted his chin from the cement floor, saliva dripping from the corner of his mouth, pooling in dried beer and dirt. He began crawling on his stomach, inching forward as his laughter gained strength.

   "There's some pretty cool shit down here," he called, voice cracking.

   I put my beer down, left enough money to cover the tab, and headed towards the door.

   There was a thin scar over his left eye. In the years to come I grew accustomed to tangent conversations, public urinating offenses, and a host of tables, chairs, and drinks overturned in the wake of Jimi the Saint.

   The last night I saw him, it was just us. We had driven home from the bar the night before, Jimi steering from the passenger seat while I worked the pedals and shifted. We blew the stop sign, crossed Main Street doing eighty, and ended up inches from my neighbor's front window.

   The next afternoon we followed the trail from the curb through the grass, between the cottonwood and fence post, over the gravel driveway where the blue S-10 was almost always parked, past the concrete stairs with the wrought iron railing, right up to our final resting point.

   Jimi laughed. "Good thing she wasn't home."

   I nodded, got in the car, and parked in my driveway. "See you tonight?"

   "Nine o'clock, sharp."

   I never knew why we called him the Saint, not that it really mattered. They said he'd been a hell of an artist once, actually supporting himself for a couple years on some paintings he'd done in the Flint Hills.

   That was before his brother died, hit by a truck. They said afterwards, Jimi drank hard, quit painting. I never saw him paint, and we never talked about his brother.

   At nine-thirty he walked in with a case of beer in each hand. He had broken up with his girlfriend a few weeks before, but we didn't talk about that, either. Instead, we delved into intellectual debates - Whitman vs Baudelaire, Pearl Jam vs Nirvana, Natural Light vs Pabst Blue Ribbon.

   After ten beers, conversations became fragments strung together. We were talking DeNiro and Pacino one second, the next he was screaming about the goddam Chiefs and how Marty Schottenheimer needed his ass canned.

   After four more, all coherency vanished.

   "You see this?"

   I searched the room. "See what?"

   "Like, what if Scorsese were here?" He hopped on a chair, fingers picture-framing the room, searching for the perfect angle, the perfect lens to shape his vision.

   "He would set the camera, then cue the music... and then... and then..." I sat there, drawn into the mumbling and the faint trace of Wyclef in the background.

   "RAGING BULL! RAGING BULL!"

   I spilled the rest of my beer down my shirt as Jimi ran around my apartment shouting Raging Bull!, filming imaginary scenes, and yelling at crew members until I half-expected to see DeNiro walk in. I stood up to get another drink, and he sprung at me, catching my collar and sticking his face into mine.

   "Jimi?" I whispered, craning my neck away. His blue eyes were penetrating.

   He cocked his head. "Do you see it?"

   "See what?"

   "Come on, you know what."

   His trembling voice hung in the stillness.

   "Could I maybe get a hint?"

   Even as the words came out I knew I'd blown it. It was like throwing a rock at a windshield, and there he was, spiderwebbing before me. The grasp at my collar loosened, the rigid gaze fractured, and he shrank into a corner of the couch.

   "That bitch," he said. "You believe that bitch?"

   After twenty minutes he slumped to his side, a half-full can slipping through his fingers. I took off his boots, worked a pillow under his head.

   "Night, Jimi the Saint."

   At that point it wasn't important who named him. I hoped somewhere there was a place for saints, hoped someday he would find it.

   The next morning he was gone.

   Weeks later I heard he turned up in Florida, cooking pastries at a resort. They said he hadn't told anyone. They said someone found a bunch of paintbrushes and sketchpads in his trashcan out back. They said he was going by James now.

   In the end, I guess it didn't really matter.