Poetry by Poem

The Second Conversation About Myself
(Recollections of Tomorrow)

I just sat on the steps with my arms crossed against that surprisingly cold whisk that inevitably stirs Chicago at this time of year. I wondered how I could know so much and do so nothing about it. There are, I'm certain, few people as self-obsessed through self-criticism of their own self-obsession as I am. Pride is the great evil I always say – to myself, to the page, to God, to everyone – self-concern eats me like a cancer, I long to overcome it. I say that – now, again, again – but I don't, I don't overcome it. I sit on the steps in the bristling wind and obsess.
I was remembering – my memory piqued by these thoughts – a man I spoke with on the Brown line platform at Chicago about three years before. (I recount the story here with Hemingway expletives).

He smelled like vomit, or sewage – I could taste that smell the moment he threw himself onto the bench next to me – and the exposed skin on his body was covered in burn-scars and cuts, dozens of them, at various stages of recovery. When he sat down he turned his head robotically toward me and exhaled a cloud of vodka and coffee, vodka and coffee, vodka and coffee – I’ve never seen, felt, smelled human breath with such obvious layers – as he said, "want me to give you something? I ain't askin' you fo a thing, not a thing." He shook his head violently and the faded rainbow fabric he had tied across his forehead filled my vision.
"Other people'll ask you fo this or that. Not me, no sir, obscene-filther. Pow! I'm gonna give you something – the power to know your own destuny. You'll be able to see it! Dis-is what humanity has always been lookin' fo! The power to know they fue-chas. (his face was all pontifical gravity) Now why would I give it to you? I like you. Das-right. You understand me. You know what kinda man I am. We understand each other, obscener." He finished with an intrusive pat of my chest and another wave of dense, humid breathing.
I was still a freshman in college, new to Chicago, new to that stench and that brand of spontaneous intimacy – to those sorts of words (though, in all my time here I haven't heard the things this man was saying to me. The forms, yes, but not the content) – and so I took the empty flattery a little to heart and let my conceited goodwill out of its velvet box where I kept it for the "really needy". I asked him what he meant, how he could possibly give me such a gift. And when I said that, his eyes burst wide and he jumped off the bench like a terrified nocturnal animal.
"Gift!" he shrieked, "A curse, mo like it. A curse, you obscene obscenity! Filth!" Then he caught himself and became suddenly calm again, slid down next to me and started patting my chest.
"You don't believe me, but that's aw-right, that's aw-right. 'He that believes will be a believa!' (this quote came, no-doubt, from the recesses of some imaginary holy book) Now you just listen, little obscener, just sit there an listen. In a-bout thirty secuns this blasphemous right fist is gonna hit Eva-wood over here (he waved at a billboard behind the bench)." I made a face at him. "Shut-up an’ listen!" He fairly jumped on me. "I know what you thinkin' obscener, 'just stop yo-self Jeffrey if you know the fue-cha – just stop yo-self' but that ain't destuny. No sir! That is not destuny" and as he said that he spun around and hit the sign much harder than I could've imagined. I stood up and reached towards him but he held me back with a triumphant fist, swished erratically in front of my face.
"See! That... is not...destuny! The fue-cha is just as said and done as the past, white boy, just as said and done – but ol' Jeffrey here, he just happens to know his own fue-cha just like he knows his own past, das right. You understand me, das right. Filth!"
He stopped waving his fist and forcefully ushered me back onto the bench. He went on confidentially, "This is what I'm tellin' you, I'm 'bout ta give you the powa to know everything that's gonna happen to you, good and bad, the sins of the children's children! You know what I'm sayin', obscener – but you won't be able to do a thing to change it, no m'aam nigga!" And he clapped his hands with a gleeful malevolence. It suddenly seemed he was becoming less inclined to be my friend and more inclined to be something in the order of my deranged murderer.
I stood up to see if the train was coming. Miraculously, mercifully, it was. I had decided that Jeffrey was not one of the "really needy" and that my good-heartedness would be better spent on someone else. He stayed seated on the bench and talked after me as if I wasn't rudely avoiding him:
"I ain't gonna be on this train, so I'll just sit tight, you already got the gift, you already got the gift. You'll know when you got it – tomorrow I'm a dead man, hear me, a dead man – and then you'll get it. BAM! Das right, but that don't bother ol' Jeffrey. Filth, it's you that's gotta worry now. Yes sir! Mmmm! You better find Jesus, filther."
The train began to slow down as it neared the platform. I felt a twinge of guilt at missing the opportunity to tell him that I had found Jesus and that he had changed my life (and so on) but then it occurred to me that trying to “witness” to Jeffrey would be like casting my “pearls to swine” and I felt piously renewed.
Then, just as the last car came up alongside me, I felt that leathery hand over my shoulder – I felt that reek.
"Mmm Hmmm" he said happily, "I ain't even gonna ask you for a dime. I already knows you ain't gonna give me a penny – not a penny. 'Sides I'm a dead man tomorrow anyway and ain't nothin' I can do about it. Right?" And he laughed hysterically.
Almost instinctively I dove my hand into my pocket, much more to prove him wrong than because I wanted to help support a reeking homeless man's drug habit – maybe it would do him some good, be the smelling salts that woke him up from his schizophrenic stupor (only since have I realized what a great beggar's strategy he was on to). But there wasn't even a gum wrapper in my pocket and I had left my wallet in my room. I wanted to curse. Instead, I left my hand stuffed deep into my pocket and pretended I had only put it there to keep warm – I hopped, disinterestedly, onto the Brown line.
I watched him – fairly dancing on the platform, waving his rainbow headband like an Olympic gymnast as the train pulled away – tried to forget about that smell and him altogether. But the guilt kept nagging at the back of my mind; and, more than the guilt, the horrible thought that he had been right – I couldn't have given him a penny.
Two days later my roommate pointed out a story in the Tribune that claimed an apparently homeless man had shot himself in the head in the last car of a Brown line train. Two passengers unwillingly watched the gruesome act early in the morning on the day after I had spoken with Jeffrey. I might have subconsciously appended the article later, but I am haunted by the words “multi-colored headband” in the dead man's brief description.

Sitting on those steps in that inevitable season-changing breeze, I kept turning that memory over in my head and wondering if Jeffrey had been telling the truth. Perhaps the future is like the past. Perhaps the future can be known the way the past is known – inevitable, unchangeable. It is a terrifying thought that a person might know the decisions he would make – blessed or utterly disastrous – ahead of time and be able to do nothing to alter or prevent them. But, at that moment, in the introspective gloom of the dusk and my memories, it occurred to me that it might be more than a mere thought. After all, don’t I know The Mistake and know, just as surely, that I will make it again tomorrow? I feel, more every day, that I am turning into Jeffrey – that the knowledge most of us would give anything to possess is driving me slowly mad.
Perhaps Jeffrey gave me his ‘curse’. Perhaps I already had it. I don’t know. It and he and that day on the steps, my cyclical failure, are a fog like the rest of my mind. A slowly lifting fog.
Perhaps what I have written here hasn’t even happened yet.