Taste Grief, Need Friends

Bad golf, good friends, and shared poetry

‘Be the ball’: a still from the 1980 film “Caddyshack.”

By Michael Judge

When it came to golfing with his children, my dad famously said (well, famously at least in my family), “It would be easier to count the number of balls lost than the number of strokes taken.” This raw nugget of fatherly wisdom came to mind recently when I took some old friends golfing and realized the old man’s words still rang true. There I was, a 58-year-old child searching for ball after ball—more than a few lost to the rough, traps, and water hazards of the front nine.

“A good walk spoiled!” was all I could come up with, reminding my two completely bald high-school buddies that I’d “fallen while taking out the recycling and fractured two vertebrae in the lower lumbar region” not six months ago. “I also cracked two ribs,” I muttered, sipping my vodka lemonade as they taxied me to and fro in search of yet another missing TaylorMade 3.

Mercifully, my friend Scott suggested early on that we play “best ball,” meaning we only play the best hit ball among the three of us and pick up the others, or, in my case, call off the search party. He and my friend Tim, both of whom I played high-school football with, are decent golfers, having personal and professional lives that every once in a while demand degrading oneself on the links: Scott is a retired police officer and homicide detective; Tim is in medical sales.

My profession? Well, that’s a good question. Writer? Poet? Editor? Journalist? Raconteur? Bullshit artist? I like to tell people, “Only a poet would go into journalism for the money.” Because that’s exactly what I did. At the not-so-tender age of 27 I got my first “real” job after stints as a fry cook, janitor, telemarketer, bartender, bouncer, painter, roofer, delivery driver, concrete-, construction-, electrical-, and fishery worker while I wrote poetry and did my best to survive.

The real job? An editing position at a magazine (in Tokyo, of all places) where a drinking buddy of mine worked—and napped—under the title “senior editor.” Thanks to my pal Alex, who kindly kept a running ledger of the bar tabs he picked up for me and would later be best man in my wedding, I had become a journalist with a steady—and relatively considerable—paycheck. And although I’d been writing poems for nearly a decade at the time, I finally had a “profession”—Journalist—something respectable (at least back then) to reply with when asked, as Americans like to do, “What do you do for a living?”

You see, poet, is and was not a suitable reply. As I’ve said in the past, in nearly every culture—except perhaps a pub in Ireland—it’s akin to saying “I’m a wizard,” or an alchemist, or worse, an unemployed poseur who “fancies himself a poet.” As the brilliant and self-deprecating Polish poet Wisława Szymborska said in her 1996 Nobel acceptance speech, even poets don’t like to call themselves poets. “Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves,” she explained. “They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it’s much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they’re attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself … When filling in questionnaires or chatting with strangers, that is, when they can’t avoid revealing their profession, poets prefer to use the general term ‘writer’ or replace ‘poet’ with the name of whatever job they do in addition to writing. Bureaucrats and bus passengers respond with a touch of incredulity and alarm when they find out that they’re dealing with a poet. I suppose philosophers may meet with a similar reaction. Still, they’re in a better position, since as often as not they can embellish their calling with some kind of scholarly title. Professor of philosophy—now that sounds much more respectable.”

But “there are no professors of poetry,” Szymborska continued. “This would mean, after all, that poetry is an occupation requiring specialized study, regular examinations, theoretical articles with bibliographies and footnotes attached, and finally, ceremoniously conferred diplomas. And this would mean, in turn, that it’s not enough to cover pages with even the most exquisite poems in order to become a poet. The crucial element is some slip of paper bearing an official stamp. Let us recall that the pride of Russian poetry, the future Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky was once sentenced to internal exile precisely on such grounds. They called him ‘a parasite,’ because he lacked official certification granting him the right to be a poet.”

Perhaps that’s why I call the makeshift bar in my basement where I regale (pummel?) visitors with poetry and very loud music, the “Parasite Lounge.” I’d partly taken the name from the Bong Joon Ho film “Parasite”—since, as in the film, my basement does back up with sewage on a fairly regular basis—but it was also a tip of the hat to all the poets and writers accused of being parasites, perverts, degenerates or worse by left- and right-wing thugs throughout history and imprisoned, tortured, exiled or executed. Nothing frightens a thug more than free expression, something writers have understood since the birth of language, which, since the birth of language, has made them easy targets for bullies, Bolsheviks, and fascists alike.

But I digress. The point is my pals from high school, both like brothers to me, would never introduce me as a “poet,” even though I’ve written poetry all my adult life and recently subjected the world to it here on the digital pages of TFP. Most of my friends introduce me as a journalist who “used to work for The Wall Street Journal.” And, up until recently, that’s how I introduced myself. Among the many pleasant surprises of launching The First Person over three years ago is the way in which I can skip across the surface of different “genres” (ugh, that word) like a smooth stone on a still pond or an unskilled water skier at high speed.

Anyway, even my oldest friends, thanks to Substack, are getting to know my poems, and in turn are getting to know me and my relationship to them and to the world in a different way. It’s one thing to read a TFP essay about my mother and the courage and compassion she embodied seeing our family through the mental illnesses of my two brothers, Steve and John. But it’s something else to read a poem about her as a young girl when her father was “Away at the War.”

In other words, the act of writing poetry has long helped me survive different periods in my life—some tragic, some joyful, some mundane—but it wasn’t until recently that I learned, and truly understood, that it can help the reader survive too. There’s a worn-out saying in workshops and creative-writing instruction: “No discovery for the writer, no discovery for the reader.” It seems silly, but I now know the second discovery can’t take place without the poem being shared, either on the page or “put into the air,” as my teacher, the poet James Galvin, used to say.

Nice earring. But did he introduce himself as a ‘poet’? (credit: Wiki Commons )

And so, dear reader, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share this poem with you that was born out of my weekend with my two dear friends, Scott and Tim. No, it’s not about golf, vodka lemonades, or the slow then rapid realization that you are indeed going bald. It’s about our relationships with our dying parents, which we all experience, hopefully, if we’re lucky enough to survive them, and their love, their faults, foibles, frustrations, and selflessness. After a dismal display of golf and a night out at bars with people half our age; after talk of early romances, “Glory Days,” and “the wink of a young girl’s eye,” we talked about the joys and challenges of parenting, our aging parents, and the death of our fathers. Tim’s mom, a beautiful woman, nurse, and former director of a free health clinic, is in memory care with late-stage Alzheimer’s—a limbo I can’t comprehend.

Scott’s old man, Rich, was like a dad to many of us back then who, like Tim and me, didn’t live near our real fathers. It wasn’t that he was a shining example of a noble father, like John Boy’s warm and wise dad, John Sr., in “The Waltons.” Rich spent most of his time in the detached garage behind the house working on his 1940s Willys Jeep, sipping PBR and bullshitting with friends. He had a thick black beard that was dark as night, even as stubble, and always had a one-liner for anyone that would listen. He had kind eyes when he wasn’t angry, and loved his wife, Karen, more than life itself.

It may not have been easy to be his son, but it sure was nice having him as one of my surrogate dads. When my brother John died at the start of my sophomore year in high school, Rich was one of the few parents who looked me in the eye and acknowledged the loss. “I feel your pain, brother,” he said, grabbing me by the back of the neck and pulling my head to his—his version of a hug, I guess. When Rich died, nearly all of Scott’s friends were at the funeral, including Tim and me. But the real sendoff was at the Sidewinder Lounge the night before, Rich’s favorite watering hole in the working-class Midwestern town where we grew up. Scott’s mom, whom we all loved, had gone before his dad, and the grief hit hard.

All this is to say, after our recent reunion, I sent Scott the poem below about his dad and him. Actually, it’s a poem in Rich’s voice, which came to me all at once, as some poems do, like a message from beyond. It’s called “Dear Hartman,” which is what Rich and Karen always called Scott, and it brings to mind a line from a poet most folks know, a fellow by the name of Shakespeare: Taste grief, need friends.

Dear Hartman

I’m not much for apologies, but I’m sorry
my last words were, “Oh shit.” I’m sorry
you had to carry me to the bathroom
my last day before hospice. Before
the beginning of the end. I’m sorry
for how much I weighed, even though
I’d lost about as much weight as a kid weighs.
I’m sorry you had to deal with the mess
and all I did was bitch about the toilet-paper
roll being backwards. You see, Hartman,
it was always hard for me to hit things
head on. It’s probably why I called you
by your middle name, why I spent hour
after hour in the old garage working
on the Willys, drinking PBR after PBR
next to that sign with the Clydesdales
drinking PBR and pissing out Budweiser.
I’m sorry I left you and your brother and your sister.
Most of all, I’m sorry I couldn’t tell Karen
how much I loved her. Even after she was gone
it was hard. I could hear her voice,
smell her cigarettes in the living room
and the eggs and toast she made for the boys
when they were hungry. I could hear you
snoring upstairs after a night as a young man,
winning wrestling bouts, tackling running backs,
and making love to some young beauty.
I’m sorry, Hartman, that I couldn’t tell you this:
You’re a good boy who grew into a good man.
You’re my son. Even now with me so far out of your sight.

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