rimbaud, redux

you know the question: what is your type? you can sort of answer that, but don't want to. you don't want to admit to anyone, least of all yourself, that you have a type, or worse, a pattern. but go on, Berlin, you can say. you like the marginal, the terrified, scary adolescents or near to, the ex-jailbirds, the one's who hurt inside, scratch poetry on napkins and throw it away, the dispossessed, the dark and the lonely. it's not like any old crumpled-up ferocious kid will do. yours is not some easily-tagged Florence Nightengale sydrome. they have to be good looking in that pimply, seering-eyed way. they have to see through my bullshit. they have to be young and pretentious and smart. ('we ALWAYS think they're smart' - Danny Fields). when i look back at these boys, especially reading, again, about Rimbaud, i realize they all have some of him in them. some more than others. as i have some of Verlaine in myself. more than once have they enthralled me, set me on edge and turned me inside out and far away from complacency. among these, most of all, it was Michael, the boy i met at the screen door of my sister's apartment in Somerville. there he stood in his underwear, out of the blue, panting from the run from his house. 'will you walk me home?' he asks. i had never met him, never laid eyes on him before this night. 'yes'. of course i would. we were inseparable for the next year and the next and the next. he looked like Rimbaud. he had the same piercing ice-blue challenging eyes. he wrote prayers and poems and burned them. he aimed a gun at the back his father's head when they walked in the woods in Louisiana. the gun was loaded and he almost pulled the trigger. he was only 12. from his porch he saw a motorcyclist beheaded when his bike slid under the tailgate of a truck. he wrote love words on the wall of his bedroom with his dog's shit. he threw matches into the brush alongside a narrow road on Martha's Vineyard. it caught fire. he drove my friend's VW into the ocean. he took off his clothes and boarded the bus stark naked. he dropped acid with me, but because he ground his teeth, or thought he did, he refused ever after to close his mouth. it hung open and drooled. he gave me a black eye after sex. he shoved a coke bottle up his dog's asshole. we slow danced in a bar for old timers, hugging, near kissing, showing off and laughing. they smiled at us. it was his idea. i suppose he was crazy. of course i think we all are, but it was all too much for him and for me. i met someone else and he was hurt. 'we always hurt the one's we love'. at a friend's suggestion he went to a camp for tough kids up in Maine. the kids thought he was gay. i guess he'd made a sloppy pass at one of them. i'm not sure, but the short of it was that he got hit in the lower back with a log and damaged his spleen. it was removed. when he returned home he had a scar like a railroad track on his belly. then things got worse. his mom didn't know what to do. he wound up in Marlboro State Mental Hospital. when i went to see him he was standing in line, in a regulation dress-like pale blue robe, accepting his paper cup of pills just like the patients in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. a few days later he drowned himself in a bathtub. it was a scandal. he was not being watched. i went to his funeral. the boys from the camp in Maine carried his coffin. he looked beautiful at the wake, even though he'd put on weight. i broke down. his mom told me that no one in his life had loved him as much as i had. still, i wonder, i worry to this day, that it was our, my, tidal wave attraction to him that hurt him most. that sent him off the cliff. i still love him, my Rimbaud. he never found the African desert. he never found peace, or gentle love. since Michael, there are the others - 2 former inmates, an artist who again, resembles the dangerous one, a fire-starter of the soul, a ridiculer, a prescient. my knees buckle every time they seem to find me.