David

I met David at a party in the basement apartment of a friend of a friend. 

He was hitting on me, but I was too innocent to realize it.

I taught him to recite a Rilke poem in German —

Doch ist einer welcher dieses fallen
Unendlich sanft in seinen händen hält.

Later he tried to take me home, but I unwittingly put him off by making some heterosexual remark.

I remember his stoical, disappointed look.

I walked home by myself and wrote a poem about the two marvelous pools that were available for me to bathe in.

____

A few weeks later I met him somewhere.

He had run out of money, had nowhere to live, and asked if he could stay with me in my apartment for a while.

I had one room and the use of a bathroom and a kitchen. It was the Spring semester of my freshman year.

He slept in a sleeping bag across the room from my bed.

We listened to music together on my little portable record player. He was able to listen to music intently, and was a great Bruckner enthusiast.

Actually, Brucker was part of his Deutschland identification. He had been brutally tormented in high school for his homosexuality, and had indulged in revenge fantasies spiced with Third-Reich imagery.

I started sharing his improvident habits. We ate dinner at the student union nearly every evening, sitting with a gay Latin TA who distrusted me because I was a Scorpio.

I don’t remember his name, but he and David were both Capricorns.

David had started as a Latin major, but not being able to concentrate on his studies he had suddenly taken off for Boston with some acquaintances, returning with hardly a cent.

Most of his energy went into having lunch or dinner or trying to find sexual partners.

I went with him nearly every night to a bar called The Sink, an old Boulder establishment, with raunchy early-Mad-magazine-style cartoons scrawled on the walls.

We drank Coors drafts, though at that time alcohol didn’t appeal to me much. But we spent money on grilled cheeseburgers with mounds of grated cheddar cheese.

David never hooked up with anyone, and we’d return to my room and go to sleep in our separate beds.

____

Needless to say, my semester was a washout. I think I finally told David that he would have to leave.

At any rate, at the end of the Spring term, I went back home to Denver and worked at a gas station for the summer, using the money to buy a 1917 Mason and Hamlin grand piano, which I still have. My father helped me buy it. For a long time it stood in the dining room of my parents’ Denver house.

I’m not sure what David did the next year. I think he went to Los Angeles for a while. But in the Spring of ’72 he was living in my old rooming house, while I was living with Eldon, north of campus.

When I had it David would borrow marijuana from me,which in his Germanophile way he called Rauschgift. He’d smoke it listening to Bruckner records.

I’m not sure what he was doing that semester, but I’m sure his studies didn’t prosper.

____

After my own Boulder career collapsed and I returned to Denver to read St. Thomas à Kempis and practice the piano, and finally return to my literature studies, David would visit me.

He was living with his parents and working at the May D&F department store downtown.

I was very cold to him at first, but he persisted, and finally we were regular friends again.

One day, I don’t know why, we drove to Boulder together. We smoked some Rauschgift and drove out south of town.

We got out of the car and hiked around. We had to jump over a stream. I jumped, and then he jumped. He was not an athletic person, and his vision was bad.

He got tangled up in some rusty barbed wire that cut him in the chest.

It was a frightening shock.

He screamed out.

We drove to a 7-11 store and bought cotton swabs, alcohol, and antibiotic cream. I applied the alcohol and cream to his cuts in the 7-11 men’s room. It hurt him, but he bore it stoically.

He went to the doctor for a tetanus shot, but a few weeks later, after working out in the basement of his parents’ house in Aurora, he died of sudden cardiac arrest.

I don’t think his death had anything to do with the barbed wire incident.

I didn’t go to the funeral, but I did visit his grave site beforehand and saw the cement vault they were going to bury him in.

To this day, his embalmed corpse lies in that water-proof box, perhaps not much physically altered from the day he was deposited there.

The thought makes me want to be buried in muck so that the worms and bacteria can eat me up quick.

____

A year or so later, my father and I visited the grave, and by coincidence met David’s parents there.

They were devastated by the loss of their only son. “He literally died in my arms,” his father said.

They clearly loved David very much; yet I thought, perhaps unfairly, that their ultimatums—Get a job or move out—had probably added to stress that may ultimately have killed him.

They were consoled to find that David had a friend who took the trouble to visit his grave.

My father had his notions about my relationship with David.

Just before he died, David left his hat at my house.

My friend liked to wear
this goofy black beret. He
left it at my folks’.

Before he managed
to come back for it, he died.
So my dad wore it.