Sam died.
And the horses ran.
And the white sky
met with the white hills
and the horses ran
and Sam is dead.
He said Hollywood
was for teenage idiots
and when he died
we drank Patrón
and read his lines
round the butcher block
in a house that Hollywood built
and sold and bought again,
idiocy feasting on itself;
read his magic
lines
to each other -
Men way out in the deserts,
alone save for the faces of their fathers.
Rock-n-roll girls,
their sanguine smiles,
their haughty tantrums,
a map to the precipice
carved in the grooves of their
gunmetal teeth.
I said everything I remembered:
how he spent time in Taos,
how at Joe’s he used to come
and sit with his fishing buddies,
talking quietly of horses.
How he took my friends
upstairs and fucked them.
How one time after a dance
he pulled Loretta onto his lap
and when she tried to squirm away
he held her there,
his skinny arms wrapped around her middle,
how Carlos came up
and said he would kill him.
How outside, Sam pulled the crazy routine,
yelling and flailing his arms.
“I’ll rip out your eyes and piss in your eye holes!”
“I’ll tear off your head and shit down your neck!”Carlos laughed
and then they laughed together.
How at a party Gen suggested
we all do Fool for Love together,
and he could play the old man.
“But I’m not the old man, darlin’.
I can’t be.
It’s not possible.
It’s beyond the realm of possibility.
”Tony piped up
he thought it was a good idea.
Sam said: “You know, I admired your father, but
you are a fucking idiot”
The boy prince of St. Cleran’s
said nothing.
Shame. I would have liked
to have seen that fight.
I told them how
he found out I acted and stumbling to
another bar, gave me this advice:
“don’t audition”
Meanwhile, I trussed myself to plaudits,
to love relationships, sacrifice,
crossed many deserts,
faces and faces going back
to the end of them
and at the end of them
Sam died.
