Elgin

by Lindsay Anderson

I think again of Elgin, his memory, like a best suit, too precious often to wear. He was a friend to me until I replaced him with illusion, ambition, and the high-minded things that conspire against a life. He was everything then, back when all was treason, schemes, and possibility.

Elgin had arms like railcars and a long mountainous face. He came to us always undone, rank-murderous and bleary, and spun those beginningless laughing fevers with squeals of praise for every lapse in meaning. He howled so loud he made the windows shimmy and the cats run like rolling balls. I can almost hear him now when a door slams or a fight starts out somewhere in the dark.

Elgin was the main Solomon of the asylum of which we were. He, sure as granite and argue-puffed, held court to the dry rattle of our minds, never giving in to reason or the sin of false charity. He'd say "Ladies today, Mr. Strut likes his toast real hot," and "Whoa, a thought so sweet the ants won't eat it," his message always commotion, never virtue.

He had his own back-minded periscope that he pushed up with wan valor for just this much near-sighted wisdom, enough to cross half the thankless span of a day. Each morning he rose from the vanquished, barroom-legs fumbling from the site of his last captive bottle. He woke cribbing bits of bloated whimsy from dreams about card-sharps, crab walks, talking bread dolls, ships he saw ramped against a wall in a town called Amenity. We went oh, ah and hah, taking no breakfast, saying like him, hey can't eat on an empty stomach, and who's gonna blow up the Governor tonight?

Elgin, he was something against a man, an unpoet of lush recalcitrance and suborned determination. Tacking through life, he dodged his duties like cold baths while, abounding, he saw the corporate smallfry collide for posts for which he did not qualify. He said, "Win this way," retreating raceless over the finish line, falling to the grass, in victory arms raised, defiant his grin a thumb dropped into the hemisphere's imperious porridge. Yes, I see him like a dim prophet, eyes addled, bagging up the heartbreak, running eyes-first to throw it to the sea. Not judging the quick and the dead, his acumen ripened to crystal and shattered hosanna up against the pedestal on which sits, curled and bleached, Merlin’s nervous shadow.

Nor to last a presumptuous lifetime, Elgin guileless flew from this causeway, burst on the atmosphere, and, his pieces whirling in one direction for every nodding blessed King of England, fell. They came with solemn antipathy, saying, you sad rascal, there's nothing in this homestead for you, move on.

He moved. "None of you can even bleed," he brayed, this last remark flung over some slotted steel door. Such a splendid insult should in truth last longer than he.

I saw him one night sober standing in the darkness, staring into the tissue of space. He said to me, Josh, everything I've ever told you was a lie. That's the beauty of it, I remembered, thinking then that beauty was a mute bass note over which life was a dogged melody. Then that mother spirit known only to cowboys and fools came to gather her piebald rogues and Elgin was gently taken, and Elgin was gone. Someone said they saw him laughing once standing beside a highway poking at the sky. That, too, is a lie.

I think again of Elgin. I wonder which parts of him were real and which I invented. I carry his memory like an injured cub in a basket of straw. On starless nights, and this is one, I lift it primly out and play it, shaking with consequence, one more time.

Lindsay Anderson (not the movie director) is, in his words, “a failed lit critic gone bad.” He lives in New York City in “something sub-humane,” and collects rent checks. He writes occasionally for the city small press and once published an article on ozone depletion in New York magazine.