Denis Johnson - Angels

“They can’t kill me because I have the poem. The poem lives forever,” Richard told Bill Houston. “I connected to the creative forces on the day I wrote it.”

The poem’s history was known to Bill Houston. The poem had actually been written as an essay based on a letter once published in a newspaper. For most of its life it had been repeatedly plagiarized by members of the prison’s community college English composition classes, and edited and revised by any number of teachers.

But if the essay had been everyone’s, it was Richard who’d hit on the idea of breaking it into lines resembling verse. He hinted that he’d made many other improvements. Now in his view the poem was the child of his own creation. He kept it folded up inside a small plastic box for a stereo cassette, and it galled Bill Houston, who didn’t read much, that Richard acted as if this piece of paper were better than money. From it he seemed to take much more than the pride of accomplishment. It was food and drink to Richard’s ego. “I’m going to read it for my last words.” Richard lifted up his chin; Bill Houston almost gagged. “Then they’ll all know bitterly that they can never kill me.”

Bill Houston pretended to be interested when Richard let him read it. But he really couldn’t understand why Richard insisted on personally owning this masterpiece. It didn’t rhyme, and the words were plainly not Richard’s — it even talked about a “nigger”—and anyone could see that somebody had typed it and then Richard had squeezed things in here and there by hand. It wasn’t actually a poem: it used words of a sort that Bill Houston used himself all the time, but didn’t care to see written down. He handed it back by way of Brian, because they weren’t allowed to pass things directly to each other. “This is a real good poem, Richard,” he said.

Brian read some of it, too, and said, “Hm! It’s a work of art.” He didn’t seemed particularly excited, but he handed it over to Richard with a noticeable amount of respect. Bill Houston shared the guard’s uncertainty about it.

Later, Bill Houston wanted to read it again. He borrowed it and kept it for a while after supper. It was just nice to have a document created by other prisoners. He couldn’t make any sense of the poem, but sadness overcame him when he looked at it. He gave it back to Richard without comment.

But he thought about it off and on all night, and the next day without any preliminaries he said, “That’s a beautiful poem, Richard. I’d like to take a copy with me on my ride.”

Richard said nothing, but he jumped up and moved about his cell. “I’ll think about it,” he said finally.

Bill Houston and Richard talked a lot about what each was going to have for his final meal. Bill Houston wanted steak. Richard couldn’t decide between chicken and pork. Bill Houston was grateful to know they wouldn’t be eating the same thing. It seemed appropriate that the State of Arizona should provide them with a variety of foods before their big finish. Bill Houston didn’t like to hear the guards calling it The Last Supper. It was a common prison expression, but he’d already heard enough about how Richard Clay Wilson would turn out to be his savior.

It was getting on his nerves. “I never asked you to die for me,” he told Richard.

Richard only put his earphones over his head and pretended to be alone in the universe.

“C’mon, Richard.” Bill Houston waved his hand before their window. “Hey. C’mon.”

When Richard removed his earphones, tiny music came out of them like the whirring of a bug.

“Listen. How about reading me your poem one time?”

Richard appeared lost in a haze of considerations.

“Fact is, I read terrible, Richard. So that’s why I’m asking you.”

Richard opened the small stereo cassette box that housed the poem like a jewel. He unfolded the document and stepped back, standing himself up on the far side of his cell where Bill Houston could get a bigger picture of him. But he cast his gaze toward the corner, where there was nobody. “Talking Richard Wilson Blues,” he said. “By Richard Clay Wilson.” And he read in a Baptist sing-song:

“ I felt like a man of honor of substance,

but the situation was dancing underneath me—

once I walked into the living room at my sister’s

and saw that the two of them, her and my sister,

had turned sometime behind my back not exactly

fatter, but heavy, or squalid, with cartoons

moving on the television in front of them,

surrounded by laundry, and a couple of Coca-Colas

standing up next to the iron on the board.

I stepped out into the yard of bricks

and trash and watched the light light

up the blood inside each leaf,

and I asked myself, Now what is the rpm

on this mother? Where do you turn it on?

I think you understand how I felt.

‘I’m not saying everything changed in the space

of one second of seeing two women, but I did

start dragging her into the clubs with me. I insisted

she be sexy. I just wanted to live.

And I did: some nights were so sensory

I felt the starlight landing on my back

and I believed I could set fire to things with my fingers.

But the strategies of others broke my promise.

At closing time once, she kept talking to a man

when I was trying to catch her attention to leave

It was a Negro man, and I thought of black limousines

and black masses and black hydrants filled

with black water. I thought I might smack her face, or spill a glass,

but instead I opened him up with my red fishing knife

and I took out his guts and I said, ‘Here they are,

motherfucker, nigger, here they are.’

There were people frozen around us. The lights had just come on.

At that moment I saw her reading me and reading me

from the side of the room where I saw her standing,

the way the sacred light played across her face.

“ Right down the middle from beginning to end

my life pours into one ocean, into this prison

with its empty ballfield and its empty

preparations. If she ever comes to visit me

to hell with her, I won’t talk to her.

God kill you all. I’m sorry for nothing.

I’m just an alien from another planet.

“ I am not happy. Disappointment

lights its stupid fire in my heart,

but two days a week I staff

the Max Security laundry above the world

on the seventh level, looking at two long roads

out there that go to a couple of towns.

Young girls accelerating through the intersection

make me want to live forever,

they make me think of the grand things,

of wars and extremely white, quiet light that never dies.

Sometimes I stand against the window for hours

tuned to every station at once, so loaded on crystal

meth I believe I’ll drift out of my body.

“ Jesus Christ, your doors close and open,

you touch the Maniac Drifters, the Fireaters,

I could say a million things about you

and never get that silence. That is what I mean

by darkness, the place where I kiss your mouth,

where nothing bad has happened.

I’m not anyone but I wish I could be told