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When you tossed a line to Larry,
it might land anywhere, in the audience,
under a table, even in the street
if a better deal was happening outside.
He’d come back naked from boot camp
with two jugs of Gallo and all but thirty
languages burned, he said, out of his brain.
UC-Berkeley’s prodigy now washed
down his wine with twenty bitter coffees
each day, smoked anything, cursed
the war in Swahili, Persian, Old Norse,
and even American. When he was high,
he was above us all, a whirling dervish
who mesmerized the crowd. Playing
with Larry was Russian roulette. When
he saw you on stage, his Cimmerian humor
could spin you beyond the rings of Saturn,
knowing you might never return.
After each show we’d load Larry
and our Wurlitzer organ into the VW bus,
drive over the water and--believing
the Bay Bridge would never fall--we’d
close our eyes and sing Larry to sleep while
he muttered in Mandarin. Home, he’d grin
and say, You guys keep me straight.
Donna Spector is a playwright as well as a poet. Her play, Golden Ladder (Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2002), was produced Off Broadway last year. A member of The Dramatists Guild and Poets & Writers, she received two NEH grants to study in Greece and production grants from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the New York Council for the Arts. Winner of the Masters Poetry Series and a finalist for the National Poetry Book Award, May Swenson Poetry Award, Snake Nation Press Poetry Award, Akron Poetry Prize, and the Paumanok Poetry Award, she has had poems, stories and monologues published in many literary magazines and anthologies.
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