Where the Successful Live
j . T. Barbarese
Somet ime dur ing the course o f that year o f mild happiness all my friends d isappeared into sweet destinies. One into disgust at my failure, one into h o r r o r at his own, one into success as if into a swank restaurant, one into a book contract for a book even he didn ' t like, and meanwhile Tom Blank at least once a week stalked me, or in te r rup ted me, as he just did, with harebra ined commentar ies , and appeals in the earnest drag of serious questions. W h e n is it p rope r to do task X? Why do authori t ies counsel plan Y? What do you think o f idea Z? A n d inevitably the translation is Are you going to let me live and pass your course?
Whenever Tom comes by I always imagine how I must appear to my ex-friends. The only rowboat head ing back to the Titanic, an acre of toxic back-yard seen f rom the metroliner, a loud stupid face accidentally caught in the picture, or maybe I am Tom Blank, with his brush haircut and sneaks and his simple white pants trying to persuade the world that he is authent ic when authentici ty is beyond even the Tom Blanks, Tom with his overf lossed overbite and horsey voice, his half-solved life, his unlovable prose, Tom Blank with his lust for success, Tom Blank who sits in the first row and stares up at me as if I had invented him,
J.T. Barbarese is the author of two books of poetry from the University of Georgia Press, Under The Blue Moon (1985) and New Science (1989). His translation of Euripides' The Children of Herakles appears this spring as the last installment in the Penn Greek Drama Series, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. This year he is a visiting assistant professor in creative writing at Rutgers University, Camden. Please address correspondence to Academic Questions / NAS, 575 Ewing Street, Princeton, NJ 08540-2741, <[email protected]>.
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Tom Blank who allows me access to his soul where happiness, financial security, and Christian fellowship will conduct a modest and ongoing mdnage ~ trois and no term paper will crowd his average destiny, and where Tom Blank welcomes me one day as an old friend, pounds my skinny back offers me a cold one, invites me to kick back and the chair closest to the fireplace and the good view of where the successful live, and of why, and how.
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