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CHARLES AZNAVOUR’S GOT SOUL LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER

by Leonard Kress

My shortcomings are my voice, my height, my gestures, my lack of culture and education, my frankness and my lack of personality…. I am incorrigible … I say ‘merde’ to anybody, however important he is, when I feel like it.

—Charles Aznavour

***

“Come to my suite at the Bellevue-Stratford,”

Grossman said, urgent and tense. “I’ll treat

you to the most splendid meal I can afford.”

In Philadelphia, this was the seat

of glitz: grand chandeliers in the lobbies,

plushness to end all plush, crushed velvet

Bellhops and clerks from earlier centuries—

spit-polished pumps, braided epaulets.

Then came the plague of Legionnaire’s Disease

and scores of legionnaires from upstate hamlets

died or nearly died. And their survivors,

dumpy in their fezzes, downing shots

between tall drafts, slim-jims, popping beer

nuts—why did this plague choose us, they wonder?

“Come to my suite,” said Grossman. This was before

all that, before the grand hotel went under,

auctioned off, renamed. I went to visit

him that night, explained to him with candor

why I quit my job at the psychiatric

hospital, where he’d been in the men’s

locked ward, treated with electric shock

while I held down his charged and flapping limbs.

When he arrived he was too medicated

to talk, his chart so chock-full of nonsense

like all charts there, narratives created

by English majors serving as COs

opposed to Vietnam. I loved James Hood’s, which stated

he’d never known a night that didn’t come to blows

or sex, and always with a different foe

or girl, and skeptical he’d ever lose

count—an entourage he kept in tow

to keep his tally. Dark with greased-back hair,

hobnailed boots and tight jeans, a pack or two

of smokes twisted into his tee, not a care

that he was, in fact, locked up. I suspected

that a fellow aide, a Curtis voice major,

who’d just seen Don Giovanni, concocted

the tale, for James was scarless and his skin

smooth, a stipple of bristles that never connected

to form a beard. Emerging from a thorazine

stupor, Grossman was thrust into my ward

where I would be his keeper. Written in

his chart—“patient delusional, declared

a vibrator was stuck in his posterior,

and turned on high, implanted there, he feared

by homosexual aliens to mate with inferior

beings like him.” Another prank, I thought,

too many English majors working here

avoiding the draft. But here he was, slippers

and robe, amphetamine-buzzed, among the dead

slugs of my ward. On TV Charles Aznavour

was singing “I hate Sundays,” and when someone said,

“Change the channel, I hate everything French,”

Grossman flew into a dreamy rage that turned sad,

“that guy’s got soul like a motherfucker,”

as Aznavour crooned: I’m drunk/And staggering

I shout loudly/ That the little cops are

all my friends. Grossman ignored the badgering

ward—their voices and conspiracy of death wishes—

and won me over, crooning along, hugging

himself to intensify longings to smother his

demons. Weeks later when we meet

at the Bellevue, he storms the lobby, thrashes

his arms, demanding that I cover his bill and treat

him to the meal he’d promised me. Grossman grown

shorter, rat-like, like he’d been groomed in the street

since his release. As though he’d been kicked in the groin

repeatedly, his rounded shoulders like a hump

under his suit. I’d come, he thought, to join

his ratty rampage—soulful, belligerent, and tortured.

Leonard Kress’s 4th poetry book, The Orpheus Complex, was just published by Main Street Rag.  He is also the author the chapbook Orphics (Kent State Univ Press). He has published poetry, fiction, and translations in APR, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Revew, Crab Orchard Review, etc.  He has also completed a new verse translation of the 19th century Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz, by Adam Mickiewicz, and was recently a guest at the International Poetry Festival in Warsaw, Poland.  He teaches creative writing, philosophy, and religion at Owens College in northwest Ohio. The above poem is used by permission of the author and of Another Chicago Magazine, where it was originally published.