But everybody called him Hal.
He was a chunk of Jersey City
asphalt in the Big Apple &
my introduction to PR & N.Y.
office life. Those were electric-
typewriter days, when 75 cents
bought a ride on the E train, &
“Madonna” meant the Virgin,
& Times Square wore Herbert
Huncke’s dirty boxer shorts.
I’d switched from dashing off
column inches about Milltown
for a Middle N.J. weekly to
banging out press releases on
Easter chocolate, & Hal’s bark
was a no-wave soundtrack.
This old man, he played one.
He played knick-knack on
my scrotum. 17,520 hours
later, I said goodbye to Hal,
& 5 years after that (1987),
I found out he was gone.
Memory then had no room
for this old man. But the mind
will do what the mind decides.
On a May night, 2017, I read,
in American Poets, an Alicia
Ostriker poem addressed to
Frank O’Hara. Six lines down
I saw – why? – in the white
space to the right, Hal’s three-
martini press-agent face, &
they came rolling in, random
names in the company archive.
Deke. Jane. Dawn. Gene . . .
In “Funes, the Memorious”
Borges tells of a youth cursed
with the gift of remembering
everything. Some things aren’t
supposed to be forgotten. Like
my eight weeks at a Jesuit
school in Paris & my Great
Financial Loss of 1996.
Others aren’t supposed to be
remembered. Like Deke. Jane.
Dawn. Gene. Matt. Mallory.
Hal.
