State of El Rancho Pendejo

Rather than endure The Pestilence breaking wind from the face, I dined informally, at my desk — a bowl of chili, a wedge of buttered cornbread, and a pint of Guinness 0 — while reading about the late and very much unheralded poet Everette Hawthorne Maddox.

Herself was in Fanta Se with a visiting gal pal. Miss Mia Sopaipilla was sprawled nearby in her crinkle tube. The TV was darkly silent in the living room.

I could’ve watched the whole dismal spectacle on the MacBook Pro, but decided that since nobody was paying me to do that, and that I was actually paying for it to take place, I was already down dozens of dollars and not likely to turn a profit on the project anytime soon. A visit to any third-string primate house would have been more informative, with less shit-flinging. Better to read about Maddox for free over at The Poetry Foundation, courtesy of James McWilliams.

Maddox, whom Andrei Codrescu called the “Christ of New Orleans,” published three books of poetry between 1975 and 1988. He died in 1989, just 44 years old, of complications from esophageal cancer. Hundreds crammed into a New Orleans bar to give a proper sendoff to the jobless, homeless, divorced alcoholic who slept in the bed behind the driver’s seat of an 18-wheeler parked outside a used-furniture store. I’d never heard of him before, but McWilliams brought him to life for me:

“Everyone should have an epitaph ready, just in case,” [Maddox] said in a rare radio interview in 1983. He called his version, written around 1974, ‘Hypothetical Self-Epitaph,’ and it comes as close to anything else he wrote to capturing his inner character:

What if I just caved in 
gave out, pulled over 
to the side of 
the road of life, 
& expired like an old 
Driver’s license? 
You might say He didn’t 
get far in 31 years. 
But I’d say That’s 
all right, it was 
the world’s longest trip 
on an empty tank.

His few books are hard to find. A plaque in the courtyard of the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street calls him “a mess.” McWilliams, who argues that he nevertheless deserves our attention, writes:

The man was dark and troubled, more so than most. But he aimed to offer his audience — his friends, as we’ll see — the brightest reflection of that darkness that he could project. 

Contrast that with what The Pestilence offered in last night’s State of the Union address, which the legacy media swarmed like rats to an overflowing Dumpster and declared a record in terms of duration, if not in unfiltered bullshit. Talk about your long trips on an empty tank.

Yeah, I think I made the right call. I toasted Maddox’s memory with my fake beer, scratched Miss Mia behind the ears, and went to bed early.

• Editor’s note: “I Hope it’s Not Over and Good-By,” selected poems by Everette Hawthorne Maddox, is available from the University of New Orleans Press.