The Pinball Wizard of
(for Larry)
I walked around in a kind of bubble.
I could look out but no
one could look in.
I took only shallow
breaths, the air was thin,
the oxygen
limited.
No one knew
about the dark thing
that held me captive.
In Las Vegas
mangled his hand between
the whirring blades of a machine.
All that remained was a
partial palm.
I was ten; he was
sixteen.
Soon he arrived at my
grandmother’s house
and I had to face the
horror
of what he had
lost.
His palm was
bandaged,
hidden from view,
wrapped up like a
miniature mummy.
He held a white, plastic
ball and tossed it to me.
I tossed it back; he
caught it
by pulling on the bottom of his shirt,
using it as a kind of
glove
for the ball to softly
land.
My fears of facing him
vanished.
I was free.
How did he know
how
I had suffered?
Later the Las Vegas
wrote an article about
him
and his prowess at
pinball
(using just one hand and
a palm).
He would often sit
in front of his house,
drinking beer,
watching over his muscle
car;
and when a can
was thrown at his
metallic prize,
he would be off to the
Vegas Strip,
chasing after the
perpetrator.
Still later, he worked
for the Department of
Defense
at the Nevada
He held the highest of
security clearances.
He married. But he knew
the dark side
of man’s inventiveness,
of man’s machines.
He knew that they could
bite,
that accidents happen.
So he quit his job.
His wife took pills and
he drank.
The money ran out, there
were fights.
It ended with the
suicide of his bride.
He became emaciated and
depressed.
His bones poked through
his skin.
Somehow he seemed to
hover above us all.
Then the convulsions
began and he fell
through the clouds, a
diver,
free falling, tumbling,
without wings,
without a chute.
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