Issue #20 (2011) PDF - myweb - Long Island University

WHEN I SAW RAYMOND CARVER READ
When I saw Raymond Carver read one lung was already gone.
He was so short of breath he could only read poems,
or very stories. Prior to this reading
I had just vaguely heard of him, but the next day
I ran into someone on campus and told him about it.
I saw something last night that changed my life!
I remember saying that. Those were the exact words I used.
Six months later he died. He was fifty years old.
He had described himself as a cigarette with a man attached to it,
but he changed my life, somehow, this brave man still reading
to a college audience in upstate New York,
with only one lung left and a few months to live.
Now I am older than Ray Carver was when he died.
I‘m almost nine years older, actually.
And one thing that has stuck with me, along with
all the rest of the memories of his reading,
has been the way that he had changed his life.
It must have been so strange finding himself
at that reading, wearing a suit in front of an audience,
knowing that he was gravely ill and that for all of
the goodness he had found in life, there was this joker
in the deck, that had popped up at the very worst time.
I, too, used to be a drinker. There are entire years I look back
on now and just shake my head. What on earth was I thinking
But it‘s only now, really, that I understand, or think I do,
what Carver meant by changing your life, the way that he did.
It‘s only now that I see that I was not leading my own life
back then, but rather, someone else‘s, someone wearing beer goggles,
every day all day, for years. Or maybe now I am the one living
someone else‘s life, the college professor teaching and writing poetry,
sober every day. Who knows Of course none of this stuff
about two lives is really true. It all happened. But it‘s just one life,
with a before and after, although it sure feels that way at times, like
two lives, and no matter how long I, or anyone else, goes without
a drink or toke or snort or cigarette, the joker is still going to pop
up when least expected, at a birthday party or wedding, the
face in the shadows nodding her head, indicating that it‘s time.
86