Alfie in the Drowning Fred

By Jack Joseph Smith

Fred for certain was all the wey Alfie in his way Women vere a fixture, but Fred could -be refined To the torment touch of beauty in its fading fateless discothe'que challenge Leisure was Fred's brown eyed worry, because engineers simply have to work Douglas Aircraft I suppose was just a little bit better then grass to Fred He ran his world from a yardstick of self While .lettirig his Pickett'e Slide Rule slide Always enough to stay silent Over the shined measured frame In the glass of people problems . It wes that neat combed black hair with a part, that I guess made a difference in Fred Crossing the Los Angeles beaches in the sixties; Fred was lean and handsome, and I liked hin Though Fred appeared stiffs though no-one can read a city bed through thoughts on nature . Anyway Fred had the lotus ladies after his doom While Fred complained that he would completely be ruined without incest So Fred split for Washington State A direction he declaimed in general But before Fred was gone; with somewhat more then a dolier on bets that Fred wouldn't, I stole pitchers of beer.for us In the Venice Oar House Tevern Floating azong the loud Bachsoe I got back to our table in time * For Fred's nod to mention s fag, thet really lmew it in his bones And due to a grin from her shouldér blades We did a jig on the peanuts above All mankind's shades on the ber

I was very sorry To loose Fred's Alfie When he winked hie last time for me explaining, just how he didn't know why people wanted to make love into something sensible Whiskey worker eyes given to being streightforward: A populer fellow Named fhe Great White Fox Later told me about Fred’ getting married up in Seattle Laid off by Boeing Fred got sucked under forever’ by his high rubber pootss while fishing a streamseo On unemployment compensation

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

An elegiac character portrait of Fred, a lean and handsome Douglas Aircraft engineer in 1960s Los Angeles, whose life of beaches, beer, and slide rules ends abruptly when he drowns in a Washington State stream after being laid off by Boeing.

The poem's conversational tone and accumulation of anecdotal detail — the Venice Oar House Tavern, the stolen beer, the peanuts on the bar — give Fred's death the shape of local legend rather than tragedy.

Claude

An elegy-portrait of Fred, who 'was all the wey Alfie in his way' - a Douglas Aircraft engineer for whom 'Women vere a fixture' and 'Leisure was Fred's brown eyed worry,' who 'ran his world from a yardstick of self / While lettirig his Pickett's Slide Rule slide.' The poem crosses 'the Los Angeles beaches in the sixties' with a lean, neat-haired, faintly baffled man who 'didn't know / why people wanted to make love / into something sensible,' marking their friendship with stolen 'pitchers of beer' in 'the Venice Oar House Tevern.' It ends in flat, brutal report: after marrying in Seattle and being 'Laid off by Boeing,' 'Fred got sucked under forever / by his high rubber pootss / while fishing a stream ... / On unemployment compensation.'

The poem's tenderness is inseparable from its refusal to clean Fred up; the same stanza that calls him 'lean and handsome' records the unsettling line that he 'would completely / be ruined without incest,' and the speaker neither excuses nor sensationalizes it. Fred is a man defined by instruments - slide rule, yardstick, 'shined measured frame' - whose precision cannot measure the affections he half-mocks, and the slide-rule that he lets 'slide' quietly predicts the drowning that takes him 'forever.' The Alfie reference frames him as a charming evader of meaning, but the unemployment-check ending refuses the film's lightness. The OCR keeps odd spellings ('Tevern', 'pootss', 'streamseo') that I preserve; the life and its grim close come through intact.