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By Jack Joseph Smith

Coming of Age for a Friend It was the way we laughed and talked over beer and fought when we should have sung Then we did that too Only that it was always alone There was a brook And the buildings were stone And there was a chaple not for catholics We were all dreaded Irish with no place to go but the Grove College wasn't clear and I just sleept there The others didn't do there studies but the private prostents took them in for football We hangover roamed in the morning out of wind for milkshakes And we dreamed of lips like oysters over seas and seasons The hugeest smile belonged to a 21 year old character actor named Paul Cusick sounded German but the brown in his hair was to red And the cuts in his face to dimpled to forget that Irish freckles look like,, you started to poul whiskey over the white cloth when suddenly your legs had reason to run from the glass Paul simply said he studied business because his father had made it clear that economics was not abstract If your going to be an actor best to learn the lines before your ass performes I left the sweetness and the bells and the mushrooms for Alaska because I knew Jack London was better than John Steinbeck Paul stayed on with the beer parties and bad knees I always knew that his blue eyes regretted everything he did but his old man had throat cancer and his brothers keep on going to the grave because they were giants in a sugar world His mother was good until the end serving roast beef and carrots on a long thin thick wood When I found out that I didn't have the nerve not to have a friend in the wilds I went to Hollywood like a predictable punk Paul got his number from the little city in the grove and went on with going back to the Ohio river vally swimming strange green rivers to sell prehistoric machines that have buttons and leavers to make their cocks work

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

This page turns memorial recollection into a roaming poem about college drift, whiskey, Paul Cusick, Alaska, and the loss threaded through friendship.

The page works by accumulation rather than plot. Brooks, chapels, milkshakes, mushrooms, acting advice, and family illness all pass through the same elegiac register. Young Ben's story seems to widen here into a whole generation's mixture of swagger, longing, and unfinished escape. The margin annotations point toward further draft material, but the reading remains tied to the stable scan-checked body.

Claude

An elegy-poem of college drift, 'Coming of Age for a Friend': stone buildings, a brook, 'a chaple not for catholics,' 'all dreaded Irish with no place to go but the Grove.' The narrator only 'sleept there' while 'the private prostents took them in for football'; the central figure is Paul, a '21 year old character actor' whose name 'Cusick sounded German but the brown in his hair was to red.' Paul stays for 'the beer parties and bad knees' while the narrator lights out 'for Alaska because I knew Jack London was better than John Steinbeck,' then admits to going 'to Hollywood like a predictable punk.' The wound is in 'his blue eyes regretted everything he did,' a friend left selling 'prehistoric machines' down the Ohio river valley. This reading stays anchored to the stable typed body; the dense, partly legible marginal revisions are documented in metadata and not yet placeable.