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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

Page 10

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 revision material, so this reading remains tied to the verified typed body.

Claude

An elegy set at a small college by a brook — Irish drinkers with nowhere to go but the Grove, a German-named character-actor named Paul Gusick with red-brown hair and dimpled cuts on his face; the narrator leaves for Alaska ("Jack London was better"), Paul stays for the poor parties and bad knees, and the page's argument is that Paul's blue eyes already regretted everything he did.