I am the Antichrist, you cried from the window of your car as we hydroplaned

through another snow shower in Wisconsin. I am the Antichrist, you bragged

to the woman in the booth at the parking lot, ice in your beard, your eyes red,

and she smiled like a Lutheran waiting to wake up from a nightmare. I am his

social worker. His medication has worn off, I said. There was no social worker

and no medication. I am the Antichrist, you told your girlfriend, who rolled over.

Sometimes you were a satyr, head stuck between the curtains of the shower,

two spikes of hair soaped up like horns. Sometimes you were a wrinkled

tailor,

wailing in Yiddish at the other tailor in the shop: You’re pissing down my back! 

Sometimes you were a half-wit prince, the offspring of siblings, your babble

and the clap-clap of your hands keeping the executioner busy with his ax.

All day I listened to the stream of voices from the car radio of your brain,

the dial spinning as you worked at your falafel stand, pausing only to spit

into the oil that fried the balls of mashed garbanzos, the zap and sizzle.

Moderation, croaked your stepfather, the dance critic for the Newark

newspaper, who would wedge a whole cake, slice by slice, into his mouth.

Moderation, you would mimic, lip jutting out, before the soliloquy on cake

your stepfather bought in bulk from the factory outlet: the box squashed

by a forklift truck, the handprint in the icing, the ash knocked off a cigarette.

Moderation, I repeated, crunching felafel in pita, even after the spit in the oil.

Your stepfather taught you the meaning of work, exiled to the meatpacking

plant in Newark, where a giant in his butcher’s apron dangled you by the belt.

You made him laugh when you flailed like a boy dog-paddling. He put you down.

Everybody laughed: me, your girlfriend, your roommates naked in the hammock at the commune, the

campus lunch crowd waiting in line at the felafel

stand.

After college, I heard you tried standup at the mobbed-up clubs of New Jersey.

Thirty years later, your brother called to say that, late one night, you sat down

on the porch of your ex-wife’s house in cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat,

propped a photograph of Sitting Bull up against a bottle of whiskey, shoved

a Colt .45 pearl-handled revolver to your chest, and fired a bullet caught by the fist

of your heart. You could envision her tripping across the body as you watched

one last performance from a balcony in the sky. I knew nothing of all the guns,

the syndrome, or the pills rattling like a hailstorm off the tin rooftop of your brain.

There was no social worker there that night. The medication must have worn

off, leaving a Jewish cowboy from Newark alone with his Colt .45. The night

your brother told me, I stopped sleeping. I swallow the pills in your memory.