My second rodeo with the folks at The Daily Drunk, and what more perfect place to publish a poem about John Belushi? (Regular reminder to read & support your independent lit mags! To see my first poem they kindly published, in 2020, click here.)
A pre-eminent sad clown, he became an American icon by often playing a buffoon, his capacity to amuse and astonish seemingly infinite. Of course, his appetite for destruction was also all-consuming, leading to a very premature death. And it’s those desperate last days that inspired this poem (which also gets some digs in at the vapid entertainment machine that he fed and which has profited nicely from his legacy). I still remember, a Friday afternoon in 1982, when news of his OD hit the wire, how shocking and senseless it seemed. It still does.
John Belushi’s Bungalow*
There’s the L.A. we created and the one that creates us
where, after-hours when the paparazzi scurries back
to their holes (hive-minded parasites without whom,
admittedly, the Strip’s frisson would cease to function,
devils’ bargains made with angels’ blood), in alleys,
half-dead hobos give head for anything on offer as puffed
up producers slump in the back seats of chauffeured cars—
oblivious to who’s going down behind these sordid scenes.
On March Fourth, blowing off steam with some Bolivian
marching powder, John Belushi blew it, a speedball sent
from hell to usher him into anti-eternity, where our martyrs
perish so they’ll stay preserved in digital tombs, also known
as bodies of work—death by natural causes if one considers
the time and place, stuck inside the Chateau Marmont, itself
unable to contain his capacity or answer his appetites: only
stars die so indelibly, burned black by their own brightness.
Who would have bet against Belushi being the odd man out,
when Robert and Robin popped in, receiving and/or recoiling
from his hospitality, pizza boxes and filthy laundry scattered
like bounced checks? (Williams, sad clown sui generis, stayed
high on his own supply and sucked on that rare ether until
the air got too contaminated, hoisted at last on his own
affected petard; Deniro—part Bull, part Mafia Boss—able
to call his own shots, bearing the weight of his greatness.)
It’s as though the 20th C. couldn’t believe what it created,
our culture always emerging from wreckage of ruined lives,
the truth forever outstripping what any screenwriter could
concoct, keyed up with squalid material too real for TV,
the news a succession of coroner’s reports, confirming all
we already know: it’s intoxicating work if you can get it,
but those not built to last will have their souls devoured,
mourned at a safe distance by voyeurs cursed with long lives.
(*On the evening of March 4, 1982, John Belushi—after a short period of abstaining from hard drugs—was holed up in a bungalow at L.A.’s Chateau Marmont hotel, in the midst of a significant relapse; before being found dead of an overdose the following morning he was visited at various points of the evening by drug dealer Cathy Smith, comedian Robin Williams, and actor Robert Deniro.)
