Page 308 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
recalled from a poem about a gunslinger that he had written when we were in P.S. 193, and he responded with the beginning of a poem that I had written about baseball at about the same time: “A crack of a bat, a ball in the air,” etc. When he was an undergraduate, he had majored in philosophy. There were a number of girls whom he hung out with or lived with, on and off, but there was nothing serious going on. He was warm, accepting, and very good to talk to. We joked about our similari- ties and our apparently divergent paths. He insisted on paying, and I relented, saying that he must let me pick up the check next time. For whatever reason, there was no next time. Years later, the following appeared in The New York Times :
Feb 3, 2002: CHASSLER, Joseph Holland. 57, January 30, 2002, at his wife Beverly’s apartment. Poet, philosopher and kind soul. He will be greatly missed.
What that obituary said was very telling. So too is what it clearly did not say. I thought of what could have been, both for him and for me, and then I thought of what was.
I later learned that in 1995 Joe had written a book, Addict’s Damn: An Interleaving of Architecture and the Homeless, with a photographer friend of his. Goodreads said the following about it:
A book of hard-core urban street photographs by Peter Bellamy coupled with gritty beautiful poems by Joseph Chas- sler this remarkable book is on life in street form. Darkness . . . Animal Passions . . . in a way that somehow ennobles them . . . They take us in . . . Show us secrets . . . Forbidden Paths . . . We join the addicts, alcoholics, junkies, and homeless, lie on the sidewalk, watch shoes and . . . more. [The elisions are in the original—on the net, at least.]
I bought it, leafed through it, but couldn’t get myself to read it. • 290 •