“I’m sorry to call so late,” the breathy voice said.
“That’s okay...” I said, sitting up in bed, blinking myself awake, pretty sure I recognized the voice, but thinking I was possibly still dreaming.
“This is Marilyn Monroe. You know — the actress?”
“I think I remember you. Very little gets past me. I’m a trained detective.”
She laughed a little, but when the voice returned, it was sad. “I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about what I read in the papers.”
“What did you read?”
“About that poor man. Mr. Bodenheim.”
“He was cruel to you.”
“I know. But life was cruel to him.”
We talked for a good hour, about life and death and poetry and her new husband and how happy she was. It was a sweet, sad phone call. Delicate, gentle, poetic in a way that I don’t think Maxwell Bodenheim ever was, frankly.
The best thing you can say about Max is that, unlike a lot of writers who hit the skids and the bottle, he never stopped writing. He never stopped filling paper with his poetry.
On the other hand, I think about the sign I found in that ten-by-ten hellhole where he died, the cardboard on which he’d scrawled the words: I AM BLIND.
Probably the truest poem he ever wrote.