To Know, Know, Know Him

He looked shriveled, his long hair looked
like a greasy wig with spikes. Sharp nose
eyes, pinched thin mouth, weak chin.

So different from blonde Lana, prettier
than Marilyn, Marilyn was pretty. Lana
prettier, cornered the blonde beauty thing

that in Hollywood sold tickets. Marilyn
legend, Lana nobody famous, unlike Phil
who wrote “To Know Him Is to Love Him”

and in his digs raised a gun and shot her
dead one night. An accident, Phil maybe
lied to himself, the court, his legal team.

Why did he act in such a way? She walked
through his door but never walked out.
Monster! A dark side friends never saw.

“I knew him but didn’t think him capable
of murder,” one friend told herself when
Phil in cuffs was led away. As a boy he saw

his father in a parked car shoot himself,
and sometime after wrote the song. No one
knows what goes through another’s mind.

How could someone be that dysfunctional,
out of control, evil. Spector was the Wall
of Sound. He created, pushed all the right

buttons. His career a litany of successes.
But he couldn’t push the right buttons
in himself. “Just to see him smile makes

my life worthwhile, to know know know him
is to love love love him.” Where was all that
the night he took Lana Clarkson’s life?

Black Menace

Sonny Liston picked cotton,
endured welts from his father’s strap,
hitchhiked from Arkansas to St. Louis
to live with his mother,
dropped out of school, stole a cantaloupe
from a vender, sat in a paddy-wagon,
sparred in a ring, hit hard.
A belt with the big gold buckle signified
he was the baddest man on the planet.
Got ticketed by a cop for driving out
the entrance of a MacDonald’s,
fired a pistol at Cassius Clay who ran
out of there so fast at a press conference,
got beaten by Clay in the ring, trained
hard on the heavy bag, the speed bag
jumped rope, jogged, and in the ring
got knocked down by Muhammad Ali,
who retained the title Sonny lost
in their first fight. Had massive biceps
chest and shoulders, wore a sharkskin
suit a pork pie hat a pencil thin mustache.
Leaned down and smiled at a little white
boy who was smiling at him and shook
the boy’s hand. In a park arrested
for loitering, cops harassed him like
they’d done all his life, even after he was
champion. Bag man for the mob
he stepped behind a counter and grabbed
a bookie hard by the collar in Las Vegas,
where his wife, having been gone two
days, came home and found him dead.
Slumped and swollen. Give him credit.
He laughed and smiled. Those who knew
him saw a man different from his public self.

My Life Is Not Perfect: Two Enigmas

Sue Peterson was shot in the back
of the head in a motel in the Oak Cliff
part of Fort Worth by Charles Albright,
coincidentally the name of Margie
Albright’s dad on My Little Margie
starring Gale Storm, who grew up in
Bloomington, which is in the Houston area.
Albright is incarcerated in Big Spring
so this is all Texas, only Sue Peterson
is buried in Alabama. Albright, called
the eyeball killer, gained her trust, he
must have. She was, back in ’83,
a street savvy sex worker very familiar
with Oak Cliff. Picture her in a denim
miniskirt, her rump sticking out as
she leans in the passenger window
of a Buick Cutlass, a few other Oak Cliff
girls in heels, like Sue walking that block.
In her mugshot she’s stoned. Her eyes
Stare, that he will take for trophies.
Chiseled nose, chin and jaw, a mouth
many might want to stick their tongue in.
One other photo, she’s in a living room
in a graduation gown and mortarboard,
her dark hair short in this photo, also
in the one where she’s in her little white
ensign cap, and navy blazer. This was
the Seventies. Women officers were less
common than today, far less common.
Gold buttons on the blazer, white shirt,
small black tie kind of like a bowtie.
She must have just gotten out of OCS.
How different in the mugshot, coke
addled, gaunt, circles under her eyes.
Oh, she must have started taking drugs,
got addicted to them and kicked out.

There’s the film footage: Alexis Arguello
in the ring after he beat BoomBoom Mancini
in a twelve round boxing match. “I love you,
Ray, I love your father.” Alexis dripping
sweat, his arm around the warrior
he’d beaten. Typical Arguello, the dark
mustache, the dark hair icicle points
in back down his sweaty neck. He was
nicknamed the explosive thin man.
Outside the ring watching him box
Mancini that night, his beautiful wife.
He may have said to Mancini, after
the fight, your beautiful father. He
had long arms, fast feet, a sharp eye
for what was coming from an opponent.
He retired, and back in his native Nicaragua
got into politics, became disillusioned
with the Sandinistas and the other side
as well. He started taking drugs. One
day, or night, in his home in Managua he
took a loaded pistol, pointed the barrel
to his heart and pulled the trigger.
He was a champion in and out of the ring,
a warrior, the explosive thin man.