The Big Whimper

She was a student at Tulane. I met her in a dining room cafeteria thing on campus where they served beer. I liked to haunt University libraries and got hungry one night. I usually didn't venture in those places because if you did make friends then you had to explain that you really weren't a student. She told me she was a witch. We talked, we went out. She had tried committing suicide a couple times in the last few years. She was obsessively pulling her hair out. She started spending the weekends at my little apartment on Dante Street. I was 22 and working at a printing company downtown and was beginning to really write: at least a thousand words a day, sometimes more. She was 20, I think. She gave me everything I wanted. She was flunking out of school. She did flunk out. She wanted to live with me, so we moved into a funky basement apartment that was too much money that she had shared with a couple of other people. She had never worked at a real job in her life. Her Daddy disowned her because she moved in with me. I had to support both of us. None of my friends liked her and everyone stopped coming around. She drank a lot. She clung to me like a vine. She couldn't find a job. I felt trapped, and I didn't want a child to take care of and I felt guilty about her willingness to do whatever I asked.

So when I talked to a couple I knew about it, they offered to let me stay at their place until I could find somewhere else to live. I guess everyone thought she was trouble. Someone else told me later that she was a Jewish Princess and that was ok if that was what you wanted and could afford.
I waited until she finally found a job so she could pay the rent, and I moved out. I told her I was going and I got my stuff boxed and left the next morning. I only saw her once after that- from a block away as she was going into an artist's studio that we both knew. She was walking like she used to when we had first met- all slouched over like she was the saddest sack in the whole world.

The husband of the couple went to hit on her now that I was out of the picture and didn't get anywhere. He told me later that she moved back to her parents house in New England. I hope she did. I have felt guilty about her my whole life. She would probably laugh at me, if she remembers me at all.

The poem "Stranded" http://www.murderer.us/Stranded/index.htm is really about this girl. I hope she has had a good life.