The Last Man’s Club – James Galvin

My favorite teacher of all time (and I’ve had some extremely good ones in my time) was one of my Creative Writing teachers at Humboldt State (in a department that included Jim Dodge, NY Times best-selling author of Fup, Jayne-Anne Phillips, Black Tickets & Machine Dreams, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham, master of the short story Raymond Carver– some of which were turned into a film by Robert Altman called Short Cuts and featuring a star-studded cast including Julia Roberts & Lyle Lovett– and his graduate advisor R.C. Day– and this just in the short time I was there) named James Galvin. In class he was as judicious in his criticism as anyone I’ve ever seen, modulating his criticism to the skill level of the writer, and always in the spirit of helping them develop, and he encouraged his class to do the same.

(Anyone who’s been in a haphazardly moderated Creative Writing workshop will appreciate exactly how valuable this sort of restraint could be)

Anyway, catch him outside of class, and get a couple of Bushmills in front of him, and you would see exactly how *ahem* opinionated this guy could be. Jim, if you’re reading this– last time I was in Arcata, that hideous sculpture on the offramp at the north end of town (don’t act like you don’t know which one I’m talking about…) was still there–

One night, he mentioned that the short story was an exercise in discovery, and there was one story he wanted to write called The Last Man’s Club, and how he’d never write it because he already knew the ending. Well anyway, he repurposed it as a prose poem, and here is…

The Last Man’s Club
by Jim Galvin

My grandfather was always sad. Sadly, as a boy, he paddled his canoe along the beautiful Hudson River, which was only then beginning to die. During the first war he was very sad in France because he knew he was having the time of his life. When it was over everyone in American felt like a hero — imagine.

Once a year on Armistice Day, he met with all his friends from the war. They got drunk and recounted the stories of the time when they had thought they were men and the world had seemed entirely possible. They placed empty chairs for certain of the dead, and in the center of the table, a bottle of cognac from France, for the last man of them to drink alone, in honor of the others.

Year after year they gathered to watch each other and themselves disappear, turn into empty chairs. Sooner or later they were all sad. Some of them must have realized they didn’t need to join a club for this.

Finally it came down to my grandfather and a man named Oscar Cooper. Neither of them wanted to outlive anyone. They couldn’t remember what honor was. When they drank the cognac it didn’t taste like anything. They threw the bottle in the river as if they thought it meant that neither of them was alive anymore.

When Cooper died the following year, my grandfather took his rifle out into the yard and fired three shots at the sky. Then he went down to the river and drank himself to sleep. After that he was never sad, not even when the river died.

Thank you, Jim.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Galvin_%28poet%29