Joey

Lyrics

Joey always told me, laughing, as though it were actually a joke, that he wanted to kill himself but it was never the right time. There were always groceries to be bought and little brothers to be tucked in at night. Don't worry. Joey isn't going to kill himself twenty more lines into this poem. That's not the kind of story I'm telling here. Joey got a promotion and now he can afford Prozac. Joey is Joe now. Joe is a cold engine in which none of the parts complain. Joe is a brick someone made out of fossils. If you removed money from the equation, Joey would have been painting elk on cave walls. People would have fed him and kept him away from high places because goddamn, look at those elk. I think that the genes for being an artist and mentally ill aren't just related, they are the same gene, but try telling that to a bill collector. We were 17, and I drove us all to punk shows in a station wagon older than any of us. We were 17 and I bought lunch for Joey more often than I didn't. We were 17 and the one time Joey tried to talk to me about being depressed when someone else was around, I told him to shut the hell up and asked if he needed to change his tampon. You know that moment when the cartoon realizes he's taken three steps off the cliff and he takes a long look at the audience like we are carrying the last moving box out of a half-empty house? Joey looked like that without the puff of smoke. He just played video games for half an hour and then went home. Once I found Joey in my dad's office, staring at the safe where he knew we kept the guns. Once Joey molded his car into the shape of a tree trunk and refused to give a reason why. I once caught Joey in Biology class staring at his scalpel like he wanted to be the frog, splayed out, wide open, so honest. There's one difference between me and Joey. When we got arrested, bail money was waiting for me at the station. When I was hungry, I ate. When I wanted to open myself up and see if there really were bees rattling around in there, my parents got me a therapist. I can pinpoint the session that brought me back to the world. That session cost seventy-five dollars. Seventy-five dollars is two weeks of groceries. It's a month of bus fare. It's not even a school year's worth of new shoes. It took weeks of seventy-five dollars to get to the one that saved my life. We both had parents that believed us when we said we weren't OK, but mine could afford to do something about it. I wonder how many kids like Joey wanted to die and were unlucky enough to actually pull it off. How many of those kids had someone who cared about them but also had to pay rent? I'm so lucky that right now I'm not describing Joey's funeral. I'm so lucky we all lived through who we were to become who we are. I'm so lucky I'm so - lucky.