A WOULD - BE SONG FOR DAVID RUFFIN

(January 18, 1941 - June 1, 1991)

For you, David Ruffin, I would be somebody else,

And you would not be dead of crack cocaine

But resting on the dance floor of a huge blank room

Where I'd just have to enter, breathe and sing

Some smooth elation in a sweet sweet voice

To set your hands and feet and body going

As you would set mine going from the one-rayed sun

Of the AM/FM Zenith in our kitchen--

Mine, my sister's and our opera- loving mother's

Who half  hummed, half-chanted "My Girl" at the stove--

You designed my whole surmise at love

And made my lack of partners immaterial

At those dreary, wall-lined BBYO socials

When you would beg, Sweet baby, please don't leave ...

If I abandoned you, I didn't mean to.

And always, eventually, your loyal voice

Would find me where I was and take me back

Even in Italy, where I'd run off

On my dizzying affair with higher culture,

I shivered when the first notes of "Get Ready"

Stormed the shabby discotheque at Settignano

Where friends had dragged me on some nutty lark,

And jangled my torso as it hadn't jangled

Since Woodrow Wilson Junior High School lunchroom,

Where tolerant black girls, whose names I never learned,

Taught me, by example, how to dance.

I believed everything you ever told me,

That I was going to walk and not look back

And, given where I'm from, what I've gone in for,

I'd say that life has kept your massive promise

Though I don't think you meant my self-immersion

In early Renaissance Italian painting

When you said I would leave my troubles behind

You meant I'd forget unfaithful lovers--

But I was twelve; I hadn't had any.

My trouble was Northeast Philadelphia

Which lacked a thing I didn't have a word for

But longed for so intensely that I'd ride the el

Just to bum the vantage from it's windows

And scour the local distance for a sign.

Probably, the word for it was grace

Which isn't, in fact, absent now from those same streets,

Their puny fifties shrubs now overgrown,

The squat twin houses hidden both by leaves

And the thick, distorting hex of being young.

Not that I am so old now; nor were you

Only that it's such a long way off--

Though there is no lyric from your greatest hits

That, concentrating, I could not recover

Among the snippets of Romantic odes

And tragic modern European elegies

Tangled up in folded, frescoed wings.

I turn out to have been wildly inaccurate

In the faulty seminarrative of things that moved me.

For quite a number of unacknowledged years

I spun my heady rhapsodies from you,

as lost beside a gold-flecked mono record player

As I was years later in a watery blue

Chapel thronged by packs of high-strung angels.

They are easier to talk about,

Greater and at still a greater distance.

And I don't suppose I'm forced to write a poem

About everything in life that ever moved me

But I've always admired my intrepid friend

Who spent a good part of his oddball youth

Perfecting Chopin nocturnes on the piano,

But fills his poems with schlocky movie musicals,

Sweet Tarts, sloppy joes, his sixth grade classmates

As if he's retroactively making a claim

To something like an all-American boyhood

While I'm still trying to convince myself

That I really escaped The man from U.N.C.L.E,

The back-to-school ensembles in seventeen,

And the romance series by a woman whose name,

Rosamond du Jardin, I never questioned

(Though I was disappointed when the heroine--

So brave in embracing her hand-me-down prom dress

As more classic than the flashier new fashions--

Turned down a millionaire Nevada rancher

to marry--was it Biff?--who lived next door).

I hadn't meant to edit so much out,

To have it seem as if we make ourselves

When, really, not that much is in our choosing.

And even if it were, I wouldn't have picked

A self who'd never listened to you sing.

I only wish I'd thought to praise your voice

Before the afternoon, not long ago,

When it came on with the news on Public Radio

And I put away my groceries on pure pleasure

Until they cut the song and said your name

(Not, as I'd expected, The Temptations)

Who died yesterday, aged forty-nine,

At U. P. Hospital in Philadelphia

Of an apparent overdose of crack cocaine.

They were wrong; you were fifty; I read the obits

In the Times, Newsweek, Jet, and Rolling Stone.

They're all I know of you, besides your voice,

Your face above a tux on several album covers

Which, drug or no drugs, didn't look much changed

At the Live-Aid concert, not too long ago,

When you appeared, in jeans, with Eddie Kendricks,

Guests of the Philly singers, Hall and Oates,

Who savored every "ooh" and "ah" as backup

And tried too hard to duplicate your moves.

I caught it at my sister's; we went wild,

Not having heard you since you quit the Tempts

Just days before our tickets, with the synagogue,

To see you in a tent at Valley Forge.

I've always thought you wanted your own career,

But one obit at least said you were fired

As impossible for the group to get along with,

Insisting, for example, on traveling alone

In the mink-lined limousine that bore your name.

You were still in a limo, this time borrowed

From a limo-service-owning longtime friend,

When they delivered you to the emergency room,

The driver saying you were in bad shape,

Your name and that you'd been with the Temptations;

And one final limo--is a hearse a limo?--

(Paid for, like your funeral, by Michael Jackson)

Brought you to the place you're resting now

Which isn't, incidentally, a dance floor

While I, of course, am no one but the ex-

Adolescent girl beside a record player

(In a turquoise bedroom with a princess phone)

That floats your voice above a neighborhood

Where, otherwise, you still would not be welcome

Unless you brought the mail or some appliance

Or stoked the furnace at a local school

Like the one where, years ago, I rarely saw

Any of the token bussed-in black kids

Outside of choir practice, lunch and gym.

You died about twenty minutes away

(By car, that is, and just when there's no traffic)

For me, then, twenty minutes from where you lived.

Believe me, David, I would take back,

The sequined tailcoats, bowties, satin cummerbunds,

The hand-claps, arm rolls, smiles, slow, suave turns,

Not to mention those last vials of crack,

The idiotic mink-lined limousine,

The restricted neighborhood, the AP track,

The way we white girls, at a distance, loved you.

I'd take back everything that worked against you

Including, say, the last three hundred years

Everything except, God help me, those recording sessions

And the warped vinyl records in my parents' basement

That I swear I have not utterly abandoned,

Despite my elaborate misrepresentation

Of the two-plus decades since I almost saw you

And the fact that this song isn't really for you.

I don't even know if I've paid tribute

Or used you yet again, this time as pretext

For remembering, in writing, the true believer

With jutting teeth, hawk nose and too much thigh

Who thought you meant her when you sang sweet baby

And who, despite her adolescent tendencies,

Would not, if she were here, examine herself

In the aftermath of your self-dissolution.

She, I know, would genuinely grieve,

Put on the record that I couldn't find

In any store in my adopted city

And join in, inconsolable, at please don't leave.

From:  Conversations with Survivors

by:  ( Award winning author) Jacqueline Osherow