Dear John, The Sequel, by Tom Dinard

Dear John,

I am going to apologize to you for quite a few things in this letter and right away, I’ll say I’m sorry that it’s taken me so long to write this. If you recall (and I hope, somehow, that you do), the ultimate fate of the first letter I wrote to you was that it was read aloud in May 1993 from the stage of the Pima Community College campus theater in Tucson.

I was 22 years old and required by my major at the University of Arizona to take a course called Introduction to Poetry Writing, but I spaced out during registering (for reasons that might soon become clear) and it was full. I had to head a few miles down Speedway Boulevard to Pima, where I took a course with the same title for the same credits but no grade.

It ended up being a lot of fun. The class was a mixture of regular community college students, a transient-looking oddball or two, and a few out-and-out freaks.

One forty-ish long-haired Mexican guy who called himself Rodriguez wore a dirty white T-shirt and BluBlockers and wrote poems that I figured could only have been devised using a highlighter pen on his toilet-side thesaurus.

In his masterpiece, “Again That Annoyance of Pockets,” he wrote of “the inscrutability of runes languidly turning that rheostate from crepuscular to caliginous fixing ambit and temperature to wavering mendicant regards.” I’m sure Rodriguez referred to it as a “pestiferous, achromatic” T-shirt.

One of the girls in the class embarked upon a series of works — lauded as almost Anne Frank-ian for their “unrelenting courage” by the matronly blonde teacher, Peg — based on her recent discovery that she was, as it turned out, asexual.

And a greasy, confused kid with thick glasses named Steve, I think, wrote under the Indian name Cetan Wanagi and described childhood images so visceral and disturbing — “the pain of a sharp stick digging deep into my inner-thigh abated/the incessant monkey bitching died/my heart ceased its dull echo,” he wrote in “Forfeited Virginity” — that I thought he very well might drive his moped straight from the top of Gates Pass, launching himself into literary legend.

Then again, John, I must admit that I was pretty much baked out of my mind every time I stepped in that classroom, that I didn’t take anything very seriously back then, and that I coasted on the poetry, with each assignment getting somewhere between four and six minutes of my very questionable attention.

Our first charge, “Write about a vegetable,” produced this blatant attempt to screw the chick who sat next to me:

***

COOL

By Tom Dinard

I’m a cucumber, that’s right.

The luckiest veggie in the biz.

I’m salad-cool.

You’ve seen my kind before.

Pick me ripe.

Peel it all off.

Taste my seeds.

Chew me and swallow me.

There …

You like the way I taste.

And I like your tongue.

***

Shockingly, John, this ode didn’t get me laid. And neither did my (first) letter to you.

I think I can remember Peg telling us to “write a letter” in the form of a poem, and this is what I jotted down … probably while watching “Dragnet”:

***

DEAR JOHN

By Tom Dinard

Hey John, what’s the rub up there?

Do the strawberry fields look any

Different?

Can you still see them clearly?

I straddle the path where you fell.

72^nd and Central Park West — The Dakota.

In front.

Yet no Salinger-wielding psychopath

Disturbs me.

But I could never

imagine

Like You.

So I live.

***

So John, if whatever state of being you currently inhabit allows you to violently dispel the contents of your stomach, go right ahead. I’ll understand. And if it’s not the first time, I’ll also understand. I would imagine you had the same reaction if you happened to be watching during that beautiful May evening when I “performed” it.

It’s hackneyed, it’s too obvious who I’m writing to, and — and this might strike you as the most offensive part of this — it got me an A.

And then, of course, I made it worse.

A few hours after four buddies and I had dropped a fresh ounce of weed on a coffee table and had each proudly and unabashedly done twenty straight bong hits to christen a new type of “Century Club,” I suddenly remembered that I had to report to Pima that night to recite “Dear John” and “Cool,” the two poems I had chosen for the end-of-semester reading at the theater.

I talked my housemate Lasky into going with me, joking that I needed the support system and hyping the unforgettable collection of weirdos he’d encounter.

We waited through two hours of doggerel, including one guy who filled the auditorium with overpowering screams about “young girls undressed, loose and whipped” and “the same fucking game, pale and driven lay incest” as his friend strummed an out-of-tune guitar through a cheap, feedback-spitting amp.

When it was my turn, I looked out at the crowd, a surprisingly large gathering of family, friends and faculty, and nervously read as quickly as I could. “Cool” still didn’t get me laid. But I gave “Dear John” the dramatic pause at the end that I felt it needed at the time. Once I said, “So I live,” the group of about a hundred let out a collective, “Aaaaaahhhhhhhh.” In case you weren’t watching, I got the biggest ovation of the night.

But that’s not all I’m sorry for, John.

I’m sorry that when I recently heard “Julia” on the radio, I concluded that if that song was released tomorrow by another band, critics and music lovers worldwide would herald it as one of the most original, innovative-sounding pop songs of the new millennium — and “Julia” is almost forty years old.

I’m sorry that you’ve had to look down upon a public whose majority probably thinks David Archuleta had something to do with the creation and/or successful delivery of “Imagine.”

I’m sorry that the Amsterdam Hilton is charging $2,308.76 a night for a weekend stay in the “John and Yoko Suite,” bragging on its website about the room’s work desk with an adjustable lamp and non-smoking status.

And most of all I’m sorry that later this year will be the thirtieth anniversary of your death and all I have is your records, a clock with your picture on it that I bought at an antique store for $28.79, and that stupid “letter” I wrote you in 1993.

So, John, I hope this second letter clears things up. If not, I’ll write another one eighteen years from now … in iambic pentameter.

Your friend,

Tom

P.S. Five years ago, I met Paul at a signing for a children’s book he “co-wrote.” I’m pretty sure he’s had work done.

For more from Tom, watch the wheels go ‘round and ‘round here …

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