I met Bill Dodd in Robert Creeley’s office at the University of New Mexico in the early autumn of 1965, just before the shit really started to hit the fan. Cornered in a littered cubicle with a poetic legend and his youngblood protégé, a dude scarcely months older than myself and whom I would come to recognize as one of the most brilliant men I’d ever meet, I tried my best to be hip. Creeley asked me what I was doing there. I spouted some nonsense about wanting to be a writer. “Oh, something experimental no doubt,” he said, “like single-spacing your manuscripts?” Dodd started laughing so hard he nearly pissed his pants.

          I had the GTO and he had the map and for the next five years, Charley Buckwheat (my nickname for him) and I met life with the joie d’ vivre of  the early US space program. (Does anybody remember how many Vanguard moon rockets blew up on the launching pad during those days?)

“Buckwheat, old sock, how the hell did we get from Durango to Fort Sumner in under three minutes?”

“I have no idea,” he replied. “I thought we were headed to Oakie’s.”

Such complexities and hosts of others bred by a vast consciousness (his) and a more pedestrian one (mine) colliding with the Acid Wars bred situations ranging from sublime union with the cosmos to utter fuckin’ disaster. Every now and then I’d catch him looking at something, or for it? A vision spied across some desolate, windswept west Texas plain scattered with tumbleweed, rattlesnakes and the distant silhouette of a bounty hunter framed against sunlight harrowing through the throb of gun-metal clouds, a nemesis tight-lipped, narrow-eyed sniffing the brimstone wafting in from the horizon?

What I think it might have been was something he was hell-bent on trying to escape.

I never really found out. Things ended on a crisp early spring dawn when he came within a whisker of killing himself and didn’t have the slightest idea he was doing it. I don’t know if it was the anger I felt at what he was doing to himself or that I just didn’t have the balls to wait on the day he finally succeeded. From that day on, we never spoke or saw each other again.

Precious memories are, however, a bitch. You are not permitted to forget the handful of great teachers you confront in your life or what they taught or tried to teach to you. Having looked into the abyss and seen the demons writhing in the pits of fire, he more than once sternly admonished me to keep my ass out of that hole. There was no point in it. He did things for me. He saved me a lot of hard-walked miles my own ignorance would have taken me down. I owed him.

I always asked after him and was happy to learn albeit second-hand that whatever he had been fighting against during the times we traveled together, he seemed to have beaten.

We all wish for a happy ending, but in the absence of one we cling to a hope that somewhere, someday we will arrive at a place where we can speak the words we should have spoken then, our accords with one another reached and our hearts mended. That’s as close to justice as might be available in this sphere, the morphine the wish provides us against the pain of regret.

If the answers reside with anyone now, they are with our departed poet and comrade, Bill Dodd.

                                                          Dean Syracopoulos