The Sons of Lee Marvin, and: Backwards Man

Abstract

The Sons of Lee Marvin, and: Backwards Man David Kirby (bio) The Sons of Lee Marvin L. M., 1924–87 I'm whacking away on a piece of gum in the Charlotte airport and sitting next to Florida governor Charlie Crist and lookingadmiringly at him when suddenly I bite my cheek and shout "Ow!" which makes me wonder if heremembers the conversation he and I had at a funeral a month ago or just thinks I'm the kind of guy who shouts "Ow!" whenever he feels like it. At the funeral, I'd been tellinghim about the Sons of Lee Marvin, a club to which both he and I belong: whenever I'm in lower Manhattan,people stare so hard at me sometimes that they walk into light poles, and about the third time this happens, I'm thinking, "What the hell," because nobody walks into lightpoles in Tallahassee when they see me on the sidewalk. We don't even have light poles—well, we do, but peopledon't walk into them because we don't have sidewalks or need them, really, since everybody drives everywhere. But in lower Manhattan, all I have to do is step out of the door and,pow, somebody's holding their face in their hands and looking for their broken glasses, and when I mentionthis to a friend, he says, "You're a Son of Lee Marvin" and explains that there are a fistful of tall skinny white-haired guys—Jim Jarmusch, David Byrne, SamShepard, and so on—who look as though they might actually be lineal descendants of the Academy Award—winningactor and that, since many of these fellows are arty and hang around the part of Manhattan where my friend and I are [End Page 17] at the moment, which is the lower and alsothe artiest part, therefore it should come as no surprise that the occasional guy in search of a bagel or woman on her wayto buy a copy of the Post should see me, do a double take, and … whang! Right into a sturdy Con Ed galvanized steel light pole sporting either a metal halideor high-pressure sodium bulb in its fixture, I'm so sure. And when I see Florida governor CharlieCrist at that funeral, as he, too, is tall, skinny, and white-haired, I say, "Governor, you and I belong to the same club," and he says, "What's that?" and I say, "The Sons of LeeMarvin," and he says, "Why, I've never heard of them!" so I start to tell him the story, but then his goons beginto press in on me the way they've been trained to do whenever some street crazy starts to tell the guv about the coming Mexican invasion or the radios the cia planted in his teeth,so I say, "Look, I'll send you something on it later," and the governor says, "Please do!" Which I do,not that he ever acknowledges it. Just think, me and the governor of Florida: brothers, but with different moms. But here in the Charlotte airport, as we areboth about to board a US Airways jet back to Tallahassee, there are other things to think about,such as the US Airways jet that crash-landed the week before in the Hudson River and the calmness of the passengers and crew who waited on the wings as rescue vesselschugged toward them through icy waters. Want to know who else would have been calm as he waited on that wing?Well, I'll tell you: Lee Marvin, that's who. He would have [End Page 18] been the epitome of calmness, as is Governor Charlie Crist, who is glancing more than once at these lines that I'm writing,is glancing so frequently, as a matter of fact, that I'm kind of scrawling his name to read something like GuhhhhChaaaa Criiiiii so he won't think this poem is about him, though if he does, he's certainly not giving any indication of that awareness. This strikes me as a quality we wantin our...