A girl says, When Julian would scream until his throat bled I’d think how I knew our love would endure forever. When I’d watch him shave his chest in some motel before the show I’d feel less sure. When the band would play “Righteous Soul Slave” for second encore I’d know that they would never be famous. They were too good. The audience didn’t understand the complicated, holy thing that was happening. It—the audience—only wanted a wall of noise to throw itself against, an ocean to dive into and drown a while. Whatever. Julian’s the poet, I’m just his. Some of the weak ones fell, bleeding, got trampled or were pulled upright by some pit angel; glaze-eyed, disorientated, stalk-stumbling off. I’d stand off-stage on Julian’s side and watch the show. Except of course on the nights—these were not rare—when the stage was just a taped-off section of floor. Those nights I stood in back with Darren the manager i.e. the merch guy i.e. the bass player’s cousin, and watched the crowd heave. Each crowd was different and the same. Sweaty teenagers swipe half-drunk warmbeers from ledges, chug with pride, to puke later in the parking lot with same. Julian was the singer and lead guitar. He was pasty and gorgeous, haunted and haunting, recalcitrant nova, all the right things, blah. But our lives were perfect, weren’t they? Rattling motion and cigarette ash. Where were we, anyway? A rest stop in some desert, bald mountains like a great fence hemming us in. The van choked out blue smoke if we pushed past sixty, but we knew we had to be in the next place by this time the next day, whatever day that was, I mean was going to be. The stakes never changed, just the fill-in-the-blank after WELCOME TO SCENIC, another sign we were already in Heaven, anyway Limbo—some place where verb tense doesn’t matter. Whatever. Details were anyone else’s job. My only job was Julian. After all, where would he be without me? Me without him? I shouted to the drummer that I was a quarter short for the snack machine. He looked past me, at the thing itself, fished one from his pocket and flipped it my way, then turned away to light his cigarette. I of course missed the catch and it landed flat in the clay, no skitter. I picked it up and saw that it was shiny, new, one of those state ones. A bird—hawk, maybe? Fuck it, it was going straight into the coin slot so I could eat. But right before I slipped it in I decided two things: first that the state on the coin was the place where we were, so Idaho. Second that the coin was a tea leaf, state motto therefore a secret message. I don’t know dick about Latin but some things are just obvious and sometimes I think that’s what God is: the obvious, resplendent and intractable and dumb. I left the other Twix in the wrapper for later, got back in the van and told Julian that in the next town he could have a groupie, if I could film it.
- Justin Taylor is the author of the story collection Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, which is just out from Harper Perennial. He is also a contributor to HTMLGiant. His personal website is http://www.justindtaylor.net/
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Tags: Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, fiction, Groupies, Justin Taylor | 
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It was just something that he had always kind of wanted to do. By no means was it the only thing that he could think about, nor did his life bare scars of regret in its absence. It came into his head, this thing that he wanted to do, every so often between more pressing thoughts, and he would half-smile and imagine how neat it might be if one day without warning this thing were to actually happen. There was a girl in his life, and he waited to ask her until they had been together for a while, until she really knew what sort of person he was and that this small thing that he had always kind of wanted to do was just a peripheral quirk, some odd take-it-or-leave-it itch that was maybe oddly endearing or even a little bit sexy. He wasn’t crazy or perverted or a freak. She would need to understand that first. So he waited, weeks and then months, before he ever brought it up.
“Let’s make love in the carwash,” he finally said one day while they were sitting on the roof watching the sun dip over the top of another roof.
She turned her head slowly and snorted.
“In the carwash?”
“Yes. I think we should make love in the carwash maybe.”
He reclined on his elbow, the words hanging there. She wrapped her arms around her knees.
“Like on the ground, in the spot where the cars go, where all the dirt from the cars is washed off?”
“No silly, in a car in the carwash. You know, either yours or mine, while it’s being washed we can stay in the car. We can stay there and make love in the carwash.”
She laughed a single laugh in that high-pitched way that means a million things and you have to choose just one. Then she turned back toward where the sun had set over shingles. Silence followed until the sky was purple and the chill drove them inside. When conversation resumed, the topic was dinner. He suggested Thai and put the carwash thing out of his mind.
This was not a disappointing outcome. It had never been his expectation that she would agree right away. That might have seemed slutty after all, which was really not what this was about. He thought of toes in the water and reminded himself of the importance of perspective. This first attempt had landed somewhere between acceptance and rejection. It was not a yes, but it was not a no either. Silence was a promising response.
They dated for a little while longer with things being quite pleasant. Each found the other to be entertaining, and there were some sweet times when they just wanted to sleep all day in the same bed with their legs touching. After an extended period of things being pleasant and the two really getting along, they decided to get engaged. She was very happy, and so he asked her again soon after.
“Let’s just make love in the carwash,” he said.
She kissed him, which he thought was a yes, but then she never brought it up again, and it sort of went away. They got married in a garden that you could rent for weddings. He was happy to say things like, I’ll have to run that by the Mrs., and she felt better after they fought and made up when she could call him my darling husband. They lived in a little house with a lamp post in the yard and felt very much like real people living real lives. Sometimes they laughed just because being that way made them both feel like laughing. It was nice, but then there was this question that surfaced from time to time – not often, just every once in a while – when they had finished raking leaves or when she found out she might be pregnant:
“Why don’t you and I take the car down the street to the carwash and, you know.”
It kept coming up, here and there, after a good movie, before a dentist appointment. The subject usually changed quickly or just melted away into chuckles and kissing. Their lives progressed in standard ways. Insurance was purchased. Important decisions were made, but then there it was again, this question at random moments, after a long night when the baby didn’t sleep or the time the cable company accidentally gave them some premium channels that they didn’t watch that often but it was nice to have for free anyway.
“No, I don’t think so.”
She started answering him outright instead of dodging, which made him feel uneasy, like maybe this was really something that was not going to happen for a very long time.
“I don’t think that’s such a great idea, husband.”
She still smiled when she said it though, a sliver of chance, a fading possible maybe perhaps.
He changed his approach several times, which was really just a matter of semantics. Why don’t we do it in the carwash? Let’s get something going, carwash style. I’m up for some carwash intimacy, how about you? She continued to deny him in as many different ways as he knew how to ask. It slowly became clear after many varied attempts, when their lives were getting very busy with things that had to be done and her patience was beginning to crumble, that there was a distinct possibility that this thing that he had always kind of wanted to do might never happen even once in his entire life.
A thinly-veiled desperation became audible.
“I’m feeling the carwash, and it’s now or never.”
His asking became a wedge. She would leave the room and then he would be there alone with his thought for too long.
He asked less frequently, but still it came up, and when it did she acted like he asked all the time. So he asked even less, almost never, and only when she was in a really good mood and the kids had been well-behaved and the laundry basket was empty. She stopped cushioning her reply and just started saying no. It was an angry no at first, but then over a period of weeks and months, the no grew softer. Exasperation became resignation, and the sound of her refusals slowly waned and wilted into silent contemplation. Finally one day, after he had swept the porch and located the toenail clippers that had been missing for weeks, he asked one last time.
“Carwash?”
“Fine,” she said.
The nearest carwash was a brown brick building with three slots in it for cars to drive through. There was no one that worked there, only a machine that counted coins and asked credit or debit? It wasn’t used very often except on days when the oil change place gave out coupons for free car washes with any premium oil change. It was crowded when that happened, so they called to make sure this wasn’t one of those days,
It was empty on the Sunday that they went, just brown bricks and pools of soapy water. He put in six crisp bills and pressed the Superwash button. A green light beckoned Enter, and he angled the car onto the track. The red light said Stop, and he shifted into park, checked the mirrors, released the seatbelt. She took off her shoes and crawled across him, placing her knees carefully on either side of his thighs, wrapping her arms around his neck, leaning her head against his so their eyes made blurry versions of each other in the idling hum. The car began to move, and everything became very dark.
There were sounds all around in every direction, and they could hear the driving blast of the water jets running cold fierce torrents across every inch of outside. The windows buzzed and glazed over, blunting hard edges, carving whistling rivers into glass. The car began to shake, and suddenly the whole wet world was pressed flat by spinning churning things with tongues and tails that make rubbery sounds in the dark. And there was gravity confused and visions of drowning and the pulling of shy things away from comfortable places, and for the two of them inside together there was nothing to do but be present and feel for the lean rift of each aching second that passed without promise of another to follow. The muffled roar expanded and absorbed every tin rattle until there existed only one broad sonic thrust. It raged on for longer than they imagined that it possibly could, too long, and for a moment they felt that they might be trapped in a systematic malfunction that would slowly erode their car, their clothes, their bodies into nothing with graceless automaticity. It grew louder still, the sound of everything at once, booming, savage, unhinged, vibration until they couldn’t hear anything else, and they couldn’t see through the glass, and they felt very small and far too brittle to be saved from angry sopping metal set spinning in the black.
But it was warm inside, and they were safe because it was both of them in there and not just one or the other. The sounds melted back into slender wet breaths and then there was just dripping and movement toward a lighter place where the sun fell on the pavement and the water rushed off into sewers they could not see.
“That was pretty okay” she said.
“Yes, it was.”
“It reminded me of something else.”
“Watching a storm.”
“At night through a window in bed.”
“And everything rumbles when the thunder falls too near.”
- James Bartels is a writer of fiction. His work has been published in Flatmancrooked and Takahe Magazine. Additionally, he has been been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and recognized as a finalist in the Glimmer Train Award for New Writers.
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: Carwash, fiction, James Bartels, Marriage | 1 Comment »
“One Groove’s Difference”: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
“Maybe the Golden Fang had sailed on to its fate, gathering those who hadn’t found their way to shore deeper into whatever complications of evil, indifference, abuse, despair they needed to become even more themselves. Whoever they were. Maybe Shasta had escaped all that. Maybe she was safe.” – Larry “Doc” Sportello, entertaining ‘maybes’
Practically speaking, the business of a private eye arises from the exercise of paranoia. To see around appearances, you might entertain every manner of phantom notion, and it’s only as false leads drop away that the truth will become isolated, more often than not cloaked in silence. Ain’t that just the way with evil? Only in cartoon life would a Bernie Madoff, bound in rope, choose to fess up to Scooby and the gang: “Yes, I did it. And here is how. And here is why… woulda got away with it, too, if not for you rascally kids!” Cartoon life, or some kind of spiritual echo chamber, maybe.
The fiction of Thomas Pynchon has always enjoyed an easy relationship to paranoia and cartoons. Evil, too. Inherent Vice, then, his latest novel, a play on the hard-boiled—or seriously baked—detective tale is not such a departure from previous work, even if the edges appear rounded to the naked eye.
Principal in this “glittering mosaic of doubt” figures one Larry “Doc” Sportello, affable stoner and PI, whiteboy afro on his head, huaraches on his feet. A hippie with a gun, he’s a denizen of surf village Gordita Beach, CA, a locale lost in time somewhere between the 60s and 70s. Doc has love for old movies, particularly those starring John Garfield (a blacklisted movie star of the 40s and 50s), and hate for contemporary TV hit The Mod Squad, which he sees propagating the myth of Cop-as-Everyman, paving to the earth the part once played in popular consciousness by PIs.
No matter. Even as a self-conscious member of an endangered species, Doc is more than happy to ask questions about a married real estate mogul named Mickey Wolfmann, who his “ex-old lady” Shasta Fay happens to be seeing. Of course, the investigation begins at Shasta’s request (“You were always true,” she tells Doc). And when these initial, nearly innocent questions lead to more vexed questions, and the vexed to the outright thorny, Doc doesn’t hesitate (too much) in keeping after the figurative ball, even if he’d rather be watching the Lakers play in the NBA Finals. The trick being to talk to the right people, adopt the right guise, and not forget to pack a few joints.
It doesn’t take long before Mickey and Shasta both have disappeared. So it is that Doc sets out, behind the manner of cool, to identify the agent(s) of evil pulling the strings at a classy outfit called Golden Fang Enterprises. Beyond Gordita Beach and the flagging myth of the American West (the Manson trials provide backdrop to Doc’s pursuit and obsessive fodder for his imaginative life), the investigation comes to center on two persons: Coy Harlingen, revenant surf band sax soloist and Zelig-like chameleon, and Lt. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, investigating officer in the Mickey Wolfmann case and general pain in Doc’s ass.
Not long after Shasta’s disappearance, Doc receives a call from Coy Harlingen’s would-be widow, Hope: she’s not sure that her husband’s really dead. Married with a child, they were stuck in a seemingly unbreakable cycle of addiction and longing. Heroin to her represented “freedom—from that endless middle-class cycle of choices that are no choices at all.” And when Doc catches up to him, Coy sees it nearly the same way: “We’d get fucked up and just sit there and go, ‘We’re draggin each other down, what’re we gonna do?’ and then end up doing nothing…” The answer, it seems, was provided by Golden Fang Enterprises: fake his own death, and Coy could become a well-paid counter-subversive. “A spy… a snitch, a weasel,” is how Coy, in self-hatred, sees it. “A very well-paid actor,” is what the guys in the suits call it, “and without groupies or paparazzi or know-nothing audiences to worry about.” When they sweetened the offer to include a set of false teeth, Coy, with his heroin-ravaged choppers, was sold. Only now he finds himself cut off, adrift between feelings for his wife and child, and the duty he’s bound to fulfill:
Doc knew that tone of voice and hated it. It reminded him of too many vomit-spattered toilets, freeway overpasses, edges of cliffs in Hawaii, always pleading with men younger than himself distraught with what they were so sure was love. It was actually why he’d quit doing matrimonials.
On the other hand, there is Bigfoot Bjornsen. In so far as a spouse can be seen as a constant companion who incessantly reminds you of your shortcomings, Doc’s might as well be his badge-toting doppelganger, “the LAPD’s own Charlie Manson,” as Doc puts it, “the screamin evil nutcase right at the heart of that li’l cop kingdom.” Everywhere Doc goes, Bigfoot seems to follow soon after, and soon enough, it becomes unclear whether Bigfoot is trailing Doc, or leading him.
Haunted by Hunter S. Thompson’s “high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back,” or lost idealism of the 60s, Inherent Vice culminates in meditation on the collective, more genuine life that once seemed close enough to touch, just a people’s movement away from realization. A friend of Doc’s has arrived at the myth of a vanished civilization to represent something akin to this disappearing dream. About the lost city, Lemuria, Doc later reflects:
People in this town saw only what they’d all agreed to see, they believed what was on the tube or in the morning papers half of them read while they were driving to work on the freeway, and it was all their dream about being wised up, about the truth setting them free. What good would Lemuria do them? Especially when it turned out to be a place they’d been exiled from too long ago to remember.
Which is a lot of weight for any hard-boiled—or seriously baked—detective tale to bear.
“The Ballad of Lost Children”: Home by Marilynne Robinson
“It is the desire of the tattered moth for the shining star that has brought me home, little sister.” – Jack
The prodigal observances run like this: “I’m sorry,” he says. Followed shortly by the dissonant smile, or a surprised laugh (as if to ask: how did this happen? Or, where did I go awry?). Maybe even a hand raised to hide his face, touching “the nick of scar” beneath his eye. An action taken time and again, with nearly the regularity of those sanctified by Sunday ritual.
His believing sister’s unvarying response: a generosity of tears.
In her most recent novel, Home, Marilynne Robinson has set herself the task of creating a work of lasting import that lives up to its title, a tall order if ever there was one. After more than twenty years of waiting since the release of Housekeeping, we erstwhile readers have been fortunate enough to receive in the past five years the critical and popular success Gilead and, now, as of fall 2008, its sister fiction, also set in Iowa of 1956.
It is almost beside the point to say that she succeeds.
Like a fissure running across the novel’s pages the prodigal observances appear with such regularity (“I’m sorry,” he says, with that smile or that laugh, that shame-covering hand, the finger raised to touch the nick of scar) that some readers—one fresh from the work of Thomas Pynchon, for example—may find their hearts thundering with impatience at the page’s staid serenity, burning with a desire to exclaim, ‘For crying out loud, man! Stop it!’ But he can’t hear you, Robinson’s protagonist, and that is exactly the point. Jack is alone, and deeply so.
More properly, Jack is John Ames Boughton, son of the reverend Robert Boughton, who for years has served as the Presbyterian minister in the small, middle-American (and fictional) town of Gilead. The name “John Ames” comes from Boughton’s lifelong friend, the still active Congregationalist minister (whose memoirs to his young son comprise the full text of Gilead). Ames, reinvigorated by a late marriage to a much younger woman named Lila (having lost his first wife in childbirth) and the arrival of a son, Robby (named after the elder Boughton), claims to be able to picture his ailing friend with “that lace bonnet sitting on the top of [his] head,” decked as he once was in the threads of infancy. The two men meet on a near weekly basis, the ambulatory Ames arriving at Boughton’s house to discuss the concerns of his congregation, as well as the pressing matters of the day, at least as they register to the two old friends: “Eisenhower or Dulles or baseball or Egypt.”
“Egypt will have consequences,” Boughton declares.
On politics, Ames simply avers, “Stevenson is a very fine man, no doubt,” meaning that he will never vote for him. Boughton, of course, sees it the other way.
Newly arrived on the scene is Boughton’s youngest child Glory (there are eight Boughton children in all). At thirty-eight, she has just returned from a protracted engagement that failed: the man was already married, a secret she keeps from her father; one night she deposited over four hundred of their letters in the sewer. Glory is surprised by the transformation in her father, ambivalent about the role she is expected to play in his house (caretaker to both him and the family trappings, his expectation being that she will maintain it like a museum, with pieces that include: “the table and sideboard with their leonine legs and belligerently clawed feet, like some ill-considered, doily-infested species of which they were the last survivors”). In Old Boughton the ravages of age are in plain view, and yet the sight of him is not without passing beauty: “His hair had been brushed into a soft white cloud, like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming.” Much of Glory’s father’s time is spent in agonizing on the well-being of Jack, whom neither he nor Glory has seen in twenty years.
Then he is there on the front porch, the handful of false cues that he might soon arrive instantly forgiven. The well spoken son of a preacher man, Jack has been shedding skins now for years, most recently in the restorative embrace of a woman named Della, with whom he lived for some time in St. Louis. This confession he makes to Glory. Della, who is black, has recently been taken up by her father and brothers to return to the family home in Memphis; Jack’s only means of communicating his longing for her is through letters, which go unanswered.
Wearied and worn by the world, Jack remains adamant in his refusal to accept his father’s faith, “I wished very much at the time that I could have been, you know, a hypocrite. But I just didn’t have it in me. My one scruple. And it has cost me dearly.” When Glory invests in a television for the three relative strangers to gather around, conversation runs like mercury from the tried and true to an underlying strife more difficult to address with politesse: for example, recent events in Montgomery, Alabama. Or the murder of Emmett Till. As father and son vie over social outrages that demand redress (the son’s cause) and the state of the younger’s soul (the father’s), Glory, in her abundance of empathy, seeks to ensure nothing more than peace of mind for them both. This, in spite of her own lingering emotions, a feeling of unease at occupying her father’s house, of futility at expending further effort on Jack, who can be, to say the least, difficult. “I really am nothing,” he tells her. “Nothing, with a body. I create a kind of displacement around myself as I pass through the world, which can fairly be called trouble.” And, again and again, he makes the prodigal observances.
As students of American history, we know that Gilead—small town middle America—will soon change forever (on the light side, check out Bill Bryson’s “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid,” on the dark, Nick Reding’s “Methland,” and somewhere in between, Ron Power’s “Tom and Huck Don’t Live Here Anymore”). The fires that animate Jack’s passion will consume the town where he feels he cannot remain. Old Boughton and Ames debate whether God’s existence in the universe allows for the possibility that a person might change (“A person can change,” Lila declares, “Everything can change”). While, steadfastly, Glory keeps watch, making the gentlest observations of her wayward brother:
That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.
- Jeff Price is a freelance writer and editor. He held the position of Associate Editor at Electric Literature in 2009. His blog is http://heresthedope.blogspot.com/.
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: Jeff Price, Marilynne Robinson, Review, Thomas Pynchon | 2 Comments »
by Etgar Keret
There was this guy who could walk on water. Not that that’s such a big deal. Lots of people can walk on water. They usually don’t know that because they don’t try. They don’t try because they don’t believe they can do it. In any case, that guy believed, and tried and did it. And that’s when the whole mess began.
That guy had an apostle who was very close to him and sold him out. Not that that’s such a special thing either. Lots of people are sold out by someone very close to them. If they weren’t very close, then it wouldn’t really be considered being sold out, would it. Then the Romans came and crucified the guy. Which, also, isn’t very unique. The Romans crucified a lot of people. And not just the Romans. Lots of other nations crucified and killed lots of people. All kinds of people. Ones who performed miracles and even ones who didn’t. But that guy, three days after they crucified him, was resurrected. And by the way, even that resurrection thing didn’t happen here for the first time, or even the last, for that matter. But that guy, people say, that guy died for our sins. A lot of people die for our sins: greed, jealousy, pride, or other, less well-known sins that haven’t been around for such a long time. People die like flies because of our sins and no one bothers to even write a Wikipedia entry about them. But they wrote one about that guy. And not just any old entry, but a really big one with lots of pictures and blue-colored links. Not that a Wikipedia entry is such a big thing. There are dogs that have Wikipedia entries about them. Like Lassie. And there are diseases that have entries there, like scarlet fever and multiple sclerosis. But that guy, they say, unlike multiple sclerosis and Lassie, achieved what he achieved through the power of love. Which is something we’ve also heard before. After all, there were those four English guys with the hair and the beards too, just like him, except that they were a little less famous, and they sang many songs about love. Two of them are already dead, just like him. And they, by the way, have a Wikipedia entry too. But that guy, there was something special about him. He was the son of God. Except that, actually, all of us are God’s children, right? We were born in his image. So what the hell was it about that guy that turned him into such a big deal? Such a big deal that so many people throughout history were saved or killed in his name?
Anyhow, every year, around the end of December, half the world celebrates his birthday. In many places, it snows on his birthday and everyone’s happy. But even in places where it doesn’t snow, people are happy on that day. And all because of what? Because a skinny guy who was born more than two thousand years ago asked us all to live lives of love and morality and was killed because of it. And if that’s the happiest thing this weird race has to celebrate, then it deserves a Wikipedia entry too. And actually it’s got one. Go to the nearest computer now. Type in “humanity” and you’ll get the entry. Short. Very short. Not a lot of pictures. But even so. One whole entry on a fascinating and slightly baffling race. A race that could have walked on water and never tried. A race that could have killed all those who believe the world can be a better place and in most cases, made sure to do just that. So merry Christmas to you too.
Please forward or post online, in full or in part, with credit to the source.
Translated by Sondra Silverston
Etgar Keret can be found at www.etgarkeret.com.
Image: Details of The Last Supper Double Jesus by Andy Warhol.
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: Christmas, Etgar Keret, Humanity, Jesus, Lassie, The Beatles | 2 Comments »
In 1979, when I’m eight years old, my dad, drunk out of his gourd on Schlitz and high on crank, runs over some guy with his brand new El Camino. I don’t know this when I’m eight. I just think his car is cool. It’s cherry-red with a huge, white vector stripe and vaguely resembles the Gran Torino from Starsky and Hutch. He drives it as he leaves town and us later that year.
Five years later, I’m thirteen and visiting Dad for an assigned two-week stint at his crappy apartment in Indy. This guy Snyder is there—as always—and Dad’s drunk—again—but it’s Milwaukee’s Best this time, not Schlitz. Dad throws me one and tells me to drink up. And he tells me the story.
This guy’s sprawled out in the middle of the road, in the pitch black. Dad’s blitzed as he’s driving down Meridian, so he doesn’t see the guy until the last second. He doesn’t even try to brake, he says, just cruises right over him. Dad stops, gets out of the car, walks over and gives the guy a once over.
This is what he sees. The guy’s naked, hog-tied and has a curling iron shoved up his ass. Every time my dad mentions the curling iron, he makes this uppercut motion with his fist like he’s actually the one cramming the thing up the guy’s keister.
I’m sure Snyder’s heard this story a hundred times, but he still spits his Beast and slaps his knee.
“I tell you what,” Snyder yells. “That was one sorry motherfucker.”
Dad does the uppercut movement again and says, “I’m just glad the fucker was already dead when I hit him or I would have been in serious shit.”
My thirteen year old mind processes the information, thusly: driving around drunk and stoned at three o’clock in the morning is not serious shit so long as the guy you run over is already good and dead. Or like this: it is better to be lucky than good.
This is a maxim I repeat and live by for many years, even though I don’t like the taste of beer—Schlitz or the Beast or even Heineken. I begin to think at some point that this is the only life lesson I will ever learn from this man, my dad. It is hard to learn life lessons, I guess, when you no longer talk.
But then, twenty-five years later, I talk to my dad for one last time and learn something new. He has just bought a small-town convenience store and invites me over for a tour. I peek in and see about what I expect to. Overpriced packages of diapers compete with Fig Newtons for space on crowded metal shelves. Stained linoleum runs under our feet, not completely intact at the seams.
As we walk through the store, he explains his hopes for expansion—into gas and liquor. He pauses for a moment, stretches his arms wide and grins. Without looking at me, he says the thing to me that I will always remember. Without irony, he says this thing. In complete seriousness, he says it. This is what he says, as he stands in the middle of his run-down mini-mart: “Son, it’s all legit. Not a single black market item in the place. Your step-mom insisted. How do you like that?”
I don’t know how I like it. I ask him if it is a rhetorical question that he asks me.
He walks over to a cooler, pitches me a beer—PBR—and says, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I have no idea.”
I toss the beer back his way and tell him I have to go. And this is what I learn: as good as it feels to go, it doesn’t feel that much better than staying.
On that day in the convenience store, the El Camino is long gone. Not just Dad’s, but all of them. Erased from the automotive memory of a nation. But not from mine. I love that car, no matter how many people he ran over with it.
- Jason Stout lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife and five children. His works have appeared in Every Day Fiction, Twelve Stories, Flashquake, The Battered Suitcase, A Thousand Faces, Loquacious Placemat, Shine! and Pequin. He can be contacted through his website: jasonstout.jimdo.com.
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: El Camino, Flash Fiction, Jason Stout, Schlitz, Sodomy, Vehicular Homicide | 2 Comments »
Discussed Herein: Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem and Amateur Barbarians by Robert Cohen
“My Birds…, My Tower…”
“Frank O’Hara and Joe Brainerd, Mailer and Broyard and Krim, Jane Jacobs, Lenny Bruce, Warhol and Lou Reed, all of it, including Patti Smith and Richard Hell and Jim Carroll, poets declaring themselves rock stars before they even had songs, Jean-Michel Basquiat writing SAMO, Philippe Petit crossing that impossible distance of sky between the towers, now unseen for so many months behind the gray fog.”
– one-time rock critic Perkus Tooth’s list of influences and heroes
“So, I’m Perkus Tooth,” is how the screed-prone, chronically ill, chronically high, and yet curiously pure protagonist of Jonathan Lethem’s latest novel introduces himself to the powers that be—as if in resumption of a previously ongoing conversation. Perkus’s talent, observes Chronic City’s narrator, the pleasant-on-the-eyes and quite nearly harmless Chase Insteadman, is for ellipsis, netted flutterings of meaning that oh-so-evocatively suggest an apprenhension taken from the sheer angles of Manhattan’s coldly shining architecture, its personalities, its towers. To deliver his message, Perkus must brave dangers from within (migraines, hiccups) and without (a tiger on the prowl). That’s not to mention his circle of friends.
Whether the narrative spotlight happens to fall in a particular instant on Perkus (recovering rock critic), or Chase (TV actor), or Richard Abneg (former tenant’s rights advocate, now instrument of the effort to leech upscale pads from units intended for affordable housing), or Oona Laszlo (ghostwriter extraordinaire, one time protégé of Perkus), or Georgina Hawkmanaji “The Hawkman” (Armenian heiress and close companion of Abneg’s), or Strabo Blandiana (Romanian acupuncturist), or Mayor Arnheim (Michael Bloomberg), or Sadie Zapping (ex-rocker turned dog walker), those who populate Chronic City abide: they have always been around and always plan to be, plot contrivances be damned; they are each bigger than the story in which they take part. So, Lethem’s novel proceeds, seemingly in sway with the whimsical, or habitual, directions of his characters’ days, while slyly advancing a narrative in subtext, one that emerges by degrees from the “amnesiac mists” of Perkus, Chase, Richard, and the Hawkman’s fellowship. Or the partially glimpsed epiphanies of Perkus’s “broadsides,” manifestos put to poster and pasted on lampposts. Or else the gray fog at the island’s southern tip.
Lethem has been quoted referring to his novel as “a bromance”; only, when he uses the word it seems somehow to quiver in meaning between irony and earnestness. Finally, though, such categories of classification must blur as well, since, surely, one who feels “a bromance” in earnest cannot himself accept such a buzzword in place of meaning. It is a liquid living thing, this connection, something alive.
Chronic City is alive. For Perkus, Chase wants nothing more than that he “have his ellipsis, have it wholly and unreservedly… without cluster [headaches]—however terribly much I suspect that one might be the price of the other.” And, yes, while he longs for his friend Perkus to realize the best, the childhood TV star grown to some facsimile of adulthood won’t hesitate from enjoying the pleasures of the physical realm, a warm body in his bed, while he remains, in public, “outstanding only in [his] essential politeness,” a “prisoner of [his] plate’s arrival, roast brown glistening something.” In outer space, the true love of Chase’s life, astronaut Janice Trumbull, orbits, while below Perkus Tooth, averse to the containment of romantic “pair-bonding,” fires off his broadsides, each “an arrow aimed into the infinite obsessive.” As must the aspiring novelist, Perkus culls choice elements from the chaos of the universe to braid together. In a novel that skirts plotlessness, he is the puttering, beleaguered plotter, the little engine that could. From the mediated peaks he dreams of setting loose a flood that will once and for all wash away the eye-liner from the city’s imperial visage.
Says Oona, who shares Chase’s bed in fits (“I’m your whatever,” she tells him), on the subject of a virtual online “reality” that seems to be bleeding into the actual lives of their trusted circle of Manhattanites: “There might be trillions of these simulations going on at once.” Asks Chase, “Why couldn’t we be the original?” “We could be,” Oona replies. “But the odds aren’t good. You wouldn’t want to bet on it.”
Whatever their provenance, Perkus’s obsessions cluster together like paragraphs on a page, while in tow to his pleasure, Chase looks on, unable in his own life to find any certain connection between the church tower outside his window and the birds who eternally circle it. The final line of Lethem’s acknowledgment in the back of the book runs, “Everything else to everywhere else forever and ever amen.” A rock critic’s benediction, if ever there was one.
The Terrible Fate of Becoming Yourself
“Hey, show a little class. You’d think someone getting laid as much as you are would spend a little less time feeling sorry for himself. But it works for you, doesn’t it, Oren? It gets you off the hook?”
- Gail Hastings to Oren Pierce
It takes no real insight to assert that Robert Cohen’s Amateur Barbarians has received considerably less attention than other current releases: for example, Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, with which it has nothing in common, save for a middle-aged (and intrepid) protagonist. Somehow, though, Amateur Barbarians has fallen under the banner of “middle-age” in subject matter, a topic about as seductive as toe-nail clippings, suggesting, as it does, the burden of responsibility and allegiances forged, concessions made to the inevitable flow of time, the specter of senescence (for the lucky few), a thinning hairline, Nick Carraway & Cialis, so on and so forth. In the popular realm, middle-age is nearly synonymous with the phrase “so on and so forth,” because everyone knows that everything worth happening happens to the young. And once that is over, well… “so on and so forth.”
Like Lethem’s Chronic City, Cohen’s novel could be termed “a bromance”: rather than sexless rock critic and oversexed actor, the bond here, the study in shadings, is between Teddy Hastings, an overachieving, fifty-something high school principal and father of two, reeling from the loss of his younger brother (a literary type) to cancer, and Oren Pierce, a mid-thirties, bookish, and omni-talented floater (having partially fulfilled graduate degrees in religion, film, psychiatric social work, and law). A perpetual adolescent, Oren would be unmoored if not for his work as Acting Vice Principal of the local high school in a small Massachusetts town, where he inches ever closer to that previously remarked upon precipice, “middle-age.” As a co-worker observes: “There’s something about that man. What is it? His eyes are all over the room.”
So, what happens?
In short, Teddy, after fourteen years as a high school principal, tries on his Oren Pierce hat, making a pitch at a new pursuit (photography, with calamitous results: “This is New England we’re talking about, a place with a proud tradition of repression and denial to uphold,” Teddy’s lawyer advises him), before embarking on a trip to Ethiopa to track down his wayward daughter, Danielle. Oren, meanwhile, tries on his Teddy Hastings hat, filling in while his boss is away. Then, for good measure, he embarks on an affair with Gail Hastings, Teddy’s wife (who happens to be the novel’s most dynamic character).
Transference, all around.
All of this has something to do with a teacher named Don Blackburn, one of the school’s most august personas, recently stricken speechless by a stroke. Oren takes to occupying Don’s empty house for hours at a time, under the pretense of seeing to its upkeep; he teaches Hawthorne’s Wakefield to a class of by and large uninterested students (“Maybe for Wakefield the only time his life looks interesting, looks real even, is when he’s standing outside it, looking in”); the affair with Gail begins in Don’s absented bed. Meanwhile, Teddy’s desire to reclaim something like the freedom he enjoyed in youth is propelled by his shock and horror at poor Don’s fate.
The wheels in motion, Cohen follows their revolutions with stunningly observed prose, conscious thought in reverie. By Beckett-inspired gradations (a few feet of agonized progress, another limb rendered useless!), the protagonists’ paradoxical meditations proceed, the minute seeming always to lead back to the overarching, and vice versa, but never without a humorous turn. Reflects Teddy, prior to taking his leave, on the subject of books and marriage:
Between her books and his you could hardly move around the bedroom at this point. But then books and marriages were well suited to each other… Both were middle-class adventures: they conspired to keep you at home, sitting still, being good. Meanwhile the mind went sneaking off under cover of darkness, traveling the world, kissing strangers in parking lots, suffering torments and temptations no one could see.
Oren, meanwhile, in the throes of an affair with Gail, pushes past the subject of marriage and books altogether to settle on an obsession with newness: “Something you discovered, not invented. Something already there. The design embedded in the carpet. The scrambled message in the acrostic. The tiny blue egg cradled in straw at the bottom of a nest. A newness that lay latent in its opposite, like oil in rock.”
Visited by memories of his departed brother Philip, Teddy muses on the folly of bourgeois attitudes: “Expecting the world to surrender its goods and lie belly-up at your feet like a dog—this was not just arrogance, Philip would say, but pathology.” Oren, in turn, communes with the spirit of Heidegger: “Suppose you were one of those people who perpetually longed for the extraordinary; did that mean you really longed for the ordinary? Or was longing for the extraordinary the most ordinary longing of all?” Once on the ground in Africa, Teddy finds himself admiring camels for “their melancholic persistence, their elaborated necks, their sly, lofty, aristocratic expressions.”
Beyond the elegance of his sentences, Cohen’s most memorable moments cut to the quick, pointing toward a premise that underlies what folks in a small town might take for granted. When Teddy at last catches up to Danielle, she has a dramatic revelation in store for him:
Okay, okay, he’d said. Come here. What else could he do? Their bodies, themselves: that was how they were raised. He’d pulled her onto his lap, stroked her bony, tremoring shoulders. Patted the clumps and knots in her hair, dabbed the snot from her nose with the back of his hand, smeared the dewy trails that ran down her cheeks like foul lines marking off the shining diamond of her face. Okay, okay. She’d clung to him that night as she had at the airport, with the same feverish intensity, the same flush of discovery and relief. As if each new moment were merely a repetition of an old one, which in the repeating became new.
- Jeff Price is an Associate Editor at Electric Literature
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: Amateur Barbarians, Book Review, Chronic City, ellipsis, Jeff Price, Jonathan Lethem, Robert Cohen, Wakefield | 2 Comments »
Recently, I was reading an interview with Ann M. Martin—perhaps my secret favorite writer of all time, the woman responsible for the voice that narrated me through my childhood, both on and off the page—and, in describing her daily routine, she mentioned that she “eases into the day” by taking care of email, then settles in to write. That struck me as counterintuitive—lately, my morning tactic has been to try to write for as long as I can possibly bear before finally opening my window onto the living world. You know, the pretend-window that I pretend-open by pretend-pressing some pretend-buttons. On my computer screen, which is also my canvas, my instrument, my palette, and my page. Does any other art have it so hard?
My email isn’t something I can ease in or out of very gracefully, nor is it something that can be taken care of in a single shot, and reading about Martin’s routine got me thinking about the differences between “growing up” as a writer today—or, okay, being a youngish wannabe writer, one of this so-called digital generation—and growing up as a writer in an earlier era. I can’t really fathom trying to write a whole short story or (god forbid) a novel on paper or a typewriter, although, sure, it might be a good option if the internet’s temptations are really killing me so hard. Nor can I honestly imagine writing on some kind of dino processor that’s not connected to the internet, though I’ve fantasized about the idea. It’s just that—when I got stuck, what would I do?
Sit there? Take a walk? Try harder?
Has any other generation of endeavoring writers had to battle a distraction this powerful, this omnipresent, and this snugly nuzzled against their work?
On principle, I’m reluctant to entertain any question that, like this one, reeks of literary doomsdayism. I hate hearing about the death of the novel, the poor prospects for literature today—all of it feels false, coming as it does at a time when people seem to be reading, in some form or another, quite a lot. I don’t like to believe that the spray of newfangled digi-stuff really represents such a monumental change, even for the literary world. We’re still communicating and we’re still living. We’re still making up stories and writing them down and giving them away to be read.
Nor do I really want to address the question in what might be the anti-doomsday way—that is, to come up with some slick metaphor that shows how we internet-surfing writers may actually have an advantage over the writers of the past. I could say that today, more than ever, there is life literally pressed up against our art-work (that funny work of rearranging pixels of meaning on the 2D-but-actually-infinitely-D plane of the screen). Life: the breathing bodies of friends and enemies and strangers, all lurking just behind the virtual page, waiting to chat, to exchange news and jokes and stories and insults and love; life, right there living within and underneath our work, ready to feed and fill and maybe receive our art—this undoubtedly a good and beautiful thing.
I do admit to feeling some writerly pleasure at the idea that the boundaries between our lives-lived and lives-on-the-page are blending—at the fact that more and more of our “living” happens in text, in these black squiggles that readily translate into words and that, bouncing between cell phones, between computers, between paper and brain, can so easily become, themselves, an act. But to exalt our historical moment in any way—to pay its idiosyncrasies any sort of privilege or disdain—feels to me like a mistake. I don’t know what the opposite of timeless is, but I’m recoiling from it.
What I want, frankly, is for my writing work and the internet to exist in some maybe-unremarkable harmony, the way they seem to for Ms. Martin. I suspect that’s how it is for many writers who have it better than me: their work is not so precious as to need to go untouched by the bustling online world, and, in hand, the online world is for them less threatening. Maybe their work is also more engrossing (read: better) than mine.
It’s only because this is what I want but don’t have that I can’t help but shout it: Painters, actors, musicians, you have it so easy! You veritable farmers! Alone and unbothered out there with your seedlings: watering, harvesting, bearing fruit. It’s not even as if we could balance the scales by somehow inviting the internet onto the palette, the stage, the violin—even then, I think, it would not be much of a threat for you others. The thing about the online world is that it is not only physically near the writing artist’s work—and, for its sociability, particularly alluring for the writer who works alone—but also that the online world is physically like our artistic world. Made up of letters, sentences, and lots and lots of silent, private, outside-of-real-time talk. A child, an alien, or even a prize-winning author could be forgiven for, once in a while, not being able to tell the difference between the fake real world of the writer and the real online world of…the world.
So here’s the story: Once upon a time, writers navigated between speech and writing, life and art. On the page, they painted a picture of their world and played the song of its sounds. Now, the page is the world. Or, at least: every day, the page and the world get closer. They creep up on each other, they press together in the dark and feel each other—so smooth, so alike. What’s a writer to do? Go out and play with the world, I guess.
- Helen Rubinstein is a youngish wannabe writer, one of the so-called digital generation. Her fiction has received awards at Yale, at the Wesleyan Writers Conference, and at Brooklyn College, where she’s finishing her MFA. She will be writing without an internet connection as a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony in the spring.
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I sometimes think writers have a different relationship to money than other people. It’s the odd work-wage equation that changes things: you can easily find yourself toiling for no pay for decades, falling into a life of monk-like asceticism with diminishing expectation for salvation at the end of the line. Writing becomes like a protracted prayer—for recognition, or at least a wise, understanding reader who exists as a kind of imagined angel. In Enemies of Promise, his book about the myriad ways in which a writer can fail, Cyril Connolly admits that poverty is devastating, but adds that having money to throw around can be “a substitute for creation.”
Conversation among writers more often than not revolves around the subject of agents and advances. The name of a magazine comes up, and the first question is: how much do they pay? They sound like a group of salesmen, insisting on a materialism that we don’t really possess, as if to trick themselves into believing that the profession is like any other. The shop talk is a way of fending off our anxiety about a livelihood that constantly seems at the point of disappearing. On occasion, the pursuit of money is put forth as the only reasonable motive to write, an absurd bit of bravado that we all know to be untrue. Norman Mailer once told of being approached by a stockbroker after the success of his first novel The Naked and the Dead. Mailer handed him $10,000 to invest. Less than a year later, the broker informed him that the value of the investment had almost doubled. Mailer cashed in the account, and refused to retain the broker. “I thought, if it’s this easy to make money I’ll never write again.”
Having a cushion of inherited money brings its own set of problems, not the least of which is the resentment it incurs, queering the fellowship hard-up writers depend on to help them through lean times. The poet James Merrill, whose father was a founder of the brokerage company Merril Lynch, navigated the touchy subject of his wealth by creating a foundation that gave grants to writers. “Cleverly, Merrill had figured out that if he wanted to spend time with other poets rather than bankers, he needed to share the wealth without making it look like handouts,” Edmund White writes in his recent memoir City Boy: My life in New York during the 1960s and ‘70s, “If a friend put the touch on him, Jimmy could always say, ‘Apply to the foundation, but remember I’m just one of the board members.’” Everyone knew Merrill had the final say, but the set-up served its purpose. “If someone got money from the foundation, he or she didn’t have to feel beholden to Merrill himself. Nor was it a loan that had to be paid back – or that could potentially create bad blood…”
A well-heeled novelist I know who comes from a family of famous industrialists complains of the American romantic notion that money is inimical to the creation of art. He’s only half-joking when he says, “I’ve had a hell of a time overcoming my advantages.” He claims that the family fortune had been dissipated by his parents. “What I’m really like is the poor schmuck who inherits a twelve-bedroom house that he can’t afford to heat or repair.” In fact, he would discreetly make substantial loans to his friends. Several years ago he bailed me out of a mess, apologizing that he couldn’t afford to give me more. “Things are a little tight, you know.” He seemed irritated when I tried to pay him back, and never cashed the check.
Having to explain the chasm between your ambition and low status can grind you down, especially when it lasts into your forties. Edmund White ghostwrote textbooks for three hundred bucks a chapter. He worked for a petrochemical company preparing glossy annual reports designed to explain to shareholders why the company continuously lost money. White was grateful to a friend for understanding how brave he was going out into the world and meeting well-known writers even though he was not yet “armed with a single publication.”
Sherwood Anderson’s collection of stories, Winesburg, Ohio, kicked around for four years before he found an interested editor. The editor summoned Anderson to New York and arranged to meet him at a certain corner near Central Park at four. Anderson arrived and waited. He was still waiting at six, when he gave up and returned to his hotel, seeing it as some kind of sadistic trick publishers enjoyed playing on hopeful authors. In his Memoirs Anderson wrote: “I went to my hotel and threw myself on the bed…tears flowing from my eyes. It all seems silly now but on that evening I was really more desperate than I had ever been before in my life.” Most writers recognize this particular brand of despair. To be told “It’s only a book,” as I was when in the midst of a seven-year heartache over my first novel, is like telling a lovesick adolescent “There will be others.” At nine that same night, the editor called Anderson. They had been waiting on different corners. He wanted to publish the stories. Anderson expresses no pleasure at this turn of events, only a vague feeling of relief, a perfect illustration of Epicurus’s definition of happiness as simply the absence of pain. For Anderson, pain wasn’t absent for long. When Winesburg, Ohio was published, in 1919, “in review after review it was called ‘a sewer’ and the man who had written it taken as strangely sex-obsessed…a kind of sickness came over me, a sickness that lasted for months.”
I might have had an easier time of it during the long apprenticeship years had I listened to my father, who, seeking to protect me from a future of hardship that he saw more clearly than I did, urged me to get a university degree. “At least you’ll be able to teach while making your bones as an author,” he said. My concept of what being a writer would entail was so unformed that I took his well-meaning advice as a typically philistine insult. Teaching sounded like a prison sentence that I might never finish serving. What I really doubted, I think, was my ability to lead a double life, writing secretly on weekends. According to Connolly, excessive isolation is one of many traps the writer should take pains to avoid. Having no one to talk to can distort your work, but talking about it too much can kill it. In retrospect, I see I first had to announce my ambition in a brazen way in order to begin to believe in it myself. Now, like most of my writer friends, I pretend that I believed it was a viable profession all along.
- Michael Greenberg is the author of Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life and the award-winning memoir Hurry Down Sunshine. Visit his website at www.michaelgreenberg.org.
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: Essay, Michael Greenberg, Money, Writing | 4 Comments »
(from Conversations over Stolen Food)
Between December 2006 and January 2007, we recorded forty-five-minute conversations for thirty straight days throughout New York City. Half of these talks took place at a Union Square health-food store which we call “W.F.” Other locations included MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera House, Central Park, Prospect Park and a Tribeca parking garage. This piece comes from the first conversation.
7:43 p.m. Friday, December 29
Union Square W.F.
A: I’ve got a final question for you. If we eat things before we exit can no one call…catch us? There’s habeas corpus but there’s something else. Body of evidence? Doesn’t physical evidence need to exist of the event? So long as we consume all evidence perhaps nothing can be done to us.
J: Yeah, I guess we’ve created a body of evidence, but only we ourselves will listen to this tape, and, what’s more, I’ve become friends with the security guards. They know me by first name, as I know them by first name. Today I spoke to…
A: Don’t. You don’t want to get them in trouble.
J: Tonight we shared reintroductions. Tonight’s my first time in the this store for several months and I shook a lot of hands. It felt warm. It’s nice to be welcomed back.
A: Now could you explain what happened in Providence?
J: You mean…
A: Inside its W.F.?
J: Well I have to admit: the desire to keep my living expenses low became reckless. I would carry into the store a bag, a plastic bag from W.F., and I’d place it in the cart and, as I’d shop, I’d place things in the bag, and I’d place of course many many groceries outside the bag, but there were certain items, certain expensive items, that I’d place in the bag—such as sirloin steaks and blueberries (for a while they cost 5.99 a carton). I’d drink an expensive ginseng tea. There was this hot sauce I’d steal, pure extravagance of course and I knew I had turned sloppy, yet I knew…
A: You know the thief’s main virtue is modesty? A modest thief never…
J: That’s right.
A: I’m guessing. I’m guessing.
J: You’re right. And I was modest tonight in stealing my my steamed broccoli and shredded carrots and brown rice, which tastes unnecessarily salted, and that explains why I keep drinking water. You’d think a place committed to health wouldn’t salt foods so excessively.
A: So what happened? So?
J: So just as I left the store an undercover guard blocked my passage. He said Excuse me; I’d like to speak with you inside. And I looked at him and said I don’t know what you’re talking about. And he said Oh, you don’t know what I’m talking about? I said No I don’t. And he said You left the store with unpaid merchandise. And I said What? And he pointed to the bag containing my wrapped sirloin, which cost twenty dollars, and said I’ve worked in this business six years—get inside. The manager stood waiting for me, totally baffled, since we were likewise on a first-name basis, and after previous episodes of stealing (in an effort to keep expenses down) I would treat him with lots of affection: shaking his hands, wishing him a good night, telling him I’d see him real soon. He led me into an office, where he did not press charges. He firmly believed I was confused. That became the story; I’d got confused. I said I’d started talking with the cashier about her necklace. She wore this charm made of imitation gold which spelled her name in cursive and…
A: Hmm, I saw one on this woman sweeping. If you can read the name I’m curious. It looked very long, like Florestan.
J: Florestan, is that right?
A: But the necklace hangs backwards, so you’ll have to read backwards. But sorry go ahead.
J: Yes. I said I got confused: I’d asked about a girl’s necklace. I said I’ll pack my groceries apart from my roommate’s since she’s vegetarian. I said I myself used to be a vegetarian, and know what it’s like. I said I’d just started eating meat again and just got confused. And the manager kept nodding with a blank expression, neither agreeing nor disagreeing while the undercover processed the paperwork. I said Can’t we talk about this? The guard said No. He snapped my photo and said If you ever step into another W.F. you could be arrested on the spot. I started thinking of this project, not wanting to jeopardize it, yet of course didn’t say anything. It’s not like I could have said Oh but sir, come two months from now I’ve planned conversations over stolen food with my friend Andy. Please don’t stand between me and this project.
A: Today’s Times contained pieces on shoplifting. One gave the undercover… [Tape ends]
Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch just completed Conversations over Stolen Food. Their book Ten Walks/Two Talks is due out in December from Ugly Duckling Presse. Other publications include Animal Shelter, Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Everyday Genius, LIT, n+1 and UbuWeb.
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: nonfiction, stealing, whole foods | 3 Comments »
In the Louisiana neighborhood where I grew up, we were always looking for ways to get out.
Barry Shinder found a way out when he was just seven, by jumping off a pier into way too shallow water off the Williams Bridge and paralyzing himself from the waist down. Chrissy Shaw found a way out by getting in a car with strangers when she was just twelve years old never to be heard from again. And there were countless others, including Jason Fillmore and Thomas Edgars who managed get behind the steering wheels of cars long before they were old enough for licenses and wrapped themselves around trees and telephone poles.
Later on, many of the people found their ways out by selling drugs and committing crimes that people would later make famous movies about. It seemed as if they would do anything to end up in prison. In fact, where I grew up they talked about “how this one went to Angola” and “that one’s gonna wind up in Angola” the way other families talk about getting into a good college.
Also later on, many of us found our way out by drinking Jack Daniels straight out of the bottle, taking blue Valium, shooting cocaine. We weren’t all brave enough to do it all at once, so we found our own slow ways to creep out of the neighborhood.
But when I was seven and eight years old, before I discovered the typewriter as an automobile to anywhere, before I discovered the various sizes and shapes of pill and liquor bottles, I found another way out.
I would like to tell you that it was all hellfire and brimstone, and terrifying, full of snake-handling and scary preachers, but that would be a lie. It would also be a lie to tell you that I ever saw the light or that I really accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior. I’d like to be able to say that the preachers, including my grandfather and my uncle were perfect men who showed us the way to salvation by being the role models that so many of the boys in the neighborhood needed. But none of it would be true.
The Pentecostal Church on the edge of my neighborhood was an escape. And considering the crime and danger that was going on in every other house in the neighborhood, the Pentecostal Church was one of the few places our parents would let us go. And there was a time in my youth, when I loved it.
***
My grandfather whom I never met was a Pentecostal preacher and a sharecropper. He was the pastor of his own church far north from the neighborhood where I grew up, way up in a Parish even we hicks referred to as “the country.” I don’t know how much of a drinker he actually was, but I do know that in my family when they say things like, “he used to drink” that usually means “he used to drink most of the time.” But I never knew him, and all accounts I’ve heard were that when he sobered up, he was a fine, non-judgmental man, not like the preachers who later on would exist solely to tell us that the Pope was the anti-Christ. But like so many people in my family, he didn’t last long. When he was forty-eight, he had a spell of some sort in the pulpit, got dizzy, passed out, depending on who you ask. People do get dizzy. People do pass out. People also get brain tumors, which is what was going on with him. He was dead within a year, leaving my grandmother to raise a crop of children in the Pentecostal tradition. They grew up to be lovely and flawed, the way that all people are. But none of them stayed in the church.
But my father had a brother, Uncle Wilson, who also “used to drink” and he became a pastor of the church in our neighborhood. We loved him. He had an auto shop behind our house, had a great presence, and was always on like electricity. And when Brother Lambert wasn’t delivering the sermons at the church, my Uncle Wilson did. And yes, he used to see the devil in everything. I used to just listen. Over coffee in the morning, he would tell us that the Iran hostage situation was a sign of the end, and that barcodes were what were going to be put on everyone’s forehead as the mark of the beast. Cousin Frank, a Baptist in New Orleans, told me the same thing a few years later. He also told me that the video games I played were going to send me straight to Hell. Anything electronic meant I was touching the devil. If I was, then I liked the way the devil felt. He felt totally alive to me.
They warned me when I was eight that KISS stood for Kings In Satan’s Service and that idolizing Gene Simmons was like worshipping the devil. I listened to Revolver more and more. Not to be rebellious, but because I knew they were wrong.
My older, New Orleans Baptist cousins really used to get to me. They were the new fundamentalists, terrifying in a way that the Pentecostals were not. I wasn’t sure why, but they seemed dangerous whereas the Pentecostals seemed kind of harmless. They told me that Hotel California was going to send me to Hell. And when I was eleven and they sensed something about me that wasn’t exactly what they wanted to sense, my New Orleans Baptist cousins took me to church and showed me a passage that said something about men lying with men instead of women. I knew what it meant. It meant that I was doomed. But they had been telling me that there was something wrong with me and that there was a fire waiting for me ever since I could remember. The images sometimes scared me, the refusal to be like them alienated me, they added to my already deeply rooted shame. They were pouring more gasoline on this boy almost on fire, and I was always waiting for someone to toss a lit cigarette or torch my way.
When you are burning up, and you know it, and you aren’t asking for water you feel free. That was one way I learned to get out. To get away from the crime-ridden world I was growing up in. To burn.
***
My parents never re-enforced any of this. In fact, they’d stopped going to the Pentecostal church years earlier when Brother Lambert had nearly gotten arrested for stealing some meat from the local A&P. It was also around the same time, when my cerebral-palsied brother wouldn’t stop crying in church and Brother Lambert got mad. That’s all it took for my parents to become backsliders for life.
Still, they liked it when my sister and I went to church. By the time I really started going on a regular basis, there were only a handful of regular members. Maybe fifteen. There was a strict dress code, women with their long skirts, not allowed to cut their hair; men with short hair, clean-shaven. Anything that didn’t look like Little House on the Prairie was pushing it. In fact, Michael Landon’s hair would have been enough of a sin to get him into serious trouble with Uncle Wilson.
Sometimes, even today, at six o’clock on Wednesdays and Sundays, I feel like I’m supposed to be somewhere. Like I’m missing an important meeting. Those are the times when, as a kid, I was in church. So my sister and I would go with some of Uncle Wilson’s nieces from his wife’s side of the family. And we would show up in that cool, brick church, which smelled brand-new and ancient all at once. It wasn’t a fancy church, but it was well kept, even the scratchy carpet had a welcoming feel to it. It was our home during the time we were there.
People think you speak in tongues, or that you get the Holy Ghost because you are so devout. I never was. After all, I had already been doomed according to the way they said I should be living my life. I knew that something as innocent as watching Battle of the Network Stars earlier in the week and staring too long at both Jimmy and Kristy McNichol was enough to disqualify me from me being saved.
But when the music would start, Cousin Hester, who wasn’t as messed up as my brother, but was never like an adult even as an adult would start waving her hands in the air. And someone would have the tambourine. And my uncle, would be working us up into a frenzy, every word, whether it was “praise”, “Jesus” or “hallelujah” was said at a decibel that would make me think some of the church bricks must be tumbling onto the grass outside.
And I’d watch it all. Like a concert, or like a show where I knew the actors. Except they weren’t acting, they meant it. And because I loved them. And because I could see them being carried some place far away, I wanted to go with them. So I would begin chanting, “Dear Jesus, save me from my sins,” “Bless you Jesus, reach down and touch me,” and this would go on for minutes, this chant. And it felt great. It felt like I wasn’t even there. And then my uncle would come over and place his hand on my head, “God, bless this child, reach down and touch this child!” A shot of electricity would go through me like I had been touched by Jesus himself. I would find myself dancing what probably looked to be a ridiculous dance, or sometimes I’d wander around with my eyes closed, blinded by the energy. Sometimes, I would wake up in the front of the church even if I started at the back. Sometimes I would find myself near the pulpit.
And for those moments, which seemed to go on forever, I was not there, not in that neighborhood, not in that town, not in this world. This, I learned was my escape. And I didn’t have to believe anything they said, didn’t have take the sermons to heart, all I had to do was repeat after them, and feed on their energy, and I could suddenly not exist.
And unlike Barry Shinder, or Chrissy, or Jason, or Thomas, my escape would not make my mama cry. Wouldn’t get my dad upset. Wouldn’t be in the papers. If it was sensational, it was my own private scandal.
Years later, after Uncle Wilson got thrown out of the church for having an affair with a sixteen-year old church member the church would stand empty. Brother Lampert had died by then. His wife and kids were far away. Weeds grew around the church. And when I’d go back home to visit, I’d wonder what was going on inside. Maybe the ghosts of Jesus and Satan were having wrestling matches, maybe it smelled even newer; maybe the hymnbooks were still in their perfect wooden places behind the pews.
Later, after the church was no longer the church, I’d find other places, other people in the neighborhood to escape with, other ways to get out. Sometimes it would be on a Greyhound bus for a run of the streets of Los Angeles, sometimes it would be a bottle of whiskey, a needle in the arm, several intentionally skipped meals. But I never found a way out as safe and pure and simple as speaking in tongues and getting the Holy Ghost.
I was never a believer, and yet I believed in the believers. I believed that they could take me away. And when I was just a kid seeking escape, they did.
- Martin Hyatt was born just outside of New Orleans. His novel, A Scarecrow’s Bible, won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association. In addition, he has been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, The Ferro-Grumley, and The Violet Quill Award. NY Magazine named him a “star of tomorrow” in their Literary Idol feature. He is the recipient of an Edward F. Albee Writing Fellowship and The New School Chapbook Award for fiction. He has taught writing at such places at Hofstra, Yeshiva, The New School, and St. Francis College. He is the Founding Coordinator of a Writing Center in New York City where he currently resides. He has just completed a new novel entitled Beautiful Gravity.
www.martinhyatt.net
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