Flashback
Take a guy.
Let’s say he is about my age: old enough to own a place and pay almost all his bills sometimes; young enough to understand that he is not getting any younger. Add a dose of fresh alienation—not enough to be unhealthy, of course, but enough to enable him to function in a world full of imbecility and indifference and all those unattainable happily-ever-afters awaiting him on the other side of his flat screen TV. Take this guy and give him enough stability so that he has no excuses, but plenty of alibis. Most likely, he is utterly average in every regard, except for the fact that, unlike almost everyone he knows, he is aware of it. Finally, add the oncoming collision of a twenty-year high school reunion and there’s no choice but to buckle up and insert all applicable clichés, complacent epiphanies and the half-earned angst that is awaiting an ideal opportunity to boil up to the surface.
Time to pay tribute. Yes, at this point it would seem appropriate to tip the 40 and pour out some beer for our dead homeboy. But we don’t because we are not drinking beer. Also, he is not dead, and we are not in a music video or even a bad movie, and above all, we are too cynical, self-conscious, or married to imitate such affected gestures. Unless, of course, we were being ironic, but it’s too early in the evening for that type of commitment, so we’ll stick to doing what we do best: retelling stories that never happened exactly the way we insist on remembering them. No harm done, a little bullshit and bourbon on the rocks never hurt anyone. Besides, I am increasingly aware that it is because these stories are so obviously embellished that we need them to be true. Add a few hours and more than a few drinks and once again, here we are: backs to the future, looking in the mirror for someone who should be standing alongside us.
This is not exactly what they mean by flashing back, and yet I’m trying to stay in the moment, knowing I can if I try hard enough. But first I need to make sense of that old saying, how does it go? If I knew now what I didn’t know then? No. If I knew then what I did know, now? I don’t know. I’m here, but now—and not for nothing—I’m recalling the mistake I did not make, almost two decades ago.
Remember Love Boat? Not the TV show, but a blunt laced with PCP, also known as angel dust. The boat. This was the holy grail of illicit drugs, and considering the fact that all drugs were illicit, period, even a dumbass underclassman knew this was filed under Fucked Up. I didn’t know shit but I knew that alcohol was off limits, marijuana was out of the question, and Love Boat was officially off the charts. This was the stuff that longhaired actor took an accidental hit of and then quickly found himself perched on a rooftop, trying to fly (or perhaps that was the surreptitious tab of acid in his fruit punch, same difference). We saw that movie in the ‘70s and it scared us even straighter. Nevertheless, every so often when we were shooting hoop after school, some older brothers would show up, commandeer the court and show us all the things we knew we could never do. Inexorably, one of them would see us seeing them, raise his eyebrow and say the dangerous words: “You lookin’?”
Most likely, the question never presumed a possible transaction, and was more an offhand (but not ironic, because nobody knew what irony was at that age) way of reminding us, at once, who they were, who we were, and most significantly, who we would never be. But some other kids were in on the action; they had to be. Why else would we constantly be on the receiving end of these perfunctory solicitations? Eventually, we agreed that it could only be one group of unusual suspects: the freaks. Older students, the rock concert t-shirt wearing army of outcasts; the rebels who at one time had been athletes, or nerds, of drama dorks, and then popped through the pimple of post adolescent purgatory and found themselves born again as deadbeats. The ones, we belatedly recognized, who saw through the self-immolation of Izod shirts and feathered hair, the ones who shirked intramural activities and the safety of numbers, the ones who could no longer belong to any Key Club that might accept them as members. The ones who never even got hassled by the jocks because they simply were not worth the aggravation; a cafeteria-style ass kicking would not earn a striving sophomore any status. These were the guys, everyone knew, who dared to flick their middle fingers at student governance, decorum and the future: they were going nowhere and seemed to be in a real hurry to get there. These were the ones, we decided, who had the audacity, when the brothers asked if they were looking, to say yes.
Just say no? Remember, this was a world before computers and consoles and cell phones and even CD players. Not an innocent era, by any means, but a time when some of us read books because we couldn’t think of anything better to do. A time when growing pains were the physical kind and the one thing everyone agreed upon was that we couldn’t get older quickly enough. A time, most likely, that comprised the formative years so many adults feel an almost unbearable longing for, mostly because whatever it is they were feeling can’t ever be felt that way again. Sentimental? Shit, I still find myself craving the same things I hoped for then: a pretty girlfriend (remember going steady?), a decent report card (also known as a performance review), to be considered cool by the types of people who are considered cool, and mostly to be accountable, at last, and free to do whatever the hell I want when I grow up. Someday.
We didn’t know how much we did not know, but we knew what everyone else seemed to understand. Such as, the U.S.A. could kick some Soviet ass if it had to (ask Rocky), that God existed (and, assuredly, was a Capitalist God), that he who dies with the most toys wins, and we all knew exactly what we’d become after graduating from our first or second choice colleges: some of us would be practicing L.A. law, some of us would be sporting Top Gun bomber jackets, some of us would get wealthy on Wall Street, and the rest of us would have the old-fashioned types of jobs that you could actually describe in one or two words. What we were not going to be was forgettable. We did not know where we were headed, but we were emboldened by an instinctual understanding that our parents’ wallets would insulate us from too much reality, or at least break our fall if any of us tripped climbing up that American ladder.
Not quite everything we believed turned out to be wrong, and life is usually kind enough to wait a while before it reveals some of the answers to questions you never knew needed to be asked. But even before graduation we were disabused of at least one illusion that took us down a notch or two: it wasn’t the freaks that dared not to just say no, it was ourselves.
Not me, you understand. I was too chickenshit, or at least too Catholic, to dabble in the dust, and while I reckon there was a vague contentment underlying that decision, I am even more relieved, looking back. See, I went to college, and I saw the reefer (smoked it too), smelled the shrooms (ate them too), saw the unsnorted remnants of white powder under the noses of blissed out fraternity brothers (fortunately for all involved, I did not have the funds for that type of fun). And, obviously, the alcohol. None of us were ever the same after those first dozen or so hangovers: no matter what it dished out, we kept going back to the unwell, looking for something to…what, exactly? Provide pleasure? Instigate adventure? Derail inhibition? Seek fleeting solace from the cold, cruel world? Sure, all that crap, but something else as well. There is a reason the most expensive advertisements are still allowed to promote an activity that kills more kids each year than any boogeyman on amphetamines—or Nancy Reagan for that matter—could ever conceive in their darkest dreams. There is something that alcohol almost, but never quite delivers, that keeps everyone in the game. Just like back in the day, there’s safety in numbers, and it would sure seem Un-American to cast aspersions on something so many people need to believe in.
Nevertheless, I saw a handful of buddies brought low, churned up and rehabbed before they turned twenty-one, and every year at least one friend or acquaintance finally finds something else to look forward to on Friday afternoons. What I’m saying is, I’m lucky. Because I never pushed my luck and ended up biting something that bit back and wouldn’t let go. But if I knew then, what I know now, I may have unwittingly joined a few of the guys—who got better grades than I did—when they took trips across town in a borrowed car.
Get this: not only were some of the guys we knew in on the action (and for the record, as far as they knew the freaks never touched the stuff—more irony wasted, like everything else, on the young), their escapades were abetted by a teacher. Put another way, a teacher at our school was paying them to make drug runs. To an adult, today, this shouldn’t seem shocking; indeed, it is practically expected. But that is only because we are too well acquainted with irony, which merely proves that we no longer have the capacity to surprise ourselves, if we ever did. In any event, it turns out that the mastermind of these Love Boat runs was quite possibly the least likely culprit and therefore (in hindsight?) the most obvious. Mr. X., as he was not known, since this is not his name, was at the time—and still, in my mind—ageless, simply an adult, although he could not have been much older than thirty. If this story were depicted in a movie, the car the kids borrowed would have been nice, perhaps ironically nice, instead of the unremarkable piece of shit it actually was. And, crucially, Mr. X. would be played by George Clooney, or a lesser star that still emanates the slick celluloid charisma no real people can ever obtain. In the movie, the teacher would have a tragic flaw: a college football injury that derailed his obvious path to the pros, or some type of self-loathing resulting from a dark secret that he finally confronts in the end. Or something similarly redemptory, and ridiculous. In truth, Mr. X. was a mess—not quite morbidly obese, but working on it with the inimitable dedication of a junk food enthusiast. To look at him, even then, it seemed exceedingly improbable that he was once a varsity wrestler (in another state, in another world) and an offensive tackle. Well, it was a little easier to imagine him as an offensive tackle. And he had the pictures to prove it. Nonetheless, those days behind him, he had really gone to the (hot) dogs, a second-rate high school jock who had peaked at age seventeen, then metastasized into a third-rate high school geometry teacher. At least, looking back, he’d had the educational upbringing (in another state, in another world) to have sufficiently mastered mathematics. Today, after TV and YouTube had their way with him, he would have been fatter sooner, and the best he could have hoped for was teaching P.E., although (again, ironically) the gym teachers are in better shape today then they were then. Hopefully they are dressing better as well.
Even today, it’s difficult to determine which revelation is the most unsettling: that one of our boys was casually smoking Love Boat with older, cooler guys (it was enough that, as a junior, he could hang with the senior wrestlers, the ones who walked through the locker room like Greek gods with acne), that he could dabble without fear of addiction (he could hit it and quit it, precisely what the rest of us, with our after school special sensibilities, were terrified of being unable to do), or that the assistant wrestling coach, and teacher (!), was a more than recreational user. He was crazy, and brazen, enough to loan his car, and his funds, to a group of varsity lettermen so they could cross the bridge into D.C. and get the goods. Or maybe they snuck right across town, in broad daylight, to the basketball court, near a neighborhood that was verboten even before rap music, and guns, were invented.
You know how this story ends: nothing happened (wait for the movie). The star athletes went off to school on scholarships and our boy, we assumed, grew out of his bad habit or, with his willing accomplices removed from the scene of the crimes, had no one to instigate further misdeeds. Mr. X.? Long gone; no idea where, not even worth Googling. Besides, unless he found Christ or Jenny Craig, the smart money says he’s currently kickin’ it in his oversized coffin. Full disclosure: it’s not his fault that I never understood parallelograms or gave a good shit about the Pythagorean theorem (remember that? Me neither), but he certainly didn’t do much to ameliorate my apathy.
In any event, everyone had plans before graduation; everyone had plans for after graduation as well, but that’s a different story altogether. Some of the guys were still pilfering liquor from their parents’ supply—that eternal fountain of youth; some guys (the smart ones, the lucky ones) were still trying to get laid for the first time before high school ended. Allegedly, some of them succeeded. Some people were busy doing whatever it was everyone did before you could live your entire life online. The rest of us, bored and boring, not knowing enough to be careful what we wished for, felt begrudgingly grateful to stand on the ostensible threshold of adulthood. We posed for pictures, we put on the caps and gowns, and eventually, inevitably, we strolled across that stage.
But one of us wasn’t there that day: our boy, who need not be named, and in the interest of fuller disclosure, was only on the periphery of my circle (that would need to be addressed in more detail for the movie). Still, we knew him, we grew up with him, and those of us who weren’t doing the things he shouldn’t have been doing were just as surprised as everyone else when, (it seemed) he was abruptly yanked out of school in the middle of the year. Just like that, he was gone, sent to one of those discreet asylums that only upper-middle class parents and pop stars from the cover of People magazine can afford. He wasn’t there, but he was with us, ensuring that we did not, in the name of good dumb fun, become unwitting apprentices to the Sorcerer who, with one angel-scented spell, could send us careening into an early adulthood. Or, even worse, some of the lives none of us would ever have imagined ourselves growing into.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Myself When I'm Real: An excerpt from the novel
I am not alone. I have a best friend, who happens to be a dog. He is really good for me, reminding me to eat, sleep, go to the bathroom and generally making sure that I get out a few times a day. He walks me whenever he gets the chance and our favorite time is after work, when we reenter the building and the walls and halls come alive, warm with the savory smells of home-made meals (you can never smell fast food, although that scent lingers in the elevator, as if ashamed to be associated with the honesty, the effort and industry of these prepared productions).
No one sits down to dinner anymore, but all around me, people are sitting down, eating meat loaf, or some sort of roast that has simmered on low heat all afternoon. Maybe there is even a pie prepared for dessert. Maybe, inside someone’s kitchen, it’s still the 1950’s.
And I remind myself that someday, if my cards play me right, I will enjoy a real meal around a table, and experience all that I’ve been missing during these efficient years of isolation. I will clear the table and clean the dishes, I will sit on the couch and take a crack at the crossword, or catch a made-for-TV movie, or go run errands or consult a book of baby names for the offspring on the way, and eventually I will work on improving my bad habits and attempt to overlook my wife’s inadequacies (the quirks that were so endearing in those early days). I will, at last, learn to communicate openly and as an adult. Mostly, I will not be alone.
My dog is a trooper.
He’s never called in sick a single day of his life: up at the crack of dawn every day, including weekends, stretched, eager, and anxious to take on the world. Or at least take a walk.
My dog takes his work very seriously, and has succeeded in making more friends than I have. He does not discriminate: men, women, cars, trees, and other dogs—especially other dogs. He wants to meet everyone, and he patrols the neighborhood like it’s his job. I, for one, admire his dedication.
Thanks to him, I am on a first-name basis with all the other dogs in my building, though I have a hard time remembering what to call their owners.
Take this guy: an older man (I don’t want to call him an old man), whose name I’ve never gotten around to establishing. I sort of prefer it that way, as he provides me with a mystery I enjoy embellishing. Where most of my neighbors are obviously what they are: mothers, fathers, bachelors, wives, working stiffs, senior citizens, anonymous law-abiding entities, et cetera, this man alone retains, for me and my imagination, an enigmatic air. He wears a wedding band, but I’ve never seen or met his spouse. He is friendly, so much so that it initially took me a while to warm up to him.
Maybe this is the way other people saw my old man. Yes, he is definitely someone’s father: he has rolled up his sleeves to punish, praise, clean, counsel, inspire, admonish, argue, approve, second-guess, support and silence. In short, things I have never done. And I think (I can’t help myself): he is a way I’ll never be.
All of us, of course, are more or less the same: we live, we work, we sleep, we eat, we love, we fight, we forget, we try to remember, we think, we break down and then we die. In this regard, all living creatures are more alike than not.
But humans are different.
We know who we are, so we wonder (we can’t help ourselves) things like: What has that man done that I’ll never do? What has he seen that I’ll never see? What parts of the world he once lived in are gone forever, replaced by newer things that younger people, not yet born, will wonder about, in time?
If I had lived in the ‘50’s, that man might have been a spy, a professor, a pedophile (I would have called him a pervert), a recluse, a con artist—but above all, he most certainly would be a Communist.
If I had lived in the 50’s, I would eat an egg for breakfast each morning with either bacon or sausage or sometimes both, I would also eat pastrami sandwiches, drink whole milk and smoke endless streams of cigarettes, I would be father to as many children as God (most certainly a Capitalist God) saw fit to provide, I would live closer to my parents, I would miss church service seldom on Sundays and never on Holy Days of Obligation, I would know how to fix my toilet and sink if they dripped, I would never have had a shirt professionally pressed, I would drive an American car and never wear a seat belt, I would have a job that I could actually describe in one or two words. I would be, quite conceivably, content.
My dog is content. One thing is for sure: if my dog lived in the ‘50’s, he would be content, just as he would be content fifty years from now. After all, all dogs want is other dogs (I think my dog thinks I’m a dog). People aren’t like that, which, I suppose is why people love dogs. The older man and I love our dogs, and for a few seconds we watch them sniff each other.
“Hot enough for ya?”
“Yeah well, it’s the humidity!”
(To ourselves we say this).
Then we go our separate ways, exchanging pleasantries.
I say: Have a nice day.
Likewise, he replies, then smiles. Not to mention a nice life.
I smile, then walk away, still smiling. Who the hell does this guy think he is, saying something like that? How dare he say something like that. Unless he means it. No one says something like that. Unless they are actually, inconceivably content.
I’m still smiling, but then a sobering thought sideswipes me (again): That man is a way I’ll never be.
There is a man who sits near the pumps at the gas station I drive by to and from work each day. He is very obviously from somewhere else and has that certain look—the meek, awestruck eyes, the apprehensive gestures that indict him as someone who speaks little, if any, English—a stranger.
He remains respectfully distant from the customers who incessantly fill their tanks, like bees returning to the nest before heeding the urgency of their instinctual obligations—but near enough to the action to remain in plain view. He sells flowers. Actually, he doesn’t seem to sell anything, he pretty much sits there, on an upturned milk crate, often from early morning until well into the evening, after the rest of the weary warriors have commuted past him, home from work and their worries of the wicked world. He silently, stoically plies his wares, content to play his part in the charade: he is not accomplishing much, he is begging, and the milk crate and collection of fading flowers at his feet communicate his inexpressible anguish. Please help me, his unscrubbed face, his unlaced sneakers, his oversized slacks, his filthy, fidgeting fingers—everything but his voice—all ask, saying what he cannot, and will not, say for himself.
Once you reach the age where you want to begin lying about how old you are (signified when you start losing the hair on your head and find it turning up in places it has no business being, like your back, your shoulders, your ears and especially your nose) you want to slow down, avoid the wreckage that is ruining everyone around you.
You spend your formative years cultivating your own unique set of issues and get to a certain age (some people actually become adults) where you realize you have issues, and they are the only things you own that no one else wants. Then you work toward eradicating your issues, and the strongest amongst us survive and eventually some of them make money sitting there, listening to people (who are paying them) talk about their issues. Then, inevitably, sitting around and listening to people talk about their issues helps them develop an accelerated, more complicated set of issues.
No one gets out of here unscathed, and you may think you’ve got life beat, but it waits, then sucker punches you in sudden death overtime.
Take this guy, for instance.
Laying low at the stoplight, I have no choice but to get a load of this specimen strolling down the sidewalk, a big shit-eating grin stretched across his face. Immediately, instinctively, I roll up the window.
“What a shame,” (to myself I say this).
What kind of sick-ass world are we living in when the sight of some happy-go-lucky son of a bitch, some idiot who actually seems to be enjoying life, arouses a feeling of fear?
And yet. It’s always the smiling psycho who slips out a sawed-off shotgun in the supermarket, or takes a hostage at the playground. It’s never the guy grimacing in line behind you; it’s never the sketchy character with the five o’clock shadow and fedora that shoots up the 7-Eleven—those faces only exist in films. Besides, no one smiles when they’re walking down the street, not in real life, not these days. Anyone who does is already living in the future; beaming at visions of the bomb they just detonated, causing a twenty-car pile up on the freeway. Or else they are smirking in silent acknowledgment of the helpful voices in their head admonishing them to be ever vigilant for anal-probing aliens, or eavesdropping federal agents, or the guy in my car looking at them with envy in his eyes. No, it’s infinitely more refreshing, and routine, to observe a stranger, swearing and scowling his way down the street. That’s a person you can trust, a person hiding no secrets, a person ensconced in the painful prison of the here-and-now.
I’m listening to the old woman again.
This is another part of my daily routine: every time I enter the building after walking my dog, or if I’m stopping to get the mail, or anytime I am anywhere between my front door and the main entrance, this woman (I have no other option but to say she is an old woman) whose name I of course cannot remember, appears like a mosquito at a campfire.
She is there every time—every time—if I’m walking out (I’ve learned not to step out of my door in only my boxer shorts) to throw my trash down the chute, she’s there; if I am coming or going to work, she’s there; if I open my door (I’ve learned not to open my door without my boxer shorts on) to get the newspaper, she’s there; and especially if I’m returning with rapidly cooling carry-out food, she’s there.
I had half-seriously begun to consider whether or not she had rigged my door to some sort of honing device, and then I slowly started to notice, over time, it isn’t just me (of course it isn’t just me)—it’s even worse than that. It’s everyone, it’s anyone: anyone she can see or talk to, anyone she can make that human touch with, however fleetingly, any excuse she can find to escape the oppression of her immaculate isolation.
Bang: another day ends with a whimper. Cooked on the surface but still raw inside, it’s all in a daze work as I drive home through disorienting yet familiar streets. Survival suburban-style; a metropolis in transition, trying its best to live up to the image it was designed to imitate—sprung from the minds of forward-thinking people who are trying to recreate the past. On the corner high school punks stand beside a phone booth, making no calls; a quick right turn and I’m feeling the money dread as I cruise past several blocks of four car families. Being outside the city is safer, particularly if you prefer the sound of crickets to cop sirens. Eventually, I arrive somewhere in the middle ground of this middlebrow town, and for lack of any other options, I am relieved.
And yet. This is supposed to happen later, with wife and kids and a basement to be banished to after hours. I’ll deal with that later. I think.
My front door is the one mystery to which I have the key, but for some reason I still feel as though I’m sneaking up on a stranger every time I return from a dishonest day’s work; I’m not sure who I expect to see, who might be hiding from me, who possibly could have found the way into my modest refuge from friends and memories.
With Pavlovian precision, I make my way to the medicine cabinet and pour myself a bracing plug of bourbon. If this were a movie (I think, mostly in the past, but even today), I would grab my crystal decanter, filled with obviously expensive spirits, and administer that potion the old-fashioned way, needing no ice cubes, especially since I would never get around to drinking it, as it’s only a prop, a cliché. No one reaches for that tumbler these days (except in movies); the question is: did they ever? Even in the ‘50’s? Or has it always been part of the script?
I still have hangovers, thank God.
Everyone who has known an alcoholic knows that as soon as you stop feeling the pain, it’s because you are no longer feeling the pain; you are no longer feeling much of anything.
So, I welcome the horrors of the digital cock crowing in my ear at an uncalled for hour, and am grateful for the flaming phlegm in my throat, the snakes chasing their tails through my sinuses, the smoke stuck behind my eyelids, the shards of glass in my gut, and the special ring of hell circling my head. Because if it weren’t for those handful of my least favorite things, I’d know I had some serious problems.
All of us can think of a friend whose father (or mother for that matter), we came to understand, was in an entirely different league when it came to the science of cirrhosis. The man who falls asleep fully clothed with a snifter balanced over his balls, then up and out the door before sunrise, like the rest of the inverted vampires who do their dirty work during the day in three piece suits. Maybe it’s a martini at lunch, or several cigarettes an hour to take the edge of. Whatever it is, whatever it takes, they always make it out, and they always come back, for the family and to the refrigerator, filled with the best friends anyone can afford.
Our friends’ fathers came of age in the bad old days that fight it out, for posterity, in the pages of books, uneasy memories and the wishful thinking of TV reruns: the ‘50’s. These are men who have never opened a bottle of wine and have no use for imported beer, men who actually have rye in their liquor cabinets—who still have liquor cabinets for that matter. These are men who were raised by men that never considered church or sick-days optional, and the only thing they disliked more than strangers was their neighbors. Men who didn’t believe in diseases and didn’t drink to escape so much as to remind themselves exactly what they never had a chance to become. Theirs was an alcoholism that did not involve happy hours and karaoke contests; theirs was a sit down with the radio and a whiskey sour, a refill with dinner and one before, during and after the ballgame. Or maybe they’d mow the lawn to liven things up, tinker under the hood of a car that had a long way to go before it could become a classic. Or perhaps friends would come over to play cards. Sometimes a second bottle would get broken out. This was a slow burn of similar nights: stiff upper lips, the sun setting on boys playing baseball, mothers sitting on the couch watching TVs families did not yet own, of forced smiles battling bottled tears in the bottom of a coffee mug, of amphetamines and affairs, overhead fans and undernourished kids, of evening papers and a creeping conviction that there is no God, of poets unable to make art out of the mess they’d made of their lives.
It was a hard time where people did not live happily ever after, if they ever lived at all. It was a time, in other words, not unlike our own.
Daydream notion. Sitting on the porch on a Sunday afternoon. Too early to start drinking, too late to stop myself from the too many drinks I had last night, and wondering things like: how seriously should one consider the expiration date on a jar of mayonnaise?
Hung over. Overhung. Hung out to dry heave. Name it, if it’s bad, that’s me.
Inhaling fast food (obviously), wondering how much my liver will let me push it around before it stands up and says I’m not going to take this anymore! It’s too hard to think and eat, so I concentrate on the food, trying not to acknowledge how incredibly awful this crap is (bad for me, bad for the environment, bad for the people who make minimum wage selling it, bad for the people who make less than minimum wage manufacturing it, and especially bad for the miserable animals whose synthetic lives are sacrificed so that we can do all these bad things).
Every time I eat fast food it’s like having sex with an old girlfriend. I’ll start to think about it: lustfully, then obsessively, then violently. I need to have it, and when I’m finally enjoying it there is nothing better, nothing else in the wretched world exists while I’m getting it on, getting it in me, devoting every iota of my being into the dirty enterprise. Eventually, inevitably, it ends, and the second it’s over those intolerable feelings of guilt begin. The sloth, the lack of control, the sickening pangs of self-loathing. Et cetera. And I promise myself never to do it again. Then the whole room reeks of what just went down, and it hangs in the air, imploding like an enraged cloud until, in my defiant fashion, I get hungry again and the smell starts to distract me until I can’t take it, and I need more. Immediately.
Later: it’s late, we’re alive, and I suddenly wish I were alone.
It was as good for her (I hope) as it was for me, and after, we lie down in darkness, with no choice but to talk since neither of us happens to smoke.
Tell me about it, I say.
Tell you what? She asks.
What’s your story? I ask.
I got laid off, she says.
Shitcanned? I ask.
No, downsized, she says.
Everyone gets downsized, I say.
They do these days, she says.
Unless you’re lucky, I say.
You’ve been lucky so far, she says.
Yes, that’s why I’m so miserable, I say.
Tell me about it, she says.
Now get a load of this guy.
My neighbor, whose name I’ve of course forgotten—if in fact I ever knew it in the first place—(and, being roughly my age, never objects to and always answers my irrefutably cordial salutations which include chief, dude, bro, and the ever appropriate and all purpose man) is standing outside my door: I can see him through the peep hole.
While I wonder if I should wait to see if he’ll knock again, he knocks again. It’s eight-thirty in the morning, what’s the worst thing that could happen?
“Hey man,” he says, embarrassed or anxious. Or both (at least he doesn’t remember my name either).
“What’s up my man?” I say, not missing a beat.
“Listen, sorry to bother you…you on your way to work?”
“Yeah, actually…why, is everything okay?”
“Uh, yeah, listen, do you mind if I come inside for a second?”
I back up obligingly, resigned to roll with it. What choice is there? After all, I did open the door.
He corners me in my kitchen and asks if I know anyone who might be interested in buying a condo. His condo, for instance.
“I’m sure there are plenty of people who would love to live here,” I offer.
“Yeah, I know, but…I mean, do you know anyone who’s looking to buy a place?”
“I’d be happy to ask around, you know, put the word on the street and whatnot…”
“Yeah, that’d be cool, I’d appreciate that.”
He looks away and it’s my turn to say something.
“Everything okay?”
‘Yeah, well, I got laid off, you know? So I’m just gonna move home for a while, with my folks. You know, ‘til I get my shit straight.”
“I hear you,” I say as encouragingly as possible, but it’s only half true. I do hear him, but I also hear myself (saying I hear you) as well as the voice inside my head, which is processing this situation and repeating the verdict: Not good, not good, not good.
He is sweating, his hands—which seem puffy and pale, I’ve never noticed what unbelievable meat hooks he has, though admittedly, the only times I bump into him are in the hallway as he disappears into his end unit with a case of Miller Lite cans under one arm, McDonalds or some other fast food monstrosity in the other—his hands, exhibits A and B, are shaking like the lid on a boiling pot, they are very obviously not obeying their master, and before I have half a chance to put two and two together he interrupts my internal assessment and looks at me searchingly.
“Hey, uh, you got any beer?”
At eight thirty-three in the A.M., there is only one possible answer to a question like this: “Sure,” I say.
I open the refrigerator and remember: I drank my last beer last night, which makes me a liar.
“Actually, I don’t,” I start, but sense that will not suffice, so I hold the door open and let him inspect for himself, which he does, making us both feel better—or worse—depending on how you look at it. He accepts this answer, but is clearly not satisfied with my response.
“Oh. I have plenty of liquor, if…”
“Yeah, do you care if I take a shot of something?”
Are you sure you’re okay? (To myself I say this).
A pint glass is obviously inappropriate, so I grab a juice glass and put it down on the counter, sliding it over to him like a bartender from a black and white western. He has eagerly grabbed my fifth of Jack Daniels and I tell him to help himself.
He pours a generous, bordering on unbelievable, belt of my booze and inhales it in one febrile motion. This is strictly business (to myself I say this).
“Better?” I inquire, and actually mean it, I actually want to know.
“Uh…do you mind if I get another one?”
“Hey bro, knock yourself out,” I say. Stupidly.
He doesn’t notice because he’s too busy securing the second round in case I try and give last call at the last second. Even the sweat on his forehead seems relieved. Although I know exactly what time it is, I can’t help myself from looking up at the digits blinking on my oven: 8:34.
He looks at me and nods his head, expressing gratitude with his burning eyes. The eyes never lie. Then he snatches a tube of toothpaste out of his front pocket, puts it in his mouth and pulls the trigger.
“So, you wouldn’t mind asking around, you know, just see if anyone is looking to maybe live here…I’ll cut a deal…”
“No problem,” I assure him.
“…I’ll hook you up with a finder’s fee too…”
“Oh don’t worry about that man, I’m happy to help.”
Not good, not good, not good.
“Let me give you a card,” he says, putting the toothpaste back and reaching into his other pocket. I’m surprised, in spite of myself, that between the shaking and the sheer size of his hands he can even fit them into his shirtsleeves.
“Fuck,” he says, frazzled or furious. Or both.
“What’s up?” I ask.
“I left my fucking cards in my place…”
“Well don’t worry about it, let me just write your number down and…”
“No, let me run and get them, and you can hand them out and shit…”
“Okay.”
After a few painful minutes pass, I go down to get them myself.
On the way, I think: Gambling debts? Drugs? Or both?
Drugs, it must be drugs.
Whatever it is, it’s something I know I want no part of. It’s obviously something my neighbor wants no part of either, or we wouldn’t both be here right now.
I knock on the door.
It opens, quickly, and my neighbor walks out, shutting it behind him. Apparently I’m not supposed to see inside. Perhaps I don’t want to see inside.
He follows me into the hall.
“Hey man, I appreciate anything you can do.”
“No problem dude, I’m happy to help…”
“Listen,” he leans in close. “Do you mind if I grab another shot?”
“Sure thing bro.”
I’ve already locked my door on the way out, so I let myself back in, tricking my dog into thinking a full day has already passed.
The bottle and glass are still on the counter, forming sticky circles of an early morning crime scene.
“Do you mind if I pour a stiff one?”
“Help yourself chief.”
You want to take the bottle with you? (To myself I say this).
He pours a shot that would give Liberty Valance pause, polishes it off, and then pulls out the toothpaste from his holster.
I ask no questions, he tells no tales.
I tell my dog to hold down the fort (again) and my dog looks confused or disappointed. Or both. I lock the door (again) and escort my soon-to-be-ex-neighbor out.
“Thanks again,” he says, then looks at me meaningfully. “I appreciate it.”
“Okay man, take care of yourself.”
“Give me a call if you hear anything.”
“Will do.”
Both of us seem to understand, as we go our separate ways, that we’ll never see each other again, and we are each somewhat deflated, probably for opposite reasons.
On the way to work I have a memory that’s more like a dream: Newark Airport. That shithole. A place has to be exceptionally beautiful, or exceptionally appalling, or incomprehensibly pointless, in order to be easily remembered years after a brief visit.
When I was a kid, (I couldn’t have been much older than eight) my father and I had a layover in Newark airport. Even then, I was perceptive enough to understand that this was no place I ever needed to return voluntarily.
An unassuming older man (at any rate, he was noticeably older than my old man, which made him old) sat in one of those impossibly plain plastic chairs, with his pants leg rolled up. It wasn’t until we got closer that I realized two things: he was alone, and he was scratching at a series of scabs on his shin. For some reason he looked our way at the moment we passed him, and after sizing us up, he stood and amiably approached my father.
“Sir, did you need someone to help you and your son carry your bags?”
“No thanks, we’re okay,” my pops replied, looking ahead and picking up the pace.
The man was persistent. In the space of fifteen seconds—my father denied him three times—my emotions slid from the appreciation of possibly having someone carry my suitcase for me, to the vague, uneasy sense that my father was being somehow rude, a jerk, to the unsettling awareness of recognition. I sensed something I’d seen plenty of, but never before in any person older than myself: fear. I saw it in his eyes, and felt it in my insides.
As we walked away my old man waited until we were at a charitable distance, then looked at me meaningfully and offered the somber assertion: That’s as low as you can go. I asked him to elaborate, as I was apt to do, and he was either unwilling or unable to add anything to his observation, as he was apt to do. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand what my father was saying, I understood him perfectly. It was because I understood him that I needed him to say more, to talk to me a little longer about it, about anything, anything to interrupt that silence and the sudden thoughts that accompanied it.
It’s easy to believe that people like this exist for our sakes: they are dying lessons on how not to live, warnings of what could happen if you weren’t careful and found yourself scratching at scabs in the world’s ugliest airport. We forget, or we don’t allow ourselves to entertain the idea, that these people have histories, that these shadows and signposts don’t happen to serve a purpose for anyone else; they were once actual people themselves.
I realize, now, my father was wrong about one thing. That’s not as low as you can go. You can go lower, a whole lot lower. But perhaps it’s more disturbing to see the ones that are on the way down, it’s somehow easier to accept the ones at the bottom of the ocean; it’s the ones who are sinking, who are still within reach, who are drowning noisily in front of you, who sometimes have the temerity to ask you to hold out a hand. These are the ones we can scarcely tolerate, because every so often when we look at them and see ourselves.
If I had lived in the 50’s, I would have taken a real job right out of college, or I may not have gone to college. I would have had to start earning a living to support my family: married at twenty-two, a father within the year. That’s just the way it would have been.
Maybe I’d like my job; maybe I would be content. Maybe I would consume so many steaks and cigarettes and whiskey sours that nothing could touch me—I would be obese, an impenetrable fortress of flesh, and no pain could get past me.
Or maybe I would work and eat and smoke myself into a muddled mess and punch the clock prematurely—another casualty of the Cold War. Maybe I would be smart enough to have left my family something, and maybe my wife would remarry and live off the fat of my labor and I wouldn’t begrudge her because I was in a better place, drinking Bloody Marys on the great golf course in the sky.
Or maybe my wife, being of her time, would not wish to remarry and instead focus her energies on the grandchildren and church functions and the increasingly mundane exigencies of old age. Maybe she would want to meet another man but her prospects would be poor—after all, she was married to a big slob who she somehow stayed devoted to and still mourned. Plus, there were always the kids to contend with. Used goods are used goods, whether you’re talking cars, real estate or relationships.
Maybe she would solider on, alone, oblivious to the insanity of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, indifferent to the surreal psychosis of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, and grow into her shrinking body the way a spider’s nest settles into a windowsill.
Maybe she would eventually understand that the family home—the house in which she lost her virginity, raised her children, cleaned a thousand rooms, cooked a million meals—had outlasted her, and embrace the inevitable.
Maybe, in the end, she would be a lot like the woman across the hall. She’s had a good life (please allow her to have been happy: in my mind if not in actual fact). She, at least, once had a husband, and maybe a son and daughter that she dotes on and who love her dearly, but they live so far away and are so busy with work and kids and life and time just slips away and so it goes.
Or maybe it is even worse than that: maybe she was never married, never found exactly what she was looking for, or the right ones overlooked her until it was too late. Maybe she was cursed with the blessing of being always apart, in all the important ways, from the utterly average, anonymous faces she came into contact with day in and day out, and like almost no one else she knew, she was unaware of it.
I want to walk out my door, but I can’t.
And this time, for once, it’s not because I don’t want to, it’s because I’m desperately certain that she won’t be out there waiting for me.
Running out of gas.
My car needs fuel too, and as I pull into the station, sure enough my man is out there, like the sun setting in the west. Out there, always, in the heat and the rain and mostly in the ceaseless, crushing boredom. Out there every day, very likely taking away a lot less than some street-corner wino stuck in any second-rate American city.
As I pump manifest destiny into my machine, I can feel the stranger behind me, screaming his same silent song. And then, finally: enough is enough. I turn around, but he is not looking at me. He is sitting on his milk crate, clocking the traffic, reluctant to make eye contact even with the cars. He says nothing, sees nothing, but surely hears everything. How can he not, when it’s all there, right in front of his defeated face? And it occurs to me, I’ve never once seen a single person buy a flower or even acknowledge him.
What can you do?
“Hey man, I’ll take one of those flowers, I’ll take all of them…”
The stranger looks at me suspiciously and shakes his head. He has not understood a word I’ve spoken.
“Listen, I’ll buy all of them…”
I pull out my wallet and start speaking the language everyone understands.
I keep giving and he keeps taking. I don’t count and he doesn’t complain.
Finally, I’ve done all I can do, and he smiles. He says a lot of things, suddenly, with those grateful eyes. I need to leave before he tells me any other things I probably should hear.
I almost make it to my car and then, before I can stop myself, I turn around to tell him a thing or two with my own eyes.
He’s gone: the man, the milk crate, even the flowers I was just holding in my hands. A mirage? Maybe a miracle. Now it’s only me and an endless stream of traffic, blowing by in both directions.
“Have a nice day,” I call out, to whomever might be listening.
Not to mention a nice life.
To myself, I say this.
No one sits down to dinner anymore, but all around me, people are sitting down, eating meat loaf, or some sort of roast that has simmered on low heat all afternoon. Maybe there is even a pie prepared for dessert. Maybe, inside someone’s kitchen, it’s still the 1950’s.
And I remind myself that someday, if my cards play me right, I will enjoy a real meal around a table, and experience all that I’ve been missing during these efficient years of isolation. I will clear the table and clean the dishes, I will sit on the couch and take a crack at the crossword, or catch a made-for-TV movie, or go run errands or consult a book of baby names for the offspring on the way, and eventually I will work on improving my bad habits and attempt to overlook my wife’s inadequacies (the quirks that were so endearing in those early days). I will, at last, learn to communicate openly and as an adult. Mostly, I will not be alone.
My dog is a trooper.
He’s never called in sick a single day of his life: up at the crack of dawn every day, including weekends, stretched, eager, and anxious to take on the world. Or at least take a walk.
My dog takes his work very seriously, and has succeeded in making more friends than I have. He does not discriminate: men, women, cars, trees, and other dogs—especially other dogs. He wants to meet everyone, and he patrols the neighborhood like it’s his job. I, for one, admire his dedication.
Thanks to him, I am on a first-name basis with all the other dogs in my building, though I have a hard time remembering what to call their owners.
Take this guy: an older man (I don’t want to call him an old man), whose name I’ve never gotten around to establishing. I sort of prefer it that way, as he provides me with a mystery I enjoy embellishing. Where most of my neighbors are obviously what they are: mothers, fathers, bachelors, wives, working stiffs, senior citizens, anonymous law-abiding entities, et cetera, this man alone retains, for me and my imagination, an enigmatic air. He wears a wedding band, but I’ve never seen or met his spouse. He is friendly, so much so that it initially took me a while to warm up to him.
Maybe this is the way other people saw my old man. Yes, he is definitely someone’s father: he has rolled up his sleeves to punish, praise, clean, counsel, inspire, admonish, argue, approve, second-guess, support and silence. In short, things I have never done. And I think (I can’t help myself): he is a way I’ll never be.
All of us, of course, are more or less the same: we live, we work, we sleep, we eat, we love, we fight, we forget, we try to remember, we think, we break down and then we die. In this regard, all living creatures are more alike than not.
But humans are different.
We know who we are, so we wonder (we can’t help ourselves) things like: What has that man done that I’ll never do? What has he seen that I’ll never see? What parts of the world he once lived in are gone forever, replaced by newer things that younger people, not yet born, will wonder about, in time?
If I had lived in the ‘50’s, that man might have been a spy, a professor, a pedophile (I would have called him a pervert), a recluse, a con artist—but above all, he most certainly would be a Communist.
If I had lived in the 50’s, I would eat an egg for breakfast each morning with either bacon or sausage or sometimes both, I would also eat pastrami sandwiches, drink whole milk and smoke endless streams of cigarettes, I would be father to as many children as God (most certainly a Capitalist God) saw fit to provide, I would live closer to my parents, I would miss church service seldom on Sundays and never on Holy Days of Obligation, I would know how to fix my toilet and sink if they dripped, I would never have had a shirt professionally pressed, I would drive an American car and never wear a seat belt, I would have a job that I could actually describe in one or two words. I would be, quite conceivably, content.
My dog is content. One thing is for sure: if my dog lived in the ‘50’s, he would be content, just as he would be content fifty years from now. After all, all dogs want is other dogs (I think my dog thinks I’m a dog). People aren’t like that, which, I suppose is why people love dogs. The older man and I love our dogs, and for a few seconds we watch them sniff each other.
“Hot enough for ya?”
“Yeah well, it’s the humidity!”
(To ourselves we say this).
Then we go our separate ways, exchanging pleasantries.
I say: Have a nice day.
Likewise, he replies, then smiles. Not to mention a nice life.
I smile, then walk away, still smiling. Who the hell does this guy think he is, saying something like that? How dare he say something like that. Unless he means it. No one says something like that. Unless they are actually, inconceivably content.
I’m still smiling, but then a sobering thought sideswipes me (again): That man is a way I’ll never be.
There is a man who sits near the pumps at the gas station I drive by to and from work each day. He is very obviously from somewhere else and has that certain look—the meek, awestruck eyes, the apprehensive gestures that indict him as someone who speaks little, if any, English—a stranger.
He remains respectfully distant from the customers who incessantly fill their tanks, like bees returning to the nest before heeding the urgency of their instinctual obligations—but near enough to the action to remain in plain view. He sells flowers. Actually, he doesn’t seem to sell anything, he pretty much sits there, on an upturned milk crate, often from early morning until well into the evening, after the rest of the weary warriors have commuted past him, home from work and their worries of the wicked world. He silently, stoically plies his wares, content to play his part in the charade: he is not accomplishing much, he is begging, and the milk crate and collection of fading flowers at his feet communicate his inexpressible anguish. Please help me, his unscrubbed face, his unlaced sneakers, his oversized slacks, his filthy, fidgeting fingers—everything but his voice—all ask, saying what he cannot, and will not, say for himself.
Once you reach the age where you want to begin lying about how old you are (signified when you start losing the hair on your head and find it turning up in places it has no business being, like your back, your shoulders, your ears and especially your nose) you want to slow down, avoid the wreckage that is ruining everyone around you.
You spend your formative years cultivating your own unique set of issues and get to a certain age (some people actually become adults) where you realize you have issues, and they are the only things you own that no one else wants. Then you work toward eradicating your issues, and the strongest amongst us survive and eventually some of them make money sitting there, listening to people (who are paying them) talk about their issues. Then, inevitably, sitting around and listening to people talk about their issues helps them develop an accelerated, more complicated set of issues.
No one gets out of here unscathed, and you may think you’ve got life beat, but it waits, then sucker punches you in sudden death overtime.
Take this guy, for instance.
Laying low at the stoplight, I have no choice but to get a load of this specimen strolling down the sidewalk, a big shit-eating grin stretched across his face. Immediately, instinctively, I roll up the window.
“What a shame,” (to myself I say this).
What kind of sick-ass world are we living in when the sight of some happy-go-lucky son of a bitch, some idiot who actually seems to be enjoying life, arouses a feeling of fear?
And yet. It’s always the smiling psycho who slips out a sawed-off shotgun in the supermarket, or takes a hostage at the playground. It’s never the guy grimacing in line behind you; it’s never the sketchy character with the five o’clock shadow and fedora that shoots up the 7-Eleven—those faces only exist in films. Besides, no one smiles when they’re walking down the street, not in real life, not these days. Anyone who does is already living in the future; beaming at visions of the bomb they just detonated, causing a twenty-car pile up on the freeway. Or else they are smirking in silent acknowledgment of the helpful voices in their head admonishing them to be ever vigilant for anal-probing aliens, or eavesdropping federal agents, or the guy in my car looking at them with envy in his eyes. No, it’s infinitely more refreshing, and routine, to observe a stranger, swearing and scowling his way down the street. That’s a person you can trust, a person hiding no secrets, a person ensconced in the painful prison of the here-and-now.
I’m listening to the old woman again.
This is another part of my daily routine: every time I enter the building after walking my dog, or if I’m stopping to get the mail, or anytime I am anywhere between my front door and the main entrance, this woman (I have no other option but to say she is an old woman) whose name I of course cannot remember, appears like a mosquito at a campfire.
She is there every time—every time—if I’m walking out (I’ve learned not to step out of my door in only my boxer shorts) to throw my trash down the chute, she’s there; if I am coming or going to work, she’s there; if I open my door (I’ve learned not to open my door without my boxer shorts on) to get the newspaper, she’s there; and especially if I’m returning with rapidly cooling carry-out food, she’s there.
I had half-seriously begun to consider whether or not she had rigged my door to some sort of honing device, and then I slowly started to notice, over time, it isn’t just me (of course it isn’t just me)—it’s even worse than that. It’s everyone, it’s anyone: anyone she can see or talk to, anyone she can make that human touch with, however fleetingly, any excuse she can find to escape the oppression of her immaculate isolation.
Bang: another day ends with a whimper. Cooked on the surface but still raw inside, it’s all in a daze work as I drive home through disorienting yet familiar streets. Survival suburban-style; a metropolis in transition, trying its best to live up to the image it was designed to imitate—sprung from the minds of forward-thinking people who are trying to recreate the past. On the corner high school punks stand beside a phone booth, making no calls; a quick right turn and I’m feeling the money dread as I cruise past several blocks of four car families. Being outside the city is safer, particularly if you prefer the sound of crickets to cop sirens. Eventually, I arrive somewhere in the middle ground of this middlebrow town, and for lack of any other options, I am relieved.
And yet. This is supposed to happen later, with wife and kids and a basement to be banished to after hours. I’ll deal with that later. I think.
My front door is the one mystery to which I have the key, but for some reason I still feel as though I’m sneaking up on a stranger every time I return from a dishonest day’s work; I’m not sure who I expect to see, who might be hiding from me, who possibly could have found the way into my modest refuge from friends and memories.
With Pavlovian precision, I make my way to the medicine cabinet and pour myself a bracing plug of bourbon. If this were a movie (I think, mostly in the past, but even today), I would grab my crystal decanter, filled with obviously expensive spirits, and administer that potion the old-fashioned way, needing no ice cubes, especially since I would never get around to drinking it, as it’s only a prop, a cliché. No one reaches for that tumbler these days (except in movies); the question is: did they ever? Even in the ‘50’s? Or has it always been part of the script?
I still have hangovers, thank God.
Everyone who has known an alcoholic knows that as soon as you stop feeling the pain, it’s because you are no longer feeling the pain; you are no longer feeling much of anything.
So, I welcome the horrors of the digital cock crowing in my ear at an uncalled for hour, and am grateful for the flaming phlegm in my throat, the snakes chasing their tails through my sinuses, the smoke stuck behind my eyelids, the shards of glass in my gut, and the special ring of hell circling my head. Because if it weren’t for those handful of my least favorite things, I’d know I had some serious problems.
All of us can think of a friend whose father (or mother for that matter), we came to understand, was in an entirely different league when it came to the science of cirrhosis. The man who falls asleep fully clothed with a snifter balanced over his balls, then up and out the door before sunrise, like the rest of the inverted vampires who do their dirty work during the day in three piece suits. Maybe it’s a martini at lunch, or several cigarettes an hour to take the edge of. Whatever it is, whatever it takes, they always make it out, and they always come back, for the family and to the refrigerator, filled with the best friends anyone can afford.
Our friends’ fathers came of age in the bad old days that fight it out, for posterity, in the pages of books, uneasy memories and the wishful thinking of TV reruns: the ‘50’s. These are men who have never opened a bottle of wine and have no use for imported beer, men who actually have rye in their liquor cabinets—who still have liquor cabinets for that matter. These are men who were raised by men that never considered church or sick-days optional, and the only thing they disliked more than strangers was their neighbors. Men who didn’t believe in diseases and didn’t drink to escape so much as to remind themselves exactly what they never had a chance to become. Theirs was an alcoholism that did not involve happy hours and karaoke contests; theirs was a sit down with the radio and a whiskey sour, a refill with dinner and one before, during and after the ballgame. Or maybe they’d mow the lawn to liven things up, tinker under the hood of a car that had a long way to go before it could become a classic. Or perhaps friends would come over to play cards. Sometimes a second bottle would get broken out. This was a slow burn of similar nights: stiff upper lips, the sun setting on boys playing baseball, mothers sitting on the couch watching TVs families did not yet own, of forced smiles battling bottled tears in the bottom of a coffee mug, of amphetamines and affairs, overhead fans and undernourished kids, of evening papers and a creeping conviction that there is no God, of poets unable to make art out of the mess they’d made of their lives.
It was a hard time where people did not live happily ever after, if they ever lived at all. It was a time, in other words, not unlike our own.
Daydream notion. Sitting on the porch on a Sunday afternoon. Too early to start drinking, too late to stop myself from the too many drinks I had last night, and wondering things like: how seriously should one consider the expiration date on a jar of mayonnaise?
Hung over. Overhung. Hung out to dry heave. Name it, if it’s bad, that’s me.
Inhaling fast food (obviously), wondering how much my liver will let me push it around before it stands up and says I’m not going to take this anymore! It’s too hard to think and eat, so I concentrate on the food, trying not to acknowledge how incredibly awful this crap is (bad for me, bad for the environment, bad for the people who make minimum wage selling it, bad for the people who make less than minimum wage manufacturing it, and especially bad for the miserable animals whose synthetic lives are sacrificed so that we can do all these bad things).
Every time I eat fast food it’s like having sex with an old girlfriend. I’ll start to think about it: lustfully, then obsessively, then violently. I need to have it, and when I’m finally enjoying it there is nothing better, nothing else in the wretched world exists while I’m getting it on, getting it in me, devoting every iota of my being into the dirty enterprise. Eventually, inevitably, it ends, and the second it’s over those intolerable feelings of guilt begin. The sloth, the lack of control, the sickening pangs of self-loathing. Et cetera. And I promise myself never to do it again. Then the whole room reeks of what just went down, and it hangs in the air, imploding like an enraged cloud until, in my defiant fashion, I get hungry again and the smell starts to distract me until I can’t take it, and I need more. Immediately.
Later: it’s late, we’re alive, and I suddenly wish I were alone.
It was as good for her (I hope) as it was for me, and after, we lie down in darkness, with no choice but to talk since neither of us happens to smoke.
Tell me about it, I say.
Tell you what? She asks.
What’s your story? I ask.
I got laid off, she says.
Shitcanned? I ask.
No, downsized, she says.
Everyone gets downsized, I say.
They do these days, she says.
Unless you’re lucky, I say.
You’ve been lucky so far, she says.
Yes, that’s why I’m so miserable, I say.
Tell me about it, she says.
Now get a load of this guy.
My neighbor, whose name I’ve of course forgotten—if in fact I ever knew it in the first place—(and, being roughly my age, never objects to and always answers my irrefutably cordial salutations which include chief, dude, bro, and the ever appropriate and all purpose man) is standing outside my door: I can see him through the peep hole.
While I wonder if I should wait to see if he’ll knock again, he knocks again. It’s eight-thirty in the morning, what’s the worst thing that could happen?
“Hey man,” he says, embarrassed or anxious. Or both (at least he doesn’t remember my name either).
“What’s up my man?” I say, not missing a beat.
“Listen, sorry to bother you…you on your way to work?”
“Yeah, actually…why, is everything okay?”
“Uh, yeah, listen, do you mind if I come inside for a second?”
I back up obligingly, resigned to roll with it. What choice is there? After all, I did open the door.
He corners me in my kitchen and asks if I know anyone who might be interested in buying a condo. His condo, for instance.
“I’m sure there are plenty of people who would love to live here,” I offer.
“Yeah, I know, but…I mean, do you know anyone who’s looking to buy a place?”
“I’d be happy to ask around, you know, put the word on the street and whatnot…”
“Yeah, that’d be cool, I’d appreciate that.”
He looks away and it’s my turn to say something.
“Everything okay?”
‘Yeah, well, I got laid off, you know? So I’m just gonna move home for a while, with my folks. You know, ‘til I get my shit straight.”
“I hear you,” I say as encouragingly as possible, but it’s only half true. I do hear him, but I also hear myself (saying I hear you) as well as the voice inside my head, which is processing this situation and repeating the verdict: Not good, not good, not good.
He is sweating, his hands—which seem puffy and pale, I’ve never noticed what unbelievable meat hooks he has, though admittedly, the only times I bump into him are in the hallway as he disappears into his end unit with a case of Miller Lite cans under one arm, McDonalds or some other fast food monstrosity in the other—his hands, exhibits A and B, are shaking like the lid on a boiling pot, they are very obviously not obeying their master, and before I have half a chance to put two and two together he interrupts my internal assessment and looks at me searchingly.
“Hey, uh, you got any beer?”
At eight thirty-three in the A.M., there is only one possible answer to a question like this: “Sure,” I say.
I open the refrigerator and remember: I drank my last beer last night, which makes me a liar.
“Actually, I don’t,” I start, but sense that will not suffice, so I hold the door open and let him inspect for himself, which he does, making us both feel better—or worse—depending on how you look at it. He accepts this answer, but is clearly not satisfied with my response.
“Oh. I have plenty of liquor, if…”
“Yeah, do you care if I take a shot of something?”
Are you sure you’re okay? (To myself I say this).
A pint glass is obviously inappropriate, so I grab a juice glass and put it down on the counter, sliding it over to him like a bartender from a black and white western. He has eagerly grabbed my fifth of Jack Daniels and I tell him to help himself.
He pours a generous, bordering on unbelievable, belt of my booze and inhales it in one febrile motion. This is strictly business (to myself I say this).
“Better?” I inquire, and actually mean it, I actually want to know.
“Uh…do you mind if I get another one?”
“Hey bro, knock yourself out,” I say. Stupidly.
He doesn’t notice because he’s too busy securing the second round in case I try and give last call at the last second. Even the sweat on his forehead seems relieved. Although I know exactly what time it is, I can’t help myself from looking up at the digits blinking on my oven: 8:34.
He looks at me and nods his head, expressing gratitude with his burning eyes. The eyes never lie. Then he snatches a tube of toothpaste out of his front pocket, puts it in his mouth and pulls the trigger.
“So, you wouldn’t mind asking around, you know, just see if anyone is looking to maybe live here…I’ll cut a deal…”
“No problem,” I assure him.
“…I’ll hook you up with a finder’s fee too…”
“Oh don’t worry about that man, I’m happy to help.”
Not good, not good, not good.
“Let me give you a card,” he says, putting the toothpaste back and reaching into his other pocket. I’m surprised, in spite of myself, that between the shaking and the sheer size of his hands he can even fit them into his shirtsleeves.
“Fuck,” he says, frazzled or furious. Or both.
“What’s up?” I ask.
“I left my fucking cards in my place…”
“Well don’t worry about it, let me just write your number down and…”
“No, let me run and get them, and you can hand them out and shit…”
“Okay.”
After a few painful minutes pass, I go down to get them myself.
On the way, I think: Gambling debts? Drugs? Or both?
Drugs, it must be drugs.
Whatever it is, it’s something I know I want no part of. It’s obviously something my neighbor wants no part of either, or we wouldn’t both be here right now.
I knock on the door.
It opens, quickly, and my neighbor walks out, shutting it behind him. Apparently I’m not supposed to see inside. Perhaps I don’t want to see inside.
He follows me into the hall.
“Hey man, I appreciate anything you can do.”
“No problem dude, I’m happy to help…”
“Listen,” he leans in close. “Do you mind if I grab another shot?”
“Sure thing bro.”
I’ve already locked my door on the way out, so I let myself back in, tricking my dog into thinking a full day has already passed.
The bottle and glass are still on the counter, forming sticky circles of an early morning crime scene.
“Do you mind if I pour a stiff one?”
“Help yourself chief.”
You want to take the bottle with you? (To myself I say this).
He pours a shot that would give Liberty Valance pause, polishes it off, and then pulls out the toothpaste from his holster.
I ask no questions, he tells no tales.
I tell my dog to hold down the fort (again) and my dog looks confused or disappointed. Or both. I lock the door (again) and escort my soon-to-be-ex-neighbor out.
“Thanks again,” he says, then looks at me meaningfully. “I appreciate it.”
“Okay man, take care of yourself.”
“Give me a call if you hear anything.”
“Will do.”
Both of us seem to understand, as we go our separate ways, that we’ll never see each other again, and we are each somewhat deflated, probably for opposite reasons.
On the way to work I have a memory that’s more like a dream: Newark Airport. That shithole. A place has to be exceptionally beautiful, or exceptionally appalling, or incomprehensibly pointless, in order to be easily remembered years after a brief visit.
When I was a kid, (I couldn’t have been much older than eight) my father and I had a layover in Newark airport. Even then, I was perceptive enough to understand that this was no place I ever needed to return voluntarily.
An unassuming older man (at any rate, he was noticeably older than my old man, which made him old) sat in one of those impossibly plain plastic chairs, with his pants leg rolled up. It wasn’t until we got closer that I realized two things: he was alone, and he was scratching at a series of scabs on his shin. For some reason he looked our way at the moment we passed him, and after sizing us up, he stood and amiably approached my father.
“Sir, did you need someone to help you and your son carry your bags?”
“No thanks, we’re okay,” my pops replied, looking ahead and picking up the pace.
The man was persistent. In the space of fifteen seconds—my father denied him three times—my emotions slid from the appreciation of possibly having someone carry my suitcase for me, to the vague, uneasy sense that my father was being somehow rude, a jerk, to the unsettling awareness of recognition. I sensed something I’d seen plenty of, but never before in any person older than myself: fear. I saw it in his eyes, and felt it in my insides.
As we walked away my old man waited until we were at a charitable distance, then looked at me meaningfully and offered the somber assertion: That’s as low as you can go. I asked him to elaborate, as I was apt to do, and he was either unwilling or unable to add anything to his observation, as he was apt to do. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand what my father was saying, I understood him perfectly. It was because I understood him that I needed him to say more, to talk to me a little longer about it, about anything, anything to interrupt that silence and the sudden thoughts that accompanied it.
It’s easy to believe that people like this exist for our sakes: they are dying lessons on how not to live, warnings of what could happen if you weren’t careful and found yourself scratching at scabs in the world’s ugliest airport. We forget, or we don’t allow ourselves to entertain the idea, that these people have histories, that these shadows and signposts don’t happen to serve a purpose for anyone else; they were once actual people themselves.
I realize, now, my father was wrong about one thing. That’s not as low as you can go. You can go lower, a whole lot lower. But perhaps it’s more disturbing to see the ones that are on the way down, it’s somehow easier to accept the ones at the bottom of the ocean; it’s the ones who are sinking, who are still within reach, who are drowning noisily in front of you, who sometimes have the temerity to ask you to hold out a hand. These are the ones we can scarcely tolerate, because every so often when we look at them and see ourselves.
If I had lived in the 50’s, I would have taken a real job right out of college, or I may not have gone to college. I would have had to start earning a living to support my family: married at twenty-two, a father within the year. That’s just the way it would have been.
Maybe I’d like my job; maybe I would be content. Maybe I would consume so many steaks and cigarettes and whiskey sours that nothing could touch me—I would be obese, an impenetrable fortress of flesh, and no pain could get past me.
Or maybe I would work and eat and smoke myself into a muddled mess and punch the clock prematurely—another casualty of the Cold War. Maybe I would be smart enough to have left my family something, and maybe my wife would remarry and live off the fat of my labor and I wouldn’t begrudge her because I was in a better place, drinking Bloody Marys on the great golf course in the sky.
Or maybe my wife, being of her time, would not wish to remarry and instead focus her energies on the grandchildren and church functions and the increasingly mundane exigencies of old age. Maybe she would want to meet another man but her prospects would be poor—after all, she was married to a big slob who she somehow stayed devoted to and still mourned. Plus, there were always the kids to contend with. Used goods are used goods, whether you’re talking cars, real estate or relationships.
Maybe she would solider on, alone, oblivious to the insanity of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, indifferent to the surreal psychosis of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, and grow into her shrinking body the way a spider’s nest settles into a windowsill.
Maybe she would eventually understand that the family home—the house in which she lost her virginity, raised her children, cleaned a thousand rooms, cooked a million meals—had outlasted her, and embrace the inevitable.
Maybe, in the end, she would be a lot like the woman across the hall. She’s had a good life (please allow her to have been happy: in my mind if not in actual fact). She, at least, once had a husband, and maybe a son and daughter that she dotes on and who love her dearly, but they live so far away and are so busy with work and kids and life and time just slips away and so it goes.
Or maybe it is even worse than that: maybe she was never married, never found exactly what she was looking for, or the right ones overlooked her until it was too late. Maybe she was cursed with the blessing of being always apart, in all the important ways, from the utterly average, anonymous faces she came into contact with day in and day out, and like almost no one else she knew, she was unaware of it.
I want to walk out my door, but I can’t.
And this time, for once, it’s not because I don’t want to, it’s because I’m desperately certain that she won’t be out there waiting for me.
Running out of gas.
My car needs fuel too, and as I pull into the station, sure enough my man is out there, like the sun setting in the west. Out there, always, in the heat and the rain and mostly in the ceaseless, crushing boredom. Out there every day, very likely taking away a lot less than some street-corner wino stuck in any second-rate American city.
As I pump manifest destiny into my machine, I can feel the stranger behind me, screaming his same silent song. And then, finally: enough is enough. I turn around, but he is not looking at me. He is sitting on his milk crate, clocking the traffic, reluctant to make eye contact even with the cars. He says nothing, sees nothing, but surely hears everything. How can he not, when it’s all there, right in front of his defeated face? And it occurs to me, I’ve never once seen a single person buy a flower or even acknowledge him.
What can you do?
“Hey man, I’ll take one of those flowers, I’ll take all of them…”
The stranger looks at me suspiciously and shakes his head. He has not understood a word I’ve spoken.
“Listen, I’ll buy all of them…”
I pull out my wallet and start speaking the language everyone understands.
I keep giving and he keeps taking. I don’t count and he doesn’t complain.
Finally, I’ve done all I can do, and he smiles. He says a lot of things, suddenly, with those grateful eyes. I need to leave before he tells me any other things I probably should hear.
I almost make it to my car and then, before I can stop myself, I turn around to tell him a thing or two with my own eyes.
He’s gone: the man, the milk crate, even the flowers I was just holding in my hands. A mirage? Maybe a miracle. Now it’s only me and an endless stream of traffic, blowing by in both directions.
“Have a nice day,” I call out, to whomever might be listening.
Not to mention a nice life.
To myself, I say this.
The American Dream of Don Giovanni: excerpt from the novel
Overture
Listen:
When some of your best friends are people who exist elsewhere—characters in books you’ve read, musicians you’ll never meet, people from the past who died decades (even centuries) before you were born, or people you knew intimately who are no longer around—it might be time to ask some complicated questions.
Who are you?
That is, or should be, the first question, as well as the last question, and it should be asked as often as possible along the way.
You see, all men are islands. After all, no one else is inside you when you’re born, no one is going with you when you die, and between those first and last breaths, the decisions, actions and accountability are your own. All, all yours.
So: you find friends, you seek solace in yourself, you learn to discern redemption through the aimless affairs that comprise the push and pull of everyone’s existence. You realize, in short, that you are going through it alone, so you should never go through it alone.
Thoreau was quite correct about quiet desperation and the long shadow it can cast over us all, but you don’t want to run off to your own unseen island. For one thing, there are no islands anymore, except the ones you pay admission to enter; plus, it’s already been done; and above all, when Thoreau got lonely or hungry he walked home and had his mother cook dinner for him, a fact he forgot to mention in his quite convincing case for individuality. Besides, everyone is already on his or her own island. You can’t run away, and the farther you run, the closer you get to yourself. And you’re all you’ve got.
If you are fortunate enough to figure this out early on, you find friends: the real ones who exist in your everyday world, and the more real ones who have been there all along, the ones you can always turn to, wherever or whoever you happen to be.
Biographical
Call me Jackson.
An automatic response—a defense mechanism of sorts— to the question that everyone always asked, obliging him to confirm that yes, his name really was John Johnson.
His father, a conservative bureaucrat—the archetypal patriot—never was at a loss to justify his decision and explain to his only son how unique his name actually was. “How American can you get?” he would always ask, with a red, white and blue grin. “Now how many people do you actually know with that name? If you think about it, you really are one in a million.”
Actually, his father never said that—and likely never thought it. His name was John, and his father’s name had been John, and being a traditional, sentimentally austere (or austerely sentimental) sort of man, it seemed entirely appropriate to pass along the name with the genes. Unoriginal on the surface, a cop-out; and yet, upon reflection, one of the few instances where a name actually signifies something. Of course, people named John do not always call themselves John, and his father—or Jack, as most people knew him—was no exception. And that is how Jack’s son became Jackson. It did not merit explanation or justification, so when people asked, he simply told them the truth: his name was Jackson.
And yet: what is there, after all, in a name? Not much, especially in America, a country where people consult best-selling books to help them determine what names are historically acceptable, currently embraced or otherwise in vogue. One result is that the more familiar, common and safe your name, the more assured you can be that your parents complied with the mundane mores of their time, and treated the naming of their child almost exactly the way they would purchase clothes or choose a car: comfort and conformity above all. The other trend, of course, was to choose the most outrageous, or mystic-sounding name—extremism that is another, equally unfortunate sign of acquiescence.
Names tell us so much about ourselves, except who we are.
Naming names is always important when recounting events that actually occurred and even more important when the events may not have occurred.
So: if you want to know who someone is, ask them where they’ve been, and where they are going.
Baggage
Saturday, 11:40 a.m.
He was running away.
Sometimes running away requires courage, because staying is the only thing a coward can consider.
He was running away; he was going home.
You’re only allowed to go back home when you have no home.
Listen:
When I leave I don’t know what I’m hoping to find
When I leave I don’t know what I’m leaving behind…
When you listen to lyrics from a song and hear your own life, one of two things is occurring: you are in love, or you have not found what you are looking for.
When you have not found what you are looking for, it’s best to travel light. He had more than his share of baggage, but he could carry all of it with him—in his car and in his heart.
Question: what do you take with you?
He took everything.
He did not have any desert island albums, or books, he needed all of them, he needed everything. He already lived on an island, and he had found a way to make everything fit.
The peripatetic existence of the perpetual student has its advantages, particularly in regards to traveling light. College, then graduate school, then Ph.D. work invariably require moving about from tiny room to tiny room, and this destitute condition necessitates as little baggage as possible. Of course, this is a benefit primarily for one who is not particularly concerned with material possessions, and anyone who would even contemplate pursuing a Ph.D. in English Literature presumably (and hopefully) would have less than little interest, or at least harbor few illusions about the eventual acquisition of such things. All of which is to say, the circumstances of compulsory attrition enabled Jackson to fit everything he owned—his life—into one small car.
There is, of course, a difference between the things one wants with them in a car for a road trip, and the things you require when you are in transition from one destination to another; although, if you are odd, poor or lucky enough to be living in accordance with the aforementioned Thoreau’s counsel for simplifying one’s world, they are all the same thing.
Driving
Driving.
It is easier to run away when you have a car, it’s even easier when you have a reason.
Everyone around him, insulated in their imported armor, had a reason. They were all coming or going, it was just a matter of time.
That’s America: everyone, it seems, is striving to get somewhere else, to be something else, to arrive someplace they’ve never been. Something better, they are certain, is there for the taking. And everybody is anxious to secure their share of what they know must be waiting for them, evanescent, just out of reach.
Behind: color (blue)—a car, noise (loud)—a horn, finger (middle)—aggression.
Welcome home to the real world, sports fan. Nothing like a near-death experience to bring you back to earth and the ugly here and now of I-95.
The phallus-shaped vehicle that had just upgraded its status from impatient tailgater to perilous leader of the pack was already moving down the road (ninety miles per hour? One hundred?), no time for accountability or the old-fashioned exchange of insults, no time to see a face or read a license plate, no time to stick around.
Had the highways—the world—changed this much in only two years? Maybe. One thing was certain: the already near-extinct evidence of defensive driving had degenerated to the point of self-parody. Anger and impatience prevailed on the black and blue highway. Music, as always, should tame the savage beasts, but little relief was to be found on the radio. More talk than music (talk radio? Isn’t that an oxymoron?): all these babbling blowhards whipping their half-witted audience into a reactionary omelet, alone in a crowd on the ever-insular freeways. Who said there were no second-acts in American life? Has-been politicians, washed-up athletes, even once-respectable reporters were cashing in on the act, relishing their reincarnation as paid professional voices.
This ain’t life. With the suspension of soul and shame, these screaming-heads, along with their cranky congregation, go a long way toward illustrating all that is not right, all around us. No need to psychoanalyze, no point in plumbing the depths of this despondency, because the answer is easily ascertained: this ain’t living.
And then, as if on cue, the car next to him made the noise cars owned by angry individuals make, so Jackson looked over at the miserable man, his mouth sucking up to an Unlucky Strike. Somehow, no smoke escaped and this was because the windows were all rolled up. Self-abuse? Stubborn defiance? Unfathomable stupidity? Nobility? Never. It was old school, plain and simple. This man, clearly constipated and full of consternation, simply refused: he was not going to share his lane, he was not going to share a smile, he was not going to share even his smoke with the unctuous odors of I-95. Old school? He was ancient school.
Welcome to Rhode Island, the man did not say.
Welcome, the sign overhead sang, announcing that his destination was one state closer. As the South slowly became more inevitable, Jackson finally noticed he was being followed.
He had not seen it in a long time, but as soon as it appeared in his rear view mirror, there was no mistaking who it was: his father, tracking him in his egg-yolk yellow ’76 VW Thing. Few sights can take you back faster than the car you rode in as a child, particularly when it’s a model that ceased production half a lifetime ago. There it was, limping along with an inextinguishable, upstart rebel yell.
That he was being followed presented problems, such as preparation: exactly what do you say, what do you do? He had no idea. And then there was the inescapable fact that his father was no longer alive.
I can’t deal with you right now Pops…
And fortunately, fate intervened, embodied by the fool in front of his father, who helpfully had chosen the exact change lane without realizing he had no coins. Smiling, he saw his father screaming at the jackass who could not summon up the strength to just drive through the toll. Stalled, he sat there; panicked, a paralyzed zombie—playing his part in orchestrating a minor traffic jam at the worst possible moment.
Seeing his chance, Jackson pulled ahead, not even thinking about the toll. He heard the mechanized alarm, indicting him like an electronic tattletale, but he was already gone. Only the innocent ones look over their shoulders, and he was never looking back. There was no looking back, because he was not innocent, having pretty well lost that privilege before knowing he ever had it.
So: success. Out of sight, but not out of mind. Never out of mind. Not for him. He knew he was going to have to grapple with his father, and the questions. He knew he needed to be prepared, so he tried not to think about it.
What had happened?
July 20, 1969. I watched you come out of your mother’s womb and then I walked out into the lobby and saw those men walking on the moon. How could I not believe in God? How could I not feel our lives were richly blessed?
Actually, his old man never said those words, as far as he knew. But there was one thing he had learned, and that was that it is acceptable, even imperative, to take a little liberty with one’s memories of deceased loved ones. When one lives with another person, particularly a parent, then a certain amount of authorial license is entitled. In other words, it is, at times, more important to remember things that might not have been said. It is easier to create fiction out of what someone did say as opposed to imagining what might or should have been said. And so he recognized that part of moving on and accepting the good with the bad was being able to make sense out of memories and put those moments in the balance of feelings, which supersede actions in some cases.
We do our best to raise you right, and make sure you are never hungry, hurt or alone. Then we pay for you to go off to college so you can take classes with pot-smoking professors who tell you to renounce your faith, your family and your freedom.
His father actually said those words, often. And Jackson occasionally looked forward to the day he might have the dubious privilege of saying them to his son.
What had happened?
The fact of the matter was that his father was dead, and of somewhat less significance was the possibility, no the probability—no, the certainty that he had taken his own life. Alone, while his only child was several hundred miles away, and unavailable for consultation or intervention. Unavailable, not a factor. It left one cold, culpable, incomplete, with anger and an inability to understand what had been done and why. And with questions. Questions that required following his mind to places he did not care to accompany it.
The kind of questions that often can’t be answered:
Perhaps your father suffered from depression! Perhaps.
Maybe he never completely crawled out of the cavern of his despair after his wife died. Maybe.
Probably he wrestled with demons above and beyond those that most people contend with; so carefully concealed that even his own son could not perceive them. Probably.
Or maybe he simply was not willing to withstand the ineluctable afflictions of this world and ultimately sought solace in a self-induced sleep. That too.
And this: how about the possibility that there was no compelling, cogent explanation? For his father’s actions, for any of it. That in a random, disjointed universe, it was only one of the infinite, inexplicable occurrences that erode the soiled sands. The sands along the shore that reside in an individual’s mind: memories. This, more than anything else, caused him to grieve.
And so, what do you say? What do you tell people? What do you tell yourself?
His father was no longer alive.
He had decided to stop living, or, life decided it no longer had anything to offer him. Et cetera.
Invariably, these feelings led to thoughts of his mother, also gone—more of which later.
Also, these thoughts led to feelings of his own—more of which later.
For now, there were more immediate matters to concern himself with, such as his own life. Fortunately, when he finally looked up he saw the sign, his partner in crime, welcoming him to the Constitution State and he noticed that the feeling, like the Thing, was no longer there.
On the road.
The road was going to require every bit of his cracking concentration, so he could forgive himself if he did not think about death and tried to stay alive. So he thought, Connecticut: concrete, creation, orange cones, congestion. Exactly when, he wondered, had Connecticut become an extended construction zone?
Connecticut was busy, and it had every right to be. After all, this was America and the Constitution State was just as entitled as any of its sisters to reinvent itself. Still, this was not the same old stretch of unending, empty interstate. So many buildings. When was it enough? It’s never enough. And who asked him anyway? Who the hell was he to admonish evolution, to protest progress? Particularly when, a generation or two down the line, some fresh-out-of-college, smug pseudo-cynic would commemorate his time, an era he neither saw nor celebrated. He would do what everyone does, and lament a lost, unsullied city, the city his grandfather called home. And above all, this: he would be right, just as Jackson was, now.
Now for you and me it may not be that hard to reach our dreams
But that magic feeling never seems to last
And while the future’s there for anyone to change, still you know it seems
It would be easier sometimes to change the past…
Yeah, what he said.
On the road: music helps.
It helped Jackson get this far, and it would take him the rest of the way. It always did.
The road, and rock and roll: there is nothing that can touch that. Nothing. And when you finally find yourself in Jersey—in between the rows and rows of wooden houses: yellow, green, blue, red and brown, solemnly staring each other down across the searing streets of the Garden State Parkway—music is a must. Loud music. The type of music that is not meant to be heard in a living room, through a carefully calibrated system and expensive speakers fashioned out of imitation oak. The type of music made for a car. Driving fast. Too fast, freedom and bliss, so fast that nothing can touch you. No one, not even…
Ouch.
When you get pulled over, it’s time to face the music.
Music!
License registration, no I ain’t got none,
But I got a clear conscience ‘bout the things that I done…
When you find yourself singing Bruce Springsteen lyrics in New Jersey to a state trooper in the hopes of avoiding a ticket, you might as well close your eyes, see what happens:
Maybe you could talk to the cop and explain that it was not disrespect for the rules of the road, but love of—and getting lost in—art that caused you to forget. To forget where you were and who you were—to find yourself in the unfamiliar role of fugitive.
And maybe he would understand.
Maybe he would engage you in a discussion about music, and how it helps us, how it is always there, and occasionally compels us to do things we would not otherwise do.
And maybe, after everything was said and done, you would stop, and ask him if he was real, if this could ever actually happen.
And maybe he would wink familiarly, as if to say: This is America, ain’t it? Anything is possible.
And maybe you would believe him, even as you heard his footsteps fading away.
And by the time you opened your eyes, maybe you were still rolling down the road, the only reality being the speed and the sky, and the siren song of metal and machinery.
Finally, his car needed fuel, he needed fuel, so he had no choice but to stop at the godforsaken rest area. Everyone, it seemed, had stopped at the same rest area: equal parts public toilet, food court and concessions stand. It was at once appalling and extraordinary; it was, in short, America.
There was no shortage of lost souls, standing or sitting, shuffling around in search of sustenance. And there was no scarcity of choices: lukewarm cheeseburgers suffocating in their Styrofoam shells, long-suffering chicken wings getting skin cancer under the heat lamp. The oleaginous ham and cheeses that would give even the paunchy postcard Elvis pause, parched slices of pizza that would make Pavarotti puke. Was there anything here that did not get destroyed in a deep fryer? It was a mess, it was America. It was nothing he wanted, it was everything he needed. When traveling alone, on I-95, one needs to fuel up. He was traveling alone, on I-95, and he was running on heavy fuel, so he needed this unreality: a raunchy, American sort of sustenance.
For who? Who were they, the people all around him? They were everyone: departing or arriving, leaving for vacation, returning to work, delighted, delirious, above all, anonymous. In New Jersey, or in any small town, or everywhere in America, there are people who find themselves lost; the people with nowhere left to go. A cliché? Sure. But clichés are made, not born. Reality, of course, is a cliché, and we have discovered that clichés—even as they are the enemy of art and authenticity—can be our friends. And so: going to church makes us sense spirituality, so we go; playing carols at Christmas facilitates a feeling of festivity, so we play; falling in love makes us feel loved, so we fall. We need all the help we can find, so we find friends and never look back.
Jackson looked back; he looked around and in front of him, seeing the stereotypes: the ones in his mind that everything but experience had created. Or was the Cliché unfurling itself, the one that perpetuates from a particular place: experience, repetition, pattern, tradition? He saw them, he saw how he wanted to see them, he saw how they saw him, he saw how they saw him seeing them, and so on.
And who was he?
What was he all about? What had he done? Where had he been? Where was he going? Who did he think he was? Everyman? No man? Or worse: the type of person who actually asks questions like this.
Walking away, stomach sagging, life-saving milkshake in hand, Jackson saw her. He could not help noticing the forsaken sister walking in circles, seeking a corner of the room that wasn’t there. How old was she? Eighteen? Eighty? Somewhere right in between? Satisfied with a meek drink in the water fountain, she was the type of person who unthinkingly drank from public water fountains. Does anyone drink from public water fountains anymore? Do they still exist? Does anyone even notice them?
It was hard not to notice her, impossible not to notice that pain.
Pain: Raskolnikov, disconcerted as he was with crime and punishment, saw all the suffering of the world in a prostitute’s eyes, and sobbed when he witnessed a peasant, hard-pressed with impotent anger, beating his horse to death. Jackson opened his eyes and half expected to see this woman whipping herself while Nietzsche—knowing full well that God was dead— held his head and wept. Who was she, and what was she doing here?
A hooker, a homeless person? A mother, a case of mistaken identity? A human symbol of hope, or Hope herself—a deity deferred, paying the price for us all, all of us sinners and those sins we can scarcely describe.
She’s just like me, a voice inside attempted to say, a voice he very well may have listened to—a voice he had come dangerously close to growing into, under the shadow of the ivory tower—had he opted to make certain decisions along the way.
He walked over, ready to help: offer money, lend a hand, do whatever needed to be done, even and especially the things he had neither the ways nor means to make happen. He walked over and smiled, and she spoke, making him an offer he had no choice but to refuse.
Enough, after all, is enough.
It was enough to make one wonder if (and even wish that) the stories in the bible, and those fairy tales and myths men have made all have a foundation in fact. That the slow, ceaseless suffering some of us occasionally see is in accordance with a plan, a motion picture we have no part in producing. That it was not even personal, all this erstwhile, enigmatic madness, it was strictly business. It was enough to cause the hardest of humans to hope for a beneficent Big Guy (or Lady, but it is asking too much for God to have the decency to be a woman) upstairs, shuffling that proverbial deck. Or cutting and pasting the appropriate pieces of the puzzle, always keeping a wise eye on the endearing idiots underneath, and generally doing and saying the things that the creator of an entire universe says and does.
But how the hell are we supposed to have hope when Hope herself had been reduced to this, turning tricks at a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike?
Is this what it’s come to?
It was enough to make one want to get out (and everyone, eventually, wants to get out).
You know you’re getting out there—out of the North anyway—when you find yourself paying for the privilege of crossing the Delaware. Just like George Washington, only instead of throwing your dollar over the water, you toss it into the basket, or hand it to the unsmiling tollbooth attendant. Just like the dude in front of you—God Am—did. How did he know it was God Am? The bike’s tags said so, and he wasn’t about to argue.
Picture this: a Harley chopper (obviously), no muffler (naturally), as clean and well-groomed as its owner was not, sporting the obligatory, sleeveless skull shirt, black jeans, chaps, wind-whipped leather boots, the shadowed cheeks that could light a match, the sandpaper skin on either hand, kicked back in the saddle, Camel—of course it was a Camel—dangling dutifully from lip, and the helmet, if it could actually be called a helmet, looking more like a black salad bowl (he might just as easily lift it off his head and eat cereal out of it, or, more appropriately, nails). And the kicker—stuck to the back of his seat two signs: POW/MIA speaking loud and proud, and beneath that, perhaps more to the point, a message brilliant in its brevity, terrible in its antipathy; just right in its genius: NOT FONDA JANE! COMMIE BITCH.
Realizing that he had just witnessed an unrecognized wonder of the world, Jackson smiled and shook his head approvingly. That’s America, he thought. And then, immediately and unexpectedly, his life flashed before his eyes.
That ladder is coming out…
These are the things that happen before metal meets metal and the nightly news crews show up, armed with cameras and commiseration: a depreciated, much put-upon pickup truck with an overused and undervalued ladder, obviously not properly procured, shaking and stuttering in its rusty, rattling limbo, unequipped to hold on for dear life, at the mercy of its less-than-conscientious caretakers. Or maybe it simply had had enough and wanted out of this world, gearing itself up for the last, big leap. In any event, the ladder was coming out, and someone was getting hurt.
The last thing you want to do on a long road trip is go and get yourself killed, but like all the truly consequential things in life, it is often out of your control. Whether we are making a quick trip to the grocery store, or en route to work, or making an impulsive return to our hometown, we are not unlike the mates who followed Ahab aboard the Pequod and into the open sea, uncertain if the gods will bless or betray our best endeavors. And those irascible forces, ever out of our control, are always in the mix, doing the things they do: if, say, an angel’s harp string breaks in heaven, or someone steps on a butterfly in a Ray Bradbury short story, then the karmic gate is going to swing wide open, ushering an unsuspecting civilian into the past tense. It takes a collective effort, a diligent faith, and an honest regard for the collective welfare, to pursue our elusive white whales without allowing selfish obsessions to endanger others.
That ladder is coming out…
Certainly, it would be morbid, if counterproductive, to consider that you were taking your life into your hands (or, if you prefer, putting your life in fate’s hands) each time you hit the human highway, which is always a poker game, even if you don’t want to play. Or each time you ate in a restaurant, or boarded a plane, or crossed the street or swam in the ocean. Et cetera. As evolved, if insulated human beings, most of us reluctantly recognize that there ain’t much you can do: if your number is up, it’s up, whether on account of the cosmic cards dealt upstairs, or the statistical calculus of a chaotic, careless universe. There is a necessary denial that enables all of us to do what we do on a daily basis. Unfortunately, self-preservation is an increasingly collective kind of affair. You do your best to stay sober and remain sane, and then you have to pay attention to the inanity of some idiot who can’t be bothered to exert a sliver of common sense.
That ladder is coming out…
If your number is up, and you have to go, then that’s the way it goes. Those are the rules, inviolable and established long before the late twentieth century burst onto the scene. And yet. It is exceedingly difficult to justify a carelessly loaded ladder crashing into your windshield and taking you out. Entirely intolerable, no acceptable explanation.
Unless.
Unless there is a God. Then all kinds of things are capable of occurring. Then, it’s a matter of the divine order of things and a ladder can just as easily become an instrument of God’s wrath. Then, when a hunk of metal comes clawing through your window, you are simply another dog having your day. Then a certain, sublime symmetry holds sway, and there is little we can do to get out of the way.
That ladder is…
There it goes! Like a satellite, it sailed toward its target, right at Jackson’s window. But then the wind, or wrath, or whatever, took it in mid-flight and discarded it safely to the side of the highway, where it crashed on the concrete. A shower of sparks conveyed a simple message: Behold the brimstone brothers and sisters.
Thanks for that, Big Guy…
When you catch yourself talking to a God you are not sure you believe in, you should cut yourself some slack. We’ve all been there. We’ve all, on occasion, looked up to the clouds and wondered if there was a kingdom beyond the skies, the place some of us were told our dearly departed looked down from. We’ve all, on occasion, taken comfort from a one-way conversation we forgot to be self-conscious about, unable or unwilling to entirely abandon the idea that someone else is listening.
And so: you talk. And, maybe, everyone listens. And it follows, then: if you can talk to God, you can also talk to Abraham Lincoln, for instance; or even Einstein, and see if they can help you make sense of the mess we’re in. Anyone might be listening up there, and that’s more comfort than anything you could ever find in a church. And so: you talk. Say something, everything—anything you need to say to survive.
Eventually, the skyline turns from gray to green, with trees instead of telephone poles and hills instead of hotels on either side. On the tops of these hills, in between the forest and the freeway, the animals stood around, detached and mostly disinterested. Not quite believing what they looked down upon, they wryly observed the random madness rushing past. Instinctively, it seemed, most of them kept a safe distance, not wanting to partake in or become a part of the carnage of the twentieth century as it cruised by.
And then you slowly enter the South. Everything gets a little heavier: the scenery, the air, and the nonexistent breeze in the late afternoon of an unseasonably warm May. It’s not unlike the languid buzz bourbon delivers: you taste it and sense what is coming, and the deeper you go, the more intimate and intense it all becomes, and before you know it, you are exactly where you set out to be, whether or not you ever intended to get there.
The first thing you notice is the green. The trees, an impervious halo, hover around the highway. Suddenly, somehow, everything is green, greener than anything you’ve ever seen, so green it’s arresting and almost unreal to actually behold. You cannot believe how green it is: at some point it compels you to consider that for all the billions of trees we’ve butchered, it is extraordinary in its own marginal way how they have managed to remain relatively plentiful. It’s almost impossible to imagine how things used to look, in the days before before Cortez and Custer did their manifestly destined duties that are well-documented in textbooks made from the paper made from the trees they helped tear down.
And then a minor sort of miracle occurs as Maryland, without warning, becomes Virginia. Trees, with roots and branches extending into either state, stand at attention, hoping never to choose sides if brothers take up arms against one another for a second time.
Northern Virginia is an anomaly, it is neither here nor there; it is the gateway to the real south. The Washington Metropolitan Area is, in many ways, a bulwark against identity, a sort of spurious, neutral ground between North and South, Mason-Dixon Line be damned. Everyone to the north of northern Virginia correctly considers it the South; everyone south of Northern Virginia feels, not infeasibly, that it is the North.You are nowhere near Faulkner country yet, but you are also, already, half a world away from Cheever’s concrete commotion, from Whitman’s lazy leaves of grass, from Updike’s arrogant New England imbroglio. When you open your eyes, you are somewhere else, staring expressively at the world around you, at the verdant trees looming overhead, at the inestimable expanse of lucid skies that stretch up and away. You see different colors, fully flowering in their fleet glory: the air has changed from salt to soot and again to honeysuckle, the taste of almond—the bounty of Spring—is on your tongue. You hear strange birds calling, and somehow you can understand this other language, words welcoming you into another world, words that welcome you home.
Listen:
When some of your best friends are people who exist elsewhere—characters in books you’ve read, musicians you’ll never meet, people from the past who died decades (even centuries) before you were born, or people you knew intimately who are no longer around—it might be time to ask some complicated questions.
Who are you?
That is, or should be, the first question, as well as the last question, and it should be asked as often as possible along the way.
You see, all men are islands. After all, no one else is inside you when you’re born, no one is going with you when you die, and between those first and last breaths, the decisions, actions and accountability are your own. All, all yours.
So: you find friends, you seek solace in yourself, you learn to discern redemption through the aimless affairs that comprise the push and pull of everyone’s existence. You realize, in short, that you are going through it alone, so you should never go through it alone.
Thoreau was quite correct about quiet desperation and the long shadow it can cast over us all, but you don’t want to run off to your own unseen island. For one thing, there are no islands anymore, except the ones you pay admission to enter; plus, it’s already been done; and above all, when Thoreau got lonely or hungry he walked home and had his mother cook dinner for him, a fact he forgot to mention in his quite convincing case for individuality. Besides, everyone is already on his or her own island. You can’t run away, and the farther you run, the closer you get to yourself. And you’re all you’ve got.
If you are fortunate enough to figure this out early on, you find friends: the real ones who exist in your everyday world, and the more real ones who have been there all along, the ones you can always turn to, wherever or whoever you happen to be.
Biographical
Call me Jackson.
An automatic response—a defense mechanism of sorts— to the question that everyone always asked, obliging him to confirm that yes, his name really was John Johnson.
His father, a conservative bureaucrat—the archetypal patriot—never was at a loss to justify his decision and explain to his only son how unique his name actually was. “How American can you get?” he would always ask, with a red, white and blue grin. “Now how many people do you actually know with that name? If you think about it, you really are one in a million.”
Actually, his father never said that—and likely never thought it. His name was John, and his father’s name had been John, and being a traditional, sentimentally austere (or austerely sentimental) sort of man, it seemed entirely appropriate to pass along the name with the genes. Unoriginal on the surface, a cop-out; and yet, upon reflection, one of the few instances where a name actually signifies something. Of course, people named John do not always call themselves John, and his father—or Jack, as most people knew him—was no exception. And that is how Jack’s son became Jackson. It did not merit explanation or justification, so when people asked, he simply told them the truth: his name was Jackson.
And yet: what is there, after all, in a name? Not much, especially in America, a country where people consult best-selling books to help them determine what names are historically acceptable, currently embraced or otherwise in vogue. One result is that the more familiar, common and safe your name, the more assured you can be that your parents complied with the mundane mores of their time, and treated the naming of their child almost exactly the way they would purchase clothes or choose a car: comfort and conformity above all. The other trend, of course, was to choose the most outrageous, or mystic-sounding name—extremism that is another, equally unfortunate sign of acquiescence.
Names tell us so much about ourselves, except who we are.
Naming names is always important when recounting events that actually occurred and even more important when the events may not have occurred.
So: if you want to know who someone is, ask them where they’ve been, and where they are going.
Baggage
Saturday, 11:40 a.m.
He was running away.
Sometimes running away requires courage, because staying is the only thing a coward can consider.
He was running away; he was going home.
You’re only allowed to go back home when you have no home.
Listen:
When I leave I don’t know what I’m hoping to find
When I leave I don’t know what I’m leaving behind…
When you listen to lyrics from a song and hear your own life, one of two things is occurring: you are in love, or you have not found what you are looking for.
When you have not found what you are looking for, it’s best to travel light. He had more than his share of baggage, but he could carry all of it with him—in his car and in his heart.
Question: what do you take with you?
He took everything.
He did not have any desert island albums, or books, he needed all of them, he needed everything. He already lived on an island, and he had found a way to make everything fit.
The peripatetic existence of the perpetual student has its advantages, particularly in regards to traveling light. College, then graduate school, then Ph.D. work invariably require moving about from tiny room to tiny room, and this destitute condition necessitates as little baggage as possible. Of course, this is a benefit primarily for one who is not particularly concerned with material possessions, and anyone who would even contemplate pursuing a Ph.D. in English Literature presumably (and hopefully) would have less than little interest, or at least harbor few illusions about the eventual acquisition of such things. All of which is to say, the circumstances of compulsory attrition enabled Jackson to fit everything he owned—his life—into one small car.
There is, of course, a difference between the things one wants with them in a car for a road trip, and the things you require when you are in transition from one destination to another; although, if you are odd, poor or lucky enough to be living in accordance with the aforementioned Thoreau’s counsel for simplifying one’s world, they are all the same thing.
Driving
Driving.
It is easier to run away when you have a car, it’s even easier when you have a reason.
Everyone around him, insulated in their imported armor, had a reason. They were all coming or going, it was just a matter of time.
That’s America: everyone, it seems, is striving to get somewhere else, to be something else, to arrive someplace they’ve never been. Something better, they are certain, is there for the taking. And everybody is anxious to secure their share of what they know must be waiting for them, evanescent, just out of reach.
Behind: color (blue)—a car, noise (loud)—a horn, finger (middle)—aggression.
Welcome home to the real world, sports fan. Nothing like a near-death experience to bring you back to earth and the ugly here and now of I-95.
The phallus-shaped vehicle that had just upgraded its status from impatient tailgater to perilous leader of the pack was already moving down the road (ninety miles per hour? One hundred?), no time for accountability or the old-fashioned exchange of insults, no time to see a face or read a license plate, no time to stick around.
Had the highways—the world—changed this much in only two years? Maybe. One thing was certain: the already near-extinct evidence of defensive driving had degenerated to the point of self-parody. Anger and impatience prevailed on the black and blue highway. Music, as always, should tame the savage beasts, but little relief was to be found on the radio. More talk than music (talk radio? Isn’t that an oxymoron?): all these babbling blowhards whipping their half-witted audience into a reactionary omelet, alone in a crowd on the ever-insular freeways. Who said there were no second-acts in American life? Has-been politicians, washed-up athletes, even once-respectable reporters were cashing in on the act, relishing their reincarnation as paid professional voices.
This ain’t life. With the suspension of soul and shame, these screaming-heads, along with their cranky congregation, go a long way toward illustrating all that is not right, all around us. No need to psychoanalyze, no point in plumbing the depths of this despondency, because the answer is easily ascertained: this ain’t living.
And then, as if on cue, the car next to him made the noise cars owned by angry individuals make, so Jackson looked over at the miserable man, his mouth sucking up to an Unlucky Strike. Somehow, no smoke escaped and this was because the windows were all rolled up. Self-abuse? Stubborn defiance? Unfathomable stupidity? Nobility? Never. It was old school, plain and simple. This man, clearly constipated and full of consternation, simply refused: he was not going to share his lane, he was not going to share a smile, he was not going to share even his smoke with the unctuous odors of I-95. Old school? He was ancient school.
Welcome to Rhode Island, the man did not say.
Welcome, the sign overhead sang, announcing that his destination was one state closer. As the South slowly became more inevitable, Jackson finally noticed he was being followed.
He had not seen it in a long time, but as soon as it appeared in his rear view mirror, there was no mistaking who it was: his father, tracking him in his egg-yolk yellow ’76 VW Thing. Few sights can take you back faster than the car you rode in as a child, particularly when it’s a model that ceased production half a lifetime ago. There it was, limping along with an inextinguishable, upstart rebel yell.
That he was being followed presented problems, such as preparation: exactly what do you say, what do you do? He had no idea. And then there was the inescapable fact that his father was no longer alive.
I can’t deal with you right now Pops…
And fortunately, fate intervened, embodied by the fool in front of his father, who helpfully had chosen the exact change lane without realizing he had no coins. Smiling, he saw his father screaming at the jackass who could not summon up the strength to just drive through the toll. Stalled, he sat there; panicked, a paralyzed zombie—playing his part in orchestrating a minor traffic jam at the worst possible moment.
Seeing his chance, Jackson pulled ahead, not even thinking about the toll. He heard the mechanized alarm, indicting him like an electronic tattletale, but he was already gone. Only the innocent ones look over their shoulders, and he was never looking back. There was no looking back, because he was not innocent, having pretty well lost that privilege before knowing he ever had it.
So: success. Out of sight, but not out of mind. Never out of mind. Not for him. He knew he was going to have to grapple with his father, and the questions. He knew he needed to be prepared, so he tried not to think about it.
What had happened?
July 20, 1969. I watched you come out of your mother’s womb and then I walked out into the lobby and saw those men walking on the moon. How could I not believe in God? How could I not feel our lives were richly blessed?
Actually, his old man never said those words, as far as he knew. But there was one thing he had learned, and that was that it is acceptable, even imperative, to take a little liberty with one’s memories of deceased loved ones. When one lives with another person, particularly a parent, then a certain amount of authorial license is entitled. In other words, it is, at times, more important to remember things that might not have been said. It is easier to create fiction out of what someone did say as opposed to imagining what might or should have been said. And so he recognized that part of moving on and accepting the good with the bad was being able to make sense out of memories and put those moments in the balance of feelings, which supersede actions in some cases.
We do our best to raise you right, and make sure you are never hungry, hurt or alone. Then we pay for you to go off to college so you can take classes with pot-smoking professors who tell you to renounce your faith, your family and your freedom.
His father actually said those words, often. And Jackson occasionally looked forward to the day he might have the dubious privilege of saying them to his son.
What had happened?
The fact of the matter was that his father was dead, and of somewhat less significance was the possibility, no the probability—no, the certainty that he had taken his own life. Alone, while his only child was several hundred miles away, and unavailable for consultation or intervention. Unavailable, not a factor. It left one cold, culpable, incomplete, with anger and an inability to understand what had been done and why. And with questions. Questions that required following his mind to places he did not care to accompany it.
The kind of questions that often can’t be answered:
Perhaps your father suffered from depression! Perhaps.
Maybe he never completely crawled out of the cavern of his despair after his wife died. Maybe.
Probably he wrestled with demons above and beyond those that most people contend with; so carefully concealed that even his own son could not perceive them. Probably.
Or maybe he simply was not willing to withstand the ineluctable afflictions of this world and ultimately sought solace in a self-induced sleep. That too.
And this: how about the possibility that there was no compelling, cogent explanation? For his father’s actions, for any of it. That in a random, disjointed universe, it was only one of the infinite, inexplicable occurrences that erode the soiled sands. The sands along the shore that reside in an individual’s mind: memories. This, more than anything else, caused him to grieve.
And so, what do you say? What do you tell people? What do you tell yourself?
His father was no longer alive.
He had decided to stop living, or, life decided it no longer had anything to offer him. Et cetera.
Invariably, these feelings led to thoughts of his mother, also gone—more of which later.
Also, these thoughts led to feelings of his own—more of which later.
For now, there were more immediate matters to concern himself with, such as his own life. Fortunately, when he finally looked up he saw the sign, his partner in crime, welcoming him to the Constitution State and he noticed that the feeling, like the Thing, was no longer there.
On the road.
The road was going to require every bit of his cracking concentration, so he could forgive himself if he did not think about death and tried to stay alive. So he thought, Connecticut: concrete, creation, orange cones, congestion. Exactly when, he wondered, had Connecticut become an extended construction zone?
Connecticut was busy, and it had every right to be. After all, this was America and the Constitution State was just as entitled as any of its sisters to reinvent itself. Still, this was not the same old stretch of unending, empty interstate. So many buildings. When was it enough? It’s never enough. And who asked him anyway? Who the hell was he to admonish evolution, to protest progress? Particularly when, a generation or two down the line, some fresh-out-of-college, smug pseudo-cynic would commemorate his time, an era he neither saw nor celebrated. He would do what everyone does, and lament a lost, unsullied city, the city his grandfather called home. And above all, this: he would be right, just as Jackson was, now.
Now for you and me it may not be that hard to reach our dreams
But that magic feeling never seems to last
And while the future’s there for anyone to change, still you know it seems
It would be easier sometimes to change the past…
Yeah, what he said.
On the road: music helps.
It helped Jackson get this far, and it would take him the rest of the way. It always did.
The road, and rock and roll: there is nothing that can touch that. Nothing. And when you finally find yourself in Jersey—in between the rows and rows of wooden houses: yellow, green, blue, red and brown, solemnly staring each other down across the searing streets of the Garden State Parkway—music is a must. Loud music. The type of music that is not meant to be heard in a living room, through a carefully calibrated system and expensive speakers fashioned out of imitation oak. The type of music made for a car. Driving fast. Too fast, freedom and bliss, so fast that nothing can touch you. No one, not even…
Ouch.
When you get pulled over, it’s time to face the music.
Music!
License registration, no I ain’t got none,
But I got a clear conscience ‘bout the things that I done…
When you find yourself singing Bruce Springsteen lyrics in New Jersey to a state trooper in the hopes of avoiding a ticket, you might as well close your eyes, see what happens:
Maybe you could talk to the cop and explain that it was not disrespect for the rules of the road, but love of—and getting lost in—art that caused you to forget. To forget where you were and who you were—to find yourself in the unfamiliar role of fugitive.
And maybe he would understand.
Maybe he would engage you in a discussion about music, and how it helps us, how it is always there, and occasionally compels us to do things we would not otherwise do.
And maybe, after everything was said and done, you would stop, and ask him if he was real, if this could ever actually happen.
And maybe he would wink familiarly, as if to say: This is America, ain’t it? Anything is possible.
And maybe you would believe him, even as you heard his footsteps fading away.
And by the time you opened your eyes, maybe you were still rolling down the road, the only reality being the speed and the sky, and the siren song of metal and machinery.
Finally, his car needed fuel, he needed fuel, so he had no choice but to stop at the godforsaken rest area. Everyone, it seemed, had stopped at the same rest area: equal parts public toilet, food court and concessions stand. It was at once appalling and extraordinary; it was, in short, America.
There was no shortage of lost souls, standing or sitting, shuffling around in search of sustenance. And there was no scarcity of choices: lukewarm cheeseburgers suffocating in their Styrofoam shells, long-suffering chicken wings getting skin cancer under the heat lamp. The oleaginous ham and cheeses that would give even the paunchy postcard Elvis pause, parched slices of pizza that would make Pavarotti puke. Was there anything here that did not get destroyed in a deep fryer? It was a mess, it was America. It was nothing he wanted, it was everything he needed. When traveling alone, on I-95, one needs to fuel up. He was traveling alone, on I-95, and he was running on heavy fuel, so he needed this unreality: a raunchy, American sort of sustenance.
For who? Who were they, the people all around him? They were everyone: departing or arriving, leaving for vacation, returning to work, delighted, delirious, above all, anonymous. In New Jersey, or in any small town, or everywhere in America, there are people who find themselves lost; the people with nowhere left to go. A cliché? Sure. But clichés are made, not born. Reality, of course, is a cliché, and we have discovered that clichés—even as they are the enemy of art and authenticity—can be our friends. And so: going to church makes us sense spirituality, so we go; playing carols at Christmas facilitates a feeling of festivity, so we play; falling in love makes us feel loved, so we fall. We need all the help we can find, so we find friends and never look back.
Jackson looked back; he looked around and in front of him, seeing the stereotypes: the ones in his mind that everything but experience had created. Or was the Cliché unfurling itself, the one that perpetuates from a particular place: experience, repetition, pattern, tradition? He saw them, he saw how he wanted to see them, he saw how they saw him, he saw how they saw him seeing them, and so on.
And who was he?
What was he all about? What had he done? Where had he been? Where was he going? Who did he think he was? Everyman? No man? Or worse: the type of person who actually asks questions like this.
Walking away, stomach sagging, life-saving milkshake in hand, Jackson saw her. He could not help noticing the forsaken sister walking in circles, seeking a corner of the room that wasn’t there. How old was she? Eighteen? Eighty? Somewhere right in between? Satisfied with a meek drink in the water fountain, she was the type of person who unthinkingly drank from public water fountains. Does anyone drink from public water fountains anymore? Do they still exist? Does anyone even notice them?
It was hard not to notice her, impossible not to notice that pain.
Pain: Raskolnikov, disconcerted as he was with crime and punishment, saw all the suffering of the world in a prostitute’s eyes, and sobbed when he witnessed a peasant, hard-pressed with impotent anger, beating his horse to death. Jackson opened his eyes and half expected to see this woman whipping herself while Nietzsche—knowing full well that God was dead— held his head and wept. Who was she, and what was she doing here?
A hooker, a homeless person? A mother, a case of mistaken identity? A human symbol of hope, or Hope herself—a deity deferred, paying the price for us all, all of us sinners and those sins we can scarcely describe.
She’s just like me, a voice inside attempted to say, a voice he very well may have listened to—a voice he had come dangerously close to growing into, under the shadow of the ivory tower—had he opted to make certain decisions along the way.
He walked over, ready to help: offer money, lend a hand, do whatever needed to be done, even and especially the things he had neither the ways nor means to make happen. He walked over and smiled, and she spoke, making him an offer he had no choice but to refuse.
Enough, after all, is enough.
It was enough to make one wonder if (and even wish that) the stories in the bible, and those fairy tales and myths men have made all have a foundation in fact. That the slow, ceaseless suffering some of us occasionally see is in accordance with a plan, a motion picture we have no part in producing. That it was not even personal, all this erstwhile, enigmatic madness, it was strictly business. It was enough to cause the hardest of humans to hope for a beneficent Big Guy (or Lady, but it is asking too much for God to have the decency to be a woman) upstairs, shuffling that proverbial deck. Or cutting and pasting the appropriate pieces of the puzzle, always keeping a wise eye on the endearing idiots underneath, and generally doing and saying the things that the creator of an entire universe says and does.
But how the hell are we supposed to have hope when Hope herself had been reduced to this, turning tricks at a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike?
Is this what it’s come to?
It was enough to make one want to get out (and everyone, eventually, wants to get out).
You know you’re getting out there—out of the North anyway—when you find yourself paying for the privilege of crossing the Delaware. Just like George Washington, only instead of throwing your dollar over the water, you toss it into the basket, or hand it to the unsmiling tollbooth attendant. Just like the dude in front of you—God Am—did. How did he know it was God Am? The bike’s tags said so, and he wasn’t about to argue.
Picture this: a Harley chopper (obviously), no muffler (naturally), as clean and well-groomed as its owner was not, sporting the obligatory, sleeveless skull shirt, black jeans, chaps, wind-whipped leather boots, the shadowed cheeks that could light a match, the sandpaper skin on either hand, kicked back in the saddle, Camel—of course it was a Camel—dangling dutifully from lip, and the helmet, if it could actually be called a helmet, looking more like a black salad bowl (he might just as easily lift it off his head and eat cereal out of it, or, more appropriately, nails). And the kicker—stuck to the back of his seat two signs: POW/MIA speaking loud and proud, and beneath that, perhaps more to the point, a message brilliant in its brevity, terrible in its antipathy; just right in its genius: NOT FONDA JANE! COMMIE BITCH.
Realizing that he had just witnessed an unrecognized wonder of the world, Jackson smiled and shook his head approvingly. That’s America, he thought. And then, immediately and unexpectedly, his life flashed before his eyes.
That ladder is coming out…
These are the things that happen before metal meets metal and the nightly news crews show up, armed with cameras and commiseration: a depreciated, much put-upon pickup truck with an overused and undervalued ladder, obviously not properly procured, shaking and stuttering in its rusty, rattling limbo, unequipped to hold on for dear life, at the mercy of its less-than-conscientious caretakers. Or maybe it simply had had enough and wanted out of this world, gearing itself up for the last, big leap. In any event, the ladder was coming out, and someone was getting hurt.
The last thing you want to do on a long road trip is go and get yourself killed, but like all the truly consequential things in life, it is often out of your control. Whether we are making a quick trip to the grocery store, or en route to work, or making an impulsive return to our hometown, we are not unlike the mates who followed Ahab aboard the Pequod and into the open sea, uncertain if the gods will bless or betray our best endeavors. And those irascible forces, ever out of our control, are always in the mix, doing the things they do: if, say, an angel’s harp string breaks in heaven, or someone steps on a butterfly in a Ray Bradbury short story, then the karmic gate is going to swing wide open, ushering an unsuspecting civilian into the past tense. It takes a collective effort, a diligent faith, and an honest regard for the collective welfare, to pursue our elusive white whales without allowing selfish obsessions to endanger others.
That ladder is coming out…
Certainly, it would be morbid, if counterproductive, to consider that you were taking your life into your hands (or, if you prefer, putting your life in fate’s hands) each time you hit the human highway, which is always a poker game, even if you don’t want to play. Or each time you ate in a restaurant, or boarded a plane, or crossed the street or swam in the ocean. Et cetera. As evolved, if insulated human beings, most of us reluctantly recognize that there ain’t much you can do: if your number is up, it’s up, whether on account of the cosmic cards dealt upstairs, or the statistical calculus of a chaotic, careless universe. There is a necessary denial that enables all of us to do what we do on a daily basis. Unfortunately, self-preservation is an increasingly collective kind of affair. You do your best to stay sober and remain sane, and then you have to pay attention to the inanity of some idiot who can’t be bothered to exert a sliver of common sense.
That ladder is coming out…
If your number is up, and you have to go, then that’s the way it goes. Those are the rules, inviolable and established long before the late twentieth century burst onto the scene. And yet. It is exceedingly difficult to justify a carelessly loaded ladder crashing into your windshield and taking you out. Entirely intolerable, no acceptable explanation.
Unless.
Unless there is a God. Then all kinds of things are capable of occurring. Then, it’s a matter of the divine order of things and a ladder can just as easily become an instrument of God’s wrath. Then, when a hunk of metal comes clawing through your window, you are simply another dog having your day. Then a certain, sublime symmetry holds sway, and there is little we can do to get out of the way.
That ladder is…
There it goes! Like a satellite, it sailed toward its target, right at Jackson’s window. But then the wind, or wrath, or whatever, took it in mid-flight and discarded it safely to the side of the highway, where it crashed on the concrete. A shower of sparks conveyed a simple message: Behold the brimstone brothers and sisters.
Thanks for that, Big Guy…
When you catch yourself talking to a God you are not sure you believe in, you should cut yourself some slack. We’ve all been there. We’ve all, on occasion, looked up to the clouds and wondered if there was a kingdom beyond the skies, the place some of us were told our dearly departed looked down from. We’ve all, on occasion, taken comfort from a one-way conversation we forgot to be self-conscious about, unable or unwilling to entirely abandon the idea that someone else is listening.
And so: you talk. And, maybe, everyone listens. And it follows, then: if you can talk to God, you can also talk to Abraham Lincoln, for instance; or even Einstein, and see if they can help you make sense of the mess we’re in. Anyone might be listening up there, and that’s more comfort than anything you could ever find in a church. And so: you talk. Say something, everything—anything you need to say to survive.
Eventually, the skyline turns from gray to green, with trees instead of telephone poles and hills instead of hotels on either side. On the tops of these hills, in between the forest and the freeway, the animals stood around, detached and mostly disinterested. Not quite believing what they looked down upon, they wryly observed the random madness rushing past. Instinctively, it seemed, most of them kept a safe distance, not wanting to partake in or become a part of the carnage of the twentieth century as it cruised by.
And then you slowly enter the South. Everything gets a little heavier: the scenery, the air, and the nonexistent breeze in the late afternoon of an unseasonably warm May. It’s not unlike the languid buzz bourbon delivers: you taste it and sense what is coming, and the deeper you go, the more intimate and intense it all becomes, and before you know it, you are exactly where you set out to be, whether or not you ever intended to get there.
The first thing you notice is the green. The trees, an impervious halo, hover around the highway. Suddenly, somehow, everything is green, greener than anything you’ve ever seen, so green it’s arresting and almost unreal to actually behold. You cannot believe how green it is: at some point it compels you to consider that for all the billions of trees we’ve butchered, it is extraordinary in its own marginal way how they have managed to remain relatively plentiful. It’s almost impossible to imagine how things used to look, in the days before before Cortez and Custer did their manifestly destined duties that are well-documented in textbooks made from the paper made from the trees they helped tear down.
And then a minor sort of miracle occurs as Maryland, without warning, becomes Virginia. Trees, with roots and branches extending into either state, stand at attention, hoping never to choose sides if brothers take up arms against one another for a second time.
Northern Virginia is an anomaly, it is neither here nor there; it is the gateway to the real south. The Washington Metropolitan Area is, in many ways, a bulwark against identity, a sort of spurious, neutral ground between North and South, Mason-Dixon Line be damned. Everyone to the north of northern Virginia correctly considers it the South; everyone south of Northern Virginia feels, not infeasibly, that it is the North.You are nowhere near Faulkner country yet, but you are also, already, half a world away from Cheever’s concrete commotion, from Whitman’s lazy leaves of grass, from Updike’s arrogant New England imbroglio. When you open your eyes, you are somewhere else, staring expressively at the world around you, at the verdant trees looming overhead, at the inestimable expanse of lucid skies that stretch up and away. You see different colors, fully flowering in their fleet glory: the air has changed from salt to soot and again to honeysuckle, the taste of almond—the bounty of Spring—is on your tongue. You hear strange birds calling, and somehow you can understand this other language, words welcoming you into another world, words that welcome you home.
Old School
This is old school, I say
To my niece who, at five years old, is now
The same age her uncle was when his parents
Transported him to this place—new then, old now.
Old school, she repeats, repeating things
I say because I am older, because I am
Still interesting, because I am…old school.
Even I can see that.
You Can’t Go Home Again, someone once wrote
And he was wrong.
Of course you can—all you have to do is never leave—
Leaving it behind does not mean it leaves you.
(And certainly I can’t be the only grown child
who returns often—in dreams, in memories and yes,
in my mind, I must confess: earnestly, ardently, often—
to the old streets that I came to outgrow
the way we outgrow games and bikes and friends
and exchange them for jobs and cars and co-workers).
You can always go home, and you need to go home,
It is only when you want to go home that you should
Start asking yourself some serious questions.
“Did you play kick the can?” my niece does not ask.
Nor does she ask if I ever played
Red Rover Come Over or Smear the Queer.
Those games got outgrown, or else we learned
To play them in ways not measured in bravado & bruises.
And I wonder if we are better off:
Growth granting us the eventual awareness that everyone is
Queer and no enjoys being…
I put away childish things each time I think
About them, storing them safely inside my heart
Where grown-up games can’t make them say Uncle.
“Uncle, did you play?” she does not say.
(She does not know everything but she knows
enough to understand that her uncle was never young
the way she is and the way she’ll always be and
far be it from me to tell her any differently).
Question: Can you play?
Remember when that’s all we used to say—
Summers summarized in a phrase we learned
Eventually to outgrow.
This uneven field (Field of Dreams, I’ll never say)
Was our Fenway and with tennis ball and wooden bat
We righted the wrongs of an evil world, where
Yaz never struck out, Bucky Dent was a blip
And the Curse of the Bambino played off-Broadway
Those days, that ceaseless, sweltering summer in 1978.
(Summer, seventies, Schlitz—not malt liquor, my friend,
this was strictly old school—no bull. I remember
block parties, warm beer, burnt marshmallows, mosquitoes
and putrid bug repellent that didn’t kill anything
but made us stronger (Don’t let the bed bugs bite, I’ll never say).
I had no idea how much I did not know but
I knew this much: if there was a beer besides Schlitz or
Bud I was unaware of it—that’s all
The adults drank back in the bad old days.
Play ball! no one needed to say because we played ball
Anyway—ball was our business and business was good,
Get it: the ball would invariably make a break for it
Ending up in the gutter (we called it sewer but, of course,
We were old school). Without a second thought
We pried off the manhole cover and dashed down into semi-darkness.
We never thought twice about it—we were young.
The game must go on! no one needed to say, we knew.
(I look now, and think: I would not go
into that hole for all the allowance money I never earned—
I know there are rats and who knows what else
Down there: the things our parents never realized
They should warn us about).
We never worried about the things that were not
Waiting for us, down there in the darkness.
“What are they doing?” I do not ask aloud,
Noticing—just in time, before I can call attention to it—
Two cats in coitus, doing what they do when they are young & free.
That’s something I’ve never seen and as I worry about
My niece asking me about it I understand: I’m old now.
Old school, I cannot say (to myself I say this).
That’s how it happens.
This would never have happened, then—
(I did not know much, but I knew this:
cats did not fornicate and kids fought only with fists).
But this is what happens when you go away.
Back then, in our close and cloistered community
Even the cats had discretion (they were old school)
Or maybe they were mortified, because
Bent over with booze or barbiturates they were
Silently screeching behind closed doors—
All of us, unknowingly, out in the light
Winning the World Series, while wicked women
Garrisoned themselves in dark alleys, behind
The anodyne of automatic garage doors.
It is quiet, now. Our mothers were so quiet, then.
Please allow them to have been happy,
In our memories if not in their actual lives.
I don’t remember but I have a feeling
That if I think hard enough I will recall
The things that were never said and therefore never forgotten.
I drink in the past and am reminded of youth,
Which tastes unlike anything other than what it is: freedom.
Cold, sour Schlitz (of course I took a taste)
With those incredibly awkward silver ring-tabs
We pulled off for the privilege of first sip.
That is old school, I do not tell my niece.
It’s only when you’re older that beer tastes
Like freedom, but it’s a borrowed brilliance,
A manufactured feeling, just like in school
How it’s cheating if the answer is already in your lap.
It’s the things they can’t package or make you pay for:
Those things that they never tell you about until you are old enough
To know better: that is what freedom is.
Curiosity killed the cat, someone once said and
Maybe they were right.
But something is going to get all of us
Eventually, whether we ask for it or understand it.
The cats are gone, maybe they have gone home
(they can always go home), back to their families—
The heavy silences and signified banality of routine
(do they still have strict rules about no TV
and everyone present around the table when
dinner is served at six-thirty sharp?
I certainly hope so, for their sakes).
Or maybe they are getting down to business—
Dirty deeds and dirty work go hand in hand—
Down in the darkness, doing their thankless task,
Keeping the sewers safe from rats and reality.
Curious or content, we know enough to take
Whatever it is that life decrees.
We went into the sewers the way we went into the world:
Unafraid, unwavering, unencumbered and
Above all: unconcerned about all those things
Older people were kind enough to never…
“Old school!” my niece repeats, curious
because she does not comprehend at all.
Old school, I do not say, reticent
Because I do remember it (all).
If curiosity doesn’t kill us, contentment gets there quicker.
How did we go down there, then?
How do we go out there, now?
Sean Murphy, 3-20-02
This is old school, I say
To my niece who, at five years old, is now
The same age her uncle was when his parents
Transported him to this place—new then, old now.
Old school, she repeats, repeating things
I say because I am older, because I am
Still interesting, because I am…old school.
Even I can see that.
You Can’t Go Home Again, someone once wrote
And he was wrong.
Of course you can—all you have to do is never leave—
Leaving it behind does not mean it leaves you.
(And certainly I can’t be the only grown child
who returns often—in dreams, in memories and yes,
in my mind, I must confess: earnestly, ardently, often—
to the old streets that I came to outgrow
the way we outgrow games and bikes and friends
and exchange them for jobs and cars and co-workers).
You can always go home, and you need to go home,
It is only when you want to go home that you should
Start asking yourself some serious questions.
“Did you play kick the can?” my niece does not ask.
Nor does she ask if I ever played
Red Rover Come Over or Smear the Queer.
Those games got outgrown, or else we learned
To play them in ways not measured in bravado & bruises.
And I wonder if we are better off:
Growth granting us the eventual awareness that everyone is
Queer and no enjoys being…
I put away childish things each time I think
About them, storing them safely inside my heart
Where grown-up games can’t make them say Uncle.
“Uncle, did you play?” she does not say.
(She does not know everything but she knows
enough to understand that her uncle was never young
the way she is and the way she’ll always be and
far be it from me to tell her any differently).
Question: Can you play?
Remember when that’s all we used to say—
Summers summarized in a phrase we learned
Eventually to outgrow.
This uneven field (Field of Dreams, I’ll never say)
Was our Fenway and with tennis ball and wooden bat
We righted the wrongs of an evil world, where
Yaz never struck out, Bucky Dent was a blip
And the Curse of the Bambino played off-Broadway
Those days, that ceaseless, sweltering summer in 1978.
(Summer, seventies, Schlitz—not malt liquor, my friend,
this was strictly old school—no bull. I remember
block parties, warm beer, burnt marshmallows, mosquitoes
and putrid bug repellent that didn’t kill anything
but made us stronger (Don’t let the bed bugs bite, I’ll never say).
I had no idea how much I did not know but
I knew this much: if there was a beer besides Schlitz or
Bud I was unaware of it—that’s all
The adults drank back in the bad old days.
Play ball! no one needed to say because we played ball
Anyway—ball was our business and business was good,
Get it: the ball would invariably make a break for it
Ending up in the gutter (we called it sewer but, of course,
We were old school). Without a second thought
We pried off the manhole cover and dashed down into semi-darkness.
We never thought twice about it—we were young.
The game must go on! no one needed to say, we knew.
(I look now, and think: I would not go
into that hole for all the allowance money I never earned—
I know there are rats and who knows what else
Down there: the things our parents never realized
They should warn us about).
We never worried about the things that were not
Waiting for us, down there in the darkness.
“What are they doing?” I do not ask aloud,
Noticing—just in time, before I can call attention to it—
Two cats in coitus, doing what they do when they are young & free.
That’s something I’ve never seen and as I worry about
My niece asking me about it I understand: I’m old now.
Old school, I cannot say (to myself I say this).
That’s how it happens.
This would never have happened, then—
(I did not know much, but I knew this:
cats did not fornicate and kids fought only with fists).
But this is what happens when you go away.
Back then, in our close and cloistered community
Even the cats had discretion (they were old school)
Or maybe they were mortified, because
Bent over with booze or barbiturates they were
Silently screeching behind closed doors—
All of us, unknowingly, out in the light
Winning the World Series, while wicked women
Garrisoned themselves in dark alleys, behind
The anodyne of automatic garage doors.
It is quiet, now. Our mothers were so quiet, then.
Please allow them to have been happy,
In our memories if not in their actual lives.
I don’t remember but I have a feeling
That if I think hard enough I will recall
The things that were never said and therefore never forgotten.
I drink in the past and am reminded of youth,
Which tastes unlike anything other than what it is: freedom.
Cold, sour Schlitz (of course I took a taste)
With those incredibly awkward silver ring-tabs
We pulled off for the privilege of first sip.
That is old school, I do not tell my niece.
It’s only when you’re older that beer tastes
Like freedom, but it’s a borrowed brilliance,
A manufactured feeling, just like in school
How it’s cheating if the answer is already in your lap.
It’s the things they can’t package or make you pay for:
Those things that they never tell you about until you are old enough
To know better: that is what freedom is.
Curiosity killed the cat, someone once said and
Maybe they were right.
But something is going to get all of us
Eventually, whether we ask for it or understand it.
The cats are gone, maybe they have gone home
(they can always go home), back to their families—
The heavy silences and signified banality of routine
(do they still have strict rules about no TV
and everyone present around the table when
dinner is served at six-thirty sharp?
I certainly hope so, for their sakes).
Or maybe they are getting down to business—
Dirty deeds and dirty work go hand in hand—
Down in the darkness, doing their thankless task,
Keeping the sewers safe from rats and reality.
Curious or content, we know enough to take
Whatever it is that life decrees.
We went into the sewers the way we went into the world:
Unafraid, unwavering, unencumbered and
Above all: unconcerned about all those things
Older people were kind enough to never…
“Old school!” my niece repeats, curious
because she does not comprehend at all.
Old school, I do not say, reticent
Because I do remember it (all).
If curiosity doesn’t kill us, contentment gets there quicker.
How did we go down there, then?
How do we go out there, now?
Sean Murphy, 3-20-02
October 20, 199_
Jim Morrison, I saw you today at a Chinese Buffet (6.95 all you can eat).
And I could not help but notice:
The dull complacency and exhaustion
That I saw in your eyes;
An obese stumbling gait imitating
Your once svelte Lizard King Prowl;
A resigned beard,
An indifferent slouch,
A southern drawl (scarcely audible)
Has replaced your butterfly scream.
Is it the tyranny of boredom?
A dream deferred:
To the safety of TV dinners
And the comfort of insipid re-runs
Before bedtime.
How was it?
To grow old and die at 27
Then: To start over again.
A play-thing of the gods.
The frenzied productivity
Of acid-fueled creativity;
A papier-mache soul,
A black and blue ego.
Everyday was Saturday,
A lifetime of summers
In only six years.
What was it like?
To die nightly
And live only to die:
Prurient fodder for the public eye.
How is it?
Now: Mysterious no more.
Burned inside-out
From your wandering, aimless rebellion.
Now it's Church on Sunday:
A banana peel reality.
Once you told us to wake up but have you
yourself awoken?
Trapped in this new-fangled slumber.
Do you remember? The message:
Even now its cadence echoes, falling
On the deaf ears of idle purchasers.
Jim Morrison, I saw you today at a Chinese Buffet (6.95 all you can eat).
And I could not help but notice:
The dull complacency and exhaustion
That I saw in your eyes;
An obese stumbling gait imitating
Your once svelte Lizard King Prowl;
A resigned beard,
An indifferent slouch,
A southern drawl (scarcely audible)
Has replaced your butterfly scream.
Is it the tyranny of boredom?
A dream deferred:
To the safety of TV dinners
And the comfort of insipid re-runs
Before bedtime.
How was it?
To grow old and die at 27
Then: To start over again.
A play-thing of the gods.
The frenzied productivity
Of acid-fueled creativity;
A papier-mache soul,
A black and blue ego.
Everyday was Saturday,
A lifetime of summers
In only six years.
What was it like?
To die nightly
And live only to die:
Prurient fodder for the public eye.
How is it?
Now: Mysterious no more.
Burned inside-out
From your wandering, aimless rebellion.
Now it's Church on Sunday:
A banana peel reality.
Once you told us to wake up but have you
yourself awoken?
Trapped in this new-fangled slumber.
Do you remember? The message:
Even now its cadence echoes, falling
On the deaf ears of idle purchasers.
As Opposed To Prayer
Nervous and unnerved this evening, alone:
Searching for solace, something not unlike prayer,
A hope that the past will not repeat itself,
Progress: a preemptive strike, this procedure
(They call it a procedure when
They expect nothing unexpected).
Precedence and percentages: our family has a history,
Meaning that some part of someone who has died
Might be alive and unwelcome and somewhere inside.
Remembering: immeasurable moments, IVs and all
The unpleasant things you can’t force yourself to forget:
Bad days, worse days, glimpses of serenity then grief,
A flash focus of forced perspective—this too shall pass.
Then, inevitably, earlier times: I recall
When doctors and dentists handled us with bare hands.
Still living, then, in a past the future had not
Crept up on, a time when the truth was believable,
Because the only lies that children can tell
Get told to escape tiny troubles they’ve created.
And so I am uneasy and it’s not even myself
I am thinking about: frightened all over again
For my mother, and I can do nothing for her
Now, just as I could do nothing for her, then.
A cycle: she had seen her own mother suffer
While each of them made their anxious inquiries,
Appeals assailed the darkening clouds, out of time.
Like her son, she eventually became acquainted
With the white-walled world of procedures
And all that happens—before, during, after and beyond:
Hope and fear, faith then despair—the nagging need
To believe in men and the magic of machines
Or the things we say when no one is speaking.
I’m so scared, she said, to anyone who was listening.
I know I was, and we hoped that God was,
The God who may have done this and a million other things
In His austere, always unaccountable way.
In the end: she feared the truth but not the reasons why
Awful things always happen to almost everyone.
Me, I envied the armor of her fear, I understood
I could not even rely on those lovely lies
About a God I can’t bring myself to believe in.
We were there: a child and the man
Who brought me into this mess
(Something I’ve always acknowledged him for,
Something I’ll never quite forgive him for).
He said what needed to be said: nothing,
And I said what he said, after all,
What were we supposed to say, the truth?
The truth was this: we too were scared.
I’m so scared, she said, and we told her
It was going to be okay, we told her
We had reason to believe and we told her
Other things when the things we’d already told her
Turned out to be untrue: we never told her
The truth, which was that we were lying.
Fear and faith are useful if you can afford either/
Or, fear is free and lingers always, longer,
After it has served its purposeless point,
Like a stain on the street, days later.
Dying is nothing to be daunted by, it’s living
That takes the toll: living with death,
Living with life, being unprepared or unwilling
To be unafraid when it’s finally time to die.
I’m so scared, I say, to anyone
Who may be listening in the silence,
Wondering if they can do more for me
Than we could manage to do for her.
There is no one left to lie to—yet
The truth, as always, is immutable.
And so, if you are out there, please help me
To absolve this dread that no one can hear.
Sean Murphy, 3/17/03
Nervous and unnerved this evening, alone:
Searching for solace, something not unlike prayer,
A hope that the past will not repeat itself,
Progress: a preemptive strike, this procedure
(They call it a procedure when
They expect nothing unexpected).
Precedence and percentages: our family has a history,
Meaning that some part of someone who has died
Might be alive and unwelcome and somewhere inside.
Remembering: immeasurable moments, IVs and all
The unpleasant things you can’t force yourself to forget:
Bad days, worse days, glimpses of serenity then grief,
A flash focus of forced perspective—this too shall pass.
Then, inevitably, earlier times: I recall
When doctors and dentists handled us with bare hands.
Still living, then, in a past the future had not
Crept up on, a time when the truth was believable,
Because the only lies that children can tell
Get told to escape tiny troubles they’ve created.
And so I am uneasy and it’s not even myself
I am thinking about: frightened all over again
For my mother, and I can do nothing for her
Now, just as I could do nothing for her, then.
A cycle: she had seen her own mother suffer
While each of them made their anxious inquiries,
Appeals assailed the darkening clouds, out of time.
Like her son, she eventually became acquainted
With the white-walled world of procedures
And all that happens—before, during, after and beyond:
Hope and fear, faith then despair—the nagging need
To believe in men and the magic of machines
Or the things we say when no one is speaking.
I’m so scared, she said, to anyone who was listening.
I know I was, and we hoped that God was,
The God who may have done this and a million other things
In His austere, always unaccountable way.
In the end: she feared the truth but not the reasons why
Awful things always happen to almost everyone.
Me, I envied the armor of her fear, I understood
I could not even rely on those lovely lies
About a God I can’t bring myself to believe in.
We were there: a child and the man
Who brought me into this mess
(Something I’ve always acknowledged him for,
Something I’ll never quite forgive him for).
He said what needed to be said: nothing,
And I said what he said, after all,
What were we supposed to say, the truth?
The truth was this: we too were scared.
I’m so scared, she said, and we told her
It was going to be okay, we told her
We had reason to believe and we told her
Other things when the things we’d already told her
Turned out to be untrue: we never told her
The truth, which was that we were lying.
Fear and faith are useful if you can afford either/
Or, fear is free and lingers always, longer,
After it has served its purposeless point,
Like a stain on the street, days later.
Dying is nothing to be daunted by, it’s living
That takes the toll: living with death,
Living with life, being unprepared or unwilling
To be unafraid when it’s finally time to die.
I’m so scared, I say, to anyone
Who may be listening in the silence,
Wondering if they can do more for me
Than we could manage to do for her.
There is no one left to lie to—yet
The truth, as always, is immutable.
And so, if you are out there, please help me
To absolve this dread that no one can hear.
Sean Murphy, 3/17/03
She Walks On
She walks on, alone.
Leaving shadows and their secrets,
Bronzed backs broken, miseries muted,
Their once-sweet souls sucked clean.
Used up and useless now,
Digested and then discarded,
Secured and purpose served,
Savored—not in memory, forgotten
Like so many candy wrappers,
Picked up by the wind and
Put down by the rain and
Smothered in the snow:
All those seasons accounted for
In their empty eyes that no longer see.
She walks on.
But make no mistake, she knows:
She knows what she’s done and
She knows what she will do again,
And again she understands, inside
She can control time and defy the devils
Of age and faith and fear,
And the misfortunes of the flesh
That come calling, always too early
And always after—it’s already over and then
Her heart is hollowed-out, eaten up
By the same urgency that was once her ally.
Impatient and insatiable, unyielding even as her eyes
Cry, mirrors of the memories she made:
Her heart, used up and useless now
She walks on, alone.
Sean Murphy, 9-15-02
An Interview with Adrienne Miller
The Literary Life and How To Live It
by Sean Murphy
An Interview with Adrienne Miller
What's going on in Akron? Ohio, that is. First the Akron-bred Black Keys drop Rubber Factory, easily the best rock album of the year, and now Adrienne Miller, who until now would understandably be associated with the Big Apple because of her role as literary editor of Esquire, releases her debut novel, a sprawling, earnest and unwieldy homage of sorts to her hometown. And it's the real deal. The Coast of Akron has hit the streets like a set of Goodyears, already garnering reviews any novelist would run over a relative to receive: accolades from Dave Eggers and Joanna Scott, and The Village Voice which (accurately) hails it as "a big, brashly ambitious novel that does not deal in half-measures." It is equal parts encouraging and refreshing—as we lurch into a new century's literary landscape increasingly compartmentalized, fast-sales-oriented and fad obsessed—to watch a writer announce herself with a work that is substantial, intricate and occasionally messy—a work, in short, that is not unlike life.
Adrienne Miller was born in 1972 in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up around Akron, Ohio. As Esquire's literary editor (since 1997), Miller has published stories by Don DeLillo, Aleksandar Hemon, Arthur Miller, Tim O'Brien, George Saunders, and Elizabeth McCracken, among others. Under her literary stewardship, Esquire won the 2004 National Magazine Award for Fiction, as well as numerous Best American and O. Henry Awards.
Murphy: First and foremost, congratulations on the early and positive buzz for The Coast of Akron! It must be equal parts gratifying and terrifying—as perhaps only a handful of people could understand: well-known literary editor of highly regarded and historically important magazine now about to have her work reviewed and critiqued…How different (or similar) would you say your experience has been to any other writer hoping to break through?
Miller: Well, in terms of the actual writing of the book, my experience was absolutely no different from that of any other first-time author: I had a job, I had a life, and I had a book to write. There is no public expectation for anyone's first book -- there is an audience of precisely zero awaiting your arrival – and there was certainly no audience waiting for me. When I finished The Coast of Akron, after about five years of work, I had very little confidence – because it is such an idiosyncratic and personal novel -- that it would even find a publisher. My job seems to be both a help and a hindrance to the publication process. Unlike a lot of other first novelists, book reviewers might recognize my name, so I'm very aware that my job in itself seems to help the book get reviewed. However, I'm finding that the book is often reviewed in a much more skeptical, more jaundiced -- and sometimes less generous -- way than most "debut" novels are. I feel as if the bar is set much higher for me. Of course, I feel that I shouldn't be treated as if I'd skipped a grade. I mean, it's only my first novel! And believe me, I know that I, like any other first-time novelist, have a lot to learn. Also, my book isn't necessarily straightforward realistic fiction, and it's risky in a lot of ways, so I know that it won't suit everyone's tastes. But I have to be suspicious whenever the book is reviewed by a writer whose work I haven't, for whatever reason, been able to use for Esquire. I'm surprised by how often that has happened – the book being reviewed by someone I know (and wish I didn't). People warned me all along about this.
Murphy: Did you always know you wanted to write fiction? One on hand it would seem that being immersed in the writing of very talented authors would naturally impel—and enhance—one's creative endeavors; but it is easy to imagine how the sheer volume of words might be overwhelming or perhaps intimidating. How are you able to wear both hats with such an impressive degree of proficiency?
Miller: I know many novelists and short story writers who also teach, and I don't think it seems remarkable to anyone that they do both. My job as a fiction editor at a magazine isn't a whole lot different than a creative writing teacher's job – I read lots of manuscripts and make comments on them. When we accept a short story, I work on that piece at a very detailed level, as a teacher would in a creative writing workshop. So I don't really find an interest in teaching/editing and an interest in writing to be all that much at odds. It would be a much more interesting story if I had a job as an astronaut or a cop or something entirely unrelated to writing.
Murphy: When I used the word "messy" before in describing The Coast of Akron, it was intentional but not meant in a critical way; on the contrary, a bad novel can be—and often is—a mess, but to convey the messiness of contemporary life (in general) and the effort, illusion and obsessions your characters (in particular) are pushed and pulled by is not an inconsiderable achievement. Or put another way, sometimes messiness—certainly in art—has its own sort of beauty, and I think your novel admirably illuminates the methods to the madness, and vice versa, of these little people with such big hopes and hugely derailed dreams.
Miller: I'm not really a tidy writer, and the books I like the most are pretty untidy themselves. I was really trying to capture some of the feeling of what it's like to be alive right now – what life looks like, sounds like and feels like, and it's messy. I also attempted to write a book in which the reader feels about the characters the way we feel about real people. I wanted the characters to be maddening, irritating, and good – or capable of good -- like us. And just like real people, I wanted the characters' actions to sometimes make sense to us, and sometimes not. An example of this is Merit's weird, creepy affair with her stoner assistant Randy – you kind of understand the attraction, and you kind of don't. I mean, how many affairs – or couples, for that matter – do you know who make sense? Human beings' motivations are often quite muddled, confused and confusing. Tidy motivation doesn't exist in messy real life. We wouldn't spend so much time talking about other people if motivations were clear.
Murphy: Much of the action—and certainly the denouement—occurs in the mansion (one review described it as a "massive faux Tudor", which I think is perfect), named (and anytime anyone is wealthy, or weird enough to name their house, serious trouble usually festers not far beneath the fastidiously polished veneer) On Ne Peut Pas Vivre Seul—"One Cannot Live Alone." But it becomes increasingly clear that all of these characters do live alone, and are lonely.
Miller: I wanted to write about characters who were deeply alienated, characters who were desperately searching for a connection to other people, as we all are. I set out to write a novel that was, above and beyond everything else, sad…although I didn't really think the novel was all that sad until recently. (When I was writing it, some of the stuff, especially stuff involving Fergus, really cracked me up, and I mean audibly.) But a couple of months ago, when I was reading over the last set of proofs, I came pretty close to having a nervous breakdown. I literally couldn't look at the book anymore and remain semi sane. And I'm finding that now it's actually very difficult for me to have to read aloud from the book, because I find a lot of it truly upsetting. The humor in the book now strikes me as a desperate gallows humor, a laugh before dying, like Rita Lydig's famous last words (while being fanned on her deathbed), "Is it a Spanish fan?" (And then she died.) Whatever humor exists in the book is used by the characters to mask a very deep, and very real, psychic pain. That's why the laughs are so uncomfortable. I should also say that if a line, a moment, a scene, was making me uncomfortable to write, then I knew I was on to something. I had to follow that strain of discomfort.
Murphy: With a cast of characters that includes a wealthy fraud of an artist, a quietly desperate housewife and her compulsive, priggish husband, a delusional gay bon-vivant wannabe who is both home wrecker and host, as well as an alcoholic who turns out to be an unrecognized genius—mostly by her own machinations, one is obligated to at least inquire about your inspirations!
Miller: Oh boy, I was afraid you were going to ask this. This book is not my adorable little memoir about my adorable time in New York, and I promise you that there are very few autobiographical elements in it -- I don't have a crazy Uncle Fergus, or any Fergus-equivalent in my life, thank God. But I did start with the name "Fergus" – several years ago, in London, I heard of someone with that name; I wrote that name down, and I let that name guide me. As cheesy and as mystical as this sounds, I let all my characters tell me who they were. I started with the names, then the voices followed, then the characters. I really didn't have any guiding principle during the writing of this book other than: follow it if it's working; get rid of it if it's not. Fergus's voice was probably inspired, in part, by the last couple of lines of Diana Vreeland's memoir D.V., a really outrageous and insane piece of work, and one of my true favorites. The lines are: "Don't ask me her other names. People called Pink don't have other names." Very few of the other people whom I've recited these lines to – and there are many such people -- seem to think they're as great as I do, by the way. So Fergus and Pink are probably how it all started. I also knew that I wanted to write about a young woman, and wanted her voice to be a slangy, colloquial third-person – I wanted her to sound like a midwestern woman around my own age. I wanted to have a statistician character, because I happen to like statisticians (a familial weakness), and I thought it was time for one to get his due in a novel. Lowell exists because I initially thought he and his voice were funny (I no longer think either of these things). I wanted to write a book in which much of the information is traded through gossip (because that's how the world works, as far as I can tell), but I didn't set out to write a sprawling family drama – after about two years of work I had these three very distinct and (at least to me) addictive voices, but I didn't know how they fit together. So I just stuck them all in one house and made them into a family. I wouldn't recommend this formless way of writing to anyone. The writers who start with a rigid outline seem much saner to me, and much more productive…although I certainly don't understand them.
Murphy: How difficult is it for a writer to appear in Esquire? How many submissions will you typically see in a year? Presumably you've compared notes—so to speak—with other literary editors…what is the percentage of quality vs. quantity in terms of unsolicited stories the top tier publications receive?
Miller: This is a difficult question to answer, because not only am I looking for good stories, but I'm looking for good stories that are appropriate for Esquire. Often I'll have to reluctantly pass on a really great story – a story that I, as a civilian reader, love -- because it doesn't match the magazine's style or sensibility. So, that is to say that I'm not only reading for quality, but also for appropriateness. During the year, there seem to be busy submission periods, and less-busy submission periods: during the busy months, we can receive a thousand or so stories; during less busy months, we can see a hundred. Most of the stories I read are quite skillfully done, but, by and large, most seem to lack a certain…what? Zest? Call it tension, drama, a fire in the belly. It's what separates all the merely good stories from the really exceptional ones. When a piece of fiction – or any kind of art -- works, you can feel it viscerally. But I don't need to tell anyone that. We all know what we like, and how what we like makes us feel.
Murphy: What were the circumstances that led you to your position at Esquire? Did you know you wanted to write during and immediately after college but reckoned a "day job" was unavoidable? Did you purposefully avoid graduate school and the MFA scene?
Miller: It so happens that I actually was intending on getting an MFA in fiction, and, by the second semester of my senior year in college, I had even decided on a grad school. I knew I wanted to write, but had no clue how else to make that happen other than the MFA track. The spring before my college graduation, I remember enrolling (as I recall, they wanted a check to hold my place), but, through a professor of mine, I found out about a job opening as an editorial assistant at GQ. I called the editor in question at GQ – after a shot of Maker's Mark -- and for whatever reason, he offered me the job. I'm a horribly pragmatic person – it's one of my least-attractive characteristics – and I knew that I'd probably never have another chance to work at a national magazine (the whole set-up seemed impossibility glamorous to me at the time), so I took the job. And, for my first years in New York, I supported myself as an assistant at a glossy magazine, making no money, often wondering why I was doing it at all, living in a studio apartment so tiny that its kitchen was nothing more than a hot-plate, subsisting on pre-sliced, semi seedless deli watermelon and Annie's macaroni (the brand with the rabbit on the box, prepared on that much-used hot-plate). A few years were spent like this, then, long story short, the job as literary editor at Esquire opened up. I interviewed for this position many times, and wrote a few passionate letters that laid out all the reasons why I, naturally must be hired as literary editor. Much to my astonishment, I got the job. I freely admit that luck and timing have both played important parts in my editorial career, but, I must say that luck hasn't been so much a factor in my writing life. In fact, my professional (meaning: editorial) luck has meant a fair amount of frustration in my writing life. Having a job you like is about the worst bit of luck a fiction writer can have.
Murphy: You've commented that working closely with other writers has helped and not hindered your own creative process. Do you think your professional experience accelerated or impeded your own path to publication? For instance, I remember being told repeatedly back in college workshops that the best (and perhaps only) way to learn to write good fiction is to read good fiction. Then, after enough emulation and hard work and the years of awful, unworthy writing one needs to get out of one's system, perhaps—at some point if you are lucky and ambitious enough—a distinctive voice inevitably emerges. I tend to buy this theory. What about you?
Miller: If I hadn't been making my living as an editor for these last years, I would have probably found a way to make a go of it as a writer. That means I probably would have published a novel or two by this point. I'm not saying that the novel or two would have been any good, in fact, probably just the opposite. And, yes, I definitely do think that reading and evaluating fiction for the last decade or so has made me a much better writer than I otherwise would have been, chiefly because being a professional reader means that I try to read my own stuff with the same dispassionate judgment with which I have to read other people's stuff. I'm not saying I can always read my own writing with a kind of coldly critical eye – who can? -- but working as an editor has at least trained me to try.
Murphy: Several of the writers interviewed for this series teach fiction at the college level. While not in the classroom, you undoubtedly see more manuscripts in any given month than most professors receive in five years. How do you feel about the quality of fiction in the 21st century: What positive trends have you noticed? What awful ones? Is it true to presume that regardless of genre or generation, good writing will ultimately rise above the fads and formulas?
Miller: I'm really quite resolutely unfaddish in my literary taste; I hate faddishness of any kind, in literature, art, fashion, everything. It seems to me that an author must write about one thing: life. That's it. Culture changes, but life –and human beings – do not. I'm really a traditionalist in my tastes, I guess. Character and language: what else is there? Other readers have other values, but those are mine.
Murphy: MFA or No-MFA? Any comments or opinions for the folks who are adamant (pro OR con) about the value of MFA programs? I've read some highly regarded book reviewers (Jonathan Yardley from The Washington Post leaps immediately to mind) who comment frequently on what they feel are the deleterious effects of "workshop" training on contemporary fiction. Again, as someone who has been very much on the front-lines of what ostensibly passes as the "best and brightest" short fiction, do you have any opinions one way or the other?
Miller: Writing workshops seem to be valuable mainly because they provide the great gift of time to writers. Whenever someone asks for career advice from me – "I got into grad school. Should I go?" – I'll usually advise them to go, especially if the program gives them money. And they'll have a book-length manuscript at the end of their two years. But I also think writers should be forewarned that grad school won't really help them get their book published later, or help them get a job (although a job is probably not what any MFA grad really wants). But what they will have is a book. And that's very cool. That's all that matters, really.
Murphy: If you had to say which writer influenced you most, and which book, what would they be? Any other notable influences, artistic or otherwise?
Miller: Many of my artistic influences have been musical. I have obsessions with both Cole Porter (one of whose songs plays a cameo in my book) and Mozart. Oh, and I loved the Smiths and The Legendary Pink Dots, and lots of other arty-type bands that would take an hour to list. I really wanted to be a musician more than anything else, but a conspicuous lack of discipline, and talent, kept me from pursuing that dream. In college, I started out as a poet, so, initially; it was poetry that melted me into a puddle. I can't really say what or who influenced the book – all writers probably want to feel that they are influenceless – but I can say that early literary ardors include Martin Amis (London Fields, which I read when I was eighteen, made me decide to become a writer), Gore Vidal, M.F.K. Fisher, and – I know this is a weird one, and from out of left field -- Quentin Crisp. (One of the book's most probing and perceptive critics noticed a Quentin Crisp connection, which I was amazed, and a little frightened, by.) I should add that I do recognize that my early influences were all supreme stylists; style was, when I was extremely young and impressionable, the literary virtue I most prized. But my literary taste has, I think and hope, become a lot more expansive than it was then. (Oh, and I love Flannery O'Connor, beyond measure.)
Murphy: Lastly: any advice for aspiring writers?
Miller: Apply seat to chair. Concentrate. Apply seat to chair. Concentrate. Repeat daily, for the rest of your life.
by Sean Murphy
An Interview with Adrienne Miller
What's going on in Akron? Ohio, that is. First the Akron-bred Black Keys drop Rubber Factory, easily the best rock album of the year, and now Adrienne Miller, who until now would understandably be associated with the Big Apple because of her role as literary editor of Esquire, releases her debut novel, a sprawling, earnest and unwieldy homage of sorts to her hometown. And it's the real deal. The Coast of Akron has hit the streets like a set of Goodyears, already garnering reviews any novelist would run over a relative to receive: accolades from Dave Eggers and Joanna Scott, and The Village Voice which (accurately) hails it as "a big, brashly ambitious novel that does not deal in half-measures." It is equal parts encouraging and refreshing—as we lurch into a new century's literary landscape increasingly compartmentalized, fast-sales-oriented and fad obsessed—to watch a writer announce herself with a work that is substantial, intricate and occasionally messy—a work, in short, that is not unlike life.
Adrienne Miller was born in 1972 in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up around Akron, Ohio. As Esquire's literary editor (since 1997), Miller has published stories by Don DeLillo, Aleksandar Hemon, Arthur Miller, Tim O'Brien, George Saunders, and Elizabeth McCracken, among others. Under her literary stewardship, Esquire won the 2004 National Magazine Award for Fiction, as well as numerous Best American and O. Henry Awards.
Murphy: First and foremost, congratulations on the early and positive buzz for The Coast of Akron! It must be equal parts gratifying and terrifying—as perhaps only a handful of people could understand: well-known literary editor of highly regarded and historically important magazine now about to have her work reviewed and critiqued…How different (or similar) would you say your experience has been to any other writer hoping to break through?
Miller: Well, in terms of the actual writing of the book, my experience was absolutely no different from that of any other first-time author: I had a job, I had a life, and I had a book to write. There is no public expectation for anyone's first book -- there is an audience of precisely zero awaiting your arrival – and there was certainly no audience waiting for me. When I finished The Coast of Akron, after about five years of work, I had very little confidence – because it is such an idiosyncratic and personal novel -- that it would even find a publisher. My job seems to be both a help and a hindrance to the publication process. Unlike a lot of other first novelists, book reviewers might recognize my name, so I'm very aware that my job in itself seems to help the book get reviewed. However, I'm finding that the book is often reviewed in a much more skeptical, more jaundiced -- and sometimes less generous -- way than most "debut" novels are. I feel as if the bar is set much higher for me. Of course, I feel that I shouldn't be treated as if I'd skipped a grade. I mean, it's only my first novel! And believe me, I know that I, like any other first-time novelist, have a lot to learn. Also, my book isn't necessarily straightforward realistic fiction, and it's risky in a lot of ways, so I know that it won't suit everyone's tastes. But I have to be suspicious whenever the book is reviewed by a writer whose work I haven't, for whatever reason, been able to use for Esquire. I'm surprised by how often that has happened – the book being reviewed by someone I know (and wish I didn't). People warned me all along about this.
Murphy: Did you always know you wanted to write fiction? One on hand it would seem that being immersed in the writing of very talented authors would naturally impel—and enhance—one's creative endeavors; but it is easy to imagine how the sheer volume of words might be overwhelming or perhaps intimidating. How are you able to wear both hats with such an impressive degree of proficiency?
Miller: I know many novelists and short story writers who also teach, and I don't think it seems remarkable to anyone that they do both. My job as a fiction editor at a magazine isn't a whole lot different than a creative writing teacher's job – I read lots of manuscripts and make comments on them. When we accept a short story, I work on that piece at a very detailed level, as a teacher would in a creative writing workshop. So I don't really find an interest in teaching/editing and an interest in writing to be all that much at odds. It would be a much more interesting story if I had a job as an astronaut or a cop or something entirely unrelated to writing.
Murphy: When I used the word "messy" before in describing The Coast of Akron, it was intentional but not meant in a critical way; on the contrary, a bad novel can be—and often is—a mess, but to convey the messiness of contemporary life (in general) and the effort, illusion and obsessions your characters (in particular) are pushed and pulled by is not an inconsiderable achievement. Or put another way, sometimes messiness—certainly in art—has its own sort of beauty, and I think your novel admirably illuminates the methods to the madness, and vice versa, of these little people with such big hopes and hugely derailed dreams.
Miller: I'm not really a tidy writer, and the books I like the most are pretty untidy themselves. I was really trying to capture some of the feeling of what it's like to be alive right now – what life looks like, sounds like and feels like, and it's messy. I also attempted to write a book in which the reader feels about the characters the way we feel about real people. I wanted the characters to be maddening, irritating, and good – or capable of good -- like us. And just like real people, I wanted the characters' actions to sometimes make sense to us, and sometimes not. An example of this is Merit's weird, creepy affair with her stoner assistant Randy – you kind of understand the attraction, and you kind of don't. I mean, how many affairs – or couples, for that matter – do you know who make sense? Human beings' motivations are often quite muddled, confused and confusing. Tidy motivation doesn't exist in messy real life. We wouldn't spend so much time talking about other people if motivations were clear.
Murphy: Much of the action—and certainly the denouement—occurs in the mansion (one review described it as a "massive faux Tudor", which I think is perfect), named (and anytime anyone is wealthy, or weird enough to name their house, serious trouble usually festers not far beneath the fastidiously polished veneer) On Ne Peut Pas Vivre Seul—"One Cannot Live Alone." But it becomes increasingly clear that all of these characters do live alone, and are lonely.
Miller: I wanted to write about characters who were deeply alienated, characters who were desperately searching for a connection to other people, as we all are. I set out to write a novel that was, above and beyond everything else, sad…although I didn't really think the novel was all that sad until recently. (When I was writing it, some of the stuff, especially stuff involving Fergus, really cracked me up, and I mean audibly.) But a couple of months ago, when I was reading over the last set of proofs, I came pretty close to having a nervous breakdown. I literally couldn't look at the book anymore and remain semi sane. And I'm finding that now it's actually very difficult for me to have to read aloud from the book, because I find a lot of it truly upsetting. The humor in the book now strikes me as a desperate gallows humor, a laugh before dying, like Rita Lydig's famous last words (while being fanned on her deathbed), "Is it a Spanish fan?" (And then she died.) Whatever humor exists in the book is used by the characters to mask a very deep, and very real, psychic pain. That's why the laughs are so uncomfortable. I should also say that if a line, a moment, a scene, was making me uncomfortable to write, then I knew I was on to something. I had to follow that strain of discomfort.
Murphy: With a cast of characters that includes a wealthy fraud of an artist, a quietly desperate housewife and her compulsive, priggish husband, a delusional gay bon-vivant wannabe who is both home wrecker and host, as well as an alcoholic who turns out to be an unrecognized genius—mostly by her own machinations, one is obligated to at least inquire about your inspirations!
Miller: Oh boy, I was afraid you were going to ask this. This book is not my adorable little memoir about my adorable time in New York, and I promise you that there are very few autobiographical elements in it -- I don't have a crazy Uncle Fergus, or any Fergus-equivalent in my life, thank God. But I did start with the name "Fergus" – several years ago, in London, I heard of someone with that name; I wrote that name down, and I let that name guide me. As cheesy and as mystical as this sounds, I let all my characters tell me who they were. I started with the names, then the voices followed, then the characters. I really didn't have any guiding principle during the writing of this book other than: follow it if it's working; get rid of it if it's not. Fergus's voice was probably inspired, in part, by the last couple of lines of Diana Vreeland's memoir D.V., a really outrageous and insane piece of work, and one of my true favorites. The lines are: "Don't ask me her other names. People called Pink don't have other names." Very few of the other people whom I've recited these lines to – and there are many such people -- seem to think they're as great as I do, by the way. So Fergus and Pink are probably how it all started. I also knew that I wanted to write about a young woman, and wanted her voice to be a slangy, colloquial third-person – I wanted her to sound like a midwestern woman around my own age. I wanted to have a statistician character, because I happen to like statisticians (a familial weakness), and I thought it was time for one to get his due in a novel. Lowell exists because I initially thought he and his voice were funny (I no longer think either of these things). I wanted to write a book in which much of the information is traded through gossip (because that's how the world works, as far as I can tell), but I didn't set out to write a sprawling family drama – after about two years of work I had these three very distinct and (at least to me) addictive voices, but I didn't know how they fit together. So I just stuck them all in one house and made them into a family. I wouldn't recommend this formless way of writing to anyone. The writers who start with a rigid outline seem much saner to me, and much more productive…although I certainly don't understand them.
Murphy: How difficult is it for a writer to appear in Esquire? How many submissions will you typically see in a year? Presumably you've compared notes—so to speak—with other literary editors…what is the percentage of quality vs. quantity in terms of unsolicited stories the top tier publications receive?
Miller: This is a difficult question to answer, because not only am I looking for good stories, but I'm looking for good stories that are appropriate for Esquire. Often I'll have to reluctantly pass on a really great story – a story that I, as a civilian reader, love -- because it doesn't match the magazine's style or sensibility. So, that is to say that I'm not only reading for quality, but also for appropriateness. During the year, there seem to be busy submission periods, and less-busy submission periods: during the busy months, we can receive a thousand or so stories; during less busy months, we can see a hundred. Most of the stories I read are quite skillfully done, but, by and large, most seem to lack a certain…what? Zest? Call it tension, drama, a fire in the belly. It's what separates all the merely good stories from the really exceptional ones. When a piece of fiction – or any kind of art -- works, you can feel it viscerally. But I don't need to tell anyone that. We all know what we like, and how what we like makes us feel.
Murphy: What were the circumstances that led you to your position at Esquire? Did you know you wanted to write during and immediately after college but reckoned a "day job" was unavoidable? Did you purposefully avoid graduate school and the MFA scene?
Miller: It so happens that I actually was intending on getting an MFA in fiction, and, by the second semester of my senior year in college, I had even decided on a grad school. I knew I wanted to write, but had no clue how else to make that happen other than the MFA track. The spring before my college graduation, I remember enrolling (as I recall, they wanted a check to hold my place), but, through a professor of mine, I found out about a job opening as an editorial assistant at GQ. I called the editor in question at GQ – after a shot of Maker's Mark -- and for whatever reason, he offered me the job. I'm a horribly pragmatic person – it's one of my least-attractive characteristics – and I knew that I'd probably never have another chance to work at a national magazine (the whole set-up seemed impossibility glamorous to me at the time), so I took the job. And, for my first years in New York, I supported myself as an assistant at a glossy magazine, making no money, often wondering why I was doing it at all, living in a studio apartment so tiny that its kitchen was nothing more than a hot-plate, subsisting on pre-sliced, semi seedless deli watermelon and Annie's macaroni (the brand with the rabbit on the box, prepared on that much-used hot-plate). A few years were spent like this, then, long story short, the job as literary editor at Esquire opened up. I interviewed for this position many times, and wrote a few passionate letters that laid out all the reasons why I, naturally must be hired as literary editor. Much to my astonishment, I got the job. I freely admit that luck and timing have both played important parts in my editorial career, but, I must say that luck hasn't been so much a factor in my writing life. In fact, my professional (meaning: editorial) luck has meant a fair amount of frustration in my writing life. Having a job you like is about the worst bit of luck a fiction writer can have.
Murphy: You've commented that working closely with other writers has helped and not hindered your own creative process. Do you think your professional experience accelerated or impeded your own path to publication? For instance, I remember being told repeatedly back in college workshops that the best (and perhaps only) way to learn to write good fiction is to read good fiction. Then, after enough emulation and hard work and the years of awful, unworthy writing one needs to get out of one's system, perhaps—at some point if you are lucky and ambitious enough—a distinctive voice inevitably emerges. I tend to buy this theory. What about you?
Miller: If I hadn't been making my living as an editor for these last years, I would have probably found a way to make a go of it as a writer. That means I probably would have published a novel or two by this point. I'm not saying that the novel or two would have been any good, in fact, probably just the opposite. And, yes, I definitely do think that reading and evaluating fiction for the last decade or so has made me a much better writer than I otherwise would have been, chiefly because being a professional reader means that I try to read my own stuff with the same dispassionate judgment with which I have to read other people's stuff. I'm not saying I can always read my own writing with a kind of coldly critical eye – who can? -- but working as an editor has at least trained me to try.
Murphy: Several of the writers interviewed for this series teach fiction at the college level. While not in the classroom, you undoubtedly see more manuscripts in any given month than most professors receive in five years. How do you feel about the quality of fiction in the 21st century: What positive trends have you noticed? What awful ones? Is it true to presume that regardless of genre or generation, good writing will ultimately rise above the fads and formulas?
Miller: I'm really quite resolutely unfaddish in my literary taste; I hate faddishness of any kind, in literature, art, fashion, everything. It seems to me that an author must write about one thing: life. That's it. Culture changes, but life –and human beings – do not. I'm really a traditionalist in my tastes, I guess. Character and language: what else is there? Other readers have other values, but those are mine.
Murphy: MFA or No-MFA? Any comments or opinions for the folks who are adamant (pro OR con) about the value of MFA programs? I've read some highly regarded book reviewers (Jonathan Yardley from The Washington Post leaps immediately to mind) who comment frequently on what they feel are the deleterious effects of "workshop" training on contemporary fiction. Again, as someone who has been very much on the front-lines of what ostensibly passes as the "best and brightest" short fiction, do you have any opinions one way or the other?
Miller: Writing workshops seem to be valuable mainly because they provide the great gift of time to writers. Whenever someone asks for career advice from me – "I got into grad school. Should I go?" – I'll usually advise them to go, especially if the program gives them money. And they'll have a book-length manuscript at the end of their two years. But I also think writers should be forewarned that grad school won't really help them get their book published later, or help them get a job (although a job is probably not what any MFA grad really wants). But what they will have is a book. And that's very cool. That's all that matters, really.
Murphy: If you had to say which writer influenced you most, and which book, what would they be? Any other notable influences, artistic or otherwise?
Miller: Many of my artistic influences have been musical. I have obsessions with both Cole Porter (one of whose songs plays a cameo in my book) and Mozart. Oh, and I loved the Smiths and The Legendary Pink Dots, and lots of other arty-type bands that would take an hour to list. I really wanted to be a musician more than anything else, but a conspicuous lack of discipline, and talent, kept me from pursuing that dream. In college, I started out as a poet, so, initially; it was poetry that melted me into a puddle. I can't really say what or who influenced the book – all writers probably want to feel that they are influenceless – but I can say that early literary ardors include Martin Amis (London Fields, which I read when I was eighteen, made me decide to become a writer), Gore Vidal, M.F.K. Fisher, and – I know this is a weird one, and from out of left field -- Quentin Crisp. (One of the book's most probing and perceptive critics noticed a Quentin Crisp connection, which I was amazed, and a little frightened, by.) I should add that I do recognize that my early influences were all supreme stylists; style was, when I was extremely young and impressionable, the literary virtue I most prized. But my literary taste has, I think and hope, become a lot more expansive than it was then. (Oh, and I love Flannery O'Connor, beyond measure.)
Murphy: Lastly: any advice for aspiring writers?
Miller: Apply seat to chair. Concentrate. Apply seat to chair. Concentrate. Repeat daily, for the rest of your life.
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