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Monday, July 28, 2008
After Smithereens - By James P. Othmer
From time to time here on the blog we're fortunate enough to get new work from established writers. James P. Othmer's writing came to me like a fever dream with his blistering first novel 'The Futurist' which I reviewed in my column at Ain't It Cool News. In a way his work reminds me of Kurt Andersen's writing, in that he has an ability to travel forward or backwards in time a few weeks, years, and bring back completely new information and deliver it to the reading public like a magician. When I read 'After Smithereens' a few weeks ago it totally blew my mind. I'm thrilled to share it with you.
After Smithereens
By James P. Othmer
(jamespothmer.com)
“Did you ever think that maybe you may have had, like, something to do with it?”
We are alone in the hardware aisle of a giant, one-stop, all you need to live box store. Me and fucking Hobbs. I consider a plastic-encased collection of flashlights, pen-to-spotlight-sized. The copy on the packaging says Every kind of light for every kind of emergency. I drop it into my basket, make a point of not looking at Hobbs, and say nothing.
“You know, in even the most secondary way, contributed to it?”
I cave and look at Hobbs. Short, fat, formerly loveable Hobbs. “Me? You think me? Secondarily? Remotely? Subliminally? Go away, moron.” I jiggle the cart at the handle bar, trying to unlock the right-leaning front wheels. Blame the asshole who designed the wheels of the common shopping cart. Blame the guy who writes trademark- stamped lies on flashlight packaging. But me? As I move forward, Hobbs, of course, follows.
“Not solely but...”
“Oh. Thanks.”
“But sort of cumulatively. As one of many, each as responsible as the other.”
Hobbs stops in Automotive Parts. Automotive Parts is a place that we absolutely do not need to visit, but here we are anyway. We’re experts at considering and often reaching for what we don’t need. Floor mats stamped with the insignia of our favorite NFL teams. Windshield-tinting kits. Stay-hot coffee mugs that plug into our cigarette lighters.
I watch with curiosity and then disgust as Hobbs tosses a pair of large, fuzzy mirror dice into his basket. Just thinking about the moment when the auto parts aisle manager stopped the novelty auto parts salesman before he left and said, “Oh, yeah. Out of the giant fuzzy dice again. Let’s do a dozen this time,” makes me want to smack someone. When Hobbs winks at me it occurs to me that my disgust has become something that Hobbs has begun to crave, to shamelessly solicit. Which is why I quickly decide to deny him of the satisfaction of thinking he’s disgusted me again. “Cool,” I say. “Really neat.” This works so well he not only stops smiling, he puts the fuzzy goddamn dice back on the shelf hanger.
One of our rules had been to not talk about it. This, of course, after we had talked it to death. After it had become clear that talking about it would not provide us with any answers. Any comfort or solace. But Hobbs, he can’t help himself. He keeps dancing around the edge of it, thinking that imposing a deeper level of thought or philosophy upon it, might make it seem like something else. But it doesn’t make it seem like something else because it is what it is. Which is everything. Hence the rules. Despite self-promises to the contrary, I take the bait. “So if you think that somehow I did it, then I imagine you think you were in on it, too?” He’s smiling again. So much that I already regret having indulged him. “Yeah. Yeah. Me too. I feel that, in a lot of ways, I was in on it.”
“So, then it’s…our fault?”
“Absolutely,” he just about shouts.
Then, because he’s so pleased with the way things are developing, our dialogue, he reaches back to reclaim the dice and doesn’t even look to see how I feel about it. I move. Hobbs follows. At the end of the Sporting Goods aisle we stop. Rather than heading right into the allegedly fun stuff, as you’d expect of two 23-year old, immature sexually-stunted jackasses, we stop and stare at the daunting row of balls and bats, clubs and sticks, Frisbees and Lawn Jarts. We consider the aisle as if it is a wonder, as if it is a dream, as if it is a graveyard. I do, anyway, because to me it is all of these things. At the same time, we lean into the handles of our poorly maintained carts and move on, towards a more practical place.
“You’re an asshole.
Hobbs feigns hurt feelings. But I know he likes this, too. The supposedly good-natured bickering. “I’m an asshole?”
“We agreed not to dwell, that the topic’s off limits. But you, you won’t give up.”
“Sorry,” he says, smiling. Always smiling. “I must have lost the minutes to that meeting.” On TV, this would have been a good laugh track moment. And if there was some kind of audience in the store to hear us, to appreciate the banter of the two opposites who down deep like each other, the exchange might have come off as kind of cute. But no one is around to hear us, and to me the whole thing comes off as kind of sad, kind of pathetic.
One of the other topics we had discussed is when it would be okay to laugh again. At first we had been in agreement: never. There were things that we would never discuss again, and it would never be okay to laugh again. And not just about the things we’d agreed never to discuss, but anything. But then one day while we were walking along a frontage road near the Thruway Hobbs called my name and when I turned around the emaciated face and caramelized eyes of a long-dead raccoon was resting on my shoulder. I screamed and cursed at Hobbs and when I began to run he began to chase me with the lifeless rotting fucking animal and while we were running, probably because we weren’t thinking, just running, we started to laugh for the first time.
So the answer to the laughter question turned out to be sixteen days. After sixteen days it is okay to laugh. But Hobbs. Now all he wants to do is laugh.
Standing in the wagon wheel racks and overstuffed shelves of the Women’s Wear section, I watch Hobbs unwrap a three-pak of black faux satin panties that are the signature brand of some former sexpot TV actress turned hag. Of course he pulls a pair over his pasty fat head. Out of habit I look around, even now still worried what others might think. Even now, I still blush. I begin to say something, but what can I say? I’ve known Hobbs since he was a chronic nose-picker in kindergarten; it’s not as if he just started acting this way, like his panty-head behavior is anything new to me. Hobbs hasn’t changed at all. The problem is that everything else has. Which is why the panties on the head routine gets no laughter from me. I shake my head, turn my cart around and head back to Hardware.
“This is different than dwelling,” he says, still following me, still, in effect, dwelling. He raises the panties over his eyebrows to more convincingly express his talking point. “This is speculating, which is considerably healthier.”
“Speculate. Wonder. Daydream. Fret. It’s all dwelling over something I’m done with.” I weigh a hatchet in my hands, convince myself that I absolutely need a hatchet, and drop it into the cart. Then I begin to collect the only other things that I can consider essential: half-inch rope, duck tape, a propane torch. Assorted batteries. Not long ago everything had seemed essential. Not long ago I would have filled six carts if someone had told me to take, on the house, anything I considered essential. But now I am hard-pressed to find anything remotely essential, and the very definition of the word makes my fucking skull throb.
Heading towards checkout I see Hobbs at the magazine racks, thumbing through a copy of Penthouse.
“Jesus. Come on.”
He holds up the magazine, centerfold beaver shot facing me. “Is ironic the right word to use regarding the fact that now that I have access to unlimited porn it creeps me out? Why does watching porn now seem more like an act of necrophilia?”
I shrug. “The dead fantasizing about the dead. Is that still necrophilia or do you get off on some kind of technicality?” While Hobbs stares at me, wheels trying to churn, I pick up a six-pack of Juicy Fruit, a couple of Snickers. Then I almost begin to put my stuff on the conveyor belt, but catch myself. There will be no conveying of items, no scanning of bar codes, swiping of credit cards, no price checks, no choice between paper and plastic. Not even an IOU.
Outside in the silent parking lot I see that, in addition to the fuzzy dice, a carton of Twinkies and a Mets hat, Hobbs has dropped the Penthouse and some other smut into his basket. At least the panties are nowhere in sight. As we make our way to our cars I see peripheral movement about a hundred yards away, to the right of a dumpster in back of the Jiffy Lube. I’m fairly certain it’s her. My heart surges and the adrenalin of hope floods my soul. I glance back at Hobbs but he isn’t looking. For a moment I think about finally telling him. Sharing. Last time I saw her I pledged to myself to tell him if I saw her again. He deserves that much.
I’d first noticed her shadowing us thirteen days ago when we were coming out of the microbrewery. We were angry that all the beer inside had gone bad and after foolishly trying for two hours to make our own IPA, we started blasting the place with our double-barrel ten gauges. The vats, the sacks of hops, the plate glass front windows. It had everything to do with beer. It had nothing to do with beer. We still traveled with an arsenal close at hand then – shotguns, Glocks, sniper rifles -- because we thought we had to. The shooting continued when we went back outside. I blew a hole in the microbrewery’s plywood sign near the road and Hobbs shot at a tanker at the Shell station next door that must have hit a hose or some kind of weak spot in the steel because it briefly sparked before the whole tanker and two rows of pumps blew to fucking smithereens. That’s when I saw her. While flames stabbed fifty-feet in the air, and debris fanned across the bluest sky. Right before I heard Hobbs say, “Whoopsie.” Right in the middle of smithereens.
She must have been spying on us from the strip mall on the far side of the gas station when the blast briefly spooked her out into the open. She looked about 25, but who knows. She wore jeans and a light blue t-shirt and was short and thin with short brown hair. I’d like to say she is beautiful and I certainly thought she was but at that point anything not named Hobbs would have been beautiful. As she ran away from the blast, from the corner of the strip mall toward the cover of a parked car, our eyes met and in her expression I could see fear and hurt and hope and a level of emotional intelligence that was light years beyond ours. Or maybe I saw none of that. Just a girl who, like us, was wondering what the fuck happened.
Regardless, I know that she knows I saw her and for a moment it even looked like she might stop and approach us. But her survival instincts took over. Even under the circumstances, why would she want anything to do with the likes of us – especially Hobbs – two horny, immature assholes with guns, looting, shooting and destroying?
I spotted her a bunch of times after that. Looking out from behind a Hummer in the driveway of a home that had burned to the ground. From behind the town gazebo while we drank a quart of Patron and pissed off the ramparts of a playground castle. I saw her eating alone on the business side of the counter of a pizza joint. Walking along a ridge in an apple orchard. I began to look for her everywhere and I never stopped thinking about her. I guess I never told Hobbs about her, or motioned for her to join us because I thought Hobbs would just fuck it up and then she’d go away for good. And who could blame her? Who knows what else she’d seen us do, besides the incident with the raccoon, the urinating off the kiddie castle, the visits to “adult” bookstores, the shooting up of the microbrewery. The destruction of the gas station. Sometimes I think I didn’t call out because I didn’t want to spook here. Others I know it’s because I don’t want to share. My sister used to say that we humans weren’t particularly good at sharing and I guess she was right.
After I saw the girl for the first time I vowed to change. To act more maturely. To impress her. To show her that I was responsible. To show her that I was the most worthy one with whom to start it all over again. So I stopped randomly shooting things. And getting violently drunk. And harvesting porn. I began to bath and shave regularly and only laughed at things that I thought a woman would laugh at, too. A correlation could also be made between the moment I first saw her and the moment I became dramatically less tolerant of Hobbs. I criticized the cars he selected to drive, the clothes he chose to loot. I mocked his disregard for hygiene and his insistence upon trying to make me laugh, trying to find humor in everything, including, all too frequently, the topic that I had tabled for eternity.
Before I saw her I would criticize Hobbs because I truly wanted him to change. But after, I did it only to make him look bad, to show her that he was not worthy, a lost cause. I want to point out the movement by the dumpster, to tell him about her, and all about what’s wrong with me, but still, I can’t. Instead I point to the car that I have chosen, an amazingly preserved 1966 Corvette, to take me back to our four-star business hotel. Hobbs sticks with his Prius.
After bringing our loot to our suites on opposite sides of the hotel we meet downstairs for dinner. I find Hobbs at the gas grill in the massive hotel kitchen cooking some rib-eyes that hadn’t yet spoiled with wild rice and onions. When Hobbs cooks, which is often, he never jokes but he seems happier than ever. This may be because he is a hell of a cook. At first it was easy to prepare a great meal but even though it is getting increasingly difficult to find fresh ingredients, his meals continue dazzle. I had never known this about him, that he was such a gifted chef, and that he enjoyed it so, and watching him, I wonder if he’d known this about himself, that he had this talent.
When the food is ready we go out to the lounge and sit at a table we had yet to clutter. I light three candles and we make a toast with the most expensive bottle of Bordeaux left in their cellar.
“To my oldest friend,” Hobbs says.
“To my only one,” I reply, and Hobbs raises an eyebrow.
For dessert Hobbs pours a 20-year-old Tawny Port and I have a neat glass of small batch Kentucky bourbon. The alcohol fills me with warmth, guilt and for a moment, tolerance. “You know,” I say. “You’re right. What you were talking about today. I do feel like, you know, I am responsible.” Hobbs finishes his port and stares into the empty glass rather than my eyes. After a long pause he answers. “Let’s drop it. Like you said. It’s off limits.” In my room after dinner I once again conclude that it isn’t fair that I have this knowledge of something else, of anything else, especially when the something is a someone, without sharing it. I tell myself once again that I will tell him about the girl in the morning.
This morning it takes a while before I notice that Hobbs’s Prius is gone. Several days ago I had challenged him to come up with one good reason for driving an electric car under the current circumstances. Staring out my bedroom window at his empty parking space, I come up with my own: stealth.
I make my own breakfast, dry Cheerios and black coffee, and spend the morning reading a small novel about a man and a woman on their honeymoon in a small English resort town. It occurs to me when I am done that what had once passed as realism now reads like the most imaginative science fiction. And, of course, the opposite.
In the afternoon I get in my Corvette and drive through downtown, around the lake, back to the mall parking lot where I’d thought I’d seen her yesterday.
He’s never gone off like this alone before. It’s not like him. In fact, it’s more like me. At one point on the highway I top out at 130 miles per hour and on a straightaway I kept my eyes closed for a new record, a ten count.
The sun is almost down when I get back to the hotel parking lot. Hobbs’s spot is still empty and I am sure now that he won’t be back. The door to his room is open. The bed is perfectly made, the room is spotless and his belongings, except for the stack of department store porn and black panties, are gone. Hobbs is gone. And I’m sure that the smithereens girl is gone, too.
During smithereens it is entirely possible to be transfixed by the spectacle of destruction and for desire to blind you to the most abject of horrors. After smithereens there is only carnage.
I lay on his bed and watch the room grow dark, unable to think of anything except the one topic I had forbidden us to discuss, and waiting for permission to laugh.
Copyright c 2008 Read more!
After Smithereens
By James P. Othmer
(jamespothmer.com)
“Did you ever think that maybe you may have had, like, something to do with it?”
We are alone in the hardware aisle of a giant, one-stop, all you need to live box store. Me and fucking Hobbs. I consider a plastic-encased collection of flashlights, pen-to-spotlight-sized. The copy on the packaging says Every kind of light for every kind of emergency. I drop it into my basket, make a point of not looking at Hobbs, and say nothing.
“You know, in even the most secondary way, contributed to it?”
I cave and look at Hobbs. Short, fat, formerly loveable Hobbs. “Me? You think me? Secondarily? Remotely? Subliminally? Go away, moron.” I jiggle the cart at the handle bar, trying to unlock the right-leaning front wheels. Blame the asshole who designed the wheels of the common shopping cart. Blame the guy who writes trademark- stamped lies on flashlight packaging. But me? As I move forward, Hobbs, of course, follows.
“Not solely but...”
“Oh. Thanks.”
“But sort of cumulatively. As one of many, each as responsible as the other.”
Hobbs stops in Automotive Parts. Automotive Parts is a place that we absolutely do not need to visit, but here we are anyway. We’re experts at considering and often reaching for what we don’t need. Floor mats stamped with the insignia of our favorite NFL teams. Windshield-tinting kits. Stay-hot coffee mugs that plug into our cigarette lighters.
I watch with curiosity and then disgust as Hobbs tosses a pair of large, fuzzy mirror dice into his basket. Just thinking about the moment when the auto parts aisle manager stopped the novelty auto parts salesman before he left and said, “Oh, yeah. Out of the giant fuzzy dice again. Let’s do a dozen this time,” makes me want to smack someone. When Hobbs winks at me it occurs to me that my disgust has become something that Hobbs has begun to crave, to shamelessly solicit. Which is why I quickly decide to deny him of the satisfaction of thinking he’s disgusted me again. “Cool,” I say. “Really neat.” This works so well he not only stops smiling, he puts the fuzzy goddamn dice back on the shelf hanger.
One of our rules had been to not talk about it. This, of course, after we had talked it to death. After it had become clear that talking about it would not provide us with any answers. Any comfort or solace. But Hobbs, he can’t help himself. He keeps dancing around the edge of it, thinking that imposing a deeper level of thought or philosophy upon it, might make it seem like something else. But it doesn’t make it seem like something else because it is what it is. Which is everything. Hence the rules. Despite self-promises to the contrary, I take the bait. “So if you think that somehow I did it, then I imagine you think you were in on it, too?” He’s smiling again. So much that I already regret having indulged him. “Yeah. Yeah. Me too. I feel that, in a lot of ways, I was in on it.”
“So, then it’s…our fault?”
“Absolutely,” he just about shouts.
Then, because he’s so pleased with the way things are developing, our dialogue, he reaches back to reclaim the dice and doesn’t even look to see how I feel about it. I move. Hobbs follows. At the end of the Sporting Goods aisle we stop. Rather than heading right into the allegedly fun stuff, as you’d expect of two 23-year old, immature sexually-stunted jackasses, we stop and stare at the daunting row of balls and bats, clubs and sticks, Frisbees and Lawn Jarts. We consider the aisle as if it is a wonder, as if it is a dream, as if it is a graveyard. I do, anyway, because to me it is all of these things. At the same time, we lean into the handles of our poorly maintained carts and move on, towards a more practical place.
“You’re an asshole.
Hobbs feigns hurt feelings. But I know he likes this, too. The supposedly good-natured bickering. “I’m an asshole?”
“We agreed not to dwell, that the topic’s off limits. But you, you won’t give up.”
“Sorry,” he says, smiling. Always smiling. “I must have lost the minutes to that meeting.” On TV, this would have been a good laugh track moment. And if there was some kind of audience in the store to hear us, to appreciate the banter of the two opposites who down deep like each other, the exchange might have come off as kind of cute. But no one is around to hear us, and to me the whole thing comes off as kind of sad, kind of pathetic.
One of the other topics we had discussed is when it would be okay to laugh again. At first we had been in agreement: never. There were things that we would never discuss again, and it would never be okay to laugh again. And not just about the things we’d agreed never to discuss, but anything. But then one day while we were walking along a frontage road near the Thruway Hobbs called my name and when I turned around the emaciated face and caramelized eyes of a long-dead raccoon was resting on my shoulder. I screamed and cursed at Hobbs and when I began to run he began to chase me with the lifeless rotting fucking animal and while we were running, probably because we weren’t thinking, just running, we started to laugh for the first time.
So the answer to the laughter question turned out to be sixteen days. After sixteen days it is okay to laugh. But Hobbs. Now all he wants to do is laugh.
Standing in the wagon wheel racks and overstuffed shelves of the Women’s Wear section, I watch Hobbs unwrap a three-pak of black faux satin panties that are the signature brand of some former sexpot TV actress turned hag. Of course he pulls a pair over his pasty fat head. Out of habit I look around, even now still worried what others might think. Even now, I still blush. I begin to say something, but what can I say? I’ve known Hobbs since he was a chronic nose-picker in kindergarten; it’s not as if he just started acting this way, like his panty-head behavior is anything new to me. Hobbs hasn’t changed at all. The problem is that everything else has. Which is why the panties on the head routine gets no laughter from me. I shake my head, turn my cart around and head back to Hardware.
“This is different than dwelling,” he says, still following me, still, in effect, dwelling. He raises the panties over his eyebrows to more convincingly express his talking point. “This is speculating, which is considerably healthier.”
“Speculate. Wonder. Daydream. Fret. It’s all dwelling over something I’m done with.” I weigh a hatchet in my hands, convince myself that I absolutely need a hatchet, and drop it into the cart. Then I begin to collect the only other things that I can consider essential: half-inch rope, duck tape, a propane torch. Assorted batteries. Not long ago everything had seemed essential. Not long ago I would have filled six carts if someone had told me to take, on the house, anything I considered essential. But now I am hard-pressed to find anything remotely essential, and the very definition of the word makes my fucking skull throb.
Heading towards checkout I see Hobbs at the magazine racks, thumbing through a copy of Penthouse.
“Jesus. Come on.”
He holds up the magazine, centerfold beaver shot facing me. “Is ironic the right word to use regarding the fact that now that I have access to unlimited porn it creeps me out? Why does watching porn now seem more like an act of necrophilia?”
I shrug. “The dead fantasizing about the dead. Is that still necrophilia or do you get off on some kind of technicality?” While Hobbs stares at me, wheels trying to churn, I pick up a six-pack of Juicy Fruit, a couple of Snickers. Then I almost begin to put my stuff on the conveyor belt, but catch myself. There will be no conveying of items, no scanning of bar codes, swiping of credit cards, no price checks, no choice between paper and plastic. Not even an IOU.
Outside in the silent parking lot I see that, in addition to the fuzzy dice, a carton of Twinkies and a Mets hat, Hobbs has dropped the Penthouse and some other smut into his basket. At least the panties are nowhere in sight. As we make our way to our cars I see peripheral movement about a hundred yards away, to the right of a dumpster in back of the Jiffy Lube. I’m fairly certain it’s her. My heart surges and the adrenalin of hope floods my soul. I glance back at Hobbs but he isn’t looking. For a moment I think about finally telling him. Sharing. Last time I saw her I pledged to myself to tell him if I saw her again. He deserves that much.
I’d first noticed her shadowing us thirteen days ago when we were coming out of the microbrewery. We were angry that all the beer inside had gone bad and after foolishly trying for two hours to make our own IPA, we started blasting the place with our double-barrel ten gauges. The vats, the sacks of hops, the plate glass front windows. It had everything to do with beer. It had nothing to do with beer. We still traveled with an arsenal close at hand then – shotguns, Glocks, sniper rifles -- because we thought we had to. The shooting continued when we went back outside. I blew a hole in the microbrewery’s plywood sign near the road and Hobbs shot at a tanker at the Shell station next door that must have hit a hose or some kind of weak spot in the steel because it briefly sparked before the whole tanker and two rows of pumps blew to fucking smithereens. That’s when I saw her. While flames stabbed fifty-feet in the air, and debris fanned across the bluest sky. Right before I heard Hobbs say, “Whoopsie.” Right in the middle of smithereens.
She must have been spying on us from the strip mall on the far side of the gas station when the blast briefly spooked her out into the open. She looked about 25, but who knows. She wore jeans and a light blue t-shirt and was short and thin with short brown hair. I’d like to say she is beautiful and I certainly thought she was but at that point anything not named Hobbs would have been beautiful. As she ran away from the blast, from the corner of the strip mall toward the cover of a parked car, our eyes met and in her expression I could see fear and hurt and hope and a level of emotional intelligence that was light years beyond ours. Or maybe I saw none of that. Just a girl who, like us, was wondering what the fuck happened.
Regardless, I know that she knows I saw her and for a moment it even looked like she might stop and approach us. But her survival instincts took over. Even under the circumstances, why would she want anything to do with the likes of us – especially Hobbs – two horny, immature assholes with guns, looting, shooting and destroying?
I spotted her a bunch of times after that. Looking out from behind a Hummer in the driveway of a home that had burned to the ground. From behind the town gazebo while we drank a quart of Patron and pissed off the ramparts of a playground castle. I saw her eating alone on the business side of the counter of a pizza joint. Walking along a ridge in an apple orchard. I began to look for her everywhere and I never stopped thinking about her. I guess I never told Hobbs about her, or motioned for her to join us because I thought Hobbs would just fuck it up and then she’d go away for good. And who could blame her? Who knows what else she’d seen us do, besides the incident with the raccoon, the urinating off the kiddie castle, the visits to “adult” bookstores, the shooting up of the microbrewery. The destruction of the gas station. Sometimes I think I didn’t call out because I didn’t want to spook here. Others I know it’s because I don’t want to share. My sister used to say that we humans weren’t particularly good at sharing and I guess she was right.
After I saw the girl for the first time I vowed to change. To act more maturely. To impress her. To show her that I was responsible. To show her that I was the most worthy one with whom to start it all over again. So I stopped randomly shooting things. And getting violently drunk. And harvesting porn. I began to bath and shave regularly and only laughed at things that I thought a woman would laugh at, too. A correlation could also be made between the moment I first saw her and the moment I became dramatically less tolerant of Hobbs. I criticized the cars he selected to drive, the clothes he chose to loot. I mocked his disregard for hygiene and his insistence upon trying to make me laugh, trying to find humor in everything, including, all too frequently, the topic that I had tabled for eternity.
Before I saw her I would criticize Hobbs because I truly wanted him to change. But after, I did it only to make him look bad, to show her that he was not worthy, a lost cause. I want to point out the movement by the dumpster, to tell him about her, and all about what’s wrong with me, but still, I can’t. Instead I point to the car that I have chosen, an amazingly preserved 1966 Corvette, to take me back to our four-star business hotel. Hobbs sticks with his Prius.
After bringing our loot to our suites on opposite sides of the hotel we meet downstairs for dinner. I find Hobbs at the gas grill in the massive hotel kitchen cooking some rib-eyes that hadn’t yet spoiled with wild rice and onions. When Hobbs cooks, which is often, he never jokes but he seems happier than ever. This may be because he is a hell of a cook. At first it was easy to prepare a great meal but even though it is getting increasingly difficult to find fresh ingredients, his meals continue dazzle. I had never known this about him, that he was such a gifted chef, and that he enjoyed it so, and watching him, I wonder if he’d known this about himself, that he had this talent.
When the food is ready we go out to the lounge and sit at a table we had yet to clutter. I light three candles and we make a toast with the most expensive bottle of Bordeaux left in their cellar.
“To my oldest friend,” Hobbs says.
“To my only one,” I reply, and Hobbs raises an eyebrow.
For dessert Hobbs pours a 20-year-old Tawny Port and I have a neat glass of small batch Kentucky bourbon. The alcohol fills me with warmth, guilt and for a moment, tolerance. “You know,” I say. “You’re right. What you were talking about today. I do feel like, you know, I am responsible.” Hobbs finishes his port and stares into the empty glass rather than my eyes. After a long pause he answers. “Let’s drop it. Like you said. It’s off limits.” In my room after dinner I once again conclude that it isn’t fair that I have this knowledge of something else, of anything else, especially when the something is a someone, without sharing it. I tell myself once again that I will tell him about the girl in the morning.
This morning it takes a while before I notice that Hobbs’s Prius is gone. Several days ago I had challenged him to come up with one good reason for driving an electric car under the current circumstances. Staring out my bedroom window at his empty parking space, I come up with my own: stealth.
I make my own breakfast, dry Cheerios and black coffee, and spend the morning reading a small novel about a man and a woman on their honeymoon in a small English resort town. It occurs to me when I am done that what had once passed as realism now reads like the most imaginative science fiction. And, of course, the opposite.
In the afternoon I get in my Corvette and drive through downtown, around the lake, back to the mall parking lot where I’d thought I’d seen her yesterday.
He’s never gone off like this alone before. It’s not like him. In fact, it’s more like me. At one point on the highway I top out at 130 miles per hour and on a straightaway I kept my eyes closed for a new record, a ten count.
The sun is almost down when I get back to the hotel parking lot. Hobbs’s spot is still empty and I am sure now that he won’t be back. The door to his room is open. The bed is perfectly made, the room is spotless and his belongings, except for the stack of department store porn and black panties, are gone. Hobbs is gone. And I’m sure that the smithereens girl is gone, too.
During smithereens it is entirely possible to be transfixed by the spectacle of destruction and for desire to blind you to the most abject of horrors. After smithereens there is only carnage.
I lay on his bed and watch the room grow dark, unable to think of anything except the one topic I had forbidden us to discuss, and waiting for permission to laugh.
Copyright c 2008 Read more!
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Sana Krasikov Interview
Dennis:
Thanks Sana, for taking our questions. And I apologize that some of the questions are so long. My defense will have to be that your work encourages long questions which I certainly intend as a compliment.
Issues relating to immigration lie in the foreground or at least in the background of all the stories in your collection, One More Year. There seems to be a constant cognitive and emotional dissonance in the stories as a result, like a low, somewhat menacing hum, even when the problem is not being addressed directly. And I have to call it a problem, because what I get out of your stories is not how wonderful it is to pull up roots and start again in a new country but how difficult it is. And I can't help wondering, have you faced this dilemma of dislocation in your own experience?
Sana:
First, thanks for having a discussion of the book on your site. I’m always delighted to find fellow lovers of short fiction, so I appreciate the attention. I think it’s great when other people see themes that you didn’t necessarily intend when you set out to write a story. When some of your characters are from other countries, themes of migration come through; though I think my stories are less about migration itself, and more about life in a post-migration world. What I mean is, they aren’t immigrants in the traditional sense, in that they’ve arrived in a new county to start a new life. In Asal for example, Gulia is married to a millionaire in Uzbekistan; her life is pretty comfortable. She’s probably wealthier than the couple for whom she becomes a nanny. Even when she arrives in the States, she doesn’t come to Manhattan with the intention of staying. It’s more of a bargaining position – she leaves Fergana to show her husband how serious she is about him leaving his other wife. In Maia’s case, she’s working to support her teenager son, who’s still in Tbilisi and who she plans to eventually return to raise (although when is very unclear). She isn’t particularly enamored with American culture, even though it does give her the opportunity to buy gifts that can’t be had in Georgia. Oftentimes, today’s “migrants” occupy both home and host country simultaneously for a variety of reasons, and I wanted to explore some of them. We hear these stories all around us, and it’s hard for one not to relate to the feeling of being caught between heaven and earth and not knowing which one is which.
Dennis:
One interesting effect that the theme of immigration and dislocation had for me as a reader is that I noticed what was universal in human behavior and misbehavior even more. I was struck, for example, how in your story Better Half Anya seems to pick the wrong guy no matter what continent she is living on. And so in the U.S. she latches on to the notorious Ryan, a loser that she could have easily picked up anywhere in the world. But I also appreciated how nicely the story was balanced, since Anya's difficulty in letting go of Ryan, impossible as he was, was quite moving. The importance of people giving up their illusions, as Anya gives up hers about Ryan, seems to be a recurrent theme in your stories. Is that right?
Sana:
It’s a good point – people’s behavior becomes distorted in extreme circumstances. And I’m touched by your insights into how I try to present these very complex relationships. But I don’t think Anya would always pick the “wrong guy.” I saw her relationship with Ryan as largely a product of circumstances, a combination of loneliness and necessity. Under different circumstances, it might have been a short-lived, casual fling. Because of the fact that she’s so reliant on his cooperation during the green-card process, the power dynamics become very skewed. And yet as soon as she’s no longer dependent on him, their relationship becomes almost like it was before they were married. In other words, he’s forced to court her all over again, and, for a short time, she’s almost able to enjoy it. I think people find themselves in these situations, rather than it being some type of predisposed abusive complex, which could compel Anya to always make the wrong decision. Even so, I think that when you finally recognize that the relationship has changed and no longer makes sense, it isn’t always a clean break with the past. In the final scene, Anya imagines she sees Ryan in the faces of others, but she moves on in spite of that.
I’m thinking about what you said about people giving up their illusions as a theme – I never conceived of it in precisely those terms, but I can see what you mean. There were some characters whom I thought of as having a “blind spot.” To bring up Asal again, Gulia is convinced that her husband doesn’t love his other wife, because that was to some degree a marriage arranged by his family – and also because the woman isn’t as attractive as Gulia. She’s convinced of this in spite of the evidence – which is that Nasrin gets pregnant every year. It’s not until Gulia hears Rashid being genuinely torn up over the “incident” at the end, that she sees more to his relationship with Nasrin than she’s let herself believe. Lera in The Repatriates certainly has a big blind spot – she’s attuned to small-scale deceptions all around her, like the invalid beggar in the metro hiding his arms under a hunting vest, but doesn’t see the big one that’s heading her way like a speeding train. To move it to a larger scale, a number of the characters have obviously been touched in one way or another by the collapse of the Soviet empire. The Soviet Union was a reality its citizens understood. They took for granted that it would last forever, even though it was crumbling all around them. It’s often when we think we have a very clear grasp of our reality that everything changes. Which makes me wonder if there’s a fractal-like quality to some motifs, or if the experience of “not seeing” that’s being explored on a very small scale in the stories is, in fact, reflective of a bigger, mass experience of uncertainty.
Dennis:
I have to say that in your story Debt I got one of the best impressions that I have ever had of the essential character of marriage. Lev and Dina have his niece Sonya and her husband over to their house-proud residence in the faux countryside and an appeal is made to the hosts that is not welcome. There's one sentence that I want to quote: "How much easier , he thinks, when it's just the two of them, a balance that others only disturb." That's an awesome line. It's as if this couple had made it, in every way a couple can succeed, but the outside world can still undermine their poise which seems rather fragile. Is that your view of marriage, that it's a kind of fragile privacy that is easily disturbed?
Sana:
I think that’s a very elegant interpretation. In some ways, I saw them as being a “living version” of the couple in the last story – and I mean Larisa and Alexei, who Larisa mourns long after his death. Larisa tells the narrator that they were one of those couples who didn’t need anyone except each other, that Alexei would spend entire Sundays just taking pictures of her in their apartment. And yet we know from the narrator that their fragile privacy did indeed come to an end. Those types of couples have always fascinated me, so I’m glad you picked up on that. And the line you noted really anchored the story for me. The scene itself was born from something I observed once on vacation, which really touched me. It involved a couple in their early sixties who had been married happily for many years, and they had learned how to manage each other. There was this almost unspoken small-scale drama going on for several days that was really testing the wife’s hospitality. She was quite a stoic person, but at one point, she just broke down. Yet the husband didn’t say anything – he just walked over to her and kissed her on the mouth. Almost as if to say that whatever else happened, they had each other.
Dennis:
I remember the French New Wave director, Truffaut, saying in an interview once that film buffs sometimes seem to regard a movie more highly if it's foreign. That is, if the same themes were presented in a domestic flick the audience would be less impressed. But somehow the presentation in the context of another culture gives the work a glamorous aura. And I am also aware that in U.S. publishing right now, there is a vogue for the immigrant experience, of seeing America through foreign eyes. But there is a bigger issue here that is touched on in your book and that is the idea that what is foreign has to be better. This attitude seems to rest side-by-side with the opposite position: that our native country is always the best in everything. It seems that finding a way to objectivity between these two positions is almost impossible. This issue comes up in the last story, There Will Be No Fourth Rome, doesn't it?
Sana:
I’m not sure if that’s true – that we necessarily find themes more interesting when they’re presented to us in a foreign context. In the United States, we’ve had a long literary tradition of people exploring the search of the American dream. From Steinbeck and Dreiser, to Kerouac’s version in the Fifties, and on and on, it’s an idea that’s undergone many redefinitions. Being an immigrant society, we also have long a tradition of authors exploring it through the experience of newcomers. I’m thinking of Isaac Beshevis Zinger in particular, whose characters were also haunted by their pasts and disoriented by their lives in America. Or Mario Puzo, who not only wrote The Godfather, but also some wonderful accounts of the lives of Italian immigrants, such as The Fortunate Pilgrim. As to whether it’s better “here” or “there,” I think that, for my characters, the collapse of the Soviet Union made that a more difficult question to answer. Obviously not everybody triumphs in a new environment; some fold, others succeed but there’s a bitter aftertaste. As writers, we’re all in some way aspiring to write about a history that we’re still living.
Dennis:
Speaking of There Will Be No Fourth Rome, I will say that I was startled by the rather negative impression that the story left with me of Moscow. Reading the story, I just had the feeling that I wanted to get out of that town. Maybe some of the characters in the story felt the same way and that was what I was picking up. Was I wrong to see the story as a negative portrait of a major world city? Putting it more informally, I gather you don't like the place or perhaps your feelings are just mixed?
Sana:
That’s funny, because I actually loved my time in Moscow. As with all the world’s greatest cities, they have the best and the worst. It may have been an impression you were getting from one of the characters, who was from Georgia. Without getting into the history of it, there’s tension between those two countries. It would be hard to do my character justice without somehow alluding to it. Muscovites themselves probably have the most poignant love-hate relationship with their city, and part of it is because it’s a place that changes so rapidly. It was mostly that change I wanted to show, so I had two different characters reflect two very different sides of the city. There was Larisa, an older woman who was your classic Russian intelligentsia but now living very modestly on a disability pension, her only real asset being the apartment she’d inherited from her bureaucrat father, contrasted against the narrator’s childhood friend, a girl who is a refugee from Georgia, who is very enterprising and ambitious, and avoids destitution by becoming the girlfriend of a foreign businessman. These characters seemed almost like mirror images of one another – a rising class displacing a declining one.
Dennis:
Still on this story, there is a kind of epiphany at the end, the most warm-hearted incident in the book, that seems to express a lot about your feeling for solidarity among women in tough times. I mean the gathering of women around the table towards the end of the story. I was quite moved by it, I must say, even though I'm a guy and I figure that I am not the intended audience. Am I right to see this sort of feeling for a sisterhood as an important concern in your fiction?
Sana:
That scene felt like a natural place to end the story, with Regina and her two friends sitting down for a quiet moment before her ride to the airport. There’s a Russian custom that says that before you leave for a long trip, you should sit silently for a minute instead of simply rushing out the door. I thought it was a nice way to end the collection as whole. A reader is, in some respects, your guest for the duration of the book. After that he or she must depart, so I wanted to provide a moment for a reader to sit with the characters and reflect.
I’m not sure why you’d think you wouldn’t be the intended audience, and to what extent writers even think about an intended audience when they set out to write a story. My only intended audience would be engaged readers who love fiction, which all three of you have definitely established. Part of what’s great about fiction is that it offers us the opportunity to glimpse a variety of perspectives.
Dennis:
Sometimes I feel that as a child of immigrants, I'll never really belong anywhere. That I am permanently displaced between different cultures, neither of which will ever feel like a totally rooted home. So I'd like to ask you if you think that assimilation is really possible or just an illusion. And is it even a good thing? There seems to be something positive about this cultural disconnect that occurs when people pull up their roots. What do you think?
Sana:
I guess it depends on where you're talking about. In the States, I’m not sure we have the one-way approach to assimilation that, say, the French have been accused of. In France there is more pressure to adopt French culture and leave your own origins behind, at least officially. In contrast, the US and, maybe to a greater extent, England give immigrants more room to express their cultural identities, as well as absorb some elements of the immigrant culture into the mainstream. In a place like the US, national identity is asserted more in terms of language and political ideology than it is in the preeminence of the national culture. I guess what I’m saying is that integration is possible everywhere, but it just depends on how you define it and whether you want to make assimilation part of that definition. I haven’t personally felt that conflict between being American and something else, though I’ve certainly met people who do feel it.
Dennis:
I believe that you are working on your debut novel right now. Can you tell us anything about it?
Sana:
I’ve only just started thinking about it, so I’m hesitant to discuss something that’s still so unformed. I would like to incorporate a historical element, though.
Thanks again very much, Sana, for taking our questions.
Thank you, Dennis. Read more!
Thanks Sana, for taking our questions. And I apologize that some of the questions are so long. My defense will have to be that your work encourages long questions which I certainly intend as a compliment.
Issues relating to immigration lie in the foreground or at least in the background of all the stories in your collection, One More Year. There seems to be a constant cognitive and emotional dissonance in the stories as a result, like a low, somewhat menacing hum, even when the problem is not being addressed directly. And I have to call it a problem, because what I get out of your stories is not how wonderful it is to pull up roots and start again in a new country but how difficult it is. And I can't help wondering, have you faced this dilemma of dislocation in your own experience?
Sana:
First, thanks for having a discussion of the book on your site. I’m always delighted to find fellow lovers of short fiction, so I appreciate the attention. I think it’s great when other people see themes that you didn’t necessarily intend when you set out to write a story. When some of your characters are from other countries, themes of migration come through; though I think my stories are less about migration itself, and more about life in a post-migration world. What I mean is, they aren’t immigrants in the traditional sense, in that they’ve arrived in a new county to start a new life. In Asal for example, Gulia is married to a millionaire in Uzbekistan; her life is pretty comfortable. She’s probably wealthier than the couple for whom she becomes a nanny. Even when she arrives in the States, she doesn’t come to Manhattan with the intention of staying. It’s more of a bargaining position – she leaves Fergana to show her husband how serious she is about him leaving his other wife. In Maia’s case, she’s working to support her teenager son, who’s still in Tbilisi and who she plans to eventually return to raise (although when is very unclear). She isn’t particularly enamored with American culture, even though it does give her the opportunity to buy gifts that can’t be had in Georgia. Oftentimes, today’s “migrants” occupy both home and host country simultaneously for a variety of reasons, and I wanted to explore some of them. We hear these stories all around us, and it’s hard for one not to relate to the feeling of being caught between heaven and earth and not knowing which one is which.
Dennis:
One interesting effect that the theme of immigration and dislocation had for me as a reader is that I noticed what was universal in human behavior and misbehavior even more. I was struck, for example, how in your story Better Half Anya seems to pick the wrong guy no matter what continent she is living on. And so in the U.S. she latches on to the notorious Ryan, a loser that she could have easily picked up anywhere in the world. But I also appreciated how nicely the story was balanced, since Anya's difficulty in letting go of Ryan, impossible as he was, was quite moving. The importance of people giving up their illusions, as Anya gives up hers about Ryan, seems to be a recurrent theme in your stories. Is that right?
Sana:
It’s a good point – people’s behavior becomes distorted in extreme circumstances. And I’m touched by your insights into how I try to present these very complex relationships. But I don’t think Anya would always pick the “wrong guy.” I saw her relationship with Ryan as largely a product of circumstances, a combination of loneliness and necessity. Under different circumstances, it might have been a short-lived, casual fling. Because of the fact that she’s so reliant on his cooperation during the green-card process, the power dynamics become very skewed. And yet as soon as she’s no longer dependent on him, their relationship becomes almost like it was before they were married. In other words, he’s forced to court her all over again, and, for a short time, she’s almost able to enjoy it. I think people find themselves in these situations, rather than it being some type of predisposed abusive complex, which could compel Anya to always make the wrong decision. Even so, I think that when you finally recognize that the relationship has changed and no longer makes sense, it isn’t always a clean break with the past. In the final scene, Anya imagines she sees Ryan in the faces of others, but she moves on in spite of that.
I’m thinking about what you said about people giving up their illusions as a theme – I never conceived of it in precisely those terms, but I can see what you mean. There were some characters whom I thought of as having a “blind spot.” To bring up Asal again, Gulia is convinced that her husband doesn’t love his other wife, because that was to some degree a marriage arranged by his family – and also because the woman isn’t as attractive as Gulia. She’s convinced of this in spite of the evidence – which is that Nasrin gets pregnant every year. It’s not until Gulia hears Rashid being genuinely torn up over the “incident” at the end, that she sees more to his relationship with Nasrin than she’s let herself believe. Lera in The Repatriates certainly has a big blind spot – she’s attuned to small-scale deceptions all around her, like the invalid beggar in the metro hiding his arms under a hunting vest, but doesn’t see the big one that’s heading her way like a speeding train. To move it to a larger scale, a number of the characters have obviously been touched in one way or another by the collapse of the Soviet empire. The Soviet Union was a reality its citizens understood. They took for granted that it would last forever, even though it was crumbling all around them. It’s often when we think we have a very clear grasp of our reality that everything changes. Which makes me wonder if there’s a fractal-like quality to some motifs, or if the experience of “not seeing” that’s being explored on a very small scale in the stories is, in fact, reflective of a bigger, mass experience of uncertainty.
Dennis:
I have to say that in your story Debt I got one of the best impressions that I have ever had of the essential character of marriage. Lev and Dina have his niece Sonya and her husband over to their house-proud residence in the faux countryside and an appeal is made to the hosts that is not welcome. There's one sentence that I want to quote: "How much easier , he thinks, when it's just the two of them, a balance that others only disturb." That's an awesome line. It's as if this couple had made it, in every way a couple can succeed, but the outside world can still undermine their poise which seems rather fragile. Is that your view of marriage, that it's a kind of fragile privacy that is easily disturbed?
Sana:
I think that’s a very elegant interpretation. In some ways, I saw them as being a “living version” of the couple in the last story – and I mean Larisa and Alexei, who Larisa mourns long after his death. Larisa tells the narrator that they were one of those couples who didn’t need anyone except each other, that Alexei would spend entire Sundays just taking pictures of her in their apartment. And yet we know from the narrator that their fragile privacy did indeed come to an end. Those types of couples have always fascinated me, so I’m glad you picked up on that. And the line you noted really anchored the story for me. The scene itself was born from something I observed once on vacation, which really touched me. It involved a couple in their early sixties who had been married happily for many years, and they had learned how to manage each other. There was this almost unspoken small-scale drama going on for several days that was really testing the wife’s hospitality. She was quite a stoic person, but at one point, she just broke down. Yet the husband didn’t say anything – he just walked over to her and kissed her on the mouth. Almost as if to say that whatever else happened, they had each other.
Dennis:
I remember the French New Wave director, Truffaut, saying in an interview once that film buffs sometimes seem to regard a movie more highly if it's foreign. That is, if the same themes were presented in a domestic flick the audience would be less impressed. But somehow the presentation in the context of another culture gives the work a glamorous aura. And I am also aware that in U.S. publishing right now, there is a vogue for the immigrant experience, of seeing America through foreign eyes. But there is a bigger issue here that is touched on in your book and that is the idea that what is foreign has to be better. This attitude seems to rest side-by-side with the opposite position: that our native country is always the best in everything. It seems that finding a way to objectivity between these two positions is almost impossible. This issue comes up in the last story, There Will Be No Fourth Rome, doesn't it?
Sana:
I’m not sure if that’s true – that we necessarily find themes more interesting when they’re presented to us in a foreign context. In the United States, we’ve had a long literary tradition of people exploring the search of the American dream. From Steinbeck and Dreiser, to Kerouac’s version in the Fifties, and on and on, it’s an idea that’s undergone many redefinitions. Being an immigrant society, we also have long a tradition of authors exploring it through the experience of newcomers. I’m thinking of Isaac Beshevis Zinger in particular, whose characters were also haunted by their pasts and disoriented by their lives in America. Or Mario Puzo, who not only wrote The Godfather, but also some wonderful accounts of the lives of Italian immigrants, such as The Fortunate Pilgrim. As to whether it’s better “here” or “there,” I think that, for my characters, the collapse of the Soviet Union made that a more difficult question to answer. Obviously not everybody triumphs in a new environment; some fold, others succeed but there’s a bitter aftertaste. As writers, we’re all in some way aspiring to write about a history that we’re still living.
Dennis:
Speaking of There Will Be No Fourth Rome, I will say that I was startled by the rather negative impression that the story left with me of Moscow. Reading the story, I just had the feeling that I wanted to get out of that town. Maybe some of the characters in the story felt the same way and that was what I was picking up. Was I wrong to see the story as a negative portrait of a major world city? Putting it more informally, I gather you don't like the place or perhaps your feelings are just mixed?
Sana:
That’s funny, because I actually loved my time in Moscow. As with all the world’s greatest cities, they have the best and the worst. It may have been an impression you were getting from one of the characters, who was from Georgia. Without getting into the history of it, there’s tension between those two countries. It would be hard to do my character justice without somehow alluding to it. Muscovites themselves probably have the most poignant love-hate relationship with their city, and part of it is because it’s a place that changes so rapidly. It was mostly that change I wanted to show, so I had two different characters reflect two very different sides of the city. There was Larisa, an older woman who was your classic Russian intelligentsia but now living very modestly on a disability pension, her only real asset being the apartment she’d inherited from her bureaucrat father, contrasted against the narrator’s childhood friend, a girl who is a refugee from Georgia, who is very enterprising and ambitious, and avoids destitution by becoming the girlfriend of a foreign businessman. These characters seemed almost like mirror images of one another – a rising class displacing a declining one.
Dennis:
Still on this story, there is a kind of epiphany at the end, the most warm-hearted incident in the book, that seems to express a lot about your feeling for solidarity among women in tough times. I mean the gathering of women around the table towards the end of the story. I was quite moved by it, I must say, even though I'm a guy and I figure that I am not the intended audience. Am I right to see this sort of feeling for a sisterhood as an important concern in your fiction?
Sana:
That scene felt like a natural place to end the story, with Regina and her two friends sitting down for a quiet moment before her ride to the airport. There’s a Russian custom that says that before you leave for a long trip, you should sit silently for a minute instead of simply rushing out the door. I thought it was a nice way to end the collection as whole. A reader is, in some respects, your guest for the duration of the book. After that he or she must depart, so I wanted to provide a moment for a reader to sit with the characters and reflect.
I’m not sure why you’d think you wouldn’t be the intended audience, and to what extent writers even think about an intended audience when they set out to write a story. My only intended audience would be engaged readers who love fiction, which all three of you have definitely established. Part of what’s great about fiction is that it offers us the opportunity to glimpse a variety of perspectives.
Dennis:
Sometimes I feel that as a child of immigrants, I'll never really belong anywhere. That I am permanently displaced between different cultures, neither of which will ever feel like a totally rooted home. So I'd like to ask you if you think that assimilation is really possible or just an illusion. And is it even a good thing? There seems to be something positive about this cultural disconnect that occurs when people pull up their roots. What do you think?
Sana:
I guess it depends on where you're talking about. In the States, I’m not sure we have the one-way approach to assimilation that, say, the French have been accused of. In France there is more pressure to adopt French culture and leave your own origins behind, at least officially. In contrast, the US and, maybe to a greater extent, England give immigrants more room to express their cultural identities, as well as absorb some elements of the immigrant culture into the mainstream. In a place like the US, national identity is asserted more in terms of language and political ideology than it is in the preeminence of the national culture. I guess what I’m saying is that integration is possible everywhere, but it just depends on how you define it and whether you want to make assimilation part of that definition. I haven’t personally felt that conflict between being American and something else, though I’ve certainly met people who do feel it.
Dennis:
I believe that you are working on your debut novel right now. Can you tell us anything about it?
Sana:
I’ve only just started thinking about it, so I’m hesitant to discuss something that’s still so unformed. I would like to incorporate a historical element, though.
Thanks again very much, Sana, for taking our questions.
Thank you, Dennis. Read more!
Saturday, July 19, 2008
One More Year by Sana Krasikov
Dennis Haritou: I'm glad that I deliberately moved myself into the position of introducing our discussion of One More Year, a debut collection of short stories by Sana Krasikov. There is an undercurrent of dislocation in these stories in which characters, most of whom have emigrated to the U.S., try to cope with universal human dilemmas like who I am going to love and how I am to deal with my family while trying to balance a new world with the old one.
Of the Three Guys, I'm the one who is closest to having immigrant parents. My father arrived in NY early in the 20th century after exhausting several other continents and my mother was the first in her immediate family to be born in the U.S. Now you might think that this distinction in birth status between my parents can't be of much importance but it was a major fault line in their marriage since my father never really left the old world while my mother never wanted any association with it. Looking back on their marriage now that they gone, I can see both their points.
So it was with great personal interest that I encountered Krasikov's stories. What I found was an old world which was like an elaborate tapestry, always in the background of the characters' lives, even if they were very well enmeshed in their new circumstances. And sometimes it was as if a figure in the tapestry would reach out and grapple with a character in the foreground, trying to pull it back into the weave of the old world. This actually happened in one story, one of the best in the collection, There Will Be No Fourth Rome, where a character seems to walk back into the web of an almost unreal new Russia.
Jasons, I wonder if you found the new world/old world theme especially compelling or whether you chose to focus instead on human dilemmas that were more universal. I think you can look at the stories from both angles. This is the first time that the Three Guys have discussed a short story collection, so I will ask you, Jaces, to name a favorite story or two and tell us what impressed you about it.
Jason Rice: At first I found this collection to be very difficult to wrap my mind around. In a way the first stories were like listening to a radio station that is just over the next mountain, slowly the reception became clear and the closer I got to the top of the hill, which turned out to be the blistering Better Half things fell into place. There was an old world sensibility to Anya's rigid innocent belief system. In that she thought for sure that a man would marry her, which would allow her to become a US citizen. But in this story there is more to the simple arrangement than is first set into motion. Anya is realizing that men are the same the whole world over, except this one is so angry, (at what I don't know, Anya sounds like a dream), he even tries to kill her, the best way to show someone you like them. Anya wonders aloud how this man could be like this in a world filled with so much opportunity, albeit the world is the land of prosperity, America, where that kind of opportunity usually has a hefty price tag. There is a great deal of musing, some overt and subtle which ripple though this collection especially when it's main characters find themselves in the presence of an American, brushing up against one seems a better way to describe it. The hinges of the old world values, family, marriage forever at all costs, the Government spinning the world for you, are never more apparent then when Ms. Krasikov returns to a homeland of sorts in the final story. She finds thieves and crooks operating in the old rusted armature of her once thriving super power. There is much made of the human dilemma within these people, but a lot of it comes flying at them with great force from the conniving humans around them.
There is displaced disgust when the son comes to visit New York City, which is just the opposite of what it seems like to me when you come to a new city, especially if you've grown up in a remote village all your life. Of course he hates the view from the Empire State Building, and only wants a new winter coat that carries a fashionable label. He's a punk kid who doesn't understand the value of things, or for that matter, freedom, and the wildness of the thrashing industrial geotopia that is NYC. These people are less specific to me, they seem like ciphers for the authors vibrant ability to soak up the world we Americans take for granted. She marvels at the excess and amount of options available to us and frowns slightly (at the reader) when she comes across people who immediately disagree with her about the lavish luxury we have here. I felt ashamed to read that Anya had let that man who would mostly likely beat her to death back in her life, it was sad, and destructive, basically fulfilling his wishes of having his very own doormat, and her wish not to change things because it would be harder to do that. The old man Ilona cares for in the first story and his eyebrow trimmings seems like a job someone who has no prospects would take. Not someone who just got to this country.
I noticed there weren't any aspirations of bigger things in these immigrants. Especially the story Debt, where people experiencing a suburban utopia and are nicely tucked away only to realize how good they have it when someone else, a version of their former selves shows up and asks for money. The closing lines of that story reminded me of the last few lines of Rock Springs by Richard Ford, something of magic act if you ask me. His character steps outside of himself and looks down on his own plight, a riveting set of sentences. Anyone who can get that kind of response out of me is someone worthy of my praise, for what ever it's worth. But it did sound like the writer talking not the wiser than they should be characters who claim when asked for money that they're not a businessman or a lender. A funny and simple response that I will gladly employ in my own life should the situation ever arise. Which is to say that these stories are strictly about about the human drama of life. Ms. Krasikov balances her voice inside the head of each character she writes with a good sense of humor, all well meaning but simple over-matched by the foils of life.
Jason Chambers: I really like a lot of Russian writers. When I was nineteen or twenty, I spent a summer reading everything I could get my hands on: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bulgarov, Nabokov. Not much else: the Russian fiction section wasn't so large at the local library, not surprisingly. I had better luck a year earlier when I read all the Robert Penn Warren I could find. Regardless, by the time I went back to class in the fall, I felt practically Muscovite.
I also like tough stories about people living on the margins of society, barely eking out a living, fighting for morsels and trying to maintain themselves in miserable conditions -- we talked about that some in the Dubus discussion. And that is where a lot of these characters co-exist, but I don't know, Dennis. I confess that the "old world -new world" motif did not carry the collection very far for me. Like JR, I had difficulty breaking through the initial fog of Krasikov's characters. And I never liked it as much as you two apparently did
There were, however, a few great scenes and stories in One More Year, that I noted. I did like the story of Anya and her abusive husband -- if, as the joke goes, anyone can enjoy that kind of pain. I don't think you really need to know why he's an asshole, and a borderline stalker and sociopath -- "why" is immaterial. Anya's story is not an unusual one. She takes the easy choice of the status quo over the hard work, loneliness, and shame of separation.
The other story I really liked was another one that JR referenced as well, although I saw it somewhat differently. Yes, the teenage boy comes to visit his mother in America, and is a rude, antagonistic, selfish pain in the ass. The mother has moved to the U.S. to try to build a better life for them caring for an aged shut-in - a position far below her previous station. The boy is bitter about what feels like abandonment on the one hand, and the embarrassment for her situation on the other. The feelings come through for him, and for the mother desperate to earn his affection, by giving him a fashionable coat to take home. Sad and frustrating.
Like JR said, few aspirations here, but sometimes it is hard to have hope. Some people's aspirations include not much more than having a better day tomorrow.
Dennis Haritou: Jasons, I appreciate the different takes we are all having on Sana's stories. But I'm going to leave my further detailed remarks to my interview with Sana that will be posted above this discussion on Three Guys. But I want to segue to that interview, where as the Three Guys prefer, we let the artist have a chance to speak for herself, by introducing some clumsy images. If I were to pick a simile for the phrase "my life" , it might be "my life is like my favorite coat", something that I put on, that is closer to me than anything else except for my own body. But considering Sana's stories, I find this image inadequate. Sana's stories are situational, like a bird caught in a wire mesh, the characters in One More Year twist and maneuver in circumstances in which their control is only partial. I also thought of children playing on a jungle gym, trying to figure the best way to get up or down while they try to avoid being kicked or bumped by their playmates.
Do the characters in One More Year understand the situations that they are in? Sana convinced me that Anya in Better Half does. But some of the kids on that jungle gym are playing with their eyes shut. More on this in the interview. Read more!
Of the Three Guys, I'm the one who is closest to having immigrant parents. My father arrived in NY early in the 20th century after exhausting several other continents and my mother was the first in her immediate family to be born in the U.S. Now you might think that this distinction in birth status between my parents can't be of much importance but it was a major fault line in their marriage since my father never really left the old world while my mother never wanted any association with it. Looking back on their marriage now that they gone, I can see both their points.
So it was with great personal interest that I encountered Krasikov's stories. What I found was an old world which was like an elaborate tapestry, always in the background of the characters' lives, even if they were very well enmeshed in their new circumstances. And sometimes it was as if a figure in the tapestry would reach out and grapple with a character in the foreground, trying to pull it back into the weave of the old world. This actually happened in one story, one of the best in the collection, There Will Be No Fourth Rome, where a character seems to walk back into the web of an almost unreal new Russia.
Jasons, I wonder if you found the new world/old world theme especially compelling or whether you chose to focus instead on human dilemmas that were more universal. I think you can look at the stories from both angles. This is the first time that the Three Guys have discussed a short story collection, so I will ask you, Jaces, to name a favorite story or two and tell us what impressed you about it.
Jason Rice: At first I found this collection to be very difficult to wrap my mind around. In a way the first stories were like listening to a radio station that is just over the next mountain, slowly the reception became clear and the closer I got to the top of the hill, which turned out to be the blistering Better Half things fell into place. There was an old world sensibility to Anya's rigid innocent belief system. In that she thought for sure that a man would marry her, which would allow her to become a US citizen. But in this story there is more to the simple arrangement than is first set into motion. Anya is realizing that men are the same the whole world over, except this one is so angry, (at what I don't know, Anya sounds like a dream), he even tries to kill her, the best way to show someone you like them. Anya wonders aloud how this man could be like this in a world filled with so much opportunity, albeit the world is the land of prosperity, America, where that kind of opportunity usually has a hefty price tag. There is a great deal of musing, some overt and subtle which ripple though this collection especially when it's main characters find themselves in the presence of an American, brushing up against one seems a better way to describe it. The hinges of the old world values, family, marriage forever at all costs, the Government spinning the world for you, are never more apparent then when Ms. Krasikov returns to a homeland of sorts in the final story. She finds thieves and crooks operating in the old rusted armature of her once thriving super power. There is much made of the human dilemma within these people, but a lot of it comes flying at them with great force from the conniving humans around them.
There is displaced disgust when the son comes to visit New York City, which is just the opposite of what it seems like to me when you come to a new city, especially if you've grown up in a remote village all your life. Of course he hates the view from the Empire State Building, and only wants a new winter coat that carries a fashionable label. He's a punk kid who doesn't understand the value of things, or for that matter, freedom, and the wildness of the thrashing industrial geotopia that is NYC. These people are less specific to me, they seem like ciphers for the authors vibrant ability to soak up the world we Americans take for granted. She marvels at the excess and amount of options available to us and frowns slightly (at the reader) when she comes across people who immediately disagree with her about the lavish luxury we have here. I felt ashamed to read that Anya had let that man who would mostly likely beat her to death back in her life, it was sad, and destructive, basically fulfilling his wishes of having his very own doormat, and her wish not to change things because it would be harder to do that. The old man Ilona cares for in the first story and his eyebrow trimmings seems like a job someone who has no prospects would take. Not someone who just got to this country.
I noticed there weren't any aspirations of bigger things in these immigrants. Especially the story Debt, where people experiencing a suburban utopia and are nicely tucked away only to realize how good they have it when someone else, a version of their former selves shows up and asks for money. The closing lines of that story reminded me of the last few lines of Rock Springs by Richard Ford, something of magic act if you ask me. His character steps outside of himself and looks down on his own plight, a riveting set of sentences. Anyone who can get that kind of response out of me is someone worthy of my praise, for what ever it's worth. But it did sound like the writer talking not the wiser than they should be characters who claim when asked for money that they're not a businessman or a lender. A funny and simple response that I will gladly employ in my own life should the situation ever arise. Which is to say that these stories are strictly about about the human drama of life. Ms. Krasikov balances her voice inside the head of each character she writes with a good sense of humor, all well meaning but simple over-matched by the foils of life.
Jason Chambers: I really like a lot of Russian writers. When I was nineteen or twenty, I spent a summer reading everything I could get my hands on: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bulgarov, Nabokov. Not much else: the Russian fiction section wasn't so large at the local library, not surprisingly. I had better luck a year earlier when I read all the Robert Penn Warren I could find. Regardless, by the time I went back to class in the fall, I felt practically Muscovite.
I also like tough stories about people living on the margins of society, barely eking out a living, fighting for morsels and trying to maintain themselves in miserable conditions -- we talked about that some in the Dubus discussion. And that is where a lot of these characters co-exist, but I don't know, Dennis. I confess that the "old world -new world" motif did not carry the collection very far for me. Like JR, I had difficulty breaking through the initial fog of Krasikov's characters. And I never liked it as much as you two apparently did
There were, however, a few great scenes and stories in One More Year, that I noted. I did like the story of Anya and her abusive husband -- if, as the joke goes, anyone can enjoy that kind of pain. I don't think you really need to know why he's an asshole, and a borderline stalker and sociopath -- "why" is immaterial. Anya's story is not an unusual one. She takes the easy choice of the status quo over the hard work, loneliness, and shame of separation.
The other story I really liked was another one that JR referenced as well, although I saw it somewhat differently. Yes, the teenage boy comes to visit his mother in America, and is a rude, antagonistic, selfish pain in the ass. The mother has moved to the U.S. to try to build a better life for them caring for an aged shut-in - a position far below her previous station. The boy is bitter about what feels like abandonment on the one hand, and the embarrassment for her situation on the other. The feelings come through for him, and for the mother desperate to earn his affection, by giving him a fashionable coat to take home. Sad and frustrating.
Like JR said, few aspirations here, but sometimes it is hard to have hope. Some people's aspirations include not much more than having a better day tomorrow.
Dennis Haritou: Jasons, I appreciate the different takes we are all having on Sana's stories. But I'm going to leave my further detailed remarks to my interview with Sana that will be posted above this discussion on Three Guys. But I want to segue to that interview, where as the Three Guys prefer, we let the artist have a chance to speak for herself, by introducing some clumsy images. If I were to pick a simile for the phrase "my life" , it might be "my life is like my favorite coat", something that I put on, that is closer to me than anything else except for my own body. But considering Sana's stories, I find this image inadequate. Sana's stories are situational, like a bird caught in a wire mesh, the characters in One More Year twist and maneuver in circumstances in which their control is only partial. I also thought of children playing on a jungle gym, trying to figure the best way to get up or down while they try to avoid being kicked or bumped by their playmates.
Do the characters in One More Year understand the situations that they are in? Sana convinced me that Anya in Better Half does. But some of the kids on that jungle gym are playing with their eyes shut. More on this in the interview. Read more!
Friday, July 18, 2008
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
The Leopard, Book and Movie
Dennis Haritou: The anniversary of the release of the movie version of Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa's The Leopard has led to a stampede for current editions of the novel. Nothing could please me more since Luchino Visconti's 1963 historical drama is indepensable movie viewing, both for it's visual splendor and the outstanding performance of its cast, led by Burt Lancaster who makes a great Sicilian prince.
But this is a rare case where both book and film adaptation flawlessly mirror each other. In both book and movie, an autocratic Sicilian prince is confronted with radical social and political change. He recognizes that he must either adapt or watch the spectacle of his dynasty being overwhelmed. There is a very great lesson in conservative values here and the necessity of adapting them to changing times while still remaining true to tradition. But this view of life is fundamentally tragic since the ultimate adaptation is to leave the scene. Essential watching and reading. Read more!
Friday, July 11, 2008
More Than It Hurts You
Jason Chambers: Glad to see Dennis here talking about More Than It Hurts You on the blog, and the decision-making process that goes into his purchasing. I came across this book on my shelf a couple of weeks before it came out (I don't remember when I picked it up initially) and thought it would be worth a quick read. I had not read any of Strauss' previous novels, but remembered the publicity and positive reviews for the first one.
I was more taken by this novel than I had anticipated. The basic premise is that advertising sales star Josh receives a call on Friday afternoon that rushes him to the hospital where his wife has brought their infant son, Zack, complaining of vague but serious symptoms.According to his wife, Dori, the hospital screwed up, but the situation draws the attention of the Head of Pediatrics Dr. Stokes who starts the machinery on the social services monster against the couple.
There is a lot of good stuff in here: the doctor's childhood seriousness compared to the frivolity of her peers; social and racial conflicts; the current state of the American press, and the couple's struggle with trust and fractured parenthood. The three major characters are all really well written. Sure, a couple of the minor characters fall a bit flat, but it's not much of a damper on the book as a whole.
And I don't think that Strauss is a genious prose stylist, as some of the reviews have suggested, but he is good and there are a handful of jaw-dropping scenes that make the book. In one, without giving away too much, Strauss splices two simultaneous scenes together, one with Josh gladhanding at a massive Manhattan advertising sales event, while Dori tends to their child on Long Island. An outrageously creepy and completely shocking scene. It might not be a novel for the short pile of books to get to immediately, but I think it's worth a read. JC Read more!
Reader's Alert - Girls of Riyadh and Reading Lolita in Tehran
Dennis Haritou: I noticed that this debut novel by Rajaa Alsanea about the lives of Saudi women, who struggle to balance their lives between two worlds, has been picked up with alacrity by both university bookstore and other serious literary bookstore markets. I put "debut novel" in italics because we are always interested in discovering new voices and new visions and it sounds like this narrative qualifies. It also brought to mind a memoir I read about the love of literacy among women in Iran, Readng Lolita in Tehran, which helped me to love literature even more by appreciating the effort it can take sometimes to stay civilized.
I haven't read Girls of Riyadh. I don't know if it's for me. But based on who is buying it, I like the company it is keeping. Read more!
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Reader's Alert - More Than It Hurts You
Dennis Haritou: When I and my Penguin rep, Bill Martin, sat down to decide what to buy on this book, we were faced with a real problem. The author's first novel, Chang and Eng, about a famous pair of Siamese twins, was a runaway success, especially in trade paper and received much critical praise. But the author's second book had tanked (second book syndrome). So we were now faced with Darin Strauss' third novel, More Than It Hurts You. So would it perform more like the first book or more like the second? In our buying decision we tried to take the middle ground and came up with a compromise number. But now we have some real data and it looks like this book is working. This novel is about a child in jeopardy and a marriage under strain. Darin Strauss is one those authors, unfailingly intelligent, who comes up with a fresh approach each time he tells a story. This is a considerable relief from those authors who tell the same story 20 times and sometimes twice a year at that. (You know who you are.)Darin Strauss is and always has been, an independent bookstore owner's dream author. Read more!
Reader's Alert - Reading the OED
Dennis Haritou: I would love to do this. If I did, then I could be sure that I was literate. Besides, behind each word is a story and here are 21,730 pages of stories. Ammon Shea took a year off from existence (another goal of mine) to read the Oxford English Dictionary. If you have done that, it's almost as if you have read every novel in English in the world because you have read all the words.
There is a flaw in my logic there somewhere but I don't care. I could rank-out the Jasons if I had a verbal arsenal like this. But anyway, reading this book, which sounds like a hell of a lot of fun, seems to be the next best thing to reading the OED. Moving. Read more!
Reader's Alert - City of Thieves
Dennis Haritou: I have seen a big spike in support for David Benioff's novel this week, both from big guys and a diverse selection of independent accounts. It impresses me since it's rather late in the game for this to happen. I suppose that David is focused more these days on writing his very successful screenplays, like Troy, Kite Runner, and 25th Hour among others, then on writing novels. But I wanted to assure him and his publisher, Penguin USA, that if he was planning on writing another novel, I am sure it would be very well received. I asked JR about this. His quote is below:
“City of Thieves is a great seller, but at this point I wonder if it will make the Times list. Viking should be happy with the sales. This is Benioff’s first novel with them, as The 25th Hour was published by Carroll & Graf, way back when, at the time it was critically praised by Ms. Kakutani, and turned into a fantastic movie, which was followed by his short story collection, When The Nines Roll Over, which struggled to find a wider audience upon it’s release, and sadly went overlooked.” Read more!
Friday, July 4, 2008
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Rollie vs. Them by Jonathan Evison
Jason Chambers: As promised more than a week ago, here is Jonathan Evison's previously unpublished short story Rollie vs. Them. I'll save any commentary for afterwards, and just let you get on with it.
Rollie vs. Them
by Jonathan Evison
Rollie Morgan was drunk. The sort of drunk that Marvelous Marv, hunching slightly in the adjacent stool, tapping his unlit Tareyton in five-four time atop the sticky bar, had come to refer to in his companion as “Foghorn Leghorn drunk.” Tonight, for the fourth night in a row, sixty-three-year-old Rollie Morgan was holding court at The Moon Temple, a queasily lit Chinese restaurant lounge populated with three television sets, a dozen bulbous, carbuncled red candle holders, and the faint but unmistakable bouquet of deep fried fat and mop water. Doug, the proprietor, was about as Chinese as Dolph Lundgren.
Tonight Rollie Morgan was in full command of his oratory arsenal. His gentlemanly southern accent, replete with velvety edges, dramatic pauses, and dy-nam-ic intonations, did indeed sound like Foghorn Leghorn. His entire manner at this stage of inebriation was in fact cartoon roosterish, a state of affairs which Marv knew could not last much longer.
Marv was 318 days sober. Yet, he continued to attend the Moon Temple in large part to resist its charms. Some nights he ordered a vodka tonic only to leave it on the bar in front of him like a challenge until the ice dissolved and the fizz went out of it and dew drops formed on the outside of the glass. Knowing all the while that if he drank it, the fierce determination to win would come surging back immediately. But knowing also the boomerang effect that morning would bring, all the terror and madness and self-loathing.
Old Foghorn had just concluded elucidating what he referred to as “the inherent inferiority complex underlying the psychology of modern leftism,” before he deftly leveled the crosshairs of his recrimination upon the whole of industrialized society, arriving finally (right on schedule) at what he considered to be the patently unjust grounds for his dismissal by the Bar Association of Oklahoma eighteen years ago, an inventory of judgly misconduct which included partiality, intimidation, as well as a certain heinous and wholly unfounded allegation which Rollie refused to dignify.
Though he’d endured Rollie’s litany of grievances on at least three prior occasions, Marv nonetheless pretended to listen. Probably, he figured, because he felt guilty. The least he could do was listen to his bullshit. The R-man wasn’t all bad. Fucker was kind of funny sometimes. Dude was pretty smart, too. Smarter than a lot of guys.
But that wasn’t going to change anything. Marv had to go through with it. That is, if Rollie ever stopped talking.
“Negligence to perform administrative or discretionary duties?” Rollie pursued. “Perhaps. The erroneous but innocent exercise of judicial discretion? Maybe. But damnit, moral turpitude? Delinquency? Never! On what grounds? What about Stump vs. Sparkman? What about—”
“Last call,” said Doug, clearing the grease trap.
“But it’s not even midnight, sir,” Rollie protested.
“Yeah, well, I’m tired, and you’re giving me a headache.”
The trek down 45th found Rollie’s head lolling in slow semi-circles as he shuffled over the wet pavement toward the lights of University Avenue. His gray hair was disheveled. His tongue was a pork chop. But he felt good. The hard, bitter little pellet that lived in his stomach seemed to have dissolved like an alka seltzer, and his thoughts were reduced mercifully to a trickle.
Marv walked in front of Rollie with his head down and a slight hitch in his gait along the downhill grade, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his green coveralls. He’d grown to enjoy walking in spite of the pain. Though certain considerations had been granted in the case of Marv’s DUI, namely, the privilege to pilot the company van during business hours on company-related charges, Marv never abused this privilege.
He paused on the I-5 overpass, where he fired up his Tareyton at last, and exhaled deliberately, gazing out over the express lanes. To the south, the skyline sprung up crisp and jagged and eerily luminous. A steely glass metroplex teeming with complications. Too many angles, thought Marv.
Rollie stationed himself beside Marv and stood as still as possible, listing occasionally side to side in spite of his efforts. To Rollie the distant skyline appeared to be tossing like Chinese lanterns on the horizon. Just how he liked it.
Marv would’ve preferred it that way, too, though he was clear-headed now, acutely aware of the complexities closing in fast around him, as he poised himself on the edge of decisive action. Now’s the time. Gotta be now.
But the moment he set a hand upon Rollie’s shoulder, the nerve left Marv. For, in steadying himself, Rollie had placed a reciprocal hand on Marv’s shoulder, and suppressing a milky burp, gave it a squeeze.
Ah, man. Weak-ass bullshit. Fuck it. Tomorrow, man. Tomorrow for sure. Suddenly Marv felt talkative.
“Too bad there ain’t no market for lawn care technicians out in the middle of nowhere, man. Not black ones, anyway. You ever see a black guy in Kettle Falls? Hell no. But I’ll tell you what, R-man. If I had it my way, you know what I’d want?”
“M–hic-m?” inquired Rollie.
“I know it sounds like some shit from an HBO movie starring Morgan Freeman or some other sage-ass old nigger with a bad knee, but R-Man, I’m serious. A gentleman’s farm. That’s what the fuck I’m talking about. In Yakima, or some fucking place. I’d get rabbits. That’s the ticket. And goats, I like goats. Wouldn’t have no manicured lawn. Just let that fucker grow. Chicory, plantain, dandelions, whatever, just let it grow. Wouldn’t even mow that shit. Know what I’m saying?”
In fact, Rollie did not know what Marv was saying, he only knew that the world was spinning too fast. Without warning, he began retching over the rail onto the interstate.
“Aw, Rollie, man, you gotta watch that shit.”
Marv required only a cursory glance at the dappled expanse of lawn surrounding the Totem Lake Commerce Center, a sprawling glass edifice offering no relief from rectangularity beyond a negligible slope in its facade, before making his diagnosis.
“Fucking necrotic.” He was irritable already from having endured the apneic discord and steam engine force of Rollie’s snoring all night long, only to awake and find his sofa (to use Rollie’s expression), “sodden.” And if that wasn’t enough, there was Rollie running his mouth in the van the whole drive out to Totem Lake. His tirade practically reduced poor Jorge to tears by the time they arrived.
But Jorge was tough. A lot tougher than his periwinkle eyeliner suggested. “You want I can blast with fungicide?” he said, as the three of them surveyed the damage.
“Hell no. You can’t just throw fungicides at the problem, bro. It ain’t that easy. We got bad drainage. This shit dries out, gets compacted, then what? We’re back where we started. Or worse. This ain’t no carpet-bombing campaign, Jorge. This is a ground war. Aerate the fucker. And pull the plugs. That means you, Rollie. I don’t wanna see little turf turds all over the place.”
Jorge nodded, pirouetted on the toes of his ladybug boots, and set off in the direction of the van to gear up for the ground war.
Rollie groaned.
“What?” said Marvin. “What’s the matter? Shit, Rollie, you about a worthless motherfucker, you know that? I’m payin’ thirteen-seventy-five an hour, here. I’m shellin’ out payroll taxes, not to mention health insurance on your cracker ass, and all you can do is groan. Well, fuck it. You ain’t no judge on my clock, understand? You ain’t been no judge on nobody’s clock in over fifteen goddamn years. So, stop bein’ such a prick. What business you got talkin’ to Jorge like that? He don’t hate America! He ain’t no collectivist, whatever the fuck that is! He ain’t lowerin’ nobody’s standards! Dude works his ass off! Got higher standards than you do! Hell, you just a broke-dick old cracker with holes in his stomach. Mowin’ lawns for this broke-ass nigger. Shit. What do you got to say for yourself, now, your honor? Huh? I can’t hear you.”
What vexed Marv more than Rollie’s insufferable bitching and haranguing and proselytizing, more than the drunken recitations of Rimbauds “A Season in Hell” delivered at two a.m. outside the Food Giant, more than all his weak-ass victim bullshit and alcoholic unwillingness to improve his situation, was the fact that not only had Rollie proved himself to be a reprehensible worker from day one, he’d demonstrated very little promise or hope for improvement in the three months to follow. He showed no desire to improve. Three months and Rollie still couldn’t top-dress for shit. He seeded in clumps, amended in gross disproportion. He inundated entire athletic fields to such an extent that Little League games were canceled. Nor, in spite of his avowed intellectual prowess, had Rollie exhibited any appetite whatsoever for the hard science of turf maintenance, not the slightest curiosity regarding the pathogens at work in the circular spread of ring spot, or the specific soil conditions favoring the spread of Magnaporthe.
And yet Marv still put up with him, still permitted him to jeopardize with each seedball, with each botched edge and stray divot, the hard won reputation of Marvelous Marv’s Lawn Maintenance
What does all this say about me? That I’m a nice guy? That I care? Yeah, right. Says that I’m as bad as him. Goddamn enabler. Sick fucking sober alcoholic manipulator. May as well be pouring drinks down his throat. Shit, pouring them down my own throat.
Certainly it wasn’t Rollie’s appearance which captivated Marv that afternoon on Broadway three months prior? Or maybe it was. His rumpled brown slacks and corduroy blazer looked like they’d been tossed on with a pitchfork. His fly was open. His right loafer was missing a tongue. There was a newspaper sticking out of his pocket. Yet, none of this stopped Rollie from projecting a regal bearing as he berated a panhandling teenage girl with indigo hair and a pierced lip for “futilely attempting to liberate herself from the psychological servitude of her own inferiority complex.”
When the teenage girl, referring to Rollie as “Hey Creepo,” suggested less than mildly that he “take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, and go panhandle somewhere else,” Rollie scarcely had time to express his outrage at this insolence before Marv intervened.
“Yo, man, what’s up? You lookin’ for work?”
Rollie and the girl both looked doubtfully at Marv, the former as though Marv were an agent of the left sent to entrap him, the latter as though Marv were some creepy black guy in coveralls holding an obscenely large sandwich.
A thorough visual inspection of Marv-- his steel-toed boots, his green coveralls, and particularly the crinkle-wrapped leviathan in the clutches of his right hand (was that Genoa salami?)— sufficiently assured Rollie that no conspiracy was afoot.
“What, sir, would you be proposing in the way of prospective occupation?”
“Lawn work.” Marv narrowed his gaze, sniffing the air like a birddog. “Yo, you drunk?”
Rollie was incredulous. “I beg your pardon, sir. Only momentarily discombobulated. More to the point, what might you be proposing in the way of compensation?”
“Thirteen.” Who the fuck talks like that, Marv wondered.
Rollie kneaded his chin briefly. “Thirteen, you say. Yes. And would that figure be commensurate to hundreds or thousands? Months, or weeks?”
“That’s hourly, Hoss.”
“Yes. Hourly. I see.”
“If you’re any good, I’ll bump you to thirteen-seventy five. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“Seventy-five. Yes. Well. There remains the question of benefits.”
“In three months, if you last that long. One day at a time, Hoss.”
“Hmm. Yes. Well, perhaps there are certain benefits I might enjoy sooner.”
“Like what?”
“Might I be so bold as to inquire whether that is Genoa salami?”
What inspired Marv’s charity that particular day, after all of those rainy morning crawls past the Millionaires Club, peering out between squeaky wipers from the warmth of his van at the dispirited collection of drunks and migrants gathered there to solicit an honest days work? Why in the past had Marv never succumb to the possibility of giving one of them a break? Why Rollie? What insane impulse had taken possession of him the morning he offered Rollie Morgan thirteen bucks an hour, half a sandwich and the use of his shower, an ever-expanding sphere of privilege soon to encompass Marv’s sofa, his socks, and his wallet? Was it really owing to the fact that Marv had to prep and prime the entire Interlaken Sports Complex by four o’clock? That due to mitigating circumstances involving Jorge and his cousin, Marv found himself minus his two best men that day? Or was it only Marv’s fascination with the human contradiction that Rollie seemed to embody: an eloquent bum, a wino capable of bombastic verbiage and unfaltering elocution. Dude talked like Shakespeare. Smelled like a wet loaf of bread. Pretty funny shit. Didn’t seem to be hurting nobody. Yeah, all right, see what happens.
And what happened? You took him in, fed him, put him in some coveralls, bought him some boots, got him an iron-on patch that said Rollie, tried to teach him a trade, gave him a chance to elevate himself. And you began to listen, sorting the bullshit from the other, began to recognize the crushing defeats, began to recognize the weakness in the face of adversity, and pretty soon you began to glimpse the broken man behind the cartoon rooster. And from there you began to delineate in your imagination the days of Rollie’s life, first backward and then forward, all the folly and estrangement and victimhood, and only then came to understand the breadth of the man’s alcoholism, only then recognized the fierce, alert look of the hunted that burned like blue ice in Rollie’s eyes. You knew those the eyes so well, eyes you saw regularly around folding-chair circles, peering out from behind Styrofoam cups through clouds of cigarette smoke, from lofts in Georgetown to church basements in Kenmore. The look that said I long to be free, even if it means giving up.
Indeed, you had seen this look many nights not so long ago staring back at yourself from the mirror. And you told yourself that no man is bereft beyond redemption, no matter how far he’s fallen.
And hadn’t Marv done his duty? Hadn’t he tried to steer Rollie toward the program? Hadn’t he taken him to a meeting on Capitol Hill, and another in Fremont? Hadn’t he told him Bill’s story, his own story, and a half dozen other cautionary tales? Hadn’t he talked about the boomerang, and making amends, and about surrendering to a power bigger than himself? So maybe he hadn’t pushed him hard enough, but it wasn’t Marv’s style to browbeat. He left Rollie to Rollie and minded his own shit. Rollie was guilty as charged. Rollie was a coward. Rollie hid behind booze and words. The two great deluders, the two things that profoundly alter our view of the obvious, that separate us from undeniable conclusions. One by misrepresentation and trickery, the other by lowering our standards in every way.
But hadn’t Marv, in rare moments, shared the intimacy of friendship with Rollie? At the very least hadn’t they become companions? Played pool, ate steaks, ogled women, complained? Hadn’t Rollie, despite his failings, accepted Marv unconditionally? Hadn’t Marv confided a great deal in Rollie when you added it all up? Hadn’t he confided all the fucked up stuff about saluting his father, all that moving around as a kid, all that self-pitying bullshit about deferring the football scholarship, only to blow out his ACL loading a truck in the desert of Kuwait, only to spiral into the madness of drugs and alcohol, to live every day with the terrible sense of yet another impending calamity? Hadn’t he confided all of that to Rollie at some point? And didn’t it all, in the end, sound a lot like the tale Rollie spun? The loss, the injustice, the bitter rage?
Fuck it.
And what about you Rollie? What have you got to say for yourself as you gather turf turds for thirteen bucks an hour and hope it doesn’t rain? You don’t really believe half your own bullshit, do you? Like all fast talkers, you’re running. You can dress fear up in a powdered wig and black robe, you can sit safely behind the shelter of an oak bar and preach about injustice, pound your gavel on the bar top until you’re blue in the face, cry contempt to whoever will pretend to listen. But you’ll only be sentencing yourself to the “psychological servitude of your own inferiority complex” in the end. Eventually you’ve got to look at the facts.
Exhibit A: The allegation. The purportedly heinous and wholly unfounded one. Maybe you fudged that. Okay, you botched it. But the pressure was eating holes in your stomach. You were drinking scotch and milk. You had a faux-Tudor with Greek pillars, a gambrel roof, and a Japanese garden to pay for, didn’t you? A little place in Cozumel. Why swim upstream, right? Graft is inevitable. What’s a few liquor licenses? A few construction permits? A trout stream?
Exhibit B: Janice. Was that really such a surprise? Really, was Janice ever the woman behind a great man? Wasn’t Janice more in front of the great man, leading him along like a horse to the banks of the revenue stream? I’m not dressing my children like bumpkins. I’m not sending my children to a public school. This old dining room is no longer functional. You can’t expect me to walk around town with no money.
Did you really expect Janice to hang around and sift through the rubble?
Exhibit C: Scott. He who endured you the least, two years, yet has the least to forgive you. Didn’t you just miss his twentieth? His nineteenth? His third, fourth, fifth, and sixth?
Exhibit D: Stephen. Everything his mother ever wanted him to be. The antithesis of you. Strong. In control. Even at age ten when you left him. Stephen to be continued. Eighteen years later. Which brings us to. . .
Exhibit E: Neurophysics for Dummies. That is, Stephen’s lecture at Roethke auditorium last March. Brilliant. No thanks to you. Stephen’s life was a masterpiece, what could he possibly begrudge you?
He didn’t recognize you, had no idea you were anywhere within two thousand miles. And you had the chance. You were even sober for the occasion, pumping his hand vigorously as you looked right at the bridge of his nose.
Fascinating.
Thank you.
Really. Just fascinating.
Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for coming.
Was that really enough, Rollie? Just coming? So why were you stuck like a deer in the headlights, unable to budge, even as Dr. Morgan turned back toward his lectern?
S-stephen.
I’m sorry, did you have a question?
I . . . just . . . I . . . I’m from Oklahoma.
Ah.
But that’s as close as you got, isn’t it, your honor? Go Sooners.
Okay, Rollie, congratulations, finally an impartial appraisal of the facts. No hung jury here. And it only took five minutes. A hundred and twelve turf turds. So what are you doing back at the van now, rummaging around for, when there must be five hundred more turf turds scattered about the Totem Lake Commerce Center? Why are you jumpy when you hear Marv’s voice from behind? What are you pretending to look for in there, under Marv’s seat?
“Rollie, man, I’m letting you go. I’ve thought about it, and there’s no way around it, so don’t start in on me.”
Marv was presently shouldering the additional guilt of having waited until five o’clock to cut Rollie loose in the parking lot of 7-11. This after Rollie had given him a full days work, albeit half-assed work. Even after Rollie had insisted on paying for the Big Gulps when he saw Marv go for his wallet. He bought the egg Mcmuffins this morning, too. Same thing at lunch. Wouldn’t let me pay for nothin’ all day. Dude was buttering me up. Ain’t gonna work.
Marv handed him the envelope. “That’s eleven hundred bucks. A little more than two weeks.”
Rollie took the envelope without comment.
“I don’t know, R-man, look, maybe it’s time for you to ask yourself, ‘what’s gonna happen to Rollie?’ Time for you to draw up a new game plan. You’d better figure something out quick. Whether it’s making peace with your people, or whatever. All I know is I’m letting you go.”
Marv almost put a hand on Rollie’s shoulder and gave him an encouraging pat, but he resisted the urge. Be strong. Crazy fucker’ll get by. Who knows, maybe the push he needs. Marv thought he saw a flash of the burning blue ice in Rollie’s eyes, but he couldn’t help that.
“Good luck, man.”
Rollie didn’t say anything, just rocked on his heels clutching the envelope.
Marv turned and walked toward the van. Halfway there, he turned back. “Yo, and thanks for the Big Gulp.”
And as Marv pulled away, Rollie issued a pointed little laugh. But at least it was a laugh. At the end of that laugh lay dread, and Rollie knew it, could feel it already, even as he clutched the envelope, even as he thumbed Marv’s credit card in his pocket, he could feel the pointy, angular complexity of the world closing in on him again from all directions. And he longed to be free of it, even if it meant giving up.
----------------------
JC: There you have it. As always, really good stuff from JE. What I really like about his work are his characters. Evison manages to make the portrayal of Rollie's downfall from a once successful family man to an alcoholic on the margins of society sad, yet keep his character very funny. I also think the structure in this one is something different from JE's other stories - or at least those that I have read thus far. I especially like the shift about 3/4 of the way through, where we read the case against Rollie - the accusations and exhibits. Very forceful.
Thanks again to Jonathan Evison for allowing us to print it here. Read more!
Rollie vs. Them
by Jonathan Evison
Rollie Morgan was drunk. The sort of drunk that Marvelous Marv, hunching slightly in the adjacent stool, tapping his unlit Tareyton in five-four time atop the sticky bar, had come to refer to in his companion as “Foghorn Leghorn drunk.” Tonight, for the fourth night in a row, sixty-three-year-old Rollie Morgan was holding court at The Moon Temple, a queasily lit Chinese restaurant lounge populated with three television sets, a dozen bulbous, carbuncled red candle holders, and the faint but unmistakable bouquet of deep fried fat and mop water. Doug, the proprietor, was about as Chinese as Dolph Lundgren.
Tonight Rollie Morgan was in full command of his oratory arsenal. His gentlemanly southern accent, replete with velvety edges, dramatic pauses, and dy-nam-ic intonations, did indeed sound like Foghorn Leghorn. His entire manner at this stage of inebriation was in fact cartoon roosterish, a state of affairs which Marv knew could not last much longer.
Marv was 318 days sober. Yet, he continued to attend the Moon Temple in large part to resist its charms. Some nights he ordered a vodka tonic only to leave it on the bar in front of him like a challenge until the ice dissolved and the fizz went out of it and dew drops formed on the outside of the glass. Knowing all the while that if he drank it, the fierce determination to win would come surging back immediately. But knowing also the boomerang effect that morning would bring, all the terror and madness and self-loathing.
Old Foghorn had just concluded elucidating what he referred to as “the inherent inferiority complex underlying the psychology of modern leftism,” before he deftly leveled the crosshairs of his recrimination upon the whole of industrialized society, arriving finally (right on schedule) at what he considered to be the patently unjust grounds for his dismissal by the Bar Association of Oklahoma eighteen years ago, an inventory of judgly misconduct which included partiality, intimidation, as well as a certain heinous and wholly unfounded allegation which Rollie refused to dignify.
Though he’d endured Rollie’s litany of grievances on at least three prior occasions, Marv nonetheless pretended to listen. Probably, he figured, because he felt guilty. The least he could do was listen to his bullshit. The R-man wasn’t all bad. Fucker was kind of funny sometimes. Dude was pretty smart, too. Smarter than a lot of guys.
But that wasn’t going to change anything. Marv had to go through with it. That is, if Rollie ever stopped talking.
“Negligence to perform administrative or discretionary duties?” Rollie pursued. “Perhaps. The erroneous but innocent exercise of judicial discretion? Maybe. But damnit, moral turpitude? Delinquency? Never! On what grounds? What about Stump vs. Sparkman? What about—”
“Last call,” said Doug, clearing the grease trap.
“But it’s not even midnight, sir,” Rollie protested.
“Yeah, well, I’m tired, and you’re giving me a headache.”
The trek down 45th found Rollie’s head lolling in slow semi-circles as he shuffled over the wet pavement toward the lights of University Avenue. His gray hair was disheveled. His tongue was a pork chop. But he felt good. The hard, bitter little pellet that lived in his stomach seemed to have dissolved like an alka seltzer, and his thoughts were reduced mercifully to a trickle.
Marv walked in front of Rollie with his head down and a slight hitch in his gait along the downhill grade, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his green coveralls. He’d grown to enjoy walking in spite of the pain. Though certain considerations had been granted in the case of Marv’s DUI, namely, the privilege to pilot the company van during business hours on company-related charges, Marv never abused this privilege.
He paused on the I-5 overpass, where he fired up his Tareyton at last, and exhaled deliberately, gazing out over the express lanes. To the south, the skyline sprung up crisp and jagged and eerily luminous. A steely glass metroplex teeming with complications. Too many angles, thought Marv.
Rollie stationed himself beside Marv and stood as still as possible, listing occasionally side to side in spite of his efforts. To Rollie the distant skyline appeared to be tossing like Chinese lanterns on the horizon. Just how he liked it.
Marv would’ve preferred it that way, too, though he was clear-headed now, acutely aware of the complexities closing in fast around him, as he poised himself on the edge of decisive action. Now’s the time. Gotta be now.
But the moment he set a hand upon Rollie’s shoulder, the nerve left Marv. For, in steadying himself, Rollie had placed a reciprocal hand on Marv’s shoulder, and suppressing a milky burp, gave it a squeeze.
Ah, man. Weak-ass bullshit. Fuck it. Tomorrow, man. Tomorrow for sure. Suddenly Marv felt talkative.
“Too bad there ain’t no market for lawn care technicians out in the middle of nowhere, man. Not black ones, anyway. You ever see a black guy in Kettle Falls? Hell no. But I’ll tell you what, R-man. If I had it my way, you know what I’d want?”
“M–hic-m?” inquired Rollie.
“I know it sounds like some shit from an HBO movie starring Morgan Freeman or some other sage-ass old nigger with a bad knee, but R-Man, I’m serious. A gentleman’s farm. That’s what the fuck I’m talking about. In Yakima, or some fucking place. I’d get rabbits. That’s the ticket. And goats, I like goats. Wouldn’t have no manicured lawn. Just let that fucker grow. Chicory, plantain, dandelions, whatever, just let it grow. Wouldn’t even mow that shit. Know what I’m saying?”
In fact, Rollie did not know what Marv was saying, he only knew that the world was spinning too fast. Without warning, he began retching over the rail onto the interstate.
“Aw, Rollie, man, you gotta watch that shit.”
Marv required only a cursory glance at the dappled expanse of lawn surrounding the Totem Lake Commerce Center, a sprawling glass edifice offering no relief from rectangularity beyond a negligible slope in its facade, before making his diagnosis.
“Fucking necrotic.” He was irritable already from having endured the apneic discord and steam engine force of Rollie’s snoring all night long, only to awake and find his sofa (to use Rollie’s expression), “sodden.” And if that wasn’t enough, there was Rollie running his mouth in the van the whole drive out to Totem Lake. His tirade practically reduced poor Jorge to tears by the time they arrived.
But Jorge was tough. A lot tougher than his periwinkle eyeliner suggested. “You want I can blast with fungicide?” he said, as the three of them surveyed the damage.
“Hell no. You can’t just throw fungicides at the problem, bro. It ain’t that easy. We got bad drainage. This shit dries out, gets compacted, then what? We’re back where we started. Or worse. This ain’t no carpet-bombing campaign, Jorge. This is a ground war. Aerate the fucker. And pull the plugs. That means you, Rollie. I don’t wanna see little turf turds all over the place.”
Jorge nodded, pirouetted on the toes of his ladybug boots, and set off in the direction of the van to gear up for the ground war.
Rollie groaned.
“What?” said Marvin. “What’s the matter? Shit, Rollie, you about a worthless motherfucker, you know that? I’m payin’ thirteen-seventy-five an hour, here. I’m shellin’ out payroll taxes, not to mention health insurance on your cracker ass, and all you can do is groan. Well, fuck it. You ain’t no judge on my clock, understand? You ain’t been no judge on nobody’s clock in over fifteen goddamn years. So, stop bein’ such a prick. What business you got talkin’ to Jorge like that? He don’t hate America! He ain’t no collectivist, whatever the fuck that is! He ain’t lowerin’ nobody’s standards! Dude works his ass off! Got higher standards than you do! Hell, you just a broke-dick old cracker with holes in his stomach. Mowin’ lawns for this broke-ass nigger. Shit. What do you got to say for yourself, now, your honor? Huh? I can’t hear you.”
What vexed Marv more than Rollie’s insufferable bitching and haranguing and proselytizing, more than the drunken recitations of Rimbauds “A Season in Hell” delivered at two a.m. outside the Food Giant, more than all his weak-ass victim bullshit and alcoholic unwillingness to improve his situation, was the fact that not only had Rollie proved himself to be a reprehensible worker from day one, he’d demonstrated very little promise or hope for improvement in the three months to follow. He showed no desire to improve. Three months and Rollie still couldn’t top-dress for shit. He seeded in clumps, amended in gross disproportion. He inundated entire athletic fields to such an extent that Little League games were canceled. Nor, in spite of his avowed intellectual prowess, had Rollie exhibited any appetite whatsoever for the hard science of turf maintenance, not the slightest curiosity regarding the pathogens at work in the circular spread of ring spot, or the specific soil conditions favoring the spread of Magnaporthe.
And yet Marv still put up with him, still permitted him to jeopardize with each seedball, with each botched edge and stray divot, the hard won reputation of Marvelous Marv’s Lawn Maintenance
What does all this say about me? That I’m a nice guy? That I care? Yeah, right. Says that I’m as bad as him. Goddamn enabler. Sick fucking sober alcoholic manipulator. May as well be pouring drinks down his throat. Shit, pouring them down my own throat.
Certainly it wasn’t Rollie’s appearance which captivated Marv that afternoon on Broadway three months prior? Or maybe it was. His rumpled brown slacks and corduroy blazer looked like they’d been tossed on with a pitchfork. His fly was open. His right loafer was missing a tongue. There was a newspaper sticking out of his pocket. Yet, none of this stopped Rollie from projecting a regal bearing as he berated a panhandling teenage girl with indigo hair and a pierced lip for “futilely attempting to liberate herself from the psychological servitude of her own inferiority complex.”
When the teenage girl, referring to Rollie as “Hey Creepo,” suggested less than mildly that he “take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, and go panhandle somewhere else,” Rollie scarcely had time to express his outrage at this insolence before Marv intervened.
“Yo, man, what’s up? You lookin’ for work?”
Rollie and the girl both looked doubtfully at Marv, the former as though Marv were an agent of the left sent to entrap him, the latter as though Marv were some creepy black guy in coveralls holding an obscenely large sandwich.
A thorough visual inspection of Marv-- his steel-toed boots, his green coveralls, and particularly the crinkle-wrapped leviathan in the clutches of his right hand (was that Genoa salami?)— sufficiently assured Rollie that no conspiracy was afoot.
“What, sir, would you be proposing in the way of prospective occupation?”
“Lawn work.” Marv narrowed his gaze, sniffing the air like a birddog. “Yo, you drunk?”
Rollie was incredulous. “I beg your pardon, sir. Only momentarily discombobulated. More to the point, what might you be proposing in the way of compensation?”
“Thirteen.” Who the fuck talks like that, Marv wondered.
Rollie kneaded his chin briefly. “Thirteen, you say. Yes. And would that figure be commensurate to hundreds or thousands? Months, or weeks?”
“That’s hourly, Hoss.”
“Yes. Hourly. I see.”
“If you’re any good, I’ll bump you to thirteen-seventy five. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“Seventy-five. Yes. Well. There remains the question of benefits.”
“In three months, if you last that long. One day at a time, Hoss.”
“Hmm. Yes. Well, perhaps there are certain benefits I might enjoy sooner.”
“Like what?”
“Might I be so bold as to inquire whether that is Genoa salami?”
What inspired Marv’s charity that particular day, after all of those rainy morning crawls past the Millionaires Club, peering out between squeaky wipers from the warmth of his van at the dispirited collection of drunks and migrants gathered there to solicit an honest days work? Why in the past had Marv never succumb to the possibility of giving one of them a break? Why Rollie? What insane impulse had taken possession of him the morning he offered Rollie Morgan thirteen bucks an hour, half a sandwich and the use of his shower, an ever-expanding sphere of privilege soon to encompass Marv’s sofa, his socks, and his wallet? Was it really owing to the fact that Marv had to prep and prime the entire Interlaken Sports Complex by four o’clock? That due to mitigating circumstances involving Jorge and his cousin, Marv found himself minus his two best men that day? Or was it only Marv’s fascination with the human contradiction that Rollie seemed to embody: an eloquent bum, a wino capable of bombastic verbiage and unfaltering elocution. Dude talked like Shakespeare. Smelled like a wet loaf of bread. Pretty funny shit. Didn’t seem to be hurting nobody. Yeah, all right, see what happens.
And what happened? You took him in, fed him, put him in some coveralls, bought him some boots, got him an iron-on patch that said Rollie, tried to teach him a trade, gave him a chance to elevate himself. And you began to listen, sorting the bullshit from the other, began to recognize the crushing defeats, began to recognize the weakness in the face of adversity, and pretty soon you began to glimpse the broken man behind the cartoon rooster. And from there you began to delineate in your imagination the days of Rollie’s life, first backward and then forward, all the folly and estrangement and victimhood, and only then came to understand the breadth of the man’s alcoholism, only then recognized the fierce, alert look of the hunted that burned like blue ice in Rollie’s eyes. You knew those the eyes so well, eyes you saw regularly around folding-chair circles, peering out from behind Styrofoam cups through clouds of cigarette smoke, from lofts in Georgetown to church basements in Kenmore. The look that said I long to be free, even if it means giving up.
Indeed, you had seen this look many nights not so long ago staring back at yourself from the mirror. And you told yourself that no man is bereft beyond redemption, no matter how far he’s fallen.
And hadn’t Marv done his duty? Hadn’t he tried to steer Rollie toward the program? Hadn’t he taken him to a meeting on Capitol Hill, and another in Fremont? Hadn’t he told him Bill’s story, his own story, and a half dozen other cautionary tales? Hadn’t he talked about the boomerang, and making amends, and about surrendering to a power bigger than himself? So maybe he hadn’t pushed him hard enough, but it wasn’t Marv’s style to browbeat. He left Rollie to Rollie and minded his own shit. Rollie was guilty as charged. Rollie was a coward. Rollie hid behind booze and words. The two great deluders, the two things that profoundly alter our view of the obvious, that separate us from undeniable conclusions. One by misrepresentation and trickery, the other by lowering our standards in every way.
But hadn’t Marv, in rare moments, shared the intimacy of friendship with Rollie? At the very least hadn’t they become companions? Played pool, ate steaks, ogled women, complained? Hadn’t Rollie, despite his failings, accepted Marv unconditionally? Hadn’t Marv confided a great deal in Rollie when you added it all up? Hadn’t he confided all the fucked up stuff about saluting his father, all that moving around as a kid, all that self-pitying bullshit about deferring the football scholarship, only to blow out his ACL loading a truck in the desert of Kuwait, only to spiral into the madness of drugs and alcohol, to live every day with the terrible sense of yet another impending calamity? Hadn’t he confided all of that to Rollie at some point? And didn’t it all, in the end, sound a lot like the tale Rollie spun? The loss, the injustice, the bitter rage?
Fuck it.
And what about you Rollie? What have you got to say for yourself as you gather turf turds for thirteen bucks an hour and hope it doesn’t rain? You don’t really believe half your own bullshit, do you? Like all fast talkers, you’re running. You can dress fear up in a powdered wig and black robe, you can sit safely behind the shelter of an oak bar and preach about injustice, pound your gavel on the bar top until you’re blue in the face, cry contempt to whoever will pretend to listen. But you’ll only be sentencing yourself to the “psychological servitude of your own inferiority complex” in the end. Eventually you’ve got to look at the facts.
Exhibit A: The allegation. The purportedly heinous and wholly unfounded one. Maybe you fudged that. Okay, you botched it. But the pressure was eating holes in your stomach. You were drinking scotch and milk. You had a faux-Tudor with Greek pillars, a gambrel roof, and a Japanese garden to pay for, didn’t you? A little place in Cozumel. Why swim upstream, right? Graft is inevitable. What’s a few liquor licenses? A few construction permits? A trout stream?
Exhibit B: Janice. Was that really such a surprise? Really, was Janice ever the woman behind a great man? Wasn’t Janice more in front of the great man, leading him along like a horse to the banks of the revenue stream? I’m not dressing my children like bumpkins. I’m not sending my children to a public school. This old dining room is no longer functional. You can’t expect me to walk around town with no money.
Did you really expect Janice to hang around and sift through the rubble?
Exhibit C: Scott. He who endured you the least, two years, yet has the least to forgive you. Didn’t you just miss his twentieth? His nineteenth? His third, fourth, fifth, and sixth?
Exhibit D: Stephen. Everything his mother ever wanted him to be. The antithesis of you. Strong. In control. Even at age ten when you left him. Stephen to be continued. Eighteen years later. Which brings us to. . .
Exhibit E: Neurophysics for Dummies. That is, Stephen’s lecture at Roethke auditorium last March. Brilliant. No thanks to you. Stephen’s life was a masterpiece, what could he possibly begrudge you?
He didn’t recognize you, had no idea you were anywhere within two thousand miles. And you had the chance. You were even sober for the occasion, pumping his hand vigorously as you looked right at the bridge of his nose.
Fascinating.
Thank you.
Really. Just fascinating.
Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for coming.
Was that really enough, Rollie? Just coming? So why were you stuck like a deer in the headlights, unable to budge, even as Dr. Morgan turned back toward his lectern?
S-stephen.
I’m sorry, did you have a question?
I . . . just . . . I . . . I’m from Oklahoma.
Ah.
But that’s as close as you got, isn’t it, your honor? Go Sooners.
Okay, Rollie, congratulations, finally an impartial appraisal of the facts. No hung jury here. And it only took five minutes. A hundred and twelve turf turds. So what are you doing back at the van now, rummaging around for, when there must be five hundred more turf turds scattered about the Totem Lake Commerce Center? Why are you jumpy when you hear Marv’s voice from behind? What are you pretending to look for in there, under Marv’s seat?
“Rollie, man, I’m letting you go. I’ve thought about it, and there’s no way around it, so don’t start in on me.”
Marv was presently shouldering the additional guilt of having waited until five o’clock to cut Rollie loose in the parking lot of 7-11. This after Rollie had given him a full days work, albeit half-assed work. Even after Rollie had insisted on paying for the Big Gulps when he saw Marv go for his wallet. He bought the egg Mcmuffins this morning, too. Same thing at lunch. Wouldn’t let me pay for nothin’ all day. Dude was buttering me up. Ain’t gonna work.
Marv handed him the envelope. “That’s eleven hundred bucks. A little more than two weeks.”
Rollie took the envelope without comment.
“I don’t know, R-man, look, maybe it’s time for you to ask yourself, ‘what’s gonna happen to Rollie?’ Time for you to draw up a new game plan. You’d better figure something out quick. Whether it’s making peace with your people, or whatever. All I know is I’m letting you go.”
Marv almost put a hand on Rollie’s shoulder and gave him an encouraging pat, but he resisted the urge. Be strong. Crazy fucker’ll get by. Who knows, maybe the push he needs. Marv thought he saw a flash of the burning blue ice in Rollie’s eyes, but he couldn’t help that.
“Good luck, man.”
Rollie didn’t say anything, just rocked on his heels clutching the envelope.
Marv turned and walked toward the van. Halfway there, he turned back. “Yo, and thanks for the Big Gulp.”
And as Marv pulled away, Rollie issued a pointed little laugh. But at least it was a laugh. At the end of that laugh lay dread, and Rollie knew it, could feel it already, even as he clutched the envelope, even as he thumbed Marv’s credit card in his pocket, he could feel the pointy, angular complexity of the world closing in on him again from all directions. And he longed to be free of it, even if it meant giving up.
----------------------
JC: There you have it. As always, really good stuff from JE. What I really like about his work are his characters. Evison manages to make the portrayal of Rollie's downfall from a once successful family man to an alcoholic on the margins of society sad, yet keep his character very funny. I also think the structure in this one is something different from JE's other stories - or at least those that I have read thus far. I especially like the shift about 3/4 of the way through, where we read the case against Rollie - the accusations and exhibits. Very forceful.
Thanks again to Jonathan Evison for allowing us to print it here. Read more!
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
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