“The mighty moral growth of the author, during his literary activity, is written in indelible characters in these exquisite short stories.” – Leo Tolstoy on Guy de Maupassant
I recently heard an admirably fired-up You Tuber say that almost all fiction writers do their best work in the short form.
Then he said he didn’t know why short fiction, i.e. short stories, are not more popular right now, in the modern world, since most fiction writers do their best work in this form.
I instantly knew I agree/d with the first thing he’d said (since I’ve said it myself many times before, in many different formats; there are no “original” ideas: period).
I also know that short stories, while they are making a small resurgence, are not money-makers in the mainstream publishing world today and far from it.
I started wondering more about why that is, because of what the You Tuber had said.
And I came to the conclusion that it’s because short stories are where fiction writers do their best work.
In other words, short stories are very often the deepest work out there and readers today (in the mainstream, that is) are not looking for depth or challenging material; they are looking for cheesy reassurance, easy affirmations, boring normalness (because it’s comforting) dressed up as something exciting.
There was a moment in American fiction when short stories were where the money was at.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Kurt Vonnegut both made boatloads of money writing short stories in the early to middle twentieth century. Fitzgerald made far more money from short stories than he ever did from his novels, including Gatsby, which was a financial and critical failure and flop during his lifetime (like Melville’s Moby Dick, or the paintings of Vincent).
But Scott and Kurt both quickly found out that, in order to make that dough, the stories needed to be romantic (unrealistic) tales, easy to digest, and written with contrived (formulaic, used-before, tried-and-true, but not true-to-life) plots. And no ragged, Chekhovian, ambiguous, challenging, thought-provoking, open endings allowed; nor any Dostoevskyean extremity of atmosphere; nor any out-of-this-world Borgesian thought experiments, either.
The best short stories right now are not hugely popular because they are not hugely easy to read.
The first thing they require is pausing from your daily life, concentrating, thinking, feeling, sympathizing, empathizing, decoding, interpreting, imagining, understanding, challenging your own assumptions, stepping away from it all, meditating, reaching out toward characters who might make you uncomfortable, and being comfortable with uncertainty (which ability John Keats called “Negative Capability”). “Beach read” novels and various kinds of thrillers now dominate the fiction best-seller lists, almost literally without exception, and almost all of them (NOT all, but almost) are, by definition, easy, stereotypical, non-challenging, seen-it-before (many times), simplistic, and unrealistic works.
And yet, short stories are, literally, everywhere in our world. School, the internet, and television all overflow with short stories, and almost all movies are far more like short stories than like long novels. Nightly and daily news broadcasts are now presented as dramatic (and, unbelievably, unrealistic, since it’s supposed to be “the news”) short short stories, one piled on top of another in an endless, ridiculous stream.
The relationship between television programs and short stories is a fruitful study for anyone interested in modern fiction writing for any reason and goes back to the very roots of the TV medium.
The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents are all classic television programs with very close connections to short stories in many ways.
The works in the Arabian Nights, the Canterbury Tales, and the Decameron are all early short stories.
Short stories are so closely tied to religion that they ARE religion.
The Good Samaritan, The Prodigal Son, Dives and Lazarus, Buddha and the Flower Sermon, Lao Tzu disappearing into the mountains after he (for free) penned the 5,000-word Tao Te Ching and handed it to the guard who’d asked him to write it, are all short stories in their (eternal) way.
This short little essay now concludes with a short little list of passed-on (but still here) fiction writers who’ve all done their best work in the short story (plus a few crucial after-thoughts afterward).
Arthur Conan Doyle. Franz Kafka. Clarice Lispector. Ernest Hemingway. James Joyce. Flannery O’Connor. Hans Christian Andersen. William S. Burroughs. James Baldwin. Grace Paley. Raymond Carver. John Cheever. D.H. Lawrence. Thomas Mann. Joseph Conrad. Dorothy Parker. Shirley Jackson. Ambrose Bierce. O. Henry. Harlan Ellison. Ralph Ellison. Frank O’Connor. William Gay. Larry Brown. Barry Hannah. Rick DeMarinis. Washington Irving. Jorge Luis Borges. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Denis Johnson. Thom Jones. H.P. Lovecraft. Nelson Algren. Cyrus Colter. Donald Barthelme. Ivan Turgenev. Nikolai Gogol. Isaac Babel. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Katherine Mansfield. Eudora Welty. William Saroyan. E.T.A. Hoffman. Ray Bradbury. Rudyard Kipling. Guy de Maupassant.
Poe and Chekhov are sort-of left off the official list because their greatest works might be poem/s and play/s; but The Raven is a kind of short story for sure, as is The Cherry Orchard.
Many modern fiction writers who did not do their best work in the short story did their best work in the novella, instead (not the novel), but that is a subject for another (annoyingly opinionated) exploration by THE DRIFTER (sometimes known by local canines and felines, ’coons, squirrels and birds as “Dale the Drifter”).
Almost all of the great nineteenth century novels were published in serial form, that is, as separate magazine or journal installments over an extended period, one chapter at a time.
As just one example, War and Peace, that episodic behemoth, originally appeared as a serial over two years (1865 to 1867) in the journal The Russian Messenger before being, heavily, revised and expanded over the next two years after that, then finally published as a stand-alone volume in 1869.
Frank O’Connor called the short story The Lonely Voice. (Just exactly why he did so is also another subject for a future exploration from: The Drifter.)
She really wanted to come over and see him and he really didn’t know quite why that was, but he said okay and hung up the phone.
The year was 2003 and the time of year was midsummer and he didn’t have a cell phone yet (on purpose) and wouldn’t (on purpose) for a long time.
The landline wasn’t his either.
He was house-sitting for a friend while the friend and his wife were in France for the summer.
The house was in the northside Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago, just off Lawrence Avenue. This was before Lincoln Square became horrifically, and ridiculously, gentrified but at a time when it was already on its way, fast, on the downward slope.
The house he was house-sitting in for the summer was ridiculously large by his standards, a person who was used to living in many different, small, cheap apartments all across the city over the last however-many years.
Only two people usually lived in the house but it had five upstairs bedrooms, four bathrooms, a gigantic kitchen, a massive dining room, a huge living room with a massive fireplace, a really big family room with an incredibly large TV, a gargantuan basement with at least six separate rooms and lots more TVs, several rooms on the ground floor that were used for things like libraries and studies that were never used, etc. etc. etc. (“Sleeping” alone in this large of a house gave him waking nightmares which usually led to him crashing on one of the first-floor couches near a window by a tree.)
His friend, the husband, wasn’t that loaded, but his friend’s wife came from a family in Oklahoma that was so rich with oil money it wasn’t really funny except it also was kind of funny – in a perhaps sick way.
When the main character of this story’s friend arrived she looked beautiful because she was beautiful. She was, somehow, much more beautiful than the last time he’d seen her, about three or four months ago at the university where they were both lecturers in the English Department.
Her long, fresh-smelling brown hair came down to the middle of her back and had blonde streaks in it that looked natural and golden when she moved her head. Her perfect face was cat-shaped and insomniac-pale, looking for something, and her large, gray, long-lashed eyes sparkled with satirical humor and a wild, one-of-a-kind, literary intelligence. She wore a dark red lipstick and had sexy crooked teeth.
She immediately bummed a cigarette off him and asked for a beer because she knew he would have some of both.
They went out into the backyard, on the beautiful green grass (that kind of grass can often be beautiful even though it literally is an environmental catastrophe for Planet Earth) which was very long and thick because, while he was supposed to keep it mowed to the neighbors’ standards while he was house-sitting, he did not do so. (The neighbors often gave him dirty looks. When the summer was over it would take him a long time to get that grass mowed before his friend and his wife returned from France.) The temperature was at a perfect eighty-three degrees F, the sun was out, the Chicago sky was blue and clear, she was in a really great mood, he was in a very great mood too, he was lighting her cigarettes for her (she kept on bumming more from him but he had a carton in the house), the beer tasted wonderful, and the two of them, both writers who made their livings as lecturers and not lecturers who made their livings as writers, were “writing in air.” In other words, they were doing it purely for the love of it (not only aiming for the $ by following trends and corporate style books).
“Writing in air” is a phrase that was used by the great American writer James Agee, author of the classic text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men which accompanied the famous Walker Evans photographs of the poor folks down in Alabama.
Like many writers then and now, too, Agee became an alcoholic and spent a great deal of time as a younger writer “writing in air,” which is to say, spending more time talking about writing with other aspiring writers than actually writing.
Such behavior looks like a waste of time to a lot of the world but it is not a waste of time. It only becomes a waste of time later. When the writer is fairly young, as these two were then (early thirties or so), “writing in air” can be extremely beneficial for the writer as she or he tries out ideas, becomes fluent in the use of verbal flow and tricks, talks about stories, poems, essays, and books, and listens (the deep, active listening is key) to the opinions and ideas of others as well.
These two were having a great time writing in air in the backyard, such a great time that day became evening became nighttime became them in the bar that was just across from the house on Lawrence Avenue.
The bar was called The Ritz and it was run by a guy who called himself Alfred.
That wasn’t his name. It was what he called himself.
The Ritz was one of the most dangerous dive bars the main character of this story had ever been in, and he had been in a million of them all across the USA, from coast to coast and from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Key West, Florida, and in at least forty-five or forty-six other different states too, as well as several in Canada, Mexico, and Jamaica, where he’d almost been killed in one of them (but that is a different story).
The Ritz is there no more. The place where The Ritz was is now a phone store.
Back then, as soon as you walked in the door, you could smell the menace and danger oozing from every single corner of the room.
The place was a garish nightmare from the mind of Poe or Dostoevsky. It had blood-red walls, a deep, sickening green ceiling, very low, yellowish lighting, very dark, hidden corners with very shady people lurking in them, and a gigantic man (as in six and a half feet tall and built like a freight truck) with a vicious scar all the way across his face and nose standing at the door glaring at everyone who walked in the place. Don’t say hello to him because he won’t answer.
The clock was upside down, the only bathroom was dirtier than the one pictured on the Rolling Stones album cover for Let It Bleed, the clientele contained gang bangers, mafiosos, hookers, prostitutes, street walkers (none of these three are always the same thing), drug dealers, thieves, hit men. Yes, “Alfred” had once told the main character of this story that several regulars in this bar sometimes made their livings taking out people for money. But don’t worry, said Alfred. They only kill who they are paid to kill and they don’t enjoy it. They don’t mind it, but they don’t enjoy it, either.
Alfred looked like an emaciated, cadaverous, half-Asian, needle-hiding version of Alfred Hitchcock who’d been resurrected from the grave and presented with a set of gold teeth which he was always flashing then hiding behind dry, cracked, pursed lips. When he gave you a drink he acted like you’d won the lottery.
It may sound half mad that the main character of this story, who wasn’t really (much of) a criminal himself after all, would’ve spent so much time in a place like this, back in the old days. No one knows why, but the facts are the facts.
And the amazing thing was that she understood the danger and the shadiness of the place very well, and wasn’t afraid of it at all.
The two of them entered the Ritz just before midnight and began drinking even though they’d already been drinking (and chain smoking) since way earlier in the day.
They started doing shots of tequila.
Lots of shots of tequila.
In The Ritz you were allowed to do whatever the hell (and whatever the F) you wanted to do, even if it brought you to hell. You might end up dead, injured, crippled, wounded, tied up, kidnapped, maimed, scarred, sick, ill, brain-dead, missing, or otherwise unaccounted for, but no one was going to stop you here. When you stepped in the door, all bets were off, and you had now entered underground Chicago, Land of the Gangsters, at its lowest, or its highest (depending on your perspective) levels.
The two of them retreated to a corner, commandeered a nasty little booth and started making out in the almost-dark, while still drinking and smoking.
After closing time (because even The Ritz had to close at some time) they made it back across the street (somehow) wrapped in one another’s arms.
She had accidentally, somehow, burned his hand with one of their cigarettes. Later tomorrow he would realize how badly and deeply the top of his hand was burned, but right now, he didn’t even notice, or feel, it.
Both of them were married (to other people). Neither of them lived with their spouses, nor had they for a long time.
She reminded him of his wife. But she was not his wife.
That fact, or those facts, made her dangerously attractive to him. She tasted like honeydew. Her flesh was manna.
They both fell down trying to make it upstairs to the bedroom. That is, while holding each other and trying to drag each other up the stairs to the bedroom, they both took a tumble, all tangled together, and somehow ended up at the bottom of the stairs, wrapped in each other’s arms, on the floor, instead of at the top of the stairs, in the bedroom.
They continued making out, there on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, before they both passed out, in each other’s arms, on the floor, at the bottom of the stairs, with the front door wide open, the summer air blowing in.
In the morning the hangover was so bad it was worse than hell. Much, much worse. Whatever hell is and however bad hell can be, this was worse! (It was so bad that this kind of thing would cause him to completely quit drinking forever in two years or so, which was almost impossible at first and also felt like freedom beyond belief – but that is another story.)
The hangover had a million different things about it that made it especially horrible, horrific, harrowing. After staggering around for a while with the splitting, near-blinding headache, he saw and reached for an almost-empty vodka bottle that was located on one of the tables in the house and took a swig to kill the pain. But it didn’t kill the pain (not yet). He retched. The cigarette which he then located and lit after finding a lighter under one of the couches made his heart pound like an old-fashioned steam engine about to permanently explode. He noticed that the top of his left hand had a deep red cigarette burn upon it (that would turn into a permanent scar weirdly almost in the shape of a heart, like a token of this story, and if it wasn’t a cigarette burn it was some other kind of burn, but he’d had cigarette burns before (a few self-administered in front of other people to impress them) and this looked like one) and that his fingers were all yellow from smoking. Three of his fingernails were bruised, and bleeding, a little; he had no idea why. His knee was killing him, probably from toppling down the stairs which he, vaguely, remembered. He located one of the three remaining Vicodin pills he’d gotten off a friend last week and gulped it down without water, then chugged a ton of water, straight out of the sink, while bending over it.
No one on Planet Earth knew how many cig’s he’d had yesterday but a good estimate was five packs of twenty (just like John Wayne). He was guessing that the number of drinks sat at around thirty – minimum. Actual solid food all day, and all night, long – zero. Cups of strong black coffee with cigarettes before she’d arrived – seven or eight. He saw a Chicago hit man loading a pistol with a blank look on his face then reaching out the other hand to take the wad of cash from Alfred. And he knew this was the truth.
One of the worst things about the hangover was that, when he woke up, she was already gone.
It was just one block away from my apartment, on the corner; but I suddenly felt like I’d traveled thousands of miles, or gone to a different level of something that was on a whole other level.
The utter humbleness of it all was what struck me most. Whoever did this took the time, with, obviously, very limited resources.
It was the early AM of a midsummer morning just outside Chicago at the time when the birds are going insane in the good way, having a party before settling down into the branches above us and hiding out for the rest of the day.
Then, suddenly, they were there, these simple signs that were honoring the dead.
And I saw that at the top of one of the lists of names, the name was Ophelia.
First it made me think of the Taylor Swift video (not just the song), “The Fate of Ophelia.”
Next it made me think of Good Will’s, and Hamlet’s, Ophelia (the lover of both for sure).
Then I noticed that, within the same list, there was (is) someone with the same first name as one of my daughters.
And THAT made me think of invisible connection/s that spread throughout the world (and what is called the universe).
And then I thought of how Ophelia is invisible to me.
“You know something is happening here/ But you don’t know what it is /
Do you, Mr. Jones?” – Bob Dylan
Last week, one of my adoring fans wrote a story about me, then sent it to me. He informed me, directly, that this story was not just inspired by me, it was (and is) about me. In other words, I am one of two main characters in the tale. My last name, in real life, is Barrigar, and my credentials are MFA, PhD, which I sometimes use, since I earned them.
This author changed my name, in his tale about me, to Bannister, MFA, PhD.
In the opening scene of this story, I am presented as a drug addict who bursts into a woman’s room, beats her into submission, and steals all her money so he can buy drugs. While I admit to having been forced into borrowing money from a few lovely, generous, and wealthy ladies in the deep past (mostly for food), the scene of physical violence that was (and is) portrayed in this story about me is so far from anything I would ever do in life (or have ever done in life) that its effect upon me, the reader of the tale that is directly about me, was (and remains) disturbing.
(I have never struck anyone in my entire life, even when struck first, although I have had to take a few people out in other ways, like tripping them or throwing them down onto the ground before swooping away like a ghost and disappearing around the corner. The message is, and has always been, Don’t tread on me.)
Next, in this story about me of which I speak, I am portrayed as if I were some sort of Ivy League, bicoastal elite because I spent over twenty years teaching (in various forms) in academia.
But I was a college dropout until I was twenty-five years old. I’ve lived in the Midwest (Michigan, Illinois, and Kansas) for 97% of my life. I attended humble state universities (the University of Illinois, Wichita State University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago). I took out an enormous (and even ungodly) amount of loans to finance my own education. I worked as a pizza delivery driver for a large portion of my twenty-somethings, and was mugged more than once while doing so. At one point I was teaching at three different colleges in the city of Chicago and spent four or more hours, four or five days a week, commuting, by car, train, and feet. And I only stayed in academia so long because I couldn’t find a job that would pay me for writing (even though I also do come from a family of teachers, so a lot of the work felt fairly natural in that sense; and on the other hand, I was often teaching so much to keep my head above water that I had no time for my own writing, postponing my development as a writer without any doubt whatsoever at all).
Finally, in the story about me, I am simplified, distorted, turned into an unrecognizable cartoon villain, and presented entirely as someone I am not, even though it’s obvious that the writer of this tale about me (which, again, he himself directly said is about me in no uncertain terms) has read a lot of my autobiographical writings to write something about me that almost, in just a few places, weirdly resembles who I almost am (but only almost, and only in a very few places).
The story about me is very poorly written and obviously tossed off in a fit of rage and pique after I verbally warred with this person online about the nasty things he was saying about my writing, and also about the writing and art of other people, on the independent literary site I am an editor for. And yes, when the vitriol and hard feelings become intense enough, it is a form of psychological warfare; and I will continue to defend my own work and the work of other artists we choose to publish on this blog until my dying day or until the site closes its doors. I consider it very much a part of the wider war against philistinism and closed-mindedness in this nation and world.
It is a weird thing to know that someone out there hates you so much that he or she is willing to sit there for hours writing a story about you that obviously shows some sort of weird obsession with you even though it also makes its disdain for you as clear as it could possibly be, and then sends it straight to you the next day, even after a cool-down period. (This sort of thing also happened to me a few times back in the old days, when I was a member of writing workshops, etc.)
None of us can understand any of the others of us in this world, not even when we think we do (or especially not when we think we do).
But sometimes, when the writer has done her or his work after long hours (and years, or decades) of patient toil and joyful, painful labor, that writer is able to start producing material that transcends the self, at least some of the time.
Almost no writers ever get to this point, and definitely almost all best-selling writers these days never get to this point. Just cast your eyes over all the best-seller lists these days, and see how all the material is: all the same, all the same, all the same (all the same, with only the names changed). Formulaic writing is not transcendent writing; and one could also say that it’s not even “writing” at all, in the sense I mean here.
After decades of toil, often-unrelenting pressure, danger, and more toil, you finally find your voice in prose. And then someone who doesn’t understand you, or your project, at all, casually happens by and pisses all over it; like a dog trying to mark a territory that was never meant for him at all.
END NOTE: Thank you to Bob Dylan for the song “Ballad of a Thin Man” which gives the epigraph to this (all-too-true) essay. There is nothing new under the sun.
In the title, “thin” means, among other things, of no real substance, insignificant, pointless; Dylan is brilliant at reinventing words (not using them in a sloppy, imprecise way).
END NOTE: The great poet Matthew Arnold first used the term “philistinism” in the nineteenth century, to describe a middle- or upper-class hatred of high culture, which is consequently a hatred of artists and art: due to the love of comfort, possessions, and money, to the exclusion of all else (hello, Mr. El Presidente and billions more).
When he was five years old, his mother got down on his level, as she often did. But this time, she told him something different, something he’d never heard before.
She told him he was going to spend the summer with his Grandmother.
And that she herself, his mother, would come to visit him a lot, with his father; but they also wouldn’t be seeing him for a while.
And she immediately informed him, before he panicked, that this was a good thing – NOT a bad thing, and certainly not a punishment of any kind.
She reassured him about how much both she and his father loved him (and he already knew that very well, since they had showered him with love and attention since day one).
Then she told him that he was going to stay with his grandmother for the summer because his grandmother had things to teach him that only she, his grandmother, could teach him.
He couldn’t wait to get going.
…
He wasn’t scared or nervous at all as his mother drove him north from their very modest Detroit suburb to the thumb area of Michigan, where his grandmother lived in a trailer park on the edge of a small town.
It was a town that was made up mostly of German American and French American people who almost all claimed Indian blood of some kind, usually Chippewa or Iroquois. All the small merchants of the town were former farmers who served all the many farmers who lived spread way out all around the town. It was, and is, some of the most fertile land not just in the USA, but in the world. The town was (and is) fifteen miles away from Lake Huron, one of the Great Lakes.
His grandmother was what can only be called a kind of German mystic, although no one called her that.
But they all came to her when they needed something.
Not when they needed money, because she didn’t have any of that.
But when they needed consolation, needed healing, needed advice, needed a friend, needed someone to listen to them without passing judgement, they came to her.
His mother dropped him off in front of his grandmother’s trailer with his little suitcase. She didn’t make sure he was safely inside or anything. She just picked him up, hugged him, kissed him, said goodbye, then gently put him down and shoved him toward the door of the trailer, where his grandmother was waiting inside.
And then she drove away.
…
At first he and his grandmother didn’t do anything special.
And he almost never got bored, because whenever he started getting too bored, he retreated, and entered a world that no one else around him could see. They thought he was in a trance, but he knew he was somewhere special.
It was a world of the imagination, filled with wild characters, wonderful animals, amazing adventures, the ability to literally fly wherever and whenever he wanted, and also to turn invisible and roam around, wherever and whenever he wanted to.
And they watched a lot of TV.
And she sometimes told him stories about the family, in her quiet voice, what it was like on the ship coming over from Germany, accidents or good things that had happened to people on the farm, wild and crazy things the farm animals had done, stories about weather and storms and harvests, stories about sickness and healing.
And sometimes she read to him, especially about Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh, and even more often than that, from the Bible, stories about Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark and the animals and the rainbow, Moses, David and Goliath, Joseph and the coat of many colors, Job and the Whirlwind, Jeremiah and the well, Jonah and the whale, Jesus and his mother, Mary, and the adventures of Paul while he was spreading the Gospel, like Johnny Appleseed in America, who she also told him all about, many times. There was only one picture on the walls of the trailer, and it was a picture of Jesus’ face. He wasn’t being crucified in the picture. In the picture, he was quietly smiling upward with mysterious eyes and a weird kind of halo light falling down behind his head onto his shoulders out of the clear blue sky.
And then one day they started planting things.
Some of the things were flowers, and other things were other, small, green plants.
And she showed him how to plant, how to dig in the soil, how to treat the plants tenderly, how to place them where they now belonged, how to put the dirt back on top, how to pack it all down snugly, but not too snugly, how to water the earth.
And they planted things all in and around the trailer park on the edge of the town.
Then one day when he was sitting on the couch looking at a Bible picture book with all the grown men with their long hair and beards, and the beautiful women in their flowing robes with their flowing, long, beautiful hair, he smelled something wonderful. It was a loaf of bread she was baking.
A little later she showed him the loaf of bread under a kitchen towel. His mouth watered and it looked wonderful.
She told him they needed to go take the bread to a man she wanted him to meet.
…
She drove slowly, cautiously, patiently, calmly, and fearlessly.
She had strong, gnarled hands, a simple bracelet on one wrist, and her long, graying, pretty hair was pulled back with a simple blue ribbon around it.
They drove for a long time.
They didn’t talk, and they were completely comfortable around one another not talking.
They both enjoyed just going, the wheels flying over the road, the farm fields all around them always with trees in the distance.
The man they were going to meet was called Old Joe.
That wasn’t his name, but it was what they called him.
Old Joe was a local legend.
He was such a local legend that stories about him had appeared in the local newspaper a few times, and even on the local TV news station one time.
He lived way out in the middle of nowhere, alone, in a shack, in the middle of a huge, vast field with trees and a river in the distance, and a few huge trees that loomed over and sheltered his shack with their leaf-filled arms.
Except he didn’t live alone.
As the boy’s grandmother pulled the car over to the side of the road by the field where the shack was way over there, she pointed, and he saw that there was a whole, huge pack of gigantic dogs lounging around on the ground around the shack.
She told him that there were at least twelve dogs.
And then he saw the goats.
The little goats were all leaping and jumping and playing and shivering with joy in the tall grass of the field. They were bumping into each other and munching and chomping on grass and little scrub trees in the field. A goat shot away from the rest of them and one of the dogs leapt up and shot after the goat and circled around it, bringing it back, and they looked like they were playing a game on the way back.
His grandmother and himself got out of the car, and started walking across the field toward the shack and the dogs and the goats on a little trail. They held hands as they went and his grandmother held the loaf of bread under her other arm, wrapped in the towel.
The dogs all came over in a pack wagging their huge tails and greeting them. The goats kept to themselves but seemed to start jumping around even more, almost like they were excited by the visitors.
But Old Joe was nowhere around.
They sat down in a couple of old, broken-down chairs that were sitting outside the shack and they waited for him in the warm sunlight as they petted the shaggy dogs and talked to the shaggy, friendly, wagging-tail dogs, and laughed and waved at the goats, some of whom started approaching them and looking at them with curious eyes before bounding away again.
And before very long they saw a man approaching them across the field from the direction of the river.
He walked slowly and steadily and when he was about half way toward where they were he raised his hand and waved at them one simple time.
When the man got to where they were, the boy was shocked, and almost terrified for a few seconds, but then just fascinated.
Old Joe wore a beat-up old black hat that came down very low almost covering his eyes. His eyes beneath the brim of the hat were the darkest, most intense eyes the boy had ever seen. The man’s nose was large and he had a gigantic mustache covering his mouth and a huge, dark, graying, tangled beard that came down to the middle of his chest. He wore a suit of old, black, tattered clothes that was dusty and filled with patches. He had old, battered boots on his feet.
And he never said a word, not even hello.
He just came over to the boy’s grandmother who handed him the loaf of bread. As Old Joe went over to take the bread into the shack, a bird swooped down out of one of the trees over the shack and landed on his shoulder. It rode his shoulder into the shack, and when Old Joe came back out of the shack, the bird flew back up into the tree again and landed in the leafy green branches.
Old Joe pulled over another old, broken-down chair from over behind the shack, and then he sat down right next to the boy. Old Joe leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and just sat there, very close to the boy, while his grandmother continued to pet the dogs and talk to them. Old Joe never said a word. Not one word.
Pretty soon the boy’s grandmother and Old Joe just looked at each other. They both had tiny, small smiles in and around their eyes. No one ever said a word.
Then the boy’s grandmother said it was time to get going. Old Joe just sat there, elbows on knees. The dogs surrounded him, like they were protecting him.
The boy and his grandmother held hands again as they walked back to the car on the little trail through the beautiful, glowing green field that was now popping with harmless grasshoppers hopping all around them.
As they drove away, she told him that Old Joe was her brother; his great-uncle.
…
There was one more thing from that summer that the boy would never forget.
He didn’t remember his grandfather, who’d died right before (right before) he was born.
She told him that his grandfather visited her almost every night (but not every night), just for a few moments.
She would know when he was about to appear because she could suddenly feel it; and then he would sit gently on the other side of her bed, the bed they had shared together, only for a few, dreamlike moments that only seemed half-real.
And he came to tell her that, though it was hard to believe, everything was (even when it wasn’t) okay: now, yesterday, tomorrow, forever, and always.
“I’m so tired because I’ve been driving for almost eleven hours straight in a row with hardly a break at all,” he told himself out loud while continuing to drive his small car down the abandoned-looking highway in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
All of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the “middle of nowhere.” There is really nowhere, he told himself, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that is not the middle of nowhere. And, after all, that is why you have traveled here, Sir (for some reason he called himself Sir inside his head although it was not a term he usually applied to himself; but she (who was now gone) had sometimes used to call him Sir; sometimes tenderly; sometimes satirically; and now that he was alone and far from her he was carrying on the tradition).
You are here, Sir, because it is the middle of nowhere. That and HEMINGWAY.
“Big Two-Hearted River” is one of the greatest American short stories ever written. It is set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In the story, Nick Adams, Hemingway’s alter ego, travels to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to get away from civilization because his body, mind, heart, and soul have been damaged by his service in WW1.
Hemingway himself got blown up over there. Over two hundred pieces of shrapnel in the legs at the age of eighteen while working as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. Anyone who thinks Hemingway loved war is wrong. Sometimes he thought it was necessary. That is a very different thing, and a very questionable belief. But Hemingway was not a war monger. He also worshiped the animals he killed in the way Native Americans did and some still do. He once wrote, of an animal, “It is not a sin to kill him if you love him.” Crazy Horse said the same thing. Such a statement has a different weight when it’s said with utter, deadly seriousness. Everyone who eats meat is a killer even if they don’t actually do the killing themselves. Too many animals have been killed and we are in the most massive age of extinction the world has ever known (except for the dinosaurs) and all of it should stop. Should stop, not will. But Hemingway was born when McKinley was president. It was a different era…
These are the kind of thoughts he kept having as he drove down the road, chain-smoking Marlboro Light cigarettes and chain-drinking black truck stop coffee. Later he would have a small stroke and develop stage one emphysema before he was sixty because of such habits as these (and the drinking in the bars (which were so loaded and thick with second-hand (and first-hand) smoke that it was like sitting in the middle of a cloud of beautiful poison for years), and the drugs, and the depression, which he called The Triple D’s) (and tonight alone in the cheap motel outside of Sault Ste. Marie, this shit would give him a panic attack; that and not having eaten any food (almost) in two days); but right now he was thirty-three years old and strokes and emphysema were the last thing on his mind; and he would never regret a single thing, which is, after all, what badass Nietzsche really meant by the thought-experiment concept of Eternal Return…
He took a drag of his cig’ and a healthy slug of the lukewarm coffee.
He had one hand on the steering wheel and the burning cigarette was in his other hand between his cigarette-stained fingers as he slumped there, exhausted and alert, behind the wheel.
The abandoned-looking road here was literally crowded with pine trees right up to the edge of the road, making a darkness, but sun fell down, between the trees, all over the road, making the road a bright yellow ribbon (follow the yellow brick road) of possibility for a few moments at least.
He drove with his knees and lit another cigarette with the smoking butt of the last one. Then he poured more black coffee from the thermos into the cup between his legs, and in doing so, he spilled a bunch of the coffee all over his crotch and felt the warm wetness all over his shorts (it was summertime) and all over his…
He laughed and called himself “Sir” again, almost hearing her voice out loud as he did so. She had also sometimes called him “Bear,” because his last name sounded like it had the word “bear” in it (even though it was spelled differently).
So he called himself Bear, there, alone, in the car, while driving, smoking, meditating, and drinking coffee, and just as he called himself “Bear” (like she had done), he looked up to see a bear standing in the middle of the road right in front of him. And it was a WHITE BEAR!
He slowed down fast then slammed on the brakes so he didn’t hit it because it wasn’t moving, at all.
It just stood there on all four gargantuan paws in the middle of the empty road (there had been no other cars for a very long time) staring at him.
And how the fuck was there a white bear in the middle of the road in the middle of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula!?
He knew that black bears lived here. Not only did they live here, many places in Michigan’s U.P. have more bears than people in them, by far.
He’d studied polar bears in books and documentaries, and at the zoo, and he’d seen wild grizzly bears from a Jeep in Alaska (the guide had said they weren’t too close). He knew enough about bears to know that this wasn’t, surely, a polar bear, a grizzly bear, or a panda bear who had escaped from a zoo (or something). He also knew that not all black bears are black; some are brown, or cinnamon-colored, etc. etc.
But this bear was utterly WHITE, as white as freshly fallen snow, as white as Snow White, as white as Moby Dick, as white as the whitest hair on the oldest person who ever lived (there was probably someone somewhere in the world who’d once lived to be 130), as white as heaven, as white as you can think of, or imagine. (He also knew that albino creatures have pink eyes and noses, and he could clearly see that this white bear’s eyes and nose were dark – very dark.)
And within that split instant of time that stretched itself out like a pink light beam shooting out to the edge of the universe (and then beyond) he knew that this might get him killed, mauled, sent to the hospital, whatever, as he opened the door of his stopped car and stepped out into the road not too far away from the white bear who was standing there in the middle of the road, looking at him.
And he and the bear stood there and stared at each other as the sun fell down into, and upon, the brightly yellowed road between them.
Then the bear stood up, massively, on its hind legs and sniffed the air in his direction.
Then it dropped back down onto all fours, and with its head lowered, it stared, and stared, and stared, at him.
They were about forty feet away from each other and black bears can run faster than horses.
And as they stared at each other, the man (the young man) felt the power of the bear SURGE through him – marking him for life.
And then the bear swung around and ran away into the trees.
In the good old days, this street had been rowdy, ragged, loud, edgy, marginal. For at least two miles in length, one bar and liquor store and cheap restaurant after another on both sides of the street had sat beside each other inviting in any intrepid soul with a few bucks in their pocket and the desire to get partially drunk or completely drunk. The music here had been raw, Chicago blues bands or punk duos or some combination of blues and punk or imitation-grunge or garage rock moved on over from the garage into the bar. It wasn’t always the greatest music (by far), but it was usually heartfelt and it had soul.
“The good old days” in this context meant the late 1980s, the 1990s, and shading into the very early 2000s. After that a shift started to occur that happened gradually, then suddenly.
Now this street was too clean. The restaurants were too expensive. The dive bars had been replaced by workout centers, hair salons, specialty shops, and boutique stores. The music was utterly perfect and utterly soulless. The people here now were the kind of people who walk at the same pace always, never speeding up and never slowing down. Lots of them were nice enough on the surface but as a group, as a race of humans, they were miserable to be around. And “race of humans” here meant people with enough money to hang around and enjoy this atmosphere. It didn’t matter what color you were any more. All that mattered was whether you had the money.
He didn’t hang out on this street any more, and he even avoided driving down it for the most part, except when he wanted to relive old memories by taking a journey back into the past where he could imagine it the way it used to be and remember. A few of the bars still had the same names, even though they weren’t the same kind of places any more, at all.
It was the Fourth of July weekend in the Year of Our Lord 2018. He was here to visit some old friends, and he’d come over here because he’d been becoming so isolated from “the world” lately that it was starting to scare him a little bit, sometimes, perhaps (or deeply). He hadn’t seen most of these people he was about to see in fifteen or twenty years.
And he couldn’t believe, which literally meant that he could not believe, just what it was he saw.
They all looked so old! Even though they were, most of them, no older than he was!
He quickly realized it wasn’t so much in the gray (or graying) hair, the wrinkles, the extra pounds. After all, he himself had all of those things as well. No, not at all, it wasn’t in the surface details where their age sat. It was more in their eyes, in their postures, in their attitudes. People who’d once seemed like lively carefree souls to him now seemed like closed-off, uptight, unimaginative bores.
And as he sat in the bar with them (there were about seven or eight of them) trying to be social at some level, he quickly realized that these folks, who now had become truly strangers to him, were all dominated and dwarfed by a quadruple threat, which was made up of: the large screen, the small screen, the dollar bill, and the beer mug.
There were five or so men and two or three women, and they were all doing the same things in sequences and orders, almost like metronomes: staring at the baseball game on the large screens that dominated all walls of the squeaky-clean establishment, scrolling on their phones, discussing the low stakes gambling they were all involved in, women too, and slowly, steadily consuming their alcohol.
He wasn’t drinking because he was an alcoholic who couldn’t drink. After a single sip of alcohol in any form, all bets would literally have been off. He would’ve followed that up with two or three more beers in quick succession, then gone straight to the hard liquor. He would’ve drank for days and days until he passed out and later woke up not knowing where he was and with the most frightening hangover that it literally would’ve made him consider putting a bullet in his brain just to end the pain, not because he really wanted to leave here. He’d quit drinking because of the suicidal tendencies it had started to create in him; and other reasons. His brain chemistry had been so warped by the constant alcohol at that point that he couldn’t even write any more. He hadn’t had a drink in seventeen years.
So he wasn’t drinking. And he realized now how drugged they all were. It wasn’t even difficult to be in their presence and not socialize with them, since they were all so obsessed with the double screens, the baseball betting, and the slow, steady consumption of their soul-killing alcohol that you could sit there in their midst and quite easily not even be noticed (almost).
He was just about to bail out, call it good, shake off the depression this had all caused, say, “See you in another twenty years!” (once he’d gotten away from them, that is) and go do something else when he saw HER.
He didn’t know who she was and he knew he’d never met her before because he would’ve remembered for sure.
She didn’t look old like the rest of them.
She had the same wrinkles and the same extra pounds (except quite a bit less so of both perhaps).
She was a blonde, what used to be called a bleach blonde. She looked, almost, like Marilyn M. if Marilyn M. had grown up to be fifty or so years old. She smiled like M.M.
She had a lively walk like M.M.
Her eyes were ALIVE like M.M.’s.
They sparkled with HUMOR like M.M.’s.
She looked around her like she knew what was going on but also didn’t care – like M.M. She had a rebel soul like M.M. (or so he imagined).
And she was lost and vulnerable like M.M., too (again, or so he was imagining).
And she walked right up to him, asked him what his name was, and sat down right next to him! And when he found out that her name was Marilee, his belief that there are no coincidences was reinforced again for the trillionth time (he was a trillionaire in his belief that there are no coincidences).
It turned out that she was the cousin of one of the beer-guzzling sports drones.
And he discovered rather quickly that it was difficult to strike up an interesting conversation with a stranger in this stultifying atmosphere: this clean, safe, comforting (to them), conforming atmosphere. (He realized that these were the kind of peeps who would’ve been hanging out in the Roman Colosseum back in the day.)
But she kept glancing at him from the corners of her long, lovely, long-lashed, sleepy-wide-awake, dark green eyes with blue eye shadow on.
She smelled like a beautiful dream and looked like a beauty queen.
He hadn’t “been with anyone” in years, both on purpose and not on purpose.
Just sitting next to her basically lifted him up into the clouds – in a very good way.
It made him not care at all about the lives of all these soulless bores. Let them rot in their own open coffins for all he cared. What did he care? He didn’t care!
There was still someone like this, like her, in the world!
He looked at her again.
She was already looking straight back at him.
…
But there were some things he needed to go take care of. He was, after all, the kind of person who frequently had “things he needed to go take care of.” Even the few people who knew him best didn’t know what those things were most of the time. They laughed at him a lot, and thought he was an enigma even more so. He frequently said to them, “I have some things I need to go take care of.”
“What things do you need to go take care of!?” they would shout at him.
But he didn’t like explaining himself.
He understood why Leonardo da Vinci wrote backwards so no one could read his writings; and why Vincent Van Gogh ended up spending most of his time alone in the fields, sometimes even sleeping there. (VVG was a much happier man than they portray him as in all the movies; although he definitely had his down days as well.)
And today, alas, he really did have some things he needed to go take care of.
The first thing was his sixteen-year-old twin daughters, who’d suddenly phoned him out of the blue with a minor emergency while he was sitting there next to his new Marilyn Monroe friend wondering how to strike up a conversation with her in this stultifying environment.
His kids’ friends’ baby was sick (both of the parents were eighteen) and nobody had any money and they needed him to give them a ride to Urgent Care.
He’d also decided that he couldn’t go through this totally “sober.” It turned out that she was drinking quite a bit faster and quite a bit more than the rest of the party, not to mention stepping outside to have a quick ciggie pretty frequently. She wasn’t drinking like a full-blown alkie (like him), at least so far, but definitely like an expert boozer. He would need some “medications” if he were going to pull this off right.
That fact meant that he needed to make a little trip to go see a friend he had.
He’d already heard them all saying that they would be here for a while, that they would maybe move to another bar, but they were definitely planning on staying on this street tonight for the duration, because it was a holiday weekend, because it was summer, and because some of them hadn’t seen each other in a while, etc.
He even asked her if she was planning on hanging out for a while.
He told her that he had a couple of things he needed to go take care of.
She stared at him with her bright, lively, intelligent, knowing, a-little-buzzed, green eyes and he could tell she was almost about to ask him what things he needed to go take care of. Next, he could also tell that she wouldn’t ask him, since they’d just met. A good sign!
He figured he could go take care of both the things he needed to take care of within ninety minutes or so and get right back here.
And he told her so.
She looked straight at him and said, “Never fear. I’ll be here when you get back, sir.”
…
He was not a person who always walked at the exact same pace, never slowing down, and never speeding up. Instead, he was a person who changed his pace all the time, sometimes walking super-slowly and stopping to smell every single figurative rose he happened upon, other times walking so fast he looked like he was in a joyful hurry to get somewhere even though he wasn’t going anywhere special, he was just going.
He walked super-fast to his small car, unlocked her, hopped in, called his friend with the “medications” to make sure he’d be there in about an hour, and took off to pick up his kids, their friends, and the baby.
Just as he was rounding his first corner off the street that he had hated before and was now planning on returning to soon (as soon as he finished the two crucial missions he was on) because maybe after all it wasn’t so bad if she was here, a woman who was doing something on her phone pulled her car out in front of a woman who was driving her car down the street like a maniac. The maniac driver slammed on the brakes, and leapt out of her car with her purse, as the woman who’d pulled out in front of her stuck her hand out the window and gave her antagonist the middle finger. The woman flipping the bird was unable to move her car forward because of the traffic, and the woman with the purse now pulled a pistol out of the purse, ran up to the other woman’s car window, and stuck the pistol in her face. The terrified driver turned her face away then ducked down into the car, and the woman with the pistol screamed, “Stay out of my way you stupid fucking Mexican bitch!” Then she hit the top of the car with her pistol butt and got back into her own vehicle, traffic started moving again and everybody drove away.
The incident would come back on him later in a nightmare, but right now he was in too much of a hurry to sit for long with the witnessing of this minor trauma. His two kids and their two friends and their baby were waiting for him. The parents of the baby were also sick and within three or four days both himself and his two kids would all come down with the same brutal, wicked, nasty, ten-or-eleven-day-long summertime cold, but for now he drove the kids to Urgent Care, made sure everything was OK as they signed in at the clinic, made sure a nurse looked at the baby before he left to make sure nothing was an emergency, handed the kids half the money he had in his pocket, and darted out the door back into his car.
As he was driving across town to go meet the man he planned on getting the “medications” from, he played the song “Soul” by Van Morrison over and over again, from Van’s great album Keep It Simple (Van’s thirty-third album released in 2008), and he (the main character of this story), quite literally, calmly wept behind his sunglasses as he was driving. He wept because the song was so beautiful and for no other reason. He played the song LOUD over and over before he switched to the title track and calmly wept along with that too, behind his dark glasses. It was a happy weeping, a cathartic weeping, a joyful weeping, a crying for beauty, and a tear-stained face because beauty still existed, very much so, in the world, in this world.
Himself and his brother called the man he was going to meet Alley Man behind his back because the alley was where the man hung out, and they called him the name he called himself to his face, even though they knew his real name was Mohammed.
As the main character of this story approached Alley Man who was standing there in the alley he instantly knew something was wrong because he, Alley Man, had lost about fifty pounds since the last time the main character had seen him, which hadn’t been that long ago.
The two of them stepped into Alley Man’s garage to make the transaction and then the main character of this very true tale asked Alley Man how he was doing.
Alley Man, who was about the same age as the main character, raised his shirt and showed the main character a huge, massive, red, bulging, sore-looking, worm-like-looking bright scar across the middle of his chest in the shape of a cross.
After a heart attack recently, Alley Man had had triple bypass surgery to save his life, and while they were in there, they discovered the malignant tumor on his lung, which they also removed while they were in there (taking half a lung with it), so that the surgery lasted all day and on into the evening.
Alley Man removed the lit cigarette from his mouth and said nothing could kill him, praise God.
They high-fived and fist-bumped each other and the main character told Alley Man to take care of himself.
As he was almost about to get back into his car, the main character ran into Alley Man’s brother-in-law, who was a man who was four and a half feet tall and had one eye.
This man’s wife was always hiding his shoes so he wouldn’t go roaming around the alleys all day and all night, but it never stopped him.
The man with one eye was wearing ragged pants, a ragged shirt, and nothing but ragged socks on his feet because his wife had hidden his shoes again. He came up to the main character, holding a beer can in one hand and an unlit cigarette stub in the other. He had another cig’ behind his ear.
He asked the main character if he had any spare change. The main character handed him a dollar. The man with one eye asked him did he have any more, brother. The main character shook his head no, gently, and told the man whose name he didn’t remember to take care of himself. The one-eyed man looked at him closely, looked at him some more, then wandered away in his ragged socks sipping from his beer can.
Alley Man had said they often found his brother-in-law sleeping in the alley. He was a street person with a place to lay his head if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to (except sometimes). God knows what had made him that way and maybe it was God himself; or herself; or itself.
In the car, the main character took about a third of the “medications” he’d purchased from Alley Man. As he sat there in a traffic jam listening to Van Morrison (the song “Behind the Ritual,” from Keep It Simple, over and over again) he felt the warm, mild, steady, liquid, consoling, BUZZING, humming, reassuring glow from the medicine seeping into his brain, his heart, and his whole system, changing everything for the better, at least for now.
He knew the “medications” would last for at least a few hours and he knew the afterglow from the “medications” would last for at least a few hours more beyond that and he knew he had more when that ran out. It was good enough for now, and now, he reminded himself, is what matters.
But the traffic jam was a bad one and it held him up for a long, long time. By the time he returned to the street that gives its generic name to the title of this story, all the beer-screen-sports-and-dollar drones were still in their usual positions, exactly as if they hadn’t moved one iota in all that time. But SHE (Marilee) was gone.
Instead of ninety minutes his little trip had taken him two and a half hours, probably even closer to three, because of weekend holiday traffic and because he’d pulled over at one point to sit and enjoy the buzz of the “medications” while meditating a little bit.
He asked some folks from the group if they knew where she’d gone and they told him she was still somewhere on this street probably – most likely somewhere in another bar. Then they quickly turned away, back to their screens and beer mugs, offering no more information.
He looked for her all up and down the street, peering into all the establishments, entering some, just glancing into others.
Just as he was about to give up and was thinking about going back to ask someone in the herd whether he could get her phone number perhaps (and he was stressing very much about that because of his intense social anxiety), he looked up and she was standing there on the formerly attractively ragged and now too-clean street corner staring at him.
She ran to him and almost collapsed into his arms.
By now, the sun was going down, and it threw a warm, beautiful, sunset glow over the whole summertime street. She smelled better than anything ever and her warm, soft, collapsing body (along with the “medications” he was on) literally transported him immediately unto another world – a better one.
She asked him if he had a car and they went to his car and she got into the back seat so he got into the back seat beside her, after rolling the windows down so they could feel the wonderful summer eve coming in.
She verbally unloaded on him then, as if they’d known each other since childhood.
She told him all about her accident last year when she’d shattered her ankle in a bicycle-riding accident, how long it had taken to heal, how she hadn’t been able to work during that time, etc. etc. etc.
She told him about her new life in Florida (his heart had sunk more than a little when she’d told him she lived in Orlando, 1,200 miles away from where they were right now in Chicago, but he filed that info away to deal with later and kept on listening) and how hard it had been, how things had not exactly gone as planned down there so far, and that was an understatement, etc. etc. etc.
She told him about her son, who was in his twenties and was addicted to opioids (no comment).
Her son lived in an apartment above a bar on “the street” and that was where she was staying while she was in town.
Then they started making out, out of the blue, there in the back seat of the car with the windows open.
They held hands, and kissed, and hugged (nothing else) in the back seat of the car as if they were teenagers. It was dreamy, beautiful, wonderful, warm, close, intimate, intimidating, great, awesome, amazing, totally unbelievably personal and proof that life was still okay despite the fact that this society itself had landed in the toilet a long time ago and would soon be flushing itself away into who knew what, for sure.
She said she had to go now and asked if he’d walk her over to her son’s apartment and asked if he’d meet for lunch tomorrow at one PM at a restaurant on the street. Yes! to both.
As he was walking alone back to his car after dropping her off, a guy from the sports-drone crowd called his name and hustled over to him on the sidewalk. He asked the main character to hold out his hand and when the main character did so to humor the man, the man placed a wad of cash in his palm. And he told the main character, grinning, that it was three hundred dollars. Someone had placed a bet in his name, and they were all honest after all, so congratulations!
He thanked the fellow heartily (the main character was on a very un-fixed income for a wide variety of reasons that shan’t be gone into now), drove over to where his kids lived with their mother, and gave them the money.
The next day, she didn’t show up at the restaurant for lunch.
He waited at the restaurant, and in the vicinity of the restaurant on the street, for at least three hours (and probably more). While waiting, he texted her exactly three times (they’d exchanged phone numbers the night before).
SILENCIO.
He texted her (very briefly) exactly once a day for the next three days in a row, then quit.
A week or so later, he couldn’t help himself, and he looked her up on the internet, just to make sure she wasn’t dead.
She’d very recently (within the last twenty-four hours) posted a picture of herself sitting on Daytona Beach snuggling arm-in-arm with another guy. They were both in their bathing suits and they both had huge, frozen smiles on their faces (almost like grimaces) and were showing plenty of perfectly whitened teeth for the camera.
He popped a few more pills (cold medications and Alley Man refills) and put on the Van Morrison song “And the Healing Has Begun” from the album Into the Music (1979); and turned it up LOUD:
She was “just a friend” but she was a very good friend and he’d made this commitment to help so he wasn’t going to back out of it now, even though if he’d been able to find a way he would’ve backed out of it now if at all possible.
But she had to be out of her old apartment by tomorrow morning latest and right now it was already nine or so PM of a mid-summer’s eve in the Year of Our Lord 2000 in the city of Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Her boyfriend was in Thailand for three months and the main character of this story was also taking care of the boyfriend’s apartment for the summer.
The main thing that duty entailed was being the caretaker for a seven and a half foot long, yellow python named Snake Eyes.
Yes, the snake was literally seven and a half feet long. He lived in a huge plywood cage the front of which was covered with chicken wire so you could sit there and look in at the snake and the snake could look out, which is what the main character and the snake were both doing right now.
The main character had initially planned on staying at his friend’s (her boyfriend’s) apartment for the summer while taking care of the snake, until he realized how small the apartment was and how large the snake was.
The apartment was a dumpy run-down studio on the third floor in an especially ragged corner of the Wicker Park neighborhood (before Wicker Park was gentrified) and so, when one slept here on the futon, one was actually sleeping in the exact same room as a seven and a half foot long and yellow constrictor snake whose cage was locked but whom the hero of the story kept dreaming about as he slept on the futon in the tiny rundown studio apartment.
For example, he dreamed that the snake grew hands which were tiny enough to reach through the chicken wire and unlock the cage. Next, the seven and a half foot long and yellow snake opened the cage without a single sound and quietly slithered over to where the main character was peacefully sleeping on the futon. Next, the giant constrictor pounced on the main character’s chest just to wake him up to see the terror in his eyes right before he pressed the main character down and wrapped all of his impossible-to-resist, supernatural power around the main character’s throat and began to squeeze…
Such dreams had haunted the main character every single time he’d tried to sleep in this dumpy apartment with Snake Eyes in the same room.
So he’d had to patch together other sleeping arrangements for the summer, which ended up being a combination of staying part-time with his aging parents, part-time with his brother, part-time with his estranged wife (but not so estranged that she wouldn’t let him stay at her place some of the time), and part-time with his friend who is the other main character (other than Snake Eyes) of this story, who he was supposed to be helping move right now.
She was over there in the Pilsen neighborhood (before it got gentrified) waiting for him right now.
There wouldn’t be much furniture but there would be a lot of boxes and the main character had a very small car.
He felt sorry, very, very sorry, for Snake Eyes who had to stay in his cage for three months.
When Snake Eyes’ owner was in town, he took the snake out of the cage every day or two at the very least and he even wrapped the snake around his shoulders and body and went wandering around the scruffy neighborhood with Snake Eyes, letting neighborhood kids come up and visit the snake and letting the snake get fresh air and see the world a little bit.
The main character wasn’t sure if snakes liked to be visited or not but he was pretty sure the snake must’ve at least appreciated being taken out of the cage and taken for a ride around the neighborhood on the shoulders of his owner.
But this was Chicago so in the wintertime the owner of Snake Eyes just let Snake Eyes out to explore the tiny apartment every day or two.
The owner of Snake Eyes fed Snake Eyes live mice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (which didn’t happen every day) as well as frozen chicken legs.
The main character of this story was too sensitive to the plight of the mouse to feed Snake Eyes live mice, but he knew the snake enjoyed toying with the mouse before he ate it so he did feel sorry that all the snake was getting for three months were frozen chicken legs.
…
The phone rang again and he got up from where he was sitting on the floor in front of the snake’s cage, looking at the snake, feeling sorry for it and drinking another beer. Just as the main character wasn’t sure whether the snake actually enjoyed being visited by neighborhood kids, so he wasn’t sure whether the snake actually enjoyed it when he sat there communing with the snake, looking into its eyes and talking to it a little bit, saying things like, “I’m sure you’d rather be in the jungle than here but we are all stronger at the broken places if we only know it.” It was a lame attempt to console the snake even though he didn’t know how much the snake actually cared, but the snake’s owner had told him he could take the snake out of the cage if he wanted to and didn’t have to if he did not want to. He’d said the cage was large enough for the snake to be okay for three months as long as he was fed properly. “Just make sure he gets fed properly and he’ll be okay until I get back – but feel free to take him out whenever you want to.” He smiled.
The main character walked over to where the phone was still ringing, and he set his beer down next to the window, lit a cigarette, and picked up the phone.
It was another friend of his who lived in Florida. They’d almost gotten married at one point except that he already was (even though he didn’t live with his wife full time), but now she was down in Florida with another guy so why is she calling me? But there wasn’t a reason, except that her boyfriend was out right now and she missed him, i.e. the main character of this story. He sat down to have a brief conversation with her before heading out the door to go help his other friend move all of her precious stuff to the new apartment.
But the conversation turned out to be a longer one than he had initially planned on. Talking on the phone with anyone, anyone at all, made him nervous, so he began to drink and smoke even faster than he already had been. She was going on and on now about how she missed him and couldn’t stand her Florida boyfriend and at some point, without his even realizing it was doing so, the conversation took a fresh turn. It took a fresh turn into a new territory that can only be described as a kind of phone sex where, again, she did almost all the talking and he played along in other ways. This part of the phone conversation was not something he’d planned on, even more so than the conversation itself, and by the time it was all over he looked up with a startled surprise to see that at least another hour, and maybe more, had passed by.
As soon as the conversation was over he hung up the phone then picked it up again and dialed the number of his other friend, the one who was waiting for him to help her move her stuff because she had to be out of her old apartment tonight and her boyfriend was in Thailand. The main character thought to himself: if he were here there would be three of us moving her crap instead of just two but that a’hole has a way of leaving me holding the bag, doesn’t he. He glanced at Snake Eyes, who right at that moment struck the chicken wire of the cage with his yellow-and-white, hard-as-a-rock head with such force that the chicken wire bulged out a little. It was a habit he had. This snake could be as scary as a great white shark almost. The difference was that he wasn’t always that scary.
She was not happy about having to sit around waiting while she was so stressed about getting all her stuff out of her old apartment. The landlord had made threats earlier in the week and she didn’t have a car so there was nothing she could do on her own, since the new apartment was three miles down the road from the old one and all the boxes were heavy. It took him about ten minutes on the phone to get her calmed down but she finally did calm down.
He finished his beer, grabbed a fresh pack of cig’s from the carton, reached into the freezer for the flask of vodka, popped it into his back pocket, made sure he had his wallet and keys, said goodbye to Snake Eyes (“I’ll be back to see you later”), locked the locks on the door, and ran down the three flights of stairs, so fast that he almost felt like he was flying.
Then he burst out into one of the most beautiful mid-summer eves he’d ever been in, or that was what it felt like. He was a moody individual and often, very often, the moods were made up almost entirely of profound JOY for a reason, or reasons, that he himself didn’t even understand.
He walked so fast to his car that it was much faster than some people can run. She (the car) started up right away without any problems and as he turned the radio on he heard to his utter JOY that the radio station the radio was already on was playing “Let It Bleed” by the Rolling Stones, Chicago’s favorite band.
He turned the volume up LOUD and headed across town.
…
His joy, which had already cooled off a little as he approached her place, cooled off even more when he saw her sitting there in the summer’s late evening on the steps of her ex-apartment building smoking a cigarette, because he could already tell from here how upset she was. As he approached her on foot on the sidewalk she looked over at him and he gave her a big smile trying to somehow wordlessly apologize for his after-all-not-that-unusual lateness, and she turned her head away from him toward the other direction down the sidewalk and took a hard drag of her cigarette. As it turned out, she was in a foul mood because, while she was waiting for him, she’d gone to the drugstore for a pack of cigarettes. As she waited in line to buy the cig’s, a huge, naked man had entered the store dripping with sweat and holding a pistol in his hand. Without further ado, the man had jumped up onto the counter next to the cash register wearing nothing but tennis shoes, waved the pistol around at the half dozen people there in the front of the store and informed them all that they were about to die now. As it turned out, when another man in the store came around the corner of the aisle and yelled at the man to shut the hell up, get down off the counter and put the pistol down, the man did exactly as he was told to. The main character of this story’s friend had heard the man telling them all that he was sorry, he was just high and had lost his head for a moment, as she hightailed it out of the store without a new pack of cigarettes.
The main character of this story couldn’t believe, and by that I mean that he literally could not believe, how many boxes she had all packed up and ranged up and down the stairs behind her when she unlocked the triple locks of her soon-to-be-ex-apartment and showed him.
It was only the main character’s desire to get to the bar before the sun came up that made the work go so fast. They knew of several bars both in the city and outside it which stayed open 24-7 but he’d recently realized that when he stayed up all night drinking and swapping yarns on into the morning hour, as the sun rose his spirits sank so very low that nearly suicidal depressions were starting to descend upon him at that time, a thing that had never happened before until recently, when he was in his early thirties. As a younger man, he’d stayed up well past the dawn on many and many an occasion with no ill effects, but such was the case no longer. Last year, a good friend had put a loaded pistol to his head when the cocaine ran out at sunrise and pulled the trigger in another town. Somehow he didn’t die, but he would never walk or talk again most likely. When the main character visited him, his friend had scrawled on a piece of paper that he didn’t mind, at all, not talking or being a member of the rat race any more; and the main character had (almost) understood that very well.
So the work of moving a million boxes off the stairs and three miles across town in his small car went off rather quickly in the scheme of things because of his desire to get to the bar before that lucky ol’ sun started rising. Using all of the car’s trunk and back seat and moving fast like a maniac in between swigs of vodka is what did the trick. They were only pulled over by the cops once and the main character was able to instantly sober up and talk his way out of it just as he’d been able to do every single time he’d ever been pulled over while intoxicated, sometimes he himself didn’t even know why or how. As he placed the last box on the top of the last pile of boxes in her brand-new one-room studio apartment, she stepped over and gave him a huge kiss on the cheek. Wow and whoa, that had never happened before.
They made it to the bar by perhaps two in the morning which, for this bar, was not really all that late at all. The bar was filled with men dressed as women and women dressed as men and other so-called “hipster”-like figures who all looked around themselves out of their cool eyes as if they were snakes trapped in a cage that they loved. The main character and his great, beautiful friend found themselves a spot at the bar and ordered tequila. At some point he noticed that she now was wearing a bright red, silky scarf drawn tightly around her beautiful throat. He realized then, again, for the millionth time just how beautiful she was, with her long, thick, flowing, black-as-night hair and her gigantic, long-lashed, oval-shaped dark eyes that sometimes seemed to see everything and the very, very, very short polka-dotted skirt she was wearing. To this day he doesn’t know how it happened but suddenly he realized that she and he were holding hands underneath the bar, and then on top of the bar. Her boyfriend, who was in Thailand for the summer, had several friends who were in this bar right now.
Somehow, without either of them knowing quite how exactly, they very soon found themselves back in her new apartment rolling around on the floor amongst the boxes, pressing each other, devouring each other’s mouths with kisses, hugging, holding, feeling, touching in all the privates places you can possibly imagine – almost. It wasn’t full-on sex exactly but it was enough to qualify as “cheating” almost certainly, at least in the minds of some people, like the guy in Thailand who was, after all anyway, probably returning the favor over there in Thailand right now.
She fell asleep right in the middle of another kiss and that was when the main character looked up at the windows to see the gray light of dawn starting to peek in.
He hurried away, and as he stepped out into the street that just kept on growing lighter he realized that there was something he still needed to do, that if he didn’t do this thing, he would somehow not be fulfilling his duty to the Universe.
So now he was back in the other apartment, sitting on the floor with a fresh beer beside him, staring at Snake Eyes right in the eyes as the seven and a half foot long yellow python stared straight back at him.
The main character undid the lock of the cage and raised the chicken wire.
He gently leaned the whole top half of his body into the dark cage toward the snake who just turned his head away.
He had held the snake once before when his friend was in town, but right now he simply could not believe how heavy Snake Eyes was as he pulled the snake from the cage and somehow, with the snake’s help, got it up and wrapped it around his shoulders – and around his neck.
He felt the snake’s massive body tighten a little around his neck.
But only a little.
And he took the snake for a long, long walk around the block and out into the park and back so he could breathe the fresh air and feel the warmth of the morning summer sun in all its beauty.
As he did so, he was absolutely positive that Snake Eyes was enjoying himself.
They made it back to the apartment and the main character of this story passed out drunk on his friend’s futon with Snake Eyes curled up right next to him, believe it or not.
And he had a dream.
In the dream, he dreamed that Snake Eyes and he were in the Garden of Eden rolling dice with the Devil, and they had rolled double sixes, and they had won the pot. The Devil disappeared – that is, he vanished in front of their eyes – permanently.
No more failure, no more humiliation, no more confusion, no more self-hatred, no more temptation, no more being put down – no more coming out on the losing end. In a town full of losers, they were pulling out of there to win.
“I’ve been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down.” – Bob Dylan
They were sitting on the steps of William Faulkner’s grand old mansion, just the two of them. No one else was around.
William Faulkner himself definitely wasn’t around, at least not in the flesh, since he’d passed out of this mortal coil about twenty-eight years earlier. The mansion, Rowan Oak, was now owned and operated by the University of Mississippi, not too far away.
If you don’t know who William Faulkner is, it’s okay. For the purposes of this story, all one needs to know is that he lived in and wrote about the U.S. South across the first half of the twentieth century and beyond, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949/’50 for doing so, AND HE RICHLY DESERVED that prize and any other prizes you can think of.
Local wags who knew Faulkner in Faulkner’s own day had dubbed him Count No ’Count. It meant Count No-Account and it was intended as a slur against Faulkner because he generally ignored everyone else in the town both before, and after, he became “famous.”
There were some people in the town that he liked.
But he was a sensitive soul (you would have to be in order to produce all the great writing which he produced, up to and including getting yourself awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature four years before Hemingway himself did, which really pissed off Hemmie even though he rarely admitted it, although he did admit it sometimes, especially when he was in his cups).
Faulkner was a sensitive soul, and he had discovered that most people, one way or another, insulted his writing, even when they were trying to compliment it.
And that is a hard fate to bear. Even for the guy who wrote “The Bear,” one of the greatest novellas in English of all time.
In France right now, William Faulkner is as popular as France’s own Marcel Proust and as Edgar Allan Poe is. Even in the South, on his own home turf, Faulkner’s fame cannot come anywhere near to touching what he has achieved in a separate nation far across the seas.
Although I’ve never been there in person and never will be there in person, most likely, I still say (because of Faulkner, and Poe) long live France! (Sometimes I feel like I must’ve lived there in a former life, and now I’m just an exile; both of my grandfathers were French Canadians recently transplanted to the USA.)
…
The main character in this story was twenty-two years old at the time this story takes place; and the other main character was twenty-three.
It, or they, were a he and a she, or a her and a him, and though they both thought they were completely “grown up” at the time (of course), neither one of them had any idea how young they still were.
The year was 1990. No one on the Planet, and by that I mean no one on the Planet at all, had any idea how much the world was about to change in the next few decades.
But only young people of any era would’ve ever done what these two did next.
They went around to the back side of Faulkner’s house, broke in through a window, and climbed into the old mansion that still had most of the original furnishings in it from decades and decades ago when Faulkner and his family had lived here together.
The act of breaking into a decaying plantation mansion that had once been an utter ruin which Faulkner purchased for five hundred bucks in the 1920s and then refurbished, over decades, all by himself, did something to the young man and the young woman who are this story’s heroes.
Before they knew what was what they were rolling around all over the floor in Faulkner’s former dining room and then they rolled under the dining room table together, there on the thick carpet, luxuriously glued to one another, making out.
Back then they still loved “making out,” which meant kissing, hugging, holding, and exploring each other for hours on end without even going “all the way” sometimes.
When they burst forth from Faulkner’s house again a few hours later, both of them were so full of health and life and youth and happiness that they literally were glowing (people had told them more than once in the bars that they literally had a visible aura) with strength, joy, confidence, fearlessness, and a full-on open-hearted appetite for whatever the world had in store for them.
…
Which is not to say that they were always perfectly happy with one another, at all.
For instance, she had been far from perfectly happy with him a few days ago when he almost drove the car straight off a dock into the ocean and killed both of them. Accidentally.
They had driven all the way down to Mississippi from Chicago because they wanted to see William Faulkner’s famous haunted mansion. But once they got to Oxford, Mississippi, they realized that the ocean itself was only a few hundred more miles away, after all.
So without discussing it for more than five minutes, they made the impulsive decision to skip over Faulkner’s famous haunted mansion for now, drive down to the ocean and check it out, then swing around and head back to the mansion tomorrow or whenever.
In 1990, everything they needed for this road trip was inexpensive and affordable, including gasoline for the small, fuel-efficient car they were driving, diner food, cheap motels, cigarettes, music tapes purchased at truck stops for the cassette player and, of course, alcohol.
But he’d been driving too much at this point. She had helped out with the driving periodically, but he did ninety percent of it. And he had been driving for so many hours now without a real break, that he suddenly realized he couldn’t even figure out how many hours it had been. She was sleeping in the passenger seat. He rubbed his bleary eyes and lit another cigarette and continued to drive. He took a swig of the cold, stale coffee he had at his side and stubbed the cig’ out in the ashtray, accidentally burning his index finger. As he was doing so, he looked up to notice that THE OCEAN WAS RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF THEM AND THEY WERE ABOUT TO DRIVE OFF AN INDUSTRIAL DOCK STRAIGHT INTO IT, meaning the dark, pounding waves of the ocean. He had been circling around trying to find a better road and he’d known they were in the ocean’s vicinity because he could smell it but there were no towns around and it was blackest-night cloud-dark and he was a Northerner who’d never even been to Mississippi or any other Deep South state except Georgia and Florida for that matter.
He SLAMMED on the brakes and the car stopped with its nose right over a thirty-foot drop straight down into the black ocean water, the salt waves nailing the sides of the drop and spraying up over the hood of the car.
She was jerked forward and stopped by both the seatbelt but first his arm which flung out rightward to protect her. Yes: his arm was faster than the seatbelt.
After she almost murdered him about seventy different ways, she finally snuggled into his shoulder and let him continue driving on into the night in the other direction.
…
On the way back north to Faulkner’s haunted mansion the next day, they took another detour and went through the Delta so they could see the place where Muddy Waters and all the other Delta blues greats like Mississippi John Hurt and hundreds or thousands of others are from. And they saw that the Delta now looks much like the Delta did then, and that every time two roads cross one really does think of Robert Johnson who made a deal with the devil at the crossroads so he could play so good. Homeric Mississippi is, by far, the poorest state in the Union and it is also, far and away, the place (if you had to choose one place) which has produced American music itself. Not only Muddy Waters but also Elvis Presley are from Mississippi. Without Muddy and Elvis, no rock and roll as we know it, without rock and roll as we know it no Beatles, without the Beatles no ’60s, without the ’60s no world as we know it now. Mississippi is the underdog, the lowliest one, the slave state of slave states, the most insulted and injured of all the states, the one place that looks more like Africa than any other state, too. And from here has come the one and only art form America ever truly invented other than the cinema and the short story (Poe again), rock and roll, of which rap and hip hop are only developments, extensions. As so often in life, it turns out the lowliest one is in many ways the greatest one of all, by far.
They rolled out of the Delta and back into Oxford, Mississippi, just as the sun was going down. Their mission now was to locate another cheap motel but first they spent a few hours that turned into a few more hours drinking, smoking, and telling tales to each other and others in the bars with the jukebox always being fed.
All the cheap motels seemed to have NO VACANCY signs a-glowing as they went out looking for a place to bed down for the night. It was past midnight by now, and she was worried he’d do something stupid like almost drive off the edge of the world into the abyss of night and chaos again. As they drove out toward the edge of town, both of them noticed a large, bright, white hotel lit up like something out of The Great Gatsby and with the bright-red VACANCY sign on.
They both walked into the lobby and literally were blown back in their tracks, stunned and terrified, when they saw what it was they saw, standing there in the lobby.
The four things they saw standing there in the lobby at first seemed like four creatures straight out of the Book of Revelation come to life out of nowhere. They almost looked like they could move, and like they were about to move, to pounce, that is.
It was four African lions, two males and two females, stuffed and kept in huge, massive, glinting glass cases.
The lions’ unexpected presence here made them so uncanny that both the main characters in this story suddenly felt like they’d entered Neverland and Wonderland simultaneously with their spirits jerked around into the sixth dimension.
Their paws were beyond massive. Their legs were so powerful it chilled your soul. Their bodies were so lean, huge and muscular that it was unbelievable. Their incredibly long tails stuck straight out behind them. The manes of the men were more impressive than anything humans have ever built and the faces of the ladies were so serious and serene that it was like being doused in holy water thrown in your face and eyes just looking at them.
The young man and the young woman who are the main characters of this story were crushed by the utter horror of the tragedy of these four lions killed and stuffed and stuck in glittering cases in the lobby of this Mississippi-Gatsby hotel. At the same time, the beauty of these creatures, even in death, even in this condition, was so profound that it was like entering a green primeval forest filled with sunlight to be in their presence, maybe even the Garden of Eden. And then they realized that the lions were in heaven. And then they knew that the four lions were angels.
The boy and girl, because they both had been transformed back into their even more youthful selves right now, both went around and around and around the four lions, again and again and again: studying the lions, talking to the lions, being terrified of the lions, being in awe of the lions, consoling the lions, asking forgiveness of the lions, reaching out as if to pet the lions, laughing with them, thanking them, praising them, then standing there silently holding hands and staring at the four lions. The sleepy desk clerk had disappeared somewhere when he realized these two were in their own little world and he didn’t care.
But then the desk clerk re-emerged and the two of them grew up again and were twenty-two and twenty-three again as they got a room, floated up three flights of stairs, floated down the hallway, found their white room, unlocked the white door, floated into the white room, and peacefully attacked each other. She fell down onto the gigantic bed with all the pillows behind her head while stripping off her shirt and he fell down gently into her arms after peeling off his own shirt and the waves came and the private magic started all over again, a private magic that cannot be described and will not be described and could never be described and shall never, ever be described and that would result in the birth of healthy, glowing twins when she was thirty-nine years old sixteen years later at which time the private magic, that kind of magic anyway, disappeared from the earth forever, gradually and then suddenly.
Let me repeat that: it disappeared from the earth (from their world) forever. Amor fati, Nietzsche’s great concept, means (in English) love of fate and one real thing it means is that we must love it when good things go away from us as much as we loved it when good things arrived, whether we like it or not. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, and to die is different from what anyone supposed, said Walt Whitman. And luckier.
There are very many kinds of death in this world and one of those kinds is the death of your former self, and former selves, uncountable; but the ghosts of the past still live on in Mississippi.
Saragun Springs 