#743 Jack/July- Victor Lodato

#743 Jack/July- Victor Lodato

You cannot always tell what a story is about from the first sentence, or what kind of characters you might encounter. But a good first sentence can set a tone and announce to the reader that the author enjoys a certain type of language. It’s a language shared between the writer and the avid reader, one that says literature is more than merely telling a story. Like good food, language can be savored. That’s the thought I’m left with after reading the first sentence of this story. I love a good opening sentence.

“The sun was a wolf. The fanged light had been trailing him for hours, tricky with clouds. As it emerged again from sheepskin, Jack looked down at the pavement, cursed.”

The story is less glorious than the language, being about a meth-head, but no less entertaining. Jack is deep into a binge, up for days. His mind cannot imagine structures of time and fact. As emotions flow through him he is reminded of good things, and he can't remember if they are real or imagined; whether they occurred yesterday or last year. To himself he is merely going through life looking for joy. To others he is a menace and a nuisance. There are many stories about drugs and their misuse, this was a good one with a few poignant quotes about drug use:

-Soon he knew the freak would come, the soul suck, if he didn’t get one of two things: more crystal or a sound sleep.

-Running out of crystal was like running out of time, sinking back into the mud that was your life.

Notable Passage: “It was so easy to forgive those who betrayed you, effortless—like thinking of winter in the middle of July. It cost you nothing.”

Rating: 9-7-8-8 Total= 32

#734 What’s in Alaska- Raymond Carver

#734 What’s in Alaska- Raymond Carver

This is a story about diversion. A couple going through life, a little bored and worn out. A man comes home from work, buys shoes and comes home to his wife who sneers at the shoes and gives him a drink. Maybe it’s the shoes and the beer, but at this point of the story I had Sinatra’s Love and Marriage running through my head (as the theme song from Married with Children, of course).

They go visit another couple down the street that just bought a hookah water pipe. The rest of the story is a whole stoner scene, full of laughs, munchies, misinterpreted conversations, fun with pets. Everyone is hyper-sensitive and yet extremely unaware. Funny, although not up to par with great stoner stories. Stylistically It is dialogue heavy. If there is any subtext beyond adults needing a diversion from their humdrum lives, I missed it and don’t feel the need to go back and find one. We never find out exactly what’s in Alaska.

Rating: 7-6-6-5 Total= 24

#556 Work Denis Johnson

#556 Work Denis Johnson

  

OK, let’s see: we have an abusive drug addict beating up his abusing drug addict girlfriend; we have an alcoholic so riddled with the DTs that he needs help lifting the day’s first shot up to his mouth; we have robbery, fights, and crooked card games…must be another Denis Johnson short story.

This is a world filled with misery, regret, shame, and little chance of redemption, unless your definition of redemption is a few ill-gotten dollars so you can partake in more bad decisions that lead to misery, regret and shame.

This story isn’t as fun as it sounds.

Notable Passage: “To me you don’t make no more noise than a fart in a paper bag.”

Rating: 7-6-5-5- Total= 23

#436 The Freeze Dried Groom- Margaret Atwood

#436 The Freeze Dried Groom- Margaret Atwood

We’ve seen a lot of short stories the past 435 days or so that involve a cold, loveless marriage. They generally aren’t my favorite stories. This one however, is better than most. Atwood adds a little noir to the mix.

Sam eats breakfast while Gwyneth tells him that their marriage is over. Without much discussion he packs and leaves. He is after all used to transience, having a career in shady dealings:

“He’s relied on them all his life, those big blue eyes of his. Round, candid eyes. Con-man’s eyes.”

“If anyone could fix him, she could…But she’s failed.”

Sam runs an antique shop, one that has at least two secrets. His partner is an expert at faking antiques, artfully distressing newer cheaper furniture to look older and more valuable. His second secret is drugs. A different silent partner drops drugs in a piece of furniture stowed in a storage unit up for auction. He bids on the unit, and “sells” the furniture to a knowing third party. He’s merely a go-between.

On one of his auctions he finds something very strange in the unit, and finds someone very interesting wanting to buy it from him.

Rating: 8-8-8-7 Total= 31

#332 Loser- Chuck Palahniuk

#332 Loser- Chuck Palahniuk

It’s Zeta Delta pledge week and as is tradition, the fraternity brothers all get dressed in ZD t-shirts, goes to a taping of the Price is Right and—of course—eats tabs of Hello Kitty blotter acid.

One of them gets selected as a contestant and wins his way on stage. Just when the acid kicks in, he has to try and make sense of what exactly is going on:

“They make you spin this doohickey so it rolls around. You have to match a bunch of different pictures so they go together perfect. Like you’re some white rat in Principles of Behavioral Psychology 201, they make you guess which can of baked beans costs more than another. All that fuss to win something you sit on to mow your lawn.”

Anyone who has ever seen an episode of Price is Right—and like this kid, most people of my generation know it from days we are home sick from school—knows that too many details of the game are off. That’s ok though, lets just say this is a satire on all televised TV game shows. In any case, this college kid, nearly spinning off the planet on acid, makes it all the way to the Showcase Showdown (trademarked I’m sure).

“It’s just you and the old granny wearing the sweatshirt from before just somebody’s regular grandma, but she’s lived through world wars and nuclear bombs, probably saw all the Kennedys get shot and Abraham Lincoln, and now she’s bobbing up and down on her tennis shoe toes, clapping her granny hands and crowded by supermodels and flashing lights while the big voice makes her the promise of a sport-utility vehicle, a wide-screen television, a floor length fur coat.”

“And probably it’s the acid, but it’s like nothing seems to add up.” Nope, sure as shootin’ it don’t.

Rating: 8-9-9-8 Total= 34

#266 The Migratory Patters of Dancers- Katherine Sparrow

#266 The Migratory Patters of Dancers- Katherine Sparrow

Five men are about to embark on an adventure, a cross country migration. Like birds, the season calls to them: “When the change comes there’s nothing for it but to start moving. That’s what birds always did, and with how they modified us, we’re no different.”

They have been genetically modified into bird-like creatures and along their migration perform dances of extinct species like sandhill crains, tundra swans, American kestrals, black terns, and California condors. “They’ve genemodded us into gods.”  

This is a crazy view into a world that has destroyed it’s wildlife gleefully and now celebrates a fake look at that wildlife, hero-worshiping falseness.  It’s also a story about being true to yourself, no matter what that self is; that no matter how much of yourself is owned or controlled by something else, you are still an individual controlling your own fate.

To a lesser degree and maybe one I’m making up, this looks like a satire on modern athletics, performance enhancing elements, sponsorships, and integrity. The migration they go on is by bicycle and, similar to the Tour De France, is 2,000 miles long and 22 stages. The dances are like the post-stage press conferences, with the winners dancing and pretending to be an extinct species…a clean, honest, athlete.

“No matter how slick our bikes are, when it comes down to it they are still one-hundred percent powered by our legs and nothing else. So we’ll do anything we can to make it easier. We’re lazy like that.”

Notable Passage: “It’s a big sky in Montana, everyone knows that, but the way it makes me feel lonely is all my own.”

Rating: 8-9-9-8 Total= 34

#258 The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz- Will Self

#258 The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz- Will Self

What do you say about a collection of short stories that begins with a long detailed description of a man smoking crack, a crack rock as big as the Ritz?  More please!

Danny (aka. Bantu, aka London) goes from England, to Jamaica, to Philadelphia to nowhere…and ends up in a recruiting office on his way with the Royal Marines to Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. The drug business has taken its toll:

“A year muscling rock in Trenchtown was about as full an apprenticeship as anyone could serve. This was a business where you moved straight from work experience to retirement, with not much of a career in between.”

War changed him, as it does. “Danny had been changed by the army. He went in a fucked-up, angry, potentially violent, colored youth; and he came out a frustrated, efficient, angry black man.”

He vowed to go legit and get out of the crack business, but sometimes the crack business comes to you, surrounds you, seeps out of the ground of your very home…literally. We are what we are, no matter how many times we may change what we call ourself.

Rating: 8-7-7-6 Total=28

#112 Emergency- Denis Johnson

#112 Emergency- Denis Johnson

A few years ago somebody left Tree of Smoke at my bar. The book was on the Pulitzer short list. It was never claimed from the lost and found so I took it home and read it, loved it, passed it on to the next person in a fun read-it-forward string of events. I am very happy to be reading one of his short stories.

Just like his book, everything here is completely off kilter, bonkers, fubar. There is a bunch of craziness going on in an Emergency room. The orderly has been mopping up the same blood from the O.R. floor for hours. Its like the blood spot from Macbeth.

A man comes in with a knife sticking out of one eye, the other eye is plastic, but he can still see.

“[The doctor] peeked into the trauma room and saw the situation: the clerk- that is, me- standing next to the orderly, George, both of us on drugs, looking down at a patient with a knife sticking up out of his face.

‘What seems to be the problem?’ he said”

When asked by the hospital staff what happened:

“My wife did it, I was asleep”

“Do you want the police?”

“Not unless I die.”

Everyone in the story is messed up, or on drugs, it’s the theatre of the absurd, or something out of the LSD crazed mind of Ken Kesey.

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 29

#12 Cartagena (2007) Nam Le

#12 Cartagena (2008)- Nam Le

In Nam Le's second story from The Boat, we come across the issue of originality.  I’m not sure which is sadder: that just by seeing the title Cartagena we know the story will be about Columbian teenage drug gangs, or that stories about Columbian teenage drug gangs is too cliché to elicit excitement.

From the first few pages, seeing the words Medellin, El Padre, Escobar, etc. made me lose excitement for this story.  Seems like I’ve read this story before. For example, there is a flashback scene where the future hardened drug lord learns the harsh lessons of life from watching his father murdered and mother raped while hidden under his bed.  If I haven’t read that somewhere before, I’m sure I’ve at least seen it in a Tarantino movie.

Ron is a young teenaged “sicario,” an assassin, a “soldado” for a cause. Presumably this cause is his agent or gang boss getting richer. The dilemma is whether Ron will fulfill a contract he was given to kill someone he knows.

“Killing has never been the business of the gallada.”

Like I said, we’ve all seen this before, seemingly 1,000 times.  However, it is the story telling skills of Le that this story remains somewhat engaging, and the ending is certainly satisfying.  Well written, but ultimately forgettable. 

Notable Passage: “I cannot hold my eyes to his. Everywhere I look ate the flames of candles. It is truly like the inside of a church, I think, although I cannot remember having been inside one for years”

Rating: 8-5-7-5 Total =25