Joseph Hirsch's Blog - Posts Tagged "army"
“Blessedly Devoid of Subtext”: Or, Iain Levison, Come Back
Some years ago, I was on vacation with my family in South Carolina. I think my parents may have still been together at this time, but I’m not sure. What I definitely remember is making a daytrip to Kiawa Island, a beachside resort that was more expensive and tasteful than the kinds of places where we usually stayed. While in a restaurant in Kiawa, I picked up a copy of the area’s local free alternative rag (I can’t remember the name) and read an interview with an irascible author who’d worked a bunch of crap jobs and written a book about his experience. In the interview he lobbed insults at the soft and feckless types that stayed in Kiawa on vacation. My guess is no one on the island bothered to read the interview, or much of anything in the free rag besides suggestions for where to drink wine or which links to tee off on. It’s doubtful a restaurant would stock an edition of a free paper in which their clientele is openly insulted, unless they hadn’t bothered to read said article.
Flash forward some time and I stumble on the book for which Levison was being interviewed, A Working Stiff’s Manifesto, and started to read. Readers have been suckers for tales about working crap jobs for some time now, probably at least since Charles Bukowski started violating the great taboo with his books Post Office and Factotum. Individual exceptions obviously exist, but it seems that pre-Bukowski, writers liked to be thought of as artists above such meager pursuits as earning their daily bread. Being all the way down and out (a la George Orwell in his early years) was okay and romantic, as was being uber-wealthy (this “top-out-of-sight” class as sociologist Paul Fussell would have it, exerted a mighty hold on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s imagination). But people whose jobs weren’t arduous enough to say, compete with Steinbeck’s day laborers, weren’t keen on revealing how they kept the lights on when the writing wasn’t paying the bills.
Iain Levison’s book was a much better-than-average contribution to the genre. It was hard-edged, funny, insightful, and written in clear and precise language. I liked the book and then didn’t think about it much more after finishing it.
Flash forward again some years and I’m in the Army (as was Levison, although I believe he was in the Scottish Armed Forces). I’m stationed at Kelly Barracks with the 22nd Sig in Darmstadt, Germany. Cambrai-Fritsch (the other barracks / Kaserne) actually had a quality library where I’d found everything from Chomsky to Burroughs to first editions of Gunter Grass, that helped me pass to the time.
I found another small book in the library by Levison, who I vaguely remembered from before. This one was even shorter than the previous one, though, and fiction. The title was Since the Layoffs. It took me something like three hours to read the whole thing (if that) and I devoured it in a sort of trance. It was a straightforward tale about an unemployed/underemployed guy who agrees to work as a heavy for a local crime figure. His logic isn’t too complicated and his morality isn’t too complex. Either be broke or break the law and have better gear, like a leather jacket, and a nice car to cruise around in.
Once, while lounging around in the bees (barracks) with a friend, burning incense and chilling on a lazy weekend, I heard someone shout, “Damn right!” I looked up and saw that my friend was reading the Levison book that I’d forgotten to return to the library at Cambrai Fritsch (I think it was a cold and snowy November weekend and I didn’t have a car). My friend looked down at the book and said, “This dude is right.”
“You can borrow the book,” I said. “Just take it back when you’re done.” My friend lived at the other Kaserne, so he would be able to drop the book off on his way to formation in the morning.
This friend and I were drinking at a bar a couple of weeks later and he confessed that Since the Layoffs was the only book he’d read that he hadn’t been forced to read, in his entire life. “I’ll read TMs (training manuals) but only because I have to.”
One more flash forward and I’m out of the army (finally, thank God) and I’m sitting there thinking, Say, that Iain Levison was a better-than-average writer. I wonder what the hell became of him?
I picked up two more books from Levison, the only other two I could find. The first one was How to Rob an Armored Car. It was, like his previous books, about working crap jobs, and, like Since the Layoffs, it was about the moral dilemma of how many laws a man is willing to break in order to live with more dignity than his station will seemingly allow. Unlike Levison’s first book, A Working Stiff’s Manifesto, this one wasn’t didactic at all. It was straightforward, unalloyed, and made its point without any kind of Michael Moore manipulation or histrionics. It was a fictional foray, like Levison’s second book, Since the Layoffs, but it was longer and much more mature, and better written.
I handed the book off to a writer friend of mine, John, and he passed the recommendation on to another writer we both knew, named Jon. John told me he dug Armored Car, but that Jon wasn’t impressed.
“Why not?” John had asked him.
“Something’s missing,” Jon replied.
To which John replied, “I know. It’s blessedly devoid of subtext.”
He had a point. How to Rob an Armored Car was about some friends who work in a big box chain store, smoke weed on the weekends, and decide to pull off a heist. One can extrapolate from it what they want, but it’s not an allegory or a metaphor. It is what it is, and there’s something appealing about its simplicity. At least for me, there was. I respect Jon and his opinion, but that doesn’t mean we always have to be on the same page.
The last Levison book I read, Dog Eats Dog, was also fiction, and, as in all his previous works, it showed maturation. This book featured Levison’s usual gimlet eye for class, but it was more a cross-section study up and down the economic ladder, a bit like that film Crash (not the one based on the J.G. Ballard book about people who get off on car wrecks, but the one that swept the Oscars). Dog Eats Dog was about an escaped con who worms his way into the life of an affected professor working on some massive study about the Third Reich, and the professor’s Humbert Humbert-esque relationship with his Lolita-like neighbor. A female Federado who reminded me a bit of Clarice Starling interjects herself into this weird mix, and Levison turns the tension up to ten and leaves it there.
Dog Eats Dog was chockfull of subtext, as opposed to Levison’s How to Rob an Armored Car. It was also perhaps an even better book. I looked forward to the next book that Levison would write, and I waited. And waited.
I’m still waiting. Based on the little bit of research I’ve done (not much sleuthing, I’ll admit) Iain Levison said “Screw it” and left for China, where he became an English teacher. It’s possible he’s still doing well based on foreign sales (he’s not “big in Japan” as they say, but like a lot of writers whose view of America is a bit too unvarnished for Americans, his stuff is big in France). Two other books by the man appear in the search on Amazon, but they’re in German. One is Gedankenjäger (Thought Hunter) and the other is the wonderfully titled Hoffnung ist Gift (Hope is Poison).
It’s hard for me to tell if these are translations of his English works, or if they’re Deutsch exclusives. Having a good translator can make or break a writer’s career abroad (look at the beautiful things Ralph Manheim has done) and I can only hope that something gives for Levison, that someone notices how good he was, and that he can somehow be convinced to believe that the game is in fact worth the candle.
Then again, if he’s happy teaching in China and he wishes to maintain radio silence from here-on-out, that’s his prerogative. I miss his voice, all the same. He perfectly documented the lives of the American former working and lower-middleclass that’s been hollowed out over the past few decades, and he took that incredibly depressing and enraging subject and made fiction that was funny and smart and tough.
Anyway, I’d wish Levison a “Happy New Year” but I know the calendar is much different in China and I’m too lazy to learn it. Are we in the year of the monkey or the dog, or is it the rat?
Flash forward some time and I stumble on the book for which Levison was being interviewed, A Working Stiff’s Manifesto, and started to read. Readers have been suckers for tales about working crap jobs for some time now, probably at least since Charles Bukowski started violating the great taboo with his books Post Office and Factotum. Individual exceptions obviously exist, but it seems that pre-Bukowski, writers liked to be thought of as artists above such meager pursuits as earning their daily bread. Being all the way down and out (a la George Orwell in his early years) was okay and romantic, as was being uber-wealthy (this “top-out-of-sight” class as sociologist Paul Fussell would have it, exerted a mighty hold on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s imagination). But people whose jobs weren’t arduous enough to say, compete with Steinbeck’s day laborers, weren’t keen on revealing how they kept the lights on when the writing wasn’t paying the bills.
Iain Levison’s book was a much better-than-average contribution to the genre. It was hard-edged, funny, insightful, and written in clear and precise language. I liked the book and then didn’t think about it much more after finishing it.
Flash forward again some years and I’m in the Army (as was Levison, although I believe he was in the Scottish Armed Forces). I’m stationed at Kelly Barracks with the 22nd Sig in Darmstadt, Germany. Cambrai-Fritsch (the other barracks / Kaserne) actually had a quality library where I’d found everything from Chomsky to Burroughs to first editions of Gunter Grass, that helped me pass to the time.
I found another small book in the library by Levison, who I vaguely remembered from before. This one was even shorter than the previous one, though, and fiction. The title was Since the Layoffs. It took me something like three hours to read the whole thing (if that) and I devoured it in a sort of trance. It was a straightforward tale about an unemployed/underemployed guy who agrees to work as a heavy for a local crime figure. His logic isn’t too complicated and his morality isn’t too complex. Either be broke or break the law and have better gear, like a leather jacket, and a nice car to cruise around in.
Once, while lounging around in the bees (barracks) with a friend, burning incense and chilling on a lazy weekend, I heard someone shout, “Damn right!” I looked up and saw that my friend was reading the Levison book that I’d forgotten to return to the library at Cambrai Fritsch (I think it was a cold and snowy November weekend and I didn’t have a car). My friend looked down at the book and said, “This dude is right.”
“You can borrow the book,” I said. “Just take it back when you’re done.” My friend lived at the other Kaserne, so he would be able to drop the book off on his way to formation in the morning.
This friend and I were drinking at a bar a couple of weeks later and he confessed that Since the Layoffs was the only book he’d read that he hadn’t been forced to read, in his entire life. “I’ll read TMs (training manuals) but only because I have to.”
One more flash forward and I’m out of the army (finally, thank God) and I’m sitting there thinking, Say, that Iain Levison was a better-than-average writer. I wonder what the hell became of him?
I picked up two more books from Levison, the only other two I could find. The first one was How to Rob an Armored Car. It was, like his previous books, about working crap jobs, and, like Since the Layoffs, it was about the moral dilemma of how many laws a man is willing to break in order to live with more dignity than his station will seemingly allow. Unlike Levison’s first book, A Working Stiff’s Manifesto, this one wasn’t didactic at all. It was straightforward, unalloyed, and made its point without any kind of Michael Moore manipulation or histrionics. It was a fictional foray, like Levison’s second book, Since the Layoffs, but it was longer and much more mature, and better written.
I handed the book off to a writer friend of mine, John, and he passed the recommendation on to another writer we both knew, named Jon. John told me he dug Armored Car, but that Jon wasn’t impressed.
“Why not?” John had asked him.
“Something’s missing,” Jon replied.
To which John replied, “I know. It’s blessedly devoid of subtext.”
He had a point. How to Rob an Armored Car was about some friends who work in a big box chain store, smoke weed on the weekends, and decide to pull off a heist. One can extrapolate from it what they want, but it’s not an allegory or a metaphor. It is what it is, and there’s something appealing about its simplicity. At least for me, there was. I respect Jon and his opinion, but that doesn’t mean we always have to be on the same page.
The last Levison book I read, Dog Eats Dog, was also fiction, and, as in all his previous works, it showed maturation. This book featured Levison’s usual gimlet eye for class, but it was more a cross-section study up and down the economic ladder, a bit like that film Crash (not the one based on the J.G. Ballard book about people who get off on car wrecks, but the one that swept the Oscars). Dog Eats Dog was about an escaped con who worms his way into the life of an affected professor working on some massive study about the Third Reich, and the professor’s Humbert Humbert-esque relationship with his Lolita-like neighbor. A female Federado who reminded me a bit of Clarice Starling interjects herself into this weird mix, and Levison turns the tension up to ten and leaves it there.
Dog Eats Dog was chockfull of subtext, as opposed to Levison’s How to Rob an Armored Car. It was also perhaps an even better book. I looked forward to the next book that Levison would write, and I waited. And waited.
I’m still waiting. Based on the little bit of research I’ve done (not much sleuthing, I’ll admit) Iain Levison said “Screw it” and left for China, where he became an English teacher. It’s possible he’s still doing well based on foreign sales (he’s not “big in Japan” as they say, but like a lot of writers whose view of America is a bit too unvarnished for Americans, his stuff is big in France). Two other books by the man appear in the search on Amazon, but they’re in German. One is Gedankenjäger (Thought Hunter) and the other is the wonderfully titled Hoffnung ist Gift (Hope is Poison).
It’s hard for me to tell if these are translations of his English works, or if they’re Deutsch exclusives. Having a good translator can make or break a writer’s career abroad (look at the beautiful things Ralph Manheim has done) and I can only hope that something gives for Levison, that someone notices how good he was, and that he can somehow be convinced to believe that the game is in fact worth the candle.
Then again, if he’s happy teaching in China and he wishes to maintain radio silence from here-on-out, that’s his prerogative. I miss his voice, all the same. He perfectly documented the lives of the American former working and lower-middleclass that’s been hollowed out over the past few decades, and he took that incredibly depressing and enraging subject and made fiction that was funny and smart and tough.
Anyway, I’d wish Levison a “Happy New Year” but I know the calendar is much different in China and I’m too lazy to learn it. Are we in the year of the monkey or the dog, or is it the rat?
That Time the Coen Brothers put out a Cigarette on my Head
The science fiction writer William Gibson once told a story about how during the composition of his famous book Neuromancer he went to see the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, which was based very loosely on the novel Do Androids dream of electronic Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Gibson relates how disheartened he became as he watched the film, realizing that the ideas he was grappling with on paper were being presented on the screen, maybe in a form arguably superior to the work he was crafting. He dealt with his unease by getting up and leaving the theater halfway through the film.
Something similar happened to me awhile back.
I was at my last duty station in the Army, running out the clock on my contract at Fort Bliss, Texas. Bliss was in El Paso, flush against the Rio Grande and adjacent to Juarez, Mexico, where open bloodletting in the streets was a daily occurrence, and meant bodies being displayed on overpasses (sometimes sans heads) to send a message to rival cartels, and corruption leading all the way up to the general staff of the Army (maybe higher).
Juarez was off-limits for American military personnel, so naturally I turned all of my attention to the task of getting there. It wasn’t that hard. I talked to a cabbie I knew from on-post, and said I wanted to go to Juarez. He agreed to take me for a flat fee, said he knew the area like the back of his hand, and that if I wanted to get women or drugs all I had to do was ask.
We met at one of the dining facilities near my barracks, which was built like a blockhouse and stucco-walled, facing the hills on the Mexican side of the border that were upholstered in chaparral dense enough to look like barbed wire.
As we drove toward Mexico I told the cabbie all I wanted to do was see Juarez, and he nodded, almost sounding disappointed. “A lot of old gringos come down here to get drugs.”
“Drugs?” I was surprised. I figured the dope market would skew young.
We came to the border crossing, where dirty cars and open-bed trucks were waiting, and he said, “No, I mean drugs to commit suicide.” He explained that Americans who wanted to be euthanized could get their hands on phenobarbital in Juarez as easily as we could get a loaf of bread on the American side of the border.
Once in Juarez, my Spidey sense started tingling, like I was back in Iraq. My heart was beating fast, and I looked on in horror as a man (or maybe a woman) with the same disease as the Elephant Man staggered toward us, selling tempura paintings of the Virgin Mary and salted pumpkin seeds in plastic bags. His face looked like one massive goiter, fluid-filled pouch, or swollen testicle about to explode. I hunkered down in my seat, and we drove to a motel built in hacienda-style with steer horns over the entrance and white Christmas lights wrapped around the building. There was also a strand of yellow “Cuidado” tape cordoning the motel off, and as we ducked under the tape the cabbie explained that the place was run by his sister-in-law and that it had been robbed by masked gunmen the previous day.
“You said you don’t want girls or drugs, so I figure maybe I use this chance to visit her.”
I sat in a dining room with a floor done in beige tiles and a massive fireplace clad in limestone while the cabbie spoke to the hotelier in soft undertones at a saloon-style bar, where every other bottle seemed to be gold-coin-colored tequila. It was cool and dark in that dining room, peaceful as a grotto where a saint sits with his reliquaries, and I had no desire to see anymore of Juarez. The cabbie and his sister-in-law occasionally glanced up from their powwow at the bar, looking over at me and smiling. They seemed to think it was funny that the buracho blanco soldier was so scared, and I had the feeling that they interspersed some jokes at my expense between whatever other words they exchanged.
A few months later I was still stationed in Fort Bliss, and I was close to the expiry of my contract with the U.S. Army. Not only was I going to be a free man soon, but I had some prospects, and even a little hope that I might make it as a pro writer.
I had a ritual, you see, that I’d maintained every week for the better part of the last year. Most weekends I would get a backpack, put my laptop in there, and then head down to the local La Quinta hotel off-post. I’d write a story on Friday, edit it Saturday, and then send it out to the publisher on Sunday morning, before returning to the barracks. I never told anyone what I was doing, and for all I knew my fellow soldiers just thought I was hanging out at a girlfriend’s house.
I got a ton of rejection slips, of course, and even some meanspirited personalized comments from publishers telling me to give it up, or at least not to send them anymore material, but I also managed to sell a few stories here and there. The main publisher to whom I sold work was, incidentally, the publisher of my last novel. We’ve had a professional correspondence going on now for more than a decade without ever having met once, or even spoken about anything besides publishing. To be honest, his/her name is gender-neutral, so I don’t even know if the person who gave me my career is a man or a woman; I’ve never asked.
Anyway, I figured that since I had sold some short stories, and accrued the beginnings of a CV, maybe it was time to try to write a novel. This was before the embarrassment of shows and movies about drug cartels really started to the flood the market (to the point where oversaturation has reached the level of the vampire subgenre), so I decided to write about border wars around the Juarez area.
I’d done as much up-close research inside Juarez as I intended to do (you only have to have a guy with a massive scrotum on his face and pictures of the Virgin Mary in his hand staggering toward you once before your tourism instinct wanes), but I felt the place’s aura deep in my bones, and thought I could at least write something respectably noir or pulpy on the subject and maybe shop the result to paperback publishers.
And then Dunphy (as I call him in my fiction) took me to see No Country for Old Men, and my heart sank, as I imagine it must have for William Gibson all those years ago. No Country got the pace of life along the border, the local flavor and color, and that sinister air of ancient Aztec gods clashing with the white man’s law, that feeling of wildness mixing with corruption and brutality in which every side is evil, and it captured it all so well that I just shook my head and said Shit.
A few years later I did write a book that takes place in and around the area where I was stationed in Texas, called Rolling Country. The book deals with an over-the-road trucker who works with a Mexican human and drug trafficker along the border. This trucker also happens to be a serial killer and a man with a penchant for transsexual prostitutes (in other words, it’s a thinly-veiled autobiography).
Rolling Country got picked up by a publisher, and I sent it to a writer who I respected but had never met or even previously corresponded with. He replied that he thought the book was good, but added the caveat, “You know you’re inviting comparison with Cormac McCarthy with this thing, don’t you?”
I knew. The movie No Country for Old Men was based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, and my book was nowhere near as good as the book or the movie. But it was a start. And though I squirmed a bit in my seat while watching No Country, at least I didn’t get up and leave the theater.
Something similar happened to me awhile back.
I was at my last duty station in the Army, running out the clock on my contract at Fort Bliss, Texas. Bliss was in El Paso, flush against the Rio Grande and adjacent to Juarez, Mexico, where open bloodletting in the streets was a daily occurrence, and meant bodies being displayed on overpasses (sometimes sans heads) to send a message to rival cartels, and corruption leading all the way up to the general staff of the Army (maybe higher).
Juarez was off-limits for American military personnel, so naturally I turned all of my attention to the task of getting there. It wasn’t that hard. I talked to a cabbie I knew from on-post, and said I wanted to go to Juarez. He agreed to take me for a flat fee, said he knew the area like the back of his hand, and that if I wanted to get women or drugs all I had to do was ask.
We met at one of the dining facilities near my barracks, which was built like a blockhouse and stucco-walled, facing the hills on the Mexican side of the border that were upholstered in chaparral dense enough to look like barbed wire.
As we drove toward Mexico I told the cabbie all I wanted to do was see Juarez, and he nodded, almost sounding disappointed. “A lot of old gringos come down here to get drugs.”
“Drugs?” I was surprised. I figured the dope market would skew young.
We came to the border crossing, where dirty cars and open-bed trucks were waiting, and he said, “No, I mean drugs to commit suicide.” He explained that Americans who wanted to be euthanized could get their hands on phenobarbital in Juarez as easily as we could get a loaf of bread on the American side of the border.
Once in Juarez, my Spidey sense started tingling, like I was back in Iraq. My heart was beating fast, and I looked on in horror as a man (or maybe a woman) with the same disease as the Elephant Man staggered toward us, selling tempura paintings of the Virgin Mary and salted pumpkin seeds in plastic bags. His face looked like one massive goiter, fluid-filled pouch, or swollen testicle about to explode. I hunkered down in my seat, and we drove to a motel built in hacienda-style with steer horns over the entrance and white Christmas lights wrapped around the building. There was also a strand of yellow “Cuidado” tape cordoning the motel off, and as we ducked under the tape the cabbie explained that the place was run by his sister-in-law and that it had been robbed by masked gunmen the previous day.
“You said you don’t want girls or drugs, so I figure maybe I use this chance to visit her.”
I sat in a dining room with a floor done in beige tiles and a massive fireplace clad in limestone while the cabbie spoke to the hotelier in soft undertones at a saloon-style bar, where every other bottle seemed to be gold-coin-colored tequila. It was cool and dark in that dining room, peaceful as a grotto where a saint sits with his reliquaries, and I had no desire to see anymore of Juarez. The cabbie and his sister-in-law occasionally glanced up from their powwow at the bar, looking over at me and smiling. They seemed to think it was funny that the buracho blanco soldier was so scared, and I had the feeling that they interspersed some jokes at my expense between whatever other words they exchanged.
A few months later I was still stationed in Fort Bliss, and I was close to the expiry of my contract with the U.S. Army. Not only was I going to be a free man soon, but I had some prospects, and even a little hope that I might make it as a pro writer.
I had a ritual, you see, that I’d maintained every week for the better part of the last year. Most weekends I would get a backpack, put my laptop in there, and then head down to the local La Quinta hotel off-post. I’d write a story on Friday, edit it Saturday, and then send it out to the publisher on Sunday morning, before returning to the barracks. I never told anyone what I was doing, and for all I knew my fellow soldiers just thought I was hanging out at a girlfriend’s house.
I got a ton of rejection slips, of course, and even some meanspirited personalized comments from publishers telling me to give it up, or at least not to send them anymore material, but I also managed to sell a few stories here and there. The main publisher to whom I sold work was, incidentally, the publisher of my last novel. We’ve had a professional correspondence going on now for more than a decade without ever having met once, or even spoken about anything besides publishing. To be honest, his/her name is gender-neutral, so I don’t even know if the person who gave me my career is a man or a woman; I’ve never asked.
Anyway, I figured that since I had sold some short stories, and accrued the beginnings of a CV, maybe it was time to try to write a novel. This was before the embarrassment of shows and movies about drug cartels really started to the flood the market (to the point where oversaturation has reached the level of the vampire subgenre), so I decided to write about border wars around the Juarez area.
I’d done as much up-close research inside Juarez as I intended to do (you only have to have a guy with a massive scrotum on his face and pictures of the Virgin Mary in his hand staggering toward you once before your tourism instinct wanes), but I felt the place’s aura deep in my bones, and thought I could at least write something respectably noir or pulpy on the subject and maybe shop the result to paperback publishers.
And then Dunphy (as I call him in my fiction) took me to see No Country for Old Men, and my heart sank, as I imagine it must have for William Gibson all those years ago. No Country got the pace of life along the border, the local flavor and color, and that sinister air of ancient Aztec gods clashing with the white man’s law, that feeling of wildness mixing with corruption and brutality in which every side is evil, and it captured it all so well that I just shook my head and said Shit.
A few years later I did write a book that takes place in and around the area where I was stationed in Texas, called Rolling Country. The book deals with an over-the-road trucker who works with a Mexican human and drug trafficker along the border. This trucker also happens to be a serial killer and a man with a penchant for transsexual prostitutes (in other words, it’s a thinly-veiled autobiography).
Rolling Country got picked up by a publisher, and I sent it to a writer who I respected but had never met or even previously corresponded with. He replied that he thought the book was good, but added the caveat, “You know you’re inviting comparison with Cormac McCarthy with this thing, don’t you?”
I knew. The movie No Country for Old Men was based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, and my book was nowhere near as good as the book or the movie. But it was a start. And though I squirmed a bit in my seat while watching No Country, at least I didn’t get up and leave the theater.
Maiming is the Mother of Invention
I think Kurt Vonnegut was right when he said that music was a far superior art form to writing. I can accomplish with a lot of effort in five-hundred pages what someone can accomplish in three minutes of tickling the ivory or blowing their horn.
Chief among my regrets is that I never really learned an instrument. I tried with the drums, and even got good enough to keep time and do drumrolls, but something happened that derailed my ambition and I was the first to drop out of a long-since disbanded high-school band that wasn’t that serious. And since I’m partially and permanently injured after my time in the army, I’m not about to pick up some drumsticks and bang those skins again any time soon.
I had a friend in the army who was a very good guitarist, whose taste skewed toward heavy metal, though he kept an open mind about all kinds of music. I told him I liked Black Sabbath alright, and after he sort of waved them off as “proto-metal” (you can hear the words Ozzy’s singing, for instance), he mentioned that Sabbath’s guitarist, Tony Iommi, got the tips of his fingers cut off while working in a factory as a young man.
The injury would have put the kibosh on a lesser man’s musical career, but being forced to compensate for the injury and find a workaround caused Iommi to choose a slower, more riff-oriented style to his playing, one that had a sludgy sound to it that drove aesthetes crazy. I think the rock critic Lester Bangs said Black Sabbath made music that sounded like what one would expect to hear if they were to go back in time and give troglodytes electric instruments and just let the cavemen jam.
But that heavy, hypnotic drone is critic-proof, and can still make heads nod to this day, while technically more virtuoso neoclassical metal just fades into the background like so much white noise. Henry Rollins once analogized Sabbath as the AK-47 of rock music; it’s durable enough to weather any abuse, especially the cruelest: the test of time. Some kids may not know Iommi’s name, and they may only know his guitar through hip-hop samples and videogames like Rock Band with its phony Fender Stratocaster, but they know his songs just the same. Who hasn’t hummed Iron Man’s pulverizing riff, the one that lead singer Ozzy Osbourne said sounded “like a big iron bloke walking about”?
When my friend told me about Sabbath’s guitarist losing the tips of his fingers and perhaps improving because of his horrible accident, I thought of the boxer Howard Winstone. I know quite a bit more about boxing than I do about heavy metal, and I remembered reading about how Howard Winstone was a hot prospect in the Great Britain boxing scene as a young man. This was the old days, though, and most boxers had day jobs, even the topflight ones, and Mr. Winstone worked in a toy factory between fights.
One day laboring at his station in the factory “the Welsh Wizard” felt an agonizing, sharp pain in his right hand and lost consciousness. When he woke up, he was missing the tips of the fingers on his right hand, which was covered in a blood-soaked cocoon of gauze and tape after emergency surgery. Some kind of machine press had given him a brutal manicure. As Henry Chinaski says in Barfly, of his own stint working in a toy factory, “You don’t know how men suffer for children.”
One of the things most people who don’t follow boxing don’t know about the game is that the majority of boxers don’t close their fists until right before they throw a punch (in order to conserve energy); that said, losing the tips of one’s fingers, especially on their dominant hand, should be the death knell for any pro boxer’s career.
Mr. Winstone, however, was not any old boxer. He hailed from the same Welsh coalmining town as another great fighter, Johnny “the Matchstick Man” Owen, who tragically died in the ring. In a book about the latter boxer (one of the best boxer bios I’ve read) there is a scene in which a gas explosion in the local colliery not only caved in the mine and killed the men trapped inside, but ventilated a fireball that reached to the local school, where the windows were shattered and the kids flew across the room like ragdolls, cast beneath their desks in some mockery of the Cold War duck-and-cover drills.
Life in Merthyr Tydfil was old stone castle ruins aboveground, and bituminous ancient rocks hidden beneath the ground, which men had to chisel out with iron at the peril of their own lives. I imagine even the cloud formations in the sky looked like snowy quartzite massifs to those young boys who had the inclination to look up and daydream. Hard times make hard people, and Howard Winstone decided that, having lost pieces of three fingers in his dominant hand, he should work on his jab (the straight punch executed with the non-dominant hand). Winstone developed one of the fiercest jabs in the business, and worked that left like a piston to flummox and blind opponents into submission and become maybe the best fighter to ever emerge from Wales. These days citing the flu or even a sore big toe (a la cruiserweight David Haye) is enough for a boxer to absolve themselves of any responsibility in a bad performance. I doubt Howard Winstone ever griped, post-fight, about how a lackluster performance was due to the lost of several fingertips, but then again he fought well enough and hard enough to never need alibis or rationalization, even in losses.
I’ve had two surgeries on my right shoulder, the details of which I won’t burden you with tonight. Suffice it to say, that a bad shoulder that hurts consistently is nothing compared to the loss of some fingertips, and typing is an easier way to make one’s living than punching and being punched. Besides which, I’ve noticed that my arm hurts less when I write, as if maybe the endorphins released by composing have a healing effect commensurate to or maybe greater than the two Percocet I allot myself per day.
When the pain throbs, though, I will try to remember Tony Iommi and Howard Winstone, whose own adaptations should shame me into silence and stifle any complaints before I give them voice, even to myself in something as insubstantial as a blog post.
Chief among my regrets is that I never really learned an instrument. I tried with the drums, and even got good enough to keep time and do drumrolls, but something happened that derailed my ambition and I was the first to drop out of a long-since disbanded high-school band that wasn’t that serious. And since I’m partially and permanently injured after my time in the army, I’m not about to pick up some drumsticks and bang those skins again any time soon.
I had a friend in the army who was a very good guitarist, whose taste skewed toward heavy metal, though he kept an open mind about all kinds of music. I told him I liked Black Sabbath alright, and after he sort of waved them off as “proto-metal” (you can hear the words Ozzy’s singing, for instance), he mentioned that Sabbath’s guitarist, Tony Iommi, got the tips of his fingers cut off while working in a factory as a young man.
The injury would have put the kibosh on a lesser man’s musical career, but being forced to compensate for the injury and find a workaround caused Iommi to choose a slower, more riff-oriented style to his playing, one that had a sludgy sound to it that drove aesthetes crazy. I think the rock critic Lester Bangs said Black Sabbath made music that sounded like what one would expect to hear if they were to go back in time and give troglodytes electric instruments and just let the cavemen jam.
But that heavy, hypnotic drone is critic-proof, and can still make heads nod to this day, while technically more virtuoso neoclassical metal just fades into the background like so much white noise. Henry Rollins once analogized Sabbath as the AK-47 of rock music; it’s durable enough to weather any abuse, especially the cruelest: the test of time. Some kids may not know Iommi’s name, and they may only know his guitar through hip-hop samples and videogames like Rock Band with its phony Fender Stratocaster, but they know his songs just the same. Who hasn’t hummed Iron Man’s pulverizing riff, the one that lead singer Ozzy Osbourne said sounded “like a big iron bloke walking about”?
When my friend told me about Sabbath’s guitarist losing the tips of his fingers and perhaps improving because of his horrible accident, I thought of the boxer Howard Winstone. I know quite a bit more about boxing than I do about heavy metal, and I remembered reading about how Howard Winstone was a hot prospect in the Great Britain boxing scene as a young man. This was the old days, though, and most boxers had day jobs, even the topflight ones, and Mr. Winstone worked in a toy factory between fights.
One day laboring at his station in the factory “the Welsh Wizard” felt an agonizing, sharp pain in his right hand and lost consciousness. When he woke up, he was missing the tips of the fingers on his right hand, which was covered in a blood-soaked cocoon of gauze and tape after emergency surgery. Some kind of machine press had given him a brutal manicure. As Henry Chinaski says in Barfly, of his own stint working in a toy factory, “You don’t know how men suffer for children.”
One of the things most people who don’t follow boxing don’t know about the game is that the majority of boxers don’t close their fists until right before they throw a punch (in order to conserve energy); that said, losing the tips of one’s fingers, especially on their dominant hand, should be the death knell for any pro boxer’s career.
Mr. Winstone, however, was not any old boxer. He hailed from the same Welsh coalmining town as another great fighter, Johnny “the Matchstick Man” Owen, who tragically died in the ring. In a book about the latter boxer (one of the best boxer bios I’ve read) there is a scene in which a gas explosion in the local colliery not only caved in the mine and killed the men trapped inside, but ventilated a fireball that reached to the local school, where the windows were shattered and the kids flew across the room like ragdolls, cast beneath their desks in some mockery of the Cold War duck-and-cover drills.
Life in Merthyr Tydfil was old stone castle ruins aboveground, and bituminous ancient rocks hidden beneath the ground, which men had to chisel out with iron at the peril of their own lives. I imagine even the cloud formations in the sky looked like snowy quartzite massifs to those young boys who had the inclination to look up and daydream. Hard times make hard people, and Howard Winstone decided that, having lost pieces of three fingers in his dominant hand, he should work on his jab (the straight punch executed with the non-dominant hand). Winstone developed one of the fiercest jabs in the business, and worked that left like a piston to flummox and blind opponents into submission and become maybe the best fighter to ever emerge from Wales. These days citing the flu or even a sore big toe (a la cruiserweight David Haye) is enough for a boxer to absolve themselves of any responsibility in a bad performance. I doubt Howard Winstone ever griped, post-fight, about how a lackluster performance was due to the lost of several fingertips, but then again he fought well enough and hard enough to never need alibis or rationalization, even in losses.
I’ve had two surgeries on my right shoulder, the details of which I won’t burden you with tonight. Suffice it to say, that a bad shoulder that hurts consistently is nothing compared to the loss of some fingertips, and typing is an easier way to make one’s living than punching and being punched. Besides which, I’ve noticed that my arm hurts less when I write, as if maybe the endorphins released by composing have a healing effect commensurate to or maybe greater than the two Percocet I allot myself per day.
When the pain throbs, though, I will try to remember Tony Iommi and Howard Winstone, whose own adaptations should shame me into silence and stifle any complaints before I give them voice, even to myself in something as insubstantial as a blog post.
“How False it all seemed”: The Book you expected to suck, which didn’t
There’s a scene in Charles Bukowski’s great coming-of-age novel, Ham on Rye, in which the protagonist Henry Chinaski discovers the magic of books. I can’t quite remember if he discovers, a la Bradbury, how to stay drunk on the words before or after he discovers the joys of being literally drunk, but it happens sometime in mid-pubescence, while Hank is going through hell.
He breezes through Faulkner and Hemingway, finding himself a bit stumped by the former but counting himself an acolyte of the latter (at first at least; Bukowski always went back and forth with Hemingway). He encounters the works of John Dos Passos, and pronounces them not great, but good enough, which is about right. At one point he gets his hopes up after finding a book with the title Bow Down to Wood and Stone, but he soon realizes that the content cannot live up to the title.
Then he discovers D.H. Lawrence. It’s a story about a pianist who’s slowly losing his mind. How false it all seemed at first, Hank muses. But as he reads on, he realizes that the tale is a very worthy one indeed.
I think we’ve all had a similar experience. There’s a book or a writer whose work we may look at askance, as perhaps a bit precious or pretentious, or just boring, and yet we start the work, however reluctantly, only to discover that it is in fact damn good.
My moment came when I encountered the book Stoner, by John Williams. I never would have sought it out on my own, but for some reason my father sent it to me sometime during my last year in the Army.
At that time I was stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso, running out the clock on my contract with Uncle Sam, whose lease on my weary soul was about to expire. I was also trying to become a writer, and if Stephen King’s old quip about cashing a check for a story makes one talented, I guess I was also talented. Or at least talented enough to pay for a cab ride or stuff a sizeable tip into a stripper’s G-string. During that last fateful year of my time in the Army, first year of my literary career (if you can call it that), I had developed a bit of a strip club habit that threatened to spiral out of control into a full-blown addiction. But that’s a story for another day, or frankly one that doesn’t even need telling.
Each Friday after final formation, I’d fall out, hail a cab, and go to a hotel, where I would proceed to write a short story. I’d polish up the short story on Saturday, maybe send it out Saturday night, and then head back to base and my barracks to get ready for the next week as a regular Joe in an air defense artillery battalion.
Of course during those weekends at the La Quinta hotel, I’d have to pause to eat (usually at the Village Inn) and sleep, and I’d also do some reading in my downtime. Mostly I read Philip Dick, Joe Haldeman, or maybe some Gary Philips if I was in the mood for something pulpy rather than a mind-bending bout of SF.
Out of respect to my father though, and with some trepidation, I started Stoner.
How false it all seemed, the most cliched and depressing grist for a literary writer too respectable to tell a story with plot, action, and all of those other base elements that go into making something actually entertaining. Yes, Stoner was that dread and musty artifact of that most rarified of the literary classes: a campus novel.
What’s the old Haldeman quote? “Bad books on writing tell you to ‘WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW’, a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”
William Stoner is a young man who goes to college at the University of Missouri in order to study agriculture. At some point during his undergrad years he discovers Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73. Reading about bare tree branches trembling in the cold gives young Stoner a sort of epiphany, and he decides to get his MA in English instead of returning back to the family farm to make stuff grow.
At this point I thought I had an idea how the novel would unfold. Stoner’s changing of his major would be a source of tension between him and his salty old yeoman planter of a father. He’d meet a young coed who’d eventually become a henpecking wife whose scolding or cold indifference would send him running into the arms of another young coed when he himself was no longer so young, and so on and yada-yada.
Here’s the thing, though. Most of that didn’t happen. Instead the focus of the book tightened to become about Stoner’s quiet faith in the ostensibly humble life he had chosen for himself. There are interdepartmental intrigues with dishonest and conniving profs, and students whose ambition and mendacity are far more well-honed than their creative faculties or passion for poetry. There are major historical events that sweep through the larger world, but merely cast their shadows over the university, resulting in manpower shortages on the homefront that makes Stoner’s path through the professional ranks perhaps a bit easier than it otherwise might have been. But Stoner doesn’t politic well and so a sinecure or even a well-earned cushy seat remains well out of reach.
And, yes, there is tension between Stoner and his wife, especially as concerns the rearing of their daughter, but the novel remains centered on the vault of the man’s unbroken mind, where his faith in the words is never destroyed.
The book makes its case for the moral rectitude of Stoner’s position without a bunch of loud or obvious melodramatic scenes. Most of what Stoner thinks remains just that, thoughts unuttered but nurtured until his convictions become nigh-religious. His refusal to be swept up in the massive, epoch-changing events of his time (the Great War, the Great Depression, the Bombing of Pearl Harbour) causes the seemingly minor events of his life to assume a grandeur such minor victories deserve, but which we rarely if ever afford them.
“War,” as Thomas Mann once observed, “is the coward’s evasion of the problems of peace.” I might not have believed that before I joined the Army and went to Iraq, but I certainly believed it afterwards. War, as bad as it is, divides one’s life into easily separable “before” and “after” periods, unburdening it of the complexities that unbroken continuity brings to life as most people live it: the unrelieved pressures of work, home, work, the cultivating of relationships, the repairing of them when they’re damaged, the acceptance of their state as irreparable when we recognize that they can’t be mended. All of this is hard to deal with, complicated, messy. War is undoubtedly messy (debriding a wound takes forever) but it’s simple and straightforward and it is something that by its very intense nature confers a meaning on a life, even if that meaning is cliched, and frankly at root a lie.
Stoner, as Steven Almond pointed out in his fine study of the work, is about genuine bravery as it is quietly exercised, rather than as it is commonly construed and loudly proclaimed.
There’s something about the pacing and quality of Stoner that made it immensely readable. It was by no means a page-turner in the traditional sense, and yet the way the author controlled the unfolding of time, dilating a moment between Stoner and a student here, contracting a season or the duration of a World War there, made it feel as if the reader were being given a peek into the mechanism of time as it is actually viewed from the outside, by a deistic god or whatever great timekeeper exists beyond the Veil of Maya. Imagine an elder being (less eldritch than one of those in Lovecraft’s bestiary) letting us view a human through the lens of deep time and you’re in the neighborhood of the strange and frankly miraculous feeling the book evokes. As someone once said of the Stanley Kubrick film, Barry Lyndon, it captures the shape of a life, not with a plodding dogged Dickensian determination. It’s not in the tradition of epics that take us from someone’s childhood to old age, but rather uses the fine-honed eye of a miniaturist or a jeweler who knows exactly where to look and what to overlook. Not only is it an engrossing, quick read; it is actually a fairly short novel, which makes the wealth of its content all the more remarkable.
Reading Stoner I felt like the boy in Michael Ende’s The Never-Ending Story (or maybe it was just the movie version), who kept shaking his head as he read deeper into the tale of Atreyu and discovered that the young and intrepid hero was aware of the boy reading of his adventures. That’s impossible.
It should have been impossible: a book about a guy who starts agricultural school, who switches his major upon reading the Bard, and then proceeds to spend his life teaching, waging some kind of internal and silent battle against the forces of the world which seem to take scant notice of him and his humble doings.
I think I read the whole book that weekend at the hotel, never once understanding exactly what trick or strange twist of magic made it so readable when I had expected to chuck it down after a few pages, politely evading any questions my father might ask about its contents, should our twice-monthly phone conversations stray toward the book he’d gifted me.
I doubt I got any writing done that weekend at the hotel, but I know that, had I written rather than reading Stoner, it would have been a much poorer use of my time.
He breezes through Faulkner and Hemingway, finding himself a bit stumped by the former but counting himself an acolyte of the latter (at first at least; Bukowski always went back and forth with Hemingway). He encounters the works of John Dos Passos, and pronounces them not great, but good enough, which is about right. At one point he gets his hopes up after finding a book with the title Bow Down to Wood and Stone, but he soon realizes that the content cannot live up to the title.
Then he discovers D.H. Lawrence. It’s a story about a pianist who’s slowly losing his mind. How false it all seemed at first, Hank muses. But as he reads on, he realizes that the tale is a very worthy one indeed.
I think we’ve all had a similar experience. There’s a book or a writer whose work we may look at askance, as perhaps a bit precious or pretentious, or just boring, and yet we start the work, however reluctantly, only to discover that it is in fact damn good.
My moment came when I encountered the book Stoner, by John Williams. I never would have sought it out on my own, but for some reason my father sent it to me sometime during my last year in the Army.
At that time I was stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso, running out the clock on my contract with Uncle Sam, whose lease on my weary soul was about to expire. I was also trying to become a writer, and if Stephen King’s old quip about cashing a check for a story makes one talented, I guess I was also talented. Or at least talented enough to pay for a cab ride or stuff a sizeable tip into a stripper’s G-string. During that last fateful year of my time in the Army, first year of my literary career (if you can call it that), I had developed a bit of a strip club habit that threatened to spiral out of control into a full-blown addiction. But that’s a story for another day, or frankly one that doesn’t even need telling.
Each Friday after final formation, I’d fall out, hail a cab, and go to a hotel, where I would proceed to write a short story. I’d polish up the short story on Saturday, maybe send it out Saturday night, and then head back to base and my barracks to get ready for the next week as a regular Joe in an air defense artillery battalion.
Of course during those weekends at the La Quinta hotel, I’d have to pause to eat (usually at the Village Inn) and sleep, and I’d also do some reading in my downtime. Mostly I read Philip Dick, Joe Haldeman, or maybe some Gary Philips if I was in the mood for something pulpy rather than a mind-bending bout of SF.
Out of respect to my father though, and with some trepidation, I started Stoner.
How false it all seemed, the most cliched and depressing grist for a literary writer too respectable to tell a story with plot, action, and all of those other base elements that go into making something actually entertaining. Yes, Stoner was that dread and musty artifact of that most rarified of the literary classes: a campus novel.
What’s the old Haldeman quote? “Bad books on writing tell you to ‘WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW’, a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”
William Stoner is a young man who goes to college at the University of Missouri in order to study agriculture. At some point during his undergrad years he discovers Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73. Reading about bare tree branches trembling in the cold gives young Stoner a sort of epiphany, and he decides to get his MA in English instead of returning back to the family farm to make stuff grow.
At this point I thought I had an idea how the novel would unfold. Stoner’s changing of his major would be a source of tension between him and his salty old yeoman planter of a father. He’d meet a young coed who’d eventually become a henpecking wife whose scolding or cold indifference would send him running into the arms of another young coed when he himself was no longer so young, and so on and yada-yada.
Here’s the thing, though. Most of that didn’t happen. Instead the focus of the book tightened to become about Stoner’s quiet faith in the ostensibly humble life he had chosen for himself. There are interdepartmental intrigues with dishonest and conniving profs, and students whose ambition and mendacity are far more well-honed than their creative faculties or passion for poetry. There are major historical events that sweep through the larger world, but merely cast their shadows over the university, resulting in manpower shortages on the homefront that makes Stoner’s path through the professional ranks perhaps a bit easier than it otherwise might have been. But Stoner doesn’t politic well and so a sinecure or even a well-earned cushy seat remains well out of reach.
And, yes, there is tension between Stoner and his wife, especially as concerns the rearing of their daughter, but the novel remains centered on the vault of the man’s unbroken mind, where his faith in the words is never destroyed.
The book makes its case for the moral rectitude of Stoner’s position without a bunch of loud or obvious melodramatic scenes. Most of what Stoner thinks remains just that, thoughts unuttered but nurtured until his convictions become nigh-religious. His refusal to be swept up in the massive, epoch-changing events of his time (the Great War, the Great Depression, the Bombing of Pearl Harbour) causes the seemingly minor events of his life to assume a grandeur such minor victories deserve, but which we rarely if ever afford them.
“War,” as Thomas Mann once observed, “is the coward’s evasion of the problems of peace.” I might not have believed that before I joined the Army and went to Iraq, but I certainly believed it afterwards. War, as bad as it is, divides one’s life into easily separable “before” and “after” periods, unburdening it of the complexities that unbroken continuity brings to life as most people live it: the unrelieved pressures of work, home, work, the cultivating of relationships, the repairing of them when they’re damaged, the acceptance of their state as irreparable when we recognize that they can’t be mended. All of this is hard to deal with, complicated, messy. War is undoubtedly messy (debriding a wound takes forever) but it’s simple and straightforward and it is something that by its very intense nature confers a meaning on a life, even if that meaning is cliched, and frankly at root a lie.
Stoner, as Steven Almond pointed out in his fine study of the work, is about genuine bravery as it is quietly exercised, rather than as it is commonly construed and loudly proclaimed.
There’s something about the pacing and quality of Stoner that made it immensely readable. It was by no means a page-turner in the traditional sense, and yet the way the author controlled the unfolding of time, dilating a moment between Stoner and a student here, contracting a season or the duration of a World War there, made it feel as if the reader were being given a peek into the mechanism of time as it is actually viewed from the outside, by a deistic god or whatever great timekeeper exists beyond the Veil of Maya. Imagine an elder being (less eldritch than one of those in Lovecraft’s bestiary) letting us view a human through the lens of deep time and you’re in the neighborhood of the strange and frankly miraculous feeling the book evokes. As someone once said of the Stanley Kubrick film, Barry Lyndon, it captures the shape of a life, not with a plodding dogged Dickensian determination. It’s not in the tradition of epics that take us from someone’s childhood to old age, but rather uses the fine-honed eye of a miniaturist or a jeweler who knows exactly where to look and what to overlook. Not only is it an engrossing, quick read; it is actually a fairly short novel, which makes the wealth of its content all the more remarkable.
Reading Stoner I felt like the boy in Michael Ende’s The Never-Ending Story (or maybe it was just the movie version), who kept shaking his head as he read deeper into the tale of Atreyu and discovered that the young and intrepid hero was aware of the boy reading of his adventures. That’s impossible.
It should have been impossible: a book about a guy who starts agricultural school, who switches his major upon reading the Bard, and then proceeds to spend his life teaching, waging some kind of internal and silent battle against the forces of the world which seem to take scant notice of him and his humble doings.
I think I read the whole book that weekend at the hotel, never once understanding exactly what trick or strange twist of magic made it so readable when I had expected to chuck it down after a few pages, politely evading any questions my father might ask about its contents, should our twice-monthly phone conversations stray toward the book he’d gifted me.
I doubt I got any writing done that weekend at the hotel, but I know that, had I written rather than reading Stoner, it would have been a much poorer use of my time.
War is the Cowardly Evasion of the Problems of Peace
“War is the cowardly evasion of the problems of peace.” I can’t find the quote online in the original German, but it’s attributed to the German writer Thomas Mann. Most probably it was excerpted from his Gedanken im Kriege (Thoughts in Wars would be a direct translation). It’s a quote that’s come back to me time and again through the years.
I suppose one’s first reading of the quote would be to view it as antiwar, but I’m not quite sure that gets at the heart of what Mann was saying. War sucks, sure, but inherent in Mann’s words is the idea that peace is even harder. Peace comes with its own burdens, which, believe it or not, make war a kind of psychic relief from the complexity and nuance that some people find excruciating.
There’s some Bukowski story I read a million years ago that’s relevant here. Buk’s alter ego Chinaski is sitting in a bar (or maybe a bus terminal, I frankly don’t remember) and some hippy kids sidle up to him. One of the hippies, wearing a grimy army surplus jacket, asks Hank his opinion of war. To which Hank characteristically responds: “When you to the grocery store, that’s a war. When you get into a cab, that’s a war.” Melodramatic? Maybe, but I think he’s right that ultimately everything is a war. He even had a poetry collection titled War all the Time.
I can’t remember exactly what the hell I was thinking when I joined the Army. It was only a little more than a decade ago but it might as well be ancient history, lost to the mists of time. All I know is that at the time I walked into that recruiter’s office, I was feeling pretty desperate. I was a classic failure to launch, a wannabe writer in his mid-twenties living at home with his mother, gradually growing weirder and more pathetic by the day. For a couple years there, I worked as a pizza deliveryman, but I didn’t enjoy having my car pelted with rocks by kids in the public housing complexes. The deductible could only cover so much, and only so many times. Also, the idea of potentially losing my life over a Meat Lover’s Supreme and a two-liter of Mountain Dew seemed ignominious, even for a creature as pathetic as I.
Eventually I wisely quit that job. After that, I supported myself (to the extent I could) by taking whatever jobs I could land through a temp service. For a time there I had a decent gig doing background checks for a firm called General Information Services. I sat in my swivel chair, squinting under the fluorescence, sneaking looks at the legs of the women around me, crossed and sheathed in black or tan stockings. Alas, that gig didn’t last, and after an excruciating stint working at the Otis Spunkmeyer muffin factory, I decided I would rather risk dying than continue living this way.
I’d threatened to join the army a couple of times, but my mom had always dismissed my threats as hollow. One day, though, I drove the recruiter’s office where it was located in the center of a suburban shopping plaza with a brick and stucco facade. They must not have been getting much traffic, as I literally had to rouse the buck sergeant behind his desk from a deep sleep.
Later that night I went home and told my mother what I had done. She promptly called my father, which shows the gravity of the situation, as he hated her and she hated him. I don’t remember much about what they said (I was already locked in my mind, lost in my own zone at this point). I just recall her shouting, “Yeah, but I didn’t think he’d actually do it!”
I was in terrible shape physically, but somehow forced my soft and flabby body through the whole nine weeks of basic training at Fort Benning. I did not emerge from the experience “Born again hard,” as Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann observed of Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. But on the plus side, neither did I put a round into my DI’s chest and then fire one through the back of my skull, either, a la Pyle.
The military simplified everything. In the real world, I had felt constantly stressed about money. I had felt pathetic and poor and out of place, weak and neurotic and sexless, a loser in a society that only tolerated winners. Delivering pizzas, I felt like a bug with a slimy carapace scurrying up to the doorsteps of these stone McMansions filled with happy and prosperous people. I drove my mom’s crappy Aerostar minivan through the suburbs, surrounded by sleek, shining Benzes and big black SUVs (usually with impressive fiberglass speedboats tailed to trailer hitches).
In the army, though, all of my bills were paid, meals were provided, and hierarchy was based on rank alone. And the loss of outward identity (down to shearing off my hair) let me develop a stronger interior life. I no longer felt insecure. I was too faceless, anonymous to pretend to paranoia. Who the hell would bother looking at me here? How could anything be personal where the drill sergeants barked at literally everyone, berating them with profanity-laced insults?
Back in the real world, I had felt the constant ache of failure that went with not having a girlfriend. I’d definitely had no prospects for marriage, or the social or emotional skills to develop anything like a meaningful relationship. Every day after work, whether at Pizza Hut or Otis Spunkmeyer, I would smoke weed in my bedroom and masturbate to porn. I was wrapping myself deeper into a cocoon of seeming pleasure. But it was really just deadening everything inside me, including all ambition and the pain, which I should have recognized was unavoidable. It would have been healthier to face it and deal with the hurt and fear.
But in the Army I was only around other young men, most of them horndogged up most of the time, just as sexually immature and crass as me. That said, a few already had spouses, real responsibilities, and even kids.
Again, everything in the army was simpler, if not always easier.
But I’m speaking only of the regimentation of Army life, not war itself.
Eventually I got orders for my first duty station (Darmstadt, Germany) and from there deployed to Iraq (though we started out in Kuwait).
The experience definitely changed me, made me more aware not just of my own mortality, but my humanity, as well as my heretofore undiscovered sense of shame. I was ashamed of what we were doing, and what I had done. The war had woken me up from the slightly unsettling dream that was my previous life, unpleasant but too undramatic to merit the title of nightmare.
Is that easier, though, than living on the homefront in supposed peace?
I think so.
It probably requires greater fortitude to, say, clean toilets at a ballpark after a big game than to man a minigun while hanging out of a Blackhawk helicopter. Staring down at villages of mud huts, relicts of ziggurats, and fields of crops shimmering under a blazing sun at least offers scenic vistas of an ancient land. It definitely beats staring into toilet bowls, even when you factor in that toilet bowls, unlike the fields in Mesopotamia, aren’t seeded with men in burnooses with AK47s.
Back when I was in the service, being a soldier still sort of conferred a certain kind of respect on the person serving. Being a soldier, I didn’t feel quite as alien or out of place in America anymore. I had passed through some membrane, performed some ritual required to psychically bond people across class and culture lines that was once an important aspect of becoming a citizen.
Of course you sensed the cynicism beneath the praise and respect with which we were showered. The whole patriotism industry feted you because it was what big war profiteers like Lockheed and their lobbies and their rent boy politicians wanted. And guys who had the audacity to cite love of country as their reason for joining made sure to get the best sign-on bonuses they could, just like everyone else. But since you were the beneficiary of all this cynicism and you got all this smoke blown up your ass, you didn’t really question it. And naturally you knew that in their hearts of hearts, the Lee Greenwoods with their jingoistic yokel acts and the businesses giving soldiers discounts thought that we were suckers. And they were right.
It takes a very special kind of mark to try to fabricate meaning out of dying for no reason, on behalf of people who deep down really don’t give a shit. Then think about the damage war does to the people in these impoverished countries, the goatherds and farmers growing their bitter crops in the mud. Think about the pain you put your family through, even if you don’t die or get severely injured, just making them worry about you while you’re downrange.
But these are all thoughts I only have in hindsight, that, as most, were minor inklings, registering as mere cricks in the neck at the time.
People would stop you in the airport and thank you for your service, too. Vets from previous wars would shake your hand, treat you with respect. Bearded, hippyish dudes who’d been in Vietnam might saddle up to you for a conversation, or an older man in suspenders might pigeonhole you to talk about war. Combat, of course, was a much more intimate affair in their days. And nothing we did in Iraq could compare with what happened at, say, Khe San, and definitely not at the Battle of the Bulge or Betio.
But again, we were the recipients of love and praise, and whether or not it was misplaced (it was), it felt good and we didn’t question it.
It isn’t just the praise and ego stroke that made being in the Army an alluring and ultimately simplifying illusion, preferable to living in the real world. Nor was it just the wearing of a uniform and feeling the high that comes with surrendering one’s will to that kind of fascistic power.
It’s the way that being in the military breaks one’s life up into easily understood chapters. It gives one’s life a narrative aspect, a B.C. and an A.D. dividing line between the person one once was and the one they have become. These things happen in normal, nonmilitary life (I assume) in a more nuanced and complex way. Eventually you go from a boy to man, or a girl to a woman, without the delusions or pageantry.
I remember coming home on one of my first leaves and feeling a great sense of pressure constricting around my chest like a band. And I remember another band fastening itself around my skull as if I were trying to take a nap in a house with a slow but persistent gas leak.
I could feel that the people around me had been going about their lives—dating, working, struggling, in an unpraised but frankly admirable kind of silence. They bore the banality, the repetition, everything I had fled when I joined the army. They labored in a fog unrelieved by action, combat, awards, changes of locale imposed by whoever at Brigade level (or even higher) cut orders. To not be shuffled around the world, to wake up and face the same people every day—coworkers, spouse, children—seemed like a great burden.
On leave I would go to coffeeshops or to libraries or to the pharmacy, and I would just steal glances at the people working there. I’d marvel at their bravery, their ability to endure this nondescript, unbroken continuity of time lived in the same place, basically the same day, relived again and again.
Their identities and lives were organic, not something handed to them by someone else. Their time was not bisected and parceled, sliced and shuffled by some clerk at Operations deciding whether to send them to Fort Bliss or Fort Huachuca. Sure they had to work eight or even twelve hours a day, but when the day was done their time and mind was theirs. In the Army, even when we shammed and hid from work, our lives and bodies and souls belonged to the institution. We could mock it and make jokes, develop codes to express our disgust (FTA supposedly meant “Fun Times Always,” but everyone knew what it really meant). But we had exchanged something we could never get back, something that everyone else still had.
A lot of the civilians I stared at on leave seemed happy. And many of those people no doubt were happy. But I think they were brave, too.
A lot braver than me.
I think, ultimately, that Thomas Mann was right about war being a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. Assuming, that is, he actually said it.
I suppose one’s first reading of the quote would be to view it as antiwar, but I’m not quite sure that gets at the heart of what Mann was saying. War sucks, sure, but inherent in Mann’s words is the idea that peace is even harder. Peace comes with its own burdens, which, believe it or not, make war a kind of psychic relief from the complexity and nuance that some people find excruciating.
There’s some Bukowski story I read a million years ago that’s relevant here. Buk’s alter ego Chinaski is sitting in a bar (or maybe a bus terminal, I frankly don’t remember) and some hippy kids sidle up to him. One of the hippies, wearing a grimy army surplus jacket, asks Hank his opinion of war. To which Hank characteristically responds: “When you to the grocery store, that’s a war. When you get into a cab, that’s a war.” Melodramatic? Maybe, but I think he’s right that ultimately everything is a war. He even had a poetry collection titled War all the Time.
I can’t remember exactly what the hell I was thinking when I joined the Army. It was only a little more than a decade ago but it might as well be ancient history, lost to the mists of time. All I know is that at the time I walked into that recruiter’s office, I was feeling pretty desperate. I was a classic failure to launch, a wannabe writer in his mid-twenties living at home with his mother, gradually growing weirder and more pathetic by the day. For a couple years there, I worked as a pizza deliveryman, but I didn’t enjoy having my car pelted with rocks by kids in the public housing complexes. The deductible could only cover so much, and only so many times. Also, the idea of potentially losing my life over a Meat Lover’s Supreme and a two-liter of Mountain Dew seemed ignominious, even for a creature as pathetic as I.
Eventually I wisely quit that job. After that, I supported myself (to the extent I could) by taking whatever jobs I could land through a temp service. For a time there I had a decent gig doing background checks for a firm called General Information Services. I sat in my swivel chair, squinting under the fluorescence, sneaking looks at the legs of the women around me, crossed and sheathed in black or tan stockings. Alas, that gig didn’t last, and after an excruciating stint working at the Otis Spunkmeyer muffin factory, I decided I would rather risk dying than continue living this way.
I’d threatened to join the army a couple of times, but my mom had always dismissed my threats as hollow. One day, though, I drove the recruiter’s office where it was located in the center of a suburban shopping plaza with a brick and stucco facade. They must not have been getting much traffic, as I literally had to rouse the buck sergeant behind his desk from a deep sleep.
Later that night I went home and told my mother what I had done. She promptly called my father, which shows the gravity of the situation, as he hated her and she hated him. I don’t remember much about what they said (I was already locked in my mind, lost in my own zone at this point). I just recall her shouting, “Yeah, but I didn’t think he’d actually do it!”
I was in terrible shape physically, but somehow forced my soft and flabby body through the whole nine weeks of basic training at Fort Benning. I did not emerge from the experience “Born again hard,” as Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann observed of Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. But on the plus side, neither did I put a round into my DI’s chest and then fire one through the back of my skull, either, a la Pyle.
The military simplified everything. In the real world, I had felt constantly stressed about money. I had felt pathetic and poor and out of place, weak and neurotic and sexless, a loser in a society that only tolerated winners. Delivering pizzas, I felt like a bug with a slimy carapace scurrying up to the doorsteps of these stone McMansions filled with happy and prosperous people. I drove my mom’s crappy Aerostar minivan through the suburbs, surrounded by sleek, shining Benzes and big black SUVs (usually with impressive fiberglass speedboats tailed to trailer hitches).
In the army, though, all of my bills were paid, meals were provided, and hierarchy was based on rank alone. And the loss of outward identity (down to shearing off my hair) let me develop a stronger interior life. I no longer felt insecure. I was too faceless, anonymous to pretend to paranoia. Who the hell would bother looking at me here? How could anything be personal where the drill sergeants barked at literally everyone, berating them with profanity-laced insults?
Back in the real world, I had felt the constant ache of failure that went with not having a girlfriend. I’d definitely had no prospects for marriage, or the social or emotional skills to develop anything like a meaningful relationship. Every day after work, whether at Pizza Hut or Otis Spunkmeyer, I would smoke weed in my bedroom and masturbate to porn. I was wrapping myself deeper into a cocoon of seeming pleasure. But it was really just deadening everything inside me, including all ambition and the pain, which I should have recognized was unavoidable. It would have been healthier to face it and deal with the hurt and fear.
But in the Army I was only around other young men, most of them horndogged up most of the time, just as sexually immature and crass as me. That said, a few already had spouses, real responsibilities, and even kids.
Again, everything in the army was simpler, if not always easier.
But I’m speaking only of the regimentation of Army life, not war itself.
Eventually I got orders for my first duty station (Darmstadt, Germany) and from there deployed to Iraq (though we started out in Kuwait).
The experience definitely changed me, made me more aware not just of my own mortality, but my humanity, as well as my heretofore undiscovered sense of shame. I was ashamed of what we were doing, and what I had done. The war had woken me up from the slightly unsettling dream that was my previous life, unpleasant but too undramatic to merit the title of nightmare.
Is that easier, though, than living on the homefront in supposed peace?
I think so.
It probably requires greater fortitude to, say, clean toilets at a ballpark after a big game than to man a minigun while hanging out of a Blackhawk helicopter. Staring down at villages of mud huts, relicts of ziggurats, and fields of crops shimmering under a blazing sun at least offers scenic vistas of an ancient land. It definitely beats staring into toilet bowls, even when you factor in that toilet bowls, unlike the fields in Mesopotamia, aren’t seeded with men in burnooses with AK47s.
Back when I was in the service, being a soldier still sort of conferred a certain kind of respect on the person serving. Being a soldier, I didn’t feel quite as alien or out of place in America anymore. I had passed through some membrane, performed some ritual required to psychically bond people across class and culture lines that was once an important aspect of becoming a citizen.
Of course you sensed the cynicism beneath the praise and respect with which we were showered. The whole patriotism industry feted you because it was what big war profiteers like Lockheed and their lobbies and their rent boy politicians wanted. And guys who had the audacity to cite love of country as their reason for joining made sure to get the best sign-on bonuses they could, just like everyone else. But since you were the beneficiary of all this cynicism and you got all this smoke blown up your ass, you didn’t really question it. And naturally you knew that in their hearts of hearts, the Lee Greenwoods with their jingoistic yokel acts and the businesses giving soldiers discounts thought that we were suckers. And they were right.
It takes a very special kind of mark to try to fabricate meaning out of dying for no reason, on behalf of people who deep down really don’t give a shit. Then think about the damage war does to the people in these impoverished countries, the goatherds and farmers growing their bitter crops in the mud. Think about the pain you put your family through, even if you don’t die or get severely injured, just making them worry about you while you’re downrange.
But these are all thoughts I only have in hindsight, that, as most, were minor inklings, registering as mere cricks in the neck at the time.
People would stop you in the airport and thank you for your service, too. Vets from previous wars would shake your hand, treat you with respect. Bearded, hippyish dudes who’d been in Vietnam might saddle up to you for a conversation, or an older man in suspenders might pigeonhole you to talk about war. Combat, of course, was a much more intimate affair in their days. And nothing we did in Iraq could compare with what happened at, say, Khe San, and definitely not at the Battle of the Bulge or Betio.
But again, we were the recipients of love and praise, and whether or not it was misplaced (it was), it felt good and we didn’t question it.
It isn’t just the praise and ego stroke that made being in the Army an alluring and ultimately simplifying illusion, preferable to living in the real world. Nor was it just the wearing of a uniform and feeling the high that comes with surrendering one’s will to that kind of fascistic power.
It’s the way that being in the military breaks one’s life up into easily understood chapters. It gives one’s life a narrative aspect, a B.C. and an A.D. dividing line between the person one once was and the one they have become. These things happen in normal, nonmilitary life (I assume) in a more nuanced and complex way. Eventually you go from a boy to man, or a girl to a woman, without the delusions or pageantry.
I remember coming home on one of my first leaves and feeling a great sense of pressure constricting around my chest like a band. And I remember another band fastening itself around my skull as if I were trying to take a nap in a house with a slow but persistent gas leak.
I could feel that the people around me had been going about their lives—dating, working, struggling, in an unpraised but frankly admirable kind of silence. They bore the banality, the repetition, everything I had fled when I joined the army. They labored in a fog unrelieved by action, combat, awards, changes of locale imposed by whoever at Brigade level (or even higher) cut orders. To not be shuffled around the world, to wake up and face the same people every day—coworkers, spouse, children—seemed like a great burden.
On leave I would go to coffeeshops or to libraries or to the pharmacy, and I would just steal glances at the people working there. I’d marvel at their bravery, their ability to endure this nondescript, unbroken continuity of time lived in the same place, basically the same day, relived again and again.
Their identities and lives were organic, not something handed to them by someone else. Their time was not bisected and parceled, sliced and shuffled by some clerk at Operations deciding whether to send them to Fort Bliss or Fort Huachuca. Sure they had to work eight or even twelve hours a day, but when the day was done their time and mind was theirs. In the Army, even when we shammed and hid from work, our lives and bodies and souls belonged to the institution. We could mock it and make jokes, develop codes to express our disgust (FTA supposedly meant “Fun Times Always,” but everyone knew what it really meant). But we had exchanged something we could never get back, something that everyone else still had.
A lot of the civilians I stared at on leave seemed happy. And many of those people no doubt were happy. But I think they were brave, too.
A lot braver than me.
I think, ultimately, that Thomas Mann was right about war being a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. Assuming, that is, he actually said it.
