Loitering: New and Collected Essays

by Charles D'Ambrosio

I notice every journalist is wearing a particularly nice raincoat, with team colors. Then I notice other things, like the cameras, the monitors, they too are covered in specially made rain bonnets. And a couple of people are walking around with umbrellas the size of parachutes. All these dry people are from another tribe. This kind of hard-hitting, high-level journalism obviously requires neat hair, which partly explains all the first-rate rain gear, and that equipment can’t be cheap, not like three-by-five cards. One of the TV reporters is wearing navy-blue pants and a red coat, an outfit that resembles the unsexed uniform of a reservations clerk for a national hotel chain. Another TV guy is practicing a look of grave concern in his monitor, a look that, live at least, seems woefully constipated. It’s weird to watch what amounts oxymoronically to a rehearsal of urgent news, especially without sound, emptied of content, because this pantomime of immediacy is patently fake, a charade, a fine-tuning, not of emotions, but the reenacted look of emotions. It’s method acting or something. In a curious twist, I realize I always knew TV news seemed full of shit, but I never knew it was, in fact, full of shit. Previously I thought the TV news had a certain endemic phoniness because all the reporters were sorority girls who’d majored in communications, but it never occurred to me that the fakery was intentional. These people do this on purpose, and realizing that stunned me, because...

I’m not going to mention the name of the big-league TV journalist I finally talked to because later in the morning, in between taping the twenty-five seconds of filler that feeds into the national show, he tried on a couple of occasions to pick up secretaries who’d come out on the sidewalk to gawk. Every time I turned around he was chatting up another secretary, then he’d rush in front of the camera and morph into the face of a slightly panicked and alarmed person nevertheless manfully maintaining heroic control while reporting nearby horrors. To look at his on-camera face you’d think Godzilla was eating lawyers off the Winslow ferry. It was clear to me that sometime in the past the putative luster of his job had landed him in bed with bystanders.

When the bums ask what’s happening the question sounds yearningly metaphysical or like a child stirring from a dream. Their need to know, at any rate, is tonally different than that of a big-league journalist. And still we’ve got beaucoup reporters doing their insane pantomime of sincerity in the parking lot. It’s like the Hitler tryouts in that Mel Brooks movie The Producers. None of the TV people have budged from their encampment in the parking lot, and I realize they’re operating under the strictest criterion of relevance—every camera is focused in the same direction—and that their sense of the narrative is, generally, in sync with the police, that is, their reason for being here will end in a roughly coincident moment.

I really want to know who the gunman is but certain elements of life in what’s essentially an SRO conspire against the ready flow of this kind of information. In the main you’re talking about people at the tail end of a trajectory, people who aren’t any longer carrying around much of the baggage by which we’re known to each other—family, jobs, schools, common aspirations, sundry memberships and affiliations, political grievances, etc.—and so asking for anything in the way of remotely biographical material brings scarcely more than vagaries. Dennis, for instance, insisted several times that the Bad Guy, L., was nice, a nice guy—but I don’t get what kind of very elastic notion of “nice” he’s talking about, given what’s going on. And while of course everyone, even the most wrecked and destitute among us, has a unique personal history, the problematic nature of trying to gather information about people who’ve severed too many basic ties is this—that in a sense we truly have history only insofar as it’s shared, and too much uniqueness really leads away from individuality to anonymity, the great sea of the forgotten. And because the Bad Guy is busy and I can’t talk to him, I’ve got to rely on people who might reasonably be expected to know him, and in fact don’t. I suppose it could also be said we’re known to the extent that we’re dull and orbital about our life, that what’s quotidian about us is more easily shared than the exuberances and passions that push us out of the predic...

One of Freud’s disciples, Ferenczi I believe, developed what was known as the thalassal theory, in which a man, in coitus, is supposedly trying via vigorous humping to shake loose or snap off his penis and send it forth in a sort of ambassadorial role, northward into the woman’s womb, thus returning anadromously to his natal home.

It’s a sophistic argument, in fact, but Paul Watson’s not much of a logician; he’s mostly a misanthrope and a sentimentalist (how often those things go together!), sweet on whales and sick about what he calls “base-virtued” humans, and his rock-ribbed stance re: the hunt is all about the lone whale, soulful and solitary, perhaps a poet, singing songs, echolocating down the coast, intelligent, gentle, sentient, loving, unfairly ambuscaded (by heathens!) while going about its business—pretty much the otherworldly and animistic whale of my boyhood.

people in the environmental movement, like holy folks everywhere, don’t make real keen ironists. I can pretty well guess that these sort of merit-badge Indians aren’t entirely or enthusiastically embraced by your average enrolled tribal member, especially as they listen to Watson float pseudo-arguments that asperse the character of the Makah and accuse them of being liars, frauds, cheats, racketeers, colluders, and, of all things, fake Indians. Abstract love is the nosy neighbor of abstract hate; they see right into each other’s windows and they always agree on everything. And neither one of them really tests disinterestedness, the ability to make tragic choices between things of equal worthiness and legitimacy—which to my mind explains why so much writing and discussion about whales tends toward melodrama, where right and wrong are always clear, where only one of the terms is justified. “The opposition are not nice guys,” Captain Watson has written. Nice? That seems a simpy word for a big old jackpot of a problem, a lazy and sinister trope suggesting that to oppose (Paul Watson) is to lack niceness, by definition. “I have no time for the arguments of tradition,” Watson, the honorary Indian, has written. And further: “I have no wish to understand them. I have no wish to argue the pros and cons of whaling.” He says, “The tradition of whalekind is of far more value to me.” And this tradition comprises what? “They [the whales] grace the azure blue with a majestic intelligence...

The acronymic groups—PAWS, AFA, SSCS, PETA, etc.—who’ve organized opposition to the Makah hunt don’t go for killing sea mammals under any circumstances. That’s really their stance, and, boiled long enough, the irreducible core of their case. This intractability has lent a sullen and futile feel to the debate, a mudslinging, lie-swapping, smug, accusational tone that, rather than clearing the air, actually just fouls and debases anybody and everybody who joins in. These people have made up their minds; there’s never been any room to maneuver. They’re into whales, and not real fond of humans. In fact they seem to favor any of God’s creatures over the malignant cancer of humanity. Their misanthropy takes the metaphoric exuberances of the late odd brilliant crank Edward Abbey literally, which is always scary. I mean, from Christ to Nietzsche we know it’s one thing when the rich voice of a solitary radical shouts out and it’s another thing when the echo of the ochlocratic chorus comes roaring back in agreement. Suddenly a certain kind of valence is gone. Abbey was a philosopher, wit, pisser, and prose stylist, and one of the first qualities sacrificed by his adherents is the anarchic soul of a man who claimed the Peace Corps was a “piece of insolence,” “an act of cultural arrogance.” The kind of man who could litter and make the act seem deductive, radical, and exemplary. The kind of man who strongly advocated population control and yet fathered four children himself—but by fiv...

Think on it—you take the biggest body of water in the world, and it’s the edge of winter, it’s maybe lonely and horrifying and you’re melancholic in some affective-disordered way and all around you there’s an extra-heavy-duty cobalt rain battering down, and there at your feet on the beach you’ve got a pile of old bones and a couple of tree branches and somehow, looking at them, and looking out to sea, somebody comes up with the idea of sticking a thirty-ton whale? It stuns the mind, it blasts and levels the imagination.

Communion we worship the salmon because we eat salmon —Sherman Alexie

I figure it took thousands of years to make Irish and Italians of my grandparents; America undid that in a scant generation. We’ve come to nothing—so soon?

I wish I had some children that were around going, “Daddy, Daddy,” so I could provide a wise impartial answer or at least pour a glass of milk for them. Who needs Pascal—“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then”—since even without a philosophical assist my uselessness appalls me.

He’d sent my sister a letter smeared with his blood. He’d tried to sell his mentally-ill son a cemetery plot. He’d shown up at several of my readings wearing a Chicago Cubs hat dangling with fishing lures, a crown of thorns fashioned from spinners and spoons and treble-hooked crankbaits, and then he’d just stood there, thirty feet away, staring and saying nothing while I signed books, in a grotesque martyrdom that I somehow understood.

Above all, the real is arbitrary. For to be a realist (in art or in life) is to acknowledge that all things might be other than they are. That there is no design, no intention, no aesthetic or moral or teleological imprimatur but, rather, the equivalent of Darwin’s great vision of a blind, purposeless, ceaseless evolutionary process that yields no “products”—only temporary strategies against extinction. —JOYCE CAROL OATES, “They All Just Went Away”

An abiding American assumption, mentally apocalyptic, says that somehow the wrongs in history stem from our ignorance; once we’re enlightened, we’ll be free of our errant ways and history itself will stop and we’ll come to rest in a return to Eden.

Among the patrons you found a deep well of faith, a certain gut feel for what Catholic theologians would call “analogical thinking,” whereby you come to know the reality of God through signs. Gambling was how you negotiated the tricky path between situation and symbol. Winning was always an answer to a question.

Bodily fear just isn’t rejectable, whereas moral and religious ideas, Pentecostal or Catholic, right or left, are better handled by hermeneutics than horror, and anyway should operate under different rules of suasion. That conversion is sometimes accomplished brutally and by subjection ought to be seen as aberrant and a sad lapse, a drop in the level of discourse. But hazing, with its disorientation, its deprivations, is fairly nondenominational. You don’t need to evangelize in order to persuade. You confuse the senses, you tilt a floor, you dead-end a few of the dark corridors, you create prolonged silences, you flash white lights bright enough to blind, you blast noise so loudly stout men faint, you suffuse a room with the sulfurous reek of rotten eggs, you set up a gallery of yucky tactile experiences, you tease out a taste of eternity in a coffin with a claustrophobic stay in a closet, you do that and I really doubt the morality of abortion or homosexuality, for instance, would be half as worrisome, at least not for the immediate duration.

Horror resembles humor in its leveling capacity, although the anesthetic quality of comedy, its coldness toward bodily pain, is replaced in a moment of fear by a more complete and nearby peril. If comedy is somehow about the body as an unfeeling object, then fear is the surge of feeling into a body threatened with nonbeing. A haunted house poses ontological problems, and thus ought to place courage in jeopardy—it ought to reach down deep into the Platonic dualism between physical and spiritual courage and blast it apart.

too often Hell House made the mistake of locating fear elsewhere, referring to moral arguments and social issues outside its walls and, in doing so, letting the drama of the endangered body drain away. Like it or not, a haunted house is a sensual affair, more like sex than theology, and won’t survive too much abstract organization or the damping down of strangeness and intuition, of otherness or the mystery of skin or whatever. Hell House didn’t obliterate distinctions and categories but erected them, the better to separate the saints from the sinners, at the expense of good fun. That a tour of hell would end in a call to prayer indicates the problem—if it had been more elemental and troubling, I would have come out the other end in need of water or air or sedatives.

Each room held its corresponding sin, the exact nature of which was often elusive. Loosely, you saw drugs plus sex, abortion plus sex, a slumber party plus sex plus murder, a cult sacrifice plus drugs plus murder, porno plus promiscuity plus bastardy plus sodomy plus suicide, and so on—there was a tendency to pile on and the impression was that you couldn’t sin casually or recreationally but had to be hardcore and committed.

You felt nothing would change, that progress was gone and destiny mislaid; what the future held was repetition and sameness. There was a malignancy in this world, but it wasn’t a problem you could blame on the devil. In Hell House it wasn’t sin so much as sadness and despair and heartbreak and misfortune and cluelessness and just every stupid human possibility that was answered with damnation. People pathetically in need of help were shot. And so as we wandered from room to room, every narrative ended in death, every story came to the same conclusion, until it felt as if a flawed and fallen world were finally being cleaned up and organized and made perfect. Mistakes were made, and the mistaken were efficiently condemned, leaving behind empty squalid rooms in which it was impossible to imagine a tender unseen moment or a kind word or a shared silence that wasn’t murderous. It’s perhaps needless to say, but the people in these skits lacked a living texture, were crude-minded and ugly in spirit and, in general, dismissively drawn. Hell House resembled the smutty mood of a sixties exploitation film more than religion, a spectacle of types, lewd and overblown, exaggerated to the point of pornography with its parade of stock characters. But Hell House was quite specifically somebody’s vision of others. Whoever created Hell House seemed to despise people, their freedom, the varied possibility of them. Whoever it was could imagine only concluded lives, lives summed up by a single ...

his showy, protesting intelligence masks an insecurity, a feeling, never entirely put to rest, that he doesn’t belong in the room. He talked about attending AI conferences with his home-built robots and being “respected by these people who, normally, without a PhD, you shouldn’t even be in the same room [with].” “Shouldn’t” is a curious choice—why not the more neutral “couldn’t” or “wouldn’t”?—in that the word subtly switches the speaker: it doesn’t actually belong to Santos but to the voice of an absent, unnamed, scolding authority. Here, then, is the central theme of paradise—banishment and exile.

The idea is that the chickens, confined to a run, will peck and till the earth, kill the weeds, eat the insects, shit and thereby fertilize the soil, but just before I arrived they were depredated by raccoons (dramatizing a flaw in the curious harmonic stasis of Eden that I could never resolve in childhood: What would everybody eat, I’d wonder, if they couldn’t eat each other?)

Fourier believed the world would eventually contain thirty-seven million poets equal to Homer, thirty-seven million mathematicians equal to Newton, and thirty-seven million dramatists equal to Molière—although, he admitted, these were only “approximate estimates.” He believed there were 810 psychological types and organized his phalanstères to include two of each. He believed in nearly complete sexual liberation—sadism, masochism, sodomy, homosexuality, pederasty, bestiality, fetishism, and sex between close relatives—and he also believed that salt would one day leech from the seas and that those seas would in turn become oceans of lemonade.

In America, looking back, we don’t really arrive at history so much as we enter romance, some place of eternal beginnings, but here, even in the bucolic Russian countryside, the devastations of war are marked by dead prisoners, shelters, stone defilades and, deep in the woods, what I took to be bomb craters—suspiciously odd declivities in an otherwise smoothly rolling or flat landscape. Here, there are ruins, and then there are things saved from ruin, things that escape, and the difference is emphatically alive and real, even if you can’t calculate why by using the ungovernable terms of historical destiny.

Time and a lot of touching have turned the interior of the orphanage funky, with a lived-in feel that now will likely never go away—it’s there in the worn wood, the marble steps chipped or cracked so long ago that the original sharp, jagged wounds have since been smoothed and cicatrized like a weal by countless passing feet. The paint on the railings is layers thick, the broken windows are patched but not replaced, the tiles that peel up remain missing. Things inside were so worn and rubbed and handled by living beings that the interior had lost a lot of its rectangularity, and was replaced, instead, by a roundedness, a kind of inner burrowed shape arrived at by working the materials from within, like the nest of a wren. I found this fascinating, and loved discovering touches of it, combing the place for evidence of the tide of children, the softening action of them against the hard surfaces and correct angles favored by the original architects. Door-sills were scooped like shells by scuffling kids, and the jambs, at various heights, had lost their edge as lingering children held them, dirtied them, and picked at them until they had to be repainted, over the years, with many quick coats of high-gloss enamel. The stone floors held smooth undulations where the kids habitually walked, wearing troughs that you could feel by skimming your feet across them, and that you could see, in certain lights, as a rippling reflection. Heavily trafficked areas of the orphanage received the...

I’d traveled halfway around the world with a dollar in my left pocket that was more talisman or trinket than anything else. I’d been boldly approached by a lovely Russian hooker in the lobby of the Moscow Hotel, a beautiful blonde with Heidi braids and endearing broken English and a Russian-novel name, Katarina, all very tempting, but that transaction, like everything else, was beyond my means. She refused to believe I was broke. We argued about it! She wanted to know how much money I made “every month in America.” I felt like we were trying to negotiate a swap of cultural clichés. I was too embarrassed to tell her that basically my mother and sister and brother-in-law had been supporting me until my new mood stabilizers kicked in and I could once again think clearly about my life, i.e., get out of bed in the morning.

Teach: Without this we’re just savage shitheads in the wilderness. Don: Yeah. Teach: Sitting around some vicious campfire. —DAVID MAMET, American Buffalo

I’m a little wary of prelapsarian schemes in much the same way I’m leery of conspiracy theories, both of which seem only to describe the limitations, like Hamlet’s nutshell, of the holder’s mind. You don’t really want to crash down the whole universe just to satisfy your situational unease or your incapacity to see the whole picture, do you? You don’t want a life based on your failure to understand life, right?

I’d never read J. D. Salinger or John Knowles, both staples of the high school curriculum, because somehow out of the always ripening ambient culture I’d picked up a whiff of the East Coast, of the upper crust and hoity-toity and, ipso facto, at least for me, a kind of irrelevance, irrelevance tinged with a defensive counter-snobbery that’s so characteristic of the West.

(In Seymour: An Introduction, Salinger writes of the psychiatric profession: “They’re a peerage of tin ears. With such faulty equipment, with those ears, how can anyone possibly trace the pain, by sound and quality alone, back to its source? With such wretched hearing equipment, the best, I think, that can be detected, and perhaps verified, is a few stray, thin overtones—hardly even counterpoint—coming from a troubled childhood or a disordered libido.”)

It should be obvious by now that I don’t see The Catcher in the Rye as a coming-of-age story, especially not in the dismissive or pejorative sense; to me it’s no more about the anxious life of an average teenager than Huckleberry Finn is. The feelings Salinger’s trying to pinpoint don’t really have much to do with the fluctuating moods of a representative teen; adolescence isn’t the source of Holden’s outsized feelings. Possibly because I came to the book as an adult, for me it’s never been about the typical, but rather the exceptional; it’s not meant to illustrate a phase of life we all pass through and share but instead to explore a disturbing and extreme loss of identity that leaves this one boy absolutely alone. And the depth of that loss comes from the fact that it’s not directly his, but his family’s.

what makes Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters nearly unreadable for me—too much snotty, all-knowing prep-school smugness in the prose, a vague assumption of values, a social vulgarity found in the rich and privileged that’s just as revolting, and similar to, the arrogant know-nothingism of the various middle classes, upper to lower. Open the story to almost any page and you can hear the sound in the overpunctuated prose.

Here is a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer that I treasure for capturing one side of how I feel. It gets me closer to acceptance and understanding than anything else. It’s from his Letters and Papers from Prison, and was written, I think, at a time when he knew he would die in the concentration camp, so he speaks from inside the heart of his death. Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; He doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary, He keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.

And so over here, Henri Bergson’s essay on the comic suggests another side, a possible path for me in my ongoing attempt to understand life by reading books: I would point out . . . the absence of feeling which usually accompanies laughter. . . . Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. . . . In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter. Put in a slightly different way, it was Charlie Chaplin, I think, who said that life up close is a tragedy, but from a distance it’s a comedy. Somebody slipping on a banana peel is still funny, unless it’s you.

Mass was ending but the responsorial chant, the intonation of every line, was recognizable to me from rhythms I had learned as a child. At early weekday masses it’s always Eleanor Rigby and her devout sisters, the secret sufferers, the wounded, the inconsolable, women who show up in their hastily tied bonnets and tattered housecoats, each alone, scattered through the nave, and yet that morning their thin muffled voices held so near to the note and so exactly to those rising and falling rhythms I knew by heart that joining in with them was like letting someone else do my breathing for a while. I had not felt so close to anyone in ages.

Pretty much the opposite of Letourneau’s hesitance was the insta-commentary offered up by local broadcasters. After the sentencing one Bonnie Hart from KIRO or KOMO—I forget which and don’t believe it really matters—quickly convened a kind of radio Sanhedrin. As far as I know Hart’s only real qualification for commenting on Letourneau is that she holds a job that requires her to say something re: something most every day of the week. Day after day I suppose she’s paid to be fluent in politics, cookbooks, fresh vegetables, fads, open or closed batting stances, menopause, studded tires, whatever. In other words, her authority is mostly occupational, though it seems she’s possessed of omniscience. Her opinions weren’t suasive enough to win me over, not by any of the common measures I developed as a Catholic kid avidly listening for lame moments in hundreds of homilies. No elegance or force of thought, no wit, no keen insight, no revelatory moments that broadened perspectives, that enlivened feelings, no resonance, no self-scrutiny, no risk, no compassion or sympathy or anything close to eloquence. By the strident and aggressive tenor of the talk you couldn’t tell if this Bonnie Hart entertained any doubt, then or ever, she was so careful not to cross herself, so careful to arrange her moral outrage along the lines of least resistance. In a sense the whole program was about Hart rendering the round world flat and endorsing lopsidedness, halfness. This seemed a crude and retrog...

have to admit to large amounts of unprofessional rock-butt and boredom, which I was able to alleviate by occasionally shifting in my seat and closing my eyes and listening to the sounds of people’s voices. But with my eyes closed I made a discovery. I heard the prosecuting attorney speak in two distinct voices. She used a sarcastic, dismissive voice while grilling Dr. Moore and another, really irritating voice, hard to describe, but sort of storybook sorrowful, the kind of voice you dip down into to read a tale’s sad parts to a child, when she was giving her summation. Now I come from a pretty much jail-free family and none of us are lawyers and so my courtroom experience, before that morning, was nil. And attorneys I’ve seen in TV shows need to convince me primarily as actors and only secondarily as lawyers—the TV case, in other words, is decided on good or bad drama, not law—so nothing had prepared me for the bad acting, the transparent, awful acting, on the part of the real-life prosecutor, Lisa Johnson. Especially during the summation, her voice tried to offer the aural image of concern, of gravity, of direness, but it was nowhere near the real thing itself. Her voice carried no genuine conviction and came off as sentimental, attempting to force on me, the listener, a feeling that was not there, that wasn’t earned. And while I understand she’s a lawyer, not an actor, still, that day, she played two different characters in court and then a third outside, using three ver...

When Richard Brautigan shot himself in Bolinas in 1984, his life was given a loosely emblematic look that had very little to say about the literary value of his books. By then his obituary had been stalking him for some time: he was the broken and alcoholic hippie, the cultural figure of somewhat transient interest, the writer whose reputation rested on the drugged sensibilities of his contemporaries. It was as if the era itself had created a vogue for Brautigan no different from paisley shirts or Frye boots; he was treated as an embarrassing fashion. There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is a peculiar sort of shame. People who read Brautigan typically pick him up in high school or college, at a time when the lyrics to rock songs are still compelling, and a similar sensibility—youthful, I suppose—has always energized a reading of, for example, Trout Fishing in America. I don’t really understand why this should be so, but both enthusiasms are hard to sustain past the age of thirty.

The right tone and rhetorical distance are lazily arrived at and almost second nature for someone raised in media culture. For example: Before he shot himself, Brautigan set the lights in his house to run on timers so that it would appear to the outside world as though he were still alive. One imagines him in those numb last hours plugging in lamps and, in a final fiction, re-creating the habits of the living, trying as he set the dials to remember what those rhythms were like. He was a depressive and something of a recluse and apparently his little gimmick worked. His neighbors left him alone. When he was found, weeks later, the manuscript he’d been editing, his last, penciled in blue, was partly eaten by maggots.

What’s essential to Brautigan’s life and work had so little to do with the sixties. The hippie California he moved to and became famous in was an outlandish trope for the future and a new society, but Brautigan was a solitary and his sentences were broken from the beginning and never found the sort of healing expansion Carver eventually arrived at. Carver’s sentences discovered generosity and grew longer late in his career; Brautigan’s didn’t.

Whereas prison, well, what is it, really? A shortage of space compensated for by an excess of time. —Joseph Brodsky