Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

He looks to be about the same age as I am—leaving the decadent comfort of thirty and reluctantly knocking on the grizzled front door of forty.

“You look pretty drunk,” Renny says. “Drunk’s a moving target,” I reply. “Just a state of being, like water, or steam, or financial solvency. To be drunk is simply to define a moment. And since every moment has already passed by the time we’re able to actually register its existence, can a person ever truly be drunk?

“Are you just repeating what I say?” Renny asks, his eyes squinted in suspicion. “Scoff!” I say. I literally say the word. “Of course not. I’m not the type of person to just repeat what someone else says with something this powerful and tragic.”

that doesn’t change the fact that it’s impossible to care about everyone. So you pick your battles. You limit how much you invest into the world and into people. It’s a type of emotional triage.”

“If nobody can see me,” The Kid starts, trying to ignore what’s going on in the bushes, “then what difference does it make what I do? Especially when I’m only hurting myself. That’s what people say about candy, right? They say that it’s bad for you and that when you eat a lot of it you’re only hurting yourself.

And now, here I am, breaking this kid’s world just like mine got broken. The irony is enough to fill me to the gills and beyond. So my stomach does all it can: it vomits up all of the chocolate, all the Twizzlers, all the lynched dreams, the redlined hopes, the color-blind promises that got Stopped-and-Frisked, the brutal, melanin-driven epigenetically inherited Americana that nobody—not even me—wants to talk about . . . it all comes erupting out of me faster than the red glare of those famous rockets bursting in air. And all the while, the poor Kid watches, powerless to do anything about it. It’s all he can do not to get covered in my bile.

Yeah, the South is America’s longest-running crime scene. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. But the thing is, if you’re born into a meat grinder, you grow up around the gears, so eventually you don’t even see them anymore. You just see the beauty of the sausage. Maybe that’s why, in spite of everything I know about it, I’ve always loved the South.

There ain’t nothing good here.” “It can’t be all bad,” I say. “No,” he says, glancing up at the same sky. “It’s not all bad. But that’s not the same as it being good.

And I know what you’re thinking: Aren’t you a writer? Ain’t that your whole raison d’être? That’s a French word I learned from a Nigerian dame. I don’t speak French but I speak existence. I speak fear. I speak insecurity. I speak it all when it’s some unknown hour of the night and I’m flying through the skies and doing my best to figure out why some woman I met is stuck in my head at a time in my life when the thing in my head keeps spilling out into the real world.

Pain makes people selfish. We only have so much so I can’t take yours too. I can’t carry your water, Kid.” “I’m not asking you to carry it,” The Kid says. “I just want you to see it. I just want you to see it the way it really is. Just stop ignoring it and look at it. Stop pretending I don’t exist. No more jokes. No more looking the other way. No avoidance. See me!”

Laugh all you want, but I think learning to love yourself in a country where you’re told that you’re a plague on the economy, that you’re nothing but a prisoner in the making, that your life can be taken away from you at any moment and there’s nothing you can do about it—learning to love yourself in the middle of all that? Hell, that’s a goddamn miracle.

“Have you noticed that, throughout all of this, you still haven’t used his name? His real name, I mean. Or your own, for that matter.” “Maybe next time.” “Why?” “Names would just make it true. All of it. Not just true, but real. I’m not sure we can let it be real. I’m not sure we could face that reality.”