Gangelhoff is one of perhaps a dozen characters (along with Ruckert, who has a cameo here) who appears again and again over the more than 30 years I’ve been writing in my black Moleskines. At this point in my archaeological excursion—49 books reread, tabbed, and in the process of being indexed; 87 books still to be revisited—it’s apparent that the Gangelhoff novel is one more book I’ll never finish.

Gangelhoff was a grotesque, an archetype of the loathsome idler, leech, and glutton. If you’ve ever spent any time around universities you’re likely familiar with the basic model. I’ve no doubt, in fact, that you’d also find such characters in the student lounges of any junior college.

Oafs who live with mama, we used to call them. Career students and know-it-alls of ambiguous middle age, the sort who hung around long enough that they’d eventually exhausted both the university catalog (and the faculty). At which point they would continue to haunt the commons areas, libraries, lounges, and neighborhood coffee shops, where you’d find them smoking pipes and hunched, glowering, by themselves over chessboards, or sprawled at a table that was heaped with papers and comic books and science fiction novels—always science fiction and ‘fantasy’ for these fellows; it was virtually unfailing.

They were reliably obsessive about Star Trek and other such dated diversions for stunted pre-adolescents everywhere. Dodgy hygiene, as a general rule. You didn’t like to think about what their bedrooms looked like. Not a shred of ambition, nothing apparent on the romance front, and you couldn’t imagine anything happening along those lines. Ever.

The Gangelhoffs of the world were always a nuisance and a drain, but then the internet came along and made them truly dangerous.

Laziness is never plain and simple. It’s always, in fact, very complicated, and has even more etiologies than industry and ambition.

Gangelhoff, for instance, was a paragon of a particular type of laziness, a very pure form, marked by blithe indolence, complete lack of shame or ambition, and utter self-delusion regarding the way in which he was perceived by the rest of the world. He seemed to feel, in a sense, that he had somehow earned his indolence through intellectual superiority. In this, of course, in every part of that assumption, he was dead wrong. He could not be more wrong, yet he nonetheless clearly believed that he was possessed of an impoverished dignity, that he was, in effect, a member of some exalted aristocracy of the lazy, and so regarded labor of any sort as beneath him.

Gangelhoff was one of those insufferable buffoons who would impose on anyone at all without the slightest awareness or concern that he was doing so. He’d follow you out of a coffee shop, yammering all the while, proceed to shoehorn himself into the passenger seat of your car, and then ask if you wouldn’t mind giving him a lift somewhere.

En route to that somewhere, he’d ask you to make a “quick stop” at a convenience store, where he would, with utter shamelessness, hit you up for five, ten, or even twenty dollars (if he was feeling especially shameless). And because Gangelhoff would always by virtue of his monstrousness put you in a helplessly defensive position that would very quickly morph into despair, you would go along with almost anything on the always false assumption that you were somehow hastening the end of his aggravations.

So, at any rate, you would stop wherever he asked, offer him whatever sum he requested, and then sit trembling with silent rage when he eventually emerged from the convenience store with a package of cheap cigars, a quart of 3.2 beer, and a box of powdered donuts.

The monster Gangelhoff, king of the sloths, Jeopardy fascist, blurting out the answers to questions before Alex Trebek had even finished asking them. Gangelhoff, loud as he was huge and baggy, baying arrogantly from Ruckert’s couch, belittling even the dim-witted contestants of Wheel of Fortune. A man who would set his oven timer as he raced, muttering, through the crossword puzzle in the New York Times, and who would, having memorized every episode of Star Trek, speak the lines along with the characters as he sat for hours watching reruns on Ruckert’s television.

What, Ruckert wondered, was wrong with him that such an odious and insufferable character as Gangelhoff could so routinely impose on his hospitality? Granted, there was a (regrettably) long history between them, but could he—would he ever—actually consider Gangelhoff a friend? An honest answer to either part of that question was more difficult to come by all the time. Or, rather, involved more humiliation than Ruckert could possibly bear.

Gangelhoff was, after all, the only one of Ruckert’s every-dwindling circle of friends and old acquaintances (there had been no new acquaintances in many years) who had paid him a visit since he had moved to the country. Never mind, of course, that there had been no invitation. Or that there had been frequent visits and increasingly prolonged stays. Gangelhoff required no invitation and provided little warning, or no warning at all.

As he had been all the years Ruckert had known him, Gangelhoff was a man who simply—or not so simply—appeared, who barged in, and who immediately made himself at home and blotted out everything and everyone around him.

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Death was bored with human beings and their confounding behavior and rituals, their lip service to life and its preciousness. How could he take them seriously after all the centuries they’d been messing up his once orderly responsibilities?

Once upon a time he’d had a pretty cut-and-dried job description. It wasn’t pleasant work—it never had been, and he’d never taken any joy in it—and it wasn’t in his nature to be creative. Occasionally, he’d get messed up in some large-scale collaborations, but he’d always found these bigger, messier projects lamentable. Yet when all was said and done (and that, really, was his bailiwick), he was the closer, plain and simple. But he didn’t like slamming doors; he’d much rather close them as quietly as possible on the way out and go on his way.

There was a time when he hadn’t been ashamed of his job. It was, after all, honest and necessary work. All the same, he’d always preferred operating under the cover of darkness, and favored black garments, not to strike terror, but rather to move as inconspicuously as possible. Once upon a time his job had simply been to take people when their time had come. Even he had never understood exactly how this business was determined, but he didn’t ask questions. Which isn’t to say that he’d never participated in some things that struck him as tragic and even unjust.

God, how he despised the term “Grim Reaper.” He knew exactly who had first coined the term, and it took every ounce of his mandated stoic restraint not to experience a spasm of pleasure when he’d finally received the order to take the man’s life. It didn’t mean diddly at that point, of course; the term already had wide currency, and would hang around forever. He understood, though, that a bad reputation came with the territory. There was nothing he could do about that, but he despised the melodramatic terror with which he was regarded. It was as if people didn’t understand that he had a claim on them from the instant they drew their first breaths.

For heaven’s sake, the world had been burying his handiwork since the beginning of time. You’d think they could make their peace with the idea. Some of them, of course, could, and he had the utmost respect for such people, and exercised the most careful restraint in stopping their hearts. At the same time, he had little patience for those who flirted with and courted him, the reckless, heedless, unhappy, and hysterical.

Still, left to his own devices, he was never rash or vengeful, and was nothing if not a fellow who followed orders. There were, though, throughout history—and with increasing frequency—eruptions of violent madness, and he resented his role as glum subcontractor in these mass incursions into his province.

Free will was a terrible mistake. He couldn’t do anything about it, but it made his business an increasingly impossible mess. Whenever humans took the job into their own hands, they inevitably made horrific work of it, and often on a vast and untidy scale. His presence, though, was required to seal the deal, such as it was, to make things official, but he seriously resented being dispatched to far-flung places at all hours of the day and night to be little more than a helpless and reluctant officiant.

He needed help—it had become too much work for one man—but things were what they were; it was too late, and he knew no help would be forthcoming. On some level, however, humans had become his bungling collaborators; they were apparently more and more willing to do his dirty work, and even to take on the sorts of unimaginable jobs that he himself would have been reluctant to perform. He had long prided himself on not being a mess maker, but it was too late for that as well. Every day of late he was up to his elbows in gore, whether he liked it or not.

The hardest pill to swallow was that he had been almost completely usurped; the work still had his name on it, and when the stench faded that was his signature on the bottom line, but much of it no longer truly reflected his craft. It had become a shit job, that was all there was to it. He had become an indifferent practitioner of something he had once dispatched with genuine skill, dignity, and a certain pride.

Whenever he had time—and he seldom anymore had time—he would return to his sprawling penthouse on the top floor of a moldering skyscraper in a forlorn neighborhood in Frankfurt, where he would sit in the dark listening to Mahler or Thelonious Monk—he’d taken them both, of course—and petition ceaselessly and with growing desperation for retirement. And night after night he found himself wrestling with a powerful and recent revelation: He was filled with loathing for human beings, and looked forward to killing them all.

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When you want to look at a person very closely sometimes you have to examine a third thing together; sometimes that is the best way to do it. This is what comes to mind when the word love is spoken, looking at a third thing.

—Heather McGowan, The Duchess of Nothing

This is all in my head. If you’re looking for real life—whatever that might be—you’ll have to go somewhere else.

There is nothing real here. These are just the words that roll down my fingers in the middle of the night. Some of them have been dictated to me by a hamburger with a pipe in its mouth. A hamburger with a mouth, and with a nose and beady eyes. A hamburger with a little blue hat on its head. A hamburger with legs and feet and hands. A hamburger that talks to me when there’s no one else around who will talk to me.

It—he?—has a voice like a cartoon bullfrog, and this is a hamburger that has lived a long life, much of it (all of it, actually, that I’m aware of) spent standing in one place with its arms extended in an empty embrace.

This is also a hamburger that has known—or so I infer from its occasional long-winded monologues—sorrow, loneliness, and despair the equal of my own. It can also occasionally be foul-mouthed and petulant, and despises much of the music I play, music which it nonetheless cannot avoid, paralyzed as it has been for so many years directly next to one of my stereo speakers. Captain Beefheart or Pere Ubu, or even Husker Du, can drive the hamburger to fits of fevered lamentations. More than once it has pitched itself from the shelf to the floor, only to discover that, tragically, it is immortal, and condemned to spend the rest of its life with me.

He had this hackneyed phrase stuck in his head—adrift in a sea of confusion—that he couldn’t seem to get rid of. Was that really the best he could do in describing how he felt?

Yes, at least for the time being, he was forced to admit that it was. He’d spent hours trying to banish those words from his head and could succeed for stretches in thinking about other things, things that had nothing to do with his present situation, but he could always sense the phrase still loitering in the shadows and waiting to pounce the instant he let down his guard.

This business had been going on for several months. He’d lost track, frankly. All night the phrase would scroll again and again across the LED screen in his brain, and he would feel as if he were literally adrift in a sea of confusion, his bed a foundering boat or a rolling raft.

He started to have episodes of what he could only call seasickness, during which he would often vomit into a pail he kept beside his bed. He became addicted to Dramamine, which, taken in such immoderate doses, would induce in him powerful hallucinations.

The drug did succeed in somewhat quelling his seasickness, but replaced it with terrifying visions of violent storms and hurricanes in which he would be tossed from his boat into the endless darkness of the ocean.

One night, after thrashing around in the usual fashion for a time, he felt himself sinking into a darker and darker place. In those moments he felt surprisingly calm for the first time in months.

The coroner’s report listed the cause of death as drowning.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. I understand that much of this material falls somewhere in the territory of the inscrutable. Some have gone so far as to call it impenetrable. I’m certainly willing to acknowledge that the bulk of what I have to say at this point is more or less pure, private static—babble in the common parlance. Depending how charitable you’re willing to be, I’m either talking off the top of my head or talking out of my ass.

I don’t suppose I can even claim that there’s any method to this madness. I have long felt compelled to ramble, and I am admittedly an obsessive fellow. It’s not so much that I have a tendency to get carried away as that I feel as if I am literally being carried away. I am swept along by forces I can neither control nor understand.

Many nights the words are driven from me by a bellowing old fellow who once upon a time rode a swift horse; these days he does his work from one of those noisy all-terrain vehicles. If this man—I guess he is some sort of cowboy or shepherd—was not ceaselessly vigilant, the words would overwhelm my head and I’ve no doubt I would eventually choke to death on them. I guess you could say, then, that my shepherd (or cowboy) is something of a mixed blessing.

I have had plenty of occasion to wonder how the hell I acquired so much confusion. I, who abhor confusion and complication more than anything, have nonetheless allowed complication and confusion to overrun the quiet, orderly routines I’ve always believed would keep me sane.

I am being ruled almost entirely by irrationality, and I can no longer sort out what I want or trust my urges. One minute I will believe anything is possible; the next, it all seems utterly impossible. I apparently have forgotten how to feed myself, and go days without eating. I routinely get lost in my own neighborhood, and any attempt to venture out into the city is inevitably an adventure in extreme disorientation.

My mind is always elsewhere. I couldn’t tell you where it is, other than elsewhere. I’d say I’m having a breakdown, or have had a breakdown, if the whole thing didn’t strike me as so fascinating, and if I wasn’t so keenly aware of the vivid strangeness of it all. Sometimes it almost strikes me as magical, as if I’ve slipped completely free of the material world and become a befuddled wraith.

More and more often I laugh myself to sleep at the wonder of it all.

The summer is fading. The moon is easing down to sleep in the trees, even as the stars step further back into the country of heaven. They look like small villages in the North Sea, glimpsed from an airplane at night.

A fox, interloper here in the middle of a city filled with the swelling cicada chorus singing August’s requiem, does its solitary, long-legged Mardi Gras dance down the middle of the empty street and I sit on my porch and watch with wonder.

These are precious days in the middle of a man’s life. If you’re going to find yourself at a crossroads, it’s nice to still have options, to have the sense that, no matter where you might find yourself, the road is still forking off in so many directions, into so many other possible futures.

Take your time, the night says. It’s all yours, even if there’s less of it now than there was last August. Take your sweet fucking time.

It’s frankly hard to imagine, on a lovely evening like this, that there’s a single thing out there to be afraid of, or that all your failures and disappointments add up to anything but a series of minor follies. It’s all hard to imagine, really: This life, this world, and the future stretching out there in the darkness clear to the horizons and out into deepest space beyond even the most distant stars.

There was no effort of flight; the effort lay in being powerlessly and violently and almost senselessly conveyed—a fragment of existence in the drive of the storm.

—Sylvia Townsend Warner, Kingdoms of Elfin

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HE COMES OUT of the dusk beneath the cottonwoods along the river, graceless, almost crouched. Bent forward at the waist, at any rate, a slow, deliberate lurch he’s developed over time so as not to fall over so often. Obscured beneath the black hood of his sweatshirt, his pink, baby-fat face can be startling when he emerges from the shadows. Sometimes like this he scares even me, and I can only imagine what his appearance must do to the teenagers parked along the boat access in the dark, drinking, fucking, smoking pot.

“Bads,” he says to me. Bats. “Nicklode?” Michelob. I’m drinking Rainier, but all beer to this boy is Michelob, from the television, and he wants one. I give him a beer, and though he’s not actually a boy, his mother doesn’t approve of his drinking any more than mine.

“Bats, eh?” I ask. “You sure they weren’t swallows?”

He shakes his head. “No, bads,” he says. “Fitch. Buds.” Fish. Bugs.

I realize that I’m mostly a convenience for his mother, the latest in a string of live-ins who’ll look after the boy in exchange for a place to live and the semblance of a relationship. I don’t mind, though, and I like to think that I do a pretty good job. I like the boy, who is 25 years old and as easygoing as they come. At the moment he’s hunched over the open window of the car door.

“Hop in,” I tell him. “Sit with me. Good country music on the radio.”

He grins, strikes a pose. “Bwoow slade shoes,” he sings, strumming an imaginary guitar, making like Elvis. He joins me in the car and offers a joke, sly.

“Knlock, knlock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Chlicken glabey.” Chicken Gravy.

“Chicken gravy who?”

“Chlicken glabey!” he shouts, and falls into me, laughing.

It’s an old joke of his, but I laugh anyway. It’s become genuinely funny by this time. Jokes to him are just funny words. He digs for a beef stick in the glove box and slurps his beer noisily.

His mother ties flies at Dan Bailey’s in Livingston, which is where I’d met her once upon a time, and she’s gone over to Bozeman for a few days to visit her hospitalized father. My back is fucked up, and I haven’t worked in four months, which is something of a sore spot with the boy’s mother, and getting sorer all the time. But, like I say, I like the arrangement with the boy just fine. We take a lot of drives together and he helps me out around the place; he’s a pretty good worker, and good company. We park out along the Yellowstone River most nights when the weather’s decent, and listen to country music or blues on the car’s tape deck. I smoke, drink beer, and try to think, and he likes to explore in the dark.

“What do you want to do tonight?” I ask him. “You wanna go into town and play the poker machines at the Mint?”

“Fiyo,” he says. Fire. The area just northwest of Yellowstone is burning up and he’s been fascinated by it on the television. I’ve been promising for days to take him into Yellowstone to see the fire.

“It’s too damn late,” I tell him, although it’s actually still relatively early.

“No,” he says, which comes out as a protracted moan. “Moh bedder.” More better.

It’s a cool early evening in late August, a big rusty moon already making its way up into the haze.

“You can’t tell your mother,” I say, and he assumes his cool, solemn expression to convey his understanding that a serious point is being made. I hold him there, just for fun, and he waits patiently for my okay. When he gets it he explodes.

“Yehwo!” he screams. Yes. He rubs his hands together, the thick, chapped skin rasping like sandpaper.

I grew up in Belgrade, but I’ve fished and camped in the park since I was a teenager. I’ve avoided this fire as I have all fires in the park. Fire is the element with which I have always been least comfortable. And I have seen the television footage of this one, the shots from overhead of the fire moving through the treetops, swirling, noisy, crashing fire lines and oozing over creek beds, crawling lazy and beautiful across ranch valleys. I have noticed as well the uneasy discrepancies between this terrifying footage and the cool-headed official assurances of the Park Service. All roads are open. Business as usual.

We drive down East River Road alongside the deep, layered shadows of the Absarokas, sprinklers working through the night out in the valley, cattle and horses out there grazing in the mist. We manage to pick up a radio station out of Alberta, Elmore James roaring through “Dust My Broom.” We stop off at a little roadside rest near Pray so the boy can take a piss. A white marble statue of the Virgin is there, a small red light glowing in her forehead, facing the empty highway with open arms.

In Gardiner we stop off at the K-Bar for beer. It’s a quiet night in the town, dogs lounging on the sidewalks, the shops and bars on the street above the park entrance mostly closed. There are a few tourists quietly strolling the streets, pausing here and there to check out the maps of the fire’s progress that are posted in the store windows. The scuttlebutt on the street is that evacuation is imminent in Silver Gate. It is a clear night in Gardiner, the only visible evidence of the fires a thick wall of smoke that’s completely overtaken the sky to the east.

“Any problems between Mammoth and Cooke City?” I ask the woman ranger at the north entrance.

“All roads are still open,” she says, administrative exhaustion and tension evident in her voice and abrupt manner.

We drive down through Mammoth, tourists mingling there with the elk herd on the lawn. Beyond Mammoth we drive into the settling haze and light, falling ash. In the Lamar Valley I pull off at a roadside fishing access near the fork of the Lamar River and Soda Butte creek. We get out of the car and just stand there for a minute, silent. There is a little gravel lip there just above the fork. I can hear the water moving below us, see where it reverses itself and heads off across the valley.

There are elk out there, standing stoic and shrouded in the haze. Ash continues to fall, cool, fine flakes tumbling like early snow. Occasional live cinders smolder tiny holes in my jacket. Army trucks trundle by on the road, headlights strobing ineffectual in the settling smoke. Helicopters drop toward the encampment in Cooke City.

The boy is quiet, circling, a fine, tight smile stretched across his face. He squints off across the valley, peering into the darkness that is settling now, the shifting opacity, confused by the muffled drone of the helicopters moving someplace above us.

“This is prehistoric,” I say to the boy. Towards Cooke City and Silver Gate you can now see the orange glow of the fire bleeding out of the general haze above the ridge. I have never been in the place when it was so eerily silent. The only close sound is the almost imperceptible murmur of the water moving through, and the nasal, labored breathing of the boy.

“Whayoh fiyo?” he asks. Where’s the fire.

“Close,” I tell him. “We’re almost surrounded by it. It’s in the backcountry beyond these ridges on both sides. See the orange there?” I point, and his eyes follow my finger. “That’s the Hellroaring fire. It’s a real big one.”

“Clows?” he asks. Cows.

“Yes,” I say. “There are cows back there. They’re probably moving them. Watering down the ranches.”

“Clows,” he says. “Mleet.” Cows. Meat. He liked these comfortable connections.

“Yes,” I say.

“Fitch?” he asks. Fish.

“Yes,” I tell him. “There are fish here, right here in this creek.”

“No,” he says. “You fitch. Fitching pohr.” Fishing pole.

I go to the car and assemble my fly rod and walk with the boy along the banks and down to a bend where the Soda Butte came crawling out of the long valley. I make a few casts and just let the fly carry downstream, throwing out line and letting it drift. The boy sits down next to a culvert and watches. The ash continues to fall and after a time I notice that the boy has fallen asleep, curled up, wheezing, in the fine gravel alongside the culvert.

I leave the boy sleeping and work my way further upstream, further into the stillness and the scrim of darkness. I become absorbed after a while, and find myself fishing in earnest, desperately juggling flies and peering intently down the rod. I want a hit. I want a fish to take back to the boy. I want to hear him say, “Fitch. Eat.” I want to show him that there are creatures still living in this dark water and things are not as bad as they seem and that I am not afraid of this sinister, creeping thing. I want to tell him, so that he can assure me once more, that this roaring I can feel and hear is not that fire chewing through the mountains, but that it is something inside me, and can be subdued.

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I’m still learning to find my way around Substack, but every day now I see posts from people who, like me, once made a reasonably comfortable living as professional writers—bylined journalists, editors, mid-list novelists, critics—before most of those opportunities were swept away in the tsunami of layoffs, media consolidation, and the folding of newspapers and magazines all over the country. In the world of oligarchs, we’ve learned, ‘belt-tightening’ apparently means going from a 48-inch waist to a 56. Anyway, I increasingly recognize the names of a lot of people I used to read with pleasure in other, higher profile places. It’s sort of sad, but it’s also gratifying to see that most of these people still have interesting and valuable things to say, and persist in saying.

The challenge for me in a post-payroll world is that I am utterly incapable of asking anyone for money, and as a result most of the work I do these days is pro bono. The question of money never even comes up, and I suspect people are onto me. All the same, it’s gratifying work, for the most part, and sometimes hugely so. But I do grow increasingly frustrated by my inability to make money doing the only thing I really know how to do, and by my terror of even raising the subject of money in the context of what is, truly, my only work.

Last night I stumbled upon this entry in my notebooks from 2015, and the origins of that reluctance became crystal clear to me.

I remember eavesdropping on those uncomfortable and often painful telephone conversations. I guess it wasn’t even eavesdropping. Our family had only one phone in those days, and there were only five rooms in our house.

The phone was an ancient rotary desk model, confined to a little table just off the kitchen. There was absolutely no privacy in that house, and no way to have a phone conversation without everybody else in the family listening in. There were of course no answering machines in those days. The phone rang and you either answered it or it just kept ringing until whoever was on the other end of the line gave up.

My mother, as she would say, was dealing with some seriously persistent sons of bitches. There were long stretches during my childhood when no one was allowed to answer the phone, and whenever it rang an electric tension would immediately grip everyone in the house. There wasn’t yet any form of caller I.D., but at some point during those terrifying years we all knew who was calling—a general ‘who,’ but even more terrifying as a result.

My mother would storm into the kitchen from her bedroom and stare at the telephone as if it were something about to explode. Even now I can picture the look on her face, the way she clenched her jaw and the squint of rage that would screw itself down in her eyes. Wherever she was in the house, she would scream, “Don’t answer that phone!”

At some point or another we all learned our lesson.

Looking back, I have no idea if she had any sort of strategy for answering the phone, or what sorts of considerations entered into whether she answered it or let it ring. I know, though, that there were many, many times when the phone would ring for what seemed like minutes at a time, stop briefly, and then ring again.

We all grew up with the deeply ingrained notion that the ringing of a telephone could virtually never be anything but unpleasant, a confrontation, a disturbance of the peace. I’ve never overcome that, even with all the modern advances in telephone technology.

For my mother the ringing telephone represented a perilous lottery with grim odds. The people who called almost always wanted money that she didn’t have, and they would make threats that would paralyze her at the kitchen table for days and weeks at a time.

Even now, more than 40 years later, when I want to recall the sound of my mother’s voice all I have to do is see or hear any variant of the phrase, “You can’t get blood out of a stone.”

I remember a time, perhaps 25 years later, after my dad had the stroke that eventually killed him. He was still in the hospital, and I’d driven down from Minneapolis to keep my mom company at home and on her long drives to and from St. Mary’s hospital in Rochester.

The old house was in a great deal of disarray at that time. All the rooms were crammed from a lifetime of refusing to get rid of anything that had ever cost my parents a single penny of their money.

My dad, I think, had always handled the family’s bills and finances (such as they were), but at this point the dinner table was piled with papers and shoeboxes full of still more papers. All those papers, my mother had explained to me the afternoon of my arrival, were bills, statements, insurance forms, and late payment notices.

Before my dad had gone into the hospital for his last open-heart surgery (his seventh valve replacement, and a failure; he had the stroke in the recovery room and was then the same age I am now), he had apparently sensed that the he was running out of time, and so had hauled all the necessary paperwork from his little desk to the dinner table. He had attempted—too late—to explain to my mother how it all worked (or didn’t work).

That would have been an impossible task for anyone by that time, and I remember sitting in the living room watching movies as my mom sat at that table shuffling through all those piles of papers. She would sit there long after midnight, night after night. Occasionally I’d hear the furious tapping of the calculator keys, or the equally furious scratching of pencil on paper. She was, I knew, attempting some impossible arithmetic.

On the night I’m remembering, she would utter the same basic fragment, an aborted attempt at an actual sentence or statement: “There are some people,” she would say, and her voice would trail off. Or, “There are those who…,” until eventually she settled on, “There are those for whom…,” which she repeated a number of times over perhaps 45 minutes.

She’d already rebuffed all my attempts to help, and I was frustrated with her, but I finally turned and asked, “There are those for whom what?” I noticed she had taken a break from shuffling through the paperwork and was playing a game of Solitaire, laying the cards down on top of the layers of loose papers.

I could tell by her body language and the aggressive way she was slapping down the cards that she was angry. She deserved to be angry. I was angry. We’d both been angry for years. I knew, though, that we weren’t angry with each other, but with the way things were, and I also knew that if I got into it with her we would end up angry with each other.

Still, or yet, I was by this point genuinely curious about what she was trying to say, so I got up from the couch and and went over and sat across the table from her, and once again said, “Mom. There are those for whom what?”

She continued to slap down the cards, but, without ever looking up, she did eventually answer.

“There are those for whom,” she hissed, “all of this is easy. Who never even have to think about this shit, or about people like us. It never costs them a moment’s sleep. Promise me you’ll never be one of those people.”

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Eleven years ago this summer, Kate and I went down to the Ramsey County courthouse in Saint Paul and got married. That chapter of my life—and this chapter of my life—was entirely unexpected. I was accustomed to living alone, and fiercely protective of my solitude and my private rituals and nocturnal routines. But here, still, we are, exactly where I want to be, and my lovely, fierce, funny, and tender-hearted wife has taught me so, so much, all of which can be boiled down to this: Anything, really, is possible.

I wrote these words the day we drove downtown to get our marriage license, and we took this picture—our reflection in a stray lens from a pair of sunglasses—in the parking lot of the courthouse.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
__Wendell Berry, “Manifesto”

In time’s short light, and less than light, we pray
that odds be thus made evens….
—Wendell Berry, “A Marriage Song”

May we be gentle. May we be brave. May we be merciful. May we pay attention, to each other, to the world, and to those on whom we depend, and who depend on us.

May we look closely at the beautiful things and the hard things. May we work together through the challenging and glum and harrowing times, and when we are together may we never feel alone.

May we laugh often, dance often, celebrate often. May we laugh through our tears and laugh until we cry. May we give thanks, for each other and for our undeserved blessings.

May we have good health, and when we are stricken with illness may we get well.

May we share our good fortune, with each other, and with others.

May we endure every long winter and cherish every spring.

May we spend quiet time together, and may we make exultant noise.

May we pick each other up when we fall, carry each other when we are too sick, tired, or weak to go on, and sweep each other along when we are seized by joy.

May we point out to each other the things that alone we would not see or notice.

May we stand up for what we believe, be not afraid to speak the truth, to combat lies and injustice. May our compassion extend beyond our own home, and our own lives.

May we feel at home together, and in the world. And may we make of our love a home, and when we are apart may we look forward to returning home.

May we make of our two stories one more, ours.

May we be tender and passionate, and may our passions be fierce.

May we push each other to be better, to be kinder, to take more risks.

May we dream together, asleep and awake, and when I close my eyes at night may my sweetest dreams be yours.

May our hearts be true, and when we drift into darkness may we call each other back to a better world. May we hold each other tight during the scary parts.

May we see each other clearly, without undue scrutiny, and love what we see.

May we make precious memories together, and cherish those memories when we grow old.

May we hold onto each other for dear life, and know, from our lives together, what dear life means.

And “may we always have each other, and want to.” (Les Murray)

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What do we mean when we say something is revolting? I’ll get up and consult my Oxford Unabridged Dictionary, which is something I used to do at least a half dozen times a week, but probably haven’t done in the last year.

Revolting: Disgusting, shocking, offensive; nauseating (“Revolting cant about the duty of obedience and the wickedness of resistance to law”—Henry Adams).

To revolt, then, would then seem to be an appropriate response to being revolted, or to finding a situation revolting: To rise in repugnance against something. To roll (volutare), to revolve, or to turn. Turn away or turn against.

Also, revolution. Again, to revolve, to revolt.

Unquestionably, we are living in revolting times, yet with few signs of revolting, or revolt, or revolution. In the history of the world, how often has a country endured such revolting inequality and injustice, such wholesale abuses of wealth and power, without rising up in revolt? Everything about our current situation is ripe for revolution, but there are no signs that it could ever happen here—or happen for the right reasons. By ‘right reasons’ I mean an insurrection or acts of righteous sedition instigated by the oppressed, the powerless.

The ‘best’ (most comfortable) truly lack all conviction, the worst are certainly full of something at least resembling passionate intensity, and the poor are truly powerless, and mostly too preoccupied with survival to effectively revolt for their basic human rights and dignity. I wonder if the genuinely revolutionary times in world history were preceded by outbreaks of violent crime motivated by real revolutionary or idealistic intent. And I wonder if the cosplay insurrection of January 6th—all the sound and fury of a real revolution, but motivated by nothing but cartoonish conspiracies—presented such a bad look and met with such pushback from the judiciary that it gave revolution a bad name; if, in other words, the Right has co-opted and sullied the idea of protest and revolt, just as it has co-opted and made embarrassing (to many sane, principled people) the symbol of the flag, the very idea of patriotism, and purported religious faith.

Forty years ago I personally knew hundreds of people who were willing to protest and go to jail for something they believed in, but those sorts of loud, angry protests don’t seem to happen anymore unless a) police kill yet another unarmed Black citizen, or b) a criminal billionaire with a long history of corruption and sexual assault fails to win reelection.

American eruptions are now situational and short-lived, relatively brief responses to provocations, but nobody seems to be able to sustain the level of large, organized protest that can truly shut things down and force the local and national people in power to address systemic abuses and failures. History says that the oppressed and marginalized will inevitably rise up and unleash the kind of chaos that results in the overthrow of the people in power, but with America’s massive investment in both the military and the militarization of law enforcement, maybe they’ve actually succeeded in creating a bulwark against revolution.

Still, we shouldn’t be able to just shake off so much of the shit we’re living with, and through. This is our world. And whether we recognize it or not, these things that are happening are happening to all of us; they affect our quality of life, our security, our futures, and the futures of our children.

I recognize that I’m fully complicit in the ongoing American epidemic of oblivion, but we all should have learned by now how class warfare and trickle-down economics really work; inequality and injustice seep down into all of our lives, our neighborhoods, our communities. We can, of course, choose oblivion, can try to look the other way at the homelessness, hunger, addiction, mental illness, crime, and despair that are now a regular and growing feature of life in our cities, and even in out-of-the-way places in this country.

We can ignore the daily gauntlet of panhandlers and the endlessly recurring sidewalk dramas of the afflicted and marginalized among us. We can go out of our way to avoid the sprawling and ceaselessly replicating encampments of the homeless. We can express our alarm at rising crime, venting on the internet pages of neighborhood watch groups. We can ignore the rising rents and property values that are effectively shutting down the future dreams of a generation of young people; ignore the egregious and escalating predations and desecrations of the billionaire (and millionaire) class, their refusal to adhere to anything resembling a social contract, their obscene hoarding of wealth and property, their growing insistence on living in the alternate reality of private communities and clubs.

We can indulge our fascination with and hero worship of celebrities and the wealthy, can participate in the uncritical celebration of a “foodie” culture, the economic model of which excludes 90% of humanity, here and elsewhere. We can spend unfathomable amounts of money on craft beers and cocktails. We can unquestioningly and uncomplainingly spend hundreds of dollars on tickets to concerts and sporting events, further enriching musicians, athletes, owners, and promoters who are already wealthy beyond any person’s wildest dreams.

We can ignore gun violence, homicide by law enforcement, the hopeless decline of political and judicial systems, the slow death of real journalism and cultural literacy, and all the terrifying shit that’s going on elsewhere in the world. We can ignore global warming/climate change, literally refuse to do anything about it or make any sacrifices despite the fact—the fact!—that the temperatures in the oceans are breaking records every year and pretty much every place in the country is smashing records for high temperatures.

I guess one could be forgiven for concluding that most of us just really don’t give a shit about anything other than consumption and burning money.

I’m always trying to figure out what it would take to get many of my so-called liberal friends in Minnesota to go out into the streets every day and make some real noise.

I actually think I know the answer to that: A Vikings Super Bowl victory. Or maybe Prince could die a second time.

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I stumbled across this one this morning, and I think I shoveled it into my previous blog hole, but since that long-dormant exercise in obscurity had a pretty much non-existent readership, I’m taking another shot at it here, because this particular Moleskine is from an especially strange and solitary stretch of my life, and I was out of my mind and writing around the clock.

My goal is to post at least twice a week, and I apologize if this monkey business results in all sorts of unwelcome email traffic from the robots. I’ve tried to figure out how to turn off email notifications, but I immediately panic whenever I stray from the one page (this one) where I can simply type and post shit. If you can figure out how to turn it off on your end, please do so.

In the movie I'm making with my dog—Satan and the Sacred Bone—the Devil wears steel-toed boots and a wetsuit. His horns have been cut off, so that he can try to disguise himself as a normal man going about the world, but if you look closely you can still see the nubs where they used to be.

The Devil wears a wetsuit because he's kind of a Poseidon sort of devil, and the portal to Hell is located at the bottom of a deep, dark lake. Since we don't have much of a special effects budget and I wanted the Devil to be able to make dramatic entrances, I came up with the idea of having him emerge from a lake in the moonlight. There happens to be a perfect shooting location near my home, and I think it's going to work out slick.

The first guy I got to play the Devil looked too fat in the wetsuit. In his defense, he wasn't a particularly fat guy in real life, but a wetsuit is unforgiving in that regard, and I thought it was important that the Devil be lean.

The second guy was really good in rehearsals, but after four days he started to have reservations. He said it was because he was a Born Again Christian, which may or may not have been true. He smoked a lot of pot for a Born Again Christian.

So, anyway, we're already on our third Devil. This one has appeared in a Car Soup commercial and also as Tevya in a local community college production of "Fiddler on the Roof." He's been lobbying hard for the Devil to have a love interest, and feels strongly that there should be at least one scene where his character gets to (as he put it) "do his old lady like a dog." He argued that this would be a subtle bit of symbolism or metaphor or some such nonsense. Though I'm pretty sure the motivation behind all of this business is purely selfish—I have serious doubts about whether this fellow has even slept with a woman—he continues to insist that the Devil needs to be portrayed as "insatiably horny" in order to demonstrate his power, virility, and otherworldly appetites.

Since I'm not keen on trying to find a fourth Devil, I put an ad on Craigslist, but have thus far received only two replies, both from clearly underage girls with questionable motives. Nonetheless, the third Devil liked the looks of both of these candidates and suggested I immediately take them on—one as the Devil's paramour, the other as an understudy and potential body double. Afraid as I was of losing yet another Devil, I was even more wary of being caught up in some sort of sting operation and so thanked the young women for their time and assured the third Devil that I would continue to pursue other options. The fix we’ve arrived at is that I’ll have my sister off camera, holding up a Playboy centerfold, and we’ll have several scenes of the Devil rolling around in the leaves and humping as if he is, in fact, engaged in sexual intercourse. I’m guessing this is where we’ll get a good idea if this guy can really act.

Anyway, weather permitting, we are slated to film our first scenes tomorrow. The premise of Satan and the Sacred Bone is that the Devil has risen from the deep, dark lake in the moonlight and is stalking my dog through the Enchanted Dog Forest. The Devil is trying to capture my dog—and in the process steal his soul—because my dog is a High Priest in the Brotherhood of the Sacred Bone, a holy order of dogs devoted to preserving the history and rituals of a bone that is alleged to be a surviving relic from the sacrificial altar of Abraham.

The Devil believes my dog knows where the Sacred Bone is being kept, and he intends to pry this information out of him at any cost.

At some point in its long odyssey through history and time, it is said, the Sacred Bone was once in the possession of John the Baptist. Then, for several hundred years, it was displayed in a monastery in France, and used in the annual Blessing of the Animals. Like so many other precious relics and works of art, the Sacred Bone disappeared during the Nazi invasion of France.

For almost three decades the Sacred Bone was presumed destroyed or lost forever, until a Dutch newspaper reported, in 1976, that a rich and unscrupulous art collector and breeder of dachshunds in Austria had the bone in his possession. Through diplomatic and legal channels this collector was eventually persuaded to turn the Sacred Bone over to authorities in Geneva, where an international tribunal attempted to sort through claims from a host of nations seeking title to the bone. It was generally believed that the Sacred Bone was most likely going to end up in Jerusalem, but a group of armed and well-trained commandos of mysterious affiliation broke into the Swiss compound where the relic was being held, made off with the Sacred Bone, and left behind a long and rambling note detailing plans to return the object to its "rightful custodians," the Brotherhood of the Sacred Bone, a loosely knit secret society made up entirely of dogs.

In the intervening years, information regarding the Brotherhood and the whereabouts of the Sacred Bone has been exceedingly hard to come by, but it is rumored that the Sacred Bone is possessed of extraordinary protective and healing spiritual powers, and is thus of keen interest to the Devil.

That's the backstory of Satan and the Sacred Bone. I've persuaded my neighbor, Lonnie, —who paints his house every year, has a rich baritone, and has done a few radio advertisements for a local bank—to provide a voice-over narrative of this saga as the opening scene unfolds. We've already recorded it (I encouraged him to sort of whisper and to try his best to muster a James Mason impersonation), and I think it sounds fabulous. Chilling, really.

I'm still trying to raise enough cash to finish this project—I've already invested more than $250 of my own money (actually money borrowed from my sister)—and am encouraging people who might be willing to help out to chip in over at Kickstarter. Anyone who gives more than $10 gets a speaking part in the film. So far we've raised $48, but obviously there's still a long way to go.

Also, because I’m really determined to make this dream a reality, and just because, you know, FYI, I ate a jar of salsa for dinner.

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From 2012 through 2014, I was roaming around the United States with the photographer Alec Soth, ostensibly documenting the state of real, on-the-ground American community in the age of the internet and the ersatz communities of cyberspace. The result was seven issues of the LBM Dispatch.

That project was the most extraordinary and gratifying working experience of my life, and I remain proud of the results.

In a sense, however, our timing was all wrong. We were on the road just before the cataclysm of Donald Trump, and though in hindsight there were warning signs everywhere we went, I think—for the most part, anyway—the LBM Dispatch was bullish on the resiliency and optimism of Americans. I also believe we were pretty clear-eyed about the complicated realities and histories of the communities we visited, but there’s no question that just a couple years later we would have encountered something a whole lot darker and much tougher to get our heads around. I certainly can’t imagine we would have received the same warm welcome and openness that were such a big part of what made those trips so extraordinary.

From early in 2015 through the end of 2017, I made several trips to New York to try to interest agents and editors in a book about the Dispatch project, but everyone I met with passed. It wasn’t the right time, people said time and again, for a big book about America.

It’s clearly still not the right time for a big book about America. And traditional trade publishers still want nothing to do with photographs, and photobook publishers are wary of text (and don’t want to pay writers). Nonetheless, I’ve got 364 pages in my Moleskines—and hundreds more in the notebooks I carried with me every day on the road—that were written in the midst of those travels, and owing to severe space constraints and the challenges of pairing text and images, the overwhelming majority of that material—and scads of Alec’s great photographs—never made it into the actual published editions of the work.

That remains a huge disappointment to me, and I’ve been mulling posting some of that writing here, but I guess I’m holding out hope that some of it, at least, will one day make its way into a proper book.

The post below was written shortly after my first of many discouraging meetings with agents and editors, and I think it addresses a lot of my feelings about the role text can play in combination with photographs.

Beyond the usual and expected February malaise, I’m trying to process a huge disappointment—a disappointment, actually, that is threatening to stray into the dangerous territory of disillusionment and disenchantment.

The project that I have been working on and thinking about for the last several years appears to be dead in the water.

This was a project that I thought was about all sorts of big American themes and ideas that have preoccupied me for most of my adult life. I saw it as a real and honest story about the state of the union in 21st-century America, about people and their dreams and daily struggles; about economic realities and both the triumph and failure of American ideals (triumph, generally, on the level of the individual spirit and the resiliency of community; failure on the part of our institutions and bureaucracy; the cynicism and indifference of our political leaders; all the ways in which the political apparatus has failed the average American).

The story I wanted to tell was about people trapped in fading dreams and history—the history of their families, their towns, their identities; the people who never got far enough away from where they were raised, and the others who just kept drifting, searching for a place where they could finally make a go of it and feel themselves at home.

It turns out, though, that maybe the stories I’ve been thinking about and living with for three years weren’t really about any of those things.

I nonetheless believe that people have contexts. They have voices, stories, histories, dreams. They are bound up with their environments, and in any given moment the peripheries and marginalia of their lives might say as much about them as anything they can tell you.

They are more than just one moment. Their lives are fluid and have soundtracks and secrets. I love to look at people, but I can only learn to love them by talking with them, and by attempting to take at least a small step into the realities of their lives. Speculating about mute photographs is like talking behind people’s backs. It’s gossip.

I tried very hard to rein in my own voice and stylistic inclinations when I was writing about the Dispatch photographs and those people’s stories and lives. At night in my motel room I knew I could let it fly, but in the moments I spent with people I thought it was important to let the subjects speak, and to take a step back and allow them to breathe and move a little bit in the spaces they inhabited outside the frame of the photograph and the moment.

I was genuinely curious about who they were, and what they thought about their lives and the world they were living in. Were they happy? And, if so, what made them happy? Were they disappointed? Did they still have dreams? What were they feeling in that moment the camera pinned them down in forever? Where were they going? What were they going through? What sorts of things might we have in common?

There were problems almost immediately. We were constantly on the move, and most of the time I was writing in motel rooms in the middle of the night, trying to process and digest the voices and faces and photographs from earlier in the day. By the time we were up and running again, the clock would be reset and I was falling further and further behind. So many words and so many stories were being lost in my notebooks. There was never enough time or space to do the stories (or the people) justice.

I was rarely satisfied, and too often I felt like a mere reporter. It doesn’t take a lot of time to take someone’s picture, and as a result I never felt like I could give the subjects of the photographs the attention they deserved. I had to listen for sound bites, and try to herd people as quickly as possible into some sort of interesting or telling quote.

I knew that at some point the photographs would be abstracted from the text, that they would stand alone in gallery shows and in a book, but I also took comfort in the fact that I had all those stories, and that I would somehow be given an opportunity to tell them.

I could probably talk for a half hour or more about most of those photographs, and those places and people, and the moments we shared. I cherish those moments. And I cherish all the hundreds of other stories from those trips that I managed to get down on paper.

I guess I now have time to let all those stories incubate for a while longer, and to try to eventually get them just right. I fear, though, that they’ll eventually just get swept away—as so much has already been swept away—by new words, new stories, new projects, new dreams and disappointments.

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You know how your heart moves, how it lurches and staggers and sways like a hobbled bell in your chest.

You know how it sounds: Those noises. That familiar music. The rattle of a cold slate shingle banging up against your ribs. The squeak of its eraser at work somewhere just behind your sternum. Its fractured song.

You know its strange language, all its clipped dialects and speech defects, the things it can and cannot say. The things it will not say.

You know when it’s grasping for something no human heart can ever have.

You know the relentless rhythm of its shovel at work in the orchard at night. In the morning you can see where it has been foraging in the garden, the glistening scarlet trail in the dew where it has dragged itself to the river’s edge.

You’re familiar with its murmurs and lullabies, its myriad prayers and laments, its low, protracted moans.

You know when it has been looking at this world through the wrong end of a telescope and when it has bundled itself in burlap or nestled deep in shavings to protect itself from the cold.

You know when it’s burning.

You know when it’s gone feral on you, when it is limping down off the mountain under a January moon, in search of companionship and sustenance from needy things and dead things preserved by the snow. You love and fear its animal moments, its wild spasms of longing and lust and unspeakable loneliness.

You know that it does not live by breaking, that nothing truly broken can ever again be made fully whole.

You see it in the space behind your closed eyes, a dark crimson planet wobbling through the slow, liquid orbit of its soul.

You know what it looks like in a masked man’s hands; how it looks when it’s laid out all alone on a stainless steel table, and when it’s simmering in a soup pot, and turning black at the bottom of a bucket on a hot dock. You know what it looks like projected on a giant screen and impaled at the end of a sharp stick.

You know its heaves and hesitations, and how it learns, longs, wishes, and crawls for miles along dark roads following one dim, diminishing star on the distant horizon. You know how it holds on, gives out, gives in, and gives itself up, and over. How it gives up.

How it goes on, and lives by beating, lives by dreaming.

You still don’t know, though, still don’t understand, what your heart is. You still don’t know what it wants. This is one of those things it will not say. You only know that it belongs to you and you’ll never let it go.

And when it grows weary you cradle it in your arms and talk to it through the long, dark hours. Together you keep your vigil, waiting for a sign. You plead and sing and whisper old, familiar stories and lies to it, until the beating stops, until at last you are carried off together into deep sleep, merciful sleep, into silence, into a safe place far beyond the terrifying world of need and dreams.

If you spend too much time obsessing about your heart pumping away behind your ribcage it can make you crazy. Still, it’s hard not to think about the sheer, terrifying marvel of the thing, the job it does, laboring around the clock, year in and year out, to keep your strange machine rolling.

You can, though, live a long time and still have no real idea how your heart works, all the mysterious ways in which it is integrated with so many other mysterious miracles of the human body and mind.

You often find yourself wondering at what point humans started taking each other apart to try to determine what sort of stuff they were made of and how they worked. You imagine the first man who removed a heart from a body and held it in his hands; what in God’s name must he have been thinking? Do you suppose he had any idea what he was looking at, or grasped the fact that this oddly configured and plumbed thing in his hands was the source of the mysterious rhythm that drove his body through time?

How did anyone ever figure anything like that out, unless something outside the world was there to steer them?

And at what point did humans begin to assign to the heart the status or function of metaphor, the most versatile metaphor in the metaphorical playbook?

You drive off to work in the gray murk of a February morning and return home in darkness each evening, your heart a distant and dull murmur in your chest. You feel it, though. You know it’s there, all tangled up in old fishing line and netting. You remember all those times you wrenched it onto a hook and cast it out into the world, hoping some big dream would swallow it whole and drag you after it into some deep and satisfying place.

It got snagged and chewed up pretty good over the years, but that just meant you’d had some bites, even if every one of them had gotten away. And on each occasion, usually in the middle of the night, you reeled your heart back in and were confronted by the damage.

How many nights do you suppose you sailed alone in the darkness with your heart bobbing in a bucket next to you?

You were always looking for something. There were ideas you couldn’t get out of your head, big ideas, stupid ideas. Jesus Christ, son, you made some mistakes. You did some damned foolish things, didn’t you? Yes, sir, you sure enough did. It’s a miracle that heart of yours is still beating.

Did you think there would be no consequences? That you could walk away scot-free?

You did, you rascal. Didn’t you?

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MAY, 2003

I drove with Jurosz over to the Starliner Motel on the outskirts of Miles City. “Weekly and Monthly Rates,” read the sign out front. “Friendly. Affordable.”

In room 11, there was an old snapshot with serrated edges taped to the mirror above the dresser, a photo of a dark-haired woman, her eyes closed and her head tilted slightly back, standing in a dark angle of shadow. Outside the shadow the sun was shining on an impossibly bright pastel world and a street lined with vintage automobiles.

“No idea,” Jurosz said.

On top of the dresser was a rusty tacklebox full of corks, keys, paper clips, and pencils; a bottle opener, screwdriver, fingernail clipper, pocket knife, and a few bucks in change. The drawers of the dresser held a small collection of socks, underwear, tee-shirts, and a few pairs of slacks. Just inside the bathroom door was a clothing rod on which was hung a handful of snap-button western shirts, a blue windbreaker, and a plaid wool jacket.

On the bedstand there were three pairs of cheap sunglasses and an assortment of baby food jars, each of them inexplicably blooming with an almost lovely green mold. Under the bed we found two pairs of shoes --plain, sturdy, black-- and a shoebox full of old photographs, mostly of horses. There was also a battered leather suitcase stuffed with scandal magazines and paperback westerns.

Under a desk whose surface was scarred with key-scratched phone numbers, there was a small refrigerator, inside of which were three bottles of ketchup, five cans of Budweiser, and an opened can of cling peaches.

The room’s late resident also owned a Stetson Stratoliner hat and two pairs of worn boots. There were no paper documents, no letters, wallet, or checkbook in the room; no reliable identification and not a single photograph of another human being other than the woman on the mirror. The room’s only real physical evidence for the purposes of identification was a battered old Rawlings Enos Slaughter model baseball mitt with a name written very legibly along the fat thumb in black magic marker.

That was apparently enough for the folks in Custer County to track down Jurosz in Wilsall.

The mattress was now stained with blood black as motor oil, and there were random splashes on the wall and bedstand that were dusty as powdered tempura.

Jurosz’s father was a sorry piece of horse trash who had abandoned his Midwestern wife and two children thirty years earlier to chase cowboy dreams. His only son had worshiped the shitbag nonetheless, and had headed for Montana the summer after he graduated from high school hoping for a happy reunion and a fresh start. In the decade since Jurosz had arrived in Montana, the old man had done nothing but mooch him for bail money, kick him in the teeth, and disappear from his life for longer and longer stretches of time.

“Did he have any enemies that you were aware of?” the investigating deputy asked.

“I imagine he did,” Jurosz said. “He for damn sure didn’t have any friends.”

“Could you come up with a list of possible suspects?”

Jurosz gestured at the deputy’s pocket notebook. “I couldn’t, but I’m pretty sure you’re going to need something a whole lot bigger than that thing,” he said.

The guy at the morgue asked if Jurosz wanted Custer County to ‘dispose’ of the body. I’m almost certain that was the unfortunate word he chose, and the instant he said it I saw Jurosz wince.

“No,” he said after a moment. “You got a funeral parlor you folks use?”

“Fuck,” I said. “Don’t be a fool, Jurosz. Let them have him.”

“Stevenson and Sons,” the man said. “They’re in town.”

“Send him over there and I’ll take care of it,” Jurosz said.

SEPTEMBER, 2003

By the time I got to the campground on the river, Jurosz was gone. An hour or so earlier I’d encountered a couple of tweaked out ranch hands at the Taco John’s in town, with Jurosz’s beat-to-shit little trailer attached to the hitch of a pick-up truck.

There was no mistaking the trailer, with its corroded aluminum and faded punk rock stickers. The tweakers told me they’d been hanging out down by the river and had bought the thing from a guy for two hundred bucks. The guy, they said, had a big fire going, and was burning everything he could get his hands on, like he was in a hurry.

I knew that Jurosz had never been a guy with the ability to get his hands on much or to hold on to whatever he did manage to get his hands on, but these two characters said they’d seen him toss armloads of clothing, books, and cassette tapes into the bonfire. They said the guy looked pretty wasted.

That guy, I told them, was a good friend of mine. I proceeded to dial Junosz’s cell phone number, at which point one of the tweakers said, “Dude threw his phone in the river.” The other guy gestured to the dog in the bed of the truck and said, “Boomer there went right in and tried to retrieve the phone, but he was shit out of luck.”

The fire was still smoldering when I arrived. There were a couple of Mexicans who had a trailer just around the bend from Jurosz’s site. I walked down there and asked them if they had any ideas what had become of him and they both shrugged.

There was an envelope containing two hundred dollars and a photo of Jurosz’s old girlfriend Deena --she hadn’t been around at this point for at least two years-- nailed to a tree right next to where the trailer had been. His truck was there, but both of its front tires were flat. Otherwise there was no sign of Jurosz.

A couple days after a group of rafters discovered his body washed up on some rocks downriver, I received a postcard from Jurosz. We had been friends since we were 12 years old, and he was the reason I’d come out to Montana in the first place.

“I had a soul once,” the message on the card read in Jurosz’s obsessively neat and microscopic handwriting. “I didn’t sell it or give it away. I didn’t exactly lose it, either. One night, I guess, it just up and left me for a better, more handsome man who didn’t spend so much time alone.”

I loaded up my truck, shoved a Minutemen tape in the deck, and headed back east.

And just like that I wasn’t in Montana anymore.

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You can find yourself in all sorts of vast, dark places out here in the West, and it’s awe-inspiring how many layers and shifting colors there are even in the deepest darkness, how from moment to moment your eyes make adjustments or the clouds will move and change the entire palette beyond the scrim.

Most extraordinary, though, are those occasions when some distant light appears—a solitary house, automobile headlamps moving far off in the valley, or a yard light from a distant ranch—and you realize the disproportionate power of light in the midst of so much darkness.

Everyone knows that you can follow a light, but though you can learn to read darkness, you can’t really follow it anywhere.

Long ago, when I was maybe 21 years old, I was coming down out of the backcountry north of Yellowstone Park, exhausted from a hike that had turned out to be much more difficult and disorienting than I expected. This was one of my first trips west of Minnesota, and I was following a Forest Service road in the darkness, tracking the constellations in the western sky—it was autumn—and hoping to find the valley, and then the highway that my map told me would eventually take me to a town.

I eventually saw, far below me, the pinpricks of light scattered across the vastness of Paradise Valley—a small consolation, at least, in that moment—but then, when the clouds finally budged and allowed the moon to work its magic, I saw the moonlight shimmering on the surface of the Yellowstone River, moonlight and water moving like a Chinese dragon across that dark valley. I knew from my U.S.G.S. map—which was falling apart—that the road I wanted followed that river out of the valley to the north, and into Livingston.

Energized by fresh hope, I walked for a long time across the valley and came to the highway intersection at the little white chapel in Pray. It was almost ten o’clock when I arrived at the intersection, directly across the road from the strip of businesses that included the Old Saloon. Clouds had rolled in on my long walk across the valley, and it began to rain as I stood there on the shoulder of Highway 89.

After a long wait, a man in a beat-to-shit pickup truck turned out of the Old Saloon parking lot and pulled over to offer me a ride. He was a large, bearded man straight out of Montana central casting, had clearly had a few drinks, and was sharing the cab of his truck with two huge Samoyeds.

“Toss your pack in the back and cram in here with us,” he said.

I did as I was told, and the man asked me how far I was going. I said I was trying to get to the town at the other end of the valley.

“Livingston,” he said. “I have to turn off right at the edge of town, but you’ll be able to see the neon lights from there. I’d drop you off right downtown, but it’s definitely better if you walk into all that neon, especially if you’ve never been.”

I told him I had, in fact, never been to Livingston.

“Oh, shit,” he said. “It’s a good town. You can’t miss the Murray Hotel. Stop in there and see if Cliff and Patty have a bunk for you. You’ll probably have to share a shitter in the hall, but you’ll be living large all the same. The bar next door is generally a lively place, and they have a kick-ass jukebox.”

I spent one of the most enchanted nights of my life in that hotel and bar.

That was how I found Livingston, and for more than 40 years now the light keeps leading me back.

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A brief refresher explanation of what I’m up to with Yo Ivanhoe: I’m very slowly making my way through my notebooks—uniform black Moleskines that I’ve written in every single night for more than 32 years—and the shit I’m posting here is straight out of those books, words that have languished in my back pages as I’ve continued to scramble to somehow come up with a new batch of words every night. I’ve now been working on this excavation for almost seven months, and have made my way through 41 of the 132 Moleskines. It’s an exhausting process, and I’ve tabbed and key-worded more than 1,600 pages that are either reasonably complete stories or essays, thousands of things I regard as story-starters, or parts of novels that are unfinished, abandoned, or more or less complete. Because I am a man who has devoted much of my life to caring for and sharing my life with dogs, I guess it’s not surprising to me that I’ve uncovered (so far) more than 100 dog stories buried in the avalanche of the black books.

Eventually I’ll start mixing in some essays on three of my other main preoccupations—photography, music, and politics—but I still spend so much time every day thinking and writing about that stuff that I tend to overlook it when I’m looking for things to post.

Huge gratitude to everyone who has subscribed, and if you feel so inclined, please send some more folks my way. I would—given my track record—have given up long ago if it weren’t for your support. But as nice as it is to have this outlet, like so much else these days it often feels like one more obscure black hole slowly filling up with silence.

Ardoine “Catfish” Crepier was at the dog park one afternoon, sitting along the fence and watching an airplane, when his friend Butch came over and tried to interest him in a stick.

“I am not in the mood,” Ardoine said. “I am feeling out of sorts today.”

“Play stick with me and you’ll surely feel better,” Butch said. “It’s a beautiful day. What can you possibly find to complain about now?”

“My rations,” Ardoine said. “Honestly and truly, I am weary of my rations.”

“Aren’t your people feeding you?” Butch asked.

“Oh, they feed me all right,” Ardoine said. “The same thing, day after day. Brown chunks for breakfast. Brown chunks for dinner. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…I forget, what is the day after Wednesday?”

Ardoine was not good with his days.

“Thursday,” Butch said.

“Yes,” Ardoine said. “Thursday, Friday, Tuesday, Sunday.”

“Saturday,” Butch said. “Saturday is the day after Friday. Today, in fact, is Saturday.”

“That’s what I said.”

“No, I’m afraid not, Fish; you repeated Tuesday.”

“What difference does it make,” Ardoine said. “The days are all the same. Brown chunks.”

“Surely there are treats,” Butch said.

Ardoine sniffed at the breeze and tilted his head to watch another airplane. “There are occasional treats, yes,” he said, “but they cannot make up for the relentless monotony of my regular rations. Why, just this morning Dagwood up the street told me that last night he enjoyed a bowl of leftover chow mein. And last week he was given part of what he said was a delicious restaurant burrito.”

“Have you not noticed that Dagwood is in poor health?” Butch asked. “And to the best of my knowledge his people never bring him to the park or take him for a walk. He spends all of his time in that tiny yard, which I think you’ll agree is in a filthy and deplorable state.”

“Perhaps,” Ardoine said. “But he eats chow mein, burritos, and even, he once told me, Fruit Loops and Jello.”

Butch dropped his stick and sat quietly beside his disconsolate friend for a moment, thinking. Butch was a shaggy, bearded fellow; in the distant past his relations had been shepherds. He remembered stories his father had told him, stories he had learned from his own father many years before.

“Once upon a time life was much harder for dogs,” he said to Ardoine. “Even those who were fortunate to receive care and attention from humans were often left to their own devices when it came to eating. They made do, I am to understand, with whatever scraps of garbage were thrown their way. Most often, however, they had to ramble far afield in search of food, and sometimes they had to resort to murdering other creatures. They certainly were not fed in relatively sanitary conditions or on a regular schedule. And they certainly were not given presents on their birthdays or on Christmas Day, as I know both you and I have been. Often as not, they slept outside in the rain and snow and cold. For all of his dietary indulgences, I believe poor Dagwood is closer to those dogs of yore than he is to you or me. You have told me yourself that you have heard his person shout at him repeatedly, and you have seen him suffer blows from both feet and hands. I know that your own people have soft hands and gentle voices. They take you for car rides, and you are allowed to climb on the furniture and sleep alongside them in their beds. Something even I, who know I am loved, am denied.”

Ardoin sighed. “Brown chunks,” he said. “Brown chunks day after day.”

“Most of us subsist on brown chunks,” Butch said. “And I must confess that even after many years I still eat my breakfast and dinner with great relish.”

A fly was buzzing around Ardoine’s head and he shook himself aggressively.

“Well,” he said. “Good day to you, Butch. I suppose I will just have to learn to make do with my brown chunks.”

“Good day to you, Ardoine,” Butch said, and watched his friend trot across the park to his people, who greeted him with happy shouts and clapping hands, and who were greeted in turn with a wagging tail and a series of ecstatic leaps.

URSULA WAS A crow, a bashful crow, relatively quiet as crows go, but she was a crow with a keen eye and an active imagination. A crow not terribly fond of flying—it had never felt natural to her, and she preferred to walk and hop. She was a dreamer and a romantic, although it would never have occurred to her to describe herself as such. She was just the way she was and the way she had always been. Her heart desired what it desired.

And what her heart desired was a dog whose name was Felix. Felix was a mongrel, although Ursula did not know this. He did not look like any other dog or creature that Ursula had ever seen. She had been watching him since he was just a puppy. She liked to sit in a big maple tree across the street from Felix’s house, a perch that allowed her to watch him coming and going every day.

She knew she was in love with him almost from the moment she first laid eyes on him, but she really and truly knew she was in love several months later, when Felix was out for a walk on a sunny day in the spring and passed directly beneath the tree Ursula was sitting in. She had hopped down several branches—the tree was still relatively bare—and flapped her wings to try to attract Felix’s attention.

Felix had paused for an instant and peered up at her.

“That, Felix, is a bird,” the man walking with Felix had said. “A crow.”

Felix had look directly at Ursula and smiled. As he proceeded on his walk, Ursula had called out to him, “I am Ursula! I am Ursula! I am Ursula!” She was not sure that Felix had heard her, but the next time he passed beneath the tree in which she was sitting, he had looked up at her, smiled again, and said, “Hello, Ursula. Good day to you.”

And that was it. That did it. In that moment, Ursula knew she would one day marry that dog.

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Because Meridel had a big stack of her father’s old Nat King Cole phonograph records that she kept in her bedroom and had been listening to for more than 30 years, Nat King Cole was the picture in her head of the man she would one day marry. And because the house in which she had grown up and lived with her father until his death was located right across the alley from a fire station, and because as a result she had been watching firemen come and go and smoke in the alley and wash their firetrucks since she was a little girl, the Nat King Cole that Meridel loved was also a fireman. A fireman and a popular singer.

Everything Meridel knew about love was from listening to Nat King Cole records and daydreaming about firemen.

Meridel was 40 years old. Her father had died on her 37th birthday. He had fallen over while mowing the lawn. A heart attack, the doctors told her. Two of the firemen had tried to revive him, but by the time they were alerted by a neighbor it had been too late.

Meridel had been at the grocery store at the time, buying white bread and chocolate milk and Coca-Cola and the cold cuts her father loved. She would never forgive herself. Not because she had not been there for her father, but because she had not seen the firemen crouched over her father’s body in the backyard.

When Meridel had pulled into the driveway and was unloading the groceries from her car, the next door neighbor, Jessica Whitcomb, had come over to give her the news. Not all the news, of course; Jessica had merely told Meridel that her father had been “stricken” while mowing the lawn; she had been standing at her kitchen window and had seen him fall over, at which point she had immediately run to the fire station for help. She told Meridel that an ambulance had taken her father away, but she did not tell her that he was dead. She didn’t have to; it was in her eyes.

Meridel asked Jessica if the firemen had touched her father. Jessica said they had done all the things they do when attempting to resuscitate the victim of some calamity. Meridel imagined one of the firemen putting his lips on her father’s mouth and blowing into it. She wondered if the firemen had been wearing their rubber boots.

Jessica had driven Meridel to the hospital and everything else from that point just happened as things do.

The day of the funeral service, the firemen had sent flowers to the house, and Meridel had taken the flowers apart one by one as they died and saved the petals in one of her father’s old Dutch Masters cigar boxes.

The old woman who lived across the alley looked like someone who would have a house full of cats. She looked like someone who would keep a disorderly house, like a solitary old woman whose life had gotten away from her.

I had a clear view from my desk into her backyard, and for two years I’d been watching her moving around out there during the warmer months. She always seemed to be moving, and there was something of the manic or absent-minded in her movements. She also, from time to time, sat in a lawn chair under the one big shade tree in her yard, but even when she was sitting she seemed coiled. She usually wore a large straw hat that kept her face in shade, and her head was always moving, her eyes darting around. It was hard to say how old she was, but I’d guess at least 80.

She was pretty spry, though. I often saw her dragging brush out to the alley, and she moved stuff in and out of her garage with sort of obsessive regularity. Copy paper-sized boxes, mostly, but there were a lot of them. If she drove or had a car, it was never parked in the garage; there clearly wasn’t room. For two years, though, I’d only ever seen her coming and going from the back door to the yard or alley, and I’d never seen her leave the property.

She dressed the way I guess you’d imagine an old woman puttering around her yard would dress—old-fashioned sun dresses and more voluminous robes.

I increasingly found myself watching her for ridiculously long stretches. There was something hypnotic about the way she moved. She was, it occurred to me, graceful. She moved like a dancer, with a gliding, fluid poise, even though it often looked like she was constantly forgetting what she was doing or where she was going. She just seemed to float and scurry this way and that in what almost seemed like choreographed patterns.

One day I was watching her carry a box of loose papers out to her garbage, and the wind swept a sheet of paper away. It was tumbled briefly upwards, jostled around a bit like a kite, and then it settled to the ground in my backyard.

A bit later I went out into the yard and retrieved this piece of paper, which turned out to be a photograph of an overweight, balding, and very stern-looking man in tiny spectacles. On the back of the photograph was written in elegant cursive:

“Otto Adolph Brohmer. A dentist. Married Adelaine ‘Addles’ Brohmer. A man of few words. We were comfortable and happily married for 53 years. No children. Five dogs. All good ones.”

At least five days a week—almost, I feel certain, without exception—I made that man a grilled cheese sandwich. Forty-seven years, and most weeks it was seven days a week. We never really took a vacation, other than a couple trial weekends at a lake cabin that we thought about buying before deciding it just wasn’t his thing. Even when we were at that cabin, I made him his grilled cheese sandwiches. There was nothing fancy about the things. Plain white bread out of a bag and individually-wrapped Kraft American cheese slices. He liked to dip them in ketchup. In the winter he would eat his sandwich with a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup. The rest of the year he had potato chips.

I never knew such a plain man in my life, but I knew that plain man. He liked to do things that nobody in their right mind would like to do: mow the grass, clean the garage, wash windows, dig fence holes, mess around with old radios. There was never a thing I asked him to do that he didn’t do immediately and with apparent eagerness.

“Isn’t he boring?” my sister used to ask me all the time. “Doesn’t he ever talk?’

“Not much,” I said. “He’s not a man who seems to have much on his mind.”

The honest answer, though, was that he was such a lovely, simple man that the boredom in time took on the quality of contentment. I might easily have been a nag—my mother had been one—but I honestly never had a reason or opportunity to nag that man. He certainly made my life a whole lot simpler than it might have been. I might once upon a time have imagined or expected things from my marriage that never materialized, but the things that did materialize I never could have imagined, so I guess it sort of balanced out in the end.

Even the things that other people might have found surprising—his piano playing, for instance; he played the same half dozen songs he’d learned when he was a boy—were so ingrained in him, and such a part of his unbreakable routines, that they quickly became part of the expected order of my days.

Nowadays, of course, the whole arrangement would be seen by many as impossibly old fashioned, possibly even tyrannical and sexist; I was, after all, a housewife and never had any other job in my life. It was work, certainly, but no demands were ever made of me. It was a partnership, and I knew from the beginning what I had to do to hold up my end of it and prove myself worthy of his devotion.

And devoted, he surely was. And though I once dreamed of dancing, singing, and traveling to exotic places, a woman could do a whole lot worse than being married to a devoted man.

But, oh, good lord, yes. That man sometimes bored me to tears.

Her father would come into her room at night. That was how she told it and all she told when after 25 years she finally got up the courage to tell anything at all.

This was after her father’s death, when she finally felt some sad and small sense of freedom.

It had surprised her, initially, that people didn’t seem to require any more information, that they always seemed to understand exactly—or close to exactly—what those words entailed. If they had a follow-up question, and they seldom did, it was invariably, “How old were you?” She wasn’t even sure about this, but guessed that she had been five or six years old, and her father had continued to come into her room off and on until she had her first period.

She’d probably been destined to be a shy child anyway, but she knew the experience had caused her to retreat even further. Her adolescence had been a terrifying, painful, and crippling time. She’d done well in school, though. She’d applied herself to her homework with a single-mindedness that she would later recognize was purely a survival instinct.

She grew up to be an attractive young woman, this despite her clear attempts to be willfully unattractive. Mainly, though, she survived by keeping her mouth shut and blending into the background as much as possible. By the time she graduated high school she’d never had a date, never gone to a dance, and never had what she would consider an actual conversation with a boy.

She couldn’t wait to get away, and had done well enough in school and on the various prep tests that she received a scholarship to a small college out east, a private university with a national reputation.

Her father had divorced her mother during her first year at college, and promptly remarried six months later. Almost a decade of silence followed, during which she did not speak to, see, or correspond with her father.

When he eventually died, she dutifully returned home for his funeral, and, sitting next to her mother at the service, wept for the first time since she was a child.

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I can’t find or follow a plot in this mess. I’m sure I had a bunch of ideas while I was stumbling around out in the world today, but at three a.m. I’m struggling to recover a single stray idea.

One of those ideas, it now occurs to me, had something to do with crop rotation as it relates to art. You know, when you’re feeling thwarted, do something radically different. Give your usual shit a rest and let it grow wild with your inattention. Fallow periods are fine, just as long as you stay busy. Read. Listen to music. Work with your hands. Take a road trip without the intention of doing any work at all, or of turning what you see and do into work.

All the other things you do when you’re not working are sort of like gravel you shovel into the rock tumbler in your head. That fucker keeps churning, keeps tumbling, even when you’re not paying any attention to it, and the obvious hope is that when you eventually get back to work the tumbler will be ready to start spitting out the gravel you shoveled in there, but wholly transformed, all polished up and almost unrecognizable and ready to serve as raw materials for inspiration.

If you’re a photographer who has a certain preoccupation or settled style, spend some time taking photographs that are nothing like the kinds of pictures you usually take. That’s always a good time to stay close to home, to document your family and friends and the place you live. Someday, I’m pretty sure, you’ll be glad you have those pictures, even if they never find their way into your ‘serious’ work. Try to shake your usual preoccupations and get lost.

“What is required to make these phantoms vanish? Light! Floods of light! Not a single bat can resist the dawn. Light up the lower strata of society.” (Victor Hugo, Les Miserables).

Light as security, truth, disinfectant, clarity, the banishing of darkness. Light as goodness. The light that allows us to see, the light that shows the way. The light that uncovers hidden things. All the light we cannot see. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Light as the opposite of dark, of heavy.

“Floods of light” has long been one of my verbal tics. I find myself blurting it at least a half dozen times a day. I love all the things it can mean: The world blown open, clarity, surprise, joy, rapture, revelation, rupture. Floods of light are what I’m after, what I’m looking for from the moment I get out of bed. It’s what I’m hoping for in my dreams. It’s the only way through.

Because there’s no way around it. The darkness around us is deep, and deeper and deeper we creep. Yet I still love this doomed world and all the magic it has inspired, produced, and is still capable of stirring up on a regular basis. And the floods of light are as real as the darkness, and we need them, need to find and notice and follow them.

So tonight I’m thinking about the hill of fireflies outside a little cabin on a hill in Vermont. I’m thinking about Livingston, Montana and Paradise Valley, and that otherworldly drive down out of Yellowstone into Gardiner. I’m thinking about the views out along Swingley Road. I’m thinking about the sun-dappled bridge in Beaver Creek Valley and the big spring bubbling up out of the rocks at the base of the bluffs. I’m thinking about sitting around on Sunday mornings reading and listening to Thelonious Monk, Horace Parlan, and Grant Green. I’m thinking about walking up Ninth Avenue through Hell’s Kitchen, heading for Columbus Circle, Central Park, and the Cloisters, feeling alive.

I’m thinking about that Great Camp on the island in the Adirondacks, sitting on the dock outside the boathouse or in the main room with that amazing fireplace and library, relaxing, relaxed, reading Wodehouse or maybe the essays of E.B. White, and listening to the loons echoing off the pond. I’m thinking about skipping stones in Grand Marais, eating lunch high above the ocean in Acadia National Park, lying in the back of my old Datsun pickup truck out in the range east of Livingston and dreaming my way into the staggering real-world planetarium stretched out above me in every direction.

I’m thinking about that ancient, cluttered magic shop, world famous, in a tiny, depressed village in Michigan, and the adjoining cemetery where many legendary magicians had chosen to be buried. I’m thinking about sitting outside my tent on a flat, rocky island in the North Sea, above the Arctic Circle, staying up most of the night stunned by the Northern Lights. I’m thinking about getting stuck in a snowstorm on my way back to Paris and spending the night in a train station in the mountains of Norway and talking all night with a stranger, not another soul in the place, no lights, no heat. I’m thinking about the drunk, off-duty cab driver I met in a bar in Trondheim, who insisted on driving me in the middle of the night to the cemetery outside the Nidoros Cathedral, where several generations of his family were buried, and then sitting with him in his cab at the fish market and falling asleep while listening to Neil Young as the sun was coming up.

I’m thinking about all the singing and dancing and whooping for joy, all the ecstatic moments and out-of-body experiences I’ve had, all the places I’ve been and the people I’ve loved. I’m trying to think about all of it tonight, trying to conjure those floods of light, to avoid one more night of thinking about this broken, heartbreaking world and the terrible darkness that I fear is coming for us all.

(Image: Abel Pann)

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Some things even the people closest to me perhaps don’t understand: That I still have no idea what I’m doing. That I still feel like an imposter and an imposition. That I’m still terrified of rejection. That I’ve never been able to bring myself to apply for a job, ask a woman on a date, request help from anyone, call a friend just to talk or to see if they might be available to hang out or go to a movie or concert. That I have never been able to submit any piece of writing for publication. That I’ve never in fact done so. That I am socially awkward and anxious, dislike parties and crowds, and am most comfortable hanging out with a dog, reading, and listening to music. That I really don’t much like to leave my house without a dog at the end of a leash and music playing through my headphones. That I prefer to be up when most of the world is sleeping. That all my life I have been afraid of the ringing of a telephone or a knock on my door. That I am both a habitual loner and lonely. That I have always distrusted my public persona, the character I have come to think of as The Man in the Brad Suit, even as I have come to think of that man as the most genuine (and generous) version of whoever I am. That for most of my life my insecurity has been disabling and for long stretches paralyzing. That I am self-conscious about virtually everything, and too often mask my insecurity and self-consciousness with episodes of mania in which I talk too much, laugh inappropriately, and often stammer and become confused. That at the heart of my self-consciousness is the fact that I truly don’t know how to write, find grammar rules and the parts of speech as perplexing as quantum physics, don’t know how to pronounce many words, and learned almost everything I know by reading and talking with people whose opinions I’ve respected. That for most of the last 30 years I have spent the overwhelming majority of my time with dogs, talking to them, singing and reading to them, dancing with them, and telling them repeatedly how much I need them. That I have battled insomnia, ADD, and OCD all my life. That the only time I’ve ever really been able to sit still when I’m not jacked up on speed is when I have a book and/or a pen in my hands. That an especially debilitating component of my OCD—as with most OCD sufferers—is an elaborate series of repetitive and ritualistic behaviors. That I count—steps, each movement of a toothbrush in my mouth, the entire time I’m in a shower, much of the time I’m driving, and whenever I’m agitated (which is often). That I count in an endless series of sevens. That I am phobic of numbers that are not seven, or don’t add up to seven (16, 25, 34, 43, 52, etc.), or in which through subtraction, multiplication, or division I can’t arrive at at least one seven or a series of sevens (my longtime address before my present home was 4325–two sevens!) and was chosen for that reason. That complicated math was necessary for me to become at all comfortable in my present home, whose street address is 1684: 8+4=12, 12-6=6, 6+1=7. That I pace ceaselessly at home or in motel rooms, counting my steps. That when I am alone I seldom speak in the same voice or accent. That I constantly latch onto words or phrases and speak them dozens and sometimes hundreds of times a day. That I have created hundreds—perhaps thousands—of alternate names and identities, each with a radically different backstory. That I will frequently do push-ups off and on all day like a death row inmate (counting to seven, again and again). That some of my more elaborate OCD rituals frequently eat up at least two hours of every day. That it is truly some sort of miracle I am still alive, and still writing words in these black books every single night.

I honestly believe what saved me was an incident in my early adolescence, when I had a vision—I remain utterly convinced it was real—of an elderly, exhausted angel crawling up the stairs of my boyhood home, gulping, wheezing, murmuring. It was a sweltering hot July morning after three a.m., and this angel was giving off a sputtering light filled with dust motes stirred up by its dusty wings. I was in my familiar quiet-hours spot at the top of the stairs, where most nights I would sit staring out across the lilac bushes and wooden fence at the glittering surface of the swimming pool in a neighboring yard.

That morning as I watched the angel crawling up the stairs toward me, the initial spasm of terror quickly gave way to a sort of pity as I studied the slow, agonizing progress of the creature, which in the darkness looked like nothing so much as a giant, faintly-glowing grasshopper. I nonetheless understood that this visitor was an angel, and I was of course curious about the nature of its visit.

The angel finally succeeded in reaching me on the landing, and it crouched near me on the top step, wobbling a bit, and then with great effort shook its wings—another blizzard of dust—and got them folded away in their proper place. For what seemed like a long time the angel sat there hanging its head and breathing heavily. Heat radiated from the angel, and it gave off a smell like an old furnace kicking in on the first cold night of the year.

Finally the angel raised its gaunt head and met my eyes.

“You must not surrender to boredom, despair, or self-destruction,” the angel said in a quavering, sexless voice. “You will have an interesting life that will take you far from this tormenting town.”

And then the angel squeezed itself through the open window, faltered for an instant, and then stumbled off into the night sky like an ancient and erratic sandhill crane.

At this point late in my life, I no longer have any expectation that anyone will read these words—or any words I write—or will believe a word I say, but that story is the truth, and every day I somehow get myself up, muster a half-hearted leap of faith, and gracelessly throw myself through a window and out into this terrifying and beautiful world.

Day draws near
Another one
Do what you can.
—Czeslaw Milosz, “On Angels”

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In those days, Escanaba was a shuddering town. Church bells tremored, clanging ceaselessly and almost imperceptibly. Were the town not so eerily silent, you probably wouldn’t even notice. You might, though, notice the rattling, clanging, and fluttering of street lights, plastic signs, flags, or the flower planters that were strung up and swaying all along the Main Street.

Something deep beneath the city was moving. You could feel the unmistakable vibrations through the soles of your shoes. A persistent local rumor posited that the government was detonating some new weapon in the abandoned pit mines scattered around the peninsula.

A regional magazine had sent me to Escanaba to do a story on Miriam Hammer, a woman who was purported to have the world’s largest collection of souvenir bells. While there I also hoped to locate the grave of the legendary giant, Ernst Shysnisky, who at one time had traveled the U.S. billed as “Ernie Shines, the World’s Tallest Man,” and was reported to be buried in Escanaba. (I have spent many, many days on the road tracking down the graves of famous giants, circus elephants, race horses, gorillas, and sideshow performers.)

Miss Hammer’s home was a modest bungalow a block south of downtown. Every wall of the house was lined with shelves, and every one of those shelves was filled with her collection of tiny bells—bells from Niagara Falls, New York City, the Wisconsin Dells, the Vatican, Paris, Amsterdam, the Ozarks, various World Fairs, and myriad other towns, cities, and tourist sites all over the globe.

Upon entering Miss Hammer’s house, I was immediately struck by the noise, which is very, very difficult to describe. Because the vibrations of Escanaba are not violent, the thousands of bells in Miriam’s collection—brass, glass, silver, stainless steel, tin, porcelain, wood—create an unrelenting sound that is as dense as it impossible to pin down. A knock on the door or footsteps in the entryway agitate the bells. I could hear them shivering even as I was standing on the front porch.

Some moments later, as I was sitting on the plastic-covered couch in the living room, I closed my eyes and tried to come up with ways to describe what I was hearing. At times it sounded like an experimental ambient composition, the twilight din of an especially mysterious jungle, or perhaps a gamelan field recording from a temple somewhere in Southeast Asia. I listened a bit more closely and attempted to isolate individual sounds; from one moment to the next I heard what sounded like the distant rattle of dog tags, someone tapping on a glass with a butter knife or drumming absent-mindedly with a pencil on a desktop; there were occasional dings, chirps, and chimes; the gentle shake of a toy tambourine or maracas; pebbles rattling in a jar; a sort of stirring noise; various pops, clangs, claps, and thuds; a key ring being jostled in a coat pocket; strange undertones from a vibraphone or marimba.

What I was hearing struck me after a time as a true wall of sound, an especially off-kilter horror movie soundtrack, and it was unsettling.

It was also unrelenting, but when I mentioned it to Miriam she claimed she didn’t have the slightest idea what I was talking about.

“The noise?” I said. “The constant tremoring of all those bells? You don’t hear that?”

She cocked her head and listened briefly. “No,” she said. “I can’t say I’ve ever noticed it.”

Though no one I talked with in town had ever heard of Ernst Shysnisky, I had little trouble finding the grave of the giant. The gravestones in Lakeview Cemetery (which was right in the middle of town) were equipped with night lights—a local tradition, I was told—and all night those lights sputtered and flickered as the ground beneath them trembled.

The information on the giant’s grave provided nothing but the basics: Birth name, and the dates of his birth and death, along with a poor engraving of some sort of songbird.

I knew about Shysnisky from an exhibit I’d seen years earlier at a local historical society museum in Lemmon, South Dakota. The giant’s 1951 visit to Lemmon was apparently memorable enough (he was said to have eaten 100 pancakes and five pounds of bacon in a single sitting) to warrant a permanent place in the community’s historical record.

I have since logged a great deal of time in libraries, obsessively researching the life of Shysnisky, but I remember the sign in the display case at Lemmon that first drew me into his story: “THE GIANT HAD TO TRAVEL WITH A COBBLER TO REPAIR HIS SHOES!”

Those shoes, I learned, were size 29, and the giant did indeed travel with a cobbler. Shysnisky was 8’ 11”, and had been plagued with excruciating foot problems since he was a boy. He had apparently experienced every sort of foot woe known to man, and a number that were unique to giants.

Shysnisky was so large—and had been so large for so long—that no career was available to him other than capitalizing on his great size. From the time he was 19 years old he had traveled with the old cobbler, who was employed by the shoe company that was the giant’s primary sponsor. He had other commercial sponsors that provided him with bread, eggs, milk, breakfast cereal, pancake mix, and ham. For more than a decade he traveled the country making appearances at shoe stores and a chain of pancake restaurants where he put on prodigious displays of eating. While he ate pancakes and bacon, he signed photographs for the people who came to stare at him.

Another sponsor—a major automobile manufacturer—built him a custom-sized trailer in which he traveled and slept. The trailer was of course immense, and was emblazoned with a crown and the phrase: “HERE COMES THE WORLD’S TALLEST MAN!” An old Greek gambler, whose name was Yannis, drove the trailer and acted as the giant’s manager. Yannis and the cobbler stayed in motels and played a lot of cards.

Very few public bathrooms could accommodate the giant, and he usually had to resort to using a bedpan and portable hospital urinal that were custom-made for him by a medical supply company, which also used the giant’s image for promotional purposes.

For a short and very unhappy period, Shysnisky trained to be a professional wrestler, but it was quickly discovered that he was fragile, weak, and entirely lacking in athleticism.

The giant’s caravan traveled 10 months of the year, all across the U.S. and Canada, making at minimum two public appearances each day. Shysnisky was shy, with a pronounced stammer, and was understandably self-conscious. In his spare time he liked to feed birds in public parks. Birds, he had discovered, were drawn to him, and would often perch on his head and shoulders.

The giant became more and more eccentric as he grew older; he let his hair and beard grow, and purchased a towering Oriental bird cage made of bamboo, and this cage he had fashioned into a hat so that he could have birds fluttering around his head at all times.

The giant’s sponsors eventually cut ties with him over this and other peculiarities, and he spent his last years living in a glass aviary at a park of curiosities in Upstate New York.

Ernst Shysnisky was 31 years old when he died, and I have been unable to find any explanation for how or why he came to be buried in that lonely grave in Escanaba’s Lakeview Cemetery.

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I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.

—George Orwell

Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.

—Ibid

How can one feel so hopeless and hopeful at the same time?

Because of the relentless rain, the explosions, the thundercrack, the gully washer. Because of those tents along the railroad tracks in the rain, the elderly homeless man, drenched, riding a children’s bicycle back to his camp after playing chess with a Somali cab driver at a coffee shop. Because of the young woman in the bright orange dress, who we saw going through the trash at the park, and then later, on our way back home from our walk, there she was, running wind sprints and doing pull-ups by herself on the playground.

Because of all those people—so many of them Black—who felt compelled to spend their lives making music and living in poverty. Because we now regard so many of them as legends. Because there were often more people on the stage for their performances than there were in the audience. Because there are people who live for things they love but never entirely understand.

Because love and passion must always be part of anything truly worth doing. Because without real artists and eccentrics who would we be as a people? What would we be as a country? Because I never know what I’m saying or why I’m saying it, but I somehow find a way to keep saying.

Because now they want me to believe that computers can make art, make music, write books, and maybe even come up with a passable imitation of Milford Graves or Jane Bowles or Barry Hannah.

Because almost 40 years ago there existed something like the Sound Unity Festival, and the Peter Kowald Quartet was on a stage—Kowald, Charles Gayle, Rashied Ali, and Marilyn Crispell. And Charles Gayle was living in an abandoned warehouse and eating off the streets, and Don Cherry’s band at that festival probably had at least 15 members, including dancers, and there’s no way any of those people were making any money, and most of them had been making music and not making any money for decades, and the Sound Unity Festival ran for three days at the CUANDO Community Center, 9 Second Avenue, in New York, and tickets were $9, and besides the aforementioned artists, the line-up included Peter Brotzmann, David S. Ware, Ahmed Abdullah, Bill Dixon, Jimmy Lyons, Charles Tyler, Frank Lowe, Grachan Moncur III, Jameel Moondoc, several dance companies, and a performance of “A Thousand Cranes Opera,” which featured a chorus of 40 children.

Because what the fuck?

Because how many people paid to attend this festival? 100? 300? Because, regardless, no one made any money. Because what’s the percentage of people who feel compelled to make art in this country who ever make any money?

Because as depressing as that all is, I nonetheless find it wildly inspiring. A dream and a scene like that is what I’ve been chasing all my life, and it’s probably too late to stop chasing it now.

Because this is who I am. Because the first time I heard music that sounded like the music those people played—and this was now more than 40 years ago—I didn’t understand it, but I knew instinctively those were my people.

Because I’m for the dreamers. I’m for the weak, the poor, the fallen, downtrodden, the suffering. I’m for the grieving, the sick, the uninsured, the homeless, the addicted, lonely, and unloved. I’m for the lost, the underdog, the strays, sad sacks, those who don’t have enough of anything. I’m for the people who learn to hide. I’m for the invisible, the unseen, the overlooked; the outcasts with the courage to get loud; the refugees, the people who drift from place to place, looking for a job, an audience, attention, a place to live, dignity, respect, someone to love. I’m for the tenant over the landlord, the employee over the employer, labor over capital, the woman or man who has nothing over the man who has not just everything he needs, but much more than everything he needs.

Because I despise entirely unregulated capitalism, oligarchs who aspire to be slave owners, Wall Street, a judicial system that has become one of the most powerful engines of injustice and inequality ever assembled. Because I’m disgusted by people who own private jets, yachts, and private islands, people who pay no taxes, yet time after time get tax breaks and government funding and bailouts; by people who refuse to pay their employees a living wage; by wealthy people who are inconvenienced by homelessness, crime, poverty, protests; people who look away from anything at all that offends their sense of security and threatens their charmed lives, and then deny the reality of all the things they refuse to see.

Because I despise narrow bigots and propagators of hate who consider themselves Christians, people who spend their lives protesting abortion—or even birth control—who think it’s a perfectly legitimate and virtuous thing for the State to perform ‘legal’ executions and to starve poor children and families.

Because I despise people who’ve read nothing, been nowhere, and don’t have the slightest idea what the fuck they’re talking about, who can’t distinguish obvious, outrageous lies from the truth; adults who lack the moral compass of the average five year old, and who can sit for hours every day passively absorbing corrosive, poisonous trash masquerading as entertainment and pumped up by tens of millions of dollars worth of advertisements paid for by corporate criminals.

Because I despise a culture [sic] that is slowly killing off everything that’s actually deserving of that name.

Because I am enraged by all this shit, this landscape increasingly devoid of any consideration of aesthetics, that’s surrendered beauty; a country that’s killing dreams, aggressively creating inequality and injustice, and choking off basic human rights and stripping human beings of dignity and hope.

And because I despise American Exceptionalism, the greatest and most pernicious of all the lies that we’ve been force-feeding our children for generations.

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Linda Manz in “Days of Heaven.” Susan Tyrrell in “Fat City.” Hellen Kallianiotes in “Five Easy Pieces.” Thelma Ritter in “Pickup on South Street.” I could spend days just watching a loop of those performances.

I watched “Five Easy Pieces” for the first time in probably 30 years tonight, and realized how much more attuned I am to movies now than when I was younger. I was raised with blockbusters on the one-screen theater in my hometown, and then the multiplex buffets of the Twin Cities, and as a result I regarded movies as little more than purely escapist entertainment. Very few films I saw during my adolescence and early adult years made any sort of permanent impression on me.

And, later, when I started renting videos of the movies I’d always been told were canonical, I would watch them on shitty televisions with tiny screens, poor sound, and illegible subtitles, and the experience usually left me more perplexed (and bored) than impressed.

I’ve been a compulsive reader all my life, and only in the last few years—during which I have watched more than 1,000 movies on the Criterion Channel—have I learned to study the movies I watch and think about them not just in the same way I think about books, but to think about them as books. I’m interested in the way they tell stories, the decisions they make, and the enviable ways the medium frees up a writer.

So much doesn’t have to be spoken or described, and because of that—the actor’s face, body language, the way he or she walks and talks and moves, where they live and what they do, and the landscapes they move through—really great lines delivered in just the right way by the right actor give me more pure pleasure than almost anything I read in books these days.

At any rate, “Five Easy Pieces” struck me as a really great novel, and great literature, period. So many extraordinary things happen that are communicated with a minimum of language, and a writer attempting to tell such a story in a novel or short story would have to labor for pages to unpack some of the history and backstory, and in the process a lot of the marvelous dialogue would fall flat.

Kallianiotes’s monologue in the backseat of the car, for instance, is an unhinged tour de force precisely because of everything else that’s going on inside and outside the car while she’s raving. When Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, or Toni Basil try to interject or challenge her, she just steamrolls them. Her face, her intensity, her delivery are everything, as are the reactions of the other characters. I honestly don’t know how you’d make that scene work outside of a movie, and even in a movie it’s awe inspiring.

The whole movie is full of this sort of thing. Nicholson’s secret musical and family history is barely hinted at in the first 45 minutes, and even after he returns home, sorting it out requires a lot of forensic attention. Nothing is ever explicitly explained, and the movie wouldn’t work if it were. Nicholson’s character is disappointing and disappointed and difficult, and he has to sell that without the crutch of a lot of exposition. Every character in the movie is an iceberg, and they all deserve novels of their own.

It’s an extraordinary film, and an extraordinary piece of storytelling. I kept rewinding and watching scenes over and over, trying to figure out how you could write such a thing. I concluded that you couldn’t. I’m not even sure how Carol Eastman wrote the screenplay. How much of it was her, and how much of it was Bob Rafelson (and Nicholson, etc.)?

There was this blinding light, too close and dangling at right about the level of my eyebrows, and Laird Cregar was leaning over me and bellowing accusations. I remember at some point thinking, “There’s no way this guy is 29 years old.”

“Dusters and nickel rats,” Cregar said to his companions on the other side of that blinding light. “That’s who’s out there running the streets.”

Who’s the guy who played Babe Ruth? It is William Bendix I’m thinking of? Anyway, that guy was there as well. And Mike Mazurki. These thugs had given me a good going over before they got me tied up in the chair and shined that bright light in my face. Cregar got right in my face and said, “Exactly what did Betty mean when she said you’d be better off without her?”

We were in some abandoned warehouse, brick walls closing in. I noticed a “No Admittance” sign on the closed door and said, “Isn’t that sign on the wrong side?” Somebody poked their head in the door, said something I couldn’t make out, and the heavies left me alone for maybe ten minutes. I was slumped over a metal desk, and blood was dripping from somewhere and pooling on the surface of the desk. The blood was clearly coming from me, but I felt around and couldn’t conclusively determine the exact source. There were likely multiple sources—nose, lip, right eye, just behind my left ear.

When the fellas hustled back in I said, “I’ll tell you right now, you guys are wasting your time,” which was something I said because it sounded like something I should say. For the same reason I also said, “Of course you’re clearly gentlemen who enjoy wasting time.” Cregar asked me where I was on the night of the incident. I replied that I’d been locked up in a sanitarium on the Upper West Side, and would be happy to provide them with the phone number of a doctor who could confirm my alibi.

Someone handed me a slip of paper and told me to write down the number, address, and name of the doctor. I complied with this request, Cregar handed the sheet of paper to one of the others, and said, “See if that squares.” A moment later the guy came back in, conferred in hushed tones with the others, and then Cregar turned on me with renewed ferocity.

“All right, wise guy,” he said. “There’s been no such sanitarium or doctor for more than 20 years. What do you say to that?”

Bendix whistled the funeral march.

“Look,” I said, “I don’t know what this is all about, but you have the wrong guy. I’ve told you everything, and I’m not even supposed to be in this movie.”

“Oh, ‘everything’ is a big word,” Cregar said. “You aren’t yet hopeless enough to tell us everything.”

“I’m hanging onto my hope,” I said. “A guy can’t live without hope.”

“Trust me,” Cregar said. “It can be done. Lots of folks figure it out.”

He suddenly jerked me to my feet and we were all moving out into a big open space filled with machinery and burlap bags stuffed with something. As they were herding me along and alternately dragging me and yelling at me to pick up my feet, a truck swung into an open door at the other end of the warehouse and came barreling towards us, guns blazing. In the chaos and exchange of gunfire that ensued, I found myself running, climbed over a mountain of burlap bags, and scrambled up a chute to a floor above. I made for a set of high windows on a far wall, wrenched one open, and stepped out onto a fire escape, beyond which I could see the lights of my neighborhood stretching away into the distance.

My dog was down there at the bottom of the fire escape, waiting for me, and I grabbed his leash and we ran all the way home.

Once you determine the old palace is haunted by a necromancer, it’s probably not a good idea to hang around, especially if there’s a portrait over the fireplace that looks like Vincent Price, and the palace servant looks like Lon Chaney, Jr.

If the streets around the palace are haunted by zombies and blind children, and every night you hear ghostly howls and murmurs, that’s also a bad sign. I’d get out if I were you, before that painting above the fireplace starts talking to you. And, you know, before you start noticing the rats, spiders, and bats.

Doesn’t it strike you as strange that the village is always socked in by fog? And the locals—those not yet zombies—are so skittery? And that every house seems to have some sort of mutant chained up in a closet? Mark my words, those mutants are eventually going to break loose and start murdering people.

Protect your innocent wife, I say. Get out! Get out while you can! Before Vincent Price—the necromancer burned at the stake by angry villagers more than 100 years ago—takes possession of your body and soul.

There will always come a moment when Vincent Price sits down and eats some grapes. And then all hell breaks loose. If you can’t resist the necromancer’s spell, send your poor, lovely wife back to Boston. Spare her! For God’s sake, man! What’s come over you? Digging up the dead necromancer’s mistress in the local graveyard and revivifying her? Toward what end, sir? To exact revenge upon the villagers? To burn each and every one of them alive?

No! Don’t open that book! It’s the necromancer’s Bible!

Wait…wait…the torch-bearing villagers have arrived at the palace, just as Vincent Price is about to sacrifice his wife to some sort of writhing goblin in a cauldron.

The villagers light the palace on fire and save the wife. The necromancer seems to have relinquished possession of Vincent Price, the helpless inheritor of the palace. Yet as he flees the burning palace and is reunited with his wife, we see him caressing the scarred tree where the necromancer was burned alive all those years ago, and a look of unmistakable evil flares in his eyes and we know—we know!—that the necromancer still has him in his grip, and the age-old nightmare is not in fact over and shall never be over for the residents of this cursed village.

The necromancer lives, and he will have his revenge!

How can I possibly sleep now, chilled to the bone as I am?

I guess the only thing to do is to sit up and watch “The Raven.” More Vincent Price. More fog. Another haunted palace. Another possessed portrait above the fireplace mantle. A telescope.

Tapping at the door, tapping at the windows. I implore you, sir! Do not let that raven in!

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I guess I’ve abandoned the purely personal encyclopedia I was working on for so many years. I originally intended it to be an encyclopedia of everyone I’d ever known and everything that ever captured my interest. I worked away at it for years, but at some point I realized it was taking up too much time, and would take up more life than I had left, even as I continued to add to the file of index cards devoted to each entry (and as I continued to meet new people, and discover more things of interest). I think I threw in the towel when I discovered that I had several dozen entries—some of them quite long—devoted to book, record, and convenience store clerks who I regarded as significant enough figures in my life to warrant inclusion.

I’m not even sure where I’ve stashed away those thousands of index cards, but I’m guessing that at least half of them were devoted to objects or things: books, records, movies, items of clothing, childhood toys, halloween costumes, Christmas gifts, bicycles, cars, baseball gloves, hats, etc. At one time I had put together what I’m pretty sure was a complete ranked inventory of every pair of shoes I’d purchased from the time I was maybe 17 years old (including at least 30 different pairs of suede Puma Clyde sneakers, every pair a different color combination).

At various times over the years, when the project started to feel too daunting, I considered pairing it down to a strictly biographical encyclopedia of all the people in my life, and started researching, conducting interviews, and collecting photographs. I intended to go as far back as I was capable of remembering, so some of the entries would be fragmented and largely impressionistic (grade school teachers, piano teachers, school crossing guards, little league coaches, ministers, local eccentrics). Some of those early characters left me with some vivid memory or memories, but I could no longer remember their names.

Just for instance: From my earliest days in elementary school I was already proclaiming my desire to be a writer. When I was in maybe fourth grade, there was this kid who used to knock the books out of my arms at the bus stop every morning. This kid was a new arrival in the neighborhood, and he was a rough character (the first kid I ever heard utter the word ‘fuck’). We were the same age, and because it was a small town and the neighborhood orbit was somewhat claustrophobic, we ended up being sort of friends.

One day he asked me why I always had so many books, and I told him I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.

“My grandma is an author,” he said. I asked what she wrote, and he shrugged and said, “Books. She has boxes of them in the basement.”

I told him I desperately wanted to meet his grandmother, and he took me up the street to his house, where the old woman was in the front lawn, sitting in a lawn chair and smoking a cigarette. She had leathery skin, and an even more leathery voice, and when her grandson told her I wanted to be a writer like her, she let out a long, hacking laugh and said, “Oh, Christ.”

The kid took me down in their basement and showed me his grandmother’s desk and the boxes of her books, all of which were paperbacks that had titles like Key Party, Nurse Nympho, Trailer Park Swingers, and Flygirl Three-Way. The covers were pretty much all illustrations of people in their bathrobes or underwear.

I didn’t understand any of that, of course. I was a little boy, and anyone who had actually published a book was a god to me. I once begged my mother to take me to the public library downtown for the appearance of an author—her name, I still remember, was Lilian Brady—who had written a book called Aise-Ce-Bon, A Raccoon. My mother bought me a copy of the book, had Ms. Brady sign it, and I kept that book in a place of honor next to my bed throughout my entire childhood.

Anyway, although I suppose I recognized on some primal level that there was something transgressive about the books my friend’s grandmother wrote, I wasn’t yet in position to understand precisely what sorts of books they were. I understood only that this woman was an author, just as Lilian Brady was; she had boxes of books that she had written and published, sitting right there next to the desk with her typewriter, lamp, ashtray, and piles of paper on it.

When I told the kid later that I wanted to ask his grandmother if I could buy one of her books and have her sign it, he immediately said, “She won’t go for that. I’ll take one for you. You saw, she has boxes of them. She’ll never notice.” The next day at school he sidled up to me in the hallway and pushed a book at me. “Hide that,” he said. “Don’t let any teachers see it.”

These details are all a bit blurry, but I suppose that it must have been somehow apparent to both of us that there was something inappropriate about this transaction, and perhaps even about the book, which was called An Orgy For Georgie.

I took that book home and tried to read it in my bedroom. The cover illustration featured two or three scantily-clad women lounging in a living room while a man in a bathrobe was standing in the doorway and smoking a pipe. I didn’t exactly understand what I was reading, but in the very early going there were instances of language that I recognized as taboo, and there was definitely something both terrifying and fascinating about what I was reading. I understood enough, at any rate, that I decided to hide the book in my dresser drawer, where my mother nonetheless found it a few days later.

Her reaction was a combination of sputtering rage, embarrassment, and mortification. I explained the situation, said that the author lived in the neighborhood, and that I had acquired the book with the idea that the woman might perhaps be persuaded to speak at the library, as Lilian Brady had.

A neighborhood scene followed, as my mother dragged me up the street and forced me to return the book to the woman. I remember my mother referred to the woman’s book as ‘filth,’ and the woman howled with laughter, flicked her cigarette at us, and slammed the door in our faces.

I no longer remember that kid’s name, and he and his family moved away not long after this incident.

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