by Kent Russell
GLENN
I’m definitely down for adventure. But my days of adventure no matter the consequences have come to an end, dude. I’d feel like such a dick if something happened to me on this trip, and my wife found out it was because I’m camping under a bridge like a sex criminal.
NOAH (O.S.)
(shouting from other tent)
You jabronis should’ve gone to law school.
KENT (O.S.)
You got stuff to lose. I don’t. I get it. Still, man. You gotta be open to the story. Do it for the doc. Everything—in service to the doc.
GLENN
Damn the repercussions? We’re going to live forever on celluloid?
KENT (O.S.)
That’s right. The Florida Glory that eluded so many.
GLENN
I guarantee you you’d feel differently if anyone was willing to have a child with you. You, though—you operate so as to not owe any emotional or social credit to anyone. Self-sabotage as a means of self-protection. Won’t let anyone help you. As soon as relief is proffered, the firewall comes down. Thinking you can achieve something like emotional self-reliance. Very immature.
KENT (O.S.)
I would argue it’s very American.
GLENN
Maybe this will be my big break. Maybe I’ve got a tragic case study on my hands. You thinking that this Florida project is going to work wonders; the audience knowing that the real wonder is in watching your delusion unfurl. My own Burden of Dreams.
KENT (O.S.)
(quietly)
Whatever.
The men fall silent. Katydids begin to chirr like lighters failing to catch.
FADE TO BLACK
—
MILE 403 — GAINESVILLE
WHERE RUDER FORMS SURVIVE
Unbeknownst to me, Noah and Glenn had conspired to take this weekend off. A few weeks ago, I guess, they invited their significant others to Gainesville, a college town oasis where there are decent restaurants and fancy coffee shops. They’d booked separate twee B and Bs.
“I mean, I just assumed we’d all stay in the hostel downtown,” I said, trying to hide my hurt.
“I need to refill my heart with my wife,” Glenn said. “I need to replenish my red blood cells. As you are a joy vampire.”
“It’s this,” Noah said, shrugging apologetically, “or we take road wives.”
We reached the Gainesville City Limits sign. Glenn wanted Noah and me to stand in front of it and expound upon the time we spent here, the friendship we developed. I did not want to do this. We were so close to finishing off the day. You simply do not stop a walker who is this close. Glenn should know that by now, I thought.
“Where are we, Kent?” he asked. His tone was as condescending as a child psychologist’s. “Can you tell us where we are? Can you tell us where we are, and what it means to you?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I said. “Look behind me. The sign. The sign is telling you where we are. Kind of question is that?”
“Fuck you, you pedantic shit,” Glenn shot back. “Don’t tell me my questions are dumb.”
“Don’t treat me like I’m some asshole off the street!” I countered. “Don’t give me the regular interview shit. Just tell me what you want, and I’ll give it to you.”
“That’s not how journalism works, man.”
“Guys,” Noah tried to interject. “Let’s just get this done.”
“What is wrong with you?” Glenn asked rhetorically. “Sometimes I wonder: Did I really spend this much time, money, and energy to be patronized by a dickhole for months? I know you think your ruinous inner and exterior life is some expression of, like, unique and devastating honesty. But it is emphatically not.”
You fucking…passive-aggressive nurser of hurts, I thought. You work so hard at keeping your small mean feelings hidden. Only in the rare argument do they appear. Hiding them even from yourself. Not willing to be seen taking your small mean everyday revenge on me, which, granted, I have sometimes earned.
But what I said was: “I’m sorry that your questions are stupid.”
“I definitely don’t want an apology,” Glenn said. “I want less commentary. Less demeaning bullshit. It isn’t just the shit talking of three guys hanging out! It’s this Chinese water torture of criticalness. You don’t offer any helpful suggestions. You just shit on what I’m doing. And then act like you’re this guy who’s so aloof he can’t take all of this to be quite real.”
Glenn looked me up and down. Then he continued: “I have no idea what’s pretense and what’s dedication with you.”
Though this bothered me—I do want to pull my weight, I do want this documentary to succeed, I do care about Glenn—I let none of these bubbles rise to the surface.
“I am helping you,” I said, half-believing it. “To be not this way. To get you to stop being so sensitive.”
Indignation raised his eyebrow. “Just so I get this straight,” Glenn said, “you’re doing me a favor by relentlessly playing me for a fool? You’re teaching me emotional maturity?”
“That’s right,” I said. “Teaching you to be Zen. Stoic. These are like koans.”
“These are like koans,” Glenn repeated.
Noah whistled.
“Yeah, so, like—when I say you are a human golden retriever, so boundlessly prepared to be happy, and so ready for everyone else to be happy along with you—that’s a compliment, by the way, you’re a friendly guy—but when I say that, it’s meant to, like—you’re supposed to think it over, while you walk. Is it true that I’m this way? Why or why not?”
“That hardly seems like something to make fun of me for.”
I went on telling Glenn that he was morally and imaginatively naïve, a serene simpleton. I informed him that my efforts at finding something deeper in him had been an all-around failure; that interacting with him was like tapping my fingernail against a bright porcelain glaze: High pure notes ring out, but not one scratch is left on the surface.
“Look, it’s OK!” I said. “You are Canadian. You’re the son of a distant queen. It’d be weird if you weren’t an obsequious mediocrity.”
“In fact,” Glenn said, “it all feels rather indiscriminate.”
“I get it. I get why it has to be so pedestrian with you.”
Now, I did not really want to be saying this. In the heat of the moment I did, maybe, sure. I wanted less to win an argument than to cripple. I wanted to see Glenn’s face buckle like the body of a man whose Achilles tendons have been cut. Looking back on it, though, writing it out—I recognize that it was not my finest hour.
It is well to explain to you here that an inner diabolism haunts my underconsciousness. I don’t particularly care for it. I’m not proud of it. I wince inwardly whenever this reflexive antagonism flares up. Yet there it is, the fact of the matter: A snickering imp lives within me. A seditious and inebriating familiar spirit. If another exalts himself, this spirit humbles him. If another humbles himself, this spirit lifts him up. I go on confusing and contradicting the other party until the other party, through word or deed, proves that he, too, is a monster that surpasses all understanding.
“Trolling,” I believe the kids call it. Acting like a provocateur and a trickster, and then gaslighting those who took the provocation seriously. Unparseable layers of irony, earnestness, persona, and performance drifting and overlapping until it becomes impossible for the other party to determine whether the devil horns are on or off.
Not that the genuineness of my actions matters in the end. I exploit the other party’s kindnesses and weaknesses; I wind them up; I watch as they are transformed into unwitting performers. Often I do this for fun. More often, I do it for profit.
“Cuntishness as buffer,” Glenn pronounced. “It’s me who gets it. Sure, I
know only what you let me know about you. But because of what I know, I know empathy is a real struggle for you. Totally.
“Your soul’s like your dumbass buggy,” he continued, giving Thunder a nudge. “It’s the perfect vehicle for you. You’ve both been left alone too long. You’re both rusting from the inside out. You’re both too weak to do the real work you’re here to do.”
“All right, guys,” Noah said, repacking his portion of the gear. “The light’s gone, so we can just do it somewhere else tomo—”
“The castle of your…your entire life…was built on sand, homie,” Glenn said, reaching for the lapel mike pinned to my collar. Clumsily or purposefully, he thumbed the point of its pin into my flesh. “It’s all coming crumbling down.”
It wasn’t the pain but the principle of the thing. I shoved Glenn. He came back at me and, God love him, he twisted my nipple. Glenn gave me a purple nurple, friend. What was left for me to do but put shoulder to thigh, wrap up, and drive? That’s just good tackling form.
So we had ourselves a dustup. Boys will be boys and all that, even when two of the boys’ wives are en route. Understand, I’m stronger in the upper body but taper to a fine point below. Glenn used this to his advantage after I’d gone to ground with him. He wrapped his slimming but still trunkish thighs around my midsection, used them to prize me off of him. We rolled about the gravel and roadside garbage as if our shirts were afire.
Noah did not rush to intervene. Something in him—something like in a dry drunk with a beer placed before him—recognized that if he even touched this, tragedies would ensue. Instead, he circled us with a hypertensive flush to his face. He looked as though he dearly wished to make himself understood; he also looked as though he’d be able to make himself understood only by way of strangulation.
Glenn and I completed one last revolution before releasing each other from the clench. We lay panting together, supine and slightly baffled, like postcoital lovers. Then Glenn pushed himself up from the dirt with his left elbow. He leaned over and gaveled a fist against my solar plexus. “You make it so it’s either spar with you or feel bad all the time,” he said, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.
He refused to make eye contact once we’d regained our footing. To the back of his head, I said, “Those whom He loves He chastens, Glenn.” I regretted it immediately.
“What you two idiots should be thankful for,” Noah said, slapping the filth from our backs, “is it wasn’t necessary for me to call upon my murder technique. Anyway, we could use a break.”
Once we reached downtown Gainesville, Glenn and Noah went their separate way. I noticed not only that they were relieved to be rid of my company—but that I myself shared their relief.
—
MILE 403 — GAINESVILLE
THIS LONGING FOR COMPLETENESS
IS CALLED “EDUCATION”
You know what they say: Each successive generation is, in effect, a conquering army of wee Huns who must be civilized before it’s too late. I decided to do my part in that civilizing mission. I offered my services to the current dean of the journalism school at the University of Florida. Who, turns out, is my old thesis adviser, a genial diet book author. The man used to smile everywhere below his eyeballs while going over my avant-garde, thirty-thousand-word-story drafts with me. He did so once again—smiled a smile that was pure exercise of will—when he saw me stride into the patisserie for our lunch meeting.
I filled him in on my professional arc, making it sound more ascensional than the top-of-the-coaster drop it had become. To account for my appearance as well as the sickly sweet aroma emanating from the area of my feet, I filled him in on the doc, too. That’s what did it. The dean invited me to talk to his magazine-writing capstone course. Long ago, I had taken that course. I had loved that course. I had been inspired to live my present life thanks to that course. Here, now, I could pay it forward.
More essentially, I could array our GoPros and film a scene for Glenn. Present him with a funny little make-up gift when we see each other next, like.
The following day, I went to pay my respects to the Ritz, the apartment complex where Noah and I had our meet-cute. What I found in its place was Cyclone fencing and hip-high weeds. The squat, off-white, two-story building had been razed some time ago, apparently to make way for luxury condos catering to well-heeled parents and alumni. Its demolition had left a gap in the row of student housing like that of a pulled tooth. And as is the case with a pulled tooth, all I wanted to do was prod the painful absence.
But I had children to inspire. So, somewhat somber-hearted, I crossed UF’s campus to meet with the dean in the new “integrated newsroom” that football boosters’ money had paid for. “Here’s where we teach drones,” the dean said, “and there’s where we do 360-degree video.” All was glass and steel, a fine architectural metaphor for a vocation purported to trade in transparency and the effacement of mystery. It was also the utter opposite of the shabby and avocado-carpeted college I’d loved so well, with its wood-paneled dark rooms, printing presses, and permeating aura of obsolescence. This “integrated newsroom” was a lame reproduction of the very thing that had destroyed journalism: Silicon Valley, right on down to the napping stations, dearth of walls, and young people sitting in headphoned silence before computers, tablets, and phones.
The dean must have misinterpreted my gasface, for he then added, “Oh, no, don’t worry—we have extracurricular seminars on social media management.”
He ushered me into a conference room and said he’d be back in an hour. I set up my cameras, took my place at the head of the class, sized up the dozen students peppering the few rows of tables. They looked…exactly as students looked when I went here. I would say that their big sneakers and graphic tees revealed in each an angry baby howling to be dressed…but I was dressed similarly.
I knew them: They had arrived on campus with the preconceived notion of an educated person being someone possessed not of a particular body of knowledge, but of an approved suite of skills and opinions. They were here to acquire the expertise necessary to acquire a job that might cancel out the debt they were presently acquiring. Their first two years of study had been given over to remedying their eighth-grade reading and writing levels. This was handled by graduate teaching assistants (and adjuncts!) who toss off A’s because they know they won’t sniff a faculty job without good student evaluations. The students know this, too, so the customer-is-always-right attitude is rampant. These children spend perhaps four hours a week on coursework; then they drink themselves unconscious Thursday through Sunday, networking for the future.
Their heavy-lidded eyes stared out at me from atop their folded arms. I contrived to begin. I could not begin. Their heads burrowed into their folded arms.
I’d led enough workshops and seminars at Columbia to know that I would need a Contigo full of hundred-proof to get through this. I pulled long and hard from the one I’d brought with me. I rocked on my heels, which had grown bristly with concentric circles of callus. I began.
I introduced myself, detailed my transcript history, swore that I was Just Like Them. I euphemized the documentary project. I rattled off the names of some magazines I’d written for. Kvetched about escalating rents in gentrifying Brooklyn. “Who here has seen The Devil Wears Prada?” I asked. No response. “All right, well—who here subscribes to The New Yorker?” Crickets.
I sucked at my thermos full of sunshine with renewed urgency. “OK, fuckers,” I said. “Who here in this magazine-writing class thinks they want to be a writer?”
The children glanced around the room. “Sounds cool, I guess…” one young man said.
I rubbed my face with both hands, let them fall to my sides. “Look,” I said. “I’m gonna tell you what I wish someone had told me at your age.”
I slugged two-thirds of the Contigo in one go. “At least one of you wants to do this,” I said. “I
know it. One in twelve. I was the one in twelve. The one of you…I sympathize. Having been divested of any hope for love, or being seen by those who mattered most, you turned to writing. Whoever you are—listen up.”
As a contemporary American writer, I said, you will have more freedom than virtually any other writer does, or did. How will you choose to put this freedom to work? What impossible goal will you attempt to effect while flexing your finite abilities in an imperfect medium? Will you oppose the neoliberal order? Cis-hetero patriarchy? The endless cycle of consumption and waste?
“Me,” I said, “I like to lodge my opposition to the market by writing long, reader-unfriendly works.”
I also try to honestly portray the humanity I see struggling in a fallen world, I told them. I try to reconcile a longing for grace and redemption with a deep sense of human imperfection and sin. Evil exists, that much is certain—but the physical world I see and describe is not evil in and of itself. We make it so.
More than anything, I said, I try to take the long view. Try to keep one eye fixed on history while keeping the other trained toward eternity.
I polished off the Contigo. I grimaced, ahhhed. “Look, you’re free, sure. But, brass tacks—if you’re going to be a magazine writer, you’re going to have to deal with magazine editors.”
Bumbling on, I said: “You will prepare for these editors a free-range, pan-roasted squab of a story, OK, and they will take it, and they will rip it apart, and they will pluck nuance and complexity like so many fine bones.” Then they will run the meat of your story through the grinder with some inorganic binding agents added. They’ll extrude the pink slime of this new “story” into a nugget shape. Drop it into the fryolator. Crisp it into something that is easy to swallow and shares well. “And all this while proper writing becomes this niche commodity that gets consumed only by people who seek it out!” I said, scanning my audience in search of an Amen! Receiving none, I said: “Ah, hell. It’s gone. It’s over. It’s something else now. It’s just visions of a Netflix deal dancing through every writer’s head.