Her sofabed was two steps from the kitchen. We’d take those steps and lie down. Ghosts and sunshine hovered around us. Memories, loved ones, everyone was watching. She’d had one boyfriend who was killed by a train—stalled on the tracks and thinking he could get his motor firing before the engine caught him, but he was wrong. Another fell through a thousand evergreen boughs in the north Arizona mountains, a tree surgeon or someone along those lines, and crushed his head. Two died in the Marines, one in Vietnam and the other, a younger boy, in an unexplained one-car accident just after basic training. Two black men: one died of too many drugs and another was shanked in prison—that means stabbed with a weapon from the woodworking shop. Most of these people, by the time they were dead, had long since left her to travel down their lonely paths. People just like us, but unluckier. I was full of a sweet pity for them as we lay in the sunny little room, sad that they would never live again, drunk with sadness, I couldn’t get enough of it.
During my regular hours at Beverly Home, the full-time employees had their shift change, and a lot of them congregated, coming and going, in the kitchen, where the time clock was. I often went in there and flirted with some of the beautiful nurses. I was just learning to live sober, and in fact I was often confused, especially because some Antabuse I was taking was having a very uncharacteristic effect on me. Sometimes I heard voices muttering in my head, and a lot of the time the world seemed to smolder around its edges. But I was in a little better physical shape every day, I was getting my looks back, and my spirits were rising, and this was all in all a happy time for me.
All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.
Additional Praise for Jesus’ Son
“In a world of predictable fiction, Jesus’ Son is a point-blank godsend.”
—LA Weekly
“[Denis Johnson] is doing something new in these stories, and the formal novelty brings us into a new intimacy with the violence that is rising around us in this country like the killing waters of a flood.”
—The Atlantic
“[Johnson has a] dazzling gift for poetic language, [a] natural instinct for metaphor and wordplay.”
—The New York Times
“Exhilarating … these stories have appropriately enigmatic shapes, but they’re built to last.”
—Newsweek
“Mr. Johnson takes loss through some kind of sound barrier, past which celebrations of joy in destitution appear. For clean line, for deftness, for hard honest comedy there is no better than Denis Johnson.”
—Padgett Powell
“Johnson has the distinction of being both a poet and a novelist of gritty realism who uses language like a paring knife to slice through the bones of his subject matter … . [These stories are] as muscular and tight as a washboard stomach, as resonant as a drum.”
—People
“These tales are told with apparent carelessness, a kind of grinding realism which would suggest that these events are as purposeless as they seem. But at heart Johnson is a metaphysician, and through the luminous windows that startlingly open in the deadpan prose … we are bystanders to an act of testimony.”
—USA Today
“I read these stories with great thrill—they cleaned out the tired old ways of the mind like a 50,000-volt kick to the head; they cleared my sinuses. Not since Barry Hannah’s wizardry in Airships and Captain Maximus have I been so invigorated by a mix of voice, language, and story. These stories terrify, warn, and instruct.”
—Rick Bass
ALSO BY DENIS JOHNSON
Nobody Move
Tree of Smoke
Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond
The Name of the World
Already Dead: A California Gothic
Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
The Stars at Noon
Fiskadoro
Angels
POETRY
The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium
General Assembly: Poems, Collected and New
The Veil
The Incognito Lounge: And other poems
Denis Johnson is the author of eight works of fiction, three collections of poetry, and one book of reportage. He is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship and a Whiting Writers’ Award, and a National Book Award for Tree of Smoke, among many other honors for his work.
JESUS’ SON. Copyright © 1992 by Denis Johnson. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Design by Gregory P. Collins
eISBN 9781466806887
First eBook Edition : December 2011
Stories from this collection have appeared in the following publications: “Two Men,” “Work,” “Dirty Wedding,” and “Emergency” in The New Yorker ; “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” and “Beverly Home” in The Paris Review ; “Out on Bail” in Epoch; “Steady Hands at Seattle General” and “Dundun” in Esquire; “The Other Man” in Big Wednesday; “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” in Best American Short Stories, 1990; “Emergency” in Best American Short Stories, 1992.
The author acknowledges permission to quote lyrics from “Heroin” by Lou Reed, © 1966 Oakfield Avenue Music; all rights controlled and administered by Screen Gems–EMI Music, Inc.; all rights reserved; used by permission.
First Picador Edition: February 2009
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