by Nick Flynn
When she was still with us I asked my mother about The Button Man. He’d mentioned the title in one of his letters from prison. He’s still talking about that? was all she’d say. At his sentencing for nonpayment of child support, the time he escaped through a bathroom window (It’s my duty to remain free, as a poet, as a human being), he stood before the judge and cried, Soon, his book would be finished and he would be known. Tears, my mother hissed. The judge gave him two months.
Some days there are twelve chapters, other days there are twelve books. This is why he needs twelve desks, one for each chapter, one for each book. He learned this from Solzhenitsyn, who shared a cell with my father, in a metaphysical sense, both put away unjustly, both redeemed through words. When Solzhenitsyn got out of Siberia he moved to Vermont to write about life in the gulag. He set himself up in a barn, surrounded himself with eight doors supported on sawhorses, a door for each of his chapters, spread them out before him, to keep track of what belonged where. This is what my father plans to do with his advance—he’ll buy twelve doors, and his own barn, a place where he can lay his life out and the next day it will still be there. On each door will be a typewriter—twelve doors, twelve typewriters. Once inside and settled, he will move between these doors, fashioning his stories into his masterpiece. Each year of his life is a chapter, the life itself is the book. This is his plan, but it takes time, he insists, it’s all about time and space, as Einstein (apparently never a close friend) said. Have you written each chapter? I ask. Of course, it’s all written, every word. I ask, Is there a notebook, a sheaf of paper, ink, words, does this novel have a body, can I see it? Of course, he snorts, indignant, waving a hand magisterially around his clutter, his organized chaos. Yet ask him the next day and he again needs more space, to spread out, to finish. He’s holding out for an advance of two million from Little, Brown, because Kissinger got two million for his book, and Kissinger isn’t even a writer. My father, who has slept in a cardboard box, is holding out for two million, holding out for a barn so he can begin, or finish, the project that defines his entire life, the book he’s been writing since before I was born. His apartment is not big enough to contain his book, a book in part about living in a cardboard box. Things cost money, kid, he tells me. Seven figures. The devil’s arithmetic. I am beginning to see I am asking the wrong question.
my brother waits for the tiny machines
Across town from my father’s subsidized apartment, in the same city, in a parallel universe, my brother, who has no use for our father and has refused to see him, to even speak to him, for a quarter century, not since our mother drove them both to Peggotty Beach that time, waits for the future. “Nanotechnology” is its name, the creation of smaller and smaller things. In twenty years, my brother tells me, we will be immersed in a computer fog, millions of microscopic computers filling the air around us, answering our beck and call. There will be no chairs in this future, no elevators. In your room you will begin to sit and the fog will automatically form a chair below you. Raise your leg and the fog will be your ottoman. The door will open when you want it to open, you’ll step into a seemingly empty shaft and the fog will be your elevator, carry you wherever you want to go. Maybe this fog can be shaped into apartments for the homeless, I venture, but my brother ignores this.
When I go to Boston I usually sleep on my brother’s couch, and before we drift off we speak to each other through the half wall he’s built to divide his studio. Often I have just come from an afternoon with our father. Though he seldom asks, my brother seems mildly curious, as much about my inclination to maintain contact as with the specifics of our father’s life. Photogenic, our father promises, smells, everything. I tell my brother this through his bookcase, and we laugh. Since he’s two years older he can remember a little about how it was when our father was with us, and those few years were apparently enough for a lifetime. I now find myself writing a book about an absent father who writes letters to a son about the novel he is writing. A novel the son doesn’t believe exists. The Great Unseen American Novel. My brother never asks why I still visit our father—I couldn’t tell him if he did. What do I hope to find? My father’s photogenic memory, to recreate a world I can’t quite remember? An envelope with a photograph of my mother inside, before…before what? Before she met my father? Before she was born? You might as well hold fog in your hands.
the book of jon
“Cobb” is the character my father has created to represent himself. His book is the story of his life. He is Christopher Cobb. That’s the way it always works. Look at Salinger, look at Twain, anyone who says otherwise is a liar. When asked for a synopsis he’ll tell you that it is a novel of an innocent dream of glory, of a man who believes that the world can be made whole again by a story, that he can change the world by what he makes. Like Noah. That if you stick with your word long enough it will become flesh. Amen. His father created a life raft where bodies were sinking into the sea. Noah built an ark miles from the nearest water. The offspring of Noah went on to build their way up to heaven, constructing their Tower of Babel. Noah needed to gather nails. My father writes his letters. These letters are all I know of his writing, my own little box of babble. Maybe this box of letters is the novel, a book that transmutes as you try to find it, the one you can never hold in your hands. Maybe I’ve had it the whole time.
30 December 1999
I am a Section 8—physically not mentally! I was completely investigated over 10 years ago by 4 of the best hospitals in America—MGH, and 3 others—all here in Boston. I live with full pain from head to toe—however—I still can write! I was declared—over ten years ago—in Federal Court in Boston as being one thing—a poet!—And that I am—always was and always will be!
Love to all, Nick—your father—Jonathan
My father’s room is filled with boxes, inside the boxes are his masterpieces, his novels-in-progress, alongside notes for future masterpieces, the blueprints for his stories. But open the boxes and you will find only more emptiness. The elements are all there—torn photographs, notes scrawled on cocktail napkins, check stubs, ink on paper—all meaning shattered. No one could reconstruct a life from these scraps, no one would find the thread that would lead to the particular stories he tells. Only his voice does that, the air moving through him, vibrating out as words. What is word made of but breath, breath the stuff of life?
Maybe the whole time the book has been standing in front of me and I’ve failed to grasp it. If I could hold my father in my hands, bring him under the light—his stories are all there, each story is inside him. The transparency of the word, the transparency of the story, he is constructed entirely of the stories he tells, like the scaffolding around a building still unbuilt. The story of how to rob a bank. The story of sleeping on a bench. The story of his father inventing the life raft. The story of my mother, the love of his life. How many stories could you take from him and leave the building standing? Is there one essential story, is it the story of his masterpiece, as yet, forever, undone? Is there a deadline ticking inside him for when he must finish, a day marked, like Noah, when the rains begin? As I reread his letters, as I try to write out his life, I worry that his obsession has passed into me, via the blood, via the letters, via the vision of him rising naked from a tin tub. For the only book being written about my father (the greatest writer America has yet produced), the only book ever written about or by him, as far as I can tell, is the book in your hands. The book that somehow fell to me, the son, to write. My father’s uncredited, noncompliant ghostwriter. Not enough to be stuck with his body, to be stuck with his name, but to become his secretary, his handmaid, caught up in a folly, a doomed project, to write about a book that doesn’t, that didn’t ever, that may not even, exist.
button man (the musical)
(2000) I’m living in Provincetown for another summer, no longer on the boat. I sold the boat for a dollar to a guy who swore to keep her afloat, who turned out to be either a liar or inept. A letter comes in which my
father claims to have located The Button Man. I show up a few days later at his apartment, and he hands me four binders, four hundred pages, typed out. Not only does it exist, it turns out to be a musical. It starts with a song:
Clink/Clank/Clunk
I think that I am drunk
Clunk/Clank/Clink
I really need a drink.
This first musical number is dated 2/15/64, the day after he blacked out and stole the sheriff’s car. The singing starts the moment he awakes in his cell, hungover. I bring The Button Man home and read it in an afternoon. A page-turner. Each day he is in jail gets its own chapter. His first day continues:
I’m writing this on paper given to me by the bicycle thief. I’m in jail. I don’t know why. And until a short time ago I didn’t know where. And I don’t know how long I’ll be here. I’m in, however, and still a bit drunk. In the Slammer, the Pokey, the Cooler, the Clink…. The only thing that I remember about last night is the Valentine’s Day party at Palm Beach.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
I’m in the jailhouse
What did I do?
Get a little drunk and you land in jail, get a little drunk and…
Clink
Clinkus
Clank
Clankus
Clunk
Clunkorum
Get a little drunk and you land in jail, get a little drunk and…
Clink/Stink
For thirty pages or so The Button Man shows promise—a hybrid of songs, letters, found documents and scrawlings smuggled out of a county jail, woven in with a tone and ideas sampled from Catcher in the Rye—a meta-text—but, like his life, it soon falls apart, dissipates into incoherence. What would I do if it was a masterpiece, an overlooked classic? What then? Would our blood be redeemed? Would time be made whole? Would I still have such ambivalence about calling myself a poet? Would I have more? Would I have some idea of what it means to be a father, would I still be terrified of becoming one? He cannot die, he tells me, until his work is complete. Perhaps I am digging his grave, perhaps the book you have in your hands is the coin for his eyes. Perhaps the story of his masterpiece is his life raft, what he’s invented to keep himself afloat.
heroic uses of concrete (the city that always sleeps)
To invent anything you need an idea. See the wooden lifeboats lined up on the deck, slipping silently into the cold sea as the ship goes under—some capsize, some upend, some shake out their cargo to their new life below. Imagine you live on the streets, that you have no key, no door with a metal number tacked to it. Imagine wandering down by the river or the piers, to seek out a likely place to crawl into for what’s left of the night. Listen to the water heave and sigh, lap and break. You might dream of a life raft, a vessel to come and lift you out of this. What does my father imagine when he utters the words “life raft”? A thin skin between his ass and the shark’s teeth? That the cavalry’s on the way? Should he hold out just a bit longer? Does he see his father, coming back for him? Does he see his son, piloting the life raft now, here to ease him into old age? There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they’re going under.
The man who imagined Pine Street didn’t see it as a life raft, more as a rock you could rest briefly upon, to catch your breath, get your bearings. A man named Paul Sullivan founded Pine Street, and he knew that his guys, many of them, were never going to find their way back to shore. The shelter was meant to be a waystation, a halfway house, but halfway to where wasn’t specified. The cot and the roof and the plate of food were only meant to tide one over. It was never meant to be a life raft. Even a life raft is only supposed to get you from the sinking ship back to land, you were never intended to live in the life raft, to drift years on end, in sight of land but never close enough.
After months of calling the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, of asking where I might locate the original patent for the invention of the life raft, I am directed to the Science, Industry, and Business Library on Madison Avenue, just across the river. There I waste a few more days online before someone finally takes pity on me and directs me to the back room, which houses the actual books of all the patents issued for every year, starting before the Civil War. As I don’t know the date of the supposed invention, I must look in each volume, under the last name Flynn, from 1900 on up. I find that in 1930 an Edmund J. holds the patent for the manufacture of zinc sulfide. I find that in 1925 Edmund P. of Eastman Kodak holds many patents for film processing. I get excited when I find that in 1929 Thaddeus J., who I assume is my great-grandfather, the one whose name is etched inside the grasshopper weathervane on the roof of Faneuil Hall, secures the patent for a new and improved roof drain. After a few more fruitless hours I assume this roof drain is the extent of the inventions in my bloodline. Fifteen minutes before closing time on my third day I find it:
To all whom it may concern:
Be it known that I, Edmund T. Flynn, of Cambridge, in the county of Middlesex and State of Massachusetts, have invented a new and useful Life-Raft.
This patent was granted in 1918. Then, in 1942, my grandfather is granted a second patent:
This invention relates to improvements in life rafts…
The problem was to keep the body above the waves. The trick was to breathe only air. My grandfather’s patent was used by seven countries during both World Wars. Thousands of heads floating above the waves. I’ll be damned.
the boy stood on the burning deck
I knock on his door.
Who is it?
Police. Open up.
Who?
Police.
What kind?
Federal marshals. Open up, tough guy, we got you surrounded.
He opens the door a crack, peeks out.
Oh, it’s little Taddy-tu-tu. How nice of you to visit your father, after all these years, after all he gave up for you.
A little game of misidentity we sometimes play. I’m unannounced, as always.
Come in, Nicholas, come in. Good to see you.
Trickier and trickier to enter without toppling something.
Look at the hair, he says, not bad in the hair department.
I shrug. His is white now, still longish, combed back from his face.
What about Thaddeus? Do you see him?
I just came from him, I say.
Is he ever going to learn to write his father a letter?
I shrug. You’d have to ask him that.
Ask him? Ask him? Are you joking? I don’t even see him, how the Christ am I supposed to ask him?
I look blankly into his face.
Do you know how much your brother has broken my heart, for never coming to see me?
I come, I remind him.
And it’s a delight, I’m honored. Is he healthy, physically, your brother?
Seems to be, I say.
Tell him Daddy-doo-doo loves him.
Last summer, when I found my father groggy and red-faced in a heatwave, I bought him an air conditioner. Now it’s January and still it’s cranked up full-blast, doing battle with the radiators. I haven’t touched it, he swears. I take out my first book, a collection of poetry. Many of the poems deal with my mother’s suicide, some deal with him. It’s the reason I’m here, to give him a copy. Now that I no longer videotape him I need to tell myself I have a reason to visit. He turns it over in his hands as if it’s a holy relic.
Christ, I’m being beaten by my own son at poetry. Who would ever believe this bullshit?
He thumbs through the pages.
I’ve been in touch with Little, Brown, he says.
They’re doing my book. Four million.
Great, I say. Congratulations.
They said it’s a masterpiece. Everything I write is a masterpiece.
So I’ve heard.
He reads a poem to himself.
That’s heavy about the gun.
Neither my brother nor my grandfather have said a word about my book. Like dro
pping a pebble into a very deep pond. Just as neither of them has a photograph of my mother on display in their homes, yet there she is, beside my father’s bed.
No, that’s great. I’m being scooped by one of my sons. I’m delighted.
He reads another poem.
It is an inherited quality. If you didn’t write I’d be surprised.
someday this awl will be yours
(2002) Music’s blasting from an apartment below. My father’s been stewing over it in his room for a couple days. After his check comes, after a day of solid vodka, he takes the club he keeps by his front door, the same club he used to carry in his cab, a spike in the business end, and lurches downstairs. He raps on the door the music’s coming from and when a guy opens it my father swings the club at the guy’s head. It misses, but shakes the guy up enough that he calls the cops, who come, inform the management company, and now the company wants my father out.