by Ryan Ridge
Sometimes, when I’m driving, I’ll hear American literature on the radio and think: Man, if this is what passes for American literature these days we are fucked! But then I realize I’m not listening to American literature. I’m listening to the news.
You won’t find American literature in the news unless you’re Ezra Pound.
Pound who said: Literature is news that stays news.
Make it new(s).
One time I found American literature at a casino in Elko, Nevada: a Norton anthology hiding in a motel drawer where the Bible should’ve been.
Although the Bible technically isn’t American literature, it’s always the best-selling book in America, year in and year out.
Every year I tell myself: “This is the year. This is the year I’ll make a significant contribution to American literature.” But in reality, I make a minor contribution to my local NPR station and move on.
Speaking of moving on, they say that there are only two plots in American literature: (1) character comes to town, and (2) character leaves town. The third plot, of course, is an amalgam of the two: character comes to town, and leaves. The term “plot” also means a small parcel of land in a cemetery.
Where would American literature be if it weren’t for the road?
The automobile is a literary device. It’s the motor of so many books—the engine. Matter of time before the wheels come off, though.
Like it or not there is a direct correlation between the price of books and the cost of gas.
All the films adapted from American literature into American movies. Will someone please adapt this book already?
The other day I walked out of a movie theater and into the light.
The other day I was out fighting illiteracy at a neighborhood pub, but it turned out badly because it turns out this particular illiterate was strong and armed.
An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Illiterature.
Kurt Cobain took pride as the king of illiterature.
Cobain who loved reading William S. Burroughs.
Burroughs who enjoyed cutting apart American literature.
They called him a dope fiend with a pair of scissors.
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. Said Ernest Hemingway.
Most of Hemingway’s inspiration came from one drink called the mojito.
Tonight, I think I’ll whip up a batch of mojitos and read some Hemingway.
Good rum is the foundation of a good mojito.
The Declaration of Independence is the foundation of American literature.
Although some say Franklin invented American literature before Jefferson.
Benjamin Franklin, who never drank a mojito, but loved strong ale. America’s first great human of letters, according to David Hume.
What does it mean to be a human of letters in an era where no one writes letters anymore?
Someday they will say of our writers: He was a man of emails. She was a woman of tweets. They were a poet of Instagram. And so on.
Someday we will view the novel as a novelty item.
Poems by and for robots.
Mem(e)oirs.
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence. Warned Raymond Chandler.
Because even the bluest poet in the reddest state is still prone to the purplest of prose.
Because the internet of the future exists today.
Because it’s hard to find American literature in the comment sections on the internet, but sometimes you’ll see it in the articles above.
As above, so below.
The cyber-hermeticism of American literature in action.
I can’t help but read every comment on the internet as a commentary on the internet itself.
I can’t help but read American literature as a commentary on literature itself.
The role of the critic in American literature is to coin consumer expectations.
The role of the consumer is to open their wallets and close their eyes.
Last night, I fell asleep reading.
This morning, I woke up and wrote this line here.
Man, if this is what passes for American literature these days we are fucked!
If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays. Warned Pound.
As the language decays, every sentence becomes a death sentence.
American literature never stopped an execution, but it may have prevented a few murders, and it’s certainly gotten many of us laid.
Is it possible to find salvation in literature? Maybe. Sure. Why not?
Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion. Remarked Eliot.
Remarks are not literature. Said Stein.
Here’s a bit of gossip: All literature is gossip. Claimed Capote.
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. Observed James.
Even so, it doesn’t mean that American history is literature.
Even so, it doesn’t mean that American literature is history.
A Novel Idea
The boy wanted to write flash fiction. It was his calling. He told his dad as much one December afternoon in the den upon returning home from boarding school for the break. “Flash fiction?” his dad said, lowering the newest New Yorker from his face as his rose-tinted monocle dropped in disgust. The fireplace hissed. “What those degenerates on the internet write? No, no, that won’t do. No son of mine is going to produce small works destined for obscurity. Novels: that’s the idea. It’s a novel idea. Novels longer than your hair, son. Something to make the publishers swoon. Now get to your room and don’t come out until you’ve written a blockbuster.”
The boy went into his room, and he didn’t come out.
For many years, he didn’t come out.
Once emerged, the boy was no longer a boy and still not quite a man. He had hair to his knees but none on his chest. He was twenty-seven. The world had changed. The boarding school had been boarded up. Dad was dead and gone. And the novel? It was not bad. It was not good. But it was not bad. It was like a lot of novels. They loved it in New York.
Past Perfect
I had been drinking and was driving. My wife hadn’t shaved because she never showed her legs. We had fought all afternoon. I hadn’t been crying because I hide my feelings. The sun hadn’t risen because it was night. I had been sleeping with another woman and felt good because she had come. At the same time, I felt bad because I had cheated. She had already left. I had already showered. I had already sobered. I had been feeling hopeful because I had written.
Dogs Named Desire
We got lucky and left Kentucky. This was after our Monday-night marriage, when we lit out for the left coast and struck it rich along the way peddling new sins to Protestants, got blackout drunk at a bar around the corner from the Alamo, forgot everything (including the Alamo) for weeks, and then continued west until we reached the San Fernando Valley where we settled amongst the modest pornographers and the unending strip-mall sprawl. Our love grew small, but our backyard swimming pool loomed largely. We named it Denial and, although we never swam in the damn thing, we liked to lounge next to it and boat drink ourselves into oblivion. Sure, when we sobered there was still plenty wrong with us, but the truth is brighter than the sun sometimes. It’s only natural to look away. We did until we didn’t. Then we didn’t.
She took most of the money and then hooked up with an itinerant yoga instructor and, last I imagined, they were wandering the world inventing new sexual maneuvers.
Meanwhile, I bought some cheap speed and got to work on an uninspired screenplay about a family of disabled acrobats who, despite it all, hang on and hunker down as they learn the true meaning of the holidays, and, sure enough, the saps over at the Hallmark Channel pounced on it and advanced me enough cash to charge a new Charger and put some road under it. I should’ve gone to Montana. I should’ve gone
to Idaho, but no, I got sentimental and beat it down to the Gulf of Mexico. When I reached the shores of Alabama, there were firemen everywhere. Smoke on the water and the flames into the sky. The heat scorched the sand into glass. I wanted to stick around, to stay and help those folks fight, but instead, I took the unexamined heaviness in my heart and the cash in my jean jacket pocket over to the dog track in Pensacola. I bet it all on a black dog named Desire and dammit if I didn’t lose as usual.
Then, I did what they say you shouldn’t do: I went home again, and I rented a studio apartment above a bar by Churchill Downs. Beneath me, people bonded over bourbon and beer. Me, I just listened to the lies through the frail floorboards, for weeks. Eventually, I dug myself from that dark place and went downstairs to bask in the neon. At the lip of the bar sat my ex-wife’s father. He was kind enough to act dumb about his daughter and me, and so he bought me a beer and then he offered me a job. I was in no position to pass.
The job was janitorial. Nights we cleaned skyscraper offices overlooking the Ohio. The days? They were there, too, always changing. Then it was October, and the Commonwealth light began to fade. A windstorm arrived and knocked out power to the city. For a solid week, I sat there in the dark, trying to think of something besides myself. I thought about driving down to the Sherman Minton Bridge and taking a leap, but for some reason, when the power returned, something inside me lit up, too. Yes, it seemed there were still stories to raise and hell to write. For a while, I palled around with the father until his hands swelled from all the heart pills. By the holidays, he’d stopped coming to work altogether. He had an angioplasty and then died. It hurt when my ex-wife didn’t attend the funeral, but it hurt less when the old man left me some money.
More days, not worth naming. In the newspaper, a debate over the merits of bridge building lasted many years. One day I woke up and everyone looked younger. One day I woke up and I was taking a hammer to my birth certificate. One day I woke up and decided to find some hero for a friend. I decided to get a dog. I thought it would love me unconditionally, fill the cheap vacancy in my life.
I went to the shelter and picked out an albino greyhound: one blue eye, one red. She was strange and beautiful. I named her Desire, loaded her into the backseat of the Charger, and drove over to Frisbee Field. That night, the sun was setting rather cinematically behind a stand of elms at the top of the hill. Immediately, she took off after a bird, knocked me over, and took the leash with her. Man, she could fly. I said: Stop, don’t.
But she went.
And never came back.
Instant Classic
So suddenly I felt so old.
Midnight at the Bethlehem Bar & Grille
1984 BC
From the smoking section came a trio of wise men dressed as wise guys in Adidas tracksuits. They carried gifts of Goldschläger, Tic Tacs, and Skoal, and they stood there stupidly, staring at my wife writhing on the floor by the foosball table. When the doctor arrived, he extracted a stethoscope from his satchel, followed by a pair of pilot’s headphones, and said: “Damn this birth is loud!” It was true. The jukebox blasted Def Leppard as buzzed bridesmaids squealed into their tequila shots and a couple of coked-out car guys argued about the innocence of John DeLorean, but now all you could hear was a brand-new voice screaming into the world like it already hated the place. If you shut your eyes, everything sounded so severe, but if you opened them just right and let them readjust to the beer light, you could see the makings of a miracle as it happened. And it happened to be a boy, or at least we thought so for many years—until he began running around with prostitutes and tax collectors and raising the dead like a roof.
The Big H
“Stop me if you’ve heard this one before,” Playboy says. “A priest, a rabbi, a Buddhist monk, and Donald Trump walk into a bar.”
“Trump?” says Bill. “He doesn’t drink. Besides, I know the punch line. He’s president.” He’s sitting shirtless in front of the motel mirror in chinos and a shoulder holster, his dyed hair damp from the shower.
“Hair looks good black,” Bill says to the mirror, but Playboy can’t tell if he’s talking about black hair in general or if he’s referring to his own.
Playboy asks Bill if he perhaps left out a pronoun in the previous sentence and Bill extends three fingers, says, “Read between the lines.”
“All right,” Playboy says. “You look like a top.”
Bill says nothing.
Bill says, “Scissors?”
Bill says, “Did you find the scissors?”
“Playboy,” Bill says, “any luck with the scissors, any?”
“No,” Playboy says. “I’ll use your pocketknife.”
“It isn’t a pocketknife,” Bill says. “It’s a Swiss Army.”
“Cool story, bro,” Playboy says. He opens the blade and presses his thumb down stupidly.
“Sharp,” he says.
Bill shrugs, says, “That’s the point.”
“Mind if I smoke?”
“I prefer a barber who smokes.”
Playboy lights a Lucky, asks Bill how he wants it.
“No homo,” Bill says.
Playboy reminds Bill that he, Playboy, bats for the other team and that it’s the twenty-first century and that maybe Bill should learn to be more innovative concerning his hatreds.
Bill says nothing.
Bill says, “Take a little off the sides and front, and a lot off of the back.”
Bill says, “ Whatever you do, don’t do a mullet.”
Bill says, “No mullets, okay? I’m looking to meet a nice piece at the casino tonight so don’t get hilarious here. Keep it cool.”
“I’m Coltrane,” Playboys says, as the cutting commences, but it’s more like sawing. Eventually, a long black lock of Bill’s hair comes loose and falls to the floor.
“Jesus,” Bill says.
“You all right?” Playboy asks.
“I’m fine, but take it easy,” Bill says. “I need a haircut, not a scalping.”
Playboy apologizes. “Sit back, relax, and let the Old Navy do what it does best.”
“Swiss Army,” Bill says. “Old Navy’s something else. A store.”
Playboy tongues his cigarette over to the corner of his mouth and lets it hang there so he can cut and smoke at the same time. Smoking without appendages: it’s an old trick Playboy picked up in the club, back when he was a bass player in a Judas Priest tribute band.
“Jesus,” Bill says. “Jesus H. Christ.”
“You all right there, William?”
“I’m fine,” Bill says. “I was just thinking about Jesus.”
“After Malibu, you’re considering a career change?”
“Not at all,” Bill says. “I was thinking about that name: Jesus H. Christ. What does the H stand for?”
“Harold?” Playboy wagers. “Disciples called him Harry maybe? Like the prince?”
“That,” Bill says, “does not ring.”
“Then it’s probably Hank,” Playboy says. “Hank’s the perfect name for gods and dogs.”
“Uh-uh,” says Bill. “No.”
Playboy saws off another lock. He’s working the back, by Bill’s neck, and leaving him with a little rattail. “Do you have any theories as to the H?”
“Holy is my best guess,” Bill says. “And Holy shit that hurt.”
“My bad,” Playboy says.
“Jesus-Holy-Christ,” Bill says. “It sounds stupid enough to be true. The big mystery is solved.”
Playboy stops cutting, steps aside and admires the dark mound of hair on the ground. “How’s it look?”
“Doing fine,” Bill says. “Maybe more off the back, though. The back is sort of, you know, I don’t know.”
“You don’t dig the rattail?”
“No,” Bill says. “I do not.”
“Personally,” Playboy says, “I think the ladies will love it. It’s ironic nouveau. Hipster chicks in droves.”
“Now you’re speaking my language,” Bi
ll says. “You ever had any honeypot?”
Playboy doesn’t dignify that with a response. Instead, he continues cutting, now and then pausing to ash his square onto the pile of hair.
“Are you a believer?” Bill says, out of the blue.
Playboy considers it, says, “Do you mean: Do I believe in Jesus H. Christ?”
“Bingo,” Bill says. “Jesus or God or Buddha or Zeus or whatever the hell—do you believe any of that?”
“I don’t know,” Playboy says, stamping out his cigarette. “I don’t think about it much. I guess if there’s a God, I’d call that a surprise ending. How about you?”
“The only thing I believe in is avoiding chicks with spider tattoos,” Bill says and laughs.
Playboy laughs, too, even though he’s not sure if or why it’s funny. “I thought that spiders are good luck,” Playboy says, and as he says it a little spider crawls across the motel mirror. “Look. See that? That’s called synchronicity right there.”
Bill reaches out and smashes the spider with his thumb.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Playboy says. “It’s bad mojo.”
“Only if you’re a superstitious cocksucker,” Bill says.
A sudden panic surges through Playboy’s arm, and he drops the knife. This feeling is more than an opinion. It’s either a heart attack or fear. He steps back from Bill and takes an inventory of the room. It’s an orgy of peach wine coolers, High Life cans, and Thai takeout boxes. Nothing strange. Nothing to see or worry about. Playboy strikes another Lucky Strike, and soon enough he’s at the window, peering through the plastic blinds. The parking lot is empty, and the empty spaces look to him like a framework for something he can’t quite pinpoint. Agnosticism maybe? He gets the feeling that something is missing. He says to Bill: “Hey buddy, where’s the backpack? You know the one that we’re not supposed to let out of our sights, like, ever?”
Bill stares at himself in the mirror and runs his gnarled fingers through his new hairdo. Eventually, he says: “The trunk? The backpack is in the trunk. Shit, man, I don’t know.”