Jesus' Son

I just finished Jesus' Son, a collection of short stories by Denis Johnson published in 1992. The book reminds me of singer-songwriter Todd Snider when he offers sublime observations from characters most would call complete fuck-ups: alcoholics or drug addicts drifting between happy hours, scheming and homeless, opportunistic. Funny how these same characters can speak so clearly about the world around them.

Below are a few passages from Jesus' Son that hit me pretty hard, either for their writing or for their startling honesty. Notice how Johnson's characters find catharsis in someone else's tragedy, and infer that this expression of emotion is what they're looking for most of all in life. In the case of Johnson's characters, that catharsis is often sought through drugs or alcohol, and is rarely if ever achieved. Finding catharsis through pain or catastrophe: how 1990s! (And 21st century? God help us all.) Anyway:

"Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That's what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere." (11)

"And here we were, this afternoon, with nearly thirty dollars each, and our favorite, our very favorite, person tending bar. I wish I could remember her name, but I remember only her grace and her generosity. All the really good times happened when Wayne was around. But this afternoon, somehow, was the best of all those times. We had money. We were grimy and tired. Usually we felt guilty and frightened, because there was something wrong with us, and we didn't know what it was; but today we had the feeling of men who had worked. The Vine had no jukebox, but a real stereo continually playing tunes of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental divorce. 'Nurse,' I sobbed. She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail glass, no measuring. . . You had to go down to them like a hummingbird over a blossom." (65-6)

"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 wood-working 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." (159)

It's an excellent book. Next up is Madame Bovary.