I know, I know. I've gotten so bad at posting the Nabokov passages I ought to be renaming it Nabokov of the Season. Too hard to admit I won't actually do better in the future.
And I did bring two dozen books with me up to Chicago this time, so that I could be surrounded by great art up here in this cold corporate townhouse, but I thought Conclusive Evidence (aka Speak, Memory) was already up here, so alas, it's left behind. Again. Damn.
If I can't quote that Nabokov, I'm not going to quote any Nabokov today.
And I've just been dying to share this passage from Denis Johnson's "Car Crash While Hitchhiking." I've read it a hundred times at least, and it still blows me away.
Censored!
In a rare act of self-censorship, I got halfway done typing it in and decided it would be in poor taste, given the main conversation in play on this blog at the moment. Whoops.
So what's going on in my head anyway, that I was driven to that passage? Aside from always being driven to it. Maybe death is on my brain this week, and I'm looking for a death story with a bit of redemption. I'm always looking for a story with redemption, but that one is prolly just a little too rough to hear for anyone too close to the Columbine story. Another time.
Let's see, my second choice was The Things They Carried. Definitely Death in the Heart week. Guess it's time to just go with it. This is the opening of the title story from the Things book, by Tim O'Brien, and my first exposure to it was deeply painful. I'll let you read it first, then explain more about my shit:
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More than anything he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf. She often quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. The letters weight 10 ounces. They were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Crosss understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin.
The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pokcet knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sweing kits, canteens of water. Together, these items weighted between 15 and 20 pounds, depending upon a man's habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced filed hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he'd stoen on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April. By necessity, and because it was SOP, they all carried steel helmets that weighed 5 pounds including the liner and camouflage cover. They carried the standard fatigue jackets and trousers. Very few carried underwear. On their feet they carried jungle boots -- 2.3 pounds -- and Dave Jensen carried three pairs of socks and a can of Dr. Scholl's foot powder as a precaution against trench foot. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother's distrust of the white man, his grandfather's old hunting hatchet. Necessity dictated. Because the land was mined and booby-trapped, it was SOP for each man to carry a steel-centered, nylon-covered flak jacket, which weighed 6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier. Because you could die so quickly, each man carried at least one large compress bandage, usually in the helmet band for easy access. Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho wieghed almost two pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away.
Stunning, huh. The material itself was moving enough, but the real problem was the big steel bolt like they kill cattle with slamming into my forehead out of the blue now and then screaming, "Oh, just hang it up! You'll never pull off shit like this--remotely like this! (asshole), so just quit making an ass out of yourself and hunt down another freaking calling.
Seriously. It's debilitating.
I get over it, I guess. Not to beat this dead horse too hard, but Mike Paterniti's Columbine piece in GQ this month was so freaking dazzling I thought I might never write again, but three days later I was on the phone hawking my own Columbine story I thought I would never get my arms around.
Huh. Friday night 13 days ago, I was riding home on a plane balling my eyes out on the plane, this time crying first and foremost over the material because I've spent five years so close to it, but aching harder and harder in my soul at my unworthiness to ever create something approaching it. And I had had the chance to approach it! This was my story, I could have written the very piece if I'd had the clarity to do it. I had actually worked with him, I had helped him select some of the subjects, I had every opportunity to do this, but had I ever done anything in five years that captured even a whiff of what he brought to these people, these events, this legacy?
No sir. I had been so blind where he had been so perceptive. I thought I could never write about Columbine again, and I shoved the magazine into my backpack with a page left to go just before landing, wiped my eyes clean so the whole freaking plane didn't see me bawling, and the flight attendants didn't question me on the jetway about being having been assaulted, and finally put to rest any dreams of ever writing a book about this. I could never write about Columbine again.
I called him the next day to tell him how extraordinary it was, but he was out and I left a message. He's such a nice guy, he left a really gracious msg back on my machine, which he didn't have to do, because he's this famous A-list writer and I'm just this struggler, but we talked on Tuesday, and suddenly I was inspired again. Five days after swearing off the story forever, I was pitching it hard to Slate.
I guess that's why I read opening to this story over and over and over. Still doesn't seem possible to write anything equally worthy, but I just can't resist the urge to bash my skull with that big steel bolt to see what might happen this time. Just never know what those bolts will do to you.
God, am I late for work.
Dutton (Penguin) in early 2009. 
