Monday, March 13, 2006

Dead Crush #13


After I graduated from college, I did what all of my friends did. I conveniently missed all of the deadlines for my graduate school applications and asked my parents for $500 to go to Europe. And about 6 months, $3000, various drugs, and hundreds of embarrassing mistakes with guys with names like Rhys later, I decided to leave my temporary home in Edinburgh to travel with my friends for a couple of weeks. I was dreading the return to the US, where I would live with my parents and face the reality of my credit card woes and what an irresponsibly trite excuse for a college graduate I was. I wanted to leave the UK with pleasant memories, so I charged a train pass to my one good card and loaded up my backpack with my ten outfits and cans of Stella Artois.

While I was trying to not starve in a city filled with ugly tourists and slimy clubs and annoying rich kids who couldn’t get into Oxford, my friends had been having a sublime time in Galway, Ireland—making out with cute hostel Australians and working in wine bars and hiking the dreamy hills. After the self-inflicted craziness I had been living with for the last few months, it was so wonderful to be in their presence again—to hear their Iowa accents, to do our inside jokes and create new ones, to get drunk and cry on a train and not feel like a total loser.

Somewhere between Liverpool and Cambridge, Raymond Carver joined us. Not the actual Ray, but a copy of his selected stories. A couple of years before, just as I was slowly beginning to fall in love with him, I found out that he had been dead for several years, and was faced with the crushing reality that there would be no more new stories from him. This made the precious few stories we had of his even more precious. We passed the book back and forth on various trains across England, and one night, as I lay in my bunk in a freezing hostel, I heard my friend C. mutter “I’m coming Ray,” as she climbed into the bunk above me and prepared to huddle under her duvet with the battered book of stories. Though I’ve read and reread and taught his stories dozens of times, each new reading always brings with it the twinge I associate with that time in my life: the new horror of being an adult, the sigh of relief that was my friends. Part of my crush on him lies in the belief that he would understand this: that I was a fuckup who needed love.

My favorite is and always has been the story “Careful.” In this story, a recently separated alcoholic moves into the third-floor apartment of a house. On the day his wife visits him to discuss some unnamed business, he has spent the morning drinking champagne and trying to clean out his ear, which is blocked with wax. He and his wife try various things to remove the wax, including bobby pins and baby oil. The point of view is dead on: drunk and tired and scared. The whole story is shrouded by the cloud of champagne and the fuzzy hearing brought on by the wax—the wife’s presence is merely a blur of questions and concern, no real person. The only reality is the fuzziness of this guy’s despair.

Now it’s no secret that I’m attracted to addicts. Which means I’ve had minor crushes on nearly all of Carver’s protagonists. But when the speaker in this story sneaks into the bathroom to get his stash from behind the toilet, it’s enough to make me swoon. Ridiculous. Alcoholism no doubt reduced Carver’s life to barely half a century, but without it, the stories wouldn’t be as painful or stark, as quiveringly shaky as my uncle’s or grandpa’s or cousin’s pre-whiskey hands at Christmas (they’re dead too). Or as mind-numbingly-I’m-alone-alone-alone-alone sad.

5 Comments:

Blogger LCALeasure said...

Ah shrew, I loved this. Right up till the last paragraph. And then I gotta disagree. My bias maybe, and god knows I'm not Carver, but damn, don't you think maybe if he could have stopped they could have been that way too? And maybe even beyond that? I don't know. You hit an obvious nerve for me. (the lie: drinking and self destruction makes for better writing. I know my work is better now. I can only imagine what carver could have achieved if he didn't die that way, y'know?)

1:15 PM  
Blogger Julia Story said...

I was thinking this very thing as I wrote...he could have been even better. But then he wouldn't have been what I think of when I think "Raymond Carver"--and the universe would be slightly altered. Maybe for the better.

And I'm totally ashamed of my romantic notions of self-destruction. I'm working on it. This stuff kills, and sometimes worse, ruins people. It's ruined people in my family. You are amazing for quitting...you've slightly altered the universe and made it better, and I really do believe that.

1:33 PM  
Blogger Julia Story said...

"Romantic notions" isn't it exactly...I don't romanticize it. I'm just inexplicably drawn to people who can't say no to their demons.

1:44 PM  
Blogger LCALeasure said...

i get it. (having dated a number of your kind ;) when I was saying oh yes! to my demons)

i don't think shame is necessary (ever)-- we all come by these habits honestly.

i totally romanticize these things, I think that's why i have to say something. It's just everytime I see the Hours, I think I should kill myself, or when I see things like High Art, I figure shooting heroin would make me much more edgey.

something about addiction takes us to that edge, and that's often not a bad thing. my hope is that something in recovery can take us to the edge, over the edge and into some sort of elysium or something. who knows what? what's past that mind-numbing I'm alone-alone-alone? You have to get there to get to the new place. I'm not sure our literature has found it yet. and I'm definitely NOT taking about the James Frye type books that continue to glamourize it. where do you go, once you know that place, but don't want to live there??

2:51 PM  
Blogger cK said...

Oh, lovely. I think this blog is lovely. Thanks for writing. Please make more!
-cK

9:35 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home