Denis Johnson's story "The Other Man" begins: "But I never finished telling you about the two men." And sure enough, you recall: earlier in the collection Jesus' Son, there is a story called "Two Men," but it's really just about one man: a deaf-and-dumb giant of a dude who ends up in the narrator's car, signaling that he'd like to be taken somewhere. He's a stranger, but somehow his inability to speak fends off a fight, and compels the narrator to comply. The man in "The Other Man" is a tourist who pretends, convincingly, to be a Polish tourist until he admits it was a prank all along. Yet the reveal doesn't reveal all:
When I've told others about this man, they've asked me, "Did he make a pass at you?" Yes, he did. But why is that out come to this encounter obvious to everyone, when it wasn't at all obvious to me, the person who actually met and spoke with him?
What's the connection between the two men? Are they both liars? And why does it take the narrator so long to remember to finish the story? All of Jesus' Son is like that, within and across stories: obscure connections are made and broken; time skips unpredictably and without warning. In "Out on Bail," the narrator is at a bar commiserating with a friend about to go to prison, until he remembers that the moment was actually one of celebration, because the friend was acquitted. In the virtuosic "Emergency," he tells us a story about getting stuck in a car in the snow, and accidentally kills a nest of newborn rabbits he'd been trying to protect. Then he says, "Or maybe that wasn't the time it snowed." This moment that he's thinking of, "The bunnies weren't a problem yet, or they'd already been a problem and were already forgotten, and there's nothing on my mind." The fractured nature of the narrative reflects the drunken, drug-addled mindset of the narrator--nicknamed, unfortunately, "Fuckhead."
Does that sound frustrating? Does it sound like the worst excesses of our most masculine hacks? Our Bukowskis, our Palahniuks, our Bret Easton Ellises? Certainly you can their shadows in a story like "Car Crash While Hitchhiking," which spares little in the way of violence or gore, or the black humor of the moment in "Emergency" when the strung-out orderly glibly removes the knife in a man's eye while prepping him for the surgery that's supposed to do exactly that. Denis Johnson is the writer those guys all wish they could be, or maybe think they are. For one thing, he can write circles around them, as in this drugged-out vision of the Iowa countryside:
Glaciers had crushed this region in the time before history. There'd been a drought for years, and a bronze fog of dust stood over the plains. The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed , wilted cornstalks were laid out on the ground like rows of underthings. Most of the farmers didn't even plant anymore. All the false visions had been erased. It felt like the moment before the Savior comes. And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time.
But also, Jesus' Son has a kind of warmth and generosity those authors can't match. Johnson has a sincere affection for those who are down and out, like Fuckhead, which is all the more remarkable because it doesn't require the kind of gritty realism that we usually think of us being the hallmark of empathetic literature about the lowest strata of our society. Dreams and visions, induced by pills or otherwise, are respected as part of human creativity and ingenuity. And both Johnson and Fuckhead are aware that much of human life is the product of circumstance and luck:
"You just don't realize. Being a cheerleader, being on the team, it doesn't guarantee anything. Anybody can take a turn for the worse," said Richard, who'd been a high school quarterback or something himself.
About Dundun, a sadistic man who tortures a friend of Fuckhead's, he writes:
Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn't know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into something like that.
The collection zips from Iowa to Chicago to Seattle, but it ends in Arizona, where Fuckhead is all cleaned up and trying to live a sober life as an orderly in an old folk's home. He spends his afternoons and evenings spying on a Mennonite couple who live nearby, trying to peer into their inner life. He's interested in them before he knows they are Mennonite, but the story says something like this: even the most straitlaced of us have inner lives that are unique, perhaps even bizarre, that we are all as weird as the drifters and addicts of Jesus' Son, thought not all of us live close enough to risk for that part of us to emerge. "All these weirdos," Fuckhead writes serenely at the end, "and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us."
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