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Summer, 2001.
NOTE: My Downtown Year was written in 2004. I will be using excerpts from My Downtown Year in a book about San Diego that I’m currently writing. For more context on its serial presentation on this blog, click here.
Day 6: There are places in the Free World where you can buy a 13 year-old boy as a sexual servant. The people saw it on Dateline and cried, “Outrage!” Less than 300 years ago, 13 year-old girls purchased as sexual servants were known as wives. Four generations prior to ours, the practice was legal in the United States under the guise of slavery. In all that time the practice of men paying women for sex and vice versa has occurred the world over. But now, now we’re talking about little boys being anally assaulted by dirty old men who look like grandpa. And PFLAG shouted, “Homophobes!” Thank you for flying United Flight 11 from Boston to New York City, and enjoy your stay in the United States of America.
Day 7: There was a man named Youandi who played the lottery religiously. From the day he turned 18, he bought a ticket for every drawing held. Every time, he would choose his own numbers. He did not have a specific set of numbers that he chose, but rather chose numbers that had been of some significance to him during the week.
One day, Youandi’s wife of 27 years, Faith, left him for a woman she met at the gas station. Both were complaining about high gas prices and hit it off. Faith had long had sexual desires for women, but considered them evidence of her being free and enlightened in her sexuality. Faith’s new lover, Chance, was a lifetime lesbian who had been sexually abused as a child. It was during a drunken “girls’ night out” that Faith and Chance had first sexually consummated their relationship. It was the infidelity that weighed heavily on Faith, and she did not sleep. In the morning, she went home and told her husband everything. She told him how she had met Chance, what happened, and that she was very sorry, but she had to leave him. She had been happy with Youandi, but could never be as happy again. She had found what had always been missing.
Youandi listened to every word. He was rent with grief, but remained stone-faced and silent. He left her where she stood and went to the store and bought his lottery ticket, as he always did. The numbers he picked were all directly related to the day’s earlier trauma, a scrambled sampling of digits from his and Faith’s anniversary, her birth date and the price of a gallon of gasoline. That night, as he mourned his misfortune, the television announced the evening’s winning lottery numbers. As the winning numbers were drawn, Youandi began to realize they had already drawn four of his own numbers. As a fifth numbered ball rolled down the shoot, Youandi found himself one stroke of incomparable luck away from the night’s 125 million dollar jackpot. When the sixth and final number was drawn Youandi was suddenly holding a slip of paper redeemable for 125 million dollars (paid in 26 annual installments).
Youandi was ecstatic. For a moment, he forgot about the immense pain of losing the woman he had loved for so long. The juxtaposition of such extreme emotions was overwhelming. He hid the ticket in a small box safe in his closet, took two Valiums and went to sleep. While he was asleep, a nuclear weapon exploded in Haifa, Israel.
When Youandi awoke in the morning, gas prices had skyrocketed to 27 dollars per gallon. All of this was still unknown to Youandi as he headed to his car to go claim his winnings. Months later, an investigation found that the police car that jumped the curb and killed Youandi was traveling over eighty miles per hour, on a suburban side street, en route to quell a riot at a local gas station, one of many gas station riots that day. And so it is that we are all prisoners of Fortuna’s Wheel.
Summer, 2008.
Andrea gave me A Moveable Feast for Christmas. It seeped into my brain to leak out in my first post, yesterday. I can’t help aping the style. Those short taut sentences are like Alexander’s blade through the Gordian knot that is modern life. They are simple in structure and lean heavily towards physical action. In the book, Hemingway says that writing hungry gave his characters great focus: they were always hungry too, always knew what they needed. Their actions and speech always represent this clarity of vision. There are no Focault-esque baroque oddities, spirals of abstraction, clause draped upon clause, endlessly supplementing, clarifying, hedging. The conventional thinking has Hemingway’s style as a product of its times, a counterpoint to the disorienting horrors of the first war fought with the full technological bounty of the Industrial Revolution, to the relativism of appocalypse. I think what makes that style so appealing today is the new universality of its application.
We live today in a continuous state of upheaval. New technologies supplant old faster than ever before. World changing innovations are on tips of tongues in labs and on campuses, not only across the country, but across the globe. Breakthroughs are shared at near the speed of light and critiqued, corrected and expounded upon nearly as fast. But the sword cuts both ways, and let us not forget, is a sword. War becomes smaller, faster and more deadly to the innocent, it seems everyday. Soldiers die less and less often, more and more return home wounded or changed or both. Industries emerge and collapse in fruit fly cycles. Today’s “conflicts” may not be “World Wars”, but the specter of their violence and confusion covers the globe.
So it feels good for me, like I’m sure it felt good for him, to put something in black and white, to cut through a knot I could never untie, to present my version of events and say simply: this is how it happened for me. Excise lengthy digressions on subjectivity and Heisenberg: writing is presenting an answer to a problem whose solution is unknowable. Every good piece of writing is a religion, presenting a universe within our own, with rules and norms askew or realigned to our own, varying assumptions about the nature of reality suggesting varying modes of life. Hemingway’s voice is authoritative as Moses’. He hedges no bets, makes no disclaimers on his prognostications. That’s a welcome relief in a deconstructed world and it’s the reason he’s the embodiment of American literature. Who could help ripping that off?
