Lilith

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Perhaps you were determined to beat
every man who haunted you, clear the night

of looming ghosts. Perhaps you desired
only to know what it was to party,
to enjoy the power of your young body,
feel the light of worship on your face.
So at a house in the suburbs you faced
thirty men in button-up shirts, heart beating
as you threw off your dress for the first time, body
frail and wan in the harsh light. That night
ended in no disaster, and you left the party
with a need for a nom de guerre. You desired
something classy. You should call yourself Desire,
I said, which you rejected with a face.
You said you liked Lilith, though at the next party
we found men’s drunken tongues were beaten
by its lisping sounds. They were Teamsters that night,
great hulks, and in play they lifted up your body
as you protested unheard. But your body
was your tool and you learned to use it, the desires
of men slowly acceding to its will. Each night
you learned a little more, how to face
down a troublemaker with a joke, to playfully beat
an unruly father with a riding crop, keep the party
under control with a gesture. Even when the party
turned mean, and a frat boy pressed upon your body
with brute insistence, or a coke dealer beat
upon your fears with an unspoken threat, your desire
for mastery was pure as alabaster, your face
locked in a diamond smile framed by night-
black hair. Still there’s no expressing the nights
we spent that way, the endless parties,
the river of nameless men’s faces,
your bared flesh, the naked voluptuous bodies
swaying and shimmering in a heat wave of desire,
and through it all the city’s electric beat.
And yours was the ivory face of the goddess of night
glimpsed through a party of tortured supplicants beating
themselves from the desire to touch your shining body.

About Gun Ownership

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I owned a gun, very briefly, when I was twenty years old. My ex-wife’s father bought it for us, a diminutive silver pistol ensconced in a gray plastic case. At the gun range I was surprised at the recoil. You wouldn’t think such a small device could snap with such sharp force.

The idea, I guess, was that it provided some kind of “protection.” Protection against what, I’m not sure, because we lived in a pretty nice apartment in a Ft. Collins suburb that reeked of safety. The roads were wide, the lawns were landscaped, fathers rode bicycles with those baby-carrier trailers behind them. We’re talking Safe City, USA, where a few frat boys lighting a couch on fire makes it into the evening news, and people lounge unafraid in city parks at two in the morning.

But still! Protection! Because, you know, bad things can happen. Don’t you watch TV? Bad things happen all the time there, unless you stop them from happening by shooting them with a gun. I mean, how many times did Scully save Mulder’s ass by putting a slug into some sewer-traveling monster? Do you want to get your face sucked off by a sewer monster? No!

Okay, that’s silly. But bad shit does happen, for real. Watch the news, you’ll see. Men shoot people over drugs, money, transgressions real and imagined. Men go crazy and shoot their wives and children and themselves. Men walk into crowded restaurants, and movie theaters, and schools, and open fire with assault rifles and multiple handguns with extended clips. Whole nations go crazy, sometimes, and thousands of men shoot each other – and women too, of course, children, whoever happens to be around – over money, territory, transgressions real and imagined.

And this, this will protect you, this contrivance of steel and powder bucking in your hand. You will face up to that sewer monster, that madman, those soldiers, and you will shoot them down. You will stand triumphant over their bodies like Russell Crowe in that one gunfighter movie. You will cruise down the halls in strangely smooth movements mowing down demons with your chain gun, you will say “Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker,” as the top of the building explodes.

But meanwhile the gun will wait in your bedside drawer. If you’re really paranoid, like my dad, you’ll keep it out of its holster, fully loaded, on top of the nightstand, in case someone tries to steal your TV from you in the middle of the night. The gun will wait, but you will know it’s there. You will tell yourself it’s a last resort. You will feel that now you are really a man, because you hold the power of death in the palm of your hand.

And you would never hurt those close to you. That’s not what it’s for. It’s for all those jerks out there who do want to hurt you, who might cut you off in traffic, and you both start yelling, and then he fires a gun. You would never fire first, unless he had his gun out already. The scenarios are endless. They run constantly through your mind. You’ve seen them before, many times, mostly on television. You never know when you’re going to be attacked. That’s why it’s important to always have the gun with you, in your shoulder holster or glove compartment.

And you would never hurt those close to you. You’d have to be really fucked up, on booze or drugs or something, to even think of that. But you do think of it, one more scenario at the edges. It does happen. Like I had a friend who threatened his wife with a gun one time. They had a pretty negative relationship, seems like. Not like mine. I hardly ever lash out in uncontrollable rage, at anyone. Maybe he thought it was the end of the world, for him. Maybe he craved a sharp climax to a life that made no sense, at the time. Maybe he thought he was the messiah, like a lot of these guys do.

So the gun will wait. It will lie in its dark drawer and when you think of it your thoughts will be dark. You will dream of shooting and being shot, because a gun is a very common, nearly universal dream image, an archetypal symbol of sexual aggression. You will talk with your friends about it, and agree that guns are just cool, and ignore the dark thoughts of gore and unhappiness eddying through the corners of your mind.

Because what else, after all, can you do? How can you give up this perceived if extremely uncertain defense against the possible aggressions of your own neighbors and countrymen? How could you live so defenselessly?

You would have to surrender. You would have to walk down the streets as though ready to offer yourself in sacrifice. You would have to open your arms and expose your heart for all to strike at, if they would. You would have to turn the other cheek. You would have to let go of this surprisingly heavy weight you’ve been carrying, and float along light as a feather. You would have to treat every day like your last. You would have to give up your fear and embrace the world, even if it kills you.

Pulitzer Winners 2010, 1951-1947

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I’ve fallen far behind on these reviews, but here’s the beginning of my effort to catch up. This also mark the beginning of a blog, which probably I should have started when I started doing these reviews.
2010: Tinkers by Paul Harding. As an old man lies dying, he reflects on his childhood and his own father’s demise from epilepsy. If this reads on first glance like literary-fiction boilerplate – As I Lay Dying, anyone? – believe me, it’s even worse than it sounds. Among other conceits, the protagonist of this graduate-school-writing-program thesis repairs clocks, which allows the author to include periodic asides from a presumably fictional horological text. Well, Harding may congratulate himself on writing a book that reads like clockwork: meticulously crafted, precise in its inner workings, and utterly mechanical.
1951: The Town by Conrad Richter. Some genuinely witty anecdotes arise in this story of an early Ohio settlement in the midst of its growth into a proper town. I liked it, for the most part, although I found the actions of its characters unbelievable at several points.
1950: The Way West by A.B. Guthrie. Guthrie’s adventure story of settlers heading across the Great Plains reminded me a great deal of another, later winner, The Travels of Jamie McPheeters, albeit with fewer literary pretensions. While wholly readable, it also was rather forgettable, due, I think, to a plain prose style, simple characters, and a straightforward plot. If you’re curious to see how the Oregon Trail video game would read as a novel, here it is. Just try not to die of cholera.
1949: Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens makes for an interesting contrast with The Way West because Cozzens has precisely the eye for for verisimilitude that Guthrie lacks. It’s always apparent when you’re reading the work of a master writer, and Cozzens displays his skill from the first page as he describes the Florida landscape from a bird’s eye vantage. The novel also shows a nuanced understanding of the relationships between different troops and their commanders on an Air Force Base in wartime, and his expansive cast includes many remarkable portraits. I can’t say that it changed my life, but I’d be willing to give another of Cozzens’ books a try.
1948: Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener. It’s obvious Michener meant well by this book. He clearly loves the South Pacific, and is at his best when relating light anecdotes of his wartime experiences there, as with a particularly amusing story about a black-toothed Chinese matron nicknamed Bloody Mary, who sells souvenirs to soldiers and encourages one particular soldier in a liaison with her daughter. Bright spots notwithstanding, Michener’s book has aged poorly, and is marred throughout by blind nationalistic jingoism and by persistent racial stereotyping that periodically flares into flat-out racism.
1947: All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren tells the story of Willie Stark, who begins as an earnest young lawyer in the South and ends as the most cynical of governors. Along the way, he destroys any number of people’s lives, his own included. Warren fills his book with memorable characters and memorable scenes – one of Stark’s early speeches especially stands out – and America’s limitless capacity for corruption makes its message as timely as ever.