Portrait Day

I. 

Vonnegut in Upstate New York, twilight hours, the 
telephone sometimes ringing, sometimes dialed. 
The wife he eventually divorced and the son 
who went to Vietnam. The whole chronology 
                                    punctuated 
with mental-illness, personalized methods of suicide; 
narrated through the kind eyes of a war veteran 
who'd quit a corporate job to write stories 
about science-fiction and daily life 
(in one of those distant eras before Social Media) 
and he made it to his 80s with his life 
in his hands 
(and everywhere else) 
without ever getting possessed by alcohol or psychedelics or 
            narcotics: Rarely 
does such abstinence produce such originality. 
(God bless, sir.) 

II. 

I think NPR described Thompson once as a kind of 
angry Holden Caulfield of American Politics. 

At 41, I see him as a German poet who traded too many books 
for bottles in the second half of his life. He'd been a poor father 
to Juan, and a sometimes brutally ugly husband to Sandy: 
things not so easily endured or forgiven by time. Like the 
Thompson before him: haunted by the fear of others 
with little recourse beyond living with exerted craziness, 
like people building your house out of dynamite to prevent you 
from smoking. 

The years are Many, through despondency, looming bankruptcy, the fame 
he savored and reviled, the mad, brilliant light of the word 'America' 
in every hateful moment of yearning for decency... 

Where young Dylan had swept his own leg with a motorcycle, 
the 66-year-old Thompson smashed himself on gravity 
and a tile floor. (Warren Zevon smiled in the most generous afterworld.) 
For my part, I'll do all I can -- and not an iota more than 
can be rightfully pledged -- to remember a man in his midthirties 
having a bizarre second childhood in Las Vegas and the ungovernable ferocity 
of indulgence annihilating indolence and Holden Caulfield just 
cried himself to sleep where a boy with the middle name Stockton 
drank the soul of the world and belched out light for centuries. 

III. 

Jennifer Egan has very few scars at all. Like if 
Robin Wright had pursued journalism instead of acting, 
if her hiddenself were a submariner before a diamond- 
thief instead of the other way around. The American-Irish 
lady more American than Irish you could count on to be 
equally versed in the refined arrangement of silverware 
and the intelligent protocol of firearms. No less familiar with 
the levitating glory of earned accomplishment 
than the unforgiving, fear-drenched canyons of 'manageable' 
familial psychotic hysteria. 

Of course, they don't put all that on the dustjacket. 
Like Walter Kirn, I'm just guessing. 

 IV. 

What can I say for Denis Johnson that hasn't already been reserved 
for the Christ Child, or Moses of Goshen ("I am the One True God" and 
all of that) or our former president, Mr. Abraham Lincoln? 

We can only hope for a better class of foreigners, within 
and without our borders, new faces from fishing villages near and far. 
Carriers of beef and poultry and grain and fine scotch to 
nourish and celebrate the contents of memory and the soul. 

I found you very late. In this desert I only imagined by mistake. 
I forget if you were somewhere on the shelf near Hemon 
or the computer turned you up on some indulgent request 
for old Lou Reed records. But in either case, you were a voice direly 
needed, a saint of tragedy and unrivaled triumph, 
someone who commanded all of us not to fear. 

I don't really think you can hear this... 
but I hope your pancreas feels better. 

V. 

We check out our books and items 
and do our honest best to use them 
to their full potential and return them 
before ordering more books and items. 
The receipts become grocery-lists, disposable 
anthologies of new words and terms and titles, 
paper ponds of germs that should one day 
become the teeth of gargoyles, 
stoic, benevolent, immovable by any force at all. 

****