Mark Richard - House of Prayer No. 2 - A Writer's Journey Home

So for your sins you are assigned to Crash and Burn. You’ll ride with rescue squads who pick up the pieces of the young sailors when the fleet comes in and they take their six months of paychecks and buy overpowered cars and motorcycles. They call the head-trauma wing of the Norfolk hospital the House That Honda Built. You’ll ride and report what you see.

At the first accident scene, you can smell the beer in all the blood. It’s hard to tell how many guys are in the accordion of car that missed the dogleg turn off Oceana Boulevard and plowed right into the bull’s-eye of the hazard sign. They’re all dead. You can’t look but you do and see a bloody arm coming out of a T-shirt that seems to be coming out of the glove compartment. There are some skin magazines on the folded-up backseat floor, and they look as though they might be gay magazines, but you can’t tell and you don’t care, it doesn’t matter, they’re all dead.

The next is in broad daylight. You go to one of those faceless Navy housing ghettos, and there’s the young girl hysterical at the front door: The snake is eating my baby! The snake is eating my baby! It’s the home of one of those asshole guys with the ninja crap on the walls and a boa constrictor or some large snake in a tank, and he leaves on deployment and gives his wife careful instructions on how to feed the goddamned snake, she’s supposed to take live mice and dip them in vitamin powder and feed them to the goddamned snake, and she can’t do it, who can blame her, and the snake gets hungry and pops itself out of its tank and makes its way over to the crib. The snake gets in there and unhinges its jaw and starts to try to swallow the baby headfirst when the mother comes in from the neighbor’s laundry and the baby is screaming with a snake on its head like a skullcap with a length of yellow and brown tail. Nobody knows what to do. One of the EMTs is a woman who tries to calm the woman and almost faints herself, the other EMT holds the snake’s neck as if he can squeeze the top of the baby’s head out of the snake’s mouth. Suddenly you’re a Boy Scout, and you take down one of the asshole’s ceremonial swords, and you tell the EMT to get out of the way and he does, and you chop off the goddamned snake’s head, and the baby is going to be fine except for some small punctures in its scalp after they cut the snake’s head off of it, but the worst part is when the snake’s body goes off twisting and banging headless into the furniture and knocks over the baby changing table and twists all around it, dying.

What do you want? your boss asks you one night in a strip club. You don’t know what you want; you seem to have everything you need—job, girlfriend, car, bar, beach. Historically, as with the realtor, when your employer asks you this question, it’s always like a sign from God that you’re about to move on.

When your employer springs this question on you, historically you’ve not been smart enough to ask for a raise, you take the question literally, and you think you might want to live in New York and be a writer, even though you’ve not really thought this out and you’re a little surprised to think it to yourself at that moment.

At that moment outside the strip club you sit in your boss’s car, and you haven’t said what it is you want yet. While you’re thinking, a black man comes out of the strip club dressed all in black leather, you’d noticed him in the strip club, mainly because he wouldn’t take off his black motorcycle helmet and they’d asked him to leave. He makes a big show of pulling on his black gloves and getting on his big black motorcycle and kicking it started and loudly revving up the engine, but something engages and the motorcycle gets away from the motorcyclist. Suddenly the black guy is driving his big black motorcycle up onto the hood of some redneck’s pristine Trans Am muscle car parked beside him, the motorcyclist putting his front wheel through the redneck’s windshield, where it looks permanently stuck. It is one of the most incredible things you have ever seen as the black guy tries to get his motorcycle off the hood of this redneck’s car and you and your boss, who has become one of your best friends, are laughing as hard as you will ever laugh in your entire life, and the only thing you want and the one thing you have wanted since is to always be able to laugh that hard again.

YOU KEEP WORKING FOR THE NEWSPAPER and read books by the Thunderbird pool. You read books and play dominoes with Brian and drink pitchers of beer when the bar is slow. The books these days are short books often with a few short stories. Some days you finish a book after just one pitcher and pass the book to Brian, and you begin to think you could write some stories at least as well as that.

So you start writing stories about things you know, stolen boats, busted dope deals, petty murders, strange weather, things you see firsthand in the T-bird Lounge. You send them to Esquire , sometimes one a week, and they keep coming back. Sometimes they have notes attached suggesting you rewrite the story, but you never do; you toss them in the trash.

An editor at the magazine, Tom, calls you and says he likes one of your stories, do you want to work on it with him? Nah, you say, you tell him you’ll just send him another one, you don’t have time to work on the story, you’re on deadline for Ship of the Week . Okay, he says, he says he’s coming down to the Outer Banks that summer, if you get a break, maybe you can get together. Okay, you say.

When you meet Tom, he tries to tell you how things work. He says if you’re serious about writing fiction, you should move to New York. Okay, you say.

Finally you read a book of stories you like, and you close the book, and you’re facedown on a chaise lounge by the T-bird pool, and you’re looking down at the pretty girl on the back cover, and she is looking back, and you get up and walk into the T-bird Lounge and announce, Boys, I’m moving to New York City to be a writer!

No one pays any attention to you because you often walk into the T-bird with its dramatically fast-opening pneumatic door with something dramatic or stupid to say. Recently you’d said, Remember, boys, Abraham Lincoln didn’t die in vain, he died in Washington, D.C .

But they see you quit your newspaper job, which gets you evicted from the penthouse, and you start crashing on their sofas, and Brian the marine biologist bartender’s wife wonders for how long when she finds you scavenging their refrigerator one afternoon. Brian says don’t microwave anything you find in the freezer, a lot of those are toxic fish specimens. When you mention there’s a couple of frozen seagulls in there, he says, yeah, that’s another project.

You meet an industrial furniture dealer’s mistress at the T-bird, and she leans on her boyfriend to get you a job working for some rough guys carrying Makita drill guns and crystal meth putting together cubicles on military bases on long weekends. You’re valuable to them because you can read blueprints and can sort the hundreds of crates coming off the trucks for seventy-two hours without a break.

During a job in Hampton at Fort Monroe you visit the on-site museum where Jefferson Davis was held after the war, the sun dappling a pattern on the ceiling of the upper masonry wall of the cell just as it must have done when Jefferson lay watching it in his bunk all those months considering the Lost Cause.

Your roommate in the cheap motel the company pays for is a black guy who drinks gin in the dawn when he thinks you’re asleep. You can hear the tin metal cap spinning off and back on the gin bottle, the sipping in between. God, he looks familiar. For a few days you can’t place him. He says you look familiar too. He also says about women, It all a hole .