Denis Johnson: Jesus' Son: Stories

"What about this little scar here, through your sideburn?" '

"I don't know. Maybe I was born with that one. I never saw it before."

"Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?"

"Oh, I don't know. I'm a fat piece of shit, I guess."

"No. I'm serious."

"You're not going to write about me."

"Hey. I'm a writer."

"Well then, just tell them I'm overweight."

"He's overweight."

"I been shot twice."

"Twice?"

"Once by each wife, for a total of three bullets, making four holes, three ins and one out."

'And you're still alive."

''Are you going to change any of this for your poem?"

"No. It's going in word for word."

"That's too bad, because asking me if I'm alive makes you look kind of stupid. Obviously, I am."

"Well, maybe I mean alive in a deeper sense. You could be talking, and still not be alive in a deeper sense."

"It don't get no deeper than the kind of shit we're in right now."

"What do you mean? It's great here. They even give you cigarettes."

"I didn't get any yet."

"Here you go."

"Hey. Thanks."

"Pay me back when they give you yours."

"Maybe."

"What did you say when she shot you?"

"I said, 'You shot me!' "

"Both times? Both wives?"

"The first time I didn't say anything, because she shot me in the mouth."

"So you couldn't talk."

"I was knocked out cold, is the reason I couldn't talk. And I still remember the dream I had while I was knocked out that time."

"What was the dream?"

"How could I tell you about it? It was a dream. It didn't make any fucking sense, man. But I do remember it."

"You can't describe it even a little bit?"

"I really don't know what the description would be. I'm sorry."

"Anything. Anything at all."

"Well, for one thing, the dream is something that keeps coming back over and over. I mean, when I'm awake. Every time I remember my first wife, I remember that she pulled the trigger on me, and then, here comes that dream.

"And the dream wasn't-there wasn't anything sad about it. But when I remember it, I get like, Fuck, man, she really, she shot me. And here's that dream ."

"Did you ever see that Elvis Presley movie, Follow That Dream ?"

" Follow That Dream . Yeah, I did. I was just going to mention that."

"Okay. You're all done. Look in the mirror."

"Right."

"What do you see?"

"How did I get so fat, when I never eat?"

"Is that all?"

"Well, I don't know. I just got here."

"What about your life?"

"Hah! That's a good one."

"What about your past?"

"What about it?"

"When you look back, what do you see?"

"Wrecked cars."

"Any people in them?"

"Yes."

"Who?"

"People who are just meat now, man."

"Is that really how it is?"

"How do I know how it is? I just got here. And it stinks."

"Are you kidding? They're pumping Haldol by the quart. It's a playpen."

"I hope so. Because I been in places where all they do is wrap you in a wet sheet, and let you bite down on a little rubber toy for puppies."

"I could see living here two weeks out of every month."

"Well, I'm older than you are. You can take a couple more rides on this wheel and still get out with all your arms and legs stuck on right. Not me."

"Hey. You're doing fine."

"Talk into here."

"Talk into your bullet hole?"

"Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine."

Sometimes I went during my lunch break into a big nursery across the street, a glass building full of plants and wet earth and feeling of cool dead sex. During this hour the same woman always watered the dark beds with a hose. Once I talked with her, mostly about myself and about, stupidly, my problems. I asked her for her number. She said she had no phone, and I got the feeling she was purposely hiding her left hand, maybe because she wore a wedding ring. She wanted me to come by and see her again sometime. But I left knowing I wouldn't go back. She seemed much too grown-up for me.

And sometimes a dust storm would stand off in the desert, towering so high it was like another city-a terrifying new era approaching, blurring our dreams.

I was a whimpering dog inside, nothing more than that. I looked for work because people seemed to believe I should look for work, and when I found a job I believed I was happy about it because these same people-counselors and Narcotics Anonymous members and such- seemed to think a job was a happy thing.

Maybe, when you hear the name "Beverly," you think of Beverly Hills-people wandering the streets with their heads shot off by money.

As for me, I don't remember ever knowing anybody named Beverly. But it's a beautiful, a sonorous name. I worked in an O-shaped, turquoise-blue hospital for the aged bearing it.

Not all the people living at Beverly Home were old and helpless. Some were young but paralyzed. Some weren't past middle age but were already demented. Others were fine, except that they couldn't be allowed out on the street with their impossible deformities. They made God look like a senseless maniac. One man had a congenital bone ailment that had turned him into a seven-foot-tall monster. His name was Robert. Each day Robert dressed himself in a fine suit, or a blazer-and-trousers combination. His hands were eighteen inches long. His head was like a fifty-pound Brazil nut with a face. You and I don't know about these diseases until we get them, in which case we also will be put out of sight.

This was part-time work. I was responsible for the facility's newsletter, just a few mimeographed pages issued twice a month. Also it was part of my job to touch people. The patients had nothing to do but stumble or wheel themselves through the wide halls in a herd. Traffic flowed in one direction only, those were the rules. I walked against the tide, according to my instructions, greeting everybody and grasping their hands or squeezing their shoulders, because they needed to be touched, and they didn't get much of that. I always said hello to a grey-haired man in his early forties, vigorous and muscular, but completely senile. He'd take me by the shirtfront and say things like, "There's a price to be paid for dreaming." I covered his fingers with my own. Nearby was a woman nearly falling out of her wheelchair and hollering, "Lord? Lord?" Her feet pointed left, her head looked to the right, and her arms twisted around her like ribbons around a Maypole. I put my hands in her hair. Meanwhile around us ambled all these people whose eyes made me think of clouds and whose bodies made me think of pillows. And there were others out of whom all the meat appeared to have been sucked by the strange machines they kept in the closets around here-hygienic things. Most of these people were far enough gone that they couldn't bathe themselves. They had to be given their baths by professionals using shiny hoses with sophisticated nozzles.

There was a guy with something like multiple sclerosis. A perpetual spasm forced him to perch sideways on his wheelchair and peer down along his nose at his knotted fingers. This condition had descended on him suddenly. He got no visitors. His wife was divorcing him. He was only thirty-three, I believe he said, but it was hard to guess what he told about himself because he really couldn't talk anymore, beyond clamping his lips repeatedly around his protruding tongue while groaning.

No more pretending for him! He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.

I always looked in on a man named Frank, amputated above both knees, who greeted me with a magisterial sadness and a nod at his empty pajama-pants legs. All day long he watched television from his bed. It wasn't his physical condition that kept him here, but his sadness.