The Vocabulary of Guns

60.

Why is your favorite book your favorite book? Is it the story, the plot, the characters, the ‘what’ that happens within? My father says his favorite novels take him into another world. It takes him to a place, I suppose, outside of himself. During the time that I am writing about, my favorite novel is ‘All the King’s Men.’ Willie Stark’s missile-phallus, lit by a million watts, looms on my right as I cross the Baton Rouge Bridge over the Mississippi River. Stark would have appreciated this bridge, this infrastructure, this long flat road to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. Indeed, Jack Burden would have appreciated it more for it was he who took the long drive across America subsisting on nothing but Coca-Cola until he reached Long Beach, California, something of a resort before the war, and there he lay on his bed with a bottle of bourbon and drank until he couldn’t remember anymore. And when that was achieved he checked out and drove home. He saw no beach, no other people for that matter except a barber and a clerk or two. He had done what was needed and therefore he could go back to the past which had swiftly become a brand new present. Along the way he encountered the man with the twitch. And it set off an existential crisis for old Jack Burden. He couldn’t get it clear in his mind if the twitch was itself or if it was connected to something larger, God perhaps, the Great Twitch Himself. Jack came to an understanding. He’d see Willie gunned down and he’d know that he may as well have put the gun in the assassin’s hand. He’d kill his own father like Oedipus of old, not knowing who the man truly was until it was too late. The bad father was dead and the good lived on. Or vice-versa, for each man, Jack came to understand, has equal measure of good and bad and what we do determines what we are and every action has an equal and opposite reaction, a filament of the web is caressed and a tree falls three weeks later. Or something like that. Willie’s capital city is behind me now and before me is the black, headlamp-lit highway. The romantic young man that I am loves the story of Jack’s struggle, the young love for Anne, the inarticulate feeling of being on a beach with love bigger than twenty suns and all day to swim. The feelings of youth, the pangs of the old writing about the young, resonates most deeply with the young themselves. It is we who must decide whether Willie is good or bad. It is we who must struggle to tell the story of ancestral sins. It is we who must be agents of vengeance in these strange and troubled times. It is we who must find and attach ourselves to something so much greater than ourselves. And so ‘All the King’s Men’ is something of a manifesto to some of us in the English class. We debate whether ends justify means and naturally I come out on the side of Willie Stark, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Peace out bro. That’s me, peace through superior firepower. It’s the do-gooders like me and Mussolini who want a well-ordered world, where trains run on time and nobody tries to make a left hand turn. A world of predictability, minus the gas ovens. I still wind up sounding like some kind of Aryan freak, and classmates openly wonder whether I’m not the type to come to school with a loaded rod and smoke some fool for an imagined offense. Not me. That’s not my speed. The pen, I pretend, is mightier than the revolver. And so I dedicate myself to the written and the spoken and not the silent language of the trigger pull, the moment of inhalation before the final exhalation. I want to be Jack Burden, ultimately. I want the girl at the end and a chess-playing father and the house with the jalousies in the town named for our family, with a view of crashing gulf surf and a fire in the fireplace and a warm four-legger and my manuscript finished and the drink is just right, we’re all happy now, safe, together, somehow mother is okay or we’re all okay with her absence, dead or drugged up in a convalescent home, it’s all the same to us, we sweet and happy few. And that’s what will bring me back, again and again to ‘All the King’s Men.’ Not so much the world of Penn Warren’s pen, though that by itself is reason enough. No, it is the world of myself that can be returned to, a way I felt as recently as last March and April when as a class we read all 558 pages and bitched and moaned the whole way. But teacher was right, she knew I’d love it and I do. The azaleas are always turning pink and white and magenta. The clocks haven’t sprung forward yet and so each evening the sun must battle the night for a few more moments of your time. The streetcars are still running past the open windows of teacher’s class room. Love is still an unknown, a still to be discovered element. You exist way down or way up rather with the rare gases, xenon and his ilk. You don’t know shit from apple butter and it feels so free. You are perched on the brink of all possibilities, uncut, unbloodied, unaware. You can discover the truth about the Judge and the crucible of Tom Stark and the fire-breathing fury of Sadie and you can ride the road with Sugar Boy and say, ‘Those bbbbaaassstuuddss,’ and laugh every time like you’d made it up yourself. And so it is. And so it goes. The great gift of literature, like an all seeing twitch, pulls each of its faithful into the web, into the conspiracy, into the maelstrom of ourselves, into a time when we liked ourselves better, knew less, wanted more.