Tobias Wolff reads Denis Johnson’s “Emergency” and discusses it with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.
When I was a teenager, I worked at a Pizza Hut. My last manager there told me I was going to go to hell. I was a senior at a Catholic high school. He was very solemn when he told me this. He was the deacon at a fundamentalist church. I asked him how I might prevent my going to hell and he told me that I needed to be saved by the Lord Jesus God. He invited me to come to his church one Sunday and meet people like him who weren’t going to be going to hell.
I said, “As long as you give me a ride down there, we’re golden.”
So he drove me down to his church — the Church of the Redeemer With Angels and Glory — one Sunday. The church building itself was conventional: pretty, white-steepled church and in a clearing in the middle of the woods near this little town north of Bradenton named Oneco.
Oneco is where the body of John Ringling resides, pickled in formaldehyde. If you pay three dollars and fifty cents you can go inside the crypt and take a look at the dead circus man. Outside you can buy a pretty good miniaturized likeness of him floating for all eternity inside his big glass coffin.
"In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being."
— Denis Johnson
My turn came to get on an airliner, a Northwest Orient 747. The commercial crew was gone, replaced by Air Force reservists. We had to lug our brand-new issue over with us, rifles and body armor and Alice packs and canteens and all. The bottom of the plane, where the luggage normally would go, was stocked with ordnance. We had so much crap that we were practically immobile in our seats. I couldn’t place my feet on the floor—my Alice pack was there. My knees were almost at eye level. I kept my rifle there for a while, then tried jamming it in between the seats.
Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, Parker realized that we hadn’t been fed yet. “Chow?” he asked the Air Force reservist who sauntered by.
“You were supposed to have brought your own,” he said. “Don’t you soldiers carry MRE’s wherever you go?”
“Um, no,” Parker said. He looked panicked.
I was beginning to cramp up. I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t figure out how. I closed my eyes for a while, but that did nothing.
And Parker was going on about the chow, or lack thereof. Two, three hours of him complaining. It was disgusting.
“Will you shut the fuck up about the chow?” I shouted. He was making me hungry when I wanted to be nervous.
“Buzz, it’s just that—”
“I can’t stand it anymore! I’m at a breaking point! Breaking point!”
We landed in Rome. The Air Force reservist assured us that we’d be allowed off the plane to stretch while we refueled. He assured my buddy that there would be hot chow waiting for us on the ground. It was a lie. We weren’t allowed off the plane. Italian officials came aboard and spritzed us with cherry-scented bug spray.
My sister and I used to spend summers with my grandparents, my mother’s parents, at their teeny-tiny apartment in Nalcrest, Florida. Nalcrest is the retirement village of the National Association of Letter Carriers, the postal union. Nalcrest is shaped like a wheel with a bingo hall in the center. And a statue of a postman near the bingo hall. And a post office right around there, of course. Other establishments floated in the center, but none that anyone cared about. All the old postmen hung out at the post office, ostensibly waiting on their mail. They discussed post office business, comparing and contrasting the old Post Office Department with the new-fangled U.S. Postal Service. And ZIP codes, hah! Who needs ‘em? This postal talk went on and on.
By John Sheppard
After I’d left my wife, after I’d been fired, again, I sat alone in my apartment drinking fruit punch-flavored Kool Aid generously laced with gin. I stared out the window. Out there was Bradenton, Florida, and the heat index, and savage, lumbering alligators unafraid of humanity thanks to construction workers who chucked their gnawed-clean chicken bones at them.
Shortly before my departure, my wife told me that I was like a plain brown paper sack that had been stapled and glued shut. You could shake the sack, and you knew something was in there, maybe something good, but who knew? You couldn’t get the sack open without ruining the sack, so what could you do? She also informed me that she thought I was semi-autistic and I should get checked by a doctor. That’s when I invited myself to leave.
That’s also approximately the time that I threatened my supervisor at Sarasota Art Index Associates with an X-Acto knife, shouting, “I cut you!” I did. It was an accident, a bad joke, but try explaining that to the security guard escorting you out of the building.
I’m unusual—but not unusual looking. I’m so usual looking that no one could pick me out of a line-up. But the mentally ill, children, and police all take an interest in me on sight. I’ve never been comfortable with this. I see people here in the 1990’s making a fetish out of being unusual. They don’t know what it’s really like. It is not an enviable position to be in. I open my mouth and say things and I don’t want to sound like I’m strange, but I am, and I can’t help it and there is no help for me. I cannot embrace my unusualness as a lifestyle, despite the loud propaganda for it on MTV. I love David Lynch—he is my brother, we share a soul—but I wish that he’d never made Twin Peaks. There is such a thing as sharing too much.
By John Sheppard
Billy sat in his cloister trying very hard not to hear his mother’s screams. It was impossible. He had work to do, spreadsheets to fill out before Monday morning, or he wouldn’t get paid and if he didn’t get paid, his mother would have to do without her two staples: Butter brickle ice cream and bonded bourbon. So he tried to concentrate. The humming of the window unit air conditioner usually helped, but today it did not help. Not one bit.
“Billy!” she shrieked. “Billy!”
She hadn’t left the two-flat in five years—not since his father had passed away—unless she was visiting one of her many doctors. His father died on the Red Line L somewhere between Morse and Loyola on the far north side, standing up to allow a lady passenger to sit, and then falling down flat on his face, dead before he hit the ground, a stray bullet zipping through the L car and through his occipital and temporal lobes before settling in the bottom of his frontal lobe.
Billy was an accountant, just like his father. Or approximately like his father.
A coroner dug the bullet out of his father’s head, back to front. The funeral was a closed casket affair. His mother shooed everyone out of the room so she could take one last look at his poor dead dad. The shooed included Billy and his older-by-two-years sister Ellen, who’d arrived from Connecticut for the funeral and left immediately afterward. Ellen advised Billy to do the same, to leave as quickly as humanly possible. “You’ve done enough for the two of them,” she said. “It’s time to start thinking about yourself.”
“Ma needs me,” Billy said.
“She only needs you because you’re here,” Ellen said, taking his hand. “Come to Connecticut with me. Plenty of jobs for accountants there.”
The brother and sister shared a face. On Billy it looked too feminine. On Ellen, it looked slightly off, like it had been slapped onto the front of her skull haphazardly.
“Billy!” his mother shrieked at the funeral home. “It’s not him! It’s not him!”
Ellen let go of his hand, let it fall.
Editor’s Note: This novel excerpt first appeared here March 11, 2012.
"Anybody can have ideas—the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph."
— Mark Twain
By John Sheppard
He is an old man, and on first inspection he seems like the kind of old man who would eat dog food out of a can because he can afford nothing better. His clothes are not synthetic. He wears a brown blazer with missing buttons. His shirt was white once-upon-a-time. His tie was in fashion maybe thirty years ago? His coat and pants (are they plaid pants?) are worn shiny in some spots and in others threads splinter out roughly.
He seems neither happy nor sad. He is neutral in expression. He seems more nimble than he should. Look at those shoes on his feet—poor sad shoes! If we could see the soles, we would see them worn through on the bottom, the only thing between his socks and the ground being a thin layering of newspaper. His socks sag around his ankles. He smells of Ben Gay and something else. Is it barbecue?
He walks so quickly for such an old coot! It’s hard to keep up, but he is not panting. He rubs at his face, his day-old shave. He coughs drily into a liver-spotted fist. His eyes are pale blue and the whites glow like phosphorus. Poverty seemingly agrees with him.
Or maybe he’s not poor. Maybe he’s cheap.
