Volume 2, Issue 19 August 31 - September 13, 2000

For two years I lived half a block off Colfax. I'd often come home to crack dealers selling their wares in the basement vestibule of my apartment building, and every night I sat out on the stoop to have a smoke, I'd see tired drunks spilling out of the next door bar. These weren't scary people; they never threatened me or even spoke to me (except to bum the occasional cigarette), but I would find myself wanting to talk to them, connect with them, and ask them their stories.

Like most people my age, I've dabbled in altered states of consciousness and a bit of binge drinking, but for whatever reason, I never crossed to the other side. I never lost myself in a drunken haze, and no matter how fucked up I got, I always managed to wake up on the sober, acceptable side of society. Still, I always wondered as I watched these strangers stumble down Colfax what it would be like to dive deep into the ocean of alcohol and drugs and never come up for air again.

In Jesus' Son, Denis Johnson's disturbing collection of short stories, we meet a shadowy cast of characters who have made such a dive and long since left "legitimate" society for the world of paybythehour hotels, force-fed detox centers, and vagrancy.

"Car Crash While Hitchhiking" introduces us to a nameless narrator who stands in the rain at the head of a highway entrance ramp. He is granted temporary clairvoyance by the slew of hallucinatory pills he's been taking and can predict which car will slow to the side of the road to pick him up. A man, his wife, little girl, and baby share the car with the unnamed, drugged hitchhiker, and as they glide down the stormy road, he can sense the catastrophe ahead. The crash explodes in slow motion, blood and screams bouncing off the interior of the car. In the tangle of violence the hitchhiker does the only thing he can-- leave the broken, dying parents and rescue the baby.

In "Beverly Home," we meet a Peeping Tom who fantasizes about raping Mennonite women. Even though he engages in some lessthanmoral behavior (including using a dwarf for sex), the way he tenderly cares for diseased, crippled people in a rehabilitation home makes us realize even the most degenerate among us can have two sides to their personality.

"Jesus' Son" shows us men who beat their lovers and girlfriends who cheat on their men. Yet through the blur of drugs and alcohol, Johnson's stories prove that no matter how flat-on-your-ass wasted you become, you can't escape your emotions.

Even though I've left the old neighborhood, I still find myself wandering toward Colfax, sitting on the stoop of my old building, and shyly catching the gaze of a stranger. Behind the glassy stare, I know there is a hazy place we've all been to, and I extend a cigarette in exchange for a story.