Jolene and Suicide

[Soundtrack for this post: Ray LaMontagne’s Trouble]

I saw Ray LaMontagne perform last week. He was awesome, as usual. He mentioned how he was on Elvis Costello’s TV show Spectacle. He said that Elvis said Allison was a song that still resonates with people, and that Elvis suggested that Jolene was a song of Ray’s that might have the same qualities. Ray then played Jolene and I came close to tearing up.

Jolene

Jolene is almost certainly in my High Fidelity -like “top five songs of all time,” and it has a shot at being #1 with a bullet. I’m obsessed with lyrics, so most of what affects my opinion of a song is what the words say. I love many of Ray’s songs, but there’s something about the storytelling quality of Jolene that really does it for me. Take Shelter as an example in contrast: a great song, a song I love and is Anne’s and my “song,” so to speak, I love it, it is beautiful, but I don’t see anything when I hear it. Jolene is different.

With Jolene I can see the coatless man, smoking his cigarettes. I can see his pain. As with many songs, I insert myself in the role of the protagonist. I am Jolene’s man. I can see the picture of Jolene holding a picture of me, it’s cracked and faded from spending so much time in the pocket of my blue jeans—I can see it in my filthy, cracked, and shaking hands. I can see myself and feel the pain of the man who has woken in the ditch, with booze in his hair and blood on his lips. I know exactly what he means when he says a man needs a nine-pound hammer or a woman like Jolene. It’s a magnificent song about love and loss. I love it so much I easily forgive the mispronunciation of Spokane, which is saying something.

Maybe it’s the mention of eastern Washington, or the drug use and boozing of what I assume is a blue collar man, or the name Ray, but the song reminds me of Raymond Carver and his stories of working class love, drug use, and drinking.

Something about it makes me want to be the strung-out drunk who wakes up in a ditch with booze in his hair and blood on his lips—something about the pain on display that can’t be ignored, a pain that shows up in such an obvious and devastating way. It’s a physical manifestation of feeling, even if AA would say what he’s trying to do is not feel. [n.1]

But of course I can’t be the Jolene man now. I have a wife and a kid. I can’t be coked out and passing out in ditches, coatless. I now have responsibilities that affect others. But I’ve felt that way for the last dozen years.

My parents lost a child in 1997, one of my sisters, and it was undoubtedly the hardest thing either of them have ever had to deal with. I determined that they, my mom in particular, could never handle another blow like that. Which means that I have to do what I can to stay alive, for them, and now for Carver too.

Suicide

I have no problem with suicide. I used to. I used to think that it was a cop-out, a way for the weak to avoid struggle. But I don’t feel that way anymore.

I am not a religious man, and am pretty dubious when it comes to any sort of afterlife. So if someone’s life sucks and causes him nothing but pain, I don’t see why he should be chastised for calling it quits a little early. Maybe that’s hard on the people that get left behind, but that’s their problem. Staying alive for the sake of others is a strange idea in at least one way: if you hate life and want to die, why do they so want you to live to suffer more pain? Can their wants be anything other than selfish? [n.2]

Regardless of what I said in that last paragraph, I am one who will always do what I can to live for others. I want to live for me too, but I also want to live for my family. The idea of my son growing up without his father is something that I can’t even think about without nearly gagging with disgust. And I am not willing to take responsibility for my parents losing another child.

I had a discussion with a psychiatrist a few weeks ago about suicide. I had explained to her how I had basically led a rather charmed life, loaded with opportunities (relatively). She asked why I thought I might be so unhappy considering that I just said I was lucky in the life department, and I responded, I shit you not, by saying “Well, people are complicated.” As if she needed to be told. I then went on to talk about David Foster Wallace.

Dave Wallace was a writer of massive acclaim and much (relative) celebrity. He was also wicked smart, to the extent where I have no problem conceding that he was way, way, way smarter than me, which is not something I concede very often. He also had a history of depression. Dave Wallace was famous, brilliant, incredibly talented, had a rather large cult-like following that undoubtedly included beautiful groupies who would do his every bidding, had a very desirable teaching gig at a fancy liberal arts college that required little more than he be himself, et cetera, et cetera. And in September of 2008 he hanged himself with a belt from his back porch. [n.3]

The psychiatrist’s question, which was undoubtedly asked more to see how I would respond rather than in an attempt to be unpuzzled, applies to Dave Wallace at least as much as it does to me (almost certainly much more so). I don’t think I have a better answer than “People are complicated.” Depression is complicated too.

Note 1: Or so I’ve been told.

Note 2: This is true, if it is at all, only when the suicide is well considered; a teenager blowing his brains out because a girlfriend dumped him is a different matter.

Note 3: In David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest, there’s a scene where one of the students at the tennis academy where much of the story takes place confesses his obsession with having his picture show up in tennis magazines. The sweat-licking [n.3a] guru to whom he is confessing basically ruins his dream by telling him that people who get that fame do not really enjoy it, and in the end their horror becomes a fear of the day when they no longer show up in magazines. Some have speculated that Wallace was working hard to surpass Infinite Jest but that he recognized there was a real chance that he never would. Need I elaborate?

Note 3a: Literally.

Manhood for Amateurs, Part 3

[Soundtrack for this post: Flunk’s For Sleepyheads Only]

[Beer for this post: Southern Tier IPA (again)]

On to the second essay in Manhood for Amateurs—it’s called:

William and I

In this essay Chabon tells a story about how he is complimented in the supermarket for being a “good dad.” He talks about how the good dad standard is so different, and lower, than the good mom standard, and how fathers in the past had it even easier.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an experience similar to what Chabon recalls in his essay, how many times I’ve been stopped and praised for being a good dad when I’ve done, as far as I can tell, nothing to warrant comment (much less praise).

I’ve often thought about this double standard. The first time I really got it was when the three of us went to visit my mom for the first time since Carver’s arrival. My mom lives on the coast of Washington so we always fly into Seattle. On that trip we spent the night in Seattle at my aunt Merlee’s apartment, which we often do rather than tackle the four-hour drive on the same day as the flight. Carver was just shy of three months on this particular trip, and he still wasn’t sleeping much. My aunt’s apartment is all on one level and isn’t huge, so when Carver woke in the early morning, I figured I should take him somewhere so Anne, my mom, and my aunt could get a couple more hours of sleep. I took Carver to a Tully’s, which is a coffee shop chain similar to Starbucks, but much better. I got a coffee and bought the New York Times, and struggled trying to move my coffee and paper and get settled why carrying Carver. At some point one of the Tully’s ladies asked me something like this: “Oooohhhhh [spoken in that very sweet way that conveys that the speaker finds something adorable], are you watching the baby so mom can sleep in?” Yes. “OOOOoooohhhh [almost orgasmic], you’re such a WONderful dad! That is so sweet.” Almost from the moment she started asking, it was as if every woman in the coffee shop decided to eavesdrop and descend on me and Carver, cradling us in this ring of praise and adoration that seemed strangely tinged with lust. I knew that if it were Anne and not me no one would’ve even commented about her mothering. That was my first noteworthy experience with the parenting double standard, and I’ve benefited from it many more times since.

Chabon has this to say about how we as a society see mothering: “Good mothering is not measurable in a discrete instant, in an hour spent rubbing a baby’s gassy belly, in the braiding of a tangled mass of morning hair. Good mothering is a long-term pattern, a lifelong trend of behaviors most of which go unobserved at the time by anyone, least of all the mother herself. We do not judge mothers by snapshots but by years of images painstakingly accumulated from the orbiting satellite of memory.” Good fathering, by contrast, apparently just means sticking around and seeming to be content with very limited parenting responsibilities. In some subcultures, it seems good fathering simply means still being around by the time the child is born.

Chabon also has this line about his father’s parenting: “My father educated me in appreciating the things he appreciated, and in ridiculing those he found laughable, and in disbelieving the things he found dubious.” As a father and a son, I find that to be a remarkably apt description of fatherhood.

I have always thought that both of my parents were pretty good parents, but that’s based on an extraordinarily limited sample size. They’re both imperfect and a little nuts, but my guess is that that describes just about everyone. I don’t have any reasonable complaints.

I have worried about being a horrible father for about as long as I’ve recognized that I might someday be a father. When I was in high school I developed a theory that parenting styles skipped generations. I used my own family as an example. My paternal grandfather was, in my young eyes, a harsh, mean, and scary man, and thus probably a bear of a father. By stark contrast, my father was, at least in my eyes, understanding, kind, and laid-back perhaps to a fault. My theory was that my father didn’t want to be like his father, so he was much easier going. My fear was that I would be like my grandfather, because I had a nice father and didn’t appreciate what it was like to have a harsh father. By that time I could see parts of my grandfather leaking through me: a fierce temper and an occasional severe lack of patience with others.

It has become clear to me in the last 15 years that I will not be my grandfather, but I will not be my father either. I have my own still developing way, and while I rarely manage to meet my own standards for what I expect from myself as a father, I do recognize that I am, relatively, probably going to be pretty good at it.

Poetry

I have published precisely one poem in my life. It was in the University of Michigan Law School’s Griot, so that’s using a very liberal interpretation of “publish.” Most of my other poetry has consisted primarily of sentimental love poems, most of which probably aren’t very good.

I actually submitted two poems to the Griot and they took only one, and I always thought it was the lesser of the two. I also still bristle when I think about the editing process for the one they took. One of my reviewing readers asked a very dumb question, and in the end they both convinced me to chop the end off, a decision I regret.

I figured I’d post them here so you can read them and, if you want, let me know what you think about them, particularly which is better and if you like “Waiting for the 33” with the end or without. Keep in mind I wrote both of these in one evening, so…

Waiting for the 33

Two crows on the power line

Mating ritual – Big male, smaller female

Cawing/cackling

Picking/preening

He shifts away, she shifts toward

She shifts and flies away

He stays

Perhaps it was her unladylike behavior

Perhaps he’s just a coward, like many men

He stayed on awhile, cackling

Five minutes later he caws across the street, in a tree

Five minutes later she joins him, they resume the dance

He stays near, preens her

Coyly playing their game, jumping from branch to branch

Preening, kissing in the rain

Back on my side of the street

Back where they started

Their movements cause the line to quiver.

(vibrations from their love work across, into the poles, continue into the staples and nails and tar)

[The published version does not have the final line]

Laundry

“I hope he wakes up this morning and has no socks.”

she says to no one, as she rubs at her mascara.

The tissues go in the toilet.

After grimacing at the initial raucous roar,

she waits for the sweet ring of the B-flat that follows.

Back behind the counter, wondering why

each drink is so unnecessarily complicated,

she winces when the milk turns to foam;

as the warm quiet rumble builds to a wail.

Fleeing the clamor,

finding the stillness of the back alley,

she takes one drag before she tosses

her cigarette to the ground.

Choking back a sob, she picks up the butt,

and extinguishes it on the thin skin of her wrist.

Biting down on nothing, wiping at her tears,

she thinks of bare feet on cold tile,

and smiles.