Jesus' Son

Denis Johnson died this summer, and his most lasting legacy may be a slim volume of short stories called Jesus' Son, (the titled based on a line from Lou Reed's song "Heroin") published in 1992. The stories are all narrated by an unnamed drug addict and alcoholic as he stumbles through life, occasionally working as an orderly at a hospital but mostly looking to have a drink or get a fix.

When I read stories about down and out characters I'm partially horrified, as I have lived a sedate life in comparison. But these stories are very funny, and have some killer opening lines that require being in a museum of great opening lines. "I was after a seventeen-year-old belly dancer who was always in the company of a boy who claimed to be her brother, but he wasn’t her brother, he was just somebody who was in love with her, and she let him hang around because life can be that way." That's a great sentence.

The narrator is a passive sort, driven by his addictions and love, for lack of a better word. His relationships with the opposite sex are frequent but misguided, at times just two people crashing in the night. Here's another opening line: "I’d been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I’d ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin." Later he says of that girl: "She was a woman, a traitor, and a killer. Males and females wanted her. But I was the only one who ever could have loved her."

Some stories stand out as comic masterpieces. "Two Men" has the narrator and his friend picking up a mute man and trying to follow his directions to drop him off, but they get stuck with him. "Emergency" is set at the hospital, where he and a fellow orderly are high. The shift ends with a man coming in with a knife sticking out of his eye (put there by his wife). The ER doctor has the narrator call to gather specialists, but his friend pulls the knife out in a moment of drugged haze.

The most interesting story is the last, "Beverly Home," in which our hero is staying in Phoenix, drying out. He attends AA meetings and has gotten a part-time job writing a newsletter for a long-term medical facility. "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." He describes dating a dwarf and a woman who is half paralyzed. But he is obsessed with a woman in an apartment he passes by to the bus stop. He peeps on her when she steps out of the shower, hanging from her bathroom window. Later he will try to catch her and her husband having sex. He concludes that they are Mennonite.

Mostly this character just likes being in bars. There are some lovely images of them: "I looked down the length of the Vine. It was a long, narrow place, like a train car that wasn’t going anywhere. The people all seemed to have escaped from someplace—I saw plastic hospital name bracelets on several wrists. They were trying to pay for their drinks with counterfeit money they’d made themselves, in Xerox machines."

I've read a few other of Johnson's books, but this book is unlike them, and feels more like Charles Bukowski or any other of a number of sketches of dipsomania. After all, a lot of great writers were drunks or hopheads, and Johnson was one of them. What makes him like Bukowski is that he sees the humor in it. I loved a moment when a character asks him if he wants to work, and the narrator honestly replies that he would rather have a drink.