Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

This post was brought to you by a recommendation from David Wegehaupt, who was a classmate during my time as a music student at BGSU. He has since then graduated, and is a grad student at Arizona State University. David is an uber cool, hip, skinny and big-haired kid (think Kenny G., but trendy) who is always two or three steps ahead of the masses. I would label David as a “scene kid”, but he is fiercely interested in his own thing, never following in anyone's footsteps or accepting society's norms without question. He is an absurdly talented saxophone player that focuses mostly on modern music and performance, and also olds a degree in recording technology. If you're looking for what you think you know about the saxophone to completely explode, look up some of his performances. He's into the vegan, tattooed, outdoor living kind of life, and is cooler than approximately 60% of the people I have ever met. Along with this aura of awesomeness, David happens to be wicked smart and a voracious reader. Because of this cocktail of coolness and intelligence, I take his book recommendations very seriously. And that brings me to today's entry.

Knowing that I am a die-hard memoir fan, David suggested that I read Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which he gave the high honor of being one of his favorite books of the year. Anyone reading this, please explain to me how you could turn down a title like that. I am a sucker for both catchy titles and cover art, and this book is la crème de la crème of both. The reviews on the book jacket were also top notch. “A heartbreaking, searing story... It is a story of self-discovery in the best sense, and also a story of the dissembling of history, the fight to keep oneself whole, and the inherent obligations of biology.” Said A.M. Holmes, author of Music for Torching. Brad Land, who wrote Goat, said “A wonder, both sweet and agonizing, a fusion of the lyric and the well-wrought story. It shatters convention with every word, and Flynn makes that destruction flawless.”

You were right, David – this book is awesome. Nick Flynn's book is not the kind of memoir you would expect from a kid with such a sad, screwed up story – he writes with passion and creativity. The book could be broken down into prose poems, instead of chapters. His words seem to take shape on the page or the tongue, jumping around as figures in your mind's eye. When he describes a blanket-covered lump shivering under the snow in a concrete corner, you don't just imagine it. You see it, you feel the ground pushing up against your shoulders and the snowflakes melting into the crevices of your ears.

The story is complicated and twisting, never following one path for too long. Nick Flynn is just another troubled kid trying to find his way and figure out what he's here for. His mother left his father and his lying, oily ways not long after he was born and he has grown up with no father figure in his life, not hearing a word from the man until he's in his upper teens. When he finally does hear from him, he discovers a man who lives a life of lies and unkept promises. He has no roots, no job, no home, no plans to remedy any of this. His father lives by the idea that he is a great writer (although he has never really written anything), and that someday, his book will be an American classic. “If you asked me about my father then – the years he lived in a doorway, in a shelter, in an ATM – I'd say, Dead, I'd say, Missing, I'd say, I don't know where he is. I'd say whatever I felt like saying, and it would all be true. I don't know him, I'd say...”

Like so many of us, Nick is discontented with his life and his family, hates school, drinks his way through his teenage years. He lives with his brother, his mother, and her endless cycle of boyfriends, all teetering on the edge of criminal or insane (or criminally insane). They aren't poor, but they're not rich; they're not happy, but they're not in despair; they don't communicate, but they aren't silent. It is a life of mediocrity and settling, and Nick feels understandably aloof. But unlike most of us, he turns this restless feeling into a want to do good for the world. Instead of feeling sorry for himself, he sees his situation in perspective with those less fortunate. And so he turns his efforts to living an isolated life on a house boat, learning to rely on himself and to live without a solid home base. Then he finds a job at The Pine Street Inn, the largest homeless shelter in the city of Boston.

Around this time, Nick starts hearing more regularly from his father. He has received letters over the years, demented unfinished sentences declaring his life a famous and glorified success. I cannot even imagine the disappointment that he must have gone through when this reunion finally happened. Put yourself in his shoes – you are a child growing up knowing that your father lives around the area, that you could be passing him on the street at any time, and that he just doesn't want to bother to have anything to do with you. Through random letters, you are being prodded to believe that this is because he is rich and famous, wildly talented or creative, any sort of genius that keeps him too busy and tormented to visit his child. And then, when you finally meet?

“One day, out of nowhere, my father telephones – 'Get over here with your truck.' The first time I've heard his voice on the phone, the first time I've ever spoken to him, really, beyond that 'Hi' when I was eight. I'm sitting behind my door with a shotgun, he now says, waiting for the knob to turn. […] I find him sitting naked in a galvanized tin tub in the center of his room, bathing and drinking straight vodka from a silver chalice, like some demented king from in the Middle Ages.”

It doesn't take long for the fantasy to fade. Jonathan Flynn is a washed up alcoholic, clinging to a pointless dream and shuffling from place to place once friends tire of his outlandish stories and attitude.

Nick is still working at the homeless shelter. “I've been working in the shelter for a couple years,” he writes, “And I want to see how close to the edge I can come without falling.” He is an emotionless soldier on the front lines of the battle against homelessness and hunger. Through his words, we are taken on a no holds barred trip through the dark, cold streets. “If not for the rats you could crawl beneath a bush. A bush. A bench. A bridge. The alliterative universe. Rats too can pass through that needle's eye to enter heaven, as easily as they pass into a box imagined into a house. Houses inside buildings, houses inside tunnels, some exist for only a day, some, miraculously, longer. This box held a refrigerator, the refrigerator is in an apartment, a man is in the box. Tomorrow the box will be flattened and tossed, you've seen the garbagemen stomping them down to fit into the truck. Wake up on the grass, soaking wet. Dew is the piss of God. 'Another bullshit night in suck city,' my father mutters.”

Once his father starts showing up more regularly at the Pine Street Inn and causing the inevitable trouble that comes with the combination of vodka and ego, Nick switches to another shift, where he is driving the Inn's van around the city at night, handing out blankets and food and trying to coerce the stubborn to spend the night indoors. The view from here is even more sad. People are huddled inside of 24 hour ATMs, Dunkin' Donuts, anywhere unlocked in order to get warm. They tape garbage bags around their bodies to stay dry, lay on air vents to catch the warm current and stay until morning, sweating, uncomfortable, because if they move they will surely freeze to death. Nick learns their names, their stories. Many are normal people who simply caught a bad hand. Some carry around pieces of their old life with them, to remind them that they are still real people. One man drifts in and out of the shelter wearing extremely expensive shoes.

These people make up much of Nick's 'family'. But the other part of Nick's family, those to which he is blood related, complete the story. The tragic fate of Nick's mother makes up a large section of the book, but we don't see much of the relationship between his brother and himself. Nick has a ten year on-and-off relationship with a girl named Emily, one of the few who know his history. But the center of the story is, of course, Nick and Jonathan's relationship. There are no words to describe the interactions between the two. Nick himself cannot explain why he bothers with the man, who still shows no affection and only comes to him when he needs money or a place to stay. The only thing that Jonathan seems to have passed on genetically is chronic alcoholism; time after time Nick admits that he has no idea why he is interested in his father, why he has faith in him. But unlike his father, he has compassion, and does his best to help. “Here is a man, shaped like a blanket, shaped like a box, shaped like a bench. Easy to miss. If this is my father, if I leave a sandwich beside his sleeping body, does this become a family meal? Is this bench now our dinner table? Are we inside again? Is this what it means to be holding it together? Am I coping? How's my driving?”

The most difficult part of the book, for me, is Nick's lack of emotion. Here is a kid handed one of the biggest piece-of-crap lives I have ever seen, but he floats through it all, seemingly unscathed. His father swings a club with a nail sticking out of it inches from his face, and he barely bats an eyelash. We see some emotion towards Nick's mother after she passes, but this is a single ripple of feeling. Some may complain that this makes the book less personal and interesting, but I don't think that Nick purposefully kept his emotions from the reader. I think that he expressed them as best he could, and this is what lodges itself under my skin – there are people whose lives are so painful that they must shut off their ability to feel pain in order to survive. For some, stoicism is survival.

The book doesn't always move in chronological order, which can be confusing. The writing flicks casually to the past and the future. It seems to be written as more of a journal entry than a novel – casual and conversational, with swooping metaphors and intricate descriptions. You really feel as if you are in Nick's mind, he brings you so closely into his thought processes and feelings. But the lack of structure adds to the tumultuous and unpredictable mess of Nick's life. The story is inspiring, stoic, heartbreaking, wonderfully real. Here I will hand out my highest honor in terms of vernacular – both the writing and the plot are extremely refreshing. I was delighted and terrified within the same pages. I wish that we had gotten to know Nick's blood relatives a little better, as well as Emily, his long-term girlfriend. But these shadowy characters and plotlines only make those which receive the spotlight shine more beautifully – and harshly. This book reaches out and grabs you, like all the best do. It reminds me in some ways of Theresa Williams' The Secret of Hurricanes, with the lyrical writing and straight emotion. Both writers refuse to apologize for their stories, which is something that makes me fall in love with them both.

In the back of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, there are five completely blank pages. There are many different ways to consider these extra pages. An editing mistake. Something to make the book look longer, more full. A way of saying, “this story isn't finished.” An afterthought that never quite made it. I personally see this as a dedication from Nick to his father. Throughout the memoir, Jonathan Flynn is chasing after one single goal – to write. He calls himself a writer again and again, those who know him say that it is the only thread of self that he has. He clings to this word, writer, and it keeps him afloat through a sea of homelessness and alcoholism, of wasted time and missed opportunities. But each time Jonathan describes his book, the title changes. The number of chapters changes. The amount of cash the publishers are waving in his face wavers between two and four million. Nick believes that, just like the rest of the life that Jonathan claims, the novel doesn't exist – but then, suddenly, there it is. When it finally emerges, this 'great American classic' is anything but. And so, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City takes shape, in order to replace this masterpiece. He takes the burden from his father's shoulders to his own, and with it creates a truly beautiful work.

“For thirty pages or so 'The Button Man' shows promise – a hybrid of songs, letters, found documents and scrawlings smuggled out of a county jail, woven in with a tone and ideas sampled from 'Catcher in the Rye' – a meta text – but, like his life, it soon falls apart, dissipates into incoherence. What would I do if it was a masterpiece, an overlooked classic? What then? Would our blood be redeemed? Would time be made whole? Would I still have such ambivalence about calling myself a poet? Would I have more? Would I have some idea of what it means to be a father, would I still be terrified of becoming one? He cannot die, he tells me, until his work is complete. Perhaps I am digging his grave, perhaps the book you have in your hands is the coin for his eyes. Perhaps the story of his masterpiece is his life raft, what he's invented to keep himself afloat.”