Short Story Month - Guest Post - Andrew McCuaig

The following comes from Andrew McCuaig, an author that has won the 2006 Boulevard Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers, as well as the 2007 Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize from Hunger Mountain.

An appreciation of "Dirty Wedding":

Of all the great, original and crazy stories in Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, a book that has risen to cult status among writers, the one I keep returning to, reading aloud (to myself, my writer friends, and my students) is "Dirty Wedding."  It appears roughly halfway through Jesus' Son, right after the long and much-anthologized story "Emergency."  On its own, "Dirty Wedding" may seem just weird and plotless, but as part of the larger whole of the book, it illuminates and provides a link between one part of the nameless narrator's life (in rural Iowa) and the latter part of the book where he's out west in Seattle and Phoenix.  In "Dirty Wedding," the narrator is in Chicago and spends his days riding the train.  We learn his girlfriend is "with child."  Both of them are drug addicts.

 

The main event in the story is his girlfriend Michelle's abortion.  He accompanies her to the clinic, walking through a crowd of protesters, and waits across the hall while the abortion takes place.  He narrates the event with a combination of pain, anger and numbness.  When the nurse tells him "Michelle is comfortable now," he says "Is she dead?  I kind of wish she was."  When he sees Michelle he observes that she smells bad and he asks her, "What did they stick up you?" 

 

Writing this now, it may seem strange that I would like such a story so much, but I feel it's one of the saddest stories I've ever read, and perfectly captures the aimlessness and self-destructiveness of the addict.  The narrator is completely lost, and from where he's writing now, he seems to know it.  One of my favorite lines is when he leaves the clinic and gets doused with holy water from a protester:  "I didn't feel a thing.  Not for many years."

 

Structurally, the story is fascinating.  The story meanders between the present, past and future.  It's filled with little encounters and anecdotes:  He describes the girl on the train "all messed up on skag."  When he tells her, "I've never tasted black honey," she replies, "Black. I ain't black. I'm yellow."  He follows a man he thinks might be Jesus out of the El and into a laundromat.  The man confronts him and the narrator gets an erection.  He concludes, "I could have followed anybody off that train.  It would have been the same." In another fragmented scene, he ends up in the Savoy Hotel, a "bad place" where "beautiful women in the corners of my sight disappeared when I looked at them."  He appears to go upstairs with a whore ("I'll just take your money and go upstairs") but it's unclear exactly what happens because he's too wasted (either then or now) to tell us. 

 

But this altered perspective, this end-of-the-line desperation, creates some marvelously poetic moments:  "When I coughed I saw fireflies."  "The streetlamps and traffic lights had wire mesh screens over  them."  "And if the darkness just got darker?  And then you were dead?  What would you care?  How would you even know the difference?"  The story also includes perhaps my most favorite of all sentences (the first paragraph of the story), which is worth quoting in entirety:

 

 "I liked to sit up front and ride the fast ones all day long, I liked it when they brushed right up against the buildings north of the Loop and I especially liked it when the buildings dropped away into that bombed-out squalor a little farther north in which people (through windows you'd see a person in his dirty naked kitchen spooning soup toward his face, or twelve children on their bellies on the floor, watching television, but instantly they were gone, wiped away by a movie billboard of a woman winking and touching her upper lip deftly with her tongue, and she in turn erased by a--wham, the noise and dark dropped down around your head--tunnel) actually lived."

 

The main reason I keep coming back to "Dirty Wedding" is that I'm not sure what it's about.  It's not about a wedding, and what's "dirty" about it?  The marriage was "dirty," I suppose, but that's not the title.  Above all, maybe the story's a love story.  He claims that he and Michelle had their drama, but that he was the only one who could have loved her.  A few year's before, she shot at him twice in an argument, but missed.  "It wasn't my life she was after," he tells us. "It was more."  At the end of the story we learn that Michelle OD'd and the man she was with, a man named John Smith, was too drunk to save her life.  Perhaps the pain of that loss combined with the abortion in the story's earlier pages provided the need to tell the story.  I'm not sure the narrator even knows.

 

What Johnson does so brilliantly, and so seemingly effortlessly, is create a sympathetic asshole, a likeable son-of-a-bitch, all the while feeding us incredibly poetic and philosophical prose that makes your jaw drop.  The story's beautiful and dirty, painfully sad and somehow victorious at the same time; it's a tale told by a survivor.  By the end of "Dirty Wedding," we get the same feeling as at the end of another terrific story from Jesus' Son, "Out on Bail": 

"He simply went under.  He died. 

"I am still alive."

Comments

[david vonbehren]

no where in the same ballpark area code as "work" or "beverly home"...not even close....