Memorybook

We were pleased to discover a gorgeous Orange County story in a recent issue of the esteemed Mississippi Review. Happy and proud indeed to reprint "Memorybook" here by poet and short story writer Bryan D. Price for hometown readership.  --The Editors

I had been sad but who hasn’t. A therapist got me to keep a diary, and that changed things though. I was reluctant, but he told me to focus on violence. I thought he was joking, but he just raised his eyebrows as if he were daring me. The first thing I thought about was sex, being screwed around with by an old babysitter and her son. But nothing was coming in terms of words. There were just sensations, images of acne at close quarters, a hand over my mouth. It didn’t seem worth writing about. And then I remember how I stabbed a boy with a pencil once. When I was young. I’m not sure how young, maybe four or five. I remember the electromagnetic current that went through me as I put the pencil into his neck. We were on a bus or train. Going to Olvera Street I think, or maybe it was Dodger Stadium. After a few minutes of nothingness, I felt as if that too was a dead end. And then I started writing about Berkeley in the late nineties. I filled every square inch of one of those cheap composition books. I wrote words & phrases 2016 and beyond on the cover. I guess it’s the title, but it doesn’t capture all that’s inside. What’s inside are more like sentences, or actually long unbroken paragraphs with no punctuation. I switched between red and black ink so that I could tell when a thought or memory ends and a new one begins. I’ve moved on to another therapist now—her name is Kimberlee. I tend to like women in such settings better.

It would have made more sense to have called it memory book, or, perhaps in the German-language style, memorybook. The first thing I wrote about was Matt and Wendy. All three of us chose academic paths, but only one of us has been successful (not me). That summer we wrote poetry together. It was the last time I’ve ever let someone who wasn’t a stranger read my poems. In my mind at the time, or my memory of it, I felt like it was some kind of love triangle, but (to my knowledge) no one ever slept with anyone or even touched. Maybe it was something going on beneath the surface, desire works that way sometimes. I continue to enjoy the memory of such innocence though because of how fleeting chasteness is. Particularly as you grow older.

I realize now that this was like keeping a diary in reverse. I guess that’s what a memoir is. But I don’t think of this as that. Diaries seem to be heavier on certain types of details. Like dates. I don’t even know what summer that was—1996, ‘97, maybe even ‘98. I don’t remember the world intervening in my life then. Waco or the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. I was living in a kind of tomb of self-reflection, without context and in ignorance of the world and its history. I also wish I had written things down that may have provided me with at least a skeleton of my day-to- day existence then. Things like, woke up, ate a banana, cashed my paycheck, bought pants, went to the movies with Emily (The Shining). I remember living on McGee Avenue and when I had to move out, Hayden Gil moved into my room. The singer-songwriter. He was more of a shadowy figure then. There’s a lot on Gil in my memorybook. I marked time by his successes which always seemed to correspond with my failures. I’ve always kind of attached myself to him or the specter of him. I use that word because I never met him. I haven’t met billions of people, and I don’t call them specters. But I don’t think of those billions as I do Gil. I don’t see their faces or say their names in my dreams.

The first time I tried suicide was after watching him on Letterman. This is a true story. I remember feeling ashamed that he had been allowed to attain that level of fame. Not that the level was particularly high, but that it was perfect. When someone attains a level of fame that is too high, it means that whatever they do (or did) to attain it has become vulgarized by its popularity. It usually means that the thing that they do is less artistic or artistically less interesting because it’s more palatable and art is meant to be difficult. That the universe or God had bequeathed him (instead of me) with what I believed to be just the right amount of fame (and so young!) provided me with this deep well of shame. The kind of shame that you can actually see or feel clambering up your body from wherever crying comes from.

What put it over the top for me was how Dave seemed to have genuine affection for Gil and his music. This was toward the end of his run, 2012, and he usually didn’t take to musical guests he hadn’t heard of before, especially young males who always seemed like they wanted to impress him. There was a kind of lack of respect in the way he introduced these neophytes. Like how he’d say their names as if he was reading them for the very first time, mocking them with his ignorance. But not Gil. You could tell he was at least beguiled by him, maybe even a little taken aback by the timelessness of not only his voice, but his mien, like he’d just walked out of the past. He looked like a lot of people, but nobody in particular. He wasn’t too tall or awkward and he looked like he always smelled good, not like fear and paranoia. Under most circumstances he wouldn’t be considered particularly beautiful or handsome, but charisma and physical beauty often have nothing to do with each other. Something about the way Dave seemed to be fawning over him really put the knife into me. To endure the thought of him being allowed to exist in the world with that kind of charisma while I reeked of the sweat-odor of anxiety was pure agony.

The biggest source of my grief has been the realization that I have no organic talent. Nothing natural to cultivate. Some people are born with a kernel of something that they can polish through hard work and perfectionism. If I ever had a kernel of anything it seemed to be beyond repair. I can be frank about such things now. Just like I can watch the YouTube video of Gil on Letterman now without wanting to kill myself. Incidentally, Gil did succeed in killing himself. At least I choose to think so. He was living or staying with some friends in Bolinas and went swimming in the Pacific Ocean. A sport fishermen found his body some weeks later. As you might expect, I’ve read plenty about it. There’s a lot of sadness in it. Almost like when a president dies, but from that segment of society that cares more about poetry than politics. There is a fair amount of controversy over whether or not what he did constitutes suicide or not, but I feel like I have special insight, like we share something or inhabit some similar twin-like existence. There is a biography coming out soon by a professor of American Studies named Micah Lorenzen that I have read an excerpt of. It suggests there was a history of suicide in his family. His father’s sister committed suicide as did his maternal grandfather. Lorenzen also says that the name Gil is a fiction, and he was born with the surname Gilliland. There has been a lot of pushback. People, for one reason or another, can’t live with uncertainty.

There are words and phrases in this thing I’ve come to call my memorybook. Words like oubliette and almanac, young-earth creationists, and numinous. Words I didn’t know or just found myself attracted to, like apeshit. I wanted to be a writer, came back to the idea many times, but ended up studying to be a historian. An odd choice, I know. I’ve never been good at what we have come to typically call school, but I was drawn to the past and what I now know to be its representation—history. It probably had a lot to do with nostalgia, which usually involves being unsatisfied with something or other. It’s not that the past is better; we’re just alienated from it to such a degree that it seems possible that we could have been happier there. When you become acquainted with the idea of history as a profession, you realize that it’s just a kind of narration, which is to say shaped or sculpted. I guess the word is mediated. The past though is just out there floating like a satellite in space, never to be seen again.

Of course, I didn’t know any of that yet and ran around like someone who thought that history and the past were one in the same—reflections of each other. Matt had introduced me to Lorca’s poetry and for some reason that made me want to know everything there was to know about the Spanish Civil War, which became the object of my study. In my memorybook I keep using the word green to describe myself: “too green to have heard of fucking Lorca!” That sort of thing. I became obsessed with the idea though of being tortured, murdered, your bones hidden from your loved ones for decades, perhaps even centuries. There was a heaviness to that history that appealed to something dark inside me. It came first as poetry then as a series of terrifying histories: rightwing coups in Latin America, and then going back further into the past, the Dreyfus Affair, Charles Maurras and Action Francaise, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Oswald Mosely, Pétain, Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, the Holocaust, Kissinger, and the Caravan of Death. I guess the whole point of innocence is thinking evil is irregular or even singular, not everywhere and unstinting, always in the background like the hum of a machine that runs forever. Of course, I’m not a sicko, I was attracted ideologically to the opposite of fascism, to the Republican cause, the romance of it in terms of good over evil. Now I’m very skeptical of anyone who speaks in terms of good and evil. Almost no one wants to think of themselves as evil, but evil chooses us, and we make the decision to accept it based on some other need or value or obligation. I’ve come to choose happiness over morality. Not in a nihilist way, but I think something’s wrong with you if whatever your morality is makes you happy. Those are separate categories.

I did get into a middling PhD program and then eventually went to Madrid to do research. That’s where I met Laura. My wondrous, beautiful Laura. Laura with curly red hair and the most exacting, tiny freckles. Laura was like a dream sometimes and sometimes she was like looking into the sun. I met her at the Biblioteca Nacional where she was working on a translation (from German to Spanish) of Adorno’s Minima Moralia. I remember she looked a little like a boy from behind. I think it was the slight melancholy hunch in her slender shoulders that reminded me of photographs I have seen of myself when I was a boy. She was wearing a Germs t-shirt worn to threads at the armpits. The first thing she said to me (in English) was that my Spanish was offensive to her. She was very rigorous about language. About a great many things in fact. Unfortunately, Laura was crazy—crazier than me. I don’t know if that’s the best word to use but our relationship was volatile, and I tend to think that most of its volatility could be sourced to her. She was cryptic but ultimately furtive about her past and I could never penetrate to the origin of what I thought to be her madness. At first I liked it. It gave me something with high stakes to focus on. There’s something about that level of intimacy coupled with a similar level of intensity that makes love less like love and more like life and death. I wanted to marry her or thought it might be possible. I’m the kind of person who imagines marrying every person that’s willing to go to bed with them.

I did want to stay in Madrid with Laura. Life seemed more important there than in America. Some of it had to do with the research I was doing, but a lot of it had to do with Laura and the abuse and condemnation I suffered at her hands. To be shit on and then loved, treated rough but with an underlying tenderness. Love and fear went hand in hand with her. Another beautiful thing about my time in Madrid was that I rarely thought of Gil. I felt as if I was becoming something with more purpose than what he was: just a singer. I used to think of the life of an intellectual as analogous to the life of an artist. All of us familiar with academic writing know that it aspires to be something other than it is. It wants the thing it cannot have. Nietzsche was a poet, that sort of thing, and I wanted to be something akin to that. Of course, that was all a fantasy. Everything good in my life at that point was rooted in fantasy, a fundamental untruth about who I really was. I wasn’t even that good of a scholar. I passed my exams, but I never completed my dissertation. That is a great regret of mine. I don’t know how much to blame Laura for all of that. I probably should take the brunt of the responsibility. But I did shift my intellectual priorities under her tutelage, so to speak. Namely, I stopped studying fascism and the Spanish Civil War. Laura liked to humiliate me, particularly around other people. And one of her favored ways was by mocking my interest as an American in European fascism and the Spanish Civil War. She’d say stuff like here comes the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and everyone would laugh at me.

It was because of this, and my infatuation with Laura, that I got caught up with certain themes associated with the Frankfurt School. Namely, the idea that capitalism is as unfree as communism and fascism, its own form of totalitarianism, to be reductive about it. Around this time, I began to work on little stories, fables or fragments inspired by Kafka and Brecht. Stories with titles like “The Broom” or “The Knife” or “Iron Filings.” They were meant to be anti-capitalist in a self-consciously didactic sort of way. We even went, me and Laura, to a kind of summer program in America on critical theory. It was at Cornell. I don’t have any fond memories of those six weeks. It was hot and humid. The university is high up on a hill and the town with its bars and restaurants are down below, so if you don’t have a car you have to sweat up and down the hill. On the last night, I got drawn into a fistfight because of Laura. To my surprise it was that kind of town.

When we returned to Europe, instead of going to Madrid we went to live in Porto for the rest of the summer. She knew a couple who’d be gone and needed someone to housesit. My memories of Porto as a city are very pleasant. Everything was cheap and plentiful, and it was rundown in just such a way that matched my personality, but I had to get away from Laura. She was going further and further off the deep end, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I remember one miserably hot day by the river, which was swarmed with tourists. I was walking by myself and I saw two undesirable looking white roses lying on an electrical transformer box. They looked natural, not purchased from a florist, but like they’d been torn from someone’s garden, the leaves were still attached, but their petals were turning yellow like old teeth. I know it sounds like the most ridiculous thing to say but in that moment I knew I had to go home, give up on whatever it was that I was doing or trying to do. I picked them up and wanted to give them to Laura but thought better of it and just threw them in the gutter. The last words she said to me were, I fucking hate you and I hope your plane crashes. She said them in English. The things I have written about Laura in my memorybook are mostly negative, but my memory of our love is still strong. I think sometimes that I may have exaggerated her idiosyncrasies. On more than one occasion I have been told that I am the type of person who likes to be the victim. I’m not sure that’s true, but I suppose it’s a fair critique. There are times though when the weather is a certain kind of cool grey, like rain is coming but it’s still dry and liable to stay that way, that I think about calling her to reminisce, but it never seems quite like the right thing to do.

When I came back, I had to move in with my mother. She lived in a condominium in Fountain Valley, which isn’t far from Huntington Beach. The beating heart of Orange County, California. A far cry from Europe. She was dying of cancer, my mother, and it was there where I watched Gil on Letterman. It was where I tried to kill myself. It wasn’t all about Gil, there was a lot of stuff going on with me, like a persistent sense of worry and dread that self-loathing was only a fraction of. For one thing I had a pretty heavy student loan debt and not much to show for it. I was spending a lot of my time at thrift stores compulsively buying things that I didn’t need but found aesthetically interesting. Blankets, I bought a lot of blankets, and fabric for whatever reason, especially if it was wool. Pyrex bowls, even if they were only clear glass. Cast iron cookware too. And a lot of books. One day I found this book of short stories edited by Clifton Fadiman called The World of the Short Story. It was funny, I don’t think I finished a single story in there. But I was drawn to the titles and Fadiman’s little introductions to the writers. I think I would have been good at writing parodies of those, but the idea didn’t really occur to me at the time. I decided I wanted to be a short-story writer though. Something about it seemed plausible. Unlike all the other things I failed at. I was wrong, of course, but I did get one published. It was published in Ibex: A Journal of Short and Experimental Prose. The story was loosely based on me and Laura, on our sex life, which was adventurous—at least for me. It was obviously different from those anti-capitalist fables, but I couldn’t place another one and thought long and hard about writing erotica, as a way of making money, but my heart wasn’t in it. I could think about sex all day long, but I wasn’t comfortable writing about it. Or reading about it for that matter. I still thought of myself as an intellectual or an artist of some kind. Or some mix of the two. That still had to get beaten out of me.

These were the dark times. My mother finally died, and I developed a few addictions that I refused to see as addictions or even habits. It was like going down a flight of stairs and then another and then another. Each descent seemed natural, but the rooms kept getting more and more squalid. There is a strange point in a certain kind of person’s life when they realize that their suffering doesn’t matter to anyone except themself. That feeling of true and complete loneliness turned me into a different person, a person who wanted to turn everything off. Turn off wanting and desiring, turn off forgetting and remembering, turn off seeing and being. I would constantly think of a gray or black pool of water like a lake or river that I could float on forever. At first there were mountains to my right and left, gray-brown ones that didn’t look like real mountains but like someone had painted them into the sky, which was almost as black as the water. And there was a rower. Sometimes it was my mother or father, sometimes it was my cousin who got into my uncle’s amphetamines and overdosed when we were seven. Sometimes it was even Gil after I knew he was dead. But then in my fantasy, the mountains disappeared and then so did the rower. I didn’t need them anymore.

My sister Liz eventually took me in. She lived in Santa Ana, and it was there that I started to run. I never was much for any kind of physical labor or exercise, but the therapist—the one who told me to write about my experiences of violence—suggested I develop some physical fitness regimen. He surfed. I couldn’t think of anything more comedic than me trying to get my dilapidated body upright on a surfboard, in the water, so after a lot of false starts I started to run. Eventually I would run at night. Every night. In Liz’s neighborhood where we lived there was a Presbyterian Church that held meetings. For one reason or another the meeting I went to was in Huntington Beach. Out of habit I guess. One night though, I saw a woman in cool men’s penny loafers and a sack dress going to the meeting at the Presbyterian church and immediately switched to that meeting. We walked around the neighborhood after the meetings and talked. Not about anything recovery related. It was all just—I don’t know—real and unreal at the same time. We just talked around the fact that we were obviously in love. Bullshitting, I think it’s called. Not lying but not thinking about what’s true and what’s not.

We’re married now. Her name is Jessica, and she doesn’t like the idea that she saved me. It makes her uncomfortable and perhaps she’s right and she didn’t save me, but she helped me to sort a lot of my issues out. Not just mental or emotional, but financial as well. Plus, her father runs a successful framing business in Westminster called Isaiah and Sons. The sons are, of course, her brothers. And now, me, I guess. I started working there almost immediately after meeting her. I hadn’t had a paying job since I worked at a Cybelle’s pizza in 2002. She worked off and on at the framing shop, but when I started she stopped altogether and I did what she had been doing— what her father and brothers called, without a hint of irony, bitch work. They are not enlightened men. It gave her the opportunity to focus on her calling, personal training. She meets clients in the park and puts them through their paces, usually women in their sixties and seventies. Sometimes I go with her, and she puts me through my paces.

Two summers ago, her father, my father-in-law, loaned us the money to buy a decommissioned ambulance that we outfitted with everything I needed to run a mobile framing business. He didn’t think it would work, but I’m pretty busy and he’s warmed up to me because the one thing he respects above all else is the entrepreneurial spirit. I have come to enjoy and even admire something about the framing business. At first I didn’t think much of it. They could have been plumbers or the people who show up at your house after a fire or flood or one of the countless other family businesses that exist in Southern California. But, over time, I learned to understand how business works, how relationships are established, how to talk to customers, and know when to hard sell or soft sell them, how to earn their trust and then go in for the kill. But I also learned how to see things we value as a society, at least that part of society that can afford to have things professionally framed.

In the beginning I thought that about ninety-nine percent of the things we framed were absolute shit. So much so that the best things we framed might be a Nagel print of a naked woman in silhouette or a Frank Kozick poster. After a little time though, I’d see extraordinary things. Once, a guy said that when he was living in Pittsburgh, he noticed all the student art at Carnegie Mellon got junked at the end of the semester and then he showed me this collage he found that he wanted framed. It was on cream colored graph paper with light blue lines and there were elk antlers mounted on Chuck Berry who was playing a guitar, but instead of a guitar it was Perseus with the Head of Medusa. The images had been printed on pink and greenish-gray paper. It was very expertly done in terms of scale and there were numbers along the side and letters across the top. I offered to buy it from him, but he refused. Another time, a woman had produced her own art that she wanted me to frame. It was a fading red grid on watercolor paper. And within each square of the grid, she had stamped an image, using the flat edge of the same rock. The color just slightly different in each one, going almost imperceptibly from a kind of light-black or dark-gray to gray to blue-gray. There was something about these experiences that made me think that there were amazing things in this world that we will most likely never find or see or scrutinize or be able to enjoy. I’ve come to take great pride in what I do. At another time in my life, I would have tried to be the artist or copy the artist. Now though, I am happy to have become the helpmeet. Perhaps it will change and my ambitions will return for something other than this, but a part of me hopes that won’t be the case.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t have some regrets. Like how embarrassing it is that the entrepreneurial spirit has come to infect my life. Plus, you come to realize that people who succeed in business, particularly a family business, tend to be conservative, which is to say, a bit hard-hearted. Jessica’s politics and mine are somewhat aligned, but her father and her brothers are quite the opposite. They’re ideologically muddled, but most certainly, rightwing. I don’t think my father-in-law knows a single thing about the Spanish Civil War, but I have no doubt that if he did, he’d be for Franco’s side. And if he had come to be born and live there today, he’d be the kind of person who would go to the Valley of the Fallen to visit Franco’s grave. Which reminds me. One of the first things me and Jessica did for a date, though I use that term loosely, is go to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to see Hayden Gil’s gravestone, which is just a flat granite slab in the grass. I told her the story of Gil moving into that room on McGee Avenue when I moved out and all about me trying to measure myself against him, but she had never heard of him. Her taste in music tended more toward eighties and nineties dance music. We left two carnations for him that day.

Bryan D. Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023) His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Santa Monica Review, Noon Annual, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Glacier, Boulevard, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California.