Independence Day

The month began badly. On July 1st, I got a haircut. The woman who cuts my hair usually does a wonderful job, but at least once a year, usually in the summer, she cuts it short, bobs it horribly, and I am miserable. I know it is a vanity, but I am miserable now—no, more ashamed than miserable. How can a haircut shrink your shoulders and expand your gut and deepen the pores in your face? Yes, I am wretched.

I just finished the short story collection, Knockemstiff, by Donald Ray Pollock. If you are a reader and have not read this, then run—don’t walk—to your nearest bookstore. I have not read as good a collection since Rick Bass’s The Watch back when he could still write. I met Rick Bass at the Key West Writer’s Conference at the same time I met Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, et.al. I am not enamored with fame, but I do like talent, so when I was getting a poster of the conference signed by the authors for the college that had sent me, I thought I might say something nice to Bass. Everyone likes a compliment, I told myself, so when I got to him I ventured to tell him how much I had enjoyed the book. Bass is approximately the same age as I and of the same build, a medium sized man who had made himself bigger through effort. He did not respond to my compliment. He simply stared at me. I could feel some deep resistance there.

I saw him again a few years later at a college where I was teaching as an adjunct. He was reading from his works, but mostly he proselytized about saving a stretch of Montanna, the Yak Valley, where he had moved. After the reading, I sat at a table next to his wife and him. I was invited over but declined. I swear I could see some atavistic memory at work in his face. He was a smaller man by then, but so was I.



I am pulling for Pollock even though he has told some of the stories I had hoped to write some day with much less ability. He has done it so goddamned well it is terrible. I am going to start over and read the collection again.

Here is a passage I read last night sitting alone in the usual sushi place at an outdoor table as all the beautiful people paraded by:

“We were stopped at a red light right outside of Portsmouth when a silver Lexus pulled up beside us. Glancing over, I was startled by the bold, sparkling eyes of the most stunning woman I’d ever seen. She was checking us out, laughing into her cell phone. Every inch of her radiated money and happiness and fine genes. Though there had once been a time when I would have yelled over and asked her to fuck, now all I felt was shame that she’d had to look at me at all. My hair wa s uncombed and greasy, my teeth coated with yellow scum, my tatoos meaningless and outdated. I turned my head and waited for the light to change.”

I think I’ll go back to the woman who cut my hair as soon as this holiday is over. Maybe she can fix it.