Read Online Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn - Free Book Online Page A

on tables, and on the next page a village is on fire. Corpses next, pages of corpses, bodies along a dirt road, a face with no eyes. As the stories of what he’d done unreel from inside him, my brother stands up and walks into his room, back to his wall of science fiction. I look at the photos, at Travis, look in his eyes as he speaks, somehow I’d learned to do that, like a tree learns to swallow barbed wire.
    Years later, when I track him down, he shows me another photo, one I hadn’t seen or don’t remember—him on a dusty road outside Da Nang, a peace sign dangling from his neck. The reason he signed up for a second hitch, he tells me, was so that he could go into villages ahead of his unit, ostensibly to check for landmines and booby traps, but once there he’d warn the villagers to run, because if they didn’t he knew there was a good chance they’d be killed by his advancing soldiers. Then he’d set off a couple rounds of C-4, radio in that it was still hot, smoke a joint, watch the villagers flee.
     
    The night he showed us his photo album, after the house went quiet, I crept into the kitchen for a glass of water, the sink still full of sea clams, forgotten. Under the fluorescent hum they’d opened their shells and were waving their feet, each as thick and long as my forearm. A box of snakes, some draped onto the countertop, some trying to pull themselves out.

slow-motion car wreck
    (1972) Portsmouth, New Hampshire ( More bars per square inch than any city in America, my father will inform me later, and all the women like to drink and fuck ). My father’s crashing with friends, working occasionally as a longshoreman. “Longshoreman” sounds more romantic, more solid, than what he actually is. “Wharf-rat” is a better term. A photograph that appears in a local newspaper shows my father standing beside his friends Tommy (“Tommy the Terror”) and Scotty, dressed the part—black knit watchcap, black wool sweater with buttons along one shoulder, jeans. A pair of leather gloves in his back pocket, a steel hook with a perpendicular wooden handle. The costume to go with the job. The caption under the photo cites the three of them as local artists who work the docks. In Portsmouth he often uses the alias “Sheridan Snow,” perhaps to avoid my mother’s warrant. He has business cards printed up, which highlight his penchant for alliteration—

    This career involves salvaging a chunk of driftwood from the beach, putting legs on it and selling it as a side table. Many people in America invent careers like this in the early 1970s (What color is your parachute?). A few years earlier he’d stalk Beacon Hill in a flowing black cape, and then for a few years he wore one of those two-way Sherlock Holmes hats, to highlight his eccentric, poetic side. Later, when he robs banks, he will try to pass as a country gentleman, in town buying antiques. He will carry a Nikon camera around his neck, wear a tweed jacket ( I was always classically dressed, even in Levi’s ). As a longshoreman he shows up looking the part of an “old salt,” tells long-winded, mildly entertaining stories, but by all accounts a laggard, next to worthless once the boat docked. Years later I track Scotty down— Jonathan created blustery characters to protect himself from being hurt. He was a great absorber of others’ personalities. He would lift phrases and gestures from those around him, make them his own. He was like a jigsaw puzzle of different people .
     
    Portsmouth’s a small city. The dockworkers go to the galleries for free wine and to feel like artists. The gallery owners like to have them around, to add energy, wildness. They go out to the bars together afterward, end up in someone’s apartment, make a night of it. Scotty shows up late and Jonathan’s already made a scene, thrown up on someone’s shoes, passed out on the coat pile. After two drinks a cloud will come over him and he’ll be another person, not nearly as fun