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Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan
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been retrofitted to work with propane canisters that he salvaged from trailers. He had first-generation solar panels on the roof, a dirt-walled root cellar, a woodstove. He showered in a waterfall. We had many memorable hallucinogenic times that did not improve my grades.
Sanford needed very little money, but that he made doing therapeutic massage in town, and one of his clients was none other than Andrew Lytle, who drove himself in once a week, in his yacht-size chocolate Eldorado, sometimes in the right lane, sometimes the left, as he fancied. The cops all knew to follow him but would do so at a distance, purely to ensure he was safe. Often he arrived at Sanford’s studio hours early and anxiously waited in the car. He loved the feeling of human hands on his flesh, he said, and believed it was keeping him alive.
One day, during their session, Lytle mentioned that his current boy was about to be graduated. Sanford, who didn’t know yet how badly I’d blown it at the school, or that I was leaving, told Lytle about me and gave him some stories I’d written. Or poems? Doubtless dreadful stuff, but maybe it “showed promise.” Toward the end of summer airmail letters started to flash in under the door of our hilltop apartment in Cork, their envelopes, I remember, still faintly curled from having been rolled through the heavy typewriter. The first one was dated, “Now that I have come to live in the sense of eternity, I rarely know the correct date, and the weather informs me of the day’s advance, but I believe it is late August,” and went on to say, “I’m presuming you will live with me here.”
That’s how it happened, he just asked. Actually, he didn’t even ask. The fact that he was ignoring the proper channels eventually caused some awkwardness with the school. At the time, none of that mattered. I felt an exhilaration, the unsettling thrum of a great man’s regard, and somewhere behind that the distant onrushing of fame. His letters came once, then twice a week. They were brilliantly senile, moving in and out of coherence and between tenses, between centuries. Often his typos, his poor eyesight, would produce the finest sentences, as when he wrote the affectingly commaless “This is how I protest absolutely futilely.” He told me I was a writer but that I had no idea what I was doing. “This is where the older artist comes in.” He wrote about the Muse, how she tests us when we’re young. As our tone grew more intimate, his grew more urgent, too. I must come back soon. Who knew how much longer he’d live? “No man can forestall or evade what lies in wait.” There were things he wanted to pass on, things that had taken him, he said, “too long to learn.” Now he’d been surprised to discover a burst of intensity left. He said not to worry about the school. “College is perhaps not the best preparation for a writer.” I’d live in the basement, a guest. We’d see to our work.
It took me several months to make it back, and he grew annoyed. When I finally let myself in through the front door, he didn’t get up from his chair. His form sagged so exaggeratedly into the sofa, it was as if thieves had crept through and stolen his bones and left him there. He gestured at the smoky stone fireplace with its enormous black andirons and said, “Boy, I’m sorry the wood’s so poor. I had no idea I’d be alive in November.” He watched as though paralyzed while I worked at building the fire back up. He spoke only to critique my form. The heavier logs at the back, to project the heat. Not too much flame. “Young men always make that mistake.” He asked me to pour him some whiskey and announced flatly his intention to nap. He lay back and draped across his eyes the velvet bag the bottle had come tied in, and I sat across from him for half an hour, forty minutes. At first he talked in his sleep, then to me. The pivots of his turn to consciousness were undetectably slight, with frequent slippages.
Sanford needed very little money, but that he made doing therapeutic massage in town, and one of his clients was none other than Andrew Lytle, who drove himself in once a week, in his yacht-size chocolate Eldorado, sometimes in the right lane, sometimes the left, as he fancied. The cops all knew to follow him but would do so at a distance, purely to ensure he was safe. Often he arrived at Sanford’s studio hours early and anxiously waited in the car. He loved the feeling of human hands on his flesh, he said, and believed it was keeping him alive.
One day, during their session, Lytle mentioned that his current boy was about to be graduated. Sanford, who didn’t know yet how badly I’d blown it at the school, or that I was leaving, told Lytle about me and gave him some stories I’d written. Or poems? Doubtless dreadful stuff, but maybe it “showed promise.” Toward the end of summer airmail letters started to flash in under the door of our hilltop apartment in Cork, their envelopes, I remember, still faintly curled from having been rolled through the heavy typewriter. The first one was dated, “Now that I have come to live in the sense of eternity, I rarely know the correct date, and the weather informs me of the day’s advance, but I believe it is late August,” and went on to say, “I’m presuming you will live with me here.”
That’s how it happened, he just asked. Actually, he didn’t even ask. The fact that he was ignoring the proper channels eventually caused some awkwardness with the school. At the time, none of that mattered. I felt an exhilaration, the unsettling thrum of a great man’s regard, and somewhere behind that the distant onrushing of fame. His letters came once, then twice a week. They were brilliantly senile, moving in and out of coherence and between tenses, between centuries. Often his typos, his poor eyesight, would produce the finest sentences, as when he wrote the affectingly commaless “This is how I protest absolutely futilely.” He told me I was a writer but that I had no idea what I was doing. “This is where the older artist comes in.” He wrote about the Muse, how she tests us when we’re young. As our tone grew more intimate, his grew more urgent, too. I must come back soon. Who knew how much longer he’d live? “No man can forestall or evade what lies in wait.” There were things he wanted to pass on, things that had taken him, he said, “too long to learn.” Now he’d been surprised to discover a burst of intensity left. He said not to worry about the school. “College is perhaps not the best preparation for a writer.” I’d live in the basement, a guest. We’d see to our work.
It took me several months to make it back, and he grew annoyed. When I finally let myself in through the front door, he didn’t get up from his chair. His form sagged so exaggeratedly into the sofa, it was as if thieves had crept through and stolen his bones and left him there. He gestured at the smoky stone fireplace with its enormous black andirons and said, “Boy, I’m sorry the wood’s so poor. I had no idea I’d be alive in November.” He watched as though paralyzed while I worked at building the fire back up. He spoke only to critique my form. The heavier logs at the back, to project the heat. Not too much flame. “Young men always make that mistake.” He asked me to pour him some whiskey and announced flatly his intention to nap. He lay back and draped across his eyes the velvet bag the bottle had come tied in, and I sat across from him for half an hour, forty minutes. At first he talked in his sleep, then to me. The pivots of his turn to consciousness were undetectably slight, with frequent slippages.
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