Read Online The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead by David Shields - Free Book Online Page A

because of the deep human need to complain.” He’s always thrown a stone at every dog that bites, but in one story he sagely advises his friend, “You can’t throw a stone at every dog that bites.” My father, who is the only person in the world who may have a worse sense of direction than I do, writes about another friend, “Lou can go astray in a carport. He has the worst sense of direction of any male driver in the state of California.” Time after time he lets himself off way too easily. I used to want to urge him out of this macho pose until I realized that it’s a way to cheer himself up, to avoid telling mild good-bye and good-night stories, to convince himself and us he’s still a tough guy from Brooklyn not yet ready to die.
    Story after story is built on self-flattering lies: his children from his first marriage, from whom he’s estranged, didn’t attend his 95th birthday party, but now they do, bearing gifts. He’s been bald since he was 40, but now his “hair is” only “nearly gone.” My mother dies at 60 (instead of 51). Writing, for him, is a chance to gild the lily. My dad still reads voraciously and he dislikes easy sentiment in life and literature (he recently declared J. M. Coetzee’s brutal, astringent
Disgrace
the best novel he’s read in ten years), which is why his upbeat tone fascinates and baffles.
    His voice in these stories is that of a
macher,
when in reality he’s obsessed with his failures and as tough as nail polish; I want him to write about weakness, about his weaknesses, but instead he quotes, approvingly, a friend, who says about women, “Remember the four F’s: find ’em, feel ’em, fuck ’em, and forget ’em.” My dad, Sam Spade.
    He grew up poor with four brothers and two sisters (his mother died when he was 12 and one of his sisters died when he was 16), but nostalgia reigns: “Ah, them were the days, the good old days: the age of innocence, the summers of my vast content.” “I’ve never felt that ‘at home’ feeling about any other apartment I’ve lived in as I did about 489 New Jersey.” “Mrs. Mason was very supportive, hugging me to her bosom at times or drying my tears.”
    My father and mother divorced shortly before her death 30 years ago, and they had, by common consent, an extremely bad relationship. But it’s now a “solid-as-Gibraltar marriage.” My father, asking for time off from his boss, tells him, “I was faced with a palace revolution and the three revolutionaries at home were getting ready to depose the king.” The king he wasn’t. I want him to write about forever having to polish the queen’s crown according to her ever-changing and exacting specifications. I want to ask him: What did that feel like? I want to know: What is it like inside his skin? What is it like inside that bald, ill dome? Please, Dad, I want to say: only ground-level. No aerial views or airy glibness.

Hoop Dreams (iv and v)
    The junior varsity played immediately after the varsity. At the end of the third quarter of the varsity game, all of us on the JV, wearing our good sweaters, good shoes, and only ties, would leave the gym to go change for our game. I loved leaving right when the varsity game was getting interesting; I loved everyone seeing us as a group, me belonging to that group, and everyone wishing us luck; I loved being part of the crowd and breaking away from the crowd to go play. And then when I was playing, I knew the crowd was there, but they slid into the distance like the overhead lights.
    As a freshman I was the JV’s designated shooter, our gunner whenever we faced a zone. I’d make three or four in a row, force the other team out of its zone and then sit down. I wasn’t a creator. I couldn’t beat anyone off the dribble, but I could shoot. Give me a step, some space, and a screen—a lot to