The Best American Essays 2013 (3 page)

This is what makes them so damn fun to read. Their vibrancy and intimacy, their mystery and nerve, their relentlessly searching quality is simultaneously like a punch in the nose and a kiss on the lips. A
pow
and a
wow
. An
ouch
and a
yes
. A stop and a go.

Or at least the essays I love most are like that. And that’s what this collection is—the twenty-six essays among the hundred and some listed at the back of this book (many of which I also loved) that made me feel, for the brief time I spent reading them, as if the rest of the world had fallen away. The essay might be about a man’s relationship to Mormonism or a woman’s search for a serial killer she may or may not have encountered decades ago. It might be about the way one hears the music of Joni Mitchell differently over time or endures the death of a child or triages injured soldiers or survives five months at sea or gives birth to a daughter. It matters not. Though they display a range of styles and cover a diversity of subjects, the essays I deemed “best” this year share a powerful drive toward emotional and intellectual inquiry that deepens into a dazzling unfolding. Each of these essays left me saying
Ah
at the end, with joy or sorrow or recognition, with delight or dread or awe or all of those things mixed together. As if nothing would ever be the same again.

C
HERYL
S
TRAYED

POE BALLANTINE

FROM
The Sun

O
N MONDAY MORNINGS
I modeled for the painters at an old cannery converted into art studios in Eureka, California. Laughable as it was for a thirty-two-year-old man to strike nude poses on a wooden platform, I preferred it to what I usually did for a living: short-order cooking or unloading trucks. I stood up there on this particular Monday in 1987 trying not to move for two hours, suffering muscle cramps and loss of circulation, and, as always, faintly worried about getting an erection but somehow even more uneasy about the possibility of strangers seeing me through the windows—as if a roomful of strangers weren’t ogling me already. Meanwhile down the hall my painter friend Jim Dalgee raved so violently that one of the artists suggested calling the police.

After I dressed and picked up my $60, I went down the hall and knocked on Jim’s door. The ranting stopped for a moment, and there was a clatter, followed by the door jerking open and Jim sticking his head out. He did not let many people into his studio, but he liked me because we had both wasted our youth, had gotten off to terribly late starts, held similarly outdated and sentimental views on art, and showed no signs of ever becoming successful. A short man in his late forties with a brushed-up shock of black hair like the crest of a blue jay, Jim wore his standard paint-spattered work shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes. The room behind him was full of dense blue cigarette smoke that curled in the sunlight from the southern windows. He smelled strongly of turpentine and beer.

“Jim,” I said, “we could hear you shouting all the way down the hall.”

“Was I shouting?”

“Yes. At the top of your lungs.”

“Come in, man. I’ve got coffee.”

Jim’s eight-by-ten, brick-walled studio was furnished with a small fridge and a card table with a coffeepot and a boom box on it. Nine years earlier he had fled his previous life as an L.A. salesman and migrated six hundred miles north to Eureka to start over as a painter at the age of thirty-eight. Stacked against and hanging from every wall were hundreds of his acrylic paintings, all of which he refused to sell or show. Jim’s style was postimpressionism: Matisse, Pissarro, Cézanne. He admired foremost those who had started late, such as the stockbroker-salesman Paul Gauguin and the wretched lunatic Vincent van Gogh. Though I was not qualified to judge Jim’s work, I would’ve liked to own his
Black Cattle Against Orange Moon at Dusk
or
Portrait of Camille Benoit Desmoulin’s Head in a Basket
.

Though I had quit drinking and doing drugs the year before, I allowed myself the occasional consolation of a few cigarettes with Jim in his studio. I also planned one day to write a story about a fictional Jim jumping from the window to his posthumous fame. I poured myself a cup of coffee while he raged at the people on the street below, calling them “philistines” and “slobs.” It was unusual to find him in such a state so early.

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

“The sleepwalkers!” he bellowed like an animal in pain.

“They’re going to call the police,” I said.

“They’ll only be doing me a
favor!
” he shouted, sweeping his arm across the room, as if to indicate all the canvases he’d stretched that morning, the color-blobbed cardboard boxes he used for palettes, and the rows upon rows of acrylic paints in plastic squeeze bottles along the floor.

There was no point in talking to him when he was this far gone. The shouting would soon run its course and be replaced by a desperate apprehension that he didn’t have long to live. I drank some coffee, shook a cigarette from Jim’s pack, and fell into one of two yellow velveteen swivel chairs, a smoldering pedestal ashtray between them, like a giant clam with indigestion.

“I’m going to buy an albacore today,” I said, applying a flame to the tip of my cigarette.

“The sycophants!” he snarled and then whirled from the window. “A what?”

“An albacore tuna, down on the docks. They’re only a buck a pound. Do you want one?”

“No, nah.” He waved in disdain and began to hunt for the cigarette he had just lit, his brow furrowed. “We need to get some more cigarettes.”

Around one that afternoon Tarn McVie rapped lightly on Jim’s door and stepped into the room. In his mid-twenties, Tarn already had paintings in galleries across the country and routinely sold single works for sums that could’ve sustained me for an entire year. His gigantic oil canvases awed me, and one sticks in my mind to this day: an orange nude coming at you through the water, flash of white at the knee. In spite of his conventional training, European-museum background, postmodern leanings, and early success without apparent struggle, McVie was the sort of natural, congenial artist that Jim and I both longed to be. He was also one of the few painters who refused to sign the petition presently going around to remove Jim from the building.

“Hello, men,” he said. “Hear the news?”

“What news?” Jim said, teeth clamped down on his cigarette, another burning in the colossal ashtray between us.

“Market crashed.”

“What market?” I asked.

“Stock market. Dow Jones fell over five hundred points,” he said. “Highest point drop in history. There’s nothing on TV except talk about it. You can’t even watch
General Hospital
. Everyone says we’re headed for the next Great Depression.” His eyes sparkled as if we were all about to go on a field trip to paint tulips and the bus were waiting downstairs. “They’re already calling it ‘Black Monday.’”

I had never paid much attention to the Ferris-wheel vicissitudes of the New York Stock Exchange, but when $500 billion in stock value simply evaporates, when nearly 25 percent of the market ceases to exist, when the president of the United States preempts soap operas and game shows to urge everyone not to panic and numerous respected experts explain that the country has seen no comparable financial event since 1929, even the poor take heed. I had also been observing the wastrel, arrogant, and bellicose habits of my country for years, and my sensitive, aesthetic side tended toward portent and hyperbole. So I trusted the news media’s Henny Penny proclamations that our Day of Reckoning had finally come.

Heading down the alley away from the artists’ studios an hour later, I thought I would remember forever this day of ruin, October 19, 1987, the same way I remembered the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A man in a white shirt and blue tie staggered toward me with a dazed expression, and from the sky above I expected to see falling stockbrokers. I pictured myself on a freight train full of hobos. From every corner came the dire chatter of radios and TVs. Like all the gloomy broadcasters, I was convinced that the next Great Depression was upon us.

The fishing boats were in from their morning runs, and it now seemed imperative that I buy that albacore. Food would soon be in short supply, and there would be mobs in the streets, breaking windows and overturning cars.

The rheumy-eyed fisherman shrugged when I told him the news. “They can’t break you if you’re already broke,” he said.

My fish, cleaned and bled, weighed fourteen pounds, and because albacore spoils rapidly, it was frozen as hard as a chunk of iron. Incongruous as it might seem to walk away from a fishing boat with a frozen fish, you couldn’t beat the price, and albacore were much easier to cut into steaks this way. I carried it by the tail with a newspaper so it didn’t freeze my hand.

I lived downtown in an apartment complex that, for its Second Empire façade, transient tenantry, and despotic manager, I had dubbed the Totalitarian Hotel. The manager, Mrs. Vollstanger, was a gouty old Prussian and always wore pearls and thick, embroidered white sweaters. She met me at the top of the grand staircase, arms folded, chin trembling, and glowered down at my fish.

“It’s an albacore,” I explained.

“Yes,” she said. “I saw you coming.” Mrs. Vollstanger had a telescope in the window of her third-floor apartment and kept track of all the goings-on below. “I have an eviction notice for you to serve.”

I considered asking if she was aware of the stock market plunge but thought better of it, since bad news seemed only to cheer her. “Who’s it for?”

“Hot Pants,” she said, meaning my common-wall neighbor, a young woman named Annabelle Taft.

It didn’t take Mrs. Vollstanger long to find derogatory nicknames for all her tenants. There was Moon Child and Clydesdale Maria and Porky Pete. I suppose behind my back I was Machine-Gun Typist.

“Annabelle?” I said. “Why?”

“I’m not running a brothel here,” she retorted, one of her fondest declarations, along with “I’m not running a crack house/animal shelter/home for unwed mothers here.”

“Just let me get this fish in the freezer, and I’ll be right up,” I said, resisting the urge to salute. “Would you like a couple of tuna steaks?”

“No, thank you,” she said.

My apartment was a single room with a set of high, arched, greenish windows, an electric stove, a fridge, a sink, and a very long entryway. Sometimes when someone knocked it took me so long to get to the door that my caller would be gone by the time I arrived. My place was full of moths, whose origin I could not determine. They were the small, rolled-up type, like pencil shavings. I had liked them at first for their silence and the intricate designs on their delicate wings, but now, with their growing numbers and regular obtrusion into my books, blankets, and bathtub, I considered them a nuisance.

My room was sparsely furnished with items left by the previous tenants, who had vacated abruptly. There was a vinyl-covered recliner and a dining room table, upon which sat my typewriter, and two chairs that went with the table. There was a television on a stand that I did not often use since it received only two channels, though occasionally I watched
I Love Lucy
—a program I had disliked as a child for all its yelling—and a PBS show hosted by theological psychologist John Bradshaw, who asserted that all my addiction problems could be traced back to my “wounded inner child.” (Maybe I was hurt by early exposure to episodes of
I Love Lucy
.)

There were four boxes of
Paris Review
s that Jim had lent me, which I studied at night, especially the interviews with famous authors. Throughout the building the floors were covered with cheap carpet that with all its gold, green, and red filigree might’ve been called “gala,” but it was so thin that it wrinkled, and there was no padding underneath, so that if you didn’t have a mattress—I didn’t—you had to build up a nest of blankets on the floor. The heat was regulated by Mrs. Vollstanger, so it was always cold, and it was best not to sleep by the windows, which had bubbles trapped in their glass and made me feel as if I were a specimen in some intergalactic aquarium.

I set my fish across the sink and promptly began to divide it into two-inch crosscut planks with a handsaw I used only for this purpose. While I worked, I thought about the coming of the next Great Depression and wondered how America would fall apart: Slowly or quickly? From the coasts inward or the middle out? With great fanfare or in a puff of smoke? And in which direction would everyone run this time? I also wondered if it had been wise to quit my job and sell my car.

Sawing up a frozen albacore is not much different from sawing up a green tree trunk. I got about twelve steaks, which I wrapped and stacked in the freezer beside all the wild game that Mrs. Vollstanger had cleaned out of her recently deceased husband’s stand-up freezer and donated to me. A big-game hunter, he had labeled all his Cryovacked packages in permanent black marker:
ELK, ELEPHANT, BLACK BEAR, ZEBRA, GAZELLE
. So far I had been reluctant to try any of it for fear that Mrs. Vollstanger had actually killed, dressed, and Cryovacked her husband.

I also had a twenty-five-pound bag of pink beans, a twenty-five-pound bag of black-eyed peas, a twenty-five-pound bag of brown rice, ten pounds of white flour, four pounds of oats, and two pounds of buckwheat—a proper head start, I thought, on the anarchy and economic despair to come.

The door to Mrs. Vollstanger’s apartment was open, and before I could knock, she invited me in. Mrs. Vollstanger had a big, well-lit, orderly apartment on the southwest corner, with a panoramic view of the bay and the Samoa pulp mill. You could predict with fair accuracy what the weather would be like by which way the smoke blew from the mill. Usually it was blowing in from the ocean, which meant fog and rain, but today the smoke flowed north, indicating fair weather.

“You’ve heard that the market slipped?” she said, handing me the envelope with the eviction notice for Annabelle Taft inside.