A WRITER'S WIT
One night some short weeks ago, for the first time in her not always happy life, Marilyn Monroe's soul sat down alone to a quiet supper from which it did not rise.
Clifford Odets
Born July 18, 1906
Maybe Drugs Are the Answer
| July 21, 2014, Greg Jackson, “Wagner in the Desert”: Two couples visit the desert area of Palm Springs and do non-stop drugs before beginning their search for Wagner, a man who may or may not finance a film one of the men wants to make. ¶ This story is truly one of, for, and about people under thirty-five. The author’s extremely articulate and lyrical prose walks (or rolls) us in a trance-like way through their lives. He names every drug, every substance (including some scrumptious food) they consume on a New Year’s weekend several |  |
years earlier. How are they different from the last group of young uns to go through this? May be the sheer magnitude, the sheer panoply of drugs and substances that are so readily available to them and how they so easily ingest great amounts of these substances and still rise the next day to do anything more than pee! It’s a miracle!
“First we did molly, lay on the thick carpet touching it, ourselves, one another. We did edibles, bathed dumbly in the sun, took naps on suède couches. Later, we did blow off the keys to ecologically responsible cars. We powdered glass tables and bathroom fixtures. We ate mushrooms—ate and waited, ate and waited . . . we smoked cigarettes and joints, sucked on lozenges lacquered in hash oil. We tried one another’s benzos and antivirals, Restoril, Avodart, YAZ, and Dexedrine, looking for contraindications.”
And yet there may be a cynical self-awareness among these characters that the previous generation didn’t possess. When the narrator’s girl friend (though she clinically explains why they should not have sex) exclaims, high or mellow on mushrooms, “It’s like . . . it was all choreographed for me,” while viewing the hush of a desert sunset, the narrator replies, “‘But that’s what it is,’ I said, ‘That’s what being on drugs is.”
With the last sentence, you realize, perhaps, the entire story has been choreographed precisely so he can say that. And yet the story is plump with realizations—epiphanies, dare I say—that just might not have surfaced without the use of drugs. Either way, whether the writer himself is stoned while writing the story or not, he certainly makes one feel that he could be! It makes you wish your own life could be transformed so easily.
Jackson graduated from Harvard and UVA and is working on a collection of stories entitled Prodigals. He is, I believe, a writer to watch. Be sure and check out the magazine’s interview with him.
Grant Cornett, Photographer
NEXT TIME: (HOPEFULLY) MY BOOK WORLD
With the last sentence, you realize, perhaps, the entire story has been choreographed precisely so he can say that. And yet the story is plump with realizations—epiphanies, dare I say—that just might not have surfaced without the use of drugs. Either way, whether the writer himself is stoned while writing the story or not, he certainly makes one feel that he could be! It makes you wish your own life could be transformed so easily.
Jackson graduated from Harvard and UVA and is working on a collection of stories entitled Prodigals. He is, I believe, a writer to watch. Be sure and check out the magazine’s interview with him.
Grant Cornett, Photographer
NEXT TIME: (HOPEFULLY) MY BOOK WORLD
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