Denis Johnson - "Already Dead"

Amazing writing. Not go to through quickly. Savour it.



"She was victorious," he said, "in trying to destroy me with lingerie."


One day he was driving on the coast, on those cliffs north of Jenner. Have you seen that place? Five or six hundred feet straight down, no shoulder-you'd have time to shit your pants and change into clean ones before you hit. He was driving along behind this black Corvette. Corvette downshifts, Corvette accelerates, Corvette sails half a thousand feet down to the Pacific Ocean. Right over the edge. Turned out the guy had just bought the car that morning, brand-new Corvette. Some jilted kid. The brake lights," he said, "never winked."
    His partner asked, "What year Corvette?"
    "A year that don't concern us," the first man said impatiently. "A year you probably never heard of."
    The chemistry between them was suddenly familiar to Van Ness. Their connection gave off a sour smoke, like bad wiring. He sensed they'd served time in prison together, or belowdecks.



Let me tell you about this girl. Her eyes are brown and wet. Her mouth twists from the effort of hiding her bad teeth when she smiles. But when she's drunk she laughs widely and her gold bridgework flashes. Bartenders like to lean forward to light her cigarettes and in the match-glow examine her as closely as a lover would. It's all exactly there. The punished child in the stolen makeup. Eyes that are never going to look at anyone again. And then she leans back, receding into that wonderful posture, her left hand in her lap. Sometimes she wilts, and sits hunched over a drunk drumming her fingers on the bar, and then she looks like a whore. She's capable of sneering. Awoman this vulnerable and perverse is usually taking time out from being tortured to death slowly by a mon who looks exactly like her father. Things come to me in images. I see the image of a man strangling an orchid. Oh, flowers!



    "Good night, I'm going to sleep in my clothes," she said, "and I hope I dream I'm not drunk," and didn't even kiss me.
    When she'd gone into the trailer, one of the rounded, aluminum ones, a Silver Stream, I laid my head, which was suddenly full of sorrows, against the steering wheel. The night wind stirred through the treetops on the ridges. The distant commotion got the sheep bleating - a word that just doesn't invoke the aged, human grief, in their voices. Across the drive the owner of this property - the Sheep Queen, a Mediterranean-looking woman in her fifties, a nice enough person but perfectly crazy - sat eating dinner in the kitchen of her ranch-style home, feeding bites from her plate to a big dog that loomed over her, standing up, as it were, with its forepaws on the table.
    It's sad to love a woman who won't love back - it tears at a man - to love a woman who gives herself to others and uses his good intentions and sets his meaning aside. But I have a feeling that this stupid torment is the nearest thing going, for me, to what life is all about. I don't just sense it dimly. The feeling is overpowering that this is the closest I can get to the truth behind the cloud.