We’ve recently taken to sitting on
our stoop late in the night to talk things over with cups of coffee or whiskey
or cigarettes, depending on the evening’s content and our own general
dispositions.
People stare at us when we’re
sitting out there, Ryan thumbing through a book called Vibrations: A
Quantitative Analysis, Will with his pipe and smoking jacket, and me with
my uke and first three measures of Stairway.
We do it all by streetlight, as though that adds some authenticity to
whatever it is that you’d say it is that we do these nights.
“Aficionados,” Will says, looking
at the silhouette of a lumpy tree, “that’s what Hemingway was all about.” Will is an English major, writing his senior
thesis about the works of Ernest Hemingway. Despite what Ryan and I say, he always insists
that he’s never had that one thing that keeps him going. The characters in The Sun Also Rises, as it’s been
explained to me, are all expatriots after the First World War. Driven to Spain for lack of better things to
do, they cope with themselves through hard work, drinking, and an appreciation
for bullfights. They might not know anything else, but they find beauty in the
relationship between the bull and the matador, living, if for nothing else, for
the way they feel watching other people do their best. Will, has several bottles of fine
scotch in a cabinet in his room, a bullfighting tattoo on his shoulder, and is
full of stories about fortune and misfortune and interesting people along the
way, but for whatever reason, none of this seems to count towards aficionado
or a spectacular life in his mind. It
all simply resonates.
He explained to me tonight about
how, despite the thesis and the tattoo and the seemingly uncoincidental
following in the footsteps, he doesn’t think that Hemingway is the greatest
author. “I think the Great Gatsby is a
better novel than anything that he ever wrote.
But it’s not about one person being a better author, it’s about how
committed he was about just being a man.
It’s in all of his books. He was
obsessed – other authors’ works were just their art, Hemingway’s books were his
entire life. Other authors fall into two categories; people who write
about themselves and their experiences, and people who just make shit up. Hemingway did both and he did it backwards –
he would make up a story then try to live it. There’s something to be respected
about that.”
“At one point in
his life, he took to big-game fishing. He eventually found marlins to be too
boring and took to hunting U-Boats in the Caribbean
with his fishing boat because he was a crazy bastard doing what he didn’t know
and doing it the best he could.” When Will told me this story, his eyes were
glowing with the look of a man who someday, too, will wind up dead and slumped
on a typewriter ticking away under the weight of his body. It makes me smile to know that Will shall say
goodbye to the world with a final series of Ks and Ls and semicolons.
Will sits outside on the stoop all
the time - even during the day - with his pipe or a glass of something cool,
finding a spot in the sunlight for himself and his book. “Filling my body up
with that Vitamin D,” he says, “Fighting off that depression. Fighting off
those rickets. Getting a tan. Watching pretty
ladies.” It confuses us to think that
Will could ever be depressed by a lack of sunlight. While he does spend lots of time in the
depths of the unwindowed library, Ryan and I feel his demeanor a victim of
circumstance. Lots of circumstance and
lots of crazy women. But he rolls them off, getting back in the saddle and
carrying on. (For this, among other reasons, we frequently refer to Will’s
ex-girlfriends as “horse.”) According to
the poetry department, people are shaped by tragedy, anyhow.
He insists that his father thinks
of him a fuckup. This is because his
father reminds him of the fact whenever they talk. I insist that’s just a sign of affection, not
unlike the way that my own father calls me a fuckup, or the way that Ryan’s
parents refer to us as Ryan’s fuckup roommates. Ryan is an engineering student in the Airforce
ROTC program. According to the Airforce, there’s no room for fuckups in the
air. All of those rejects are
sent to the ground - to the trenches or the stoops along Washington Avenue. Ryan made us promise
freshman year to never let them know that the three of us sit and watch cars go
by together late at night. We think
there’s something in these relationships that would help indicate why we get
along so well. Freud would probably say that we all want to kill our fathers
and seduce our mothers, but we know that’s the not reason we want them
dead. And besides, we’ve never been keen
on psychiatrists or the deceased telling us our intentions.
Some nights I’m there alone or with
Ryan or Will and work on the introduction to Stairway to Heaven on my
ukulele. Some nights I must play it
forty times. Nate has a friend who’s
dating a guy who lives in the apartment next to us with a neighbor that sits outside and
plays the ukulele. Apparently it’s a bit
too much for him at three in the morning, but that’s when the mood strikes, so
that’s when I play. Ryan and Will don’t
seem to mind. When we talk about music
or writing or girls or anything else that we all care about, the word sisyphean
comes up. Different reasons for all
of us. We’re not trying to be the best
there ever was – we’d just like to do something that resonates with someone
somehow. Even if just among the three of
us. And even if we just have to keep
starting over, it’s worth it somehow.