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Time For Nap #99 I'm reading The Rum Diary by Hunter Thompson in which Kemp, his protagonist, fantasizes being interviewed by a reporter about why he, a young man ready to step out into the world, is fleeing his childhood home of St. Louis, packed bags at his feet and $300 in his pocket. "'Well fella, I wish I could help you. God knows I don't want you to go back without a story and get fired. I know how it is - I'm a journalist myself, you know - but...well...I get The Fear...can you use that? St. Louis Gives Young Men The Fear - not a bad headline, eh?'"
This is early Thompson, but "The Fear", yes, we know about "The Fear".
This is Puerto Rico of the 1950's. Why would anyone not want to leave Puerto Rico in the 1950's from the perspective of one who grew up with "two toilets and a football", a veritable participant in the American Dream itself as he continues: "This man Kemp is not a model youth. He grew up with two toilets and a football, but somewhere along the line he got warped. Now all he wants is Out, Flee. He doesn't give a good shit for St. Louis or his friends or his family or anything else...he just wants to find some place where he can breathe...is that good enough for you?"
The Fear. I've read Thompson, everybody's read Thompson, but
Seems a little extreme, don't you think: "The Fear", "The Horror". Death fed by boxcars and soldiers with metal prods would seem better subjects for these words, acts of gravitas and meaning. But that's not so. That's not so. I remember talking with Kelliher one day on the deck of my cousin's house on Bainbridge Island, his history, as mine, tangled in houses like this, neighborhoods like this and he saying he couldn't live here again, you know, it would kill him and without particular comment I nodded my head in agreement.
Except those days have pretty much worked themselves through. If the Fear
still exists today (and it does, I have no doubt), what of it? Most of the
I just never thought of it in those terms, that feeling when school was finished and all of the commitments had been met: that this strict uneasiness with the way things seemed to be going was really a compulsive fear and it wasn't even useful to think about adapting. Go out onto the edge, yes, but go way out on the edge and see what you can find out. No need to take the really stupid chances, but since you had to invent it from scratch, what else? So, I dawdle on. The Fear springs up one last little hiccup and generates a few lines while reading Thompson's book. The jaw one day more healed, thoughts of things that have gone before, things that may come. The weather is beautiful, the temperature fine and I think, now that all this is in the computer, it's time for nap #99. |
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Thompson's character Kemp has just read a story by his fellow reporter
at the Puerto Rico Daily News about why Puerto Ricans left Puerto
Rico and realized it was a piece on why anyone left anywhere with The
Fear in Their gullet.
I realized in some little chink not yet breached in my soul that it
was indeed The Fear that had driven me from my home in Seattle. Conrad
talked about The Heart of Darkness and used a river in Africa as
a metaphor for the soul, I suppose, reaching back up within to find
"The Horror! The Horror!".
options that drove me from my home are no longer evident: a suburban life
with a wife and family trapped like dogs unable to breathe in the heat of
the American Dream is no longer a question. Maybe it's time to ease up and
take a look around, see what wreckage still on the table might be used
to make something else.