One Life For So Long

I’m with John and so it’s necessarily interesting.  We’re in Ireland so it’s necessarily exotic and familiar in equal measure.  John’s left the Dakota and is on the run, in the west of Eire.  His tart Scouse, well rendered, thumb wrestles in bursts with his Oirish guide and the Oirish extras.  This for more than half the book, till the author appears and suddenly explains why it is he has John out at a freak hotel, ranting, being ranted at, en route to a deserted island.  He shows us a grainy photograph of this Amethyst hotel.  And then Kevin Barry, the author disappears again and John and Cornelius, the guide return.  I got this novel “Beatlebone” for Christmas.  It was sitting there, staring at me the last few months.  So, between books, I grabbed it.

It’s odd to have venerated this one life for so long.  The four of them are there in my consciousness from the beginning certainly but by the age of ten, my veneration began in earnest.  Even odder still is that with the exception of a ritual teenage purging in the name of punk purity, when I cast the Beatles as of-the-system for a few pivotal years; John Lennon has remained a painfully interesting person.  I’m nearly always ready to stop and consider him. When I was small, he was a very big man.  When I was in my twenties, I considered his remarkable twenty-something trajectory as a peer might.  And now, having outlived him by more than a decade I find it quaint that he felt old at thirty-eight.  Every year reinforces how much of life he missed when he was cut down there on the upper west side, minding his own business.  

Secular and skeptical, it’s all rather sensitive when someone presumes to fashion this sacred raw material into a piece of fiction.  The first hint of something off color and gratuitous and I’d have thrown the book down.  But I didn’t.   Apocryphal musings are sometimes more powerful than the real thing.  It is perhaps easier to consider Mr. Barry’s struggle to fashion this tale than it is to identify with any struggle of John’s, as his circumstances were always so uniquely exceptional.

Expense reports are also the real thing.  What a tedious affair.  I’d been paying my nephew to help me with them.  He’s otherwise occupied this spring.  If they’re going to get done, I’ve got to do them.  Squirt the glue out of the small tube.  We’re running out.  Spread it around the edge of the taxi receipt with your fingers.  Paste it on to the paper.  I’m back in arts and crafts class in summer camp.  This scan has come out unclear.  You can’t see the total amount.  Underline it and do it again.  Now attach this sheet to the email, which is getting rather laden with all these scans and enter items in the excel sheet, making sure to do so chronologically.

“I want money.  That’s what I want.”