Terminal Jive
by James Hippie
Genre: Literary & General Fiction / Short Story Collections
ISBN: 9798852921352
Print Length: 109 pages
Reviewed by Warren Maxwell
A gritty collection that casts its net over the downtrodden, addled, and alcohol-infused world of masculinity
“Caroline says my tattoos disgust her. It’s possible she used the word loathsome,’ but that may have been a different conversation about my smoking habit. Caroline regularly describes my appearance and behavior as grotesque, hideous, thuggish, unrefined, brutish, and typically American.”
Filled with the humor and anti-romanticism of hard luck, hard living men, these fictions pickup the residue of Bukowski’s legacy and play dice with it. So sharp and boiled down that some don’t even last a page, the nineteen stories in this collection tumble by with a flow and charm that is hard to resist.
Even as characters wave their hands futilely at the sun or get drunk on the job and fantasize about disappearing in the dust of a collapsing hotel, an enormous vitality and zest creeps into the decidedly dark material.
Of course, there are exceptions to this rule—some of the pieces peer into an ever blacker hole and never find their way out—as in the title story in which a man reflects on his memories of being happy (there are only two and even these are a little fuzzy) as he approaches what seems to be an inevitable suicide. These and other pieces break with what the narrator of “Caroline Says” (the collection wears its inspirations on its sleeve, frequently references them) calls the most “disgusting thing to me…the romanticized view of madness.” Throughout these pages, there’s a raw tension between sarcasm and self-depreciation and abject wallowing, but more often than not the stories land on a beautifully unexpected side of the equation that encompasses love, if not optimism, as well.
“Somewhere at home there was a box of notebooks, unfinished stories, outlines, drunken scrawls, polaroid photos taken in bars I couldn’t remember being in. Looking at it now there are no regrets, and I’m glad I never attempted to publish anything then.”
The character who narrates “Caroline Says” is a heavily tattooed thirty-five year old living with his parents in California when he stumbles, through quasi-online dating, into a job driving Caroline’s van up and down the east coast as she makes a performance out of attending jewelry fairs and mostly not selling her wares. He hunts down William T. Vollmann books in local libraries while disparaging his own intelligence and mocking the pretensions of Caroline (she loves Milan Kundera!). Yet somehow, in the midst of these contradictions, with pretension flying thickly on both sides, the narrator emerges with a sense of chivalry and nobility far removed from the tattered appearance he puts on. Caroline sees it, we see it, and to a certain extent, he sees it as well. This is the odd beauty of the collection’s best pieces. Not only is there a roughed up sense of compassion lingering at the story’s edge, the fatalistic, recalcitrant narrators manage to quell their nervous energy long enough to catch glimpses of themselves and see more than they expect to. They hold out for the possibility of change and renewal.
“Poetry Man” retells how the narrator met up with a distant friend from community college who has begun to make it as a poet. Writing and failing to write are common themes in these stories—this narrator of the story tells us “I wrote just enough that I felt justified in thinking of myself as a ‘writer,’ but I had very little to show for my efforts.” One meet-up goes well, leading to another which does not go so well. He and his friends overrun the poet, who fancies himself a rogue, and end up thrown out on the street and spending the night in a Denny’s. It’s a forthright memory of debauchery that is disarming in its direct, unself-conscious recounting of a ridiculous and boorish night. Yet again, it’s the self-awareness of what is going on that transforms these from tall tales of recklessness into genuinely intimate, searching works of literature. While many of the book’s protagonists are similar, none are quite the same. The language clearly reflects this, as each character is gifted an organic vernacular of their own, tending toward off the cuff beauty and moments surprising clarity.
Full of roughed up and bleary-eyed men who are old beyond their years, these are gorgeous, anachronistic stories that harken back to the seedy tremors and excitements of the 20th century. An electric collection.
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