Excerpted from Sam Lipsyte’s No One Left to Come Looking For You, out now from Simon & Schuster.
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The Earl told me that Our Lady of the Flowers was written by Genet in prison so he could have something to whack off to.
“That’s the purest kind of literature,” he said. “Otherwise you’re just writing for money, or fame, or to look good.”
“What about to make a better world?” I said. “That’s only ever a by-product. You can’t set out that way. Otherwise it will be false, stilted. You write a book to jerk off to. If it’s great, it will set people free.”
“Free to jerk it.”
“Jonathan, think of all the things you are not doing when you beat off. For that moment, at least, you’re not killing, maiming, stealing, lying, cheating. You’re not participating in the carnage of the system.”
“You sound like Toad.”
“Toad has blue balls. He could use a good tug.”
“Isn’t it better to make love with another person?”
“Is that what people make with each other?”
“I think so.”
“I’ll tell Hera.”
The Earl chuckled, fell back into a light nod.
This conversation took place only months ago, but it feels like years.
Sometimes, when he lounged by the window in the late-afternoon light, the Earl acquired this heavenly shimmer. It was hard to picture him as he was onstage, a broiling demon, a louche god, a howling blues dog and ancient babyman and suave crooner, a society of the spectacle unto himself, a walking mirror phase, a simulacrum but also the return and revenge of the repressed desert of the real, never quite of us but our reason for being, or at least being together.
We’ve always believed in the Banished Earl more than in ourselves. That’s why we went along with his idea for our names. He pilfered his and Cutwolf’s from characters in a book by this Elizabethan gadfly named Thomas Nashe, a crumbly paperback called The Unfortunate Traveler, or the Life of Jack Wilton. The Earl found it tossed on some sidewalk trash heap, the same way he’d discovered Our Lady and Dangerous Dances. The Earl dropped out of community college, reads whatever the street proffers.
“And you, Jonathan,” he said after one of our early band practices, over shots of house bourbon at the Stop Pit. “You can just be Jonathan. Jonathan Shit. The standard-bearer.”
“I’m staying Hera Bernberger,” Hera said.
The Earl smiled.
“As anyone in their right mind would.”
Without the Earl, we are a raucous, semi-coherent noise band. With him, we edge up to the portal of depraved magnificence.
I always figured that if we worked hard, played enough shows, wrote a few more songs as good as “Orbit City Comedown” or “Spores” or “Invention of the Shipwreck” or possibly even “Ghost Strap,” we might stride through that portal. It’s all I’ve wanted. Now, with Hera’s desertion and the Earl’s disappearance, I’m beginning to doubt everything. Most people surrender their dream long before they fly to Barcelona. They plan far in advance to give up, even if they don’t know it. Maybe they seize on the dream in the first place to have something to quit, a failure they can point to, say, “See, I tried,” and get on with their dismal lives.
Even Cutwolf’s commitment seems shaky lately. Just the other day we were at the Laundromat, relaxing in those mustard-yellow hardshell chairs. We talked big picture, watched our jeans and skivvies spin.
“I’m just saying,” Cutwolf said. “I need to think about other things. My uncle back in Ohio makes good money tiling fancy kitchens and bathrooms. I could work for him and look into grad school. I don’t want to be thirty years old and still in a band.”
“Why not? I want to be in a band when I’m fucking eighty. What’s wrong with that? Look at Suicide. Alan Vega is my dad’s age.”
“I know. But it just seems kind of sad.”
“Sad? Sad is all that maturity bullshit. Going to school. Training to be a drone. If you’re lucky.”
“Life is not just a choice between the Shits and being a drone.”
“What if it is?” I said, to which Cutwolf had no reply.
When I relayed this conversation to the Earl, he chuckled, rancorless but dismissive, as though he floated above such petty anxieties, which he did, usually with the aid of various powders.
“Don’t worry, Jonathan,” he said. “Whatever happens will not only happen but has already happened, in all possible ways.”
There is deep Zen clarity in this idea, but it’s not necessarily the answer to everything, and I told the Earl as much.
“There is no answer to everything,” he said.
“But what if Cutwolf quits the band?”
“I’ll learn bass. You’ll switch to guitar.”
“You think the bass is that easy?”
“No, Jonathan. But I think you will make a good teacher.”
Recalling this compliment makes me miss the Earl. I see him lost, wandering some frozen hinterland like in those Russian novels from my world lit class, and I hope he’s okay, but I’m beginning to suspect he may be far, very far—many fucking versts, in fact—from the province of okay.
The Earl has filched my stuff for dope money before, including compact discs, records, and a pleather car coat of which I was quite fond, but I always considered these minor crimes, nothing compared to the gift he bestowed on all of us with his presence, his pledge, when it came to our shows, to leave everything out on the bitching floor.
Sometimes his squirrelly drug-fiend behavior grates, but I guess until now I couldn’t face the gravity of his situation, his disease.
Steal a roommate’s favorite jacket or scratched Trout Mask Replica LP, that’s one thing. To take your bandmate’s only working instrument, that’s just the ultimate sacrilege, born of a sickness heretofore unknown.