Deep in my heart I know I've lied

Denis Johnson's characters slow dance to "Misty Blue" on the edge of oblivion

Twenty years ago, Rick Moody wrote “The Creature Lurches from the Black Lagoon,” an account of the shifting moods he felt as he witnessed the making of the film adaptation of his novel The Ice Storm. Among his complaints, couched in genuine gratitude for the film and its makers, were the clumsy difficulties that movies have historically had in capturing a first person point-of-view, by nature a subjective experience. He gives as an example the cheesy “point of view” shot of the titular creature emerging from a lagoon in some 1950s B-movie, its victims shrieking and running from his glare as he clumsily strides ashore, the camera tilting and shaking in an approximation of a first-person (or in this case, -monster) point of view.

I was reminded of this while re-reading Denis Johnson’s extraordinary book of stories Jesus’ Son, its title taken from Lou Reed’s infamous line in the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin,” a song about the inbound oblivion of a very particular point of view. Reading Jesus’ Son gives the impression of the floor going out beneath you. No matter how geared up you are for the accounts of dive bar debauchery, black-out road trips, or general druggy carelessness, Johnson’s dry yet vivid details still startle. Drained of every ounce of sentimentality or preachiness, his prose offers a Naturalistic Absurd, a matter-of-fact rendering of men and women abusing drugs and alcohol and making reckless choices while somehow keeping their heads above choppy seas. Most of them, anyway. They love and lose in spectacular fashion, and Johnson records their endless evenings, grueling mornings, and aimless afternoons without judgement—a fellow barfly a few stools away. Reading Jesus’ Son I’m put in mind of the late, great Larry Brown, whose Mississippi-bred and -trapped characters also messed up with spectacular regularity. Brown wrote about them with great attention and respect. Mean motherfuckers, a few grudgingly or skeptically large-hearted, all of them, as Willa Cather observed in another context, dropping back into the immense design of things.

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“There were many moments in the Vine like that one—.” That’s the narrator of Johnson’s “Out on Bail” describing the sickly appeal of a favorite dive bar.

…where you might think today was yesterday, and yesterday was tomorrow, and so on. Because we all believed we were tragic, and we drank. We had that helpless, destined feeling. We would die with handcuffs on. We would be put a stop to, and it wouldn’t be our fault. So we imagined. And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons.

A moment later, he remarks that after a fight with his girlfriend he’d walked the streets until the bars opened in the morning. “I just went into any old place.”

Jack Hotel was beside me in the mirror, drinking. There were some others there exactly like the two of us, and we were comforted.

Sometimes what I wouldn’t give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God.

“Work” is a story about the narrator and his buddy Wayne spending an afternoon stealing copper wire from an abandoned house (Wayne’s former house, as it turns out). It’d been a wonderful day, a surprise—they got out of the bar, they earned some dough, they even watched a nude woman skydiving over their heads (Wayne’s wife, as it turns out). “All the really good times happened when Wayne was around,” the narrator marvels. “But this afternoon, somehow, was the best of all those times.”

We had money. We were grimy and tired. Usually we felt guilty and frightened, because there was something wrong with us, and we didn’t know what it was; but today we had the feeling of men who had worked.

Returning, triumphant, to the Vine, they’re ecstatic to discover that their favorite bartender’s working, pouring doubles “like an angel, right up to the lip of the glass, no measuring.” The narrator goes down to that glass “like a hummingbird over a blossom.” You were my mother, he says of the barmaid, later, paying tribute.

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That such comforts were deceptions found in dubious places, fated to evaporate in the vapors, didn’t matter much to Johnson, who battled alcohol and drug abuse in his twenties and thirties before righting his ship and embarking on a remarkable career (sadly cut short; Johnson died in 2017 of liver cancer). He recognized, poignantly, that the fuck-up in the bar deserved as dimensional and generous a rendering as the person who, on the parallel yet equally fabled straight-and-narrow, turns up their nose while walking past the joint.

Johnson also found a kind of black humor in these characters’ desperation. So did his devoted readers. “People would almost always come up to me [after readings] and say, ‘I didn’t realize those were funny. I thought those stories were just sad’,” Johnson remarked to Janet Steen in an interview published a year after his death. “When you read them out loud, people laugh a lot, because the characters are humorous. It’s just their situations are generally very, very bleak.” He added, “I think people get overwhelmed by the depravity and the bleakness, and so they don’t really notice sometimes, and then they’re surprised when they sit in an audience and hear everybody laughing.”

Steen asked Johnson if he ever feel nostalgic for that time in his life spent wandering as “a youthful soul,” in Johnson’s phrase. “Well, just for the self abandonment of it,” he said. “Just sometimes there’s nothing better than lying down in the dirt, being completely hopeless and helpless, because then of course you have no responsibilities, and that kind of appeals to me. But the problem is you can’t do that for long. There’s always a steam roller headed your way. You have to get up and cope, you have to rally, you have to get a job for at least a few minutes, come up with a couple of bucks.’

He added, “Life for someone who doesn’t want to live it is really hard.”

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Jesus’ Son was adapted by filmmaker Alison Maclean in 1999. The chief highlight for me: Denis Johnson’s cameo as the man whose wife stabbed him in the eye. He remains calm and collected.

The film was well received and made small waves in the awards season, though it suffered from poor distribution. Maclean, faced with the problem of cohering Johnson’s dryly spare, standalone chapters, found a through line of redemption in her film, a repentance only glimpsed at the end of the book. (“All these weirdos,” the now clean and sober narrator says about the “old and helpless” residents he serves at Beverly Home, “and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”) Maclean and screenwriters Elizabeth Cuthrell, David Urrutia, and Oren Moverman conflate and combine scenes in the book, create composite characters, move things forward in a generally chronological way, and tidy up the narrative arc of the narrator and his girlfriend Michelle.

It’s all a bit conventional relative to the blackout despair in Johnson’s disjointed stories (a fate also suffered by Nick Flynn’s brilliant, similarly-vibed memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, adapted as the defanged Being Flynn; Flynn’s book The Reenactments about that experience is a terrific read). Billy Crudup, playing the narrator, is too handsome by half, and too amiable. His teeth are incongruously bright, and he often gives the impression of flopping about the dire scenes wide-eyed and childishly, as if he’s playing catchup with the film’s more hard-bitten characters. (Dennis Leary as Wayne and Michael Shannon as Dundun capture their characters’ dangerous, druggy aplomb especially well.) And don’t get me started on Jack Black’s mannered take on Georgie. (Can Jack Black play anyone but Jack Black?)

I should say that I’m generally averse to film adaptations, epesically of non-conforming literary works. Rick Moody’s complaint about the difficulty of translating an interior point-of-view in film feels especially right here: the stories in Jesus’ Son roam about the gray worlds of small-town Iowa, the bleak Northwest, and impossibly-bright Arizona, but the real drama occurs in the addled mind of the narrator, an age-old conflict of truth and lies, self-knowledge and self-deception, sober and fucked. That stuff can be dramatized—Maclean captures the grimy streets, shitty apartments, and low-rent bars well, and though I haven’t watched Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly in decades, recalling the movie brings a vivid feel to my fingers of a slimy bar top as fluorescent lights flicker in my head—but in Johnson’s book, the most graphic point-of-view shot is of the bottom of the last glass of beer or bourbon that you can afford that day, the limits of your life graphically, brutally expressed as diminishing returns.

If you’ve seen the movie, let me know what you think.

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I write primarily about music at No Such Thing As Was. There are very few specific passages about music in Johnson’s book (one character idly sings Neil Young’s “Cowgirl in the Sand”) yet the dreary, surreal moans and cries of the dive jukebox are evoked on nearly every page.

In one of the many instances of conflation in the film, Maclean directs a scene where the narrator and the character Mira (played typically wonderfully by Holly Hunter) slow dance to the song “Misty Blue” at an AA meeting, followed by a scene of them fucking at Mira’s place, the sequence suggesting sweet(ish) communion and hesitant atonement for the narrator. This dance scene doesn’t occur in the book; Hunter’s character is unnamed, another in a line of quirky, semi-understood women with whom the narrator half-skeptically involves himself, and appears late in the book, in the story “Beverly Home.”

The slow dance comes earlier, in “The Other Man,” between the narrator and a nameless (again) woman at Kelly’s, another beer-and-shot joint. “There was one woman in the place. She was drunker than I was. We danced, and she told me she was in the army.” Both are wasted strangers, dreamily embracing not only each other but the lies in the moment. She wants to take him home, but her man’s there; she could tell her husband that the narrator’s her cousin, or her brother maybe, and she can come visit him on the couch when her husband’s sleeping. Everything desperate, and wildly improbable, yet fantasy’s coursing through their blood. “She just kept kissing me as we danced. There was nothing in the world for these men to do but watch, or look at their drinks.”

I don’t remember what was playing, but in that era in Seattle the much favored sad jukebox song was called “Misty Blue”; probably “Misty Blue” was playing as I held her and felt her ribs moving in n my hands.

“Misty Blue” was written by Bob Montgomery in the mid-1960s. In the film, the couple dance to Dorothy Moore’s sublime version of the song, recorded in 1973 and released two years later on the Malaco label; in 1976, it hit number 2 on the R&B chart and 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Maclean’s choice is smart here; Johnson’s stories are set in the early- and mid-1970s, so it’s likely that the “favored sad jukebox song” was indeed Moore’s version. Her yearning and regret are palpable in her performance, her oh’s and ooh’s doing nothing to soothe the loss she feels, unable to shake the thought of her lover. “Baby, I should forget you / Heaven knows I’ve tried / Baby, when I say that I’m glad we’re through / Deep in my heart I know I’ve lied.” Given Moore’s unrequited longing, Wardell Quezergue’s sorrowful string arrangement seems redundant.

Before I was able to place Moore’s “Misty Blue” at the scene of the crime, as it were, I listened to Eddy Arnold’s single released by RCA Victor in 1966 (also the first track on his album The Last Word in Lonesome). His lush “Nashville Sound” take on Montgomery’s song produces a cooler air temperature than the humidity registered on Moore’s recording. The playing’s restrained, Bill Walker’s strings are closer in texture to molasses, Arnold’s voice pitched somewhere between clean and cleaner, unlikely to surprise the listener into empathy. In Moore’s version, it’s inevitable that you’ll identify with her blues. It’s impossible not to.

And yet Arnold’s version works, too. And I hear it also when I read and when I see and imagine Johnson’s characters slow dancing against the truth in a shitty bar, Arnold’s gentle lilt a David Lynch-ian preemptive balm against the soreness that they’ll wake up with tomorrow, half-remembering everything.

Whatever version you prefer, and there are others, each soundtracks in its own way the bittersweet scene in “The Other Man,” the final moments in the story, beautiful and bruised. The inevitable page-turn feels like an unwanted reckoning.

“It was there. It was,” the narrator marvels, embracing this stranger, moving with the song on the jukebox. “The long walk down the hall. The door opening. The beautiful stranger. The torn moon mended. Our fingers touching away the tears. It was there.”

Photo of Mona’s, in NYC, by author

“Denis Johnson, Berlin 2003” by Oliver Mark via Flickr