All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen

Author:Keith Gessen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Literary, General, Fiction - General, Authors, American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, Young men, Fiction
ISBN: 9780670018550
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2008-04-15T07:00:00+00:00

Uncle Misha

Before I finally escaped from Baltimore in the spring of 2003 I spent several months driving up I-83 and I-78 to New York. It had been a point of great contention, between my father and my uncle Misha, whether it was faster to take I-95 all the way up, as my uncle and most other people would have it, or whether, as my father fervently believed, I-95 was so heavily trafficked, so miserable, so corrupt, especially in its Delaware portion, that one should take the long way—up to Harrisburg and then across the great state of Pennsylvania at top speed. Keep moving, was the gist of my father’s directive. Keep moving. And I followed it.

I did this in a Nissan Maxima—which was after all a graduation gift from my father—a sleek black machine on its last few journeys in this life. It was a car about which my father’s Russian mechanics now spoke in the most melancholy reproachful tones, as if to say, If only you hadn’t taught Jillian to drive stick on it, oh, it might have lived a hundred years.

I too had my regrets. The car had started eating cassette tapes sometime in the late nineties, and we never replaced the thing with a CD player. The precariousness of our life together in the run-up to the election had come to infect everything, so that I often felt like, with us possibly breaking up, it probably wasn’t worthwhile to replace our deteriorating earthly goods. Of course this made no sense—the goods would remain, even if we didn’t—and now, in the case of the CD player, it really was too late—the car was dying, and though I had saved $150, I had paid for it a hundred times. Here I was on the way up to New York and I was forced to place a boom box on the passenger seat beside me and try to keep things steady, because the boom box had no tolerance at all for bumps and jolts, and the disc, if the car shook, would simply reset, in which case I’d have to fiddle with it, and this is how car accidents happen, at least to me. Luckily the long stretch of 78-22 across the Mennonite state of Pennsylvania, and 81 before it, was a good straight road—for I was speeding down it at ninety miles an hour, because I was free, again, and because I wanted to prove that my father’s way was the fastest way, and so if I’d crashed into a tree, in short, because I’d been fiddling with the CD in the boom box, I’d have died in a burst of flames.

I was free. I was free, and having received my freedom I immediately reached for all the things I’d been so put-upon to do without. So I would leave our apartment and go moshing, sort of, at the Ottobar on North Howard; in our apartment I would leave my clothes on the floor, I’d go jogging at all hours of the day, at all hours of the night.

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