Last Day on Earth by David Vann

Author:David Vann
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8203-4210-8
Publisher: The University of Georgia Press
Published: 2011-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

STEVE KEEPS HITTING CRAIGSLIST, looking for sex. Mark writes to him, “Mysteriously disappearing, also known as Craigslist gone bad,” because Steve is going off the radar.

Steve leads, usually, with that line about his saxophone tongue but settles in one case just for long chatty emails about school, life, etc. He spends a lot of time online with “Lisa,” an undergrad at U of I, from November 6 to 7, 2007. They begin with a misunderstanding. Her ad on Craigslist, using the email name “damaged goods,” apparently mentions a threesome, because he responds, “I’ve always wanted to be in a threesome as well and would be willing to participate as long as you are DD free (as I am) and can provide the 3rd person, (I want to be the one giving you oral).”

“I was just voicing my frustrations and fantasies,” she writes back. “What kind of decent girl hooks up with people from craigslist? . . . if I were you I would stay away from girls soliciting sex on the internet, they generally fall into the category of ‘whores.’ By which I really mean ‘dirty whores.’”

They work things out, though, and Steve ends up revealing a lot about himself, perhaps because he’s pretty sure he’s never going to meet her in person (though he does try). “I only have 2 friends who are male [Joe Russo and Mark], while the rest of my friends/acquaintances are female since it seems easier for me to click with someone of the opposite gender.” He complains about the limited dating options in his program and says women in his field tend to be preachy. He tells her about being in a “state group-home,” his history at NIU, that he spent all his time studying, resented fraternities and sororities, etc. She reveals that she came to U of I to be with someone she loved, which didn’t work out, tells him about all her plans and hopes now, majoring in biology but considering the Peace Corps or the FBI.

It’s in these emails with Lisa that Steve most clearly reveals his confusion about his career, about what he’ll do with his life, and also how he felt about grad school. He details the shift from computer science to political science to sociology to law school to public administration. None of it has worked out for him. “I worked for a city manager as an intern for a few weeks and disliked it, because I could not tolerate working in a system that was so rigid and inflexible.” He tells her about the cuts in criminology in the sociology department at NIU and says he’s happy to have gotten into the social work master’s program at U of I. “The odd thing is that I would have gone to graduate school at UIUC from the beginning if not for a woman that I was dating (an eccentric art teacher [Kim]) at the time who wanted me to stay in the area so we could live happily ever after, or something like that.

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