Not Even Immortality Lasts Forever by Ed McClanahan

Author:Ed McClanahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2019-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

VIII. My Crazy, Mixed-Up Father

My father died of lung cancer and heart disease in the summer of 1962, and since his presence has loomed so large in this story, we’ll end it with his passing. But that melancholy time comes a full ten years after my de-matriculation from Spoonbred U, and in narrator years, that could turn out to be a very long, tedious interim indeed—especially if one is stuck (as you are) with a narrator who doesn’t seem to know when to get on with the goddamn story, fer crissakes. So now I’m going to take my own advice, and proceed with all the deliberate speed I can manage.

I spent that first post-Spoonbred summer working as a rodman on a surveying crew for the Kentucky state highway department. It was sometimes hot, sweaty, demanding work, but there was a lot of downtime too, when we holed up in the back office, out of view of the taxpayers, and played cards, or pitched pennies, or otherwise fornicated the canine. I somehow got on a Sinclair Lewis tear that summer, and read both Main Street and Babbitt sitting on dusty cardboard boxes stuffed with ancient highway department documents, cowering from public scrutiny in that musty old back room. I also read The Naked and the Dead and From Here to Eternity on my own time, and the new teenage sensation Catcher in the Rye, and of course I continued my study of the immortal Erskine Caldwell, which I still pursued while standing at the paperback rack in Kilgus’s Drugstore. I had no idea, certainly, that there existed any such phenomenon as a literary movement called realism, but if anyone had asked me what I liked about these books, I would’ve said it was that they were “realistic.” As soon as I got a good start on my career as a freelance writer up at Miami, I intended to write something so scandalously realistic it would probably make me as famous as what’s-his-name, the guy who wrote Forever Amber. (Yeah, yeah, I Googled him too—so don’t tell me, I know the dude’s pen name is Kathleen.)

But I threatened to kick out the jams in this rambling meditation, and the moment for doing so is at hand. Fortunately, my narrative can now proceed by leaps and bounds, because I’ve already written (dare I say exhaustively?) about almost everything of consequence that transpired in my life during those next ten years, in three or four books (as well as elsewhere in this one). As I take it, this leaves me at liberty to summarize my adventures more or less at will, with the understanding that if you really want more details, you can look it up yourself.

Miami turned out fine. I bumbled through one more excruciating year of ROTC, and then managed to evade the clutches of Miss Alma Potts and the Selective Service for the next two years, thanks to the hitherto inconceivable fact that over those six semesters, my grades improved, incrementally but inexorably, semester after semester, keeping me one step ahead of Miss Alma the whole way.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.