|
"Culver
City is south and east of everything worth anything in L.A.
We're all between jobs here or between marriages, between
runs of good luck." This sums up the tragic lives of the characters
in Richard Lange's heartbreaking and moving debut short story
collection, Dead Boys.
The stories
in Dead Boys are populated by eternally optimistic
losers who know that their big breaks are just around the
corner. Their hopefulness in spite of their circumstances
is what makes them more tragic and more appealing. How can
one not feel for the guy in "The Bogo-Indian Defense" who,
upon discovering that the ashes he needed to deliver to a
dead man's estranged daughter have been stolen from his car,
fills an urn with dirt, and then tries to date the woman?
What redeems this man is the sense of remorse he feels over
every misstep. When he finds the trunk of his car wide open,
he says, "Your own skin feels like a punishment." And who
cannot feel for Spencer Wright, the kleptomaniac in "Long
Lost" who spends $200 on a Christmas tree to impress the half-brother
he has just met, an ex-con who was jailed for stealing drugs
from a dealer? In "Everything Beautiful is Far Away," a man
pines for and stalks a woman he dated for three months. His
obsession for this woman has pushed all the joy out of his
life. His life is so miserable that he's willing to risk imprisonment
to recapture some of the joy he felt during those three months.
Like
Charles Bukowski's characters, the men in Dead Boys
float from one menial job to the next, and meet, move in with,
and lose women. All the stories are written in the first person,
and in many cases, readers never know the protagonist's name.
In story after story, each beat-down optimist tries to brush
off the hurt and start again. Lange's characters live in the
sort of America where dangerous criminal activities seem like
logical solutions for poverty. He's is such a skilled writer
that readers don't fault these men for their mistakes. It's
easy to feel affection for them in spite of (or perhaps because
of) their failures. Lange often ends the stories on an unresolved
note, but the characters' positive attitudes leave readers
with a hope that maybe things will work out all right for
once. There are a few notable exceptions to these loose endings,
and the concrete resolutions balance out the collection.
Lange
writes in a taut, tough-guy style, making this collection
seem part Raymond Carver and part Raymond Chandler. Lange's
characters keep their emotions close, even when they've hung
all their hopes on one slender hook, be it an acting job or
a woman. But occasionally, they bust out a beautiful phrase,
which shines like a ray of sun through smog. In "Telephone
Bird," a man is taunted by a bird's call that sounds identical
to his phone that never rings. When a fellow resident of the
boarding house where he resides gives him a pellet gun to
shoot the bird, he decides to have a little target practice
on a photograph of him and his ex-wife on their last vacation.
As he shoots out the faces in the photo, he muses, "The memory
of how happy I'd been then sometimes kept me awake late into
the night." In "Culver City," there are "three different kinds
of palm trees between me and the 7-Eleven, and, when the wind's
right, the faintest tang of ocean—just enough scraps
of paradise to drive you nuts." Spencer Wright in "Long Lost"
says of an old man he sees, "His desolation is as beautiful
as a broken mirror."
In one
of the most touching stories in the collection, "The Hero
Shot," an evicted man who goes home to live with his mother
tries to rebuild his life and get sober by fixing his mother's
house, living in his childhood room and reading old comic
books. He says, "Sometimes happiness just sneaks up on you
like a piece of a song in the wind." Lange's desperate characters
are still able to see the splendor in their miserable worlds,
leaving the reader with the hunch that maybe everything is
beautiful.
(September,
2007)
|
