This one hit me hard – I read it just a few months after my mother’s death, as I was trying to make sense of it all. It’s truly meditation on death, with Roiphe profiling the last days of a small group of great writers and thinkers: John Updike, Susan Sontag, Dylan Thomas, Sigmund Freud, and Maurice Sendak (with some “bonus material” involving James Salter, who Roiphe interviewed during the writing of this book immediately before his death).
(more…)Category: Existentialism
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The Dirty Kids – The Finale
After the service ended, they drove back to Spencer’s apartment. As soon as they walked in the door, Sal collapsed facedown on the bed and began to snore. Spencer sat at his kitchen table for a few minutes, then left Sal sleeping and headed over to the library. About an hour after he arrived, Spencer felt his phone buzz in his pocket. He dug it out and saw a text from Sal. All it said was: “Gotta go.”
“Hold on a minute” Spencer texted back.
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The Dirty Kids (Part Six of Seven)
It was just past eight in the morning when they got to the Presbyterian church. It was the sixth church they’d been to that morning, driving around and relying on Spencer’s memory of churches he’d seen around town during his nighttime wanderings.
Sal shook his head, disappointed. “I told you, it has to be Catholic.”
“I grew up Methodist.” Spencer turned out of the parking lot. “I always thought a church was a church.”
Sal shook his head again. “Fucking Methodists.”
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The Dirty Kids (Part Five of Seven)
Spencer closed his eyes and the sensation of spinning was replaced with one of acceleration. He felt a sinking feeling in his stomach as if he were on a steep drop on a roller coaster. His heart, lungs, and stomach felt flattened against his shoulder blades and spine.
He felt a sensation as if his mind were being pulled out of his body through a straw, and his pure consciousness, disconnected from his corporeal form, was hurtling through an infinite tunnel of time and space. For what felt like an eternity, he continued to rocket through complete darkness until he began to see a flickering pinprick of light in the endless field of black. As he continued to move toward it, he realized that this infinitesimal point of light, surrounded by endless fields of all-consuming darkness, was his life.
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The Dirty Kids (Part Four of Seven)
Spencer could tell that Sal was still pissed at him as they played basketball. The court was one he’d found during his nighttime wanderings. It was surrounded by a grove of trees, which served as a kind of courtyard for a nearby cluster of university administrative buildings. The offices were closed for the weekend, but their burning white surveillance lights threw strangely angled shadows onto the court.
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The Dirty Kids (Part Three of Seven)
After Spencer downed his bottle of Robitussin, they drove, skirting the edges of town, where the strip malls gave way to surrounding crops of corn and soybeans. They came across a 24-hour Meijer and wandered through aisles of blinding white fluorescence until, chastened by the black surveillance camera domes on the ceilings high above them, they hurried up to the automated checkout counter with their chosen wares: Spencer, a new Spalding basketball; and Sal, a mango he’d been carrying around the store clutched against his chest like a newborn. Then they got back into the car and headed back toward campus, taking bites out of the orange-green skin of mango and spitting chunks of pulp out of their windows. They laughed deliriously as Future’s “I’m Trippin’” played from Spencer’s playlist.
Astronaut at the same time
Gone to Mars at the same time
Pluto Jupiter the same time
Pick a planet the same time
I’m trippin’, I feel ignorant
Keep rollin’, keep sippin’
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The Dirty Kids – Part Two (of Seven)
Spencer and Sal had known each other for as long as either could remember, but had only been friends since middle school. Spencer grew up in a subdivision of well-manicured lawns and streets named after wildflowers. Sal lived across the thoroughfare, on a block populated by run-down apartment buildings and small, five-room houses with weed-choked lawns strewn with broken plastic toys and battered lawn furniture.
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Introduction
I am a Gen X lawyer, powerlifter, music afficionado, veteran record collector, beginner guitar player, husband, and father (not in that order). I started writing short fiction in 1999, then took an extended break from 2002 until 2021, in which time I wasted my twenties partying in Chicago; got my JD from a Big Ten law school (summa cum laud for anyone keeping score); began my career with the prestigious, workaholic, and very evil law firm Wolfram & Hart*; got married and had two children; and nursed an ever increasing alcohol habit.
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