The sky is turquoise smeared with wispy clouds that you can tell will not last long. This morning on NPR Jon Clinch discussed the difficulties of writing his first novel, Finn (Random House Books). He says it’s like building a house with raisins. It’s the dark secret history of Huck Finn’s father and the excerpt read on the air sounded fascinating. Before Finn was published Clinch spent a dozen years writing fiction and wrote five novels that weren’t published.
I need to turn you onto a writer you’ve probably never heard of, Poe Ballantine. I have not read Ballantine’s novels but have been following his real-life, oddball adventures in The Sun magazine. He regularly contributes essays about his forays on the outskirts and strip malls of America. His lifestyle is spare, and he lives in crappy motels, working at minimum wage jobs so he can write. His writing is sad and funny and real and sweet and makes you think a lot about what is wrong with this country. Often his work makes me feel as lonely as hearing a far-off train whistle in the middle of the night. His latest essays have been collected in 501 Minutes to Christ: Personal Essays by Hawthorne Books. In the July issue of The Sun he has written about his experiences with meth and the essay is so searing and jumpy and that I got a hangover after reading it. I’ve always been baffled why so many people have gotten hooked on such a dirty, wasting drug, but after I read his essay I finally understand why people get involved with it. The essay describes how he moved home with his parents to write a novel, then because the writing wasn’t going well, got a job in a warehouse, then starting using meth. Here is an excerpt from Methamphetamine For Dummies where he described the aftermath of doing meth:
“God strike me with a urine-soaked newspaper if I ever do this drug again, the aftermath is simply unforgiving, a hangover infinitely more excruciating than you get from alcohol, as if your nerves have been shaved by an asthmatic witch doctor, pumped with musard gas, and then stomped crooked by a drunken plumber who refuses to clean his boots. I’m convinced that methamphetmamine is not a drug but a plague with which Nature has supplied us in lieu of yellow fever and cholera. There is nothing subtle ir romantic about this souped –up bathtub solvent concocted from the very same items I move daily at the chemical warehouse. It doesn’t inspire odes and lyrics the way heroin does. Think of all the great heroin songs, from Beatles’ “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” to David Bowie’s “China Girl”. No one writes songs about meth, for the same reason no one writes songs about yellow fever and cholera.
I am back at Javier’s the next Friday, Amphetamines can be useful, I tell myself. They make you productive, a creative dynamo even. Think of Ayn Rand, who wrote The Fountainhead—all 720 pages of it—on amphetamines. And my drugs are about twenty times stronger than hers.”
Ballantine currently lives in Chadron, Nebraska. His first nonfiction book is titled Things I like About America. In addition, his work has been published in magazines such as The Sun and The Atlantic Monthly Online. He won a Best American Short Story award. His novels are God Clobbered Us All and Decline of The Lawrence Welk Empire.
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