What if your father, who you never even met face-to-face until you were 27, was a bank robber, a drifter, a poet, an ex-con, a homeless hopeless drunk?
Nick Flynn tells his version of that tale in a heartwrenching memoir, “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City” (W.W. Norton, 2004, 342 pp.)
The book reads like fiction — fiction too sad and devastating to be true. I learned about it reading an article about actress Keri Russell (“Felicity”, “Waitress”) in Health magazine. She counted the book as one of her favorites, one that taught her something, haunted her.
I was intrigued by the title alone.
Raised in Scituate, Mass., a seaside town south of Boston Harbor, Nick’s father deserted him and his brother as children. His young mother struggled to make ends meet. She was set adrift, finding precarious harbor with a string of abusive, dangerous men. She burns the house down for the insurance money when they are young. She ultimately kills herself when Nick is in his late teens.
Nick, unable to finish college after this turn of events, develops a taste for any kind of drug, any kind of escape. Aimless, he works as a laborer for a mob boss and saves enough money to buy and restore an old boat with a friend. He lives on this boat in Boston Harbor for many years, and stumbles into work as a counselor in a homeless shelter in Boston.
His father, Jonathan, shows up there — not looking for Nick, just looking for a warm place to sleep. Jonathan had written to teenaged Nick from prison, claiming he was writing the Great American Novel.
Nick Flynn writes, “The way he came to me first was as a letter, handwritten. It came addressed from a federal prison, it came during America’s Bicentennial. The stamps were free, he’d later tell me. A number written below his name, a few words strung together, an incomplete sentence. Soon—very soon—, he promised, I shall be known. Known? What did that mean? I was sixteen, Id’ never asked for any such promise. I’d never asked him for anything, as far as I could tell. Tell me of yourself—I regret our mutual loss. Over the next twenty-five years he would send me hundreds more.”
Jonathan has struggled with alcoholism throughout his life and, once released from prison, falls into an inescapable bottle. He works as a cab driver, an odd jobs guy when he can. He ends up sleeping in parks, in the vestibules of ATM machines. All the while he claims he has a classic American novel in the works. He tells his son he has a letter from Little, Brown promising to publish it. An advance of $2 million … no $4 million on the way.
Jonathan seems to not care at all what happens to Nick. He’s the antithesis of the father figure.
Nick tells the story dispassionately. His voice is so detached, his story seems more novel-like.
Sometimes I didn’t like where the story was going, got frustrated with it — I forgot that it’s not a story, it’s a true story. It’s disjointed. Time is malleable. Decades fold in on one another, the same way as memory. I wanted the story to be linear. I wanted Nick to stop his self-destructive behavior, marry his longtime girlfriend, finish college. He did two of the three in the end (letting his longtime girlfriend but possibly enabler of drug behavior go). But Flynn’s tale of woe is punctuated by passages of pure poetry, lyricism.
Nick seeks the help of a psychologist, over many years. Breaking his drug habits also takes many years — we don’t ever learn that he’s actually stopped. He finds his own way to have a relationship with is father — as an outsider, a documentarian, someone who does not allow himself to care too much but can’t seem to breakaway altogether.
We all have daddy issues, but this is beyond extreme. Imagine how much that would fuck you up: To have a long-term job in a homeless shelter and have your long-lost dad show up there. You might think that Nick would offer Jonathan a place to sleep. Nick had done as much for acquaintances in the past. But Jonathan is a different animal altogether.
Nick has himself transferred to The Van — the mobile outreach part of the shelter — so that he doesn’t have to deal with Jonathan. For his part, Jonathan, having lived on the streets for too long, has become even more paranoid, drunk, abusive. He gets himself kicked out of the shelter.
Back on the streets, he’s close to death. Not Nick, but someone else at the shelter, helps Jonathan apply for and get into Section 8 housing. There he lives off his disability checks for more than a decade, drinking vodka all the time, ultimately nearly getting himself kicked out.
Nick keeps visiting him throughout, and years down the path comes to the realization that he needs to get away. He makes his escape to New York, to finish college, to find work as a professor, a novelist, a celebrated poet — things his father never could make happen for himself.
Their relationship is like a train wreck — spectacular, grisly and sad, and you can’t take your eyes off it.
Note: I read that a film is in the works, starring Robert De Niro and Casey Affleck. It won’t be a happy film, but may be a spectacular drama.
While I didn't read Anita Shreve's novel "Body Surfing" sunglasses on, toes in the sand, I wished I that was. It's the quintessential beach read, but then, most of Shreve's works are.
