![]() One thing I love about this ending is that it’s very different from the endings to the other stories in the collection-stories that end with someone saying, “Talk into my bullet hole. ![]() I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.” The ending reads like this: “All those weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. That is, until the last paragraph of the final story, “Beverly Home,” which is about Fuckhead working at a hospital for the aged (and sleeping with or spying on various women during his off-hours). The book is many things-raw yet carefully sculpted, honest, and poetic-but one thing it’s not is hopeful. It’s been almost twenty years since I read that story, and I can’t get the image of the guy with the knife in his eye out of my head. Fuckhead endures a number of hardships-most of them revolving around drugs and alcohol-and, in one harrowing story called “Emergency,” witnesses a guy with a knife in his eye. It’s about a character who’s called Fuckhead (not his given name). In case you haven’t read it, the book is called a short story collection, but because the characters and themes are related, I’d argue it’s a novel. ![]() I read Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son in 1995 when I was in graduate school, and it’s affected every ending I’ve ever written since. ![]()
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