Another Bullshit Night In Suck City

I read a short story the other day by a Brazilian writer, Guimaraes Rosa. It was about a boy whose father walks out of the house one day, gets into a boat and sails out to the middle of the sea. From the shoreline, everyone from the town can see him, sitting there in his tiny boat, waiting. He stays out there for many years and often the boy sneaks food out to him, hoping to convince him to come home, but more so wanting to make sure he stays alive. The boy grows old. He stays home; he doesn’t marry nor leave with the rest of his broken-hearted family because he can’t bear to abandon his father. One day, when the boy’s hair has turned gray and his father’s even grayer, the boy hollers out to him to come home and offers to take his father’s place in the boat. The father stands up and waves, the first and only acknowledgment the boy has received from his father since the day he left. Without knowing why, the boy immediately turns and runs away.

I couldn’t help thinking about this story when I came to the end of Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, a memoir revolving around his father’s life and the life he leads as a homeless man’s son. From the first chapter, I felt immediately “in” with the narrator. His internal reflection cries out in a unique, witty, and somewhat bitter tone that hides nothing under the surface and yet slowly unveils a deeper voice throughout the chapters. The short and almost “snapshot” chapters were lively and candid and made for a fast moving yet compelling read. Flynn’s clever chapter titles are mostly one-worded and obvious like “shelter” or “photogenic,” but others are personal and lyrical like “the piss of god” or “vodka, stamps, flowers.” They seem reminiscent of the moments in Flynn’s life, short and on the edge of memory, yet pivotal in the way that they shaped him.

Flynn’s voice was evocative and honest; I often felt swept away to a place he visited in his life, whether bobbing in his Chris-Craft boat named “evol” in Provincetown or getting hammered on the pier with his “gangster” co-workers. Although Flynn’s memoir does not revolve significantly around place, the moments he does take his readers to one, there is a powerful connection between his inner reflection and his surroundings. For example, one of my favorite sections was when he is alone on his boat a quarter mile offshore, and he is forced to see the boat and the water for what it really means to him: “…somehow reluctant to move back onto land, feeling that land itself is a temporary state, a transition. Living on water quiets my mind…The boat has becomes supreme isolation, chosen isolation, holding myself apart from the world, which I only dimly understand anyway…that I can drift out of sight of land makes twisted sense, in line with my internal weather.” I admire his ability to weave in emotional reflection in a non-sentimental no-need-to-feel-sorry-for-me (something he does that I love) kind of way. Yet, I can feel for him and recognize his vulnerability without him having to scream it from the page.

Like Lori Jakiela, Flynn refers to a similar sense of “grounding” himself on land, but instead of being grounded between airplane flights, he stops on land while traveling by boat or motorcycle. Flynn touches down to earth with the soles of his feet while flying down the highway on his motorcycle and he docks on land while traveling at sea. I think Flynn does an amazing job of threading in this search for “grounding” as well as this search for where he is going.

The heart of this memoir to me lies in the complicated relationship between Flynn and his homeless father. Father and son have always held an intense expectation, one that assumes generalizations involving extensions of one another, genetic inheritance, like father like son, you are your old man, pride, and strength along with many others. Flynn touches on this inherent need to stay connected with the man in his life no matter what the circumstances. In that sense, he is like the boy in the Brazilian narrative, obsessed with staying close to his father, yet determined to break free from him, to take all the good of his father with him and find a way to turn it into his own.

I commend Flynn for his ability to bring his father’s character into the memoir, through his physical description, actions and most importantly the italics he puts his father’s words in. I wonder if he actually remembers much of this dialogue, or if he created what he thought his father would say based on his character. A couple chapters confused me, and I wonder Flynn’s thought process for them. The “fuckin gonuts” chapter and the “santa lear” chapter threw me off a little. But I appreciated so much Flynn’s new and creative way to approach a memoir, like with the “thirteen random facts” and “riddle” chapters. I learned so much about taking risks and being bold in writing just by reading this memoir.