Them what made me, and them before that

I drove from one end of Texas to the other yesterday. It's a long drive. From El Paso to Texarkana is roughly twelve hours on the interstate, though we opted for much of it to drive on state roads and farm roads, winding through cow pastures and oil fields and seeing the landscape change from desert to breadbasket right before our eyes. Katie and I listened to Shit Town for most of the day, the new podcast from This American Life and Serial. It was an incredible story, a real work of art. It pretends to be a crime story, a murder mystery, but in the end is just a study of a brilliant and fascinating person living in a small, impoverished Alabama community. It is his story, but also the story of the people around him, friends and foes alike, and the town he both loves and hates; the town of his birth and the prison from which he can't (or won't) escape.

At one point in the story a man named Tyler Goodson, a redneck tattoo artist who is perhaps the main character's only real friend, asks the host, Brian Reed, if he thinks he is a good person or not. The question comes on the heels of Tyler's revelation that he intimidated a man who stole his grandfather's rifle by threatening to cut off his fingers with garden shears while tied to a chair.

"One finger and them guns would have been found. It wouldn't have took two or three."

Tyler asks Brian "Do you see me being a bad person?"

Brian answers him: "No man I see you as a complicated, normal person. I disagree with some of your decisions. But you also have had a very different life experience than I've had."

Tyler was raised by an abusive, absentee father who he has spent his life trying to get out from under the shadow of. His family and friends don't expect that he's capable of much and that he'll end up like his father. He's poor, he likes to drink, he has a temper. He's got a long list of legal troubles and for much of the series is facing a grand jury on some felony charges I won't spoil for you here. His mother says she has no more tears left to cry for him. His grandmother says she doesn't know whether to love him or scold him. On the other hand he's a decent father to his three daughters and he's a good friend to John, the character that the series revolves around. But Tyler says that he's made some bad choices in his life and has had some hard luck. He says he no longer expects anything good to happen to him. And not much good does happen to him during the years that this story covers.

Yet somehow Tyler is the hero of this tale, the person we found ourselves rooting for through it all. Somehow we, along with Brian Reed, reached through our bourgeois bullshit and discover the heart and soul of this violent, racist redneck and want him to win. Somehow we understand that Tyler lives in Shit Town Alabama, and that our expectations of how a person should be don't really matter much, and what all matters is how honest and kind a true a person's actions and intentions are. And somehow we start to see that Tyler and the other characters we meet in Shit Town are actually not shit at all, but are beautiful and complex and passionate and real. And why is that a surprise? Why is it so bizarre and fascinating to find something beautiful and true in a place that is incredibly poor? Surely these are the places where we will find the truest things, where the pretenses and false offerings of our middle class morality are stripped away and people's honest natures are laid bare.

Several times this past year in Hot Springs I've had people ask me "why are you writing a book about Hazel?" Actually the first thing they usually do is start to tell me what a wonderful woman my grandmother was. A great mother to her boys, a lovely person, a fabulous cook. Then I tell them that I know none of these things are true and that I'm looking for the unvarnished truth about her, the real raw shit. The stories of stolen cars and guns and ripoffs and booze and drugs and death. And so then they say "why are you writing a book about Hazel?" What they mean to say is why do you want to celebrate this awful person?

Maybe at one point I thought that in coming to understand Hazel's life I'd make more sense of some of her choices that I didn't agree with. That I'd see her differently once I came to understand the different life experience that she had. And while I do believe I've come closer to understanding her, to empathizing with her, I don't think I have come to sympathize or feel better about any of her choices. In fact the more I've come to know of her life, the more I've come to resent her. I don't think that she's a victim of circumstance. I don't have this removed, aloof suspension of judgement anymore. I judge her and those around her harshly.

I don't think I would have arrived at this point of view if I hadn't moved down here to Hot Springs. If I stayed in New York I would have kept that arm's-length distance from her. I would have written a very different story than the one I'm writing now. But I'm living here in Hot Springs with my wife and children, working here, writing here, retracing the steps of my father and uncles and grandparents, sitting and breaking bread with the very people whose lives she touched, who she hurt, who helped her when she was in need, who loved her, who hated her. I'm here in my own shit town, the place that I love, the place that made me, the place that made them what made me, and them before that. Being here made me realize there's not a lot to reach through to discover the heart and soul of this story. This story is not just Hazel's. It's my father's. It's mine. I don't have to withhold judgement on Hazel because her life experience was different than mine. I can resent her and forgive her at the same time. What matters is that I understand her. That I see how her life and mine are intertwined. How my future and her past are connected. What matters is that I strip away the bourgeois bullshit. Hazel and Hot Springs are me, and I am they, and this is our story.

With love and without pretense,

David

P.S.

My apologies for not writing a Letter from Hot Springs sooner, but I've been making real progress with the book and nearing the end of it and had little time to spare to take these little tangents. However I'm working when I can on a new story for this tinyletter that I hope will go out very soon. As a small hint for what it's about, I wanted to link you to this story I wrote for the magazine Victory Journal last year. Not many people saw it in print and it only recently went up online. Anyway it should give you a clue about my next (hopefully) Letter from Hot Springs.

As always, if you don't already, please subscribe. I so appreciate all the subscriptions and shares. And go listen to Shit Town because it is brilliant and moving and awesome.