The Kid

Okay, Raymond Carver, you may be a great writer, but you really blew it with your short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. I like the first part where two couples are arguing about the nature of love. Especially when Terri talks about her ex-hubby Carl, who used to drag her around the living by the ankles, knocking her head on things, all the while telling her how much he loved her. That’s good. Writing, I mean. As for Carl, well, he sounds like a royal psycho; but some women go for men who make them look like squished blueberries, I guess.

But then, midway through the story, Herb, who’s a heart surgeon – ha ha, I get it – talks about the time this eighteen-year-old kid driving his dad’s pickup truck rammed in a camper with an old man and his wife. You spend the next umpteenth pages telling their story – how much they loved each other and held hands in the hospital even when they were all bandaged up from head to toe, like living mummies. You go on and on about how much this old couple loved each other. It’s touching, this story within the story, and is a nice contrast to the two couples, who just sit around drinking gin and tonics arguing about the nature of love and looney Carl.

But, hey, Carver, what about me?

I’m the eighteen-year-old kid who smashed into the camper, turning the old couple into five-hundred pounds of bandages.

But all you say is that I’m D.O.A. and that I’d taken the steering wheel through my sternum and must have died instantly. That’s it! Goddamn it, you make me sound like some drunken teen who spends all day slouched in the last row of his high school classroom doodling or thinking about whether his next tattoo should be a picture of a Chinese dragon or skulls and bones.

I’m no airhead who had a blood alcohol content of 10,000 percent. In fact, if you took the trouble to do your research, Mr. Know-it-All, you’d have known that I’m actually a child prodigy. A young cellist who had just been admitted to Julliard. The next fuckin’ YoY o Ma! And, the reason I hit that camper was not because I’m was guzzling whiskey at some late-night orgy, but rather because I’m distracted these days. Why? My dad, a lineman with Long Island Pepco, is sitting in an 8 x 8-foot jail charged with murdering three college women!

You’d have known all this, Carver, if you’d only taken the time to read Ken Langer’s short story, The Gift of Time, which is about me and my dad. Okay, it never got published, but that’s not my fault. I can already hear you making excuses, like Langer’s story was written three decades after my death. No excuses!

If you’d read just bothered to read it, maybe you wouldn’t have Carver’ed me right out of your story. You would have known how broken-hearted I am seeing dad stuck in a cement box like a ship in a bottle – my dad who used to spend his days high up on those utility poles listening to the birds as he plied his craft with those thick leather gloves. You’d have known how he loved to sit on the edge of my bed and listen to me play Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello. You’d have known how he took me to Carnegie Hall when I was eight to hear Pablo Casals play The Song of the Birds, the beautiful piece the Maestro wrote based on a Catalonian folk song from his childhood. You know, Carver, that that’s love, too. My love for Dad, that’s something to talk about when we talk about love. Love isn’t just two old mummies holding hands in a hospital!

Look, I’m not knocking the old couple. They enhance your story. In fact, I think your original story in the New Yorker – the one entitled Beginners – was much better. Your book editor did you a real disservice by hacking out all that warm-hearted stuff about those old guys in in the hospital. One might even say your editor butchered the story, took the heart out of it. But that doesn’t justify what you did to me.

I’m pissed. But I forgive you. You’re a writer, and short-story writers can’t go off the rails by including everything under the sun. You weren’t writing Moby Dick. I get it. And I’m dead, so what the hell. But you should know that my life isn’t – I mean wasn’t – chopped liver. In fact, the story about me and my dad is also about love, and every bit as important as that jerk Carl and the old couple.

It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it, that I can think all this stuff when I’m dead. I guess the brain works a little longer than the body. But that’s another story. Maybe I’ll listen to you reading the story again on YouTube – if I can get Internet down here. Maybe not, I’m getting sleepy. No Julliard for me. Shit.