Bolt from the Blue
A funny thing happened in seventh grade. I read The Great Gatsby. And I was never the same.
All I ever read was detective and spy books. I still adored them, but this was something totally DIFFERENT.
The page where Fitzgerald discusses Gatsby’s character (around page 125)…..”He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never again romp like the mind of God.”
“A tuning fork had been struck upon a star” OMG, it was like a corner of my mind cracked open to the sun.
This was poetry with no rhymes. He spun a complete portrait of someone complex–empty inside, but fascinating for what he represented and his fame (based solely on how sprawling and epidemic his parties were). He was going to be fucked whichever way he turned. But you couldn’t look away, the descent was pre-ordained, just as sure as those eyes on the billboard watched 24/7. [Note: I had nightmares about those eyes.]
And what made it better was that Gatsby was the man everyone just had to know, but no one knew him. Living near rich town, I knew first hand about the empty partying of adults. Everyone standing around drinking, laughing and telling lies about themselves and the children they loved whilst praying someday their torture ceased.
Even in stifling heat, Gatsby’s characters loll around in designer clothes, sipping booze and talking how dreadful this or that person and their parties were. Gatsby’s soirees were like a palate cleansing for the idle rich and all the others who prided themselves on being 2 degrees separated from someone idle, if not rich.
Dizzy irony leaked into my high school brain–our underage rich town parties were kindergarten charades of adults’ cocktail parties. We drank to excess and traded empty stories of epic useless shit we did. OR passed around thumbnail critiques of other kids who drank too much (or not at all), smoked a lot of weed (or didn’t smoke weed), and what girls or guys treated people like crap. I think everyone fell in the last category.
But I wanted more than anything else to be drunk and/or stoned, so I kept on trucking. Besides, who the hell in that world actually LIKED a book like Gatsby? Dealing with my parental abuser was way more important than trying to find equilibrium with my personal demons.
So, Thanks you, FSF–I would never be a lonely blog writer without the fire you put in my body.