BooksBarbecue
Back Loudermilk Save as PDF
Chapters (60)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Personae
  4. I: Early Days
  5. One. Control
  6. Two. Doubt
  7. Three. Fate
  8. Four. Same
  9. Five. Fine Arts
  10. Six. In Loco Parentis
  11. Seven. Settling
  12. Eight. Neighbors
  13. Nine. Prospects
  14. Ten. The Lucky
  15. Eleven. Instruction
  16. Twelve. Same
  17. Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
  18. Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
  19. Fifteen. The Reason
  20. Sixteen. That Person
  21. Seventeen. Predictably
  22. II: Writing Teacher
  23. Eighteen. Early Poems
  24. Nineteen. Motivation
  25. Twenty. Allegory
  26. Twenty-One. Grief
  27. Twenty-Two. A Portrait
  28. Twenty-Three. Veils
  29. Twenty-Four. Soft Power
  30. Twenty-Five. Lists
  31. Twenty-Six. A Break
  32. Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
  33. Twenty-Eight. Custom
  34. Twenty-Nine. Parity
  35. Thirty. Fortune
  36. III: Volta
  37. Thirty-One. Images
  38. Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
  39. Thirty-Three. Letters
  40. Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
  41. Thirty-Five. Love
  42. Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
  43. IV: Your Best Reader
  44. Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
  45. Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
  46. Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
  47. Forty. Détente
  48. Forty-One. Worlds
  49. Forty-Two. Recognition
  50. Forty-Three. Persistence
  51. Forty-Four. And Then
  52. Forty-Five. Mingling
  53. Forty-Six. You
  54. Forty-Seven. Persona
  55. Forty-Eight. Est et Non
  56. Forty-Nine. The Author
  57. Epilogue
  58. Afterword: The Libertine
  59. Acknowledgments
  60. About the Authors

Harry squints. A big rig with a pale, determined-looking face inside its cab is barreling toward them.

Harry mutters, “This is the whole problem.”

“What?” Loudermilk has his head down, is groping around behind the passenger seat.

Harry quietly reiterates, as the circular logo on the blue hat worn by the driver of the colossal tractor trailer becomes apparent, along with the driver’s expression of baffled rage, that this, their remarkably divergent outlooks on the world, this, Loudermilk’s blasé treatment of a scenario in which multiple tons of steel plus hundreds of gallons of igneous dinosaur juice are hurtling toward them, and they it, on a course of perfect inevitability, THIS, Loudermilk’s insistence on placing his hand on a cup lid at this very moment, none of which there is time to say, is a living, breathing summation of everything that is the matter with their incomprehensibly futile, and now increasingly brief, lives.

“What?” Loudermilk, rifling, repeats.

The semi driver, recognizing that he is in danger of being frontally reamed by a pair of fucktards from the Empire State, deploys his horn.

“Got it!” Loudermilk exclaims, popping back up.

The semi’s horn has become a deafening, uninterrupted blare. The driver’s face is contorted by what looks, at two yards’ distance, to be a mixture of mortal fear and the desire to commit slow, surgical murder.

The Land Cruiser leaps into its designated lane, narrowly avoiding a white Bonneville.

The rig wails by.

Loudermilk swerves to the right and punches the car onto an exit, simultaneously fitting the reclaimed lid over Harry’s warm vomit. Windows rise.

Loudermilk shakes his head. “And we’re in. Now what the fuck were you trying to say?”

Harry balances the Big Gulp in the Land Cruiser’s cup holder and ejects the tape. He scrolls around on FM until he gets some classical. “I don’t remember.”

Loudermilk is like, “That is stellar, dude.”

Harry examines a strip mall. It is in no way promising.

Loudermilk is saying, “I believe we have arrived.”

They overtake a cluster of field-hockey enthusiasts in shorts and shin guards who are waiting for the light to change so that they may pertly advance to a campus athletic field.

It is 2003, August, Friday the 29th.

Two. Doubt

Two

Doubt

This isn’t anyone’s autobiography. What I’ve lost is so easy to name as to make it impossible to speak about.