Jesus' Son

“Happy Hour” takes the typical form of a story in Jesus’ Son: It involves F**khead taking on a difficult task (in this case, finding the belly-dancer) and getting distracted during his task by the other pressures, violence, and tensions of Substance Use Disorder. One piece of characterization that’s particularly evident in this story is F**khead’s relative lack of self-esteem. An interesting stylistic choice in Jesus’ Son is the narrative’s near-complete lack of backstory for its characters, especially F**khead; however, many things about F**khead’s past can be inferred from his behavior. In “Happy Hour,” F**khead seems desperate to find the belly-dancer he’s in love with, even though she clearly does not value him in the same way or to the same extent. An assumption that can be made from the way that F**khead behaves in this story is his lack of self-esteem; F**khead consistently behaves in a way that demonstrates that he’s desperate for someone else to value him and treat him well, perhaps because he is incapable of valuing himself.

As F**khead writes during his wandering, “People entering the bars on First Avenue gave up their bodies […] Souls who had wronged each other were brought together here. The rapist met his victim, the jilted child discovered its mother” (101). In this passage, F**khead leaves it unclear as to who the “mother” and “child” are in his analogy; however, in other stories, such as “Work” and “Dirty Wedding,” it’s made clear that F**khead himself is searching for a mother figure, which is one of the ways that he views the women in his life. This searching is tinged by his substance use, resentment, and anger, frequently ending in F**khead’s humiliation. This search for a mother figure—someone to care for him and take away all his troubles—is doomed from the outset, and part of F**khead’s arc toward a kind of redemption comes later, when he’s able to find peace and community on his own, without the need for a person to be a stand-in for his mother. Interestingly, the belly-dancer seems to merge two ways in which F**khead views women: He searches for her as a child searches for his mother, but he is also attracted to and in love with her, like a lover. “Happy Hour” also connects to “The Other Man” through the act of a person lying and saying they are a family member, as the man does with the belly-dancer and F**khead planned to in “The Other Man.”