Jesus' Son

“It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.”

Following a disorienting jump into the future, the narrative completely breaks down in this moment, revealing F**khead’s continuous hallucinations and his anger toward the world. The narrative here slips into a direct address toward the audience, implicating them in the choices that F**khead has made throughout the story.

“We bailed him out later, and still later all the charges against him were dropped, but we’d torn open our chests and shown our cowardly hearts, and you can never stay friends after something like that.”

A consistent aspect of F**khead’s character is his near-complete inability to hold any sort of long-lasting friendship. Only a few characters appear in multiple stories, and usually, when they do appear, they are memories or flash-forwards. This scene demonstrates why this might be: F**khead’s selfishness often conflicts with his desire to maintain friendships.

“No wonder he didn’t hear or speak, no wonder he didn’t have anything to do with words. Everything along those lines was used up.”

This sentence draws Stan into a direct contrast with F**khead, who is characterized as someone who speaks almost compulsively. The trauma and intensity that both men have experienced in life comes out in different ways—in one, a deep silence, and in the other, constant chattering and poetic association.

“And then, as if to twist my life even further, I realized that all the celebrating that afternoon hadn’t been Hotel’s farewell party after all, but his welcome home. He’d been acquitted.”

This passage explores the slipperiness of time, demonstrating how F**khead’s attachment to the reality in front of him is often tenuous. Different experiences and times are collapsed together in his mind due to his drug use. F**khead, in this instance, latches on to the importance of Jack Hotel and how the world treats him, rather than the neat and tidy chronological version of events, demonstrating in further depth his way of thinking.

“But after a while they forgot about him, and his breath failed without anybody’s noticing. He simply went under. He died. I am still alive.”

The concluding lines to the story “Out on Bail” explore the narrator’s conceptions of Violence as Inevitability, as well as the motif of memory. Jack Hotel died because he was forgotten about, whereas the narrator lived through the same experience because he was remembered. In this passage, F**khead’s continued life seems to be considered as random as Hotel’s untimely death—neither has greater significance rather than a plain statement of facts.

“When they saw it was only me, the three of them resumed looking at Mclnnes, who sat on the couch all alone, with his left hand resting gently on his belly.

‘Dundun shot him?’ I asked.

‘Somebody shot somebody,’ Hotel said.”

In his only other appearance in Jesus’ Son, Jack Hotel expresses a central motif connected to the theme of Substance Use Disorder, that of hopelessness. Hotel doesn’t connect Dundun’s violence directly to what happened to McInnes; as we find out later in the story, Hotel himself will later be a recipient of Dundun’s violence, and his lack of blame is perhaps a contributing factor.

“Glaciers had crushed this region in the time before history. There’d been a drought for years, and a bronze fog of dust stood over the plains. The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, wilted cornstalks were laid out on the ground like rows of underthings. Most of the farmers didn’t even plant anymore. All the false visions had been erased. It felt like the moment before the Savior comes. And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time.”

In this passage, the slipperiness of time is explored in relation to the intense events of the story, including the death of McInnes. Here, F**khead is connecting the long history of the region—one expressed in the language of destruction and decay—to the untimely death of his friend. Both are considered to be natural disasters; in “Dundun,” destruction from drugs is just as natural and unavoidable as the retreating glaciers.

“Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn’t know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.”

As with the ending of “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” the ending of “Dundun” directly implicates the audience in their judgment of the characters in the stories and their actions. The narrator anticipates the possible audience reaction—that of feeling superior—and undercuts it by implicating the audience as being the same as Dundun.

“We found my sixty-dollar Chevrolet, the finest and best thing I ever bought, considering the price, in the streets near my apartment. I liked that car. It was the kind of thing you could bang into a phone pole with and nothing would happen at all.”

The few possessions that F**khead owns seem to reflect his person. In this case, he likes his car because it can get beat up and still function—the car is a survivor, just as F**khead is portrayed throughout the book.

“Usually we felt guilty and frightened, because there was something wrong with us, and we didn’t know what it was; but today we had the feeling of men who had worked.”

Though F**khead understands what makes him happy in life, he still feels a complete inability to change his situation, as demonstrated by this passage. F**khead’s self-pity here keeps him from a deeper realization, and his life continues as it has before. He feels happiness from working hard and accomplishing things, but his substance use disorder often prevents him from pursuing this kind of work on his own.

“Georgie could be heard across the hall, washing his hands and singing a Neil Young song that went ‘Hello, cowgirl in the sand. Is this place at your command?’

‘That person is not right, not at all, not one bit,’ the doctor said.”

“Emergency”

This passage demonstrates the extent to which the people around F**khead are on the fringes, unable to hold down basic jobs. Georgie considers himself more responsible than F**khead, considering their later confrontation over the rabbits, but here, early on in the story, he shows himself to be just as confused.

“What’s important for me to remember now is that early the next morning the snow was melted off the windshield and the daylight woke me up. A mist covered everything and, with the sunshine, was beginning to grow sharp and strange. The bunnies weren’t a problem yet, or they’d already been a problem and were already forgotten, and there was nothing on my mind.”

This passage, in which F**khead recounts waking up in the morning in the car with Georgie, shows the lyrical and gritty quality of Johnson’s prose. Additionally, the slipperiness of time is evident here, as F**khead is not sure where he is in time in relation to the bunnies.

“Some hours before that, Georgie had said something that had suddenly and completely explained the difference between us.”

What Georgie says to the hitchhiker is that he and F**khead save lives. F**khead’s insistence that this explains the difference between them demonstrates that, in actuality, F**khead doesn’t believe he’s saving lives. Though he could be referring directly to the bunnies he killed, F**khead is also speaking analogously about their positions as orderlies in the hospital.

“I especially liked it when the buildings dropped away into that bombed-out squalor a little farther north in which people (through windows you’d see a person in his dirty naked kitchen spooning soup toward his face, or twelve children on their bellies on the floor, watching television, but instantly they were gone, wiped away by a movie billboard of a woman winking and touching her upper lip deftly with her tongue, and she in turn erased by a—wham, the noise and dark dropped down around your head—tunnel) actually lived.”

As with how Jesus’ Son’s fractured narrative structure mimics the thought process of a person with long-time substance use disorder, this passage functions as a synecdoche for the collection. The book itself takes the form of a series of imagistic scenes of squalor, glimpsed one after the other, just as one sees through the windows of an elevated train.

“But I never finished telling you about the two men. I never even started describing the second one, whom I met more or less in the middle of Puget Sound, travelling from Bremerton, Washington, to Seattle.”

Though Jesus’ Son is considered a story cycle, most of the stories are very loosely linked, each containing an entirely different cast of characters, with the only connection being F**khead himself. However, the first lines of “The Other Man” show a direct connection to the story “Two Men,” which only contains a description of the first man of the two.

“The motor traffic was relentless, the sidewalks were crowded, the people were preoccupied and mean, because Happy Hour was also Rush Hour.

During Happy Hour, when you pay for one drink, he gives you two.

Happy Hour lasts two hours.”

Just as F**khead himself is a character composed of contradiction—erudite and immature, painfully self-aware and completely oblivious—so too does the narrative explore the contradictory nature of other places and objects in F**khead’s orbit. In this passage, Happy Hour becomes a stand-in for all of these contradictions—it’s an hour in which one drink is worth two, and it also lasts for two hours, not one.

“I wanted to find her because, despite her other involvements, she seemed to like me. I’d liked her the minute I’d seen her the first time.”

Despite his contradictions, F**khead is characterized consistently as having very low self-esteem. Throughout the book, his most consistent desire is for someone else to value and enjoy him; in this passage, he shows that his self-esteem is low enough that he’s willing to chase the belly dancer on the off chance that she likes him. Part of F**khead’s arc throughout the book is his slow change toward developing higher self-esteem.

“I could have gotten him around the neck right then, right there in the library, and killed him. Stranger things have happened on this earth.”

Unlike the many people who have committed worse sins against F**khead, his most violent thoughts are reserved for a stranger who told him his fly was down. F**khead deals with significant aggression and anger, but typically only thinks or acts violently toward those who are physically weaker than him, another indictment of his character at earlier stages of his substance use disorder.

“They ran a few syringesful into me, and I felt like I’d turned from a light, Styrofoam thing into a person. I held up my hands before my eyes. The hands were as still as a sculpture’s.”

During a stint in detox at Seattle General Hospital, F**khead takes to shaving the other patients, taking advantage of his newly steady hands. This moment is the beginning of his transition toward sobriety, and the first moment of hope in a possible change that the narrative positions as being explicitly positive.

“No more pretending for him! He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.”

In the final story of the collection, F**khead has a difficult time navigating life as a newly sober person. This quote is demonstrative of this difficulty, as, at this point, F**khead feels as if he’s fooling people with his newfound responsibility and legal job. However, this is still a positive development toward change for F**khead, since, despite the fact that he thinks that he’s still “openly a mess” and is only fooling everyone, the change is legitimate and lasting.

“But I felt about the circular hallway of Beverly Home as about the place where, between our lives on this earth, we go back to mingle with other souls waiting to be born.”

This passage explicitly shows how F**khead is waiting to be reborn into someone new. However, “Beverly Home” also makes the argument that waiting for this change is folly, since he’s still acting in the same selfish and exploitative ways that he did when he was under the influence. F**khead, at this point in the narrative, is in between the place he was previously and the place he wants to go, which is to become a fully responsible member of society; in that sense, his job at the Beverly Home is the perfect place for him.

“She dipped the toe of her right foot into the water, then the whole foot, lowering it down out of sight into the yellow basin. He took the cloth from his shoulder, never once looking up at her, and started the washing.”

F**khead spies on a local Mennonite couple near his work, hoping to catch them making love. However, he instead catches them in an intimate moment of grief during an argument, after which the husband watches his wife’s feet. During this passage, F**khead is shown to not understand what his own desires are; in his head, he thinks he’s in lust with the Mennonite woman, but instead, it’s implied that what he truly desires is the connection and community she shares with her husband.

“Most of these people, by the time they were dead, had long since left her to travel down their lonely paths. People just like us, but unluckier. I was full of a sweet pity for them as we lay in the sunny little room, sad that they would never live again, drunk with sadness, I couldn’t get enough of it.”

In allowing himself to fully fall in love with someone, F**khead shows the true contours of his arc throughout the book, from a fractured and selfish man to a still selfish, but more empathetic person. The woman he falls for has a similar history to him, full of loss, grief, and pain, but the two of them are able to connect over storytelling and memories, demonstrating how far F**khead has come since the days where he tried to avoid all pain.