"Car Crash While Hitchhiking"

So I'm starting a blog about stuff I've read. Here we go.

I first heard about Denis Johnson when I was in college, 1996 or 1997, I guess, and I was playing a Beat Happening song called "What's Important," from 1982, for a friend:

That song contains the lyrics:
"We sit by the window and we watch the rain
Each little drop has got a name.
They're falling down, they're hitting the ground.
They're washing all the people away."

My friend told me that the song reminded him of the story "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" (1992), by Johnson (Denis, not Calvin), which contains the line, "I knew every raindrop by its name." I liked the Beat Happening lyric, so I decided to check out the story.

For the most part, I didn't like it. It felt fake from the opening lines:

"A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping . . . A Cherokee filled with bourbon . . . A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student . . .

And a family from Marshalltown who headonned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri . . ."

Today, I read the story again. Seventeen years on, I can find things to admire in this opening ("captained" as a verb choice, for instance), but it still rubs me the wrong way with all the ellipses and especially that overly-dramatic paragraph break. It all feels as if it should be read by Bruce McCulloch in the voice he uses in the "Doors Fan" sketch from The Kids in the Hall:

Particularly when McCulloch says, "An old lady on a bus sucking humbugs, she's a rider on the storm, but she ain't never heard the sounds." That seems to me like a line that could have come out of Jesus' Son.

The line about the raindrops, though... When I first read it, I thought it was just the sort of thing someone would say to try to seem cool, like the pretty but ultimately meaningless poetry Roy Batty spouts at the end of Bladerunner. Reading the story again, half a life later, I see it has a bit more weight. The raindrops have names but the people don't, and it's but one of many moments when objects take on traits that are "more human than the human" (to reference Bladerunner again), culminating in the box of cotton balls that speaks to the narrator. But it works better in the Beat Happening song.

What I liked most about the story this time around, though, was this line: "my pulse marked off the seconds of time." "Seconds of time" defamiliarizes a simple concept. It almost sounds like something a person who speaks English as a foreign language would say. Like, "How many dollars of money should I pay you?" But I like that sort of wording that slows me down and makes me pay attention.

I'm still not the biggest fan of this story, as it mostly seems to hinge on the fairly simple dramatic irony that the innocents rather than the sinners are the ones involved in the car crash, and it's all a bit too overly dramatic without much sense of humor about itself. But I like it more than I did when I first read it, and I may finally get around to reading more Johnson despite the initial negative impression.

Also, I think it's funny that in Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice there's a character named Denis whose name rhymes with "penis."