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The Treacherous Currents in This River

Published in Trajectory, Summer 2011

 

Even before readers open This River, a memoir by James Brown, we get a hint of its potential impact from a blurb on the front cover by best-selling author Tim O'Brien, who calls the work “intensely moving” as it chases topics that include family and death, love and hopelessness, hope and degeneration. We intuit that we might be in for a brutal reading experience.

            The question, then, is this: Why would anyone want to read a memoir about a man who is an alcoholic, an addict, and, at times, a mentally unstable malcontent who has suicidal tendencies? And that's just the half of it. Isn't life difficult enough without inviting these stories into our psyches?

            As is so often the case, the question is easier to formulate than the answer.

            Brown's memoir is a continuation of earlier stories of his dysfunctional life—from childhood to middle age—as laid out in the much-acclaimed The Los Angeles Diaries (HarperCollins, 2003). The author wastes no time in this new work. The first chapter, “Talking to the Dead,” opens with Brown explaining that his brother and sister visit him late at night, and they are all happy to see each other again. But this is about as good as it gets for Brown, who immediately admits that frequently he wakes up shouting and soaked with sweat. “Not a day goes by,” he writes, “where I don't think of my dead brother and sister, my dead father, too, and now, most recently, my dead ex-wife.”

            Brown's stories, contained in twelve titled chapters, are not told chronologically; rather, they weave their way along a fluid stream that twists and curves and turns back upon itself to intersect with earlier tales. At one point we meet Brown's twice-widowed mother, who needs her only surviving child's help. Though they have been estranged for twenty years, Brown comes to her rescue, and we discover yet another liability he must overcome in the form of this incredibly unaware, self-absorbed, unrepentant parent who forged a signature that bankrupted Brown's father, a crime for which she spent several years in prison when the writer was a boy. For that offense, and others even more serious, Brown tells us, “I don't suppose I'll ever entirely forgive my mother. . . .  In this way we are the same, joined by blood and duplicity.

            There are stories aplenty in this memoir, all cogent, all telling: Brown's altercation with another driver on a narrow mountain road; the writer's obsession with body building, leading to steroid abuse; the suicides of Brown's sister and brother; the writer's desperate flight to avoid Ward B, the psychiatric hold, at the San Bernardino County Jail. Other tales show the man in an altogether different light: Brown coming to the defense of a failing university student who writes a threatening short story; Brown leaving his mother's home as a teen to live with his father, a man who teaches him how to set a hook and pour a driveway; Brown's dedication to his sons, taking them fishing, coaching them in wrestling, loving them without reservation.

            The most harrowing chapter in this book full of horrors might be Brown's almost casual tale of visiting his drug dealer. “Tonight,” he writes, “I am accountable to no one, and frequently these are the occasions when I mess up, when I'm alone and the bright idea to get wasted suddenly pops into my head.” His dealer, “Eddie,” has “syringes hanging from his shoulders, one on each side, the needles sunk into the middle head of the deltoid muscle,” one filled with heroin, the other, cocain. Eddie's list of available drugs is ten-items long. Brown asks for a gram of black and watches a rerun of Gilligan's Island on the TV as he waits for delivery. The evening gets stranger when Crystal—barely eighteen, an addict, and Eddie's live-in—awakens, and the three of them visit as they get high together, Eddie and Crystal searching for veins with their needles, their blood spurting and dripping to the floor. “Their eyes roll back into their heads,” Brown tells us, and “their lids slowly close.” He gathers up the remaining black he has purchased and slips out unnoticed.

            These stories are pitch-perfect; it's as if the writer carries a tuning fork in his literary ear. The language is unembellished, frank, and a bit self-effacing without ever becoming melodramatic or maudlin. This is what happened, he tells us, this is the way it was. “I'm five or six years old,” he writes toward the end of the memoir, “and I've just learned that my mother has been arrested and jailed.   . . . I once believed in God. He could've saved my mother and did not. Looking up into the sky, I curse God.”

            The title of the last chapter, “Relapse,” looms black and foreboding. Brown, in the midst of a two-month bout of heavy drinking, pushes away from the dinner table and grabs his car keys, his twelve gauge, and a box of shells. Where the story goes from there I will not divulge, except to celebrate the obvious fact that James Brown survives to write about it, and that we, through the alchemy of literature, become better and wiser people, more cognizant of the treacherous currents of this river we call life for having read Brown's story.

 

Brown, James. This River. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010, 178 pp.  

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