Jernigan Read online

  Praise for Jernigan

  “David Gates has created a memorable man for our times.… Jernigan makes for compelling reading.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Brilliant … reveals the screaming exhilaration of life in free fall.”

  —Esquire

  “Extraordinary … One of the more memorable pieces of literary heartache to come along in years. There are specific moments in the novel that manage all the delicacy of emotional truth and pathos. The best characters in fiction reveal themselves slowly, taking on a life so real they begin to live beyond their novels. You feel this happening with Jernigan.”

  —Boston Sunday Globe

  “[A] considerable talent … intelligent … powerful … subtle and moving.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “[Jernigan] tells his tale so honestly, so self-critically, that the accounting itself becomes a kind of salvation.”

  —Newsweek

  “Affecting and true. Gates has found the perfect voice for Jernigan. It’s self-deprecating and funny and wry … splendid.”

  —Newsday

  “Vivid … honest … a throat-tearing voice—bitterly ironic, crippled by hyperactive intelligence, at war with itself—that recalls the boozy obsessiveness from Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.”

  —Village Voice Literary Supplement

  “Engrossing … [Gates has] flawless control over his material. Grimly funny, alarmingly revealing … by the book’s end Jernigan has taken on a mythic quality.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Peter Jernigan is a quintessential late 20th-century antihero … with a wit so darkly sharp it could slice through a stack of Yellow Pages.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “Jernigan—an unflinching wonderful modern fool, like a great many of us—makes us practically howl at his late-century insights, dim and profound, somehow, at the same time. Terrific!”

  —Barry Hannah

  “Jernigan the man [is] stewed to the eyeballs in the Zeitgeist. Jernigan the book is great, nasty fun.”

  —Joy Williams

  “Thorny, thoughtful, written with venom and verve, Jernigan paints an anguished portrait of an impenitent rebel.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Exquisite … rich … Jernigan is compelling, amusing and disturbing, a lively, naked exploration of a tormented man living a life without contours.”

  —Kansas City Star

  DAVID GATES

  Jernigan

  David Gates writes about books and music for Newsweek. He lives in New York City and in a small town upstate.

  First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, April 1992

  Copyright © 1991 by David Gates

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1991.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gates, David, 1947–

  Jernigan: a novel / by David Gates.—1st Vintage

  contemporaries ed.

  p. cm. — (Vintage contemporaries)

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76589-5

  I. Title.

  PS3557.A87J47 1992

  813′.54—dc20 91-50720

  v3.1

  Thanks to Dave Friedman for computer expertise, to Marjorie Horvitz for stern copy editing and to Garth Battista for making everything easy.

  Thanks to Dolly Fried’s Possum Living, regrettably out of print, for its account of suburban survivalism.

  And thanks to those who have taught me, believed in me and saved my bacon: Sam Seibert, Patrick McKiernan, David Spry, Douglass Paige, J. D. O’Hara, Madeleine Edmondson, Meredith White, Sarah Crichton, Amanda Urban and Gary Fisketjon. And especially to Gene and Helen Gates, to Ann and to Elizabeth. And to Susan.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  I

  1

  I ended up driving all night. The snow eased off after a while—or, more likely, I’d driven past the edge of the storm—and I just kept going. Stopped for gas where you get off the interstate, then followed the state highway on up through the woods and through the open lands and through the empty little towns as it began to get light. Church steeples. The first human, in a red plaid jacket, bending over to scrape his windshield, blowing out clouds of breath in early-morning sun. Two more towns to go. Then, in the center of the second town, a left at the church and up that road for probably five miles. And at what must have been eight or nine o’clock I finally got to the place where you turn off the town road to get down to Uncle Fred’s camp. Just a gap between fenceposts. Blinding sun by now; this absolutely blue sky and snow all around. And so silent when I turned the engine off. This was as far as I could take the car: they hadn’t plowed down to where the camp was. So I just pulled as far over to the side of the road as I could, passenger door scraping against the snowbank. And I thought, Before it snows again you better get a carlength of that track cleared so you can pull in there off the road. Otherwise, next time the plow comes through here, I don’t know, no need to finish the thought.

  My God it was cold when I opened that car door. Inch or so of gin left in the bottle, but then I thought No, save that for when you get the stove going and the trailer good and warm. I’d finished all but that last inch on the way up. Just drinking to keep drinking: it didn’t make me any drunker. Or I guess any less drunk either. It wasn’t supposed to be a good idea to be drunk and out in the cold, that was a common misconception. I mean, the misconception was that it kept you warm. Just hoped to hell there was some wood, and some paper to get it going, and maybe something lying around for kindling so I wouldn’t have to try splitting logs in this kind of shape. Provided they hadn’t stolen the God damn woodstove out of there too. Get that stove going and wash down about four five more Pamprins with the last of that gin, boy, and sleep the sleep of the just.

  Now if only Danny had come along—I’d practically got down on my fucking knees—he could’ve been carving out that carlength of snow while old Dad was humping the wood inside and building the fire and getting the trailer warmed up for him to come in to. Heating up a can of beans if there was a can of beans. See, I would have had him sleep most of the way up, and then he could have stayed awake to feed the fire while old Dad took his rest. But, of course, stayed awake to do what? Oh, practice his guitar for a while, I suppose. Playing it through his Rockman so as not to wake old Dad. Well, fine, okay, but after a couple hours of that? So it might’ve been just as well.

  The trailer was maybe half a mile in from the town road, down a pair of ruts. Though with the snow the way it was, all you could see was a gap in the hemlocks or whatever they were. Just pine trees, probably, but I had that thing going in my head—

  And the hemlocks and the peacocks

  And the peacocks and the hemlocks

  —or however the hell it went. That Wallace Stevens thing about the peacocks and the hemlocks. Then I tried to make up some joke, in my head, about the hemlock maneuver. And then the hemlock remover. A chainsaw: that could be the hemlock remover, although how would you set up the joke? Some inner life, boy. That’s about what it had come down to. At any rate, I grabbed a book of matches out
of the dash, got out of the car, shouldered my shoulderbag, then reached in back and started trying to work the suitcase out between the front seats, banging it around the gearshift and the steering wheel. All the time thinking Fuck, wouldn’t it have been easier just to bend down, release that little catch and flip the driver’s seat forward?

  So I started down through where I knew the road had to be, right up over my knees in all that God damn snow. I could feel it going down into my shoes. But at least nobody else had been down through here: the white surface ahead was utterly smooth. And so bright that the shadows under the trees were grateful to the eye. I wished right then for another storm to come and cover my tracks, if wished isn’t too strong a word. And so quiet here. About halfway through the stand of hemlocks (I’m just going to go ahead and call them hemlocks) I stopped, let my breathing slow down to normal again, then held after an outbreath and started dropping into a silence without bottom. Though of course you can’t drop far before you have to gulp in another breath, and there you are, back up in the old one two one two again. So I let that new breath out—you could see the big cloud of it linger; not for long—and went on again into the white.

  At the bottom of the slope the trees ended and I looked out across a field of snow. I don’t know acres, but say the size of two football fields. Once this was somebody’s cornfield. Up in this part of the world they used to graze cows on the hillsides and plant corn in the bottom land, still do, there’s some folkways for you. In case you’re thinking, Well, Jernigan, fuck him, he just lives inside his own head. All around, hills forested in now-bare hardwoods and ever-dark evergreens. I remembered the shape of every hill. At the far end of the field, near the edge of the woods, sat Uncle Fred’s trailer, a faded blue, with snow halfway up to the doorknob and a white hump of snow on top, a stovepipe elbow poking out of a window. It seemed to be floating like an ocean liner. What do you know, white sea, blue ocean liner. Huh.

  I started making my way around the edge of the woods instead of cutting straight across the field and fucking it all up. When I’d circled around behind the camp I could see firewood stacked under the lean-to that ran along the back of the trailer. A roof of green corrugated fiberglass propped up with two-by-fours. Weathered, wedge-shaped ends of split logs, stacked as high as my head the whole way along, except for a gap where the two-by-fours braced the logs away on either side so you could get in and out the back door. I had long since stopped holding Uncle Fred in contempt for being provident—no I hadn’t—but right then and there I started praying Dear God, please bless Uncle Fred and thank You too, dear God. Praying like a five-year-old. I mean, bless? You picture somebody with this pile of things heaped on his back and still more things getting heaped on.

  So I came out from under the trees and crossed the open snow to the back door. Stood under the lean-to, in the greenish shade, smelling that good sour wood smell. Then I tried the door. It was unlocked, as Uncle Fred had guessed it would be. I stepped inside, where the air was even colder because of no sun, and smelled musty. And the first thing I saw was that good old sheet-metal chunk stove, like a big old pencil sharpener standing up on end. The stovepipe still hooked up too, going outdoors through the sheet of galvanized metal in the window. And right next to it, the big old woodbox, with a few logs and a jumble of broken tree branches. And a stack of Sunday Timeses about yea high. Thank You, dear God. And that book of matches right in my pants pocket. I patted and made sure.

  2

  I have Uncle Fred to thank, apparently, for making whatever arrangements were necessary to get me into this place. And for calling the state police, who carried me out of the trailer and rushed me to the hospital. I don’t remember any of that, though I’m supposed to have been mumbling away on the stretcher. They got there too late for my thumb and forefinger—the surgeon almost had to do (meaning cut off) the whole hand—but the essential man was, and is, still intact. Which is the big thing, right, the essential man? Jernigan.

  Suppose we start out by explaining that Uncle Fred’s name isn’t Fred and that he’s not my uncle, that should stretch this out some. The name Uncle Fred had stuck because it just fit, though by that I don’t suppose I mean anything more mystical than this: that even in his freshman year he looked like William Frawley on I Love Lucy. Though he used to say Edmund Wilson. I was the only other one on our floor who knew who Edmund Wilson was. Edmund Wilson, in fact, had once been dragged to one of my father’s openings, and pronounced his work fraudulent. Or so their mutual acquaintance later took it upon himself to tell my father. Except the more I think about it the more I wonder if that story wasn’t about somebody else and Edmund Wilson wasn’t some whole other story. Anyhow, at some point in high school I’d bought the old gray Scribner’s paperback of Axel’s Castle and tried to read some of it. So Michael Warriner and I became friends.

  We go back, in other words, to before he taught himself all that bluff Uncle Fred bullshit he does nowadays, where you can’t get a straight word out of him. Oh, I can see the appeal: even during the drug years, he was still impermeably Uncle Fred. For which you had to envy him as well as hold him in contempt.

  Right, how he got the name. Freshman year he and I took the train up to spend Christmas break with his family in Connecticut. That was the year my father was in Mexico. (My mother, of course, was out of the picture by then.) At Bridgeport I think it was, this little kid and his mother got on the train and the kid came running wide-eyed up to Michael yelling “Uncle Fred! Uncle Fred!” His mother couldn’t talk him out of it. She had a Kelly green coat with big buttons. I remember her as a weary middle-aged lady, although I suppose, in retrospect, that she wasn’t as old as I am now. You remember that song, She was common, flirty, she looked about thirty? It’s like the difference between what that meant then and what it would mean today.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said. “He thinks you’re his Uncle Fred.”

  “We’d gathered that,” I said, snotty college kid.

  “Timmy,” she said, “this man is not Uncle Fred. See, his Uncle Fred”—she mouthed the word died. “We tried to explain it to him, but he doesn’t get it. You know, he sort of gets it and he sort of doesn’t.”

  “Time,” said Michael. “In time these things become clearer.” We were both pretty smashed.

  “That’s the thing of it,” said the woman. “I don’t think they really get it until they’re a little older. When they’re older they actually can get things. But a little kid?” She shook her head; he shook his head too. Big agreement reached about human nature. So it was Uncle Fred from then on.

  The summer after freshman year, Uncle Fred and I and a kid named Kenny Angleton got a seventy-dollar-a-month apartment on East 10th Street. Angleton wore round wire-rim prescription sunglasses indoors and out, and always dressed in black jeans and black turtlenecks. No matter how hot it got—and this was a top-floor walk-up, right under the roof—he never rolled up the long sleeves that hid the tracks he didn’t have. The day we moved in he went to 14th Street and bought a pair of ankle-high pointy-toed boots with Cuban heels. The heels were made of what looked and felt like cardboard, and they wore down in a week. So one night, about four in the morning, he bought a jar of Skippy at the all-night bodega and threw it through the window of the store where they’d sold him the boots. Or so he said. We’d all been up snorting methedrine and he came back in trembling, asking us if your fingerprints could be traced if you’d never been fingerprinted. Not long after that he managed to get hold of some works, which he just took out and looked at for a week or so while snorting up as usual. The first time he tried to shoot himself up I watched until I got sick to my stomach, thinking if he could get it happening I’d maybe try it too. He tapped and tapped with his fingertip, trying not to hurt himself, then got impatient and howled when he jabbed the thing about half an inch in.

  Although Uncle Fred and I never said so to each other, it was mostly to get away from Angleton and the people he’d started bringing around that the two o
f us went up to Connecticut to spend some time at his parents’ house. Guilford had country roads to drive, in Uncle Fred’s father’s Buick, playing the radio loud: this was the summer of “Hanky Panky” and “Wild Thing.” Not the “Wild Thing” they have now, where the guy just talks in rhyme the whole way through, but the real “Wild Thing,” where he thinks she moves him but he doesn’t know for sure. Woods to trip in, a village green to circle and circle and circle looking for girls, the beach at Hammonasset a couple of exits up the turnpike, New Haven with movies and Cutler’s record store a few exits down. And Uncle Fred’s fourteen-year-old sister always there when we got home: pretty enough to keep me stirred up, young enough not to have to do anything about.

  We were still there when Uncle Fred’s father got a four-day weekend because he’d had to work over the Fourth of July. He was going to spend it at their camp up in New Hampshire, putting up a lean-to to keep firewood under. (Right, same lean-to, same green fiberglass roof.) Mrs. Warriner said he’d do better to get going on the bathroom, and that all that hammering would give her a sick headache, and that she’d just as soon not go shacking all over Robin Hood’s barn. Maybe Michael and his friend would like to go up and give a hand, and she and Diane would hold the fort and have a regular old hen party.

  “Oh man,” I said to Uncle Fred when I got him alone. We were supposed to have been getting together that weekend with some girl he knew from Clinton and some friend of hers whose parents were supposed to be away.

  “It’s cool up there,” he said. “It’ll be cool, promise. The old man just farts around and doesn’t know what’s happening.” As if I’d had any choice anyway. My father had sold the house in the Springs—I think he let it go for twenty-five—and he’d sublet the place on Barrow Street to somebody while he was in Mexico. So it was either stick with Uncle Fred or go back to 10th Street with Angleton sitting crosslegged on his mattress all night fucking around with his works and smoking Camels and scratching himself and jerking his head to the soul music on WWRL.