The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston

books at his elbow, thick plastic-rimmed glasses on the end of his swollen nose, a sweating glass of beer in front of him paired with a half-full shot glass.
    He nudged a few dollars out of the pile of bills next to his drinks.
    —That bother you, that no-TV thing?
    I lifted my glass and took a sip.
    —No. Not really. I read a lot.
    The bartender took the money and went back down the bar.
    —Well I like TV.
    The old man gestured at his back.
    —And here he is, tending bar.
    I shrugged.
    —It's a job.
    The old man scraped his fingernails over his whiskers.
    —It's a shitty job.
    The bartender turned up the volume on the TV.
    The old man dog-eared the corner of the page he was reading and closed the book.
    —You still read a lot?
    —Yeah.
    He started going through the stack. He found what he was looking for and pulled it from the pile and offered it to me.
    —Ever read this one?
    I took the book and looked at the cover.
    A Fan's Notes.
    —Yeah, I read it.
    He took the book back.
    —That's a good book.
    I took a sip of beer.
    —It's good, I like it, but it's not that great.
    He put the book on top of the stack.
    —Did I say it was great? I said it was good. Try listening.
    —Whatever.
    He pulled at the collar of his red flannel shirt, the skin beneath beach-bum rough and brick red.
    —A great book is a rare thing. What have you read lately that's great?
    —Nothing.
    —See what I mean.
    He held up the book he was reading when I came in.
    —Anna Karenina.
A great book. Indisputably.
    —Indisputably great trashy fiction.
    He set the book down.
    —Are you trying to upset me?
    —No. I just think it's a great piece of popular melodrama, but not a great piece of art.
    He turned on his stool, faced me.
    —Who the hell? Where do you get off? This is one of the.
    He backhanded the air.
    —Why do I bother? You might as well have spent your childhood watching TV. Should have just wheeled one into your bedroom and plugged it into your eyes and let it brainwash you like the rest of society. You could be a bartender instead of a teacher. You could have a nice comfortable job pouring drinks and mopping vomit and watching TV. Wasted time. Wasted effort.
    He picked up his shot glass and drained it.
    —Wasted life.
    I stared at the beer in my glass.
    He knocked the base of the shot glass on the bar and the bartender came down with a bottle of Bushmills in his hand.
    He topped off the old man's shot glass.
    —L.L., how ’bout you take it easy on my customers. You buy the guy a drink, doesn't mean you have the right to browbeat him.
    I raised a hand.
    —It's cool, he's my dad.
    L.L. wrote a novel.
    It's on that shelf with the Nelson Algren and Bukowski and Kerouac at your local independent bookstore. If you have one of those. If not, you can find it on the Internet. But it will probably be the printing they did for the movie.
    He wrote his novel before he met my mom. Really, he met my mom because he wrote the novel. It was a cult thing. Dozens of printings over theyears, each of them a run of a couple thousand, well regarded enough to get him several guest lecture gigs in the late sixties as a not quite elder statesman of the counterculture. If not for that, he'd never have been at UC Berkeley in ’68. Never gone to the Fillmore with some of his grad students to see a happening, and loudly denigrate it as bullshit, sounding off at the back of the hall, a bottle of mescal in one hand and a huge joint in the other, surrounded by the more reactionary wing of the peace and freedom movement. If not for that, he'd never been challenged by an attractive young undergrad from SF State, who proposed to show him how rock music, acid and free love could change the world. Never would have eye-droppered a dose of U.S. government pure LSD and ended up fucking the undergrad's brains out in Golden Gate Park at dawn, receiving along the way what he once described to me as,
The most sublime head known to man or Jesus. I saw the universe