A sense of speed and darkness loomed that summer and its wings extended and snapped to full spread and we were all in its shadow careening though we did not know it. That summer I drank more than I ever have and I was doing it with people who were doing the same and whatever it was that was going on with them I was figuring something else out on my own in the only way I have ever been able — by going forward, not knowing where, just going. I was learning how to write not by writing but rather by wandering half-blind down the dark halls of myself, by following some peculiar internal sense of things which in the end is how you should write. I was working with some white kids at the small general store in my small hometown on the reservation where I grew up and we listened to music all day while we worked and when I was alone I was reading or watching films and wondering if I would ever get laid that summer which I did in fact not. Day after day while beautiful women of seemingly every possible kind walked into the store and perused the aisles and had flirtatious exchanges with my male coworkers, the sort of thing I was certain did not happen for me, I was making overloaded sandwiches and top-heavy pizzas and standing at the bandsaw cutting ribeyes and New Yorks trying not to cut my own fingers off because I knew it would be bad to lose a finger — it seemed a number of essential actions would be more difficult after that — but mostly because I knew it would hurt and for the first time the fear of pain had become part of my life. Not losing part of a hand was maybe the only thing I did well that summer. I stood at the slicer wearing my white butcher’s apron and sliced ham, turkey, prosciutto, salami, pastrami, Canadian bacon, pepperoni, and roast beef — which one always had to test immediately and then test again and then maybe once more to be sure of its quality — along with various other lesser-known meats I cannot remember the names of because only with the greatest effort and repetition of exposure do I retain such things. I rarely remember the titles of songs or the names of paintings or sculptures or albums or most characters in film or fiction and often not the names of actors or actresses and even less often their famous lines but I do recall with perfect clarity the feeling that follows a half step behind a song, the hue of a painting that reshapes my insides, the shape a face on the big screen makes that becomes my own internal face, the heat signature of a phrase that stamps itself into my skin. Contrary to whatever it is New York is saying, what makes a writer is not the complicated thought but the clean, simple, ruthless perception that lights up the dark. 

For most of the day music was a thing in the background while we made sandwiches and sold cigarettes and gave directions to tourists and talked about what you should carry when you’re hiking so you maybe don’t get mauled by a grizzly and whatever was playing at any given moment was a result of someone being near the cheap black stereo that sat on top of the shelving or the cooler near the deli when a disc stopped playing and if it was you then everyone, worker and customer alike, listened to your pick for the next hour or so. It was mostly jazz and ’70s rock and live jam band albums and only the last of the three sucked and would be struck from the record of this world if I had any say in the matter. Mornings were usually bright and quiet and the afternoons despite a continuous stream of customers were often a Sargasso Sea right there on the southwest side of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation but evenings were where it was at because you could feel the freedom of release on its way and it was during that final hour or so of the day that for the first time I learned to lose myself in tasks. I was not looking up from cleaning and bleaching the cutting board and I was not looking away from stocking and fronting coolers and I was not looking up from sweeping and mopping the floor that over the last 80 years had lost its level plane and all of this each evening as the sun fell behind the mountains and the last light left that part of the earth and the doors were locked. I came to love looking down those aisles of worn linoleum at night and seeing them shine because though the surfaces would never again strike their original pose you could still dress them up real nice on a Saturday night. I came to see it was about a sense of order achieved by the will of my own hands that gave rise to a feeling of satisfaction and it was one you could achieve again and again if you did it right. I could stand back and see what I had done and it was good and though over the course of the next day it would all go to hell by sunset the things of the store’s world would be put in order once again. It was during this time, when the store was largely empty, when it was just me and my boss — we will call him John — and the keys and the mop and my rapidly developing knowledge of what a clean well-lighted place might look like that the music ceased to be a thing in the background of the minutes and hours of the day, a distraction merely pleasant unless it was Phish, and became something that filled and defined the space around us and I began to understand music as something more than good sound.

I had a number of friends both indian and white I hung out with a lot during that time in my life and I had my family, my endless reservation family which was indian and white and black and I had known all these people for most of my life but that summer I felt alone in a way I could not put to words and it was my boss that was there in the way certain people are just when you need them. John was one of those white guys who had no difficulty being on a reservation and getting along with indians because he saw us as people and as indians, as Blackfeet, an achievement so remarkable that almost no one in the history of the Americas has pulled it off. John was a serious reader, one of those people who always had a book on hand, was always reading when he had the chance. If he was not working he was in the store’s basement or in the old living quarters up above the main floor burning through another book and if he was working and there was down time and there was no one for him to talk to he might rest his elbows on the counter by the tills and read. He was always watching films too, he was always listening to music, always smoking cigarettes and often he was also rolling joints and at night he was usually drinking and trying to get laid. He was the sort of American who does not really exist — cannot exist — anymore, people who lived peripatetic lives but weren’t poor, working in the service industry as chefs and waiters and bartenders and as instructors of various types at resorts, people who worked in a place for a few years and then moved on to another job somewhere else, would work a while and move on again because you could do that then, you could make enough money to live like that, it was a way for middle-class people of a certain inclination to see the country and lead lives of hardworking decadence. John had lived and worked everywhere it seemed and he appeared to me at times like a journeyman character from a film, probably one from the ’70s or one meant to be about the ’70s, the kind of guy for whom the question “Do you party?” meant a specific sort of thing. He was a legendary bullshitter. I had never and have not since seen a man talk to anyone willing as often and for longer than John did and this would mean more if you had ever spent time in Blackfoot culture, which is full of men who love to talk and most often about themselves. The Blackfeet who came into the store seemed to unreservedly like John and that was something new to me. A reservation is a place shot through with all the complicatedness of insider-outsider conflicts common to somewhat postcolonial areas, a place of people descended from the original inhabitants of the land and of people who came from the outside — in many cases to get away from the rest of America, for better and for worse — and of people descended from both. Such a place is not easily accessed, at times not even by someone from there, and John navigated this situation with an impressive ease from the time the store doors opened to the time they closed and well beyond that into the night.

I was out almost every night and not back to my bed until at least three or four in the AM, so late that you could not call it night anymore because by then out on the western horizon was the pale line of light that marks the beginning of day though it would still be several hours till the sun was fully up. The way it worked was we hit the lights and headed upstairs — leaving only the glow of the coolers to light the scuffed linoleum and the bottles of champagne on the rack across the aisle — and we drank. There was a lot of beer, that was the early days of microbrew culture and it seemed every week there was a new beer that my coworkers said was so dark and heavy it was like drinking a steak and I thought that was the dumbest shit I had ever heard, not what they said but the way they said it, as though there could be no higher pursuit than a double chocolate stout, and I hated every swig though I still bought one on occasion to see if maybe today was the day beer finally changed my life. Mostly I just went for hard liquor because it would get me drunk the fastest and anyway you could mix tequila or whiskey with something and it would take the edge off whatever it is you taste when you taste alcohol. We drank and bullshitted in the living room where the decor had not changed it seemed for decades and where everyone was apparently much more excited about things than me and eventually John was talking to another woman he had invited up to hang with us and I would take an amazed moment to bear witness to the process. Or we hung out on the deck at the top of the stairs on the back wall of the store and watched the parking lot of the bar across the street slowly fill up until one of us got bored and then we filed down and headed over ourselves. There was all kinds of talk, the small close-of-day talk, the loping talk of gossip, the stupid drinking talk. A lot of bullshit about which I recall nothing, which is another way of saying life. What I do remember is that the conversations John and I had throughout my shift would follow me into the night. I was at the beginning of a journey to the far edge of things but like most young men undertaking such a task I had made the mistake of believing that journey necessarily involved some kind of retreat from “society,” probably to the mountains, in order to write a manifesto lit by candle alone and only then I could begin the real work of revolution — about all of which I had only the vaguest thoughts — and that if I did not take it that far then I was a spiritual failure of some sort. Of course I was never going to do those things because I didn’t actually want to and because somewhere in me was a voice that said there was some other way. But I was building the nascent understanding that art would be an essential part of my life and not just any art but the kind that opens a door onto the vast darkness at the heart of life and though it would be some time before I knew that’s what was going on I believe John did recognize this about me and that is why he kept introducing these strange artifacts to me either in conversation or, in the case of certain books, by literally handing them to me. At some point in the night we would talk and I would try to convey what I was hearing when Miles Davis was playing in the store during work hours — usually Bitches Brew, sometimes In a Silent Way, Jack Johnson here and there, Kind of Blue on slow afternoons, once in a while Live-Evil, which to this day has never caught my ear, and unfortunately not once Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, which I would not hear until many years later and find so beautiful and so perfectly matched to a part of my myself that initially I could not listen all the way through, it was simply too much — and he would nod and laugh and smile and flick the ash from the end of another cigarette (at that time you could still smoke in bars) and then after a moment of pause he would discourse briefly (John was an endless series of bons mots) on whatever the album brought to mind (usually fucking). John had been a history major in college and like most such people he had a strong sense of art as something attached to a creator in a way that I did not then and it seems likely never will because what catches me about a work of art is the part that somehow breaks the gravity of its creator’s life, allowing it to begin its solitary journey across time, waiting to be found again and again by those lonely searchers we call artists. Or we would talk about what I was reading on the nights when I was not drinking after work or going to bonfire parties with my friends up at the old graveyard or down by the lower lake or maybe up near the Canadian border; or in the mornings and afternoons when I was home recovering from what the late nights and alcohol and weed and sometimes psychedelics were doing to me. John had books that existed within a vein of literature I knew very little about. These are not the books covered in survey courses and these are not the books most often recommended in lists online — in fact never, in my experience; academic and internet literary spaces are the safest and dullest places imaginable for an art form whose long history is, from a certain vantage, defined by insubordination in the name of beauty and truth but not necessarily goodness — but they are the books that change lives. They are the books handed from reader to reader with the understanding that this here, this is something different.

John loaned me a lot of books that summer, usually handed over at two or three in the morning after we’d been talking about art and women, or rather he would talk about women and I would listen. While his other employees were most likely discussing a Dead or Phish bootleg or how sick this new beer was or how fucked up they were he would say to me, You should read this. It was Cioran and Lautréamont and Céline and Genet and de Sade and Rimbaud and Burroughs and others and I did, I read them all with a zeal and intensity I have not felt since and likely never will again but none so much as Tropic of Cancer. I read through much of Miller’s significant work that summer — Tropic of Capricorn and Black Spring and The Colossus of Maroussi and Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and The Books In My Life and Stand Still Like the Hummingbird and The Time of the Assassins — and we talked about all of them but Cancer was the one we returned to the most and it was Cancer that provoked something so unfamiliar in me that I memorized certain passages from it and could recite them out loud for many years after if I felt so inclined. John did not think Miller understood how psychological his work would be, by which he meant Miller did not know his writing would transform people and culture in the ways that it did. And of course we would talk about films, some of which we rented out at the store, VHS tapes and a few DVDs that sat innocuously on a rack off to the side of the tills and which most people I knew had never seen or if they had they were not thinking about them as works produced by a particular director, as elements of a larger vision of the world. It was Kubrick and Ken Russell and Oliver Stone and Cronenberg and Polanski and Friedkin and Peckinpah and Lynch and I watched what we had and I wondered how I could get my hands on the ones we did not that John talked about in passing and it seemed the only way might be to order them from an arthouse rental place in Chicago, a difficulty of access so great it seems ludicrous now. It was the ending of Full Metal Jacket and the visionary sequences of Altered States and the nihilism and violence of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and it was baby wants blue velvet and Deborah Harry’s TV screen mouth and all of that made me go quiet inside in a way I never before had. Everything I was hearing and reading and watching seemed to emerge from the same darkness, the far reaches and depths of the same monstrous, sensual, disturbing underworld and I was transfixed. All of this art all at once and all having arrived in my life like a series of lightning strikes.

Most days at the store went along without incident but occasionally a customer came in and heard the music playing and saw the food on the shelves and the meats and cheeses in the deli, some of which were imported, and got a look on their face that I came to recognize as an admixture of confusion and unexpected pleasure and they usually said something while they paid for whatever they had picked up about what I can only call the culture of the store and I would direct them to the boss and if he had time on his hands then they would chat. Such people have always come through my hometown since its very beginning because Glacier Park is only a few miles away but during the years John ran the store more than a few of these people came back to hang out the next summer or for several summers after to get their break from the American hellscape where they’d made their home. I never got to know any of these people, I was too strange in myself then, I know that I smiled and was polite and helpful and I’m sure they thought I was a nice kid, which I was, but there was something else going on with me that was akin to those scenes in sci-fis when a dead space station is finally relinked to its power source and whatever the result of that process might look like it would be a long time before it was completed. In the meantime I continued having a hard time saying what I was really thinking and feeling unless I was drinking. Probably they thought I was stupid or special but I came to understand them as my people nonetheless. They were part of that secret network whose members require art to live, people who live the recursive lives that circle back and back to art because they cannot find any other way through. What they meant by their comments, the thing they did not say directly, was how did such a store come to exist in a place like this? How does one come to find imported olives on a reservation? The simple answer is John found his way to my hometown and fell in love with it because it was small and out of the way and weird and he stayed for a while — but that is like saying the reason you’re here is because you were born which is an answer but not an insight. What can be said is that for a summer I drank in the way young people drink who are lost and are beginning to feel the outermost pressures of time but cannot say what it is they feel so they drink. And they drug. And they flirt and they fuck and I was certainly doing the first two and maybe accidentally the third but not the latter at all. Nonetheless we were all standing equally in the shadow of something none of us had words for. Never in my life did I want a woman more and never was a woman further from me. I recall my attempts to get laid with no small amount of embarrassment but the reality is they were halfhearted. In the store the women came and went talking of Phish and I … I was reading books that talked a lot about women and the pursuit of women and fucking and the pursuit of fucking and of course ennui but there was something else behind all that and I was enthralled by it but did not yet know what it was. Meanwhile there was John, resting his elbows on the counter by the till next to me, talking about Miller or his winters as a ski instructor or his time as a chef in San Diego or he was standing in the back by the deli, wiping his hands down with a bleached dish rag, talking to another beautiful and interesting woman from who knows where. Sometimes Montana, sometimes California. Occasionally France. The women who worked at the store laughed about it and said he was funny, they could see it, and the guys who worked there marveled at his success. You would think the knowledge of how that sort of thing comes about would have rubbed off on me but there’s a reason we only know of one Cassanova.

I would like to say that by the end of the season all the art and talk had left me a changed man but the reality is I drank myself stupid though I hated the taste of alcohol and smoked weed though I hated smoking and sometimes did mushrooms and acid, which I loved, and through it all I remained very low and thought it would always be that way and in my lowest moments when I felt the most alone I thought about taking my own life and to the best of my knowledge I kept that fact to myself. By late August I was drinking very cheap whiskey when I woke up in the morning after camping in the Park with my friends and I tasted almost nothing when I did and I was proud of this and my friends shook their heads about it and there were days when I stood at the deli counter and watched my hands shake and realized if I did not change something I wouldn’t need to do anything in particular about the future. Things would take care of themselves. I don’t know what the kids I worked with were thinking, if they were in the same lost place I was or if they really were just partying their asses off and carousing and their laughter was not just another stay against the gone. Regardless we did it together, under the aegis of John’s store, amidst microbrews and head cheese and meats I have not seen anywhere since but in import markets and all this on the Blackfeet Reservation, which is a much stranger place than you might imagine, even if you are from there.

Though nothing ever really leaves you some things follow much closer than others and there are two pieces of art that still recall whatever it was that happened that summer and both have gone with me through the vagaries of my life. I can still recite passages from Miller’s masterpiece though not with my former confidence and force and they do not buoy me up so much as remind me what words can do to a person when they hit you at the right time. I have maybe five copies of Cancer, all different editions, from the time in my life when I would collect several versions of a thing as though they might have a talismanic effect. And there is Davis’s masterpiece, Bitches Brew, which I listen to at least once a year in order to remind myself what freedom sounds like. Back then these works were boundless and they exceeded me in every possible way; now they seem somewhat contained though not because I misjudged their ultimate value but rather because the unlit plain onto which they opened is no longer alien, though it does remain in the end unchartable. The artist’s doorway opens not outward but inward. There is a moment near the halfway mark of “Pharaoh’s Dance” when the other instruments drop back and all that remains is Davis’s trumpet and around that sound you can see what was always there, the vast dark that surrounds the light. The silvery trumpet sound that has been hovering, threading through since the start of the song, does not so much come to the fore as it is revealed, and it is alone in the night of the album. It still stuns me, every time. I want it to go forever but it does not. Then the other instruments return and the song continues its run, driving and chaotic and dark and beautiful and inviting and enthralling and warm and then it ends and after that something is different. I worked another summer at the store and then went back to school and one night because I was driving blacked out I wrecked my jeep and the next morning when I woke up I knew I had to change my life. I worked for my dad as a land agent off and on for the next decade, meeting Blackfeet both on and away from our reservation in order to discuss various land-related matters. A few years after that John lost the store. He was a hell of a boss, the best I ever had, but he was not much of a businessman. Though the store is still very much open not a trace of its former life remains. 

I have notebooks from those summers stacked on a shelf in my old bedroom where I still write when I’m home and sometimes I think about them. Sentences drop off mid-run and paragraphs like unfinished bridges are everywhere and to call any of it an imitation is generous. I had begun to write though and the next year I took my first creative writing class and at some point along the way I felt certain those early encounters with darkness and art were mere juvenilia. I felt tremendous in my maturity. The people I worked with at the store — I have no idea where most of them are. Not long before he lost the store to bankruptcy John knocked up a woman who was so out of her gourd that shortly after giving birth to their son she ended up in a modern asylum. By that time they were in Michigan so John went on to raise the kid himself in the northern part of the state which is, aside from the Blackfeet Reservation, possibly the most beautiful place in the country. These days we talk on the phone about once a year and it is good and usually it’s about books but not in the way it was before and that’s fine. Sometimes I remember a quiet morning standing at the tills with John when the store was empty and there was nothing for us to do but pass the time with talk and so that’s what we did. I had asked how real he thought Miller’s work was and he paused for a while before saying he thought the books were how Miller wanted life to be and somehow I understood this was true and because of that I knew that a book is not a life and a life is never art no matter how much we want that to be the case but I would pretend for a while longer that it could be.

I began somewhere in the smallness of myself and then I went beyond it and I had distance and I thought I was ready but I was not. Then I did it again and then again and I came to understand you can never see what’s on the way. What matters is where you start. The first move is the last move. You choose beauty over death.