One morning at the laundry [Mrs. Armitage] gave me a key and I took it. She said that if I didn’t see her on Thursdays it meant she was dead and would I please go find her body. That was a terrible thing to ask of someone; also then I had to do my laundry on Thursdays.
Before proceeding, consider reading “Angel’s Laundromat” online (for free!) here
Lucia Berlin had what they call a “small but devoted following” while she was alive. Really they just mean small. Most literary writers are like this honestly. Even the really incredible ones often have bios like “Published ninety-nine stories while they were alive, winning two (2) awards. Later they died penniless on a beet farm. Their collection XXXXX was published five years after their death and became an instant bestseller.” What can you do.
Berlin struggled with many health problems including lung cancer and passed away in 2004. In 2015 her longtime writing buddy and editor Stephen Emerson published a collection of her work titled A Manual for Cleaning Women, with undertones of “look what you morons missed out on”:
Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they’d ever overlooked her in the first place.
I don’t blame him for being a little pissed off, because these stories rule. The collection became a bestseller which was how I heard about it in 2017. I purchased it for $9.98 from a small bookstore in New York City called Bookbook, which has since gone out of business.
Berlin was a funny and sad writer who drew extensively from her personal history. In that way she’s similar to Denis Johnson whose collection Jesus’ Son we just finished.
Oh shit I forgot to put a subscription button at the top so uh:
Actually the beginning of “Angel’s Laundromat” (which if you didn’t read it above here’s another link) is quite similar to some of the intros in Jesus’ Son.
Here’s “Angel’s Laundromat”:
A tall old Indian in faded Levi’s and a fine Zuni belt. His hair white and long, knotted with raspberry yarn at his neck. The strange thing was that for a year or so we were always at Angel’s at the same time. But not at the same times. I mean some days I’d go at seven on a Monday or maybe at six thirty on a Friday evening and he would already be there.
And here’s that intro to Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” that we discussed in my first post:
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 . . .
Descriptive fragments, rambling disconnected details, clarifications of clarifications…
I do think that the reflective/memory-decoding style of these short stories benefits from evocative fragments like these. The few classes I took on short story writing tended to emphasize the need for a good hook at the front and in my opinion it is a ballsy move to begin with a series of meandering descriptions. It’s saying: These thought-fragments are so poignant and delectable that they can suck you in on their own.
Berlin is a very funny writer. She uses understatement like Johnson but she also deploys a kind of overstatement to poke fun at characters reacting to serious/sad situations in unintentionally comedic ways. E.g. the parody of Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” six-word story here:
I read all the signs. GOD GIVE ME THE COURAGE. NEW CRIB NEVER USED - BABY DIED.
She’s also a master of the one-two punch/literary reversal. A paragraph will careen off one direction and 180-reverse on the next line. Some examples from “Dr. H. A. Moynihan,” which is about the narrator’s crazy dentist grandpa:
Everybody hated Grandpa but Mamie, and me, I guess. Every night he got drunk and mean. He was cruel and bigoted and proud. He had shot my uncle John’s eye out during a quarrel and had shamed and humiliated my mother all her life. She wouldn’t speak to him, wouldn’t even get near him because he was so filthy, slopping food and spitting, leaving wet cigarettes everywhere. Plaster from teeth molds covered him with white specks, like he was a painter or a statue.
He was the best dentist in West Texas, maybe in all of Texas.
The narrator’s grandmother has a terminal disease, and to cope or distract himself, Grandpa has the (fourth-grade) narrator help him pull out all his teeth to replace them with a masterpiece set of dentures.
When we got home, the driver helped Grandpa up the stairs. He stopped at Mamie’s door, but she was asleep.
In bed, Grandpa slept too, his teeth bared in a Bela Lugosi grin. They must have hurt.
“He did a good job,” my mother said.
“You don’t still hate him, do you Mama?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Yes I do.”
She writes funny stuff and she also writes stuff that hits like a truck. From “Angel’s Laundromat”:
Angel and I got Tony back onto the floor of the pressing room. Hot. Angel is responsible for all the AA prayers and mottoes. DON’T THINK AND DON’T DRINK. Angel put a cold wet one-sock on Tony’s head and knelt beside him.
“Brother, believe me . . . I’ve been there . . . right down there in the gutter where you are. I know just how you feel.”
Tony didn’t open his eyes. Anybody says he knows just how someone else feels is a fool.
When I write sentences sometimes I look at them and how flat and lifeless they seem compared to the sentences of someone like Lucia Berlin and… well not to be melodramatic but it sort of makes me want to cry.
Lucia Berlin and Denis Johnson are both dead but even if they were alive and I met them I don’t think I would be able to explain what their stuff means to me.
“I really like your stuff,” I’d say, tearing up. “It’s really inspirational to me, an aspiring writer…”
“Thanks,” they’d say, avoiding eye contact, wanting to get away. “Thank you for, uh, saying that.”
More posts soon, subscribe to catch them in your email inbox alongside the various updates about your many Amazon packages the contents of which you have forgotten: