My Summer of Love, Or: How I Learned to Stop Watching Law & Order re-runs and Love the Novel

I spent July in Boulder, Colorado, living with hippies: my cousin, her husband, their baby, and some guy named Jeff. I went there for peace and writing time, and to avoid legitimate employment for another month. After my semester had ended in May, I had survived on a steady diet of Law & Order re-runs. It got bad: I cancelled dinner plans and skipped parties, not wanting to miss an episode, though I’ve seen them all, many, many times. I needed help, and a safe space to dry out, so I headed west to detox with books.

At first I was disappointed by my lack of nightlife: my cousins went to bed by 10; Jeff was out doing hippie things with his hippie friends; and the baby, forget it. She’s a blast when awake, but you don’t want to mess with her after 8pm. She loads up on breast milk and gets mean, screaming in your face, wobbling around like a drunken sailor. So I read.

But then I came to embrace this new life. The word ‘wholesome’ kept coming to mind, a word that has never been attached to my activities or lifestyle. Friends would call, to make sure I put on a bra at least once a week and hadn’t traded in my return ticket for a share in an organic performance art collective, and, upon hearing about my new chaste life, would say, wow, that sounds so… wholesome… in a strange, hesitant voice, like it was a word they had had little practice or reason for saying themselves.

But then I became addicted. The stuff on my cousin’s shelves was decent, but sparse. I hit rock bottom one night, while reading a short story collection by “women writers” on “failed relationships” that they had recommended. I think it was the line, “Pablo, I’m only in Costa Rica for one more night – then I have to meet my boyfriend in Detroit,” that pushed me over the edge. Next thing I knew I was rummaging through my cousin’s purse until I found her library card. I hid it under my pillow until the next morning, and then dragged my feverish, wanton body over to the public library. So much for wholesome.

1. I started with Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, because I was too embarrassed to go another day without having read it. I usually nodded and smiled when people made references to it, but knew that would get me in trouble sooner or later. I loved it, and it felt good to read, like taking vitamins. Wholesome even.

2. After that I moved on to The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, by Gary Shteyngart, because I went to high school with him and was tired of bragging about that, then having to admit I hadn’t read the book when people inevitably asked how I liked it. I did, very much.

3. Very little of Debutante takes place in Russia – only a few childhood flashbacks, but I stayed close to the motherland, choosing Dancer, by Colum McCann next, and being a frustrated, aspiring dancer I had always wanted to read it. Told in a series of vignettes from the point-of-view of those closest to Him, including He Himself, Dancer follows the story of Russian ballet star Rudolph Nuryev. There are stories from his first ballet teacher’s husband, his sister, Margot Fonteyn, his long-time dance partner after his defection to London, a poet who housed him during his years at the Maryinsky, his lovers, best friend, shoe maker, and French maid that paint a vivid, intense portrait of life for artists and those around them during that period.

4. I’ve long had a fascination with the 60s and 70s, being the child of hippies, and the sections from Dancer that sparked my interest most were the stories of New York City nightlife, during what Hunter S. Thompson calls the 20-year golden period between the advent of the birth control pill and the tsunami of AIDS. To continue in that vein, I tried The Last of Her Kind, by Sigrid Nunez, which takes place in New York City, at Barnard College, at the end of the 60s. It follows two roommates on the paths they take which lead to prison, motherhood, fashion magazines, Harlem, the ballet, and a speed-fueled diatribe on The Great Gatsby. My favorite line is a character’s description of using heroin for the first time, “I thought God had bent down from heaven and kissed me on the lips.”

5. My fixation on the 60s now firmly in place, I headed to Drop City, by T.C. Boyle, to hopefully cure myself of a fervent desire to live on a commune. I describe it as: Sex, Drugs, Rock-and-Roll, goats, Alaskan frontiersmen, septic systems, white guilt, venison, whiny hippies, prom queens gone to seed, sled dogs, bridge, benzedrine, children on acid, tree houses, early date rape, seaplanes, and lots and lots of pot. Even this list doesn’t do it justice.

6. Not wanting to come down from my free-love high, I picked Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill, a novel that looks at the 60s from the point-of-view of a young, aspiring model. Is it still considered free love when you’re using it to procure employment? You can debate exploitation vs. empowerment all the live long day, but all I know is they were having more fun than any of us at Oberlin ever did in the mid-90s.

7. Chuck Palahniuk brings together sexual perversity, insurance fraud, and historical- reenactment theme parks in Choke like no one else can (not that anyone would want to). I met a man on an airplane once who described a vivid sex-scene in an airplane bathroom from this novel, and I had wanted to read it ever since. This was one from my cousins’ bookshelf, purchased because my cousin’s husband had gone to school with Palahniuk and wanted to support him, but never read. They, like EVERY SINGLE PERSON I met over the summer, from the mayor of Boulder to truck drivers to hippie surfers to San Francisco dot-commers, were reading Harry Potter. I actually don’t mind at all, I’m just happy to see people reading.

8. I had been planning a trip in August to Wyoming, a state I had thought was next to Texas before that summer, so I figured I should brush up on my Annie Proulx to orient me to the region. I started with Heart Songs, by Annie Proulx, a short story collection that I assumed took place in Wyoming. The snowy hunting mornings, the condescending, rich estate owners, the trout fishing – I pictured it all with the mountains of Wyoming (which mountains, don’t ask me), in the background. I did wonder why characters frequently made road trips to Quebec, wasn’t that a four-day drive, at least? And one of those rich, estate-owning assholes was from New Jersey, but lots of assholes come from New Jersey, I figured these ones liked six-hour plane rides with several transfers and a long car ride at the end. At some point I noticed the jacket cover said the stories took place in Vermont, and things made much more sense. After that I read Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, by Annie Proulx, stories that took place, obviously, in Wyoming. While reading them, I kept expecting to fall in love, and never did. However, months later, I still recall certain phrases, images and scenes from her stories. They have stayed with me more than anything else I read that summer; she must be doing something right.

9. I don’t remember how I came to Billy Bathgate, by E. L. Doctorow. I’m trying to read all of E. L. Doctorow’s books, and so far I’ve gotten to: Loon Lake, The Book of Daniel, Sweet Land Stories, and Ragtime, One of the more interesting moments of reading Billy Bathgate was realizing that the obscure “number square” puzzles created and practiced by the accountant was Sudoku, or at least a close cousin.

10. Vegans and locovores (or whatever the local-grown food movement calls itself) got you down? Sign up for The Master Butcher’s Singing Club, by Louise Erdrich, and the wonderful world of slaughtering animals and making treats from every part of their bodies, inside and out, all rendered in her loving, insightful, heady details. You’ll never like tripe as much as you like it here. There’s the usual love, betrayal, addiction, cultural mish-mash that pervades all of her work, and it is brilliant and beautiful, as all of her writing is, but I could read Love Medicine over and over, for the rest of my life. I haven’t found anything I like as much yet.

11. Hunter S. Thompson died of a self-inflicted gun-shot wound on February 20^th, 2005. I first read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, like many a pretentious teen-ager wanting a taste of anything bad and forbidden, and fell in love. I was young and impressionable. I later read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, and the attraction deepened, grew serious. He is frequently called meglo-maniacal, solipsistic, self-aggrandizing, stale, adolescent, irrelevant, and all of those have been true (except the last) at one time or another, but he is also one of the greatest voices of our time. In this era of cool detachment and ironic self-loathing, it is refreshing to read someone who is passionate and angry. As David Plotz describes in his Slate essay, Thompson was ferocious, and ferocity is not comfortable (or popular) these days. I found Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century, at the library, which starts with a story about Thompson destroying a mailbox when he was nine, and being questioned by the FBI. It gets better and worse after that. Some of it is challenging to read, to say the least, but it’s worth wading through the tripe to get to the good stuff.

When the librarian tried to help me locate his books at the library in Boulder, most of them had been stolen, a phenomenon she hadn’t seen with any other author. This might be more of a statement about his fans than on Thompson’s popularity, but I prefer to believe that he must be doing something right.