Hanging on to Hope (Revision)

Choose life
Choose a job.
Choose a career.
Choose family, cars, a big fuck-off TV. Matching luggage, washing machines, compact disc players and electrical tin openers.
Choose sitting on that couch, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth watching mind- numbing, spirit-crushing game shows.
Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in some stupid home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.
Choose life.
But I chose not to choose life.
I chose something else…

So opens Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, a lurid tale of life and anti-life in the streets of Edinburgh’s heroin addicts. They chose heroin as the next best option to life.
I chose crystal meth, no, wait! Maybe it was suicide! Or was it the other way around?
Either way, I deliberately chose not life, or at least not the life availed to me as portrayed in Don DeLillo’s Americana, which, though written nearly thirty years ago is as truthsome a tale as ever I read.
The experience of Americana, or perhaps better stated: “the American Dream” as seen through the eyes of DeLillo’s anti-hero David Bell is bleak and inelegant.
David is pathological (spitting into the ice cube tray at cocktail parties), misogynistic (affairs with various secretaries; fucking and beating up the police chief’s daughter in high school , and sexually …confused (?) at best, deviant at worst, as evinced by his narcissistic self-examinations at every mirror, his fetish for describing in detail every outfit he wears throughout the story, and his near idol-worship of Burt Lancaster.
At the same time, he holds contempt, if not outright abiding hatred for his father, a brusque businessman who is crass, uncouth, and only marginally related to himself.
His father, the last of a dying breed of ad-men, treats David as more of a drinking buddy rather than son, dispensing business advice: “If you know your job, you can afford to be yourself (and your men will respect you) because you can do their job better than they,” as well as practical tips on romancing the police chief’s daughter: “If he finds out you are fooling with his daughter, he’ll blow your head off.”
He seems to have a lightly beneficent air towards his son, though it probably would not surprise him to know that David, in fact, hates his old man and “wished he were dead.”
Perhaps David’s hatred for his father stems from their mutual connection to the ugly, backbiting world of TV network sleaze and the attendant whorish advertising, which, if anything is just that much worse
However, they did have a “clean” point of commonality once upon a time through David’s mother, a Virginian-born minister’s daughter who is, was, and shall ever be the purest personality either man shall know in their lives.
“She was a different breed of cat…there was something magic about her.” David’s father recalls.
She is a woman of grace, yet she is stained not just by an unfair, spiteful cancer, but also by the indignity of suffering a sexual assault by her physician Dr. Weber.
Before she dies she divulges this bit of horror to David alone, and thus plants a putrid seed of darkness, which germinates and festers in his ear, ultimately driving him mad.
After attending an exclusive, experimental liberal arts college in Southern Californian, David returns to New York, landing a network job via his father’s connections and quickly rises through the ranks; the prodigal son as far as the other executives are concerned. He eliminates any rivals and uses dirty secrets, gossip, and the tips whispered to him by his secretary-who-is-fucking-his-boss to full advantage.
Despite the high salary, office with a window, and expense account, David’s existence is shallow and lost and meaningless; moreover, he recognizes it as such, and scrambling for a lifeline, he leaps at the chance to rediscover America, ostensibly to shoot a documentary about the Navajos, but the idea of the Great American Road Trip catches hold of his imagination and last dregs of romanticism, and hope is re-lit in his soul for the chance at redemption; a return to innocence, perhaps.
His enthusiasm infects several friends equally lost in a country shuddering under the blight of the Viet-Nam War.
Sullivan: the chain-smoking, SoHo-lesbian-artist-archetype.
Brand: the young Republican drafted to commit atrocities in 'Nam all in the name of God and Country and returned Stateside to become an assistant plant manager of the general foam division, Tenneco Chemicals. In that order.
And Pike: a Timothy Leary doppelganger, Ivy League educated, experimentally chemicalated.
Along the way they encounter Richard Specter who, ghostlike, and disenfranchised drifts away from his Pentagon appointment in Washington, D.C., turns his back and begins walking to California.
Also in a sleepy, non-descript mid-western town –could be Iowa, could be Illinois—they meet actors Austin Wakely and Carol Deming with whom David elects to film a series of monologues soliloquies, transparently in retaliation against the network heads who cancelled his own program of the same concept.
With the help of some interested locals, David tapes a wide and wonderful, bleak and beautiful, grim and hilarious series of slices of Americana pie, juicy with wormy apples.
Examples include:
Recollections of the Bataan Death march.
Falling in love with a racketeer and hit man.
One-on-one high school basketball.
Ad nauseum.
One day, however, David is inspired to capture the essence and beauty of the stillness of the small-town streets. He and Pike clamp their camera to the doorframe of their truck to reduce vibration and unnecessary movement, and they slowly drive up and down the dusty, silent streets. “An interview in a new language,” they claim, whereas I am reminded of the song America the Beautiful and the film American Beauty concurrently.
Yet the beauty of these few moments are fleeting pinpricks of light compared to the ocean of darkness which swallows the rest of the novel.
David abandons his friends after discovering they had each had carnal relations with Sullivan—the only woman he has never been able to dominate/intimidate, and he flees south, hitchhiking where he eventually encounters a series of grotesqueries en route.
First, a test-track manager named Clevenger picks David up in Missouri, and together they speed up and down Route 66, blazing a swath from Kansas to New Mexico, across the southern edge of Colorado, and whirling back down into Texas like wild horses, crazed on loco-weed (as it were), bereft of direction, but pumped up on booze, testosterone, weed and the need to run, run, run, as fast as they can.
For they know that just behind them, gaining through the dust of their passage is the ultimate horror: the luke-warm, suburban nightmare---the propriety of the savages now dully tamed, whom David now recalls he has meant to make a documentary about.
Over a week of fierce, burning days, across the hot, painted deserts, David and Clevenger finally come across the Navajos.
…a sad lot indeed.
For starters, most of them are white, that is, the small group of squatters David interviews has been infiltrated by white hippies, trying to get back to the Earth Mother or somesuch, and while suitably poor and wretched, they are not romantic.
Dirty.
But not romantic.
Clevenger returns for David and takes him to his test track and garages whereupon a vulgar orgy of the basest designs commences.
Once again David flees and hits the road, and in one final depraved encounter (sort of a final fuck-you from DeLillo to the readers he has jerked through the mud and muck of this so-called “great nation”) he is propositioned/threatened by a psychotic one-armed sailor.
In the end, David returns to the soothing security of his native New York.
What to make of it?
Americana is real. Too fucking real. Too-weeping-Christ-for-our-sins, may-He-have-Mercy-upon-Us motherfucking real.
DeLillo is either a master of his craft, or a first-hand witness, ‘cause you generally just can’t make up shit like that, you know what I mean?
But disturbing can be enlightening, if you dig, just like my own life story, short and sweet:
I tired to kill myself, botched the job, and struggled for five years to overcome the consequential disabilities: the deafness, the dizziness, the panic attacks, and the incapacitating stutter.
What’s it all mean in the end?
I’ll tell you what: if there is a God, and I do mean IF, then that motherfucker has got a heavy, blacker-than-black sense of humor. And while I have come to learn to appreciate His twisted jokes on us, that still don’t mean they ain’t black.
By that same token, however, that doesn’t mean those beautiful moments of stillness, with only a sweep of golden dust in the air, falling silently on the roadsides of Americana are any less beautiful.
Perhaps more so.