Emily used to wear a white ribbon around her throat and talk in breaths and murmurs, being nice, as she was, in a way so you didn’t know if she were a slut or just real down-to-earth. And from the start I was dying to find out, but I thought I had a girlfriend and I was shy.
This is the amazing opening of this amazing novel. It’s the story of an Iraq veteran with PTSD who pays for his opiod addiction by robbing banks. It’s semi-autobiographical, as you can tell by the fact that the author is currently in jail for robbing banks. It sounds bleak, which it is, but it’s also very funny. And so apparently raw that I can only wonder at the huge artistry that went into it.
Let’s enjoy first his descriptions. A frat house basement:
done out in plywood, some kind of beer-pong sex dungeon, everything dismal as murder
His fellow recruits in the army:
. . there was a lot of inadequacy to be seen in the big room. Fat kids. Acne. Acne on the face. Acne on the body. Skinny kids. I was a skinny kid. I wasn’t strong. We looked like shit. We’d grown up on high-fructose corn syrup, with plenty of television . .
He has a terrible time in Iraq, reminding us that while it was not Vietnam it was bad enough. He’s a medic, so there is a lot of putting corpses in body bags. It’s so bad his relaxation is looking through the IKEA catalogue to decide what he will buy when he gets home. In fact, when he gets back he does not buy furniture but OxyCotin. He ends up robbing banks to pay for his habit, offering good advice:
One thing about holding up banks is you’re mostly robbing women, so you don’t ever want to be rude.
And
I don’t imagine that anyone goes in for robbery if they are not in some kind of desperation. Good or bad people has nothing to do with it; plenty of purely wicked motherfuckers won’t ever rob shit. With robbery it’s a matter of abasement. Are you abased? Careful then. You might rob something.
Things are really bad; he is so sick from withdrawal that he repeatedly pukes into his own shirt while waiting in line to show his gun to the teller. He is almost relieved when he hears sirens as he leaves the bank and knows he is caught. He waits for them:
There’s a fuckload of starlings gone to war over a big wet juicy bag of garbage – look at them go! The big swinging dick starling’s got all the other starlings scared. He’ll be the one who gets the choicest garbage!
I had no reason to add this last quote, just only I thought it was so wonderful