A Christian Bukowski: Drunk on Disdain

 

Henry L. Racicot, whom I interviewed back in 2015 for those interested in reading a more thorough introduction, blogs at Few There Be That Find It, where he holds forth on humanity’s failings and writes ruminative zingers like, “Trump’s non-goodness is first readily evident in his obesity, let alone any non-physical shortcomings”, and never hesitates to take an unpopular position. (See, for instance, “Kyle Rittenhouse, Transgendarme” and “Kyle Rittenhouse, Hero?”) Racicot is not a nationalist – in a 2009 post, “Something to Be Thankful for on Thankstaking”, he even refers to “the devil’s nationalism” – but he is a man who, through forces beyond the common man’s control, finds himself marooned and alienated by the flow of history and at odds with the prevailing fashions and plutocratic orthodoxies, which makes him an oddball online neighbor of sorts. This year, Racicot published two collections of short stories, and it is the first of these, Holy Days in the Sun, that I will be considering here.  

The title establishes Racicot’s preoccupation with the divine, but, in its allusion to the Sex Pistols song, also evokes the nihilism of a materialistic world in which considerations of the holy seem quaint or even bizarre. A few of the stories, like “The Three Wise Men” and “Denver Scramble” (which, serendipitously, I happened to be reading on Thanksgiving), have holiday settings, but a less forgiving reader might find in the title an advertisement for a “cheap holiday in other people’s misery”, as Johnny Rotten put it. “I haven’t smiled, except at the misfortune of others, in decades,” admits the narrator of “The Unknown God”. Holy Days in the Sun is shot through with misanthropy and smeared here and there with a mingling of sympathy and contempt. “Growing up is a losing proposition,” he writes in one of my favorite lines – a sentiment that captures much of the book’s sensibility. “Life is a waiting room,” Racicot writes of the futility of man’s endeavors: “A waiting room for death” – and, appropriately enough, several of his scenarios involve waiting: waiting for a bus, sitting in a clinic’s waiting room to get tested for herpes, or waiting in the customer lounge of an auto repair shop. “Me? I’m in a ditch by the side of the road,” he muses. “Nothing to do but wait. That’s the test of faith. To resist trying to save myself, and to wait for Jesus to pull me out at the End of Time …”

As an atheist of pagan and Promethean affinities, I find the author’s Christian resignation to be rather foreign and uninspiring. Faith mostly furnishes a background to the goings-on, and the book tends to become more annoying as its theological concerns creep to the fore. “Snake eyes from Eden on. Born to lose,” Racicot writes in one of Holy Days in the Sun’s less subtle passages. “How Jesus would have gathered them, but they would not! The great kill themselves, the poor offer their livelihood to the unknown god, hoping for their miracle when the slot machines are troubled like the waters at the pool of Bethesda.” Another example of Racicot’s writing at its most explicitly religious and therefore least engaging is this passage that opens “The Captive”:

Hours turn into days, and days turn into weeks, and I notice nothing. I don’t even see myself, anymore. I am no longer apart. The waves of life carry me toward the shores of death. I no longer refuse. I perform the motions of life: family, work, state, but because I no longer seek another way, I drown in the sea of nothingness. The pantomime existence of the masses. Vast eons of life passed this way, with the unthinking multitude, the daily suicide shirking the responsibility of life, which is to remove oneself from the counterfeit of the world, and seek the Kingdom.

No fewer than seven occurrences of the word “I” from a character who claims no longer to notice himself! This paragraph, one of the book’s worst, is, however, followed by some of Racicot’s best:

Only the shock of tragedy jolts me from the stupor. My latest fall into the sleep of the living dead was arrested as I was walking down Main Street and observed a fat woman training a dog to become a Seeing Eye. What horror! The poor beast leashed to the human gob, its neck yanked, choked, every time it tried to seek its way. The dog’s will destined to be broken, it will submit to an unworthy master. I immediately recognized myself in the dog, regained my senses and vomited right there on the sidewalk from the sickness of everyday life.

He then launches into descriptions of his experiences in art museums:

I’ve frequented museums all across the United States and Europe, and even though most works housed in them are worthless – imbecilic portrayals of Mary and Jesus, technically fine but thematically somnolent studies of bowls of fruit, incompetent nonrepresentational stains – the diligent patron will always find three or four pieces which accuse and convict humanity of auto-lobotomy. These rare treasures exaggerate human experience, exposing the sad sell-out of the peasant and lumpenproletariat classes, ancient to contemporary.

His irreverent catalogue of “the usual dreck, Monet’s water lilies – the perfect packaging for air fresheners … busted Roman sculptures – tiny-cocked nudes missing a limb or two, lacking the wit even of a garden gnome … Rothko’s honestly titled Untitled – a red rectangle between two black rectangles, quintessential usury art,” can be both spot-on and hilariously unfair.

As the reference to “usury art” indicates, Racicot is aware of Jews, who show up in more than one of the stories, not always in a favorable light. In “The Eleventh Step”, for example, a know-it-all Jew named Ira takes offense at the presence of a Christmas tree at an AA-type meeting and also objects when somebody speaks out of turn that “the protocols forbid cross talk” at their gatherings. My favorite story, “The Three Wise Men”, in which the protagonist’s two young sons frolic through a shopping mall on their way to a coin-operated ride, contains this humorous moment:

“Time for a cookie, Michael. Say ‘merry Christmas’ to the nice girls, then follow me and your brother.”

“Merry Christmas!” Michael says.

“We’re Jewish. We don’t deserve Christmas,” the girl at the steering wheel says.

The mother looks horrified.

“OBSERVE, Rachel! ‘We don’t observe Christmas!’”

Blacks also appear in the book; and, given Racicot’s exposure to them through the criminal justice system, they come across believably enough. Take, for instance, the reaction of some jail inmates to the clumsy attempt of one of their subnormal fellows to escape detention:

Some of the inmates laugh at the spectacle.

“That silly ass nigger ain’t got no pride,” one says with great scorn.

“Pride ain’t got nuttin to do wit it,” another says wearily. “He a retard. He as dumb as you, nigga.”

As condescending as some of the author’s characterizations are, readers are never encouraged to see one ethnic group or class of people as better than any other. “Human decency,” he scoffs. “Human and decency go together like oil and water.” Racicot has contempt for us all: “It’s from this jail I see the absolute worthlessness of human nature, and the absolute lack of faith,” he confesses in this typical statement of his relativism:

I’m grateful to God to have worked a year in here. It’s now crystal clear everybody in the world is on the wrong path.

The only difference between the people in jail and the people on the outside is clumsiness. These people, the inmates, are klutzes. They stumble more, they crash into things and draw attention to themselves. Losers. But they’re just caricatures of the so-called successful. They view life the same as the rest, including the Sunday morning pew-warmers. They think there is something to get out of this world … but there’s nothing to get out of the world … except their souls. 

Whatever the reader’s spiritual perspective, Racicot’s sketches of urban squalor probably will ring true for inhabitants of any of America’s wasted metropolises:

I’ve driven down this street thousands of times. A typical ugly American street. Mile after mile after mile, littered with retarded businesses. […]

As I get into the city, the shops are boarded up. The survivors cater to the basics. Tire store. Liquor. Collision shop. Not many people on the street. […] The few shuffle along, wiping their noses and looking in garbage cans. 

“You know you are awake when you are filled with disgust,” he writes elsewhere – and it is these moments of identity in revulsion that constitute the book’s unexpected saving grace, as when he weighs the merits of “that cocksucker Stephen Hawking. I always hated his ugly mug and his ugly thoughts,” Racicot spits in “The Last Supper”: “Master of the Universe! What makes me bitter is that he would be considered better than the [vagrant] guy sitting next to me.” He can be particularly brutal in his descriptions of women, as in “Living Bodies”:

Everything dies, including beauty. Sin alters brain chemistry, sin engineers genetic mutations, etc., etc. Thousands and thousands of years of human sin, the human body marred. I mean, look at that lizard sitting over there. Forty and her face rough as sandpaper. When Eve was three hundred she probably looked twenty years younger than this bag, with her straw hair. Look at her, her mouth hanging open while she stares at the television, her gray teeth pointing every which way. Listen, if this crocodile were the one who offered Adam fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we’d all be fine today …   

In “Denver Scramble”, he diagnoses another unappealing woman’s “McBreakdown”, Americans’ superficiality and spoiled desire for quick, junk solutions to their problems predisposing them to the occasional “drive-thru emotional crisis”. Sometimes, though, as in “Knock, and It Shall Be Opened”, such unappetizing specimens of womanhood are the only ones who may be sexually available: “This is my first close-up look at her. She has a little whitehead at the corner of her nose. It’s depressing,” she prompts him to ponder more broadly: “We’re all just pimples on existence.” Suffice it to say that this is unlikely to be a selection for Oprah’s Book Club anytime soon.

Holy Days in the Sun is a work of devotion, but not “inspirational fiction”, nor is Racicot likely to land a book deal with Christian publisher Zondervan – not that he would seek such a dubious distinction. This is a mostly morbid book, with precious few lighthearted or conventionally redeeming moments, so that Racicot’s last-page recommendation to “Be of good cheer!” comes across as sarcasm more than anything else. Two or three (more than usually) disturbing passages in the stories even had me wondering if the author is mentally ill – which I can only assume he would readily confess. At any rate, the man earns a pat on the back if only for having thought up stunning pieces of dialogue like, “I pray God bless you with the HIV virus, that you may come to know our Great Physician!” This would probably be a good Christmas gift to give to boring, unlikable Christian relatives, actually – just to freak them out.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.