I moved to California at an age when my knees were soft, my sleeps long, my biggest challenge: to see how far I could swim underwater without breathing. Summers were slurped from hot green garden hoses, the taste of iron and rubber, then a burst of chill.
The adult world was a cloud cover for us then, for my brothers, my friends, and me; we knew it was there by its atmospheric pressure.
We regarded the world and learned to mimic it. Rode our bikes like choppers. Arc’d our skyhooks like Kareem, dropped our r’s like tough guys. We got too big for these games and ran everywhere, because why not?
Movement felt good. As it did when we borrowed cars or bought our own. Hours piled up at ice cream stands turned into wheels, windows open. The toasted Central Valley air blowing through a vehicle at speed was the feeling of freedom.
I recall one afternoon squeezing into a V8-powered Mustang and driving out to an air force base access road. Summer afternoons, they’d test-fire jet engines at full thrust, going nowhere. The rumble could slide a glass across a countertop 20 miles away.
So, picture four of us in the car, windows rolled down, accelerating to 142 miles per hour, my friend R driving one-handed. The mile markers flicking by. Hear us laughing.
He’s dead now, my friend who was driving. He died in the hospital a decade ago of a staph infection. He wasn’t the first one of us. There was S, my track teammate, who died in a fire at a crack house. N, my best friend at age 13, who got high and jumped off a cliff in Truckee, a love note folded in his backpack.
The girl in my math class I once dated, who had put her brother away for sexual abuse, then turned out by her dealer, and then fading.
And then a name in the newspaper.
D, who disappeared from freshman year at Harvard, just walked off into the woods, one month a number-one student, the golden boy, the next an inpatient and, the rest of his life, controlled by Thorazine.
He disappeared in plain sight.
B, who stepped on the trigger of a shotgun pointed into his mouth.
K, of the 92-mile-an-hour fastball and training camp, suddenly old in the face, sitting down on a curb outside a party looking up like…
One day we were invincible, and the next we were mortal. We were not just mortal, we were prematurely old. We were standing outside funerals and meetings in church basements, smoking cigarettes and drinking black coffee, hands shaking, thinking we were too young to feel this old.
If we were angels, we had leapt upward out of heaven.
It’s hard to think of a poet who was as old as Denis Johnson at age, his 1969 debut. He was a student then at the University of Iowa, but he sounded more like a beat-down Baudelaire, already exhausted by life. In the collection’s opening poem, “Quickly Aging Here,” he writes:
