David Gates - Jernigan

Praise for Jernigan

David Gates has created a memorable man for our times. Jernigan makes for compelling reading.

Chicago Tribune

Brilliant reveals the screaming exhilaration of life in free fall.

Esquire

Extraordinary One of the more memorable pieces of literary heartache to come along in years. There are specific moments in the novel that manage all the delicacy of emotional truth and pathos. The best characters in fiction reveal themselves slowly, taking on a life so real they begin to live beyond their novels. You feel this happening with Jernigan.

Boston Sunday Globe

[A] considerable talent intelligent powerful subtle and moving.

Los Angeles Times

[Jernigan] tells his tale so honestly, so self-critically, that the accounting itself becomes a kind of salvation.

Newsweek

Affecting and true. Gates has found the perfect voice for Jernigan. Its self-deprecating and funny and wry splendid.

Newsday

Vivid honest a throat-tearing voicebitterly ironic, crippled by hyperactive intelligence, at war with itselfthat recalls the boozy obsessiveness from Frederick Exleys A Fans Notes and Malcolm Lowrys Under the Volcano.

Village Voice Literary Supplement

Engrossing [Gates has] flawless control over his material. Grimly funny, alarmingly revealing by the books end Jernigan has taken on a mythic quality.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Peter Jernigan is a quintessential late 20th-century antihero with a wit so darkly sharp it could slice through a stack of Yellow Pages.

Washington Post Book World

Jerniganan unflinching wonderful modern fool, like a great many of usmakes us practically howl at his late-century insights, dim and profound, somehow, at the same time. Terrific!

Barry Hannah

Jernigan the man [is] stewed to the eyeballs in the Zeitgeist. Jernigan the book is great, nasty fun.

Joy Williams

Thorny, thoughtful, written with venom and verve, Jernigan paints an anguished portrait of an impenitent rebel.

Houston Chronicle

Exquisite rich Jernigan is compelling, amusing and disturbing, a lively, naked exploration of a tormented man living a life without contours.

Kansas City Star

DAVID GATES
Jernigan

David Gates writes about books and music for Newsweek. He lives in New York City and in a small town upstate.

First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, April 1992

Copyright 1991 by David Gates

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1991.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gates, David, 1947
Jernigan: a novel / by David Gates.1st Vintage
contemporaries ed.
p. cm. (Vintage contemporaries)
eISBN: 978-0-307-76589-5
I. Title.
PS3557.A87J47 1992
813.54dc20 91-50720

v3.1

Thanks to Dave Friedman for computer expertise, to Marjorie Horvitz for stern copy editing and to Garth Battista for making everything easy.

Thanks to Dolly Frieds Possum Living, regrettably out of print, for its account of suburban survivalism.

And thanks to those who have taught me, believed in me and saved my bacon: Sam Seibert, Patrick McKiernan, David Spry, Douglass Paige, J. D. OHara, Madeleine Edmondson, Meredith White, Sarah Crichton, Amanda Urban and Gary Fisketjon. And especially to Gene and Helen Gates, to Ann and to Elizabeth. And to Susan.

I ended up driving all night. The snow eased off after a whileor, more likely, Id driven past the edge of the stormand I just kept going. Stopped for gas where you get off the interstate, then followed the state highway on up through the woods and through the open lands and through the empty little towns as it began to get light. Church steeples. The first human, in a red plaid jacket, bending over to scrape his windshield, blowing out clouds of breath in early-morning sun. Two more towns to go. Then, in the center of the second town, a left at the church and up that road for probably five miles. And at what must have been eight or nine oclock I finally got to the place where you turn off the town road to get down to Uncle Freds camp. Just a gap between fenceposts. Blinding sun by now; this absolutely blue sky and snow all around. And so silent when I turned the engine off. This was as far as I could take the car: they hadnt plowed down to where the camp was. So I just pulled as far over to the side of the road as I could, passenger door scraping against the snowbank. And I thought, Before it snows again you better get a carlength of that track cleared so you can pull in there off the road. Otherwise, next time the plow comes through here, I dont know, no need to finish the thought.

My God it was cold when I opened that car door. Inch or so of gin left in the bottle, but then I thought No, save that for when you get the stove going and the trailer good and warm. Id finished all but that last inch on the way up. Just drinking to keep drinking: it didnt make me any drunker. Or I guess any less drunk either. It wasnt supposed to be a good idea to be drunk and out in the cold, that was a common misconception. I mean, the misconception was that it kept you warm. Just hoped to hell there was some wood, and some paper to get it going, and maybe something lying around for kindling so I wouldnt have to try splitting logs in this kind of shape. Provided they hadnt stolen the God damn woodstove out of there too. Get that stove going and wash down about four five more Pamprins with the last of that gin, boy, and sleep the sleep of the just.

Now if only Danny had come alongId practically got down on my fucking kneeshe couldve been carving out that carlength of snow while old Dad was humping the wood inside and building the fire and getting the trailer warmed up for him to come in to. Heating up a can of beans if there was a can of beans. See, I would have had him sleep most of the way up, and then he could have stayed awake to feed the fire while old Dad took his rest. But, of course, stayed awake to do what? Oh, practice his guitar for a while, I suppose. Playing it through his Rockman so as not to wake old Dad. Well, fine, okay, but after a couple hours of that? So it mightve been just as well.

The trailer was maybe half a mile in from the town road, down a pair of ruts. Though with the snow the way it was, all you could see was a gap in the hemlocks or whatever they were. Just pine trees, probably, but I had that thing going in my head

And the hemlocks and the peacocks
And the peacocks and the hemlocks

or however the hell it went. That Wallace Stevens thing about the peacocks and the hemlocks. Then I tried to make up some joke, in my head, about the hemlock maneuver. And then the hemlock remover. A chainsaw: that could be the hemlock remover, although how would you set up the joke? Some inner life, boy. Thats about what it had come down to. At any rate, I grabbed a book of matches out of the dash, got out of the car, shouldered my shoulderbag, then reached in back and started trying to work the suitcase out between the front seats, banging it around the gearshift and the steering wheel. All the time thinking Fuck, wouldnt it have been easier just to bend down, release that little catch and flip the drivers seat forward?