James Brown - This River: a memoir

Table of Contents

Praise for This River

Sometimes a way to gauge the quality of a creation is to think about what it took, what was overcome, what price it extracted. In this case, the proof is in your hands. This River is raw and palpable and beats like a heart. Brown gave everything he had: infinite strength, exacting discipline, fearsome courage. When you put this book down, trust me, you will think about it for a long time.

Robert Olmstead, author of the national bestseller
Coal Black Horse and winner of the Chicago Heartland Award

James Brown has shaped from the English language something rather different: an exacting, muscular prose both tender and unforgiving, rigorously concise in its refusal to dilute the darkest realities and yet capacious and nuanced in its pursuit of redemption and familial love. Brown is one of our most accomplished writers, and this brilliant memoir among the finest of its kind.

B.H. Fairchild, author of the National Book Critics
Circle Awardwinning Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower
Midwest and National Book Award Finalist for The Art of the Lathe

James Browns provocative, beautifully written and gut wrenching memoir illuminates a life rich in those elemental passions that govern our livesanger, fear, depression, death, and love. Sometimes tender, sometimes manic, but always wise and insightful, This River never falters in the muscularity of the writing, all of it filled with riveting details that kept this reader turning the pages as fast as he could read them. Mesmerizing from beginning to end. Unforgettable.

Duff Brenna, author of The Book of Mamie, winner of the
AWP Award for Best Novel, and Too Cool, a
New York Times Notable Book of the Year

This is a harrowing and beautiful memoir, shot through with excess and violence and shocking, heart-stopping compassion. James Brown renders his extraordinary life in tight, muscular prose, sparing neither himself nor the reader the hard lessons of addiction and recovery. The result is an unforgettable book, stripped of irony and pretense, that lays bare the darknessand the lightin all of us.

Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Corpus Christi: Stories

Sequel to Browns indelible Los Angeles Diaries, this cycle of linked narratives is equally powerful and complete in itself. Browns profoundly authentic story of Brown, survivor of sibling suicides, drinker, user, writer, teacher, father, husband, is as fully imagined as it is unsparing. In speaking from the edge of loss, Browns eloquence recalls Robert Lowells my eyes have seen what my hand did.DeWitt Henry, author of Safe Suicide

Of this book, earlier versions of chapters appeared in: This River and Dirty Moves in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. The latter piece was also reprinted in Best American Sports Writing (Houghton Mifflin) and Fathers and Sons and Sports: An Anthology of Great American Sports Writing (ESPN Books). Some Kind of Animal was published in GQ under the title The Beast in Me, Talking to the Dead appeared in the Santa Monica Review, Instructions on the Use of Alcohol was published in Redivider: A Journal of New Literature under the title How Some of Us Become Drunks and Junkies, and Blood and Duplicity appeared in Ploughshares under the title Missing the Dead.

TALKING TO THE DEAD

Theres another side to this story, when my brother and sister visit late at night, or in the early morning hours, and we simply talk. They are glad to see me again, as I am glad to see them, and we like to catch up on things. If only for a brief while, I am dreaming my brother and sister alive, and Im grateful for their company.

Other times Ill wake up shouting, the tips of my hair damp with sweat. Paula says that when I sleep my legs are like live wires. She even writes a poem about it. A dark poem about nightmares and personal demons. Afterwards, Ill lie in bed for hours, afraid to close my eyes. Add to the mix my long-standing battle with depression and Im blessed with what in the field of psychopathology is regarded as a deeply disturbed mind. These are the things that inspire Paula to put such personal matters to paper. Were married by this time, and I suppose, in some ways, that gives her the right.

Not a day goes by where I dont think of my dead brother and sister, my dead father, too, and now, most recently, my dead ex-wife. I could be in the middle of a conference with a student at the college where I teach and itll flash on me, my brother, recoiling from the gunshot that took his life. I could be driving home and Ill see my sister sprawled out on the concrete bank of the Los Angeles River, her limbs twisted in all the wrong directions. I try not to imagine her bleeding. I try to blank out how the blood drains, the pool widening around her. The fall from the overpass wasnt more than twenty-five, thirty feet, and I doubt she died on impact. The skull, Im sure it cracked, but the heart may have continued to pulse. I pray she went into shock quickly, and alive or not, for however long she possibly lingered, that mercifully she soon felt nothing. And I cannot pass a hospital, any hospital, without hearing the sickening thump-and-hiss of the ventilator on which both my father and ex-wife spent their final days, unable to speak.

I try to forget these things.

I try to push them out of my thoughts.

If its during the day, and I drink enough, Ill sometimes succeed. But at night when I fall asleep, as the alcohol wears off and the subconscious comes into play, all bets are off. My brother shot himself in bed, and often my dreams fuse with memory, so that I find myself reliving a heightened version of the actual experience, cleaning up his room after the suicide, etching into my mind images of crystallized blood and fragments of bone. These dreams, or visions, whatever youd like to call them, unroll frame-by-frame, in glimpses and flashes, and for years theyve kept me from countless hours of sleep.

Time after time the dream that begins with promise quickly grows dark, and Im returned to consciousness by Paula shaking me, shouting, wake up, wake up. Eventually her patience wears thin, and one morning over coffee, she confronts me.

You need to get help.

What do you mean?

You know exactly what I mean. She reaches across the kitchen table and touches my temple with her fingers. Its a circus in there, and you dont even see it. Im worried. Ive been worried a long time, Jim, and I really dont know how much more you can take of this. She only uses my name when she wants to instruct, and her tone is sincere. Every night you drink until you pass out because you cant sleep, but the drinking only makes the nightmares worse. Something has to give, she says. There must be some kind of medication you can take.

Medication, I think, is for the truly troubled psyche, and I dont see myself quite that far down the line. And strangely enough for an alcoholic-slash-addict, I dont want to get strung out on whatever some doctor might prescribe. Depression and nightmares, however, frequently go hand-inhand, and I figure that if I can remedy one, Im bound to see improvement in the other. Im also not altogether enamored by the idea of bearing my soul to a psychiatrist, so in my initial plan of attack I make an appointment with a general practitioner. On my first visit I tell him that Im depressed.