Luke Goebel - Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

About twenty pages into Luke B. Goebel's Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, I realized I was reading with one hand holding my forehead and one balled at my waist, kind of clenched and gazing down into the paper, like a man soon to be converged upon. Goebel's testimony comes on like that: engrossing, fanatical, full of private grief, and yet, at the same time, charismatic, tender, and intrepid, aglow with more spirit than most Americans have the right to wield.

Blake Butler, author of Nothing and Scorch Atlas

I'm in love with language again, because Luke B. Goebel is not afraid to take us back through the gullet of loss into the chaos of words. Someone burns a manuscript in Texas; someone's speed sets a life on fire; a heart is beaten nearly to death, the road itself is the trip, a man is decreated back to his animal past better, beyond ego, beautiful, and look: there's an American dreamscape left. There's a reason to go on.

Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Liberty's Excess and Dora: A Headcase

Luke may be one of the last few geniuses we have left in this life. I mean that. He's a good boy with a lot of pain in his heart.

Scott McClanahan, author of Crapalachia and Hill William

The protagonist of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours doesn't make it easy for us, channeling as he does Barry Hannah and Denis Johnson by way of Rick Bass and Dennis Hopper, and self-presenting as yet another damaged romantic who thinks it's always time to play the cowboy, skating in and out of sense. He can't see right, and he's haunted by nearly everything. He's trying to open up or shut himself down or at least get a hold of himself. He's trying to make do with what he's done, while he reminds us that we're all, one way or another, in that position.

Jim Shepard, National Book Award finalist and author of the short story collections You Think That's Bad and Like You'd Understand, Anyway

IN THE HOSPITAL. In the gown. On the gurney. Strange me but I love it here. I like the inside. I'd rather be well, but I love to hear the people speak. An old woman in her room wants to speak sputum. I hear garbage bags being opened. I'm on a hospital bed not a gurney. I hear crinkling sounds. The rush and flock of life's little hospital-bound disasters. Even in my little room. I can't believe I get to be in the world. I have always felt like I'm getting away with something being alive. Even though it's the usual cases of shit nervous breakdowns on peyote, cowering in my mind, getting myself back together with it, moving from hotel to hospital to behind the wheel.

How about a JOKE: A man, let's call him Harry. Harry goes into an interview in old New York City. There is a great big man behind the desk, an outdoorsman-looking man, even in his finery and top office. You can tell he is an outdoorsman, among other things, by the occasional artifact placed here or there, the pictures on his desk of his duck-hunting dog, by the duck-hunting dog itself, Buck, lying on his carpeted floor. Let's say the interview starts and Harry has terrible gas. He is trying to hold it. He's a young guy looking for a first real gig in the city. He has some good connections and a highfalutin education. He answers the first question fine but out comes Harry flatulating. Luckily, Harry thinks, Buck is nearby. He pins it off on the dog. Pretends nothing has happened. Looks at Buck briefly. Pretends to be polite about the indiscretion. Pretends he's hardly even noticed, he's such a guy, Harry is. Well, you know jokes. Every step of the interview, bwaaaarp, another fart from young nervous Harry. What can you do for me, the old man barks, followed by a further line of questioning. Qualifications? Fwaaart. The old man looks at Harry, Harry looks at Buck, disapprovingly. The interview is going great, Harry decides, as the old man thinks it's Buck. Pretty soon, Harry is sure he has it in the bag! He's bagged the buck by luck by Buck's being there in the room. What luck the old man had a dog! Right then, Harry can't hold it in anymore. He lets one go. Buck, Buck, the old man shouts. Bucky, B U C K! Get the hell away from that guy before he shits all over you, the old man says.

I am to have a CTscan.

See, I came to the hospital. No one or me knew what went wrong. Rib pain, lung pain, stomach pain, pain in the guts and groin. Groaning pain doubled me over.

See, I start to hate the old woman in the unseen room. I yell for her to quiet down. She gets sandwiches, I hear, which I don't get any of. She talks of Anus Parade Nursing Home. I miss so many words. I get others wrong. I have a life of taking trips with my little mind, all freaked over from long ago and still traveling from the ground out of my head, moving my body around like a Cracker Jack.

I can partly see a sign outside that woman's door. Can't make out the words or pictures. A doctor comes and wears a front plastic coating, gloves, eye gear.

He enters her.

I pick apart a newspaper in my gown. I find the inside pages with pictures of steak, potatoes, Mr. Clean.

We had an IGA we had called Wagner's in Ohio. That's where I grew up: Ohio. It was all pick-up trucks and football, basketball, baseball, then football again. My brother was there, older than I. My sister came next after me. Our church everyone went inside, sun or rain. All the seasons. We had crazy parents who were kids themselves, insane, sweating, shouting and watching everything in sight Dad had a Connecticut Crusher hat in the hall closet which the hall had a beautiful cold stone floor made of different shaped real tiles cemented together and cobbled. He had suits and long herringbone coats. He had shoes in there. Hat and ties. Things in the coat pockets. Mints and money. He had a job at a fortune 500 company in the Midwest. He had our diesel Mercedes with the leather and the diamond patterns in the leather and all that road all over the place. He had cigs on the way to take us to school far away from where we lived, him gagging and spitting out the window, and crazed, dressed like a pro. Montessori was the school, and our mother found it for us our mother who tried and tried, fought and hoarded the family money dressed in men's clothes. We had the 80s in America, America, America and the whole trip of being a self within a family within a nation of movies, vacuum cleaners, the whole nine yachts Reagan, Dennis Hopper, real records on the wheel in a house, the house we bought from family within our family, with the wood stove with their last name's initial emblazed in gold, movies and no war, just politics, president wearing makeup, hardly any places to raise a chicken or grow a vegetable where most people were going and us with cornfields in the backyard, the little Ohio woods, still plenty of room for chickens and veggies, but also cold weather and the need to go to work for more money in the bank.

Who am I, now, but a weird patient part of all this world, in a little room with a sign about pain? It ranks pain from No Pain, to 1,2,3Mild Pain, 4,5,6Moderate Pain, 7,8,9Severe Pain with faces that show increased crucifixion. 10 is Worst Possible and the face looks about right for the living. I can take the body's betrayal, at first, I think, but I think of Catherine and I'm done for, nearly.

I told her, when she left me, over the telephone, that I had memorized her feet, I told her. I had them sunk in my mind, I told her. I had lust on all over for them, I told her. She waited on me to prove it. She was always waiting on Yours Truly to win her, or I misunderstood. The first times we were together I sucked her feet whole. I licked her from crack to crack. I sat back on her couch, and she stood on the arm and the back of the sofa and lowered herself down to my taste. This was on a terrific street up above a China person's restaurant in NYC. I always feel like a little guy trying to prove I can. She is beyond immaculate. Then I went nuts along her. Mouthed everything.