Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan Read Free Book Online

we all were, how everybody else should really think about a career in music. Josh played “Stairway to Heaven,” and we got loud, singing along. Darius said, “Keep it down, man! We don’t need everybody thinking this is the sin wagon.”
    The rain stopped. It was time to go. Two of the guys planned to leave in the morning, and I had to start walking if I wanted to make the overlook in time for the candle-lighting. They went with me as far as the place where the main path split off toward the stage. They each embraced me. Jake said to call them if I ever had “a situation that needs clearing up.” Darius said God bless me, with meaning eyes. Then he said, “Hey, man, if you write about us, can I just ask one thing?”
    “Of course,” I said.
    “Put in there that we love God,” he said. “You can say we’re crazy, but say that we love God.”
    The climb was long and steep. At the top was a thing that looked like a backyard deck. It jutted out over the valley, commanding an unobstructed view. Kids hung all over it like lemurs or something.
    I pardoned my way to the edge, where the cliff dropped away. It was dark and then suddenly darker—pitch. They had shut off the lights at the sides of the stage. Little pinpricks appeared, moving along the aisles. We used to do candles like this at church, when I was a kid, on Christmas Eve. You light the edges, and the edges spread inward. The rate of spread increases exponentially, and the effect was so unexpected, when, at the end, you had half the group lighting the other half’s candles, it always seemed like somebody flipped a switch. That’s how it seemed now.
    The clouds had moved off—the bright stars were out again. There were fireflies in the trees all over, and spread before me, far below, was a carpet of burning candles, tiny flames, many ten thousands. I was suspended in a black sphere full of flickering light.
    Sure I thought about Nuremberg. But mostly I thought of Darius, Jake, Josh, Bub, Ritter, and Pee Wee, whom I doubted I’d ever see again, whom I’d come to love, and who loved God—for it’s true, I would have said it even if Darius hadn’t asked me to, it may be the truest thing I will have written here: they were crazy, and they loved God—and I thought about the unimpeachable dignity of that, which I never was capable of. Knowing it isn’t true doesn’t mean you would be strong enough to believe if it were. Six of those glowing specks in the valley were theirs.
    I was shown, in a moment of time, the ring of their faces around the fire, each one separate, each one radiant with what Paul calls, strangely, “assurance of hope.” It seemed wrong of reality not to reward such souls.
    There are lines in a Czeslaw Milosz poem:
     
And if they all, kneeling with poised palms, millions, billions of them, ended together with their illusion?
I shall never agree. I will give them the crown.
The human mind is splendid; lips powerful, and the summons so great it must open Paradise.
    If one could only say it and mean it.
    They all blew out their candles at the same instant, and the valley—the actual geographical feature—filled with smoke, there were so many.
    I left at dawn, while creation slept.

 
     
FEET IN SMOKE
     
    On the morning of April 21, 1995, my elder brother, Worth (short for Elsworth), put his mouth to a microphone in a garage in Lexington, Kentucky, and in the strict sense of having been “shocked to death,” was electrocuted. He and his band, the Moviegoers, had stopped for a day to rehearse on their way from Chicago to a concert in Tennessee, where I was in school. Just a couple of days earlier, he had called to ask if there were any songs I wanted to hear at the show. I asked for something new, a song he’d written and played for me the last time I’d seen him, on Christmas Day. Our holidays always end the same way, with the two of us up late drinking and trying out our “tunes” on each other. There’s something biologically