Danny the Ambulance is a novel about a man who walks into a bar and over the course of the night realizes everyone in the bar is named Danny.
The Jury Room feels like a long thin unendurable shack and the rain pouring down overtop has the cadence and impact of tiny hammers falling on it. With climate change heralding the introduction of continual atmospheric rivers in the western United States the electrician is king, so that is what I am, King Electric, a business name that makes me shudder but that I know will do well in Santa Cruz because of its quirkiness mixed with its vaguely libertarian undertones. Surf communities are famous for this paradox or contradictoriness or whatever someone should call this knotty gnarly thing that simply doesn’t make sense until you think of the most elementary psychology, the behavioral atmosphere of chill and mellow outlook, paired with the militant and despotic programme to enforce chill and mellow behaviors; this is our ocean and this is our surf and we will not die to protect it, but we will kill. Or if you think of surf and turf, surf is pacific flow and turf is querulous propriety. We love our beautiful land on which we read mandalas and consider the phases of the moon that tame and wild our oceans, and no government will ever interfere with the spirituality of our earthly existence. That’s why there’s smoking bars in Santa Cruz. But paired with this do-it-yourself laissez-faire entrepreneurial spirit of the beach town, this individual streak that pretends towards community, is a lack of infrastructure to guard the town against climactic disruption and catastrophism that a government agency is designed to step in to handle; basically, just a forecast of rain can cause a power outage in twenty neighborhoods. I couldn’t have predicted this boon to business, but I can bask in and rule over it. At least this is what I say to Danny, much of this is what I say to Danny, and it’s full of unearned judgments I haven’t even made about a place I’ve only just moved to and barely observed. I have a habit of lying, at least this is what a lot of people who know me well would say about me, but those who know me really really well would say, well, he just likes talking. He likes creating something out of nothing, which is what talking is. No one would say that last part. No one knows me that well. I’m not saying I’m unknowable, that that’s particular to me, I’m just saying no one knows me that well, I’m convinced of it. I’m not saying no one can know me. I’m just saying I don’t know. I don’t know.
While talking to Danny I hadn’t noticed the woman who had come in and is now reading a book a couple stools away at the bar. Danny’s gone now and I’m two drinks in and I don’t know where he’d started but I know where he isn’t, which is here, and it’s cleared the optical way to see this woman reading at the bar. When you’ve been going to bars as long as I have you learn that there aren’t really goodbyes and there are barely hellos, it’s all in medias res, you’re just in the conversation, and then there’s a certain point that you’re not. You don’t even always notice that point. I used to read at bars until I got frustrated with being interrupted reading at bars, and it was always the same thing: What are you reading, someone would say, and I’d say Well nothing now, and that would either cause a fight or, worse, the interlocutor wouldn’t notice the tone and would continue asking about it, and then they would tell me everything they’ve ever read in their life, which almost invariably wasn’t much, and then they would ask me how I can read in a bar, and why, and then eventually they were just talking about themselves. I know I’ve already said this. I know I’ve already said this but what I said before was sort of different. I know I’m drunk already and I know I’m drunk already because I’m talking too much and it isn’t consistent, like how I keep ordering the same drink but eventually the same drink tastes different, bourbon tastes like diesel until the fourth time it tastes like caramel corn. The thing I like about bars is I don’t actually have to talk about myself, any question is a pretense to get the questioner going about what they actually want to talk about, which is themselves, and then they go, and I almost never have to talk again, I just listen. But I don’t know that I like listening. I know that I hate talking. But do I hate being drunk I don’t know. I don’t know.
The woman is reading the book but more than reading the book is crying over the book. It’s not soft tears but sobs and shudders and sometimes she lifts the open book and closes it over her face, like it’s trying to eat her. But books don’t have teeth or gums. But still it’s a hardcover and I feel like repeated smacks are going to have a cumulative effect, like how a glass cup microfractures every time you knock it against a surface, even gently, until it chips. The point of actual cracking is not a sudden event but one that’s been taking place almost stratally, layers and layers of invisible damage. Maybe I’m just talking about my personality now. I’m not talking at all actually. This is why I just listen, but I wonder if listening to drunks is the same as a glass being softly battered all of the time.
Are you okay, I say to the woman whose glasses are fogged with emotional condensation. Is the book that bad, I say.
She turns her head slowly toward me, a rotation of the face while she cradles the back of the head with her palm so her elbow is splayed now on the bar, face at degree 0 and elbow at degree 180. Directly above her hangs from a thin wire a plaster-cast baby with blood on it. The blood is not on its mouth, as you would expect, but blotching both its elbows. I think about Rorschach images, this is a red blot, what does the left elbow blood blot resemble to me? It resembles a baby hanging from a wire from the ceiling of a dark bar with blood on its elbows. Why did I not notice this baby before, I wonder. It’s a noticeable baby. Are there other babies I’m not noticing, I wonder. What do you think of the Iliad, she says to me.
Wut, I say.
What do you think of the Iliad, she says to me.
By Homer? I say.
Yes, she says.
I don’t really have thoughts about the Iliad, I say. What do you think of the Iliad?
When I think of the Iliad, the woman says, I think of its relation to the Odyssey. And then I think of the relation of the movie Alien to its sequel, Aliens. They’re completely disparate genres because their scales of action are so different, and their concerns. Alien is a psychological horror thriller that happens to be set in space. But it’s all about space; it’s claustrophobic because it takes place on a small ship in the vastness of infinity, infinite at least in relation to our ability to conceive of finitude, space, and this contrast makes the space of the ship infinitely smaller. And yet the ship is still relatively enormous in relation to the human body, and the human body is still relatively small in relation to the alien body of the alien monster that newly inhabits and terrorizes the ship, and so the ship, which is a place, becomes space, because it has been defamiliarized, newly estranged by the alienizing presence of the alien who may be hiding in any area of the ship, the alien who conquers space by being able to become space, itself, who can change its shape and hide anywhere, it’s unnoticeable as long as it chooses to escape notice, and yet it invests all of space with its possible lethal presence. Every moment in that movie spans an eternity, because of all the anxiety of it. Aliens, the woman continues, wiping the steam off her glasses with a bar napkin and peering at them, not at me through them, is an action adventure film. There is a whole brood of aliens and a whole cadre of military crew and each member of each race is expendable, it’s no longer a dramatization of the struggle to survive but a staging of the cheapness of life, total war and total carnage. It’s a grand theater of war. That’s James Cameron’s specialty, the scale of the large, which makes drama small. That’s Aliens. Ridley Scott works more minimalistically, and so the human and emotional drama is enormous. That’s Alien. The Iliad is Aliens, but I don’t know that I can say the Odyssey is Alien. That’s my current quandary, she says, and looks up at me for the first time. Her eyes are bloodshot, her brain hair, the brown hair over her naked brain, is mousy, her complexion pale. She is wearing a cream-colored fur coat, and underneath it a black and gray sweater with reindeer on it, or the shadowy outlines of reindeer. It’s not even cold in Santa Cruz, or in the bar, but I guess it is raining. But it only began raining while I was in the bar. But she’s not even wet. I can only think of lists of things that are not, negative lists. I know this about myself. When I try to think of what is, of what exists, it’s always only ludicrous guesswork, chimeras of the real and the unreal, but that’s only apparent to others.
This quandary is why you’re crying at the bar? I say.
No, she says. I’m crying from a catastrophe, not a quandary. A quandary is something that can be solved. I’m crying from something that is total ruination, she says.
Why does the Odyssey have to be Alien? I say. Can’t it be something else?
It would be neater, it would fit into a pre-established category, even if that category is arbitrary, a personal category, a personal alphabet, it would make me feel better, she says, if I could just say the Iliad is James Cameron’s Aliens, and the Odyssey is Ridley Scott’s Alien. It would be easier to write about, she says.
Why can’t the Odyssey be Alien, I say.
Because the only thing the Odyssey and Alien have in common, really, is that they follow one main character, Odysseus and Ripley, respectively, she says. Otherwise they have nothing in common; the Odyssey has more in common with the Iliad than Alien has in common with Aliens. The Odyssey isn’t cramped, there’s no narrative-long confinement to one space, there’s confinement to many different spaces which, ironically, implies movement and freedom, throughout the whole world in this case, and there are huge battles, also, or at least skirmishes, and there’s not just one monster that becomes the negative foil to the main character, Odysseus. The enemy is the whole world. The enemy is the gods.
Why don’t you just bend the criteria a little, then, I say. Can’t the Odyssey and the Iliad both just be James Cameron movies? What if the Iliad is Aliens by James Cameron, and the Odyssey is Avatar by James Cameron?
She starts crying again, but this time takes her glasses off first. This time too it’s not sobs or anything guttural, but tears sliding out her eyes. Her tears are a visual experience. She’s looking at me, although often I haven’t been looking at her. I can only look at someone when they’re not looking at me. It’s a game of chicken. I’m a coward. I look at someone until they look at me, and then I turn my head. This time though I turn to her when I say the word avatar, and she turns to me, too, and the tears slide out as the glasses slide off, or she slides them off with her fingers, whatever. Maybe, she says, you can help me with my other quandary.
I thought you said it was a catastrophe, I say.
I’m a catastrophe, she says, not my problem. Hell isn’t other people, she says. Hell is Alien, by Homer.
What’s your quandtastrophe, I say.
I’m writing my dissertation on the sestina, she says, do you know it?
No, I say.
Maybe you can’t help me, she says. She slides down to the bar again, her elbows splaying out on the ledge like seal fins on a rock. What is it you do? she says.
I’m in real estate, I say.
You definitely can’t help me, she says.
What’s a sestina, I say.
The sestina is a poetic form, she says. It’s maybe the most difficult to write in, difficult because the most repetitive and tedious. Each stanza is six lines, and each line ends with one predetermined word. In the next stanza, the lines end with the same predetermined words, but in a different order. You switch the order of the word-ending lines depending on their positioning in the previous stanza. If the sixth and last line of the first stanza ends in the word bluejay, for example, then the first line of the next stanza will end in the word bluejay. Next, if the first line of the first stanza ends in the word blowjob, the second line of the second stanza will end with the word blowjob. If the penultimate, sorry, the fifth line of the first stanza ends in the word Betelgeuse, then the third line of the second stanza will end in the word Betelgeuse. If the second line of the first stanza ends in the word Bojack, the fourth line of the second stanza ends in the word Bojack. If the fourth line of the first stanza ends in the word broadjump, the fifth line of the second stanza ends in the word broadjump. If the third line of the first stanza ends in the word breadjoy, then the sixth and final line of the new second stanza will end on the word breadjoy.
Even though breadjoy isn’t a word, I say.
In a poem, the woman says, whatever assemblage of language is phonemically sound is a word.
Is phonemically sound a pun, I say.
Yes, she says.
I would like to read that poem, I say.
I would like to write it, she says. The next stanza will be organized according to the same logic, until there are six full stanzas. Finally, the seventh stanza is three lines. The three lines in this case do not need to follow the pattern of the previous stanzas’ end line; they couldn’t, after all, being only three. Nonetheless the three lines must now incorporate all six of the poem’s repeating words.
So the poem could conceivably end:
Bojack’s breadjoy is
to Betelgeuse’s broadjump
as a blowjob’s to a bluejay
I say, marking off the endlines aloud by pointing up my thumb, and then pointing up my pointer, and then my middle finger, so I’m holding three fingers aloft.
Yes, the woman says. You could certainly end the poem that way, in fact it would be innovative. The sestina is a very old form but it isn’t ancient, maybe half a millennium old. It’s a French form. It drives writers insane and, in many creative writing classes, teachers will teach a sestina as a sort of hazing ritual, a way of testing to see if you, the aspiring writer, know what you’re getting into with poetry. The redundancy of it, the emptiness, the plodding, the tedium, the stiltedness. Most people don’t write in sestinas for this reason, and it’s not widely used because most people don’t see the point in doing it, the function. On the other hand some of the most beautiful poems I have ever read are sestinas. I have discovered in the sestina form a form of devotion rarely seen in other forms; why else recycle the same words unless through an act of devotion? To turn rote repetition into chanting devotion, to turn reuse into reverence. These same recalled words must be used in different ways, with different syntactical functions and different contextualizations, to keep the sestina fresh and turning. You use the word jack as an end line word, for example, and you discover all its potential, or at least six points of potential: Jack or Jill, jack of the game jacks, the second half of carjack, jacked up on coffee, jack- / fruit enjambed to the next line, etc. These verbal transformations herald for me, or are metaphorical for, the same sorts of transformations we seek to find in life, the word becomes another word as a person meets their Other and is changed by and even perhaps into their Other, the human life is halved and metamorphosed as they turn / to something or someone else (fruiting)—here the woman pantomimes parentheses by turning to me, taking the pointer finger of each hand, and drawing in the air vertical semicircles as she says fruiting—the queering of the line and of the word, all of these potentialities are expressed by the form of the sestina itself, it’s primrose promise of literally literary revolution. It’s sexy, she says, and smiles. She’s maybe lost, or transformed. I’ve been writing about this for eight years, she says, and her smile drops.
What are you calling the dissertation? I say.
Sex Tina, she says. That’s the problem.
That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard, I say, and I think it is, actually, the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. I can’t tell whether it’s brilliant or dumb, so I think it must be brilliant. Why is that the problem, I say.
Because someone just came out with a book of sestinas last month called Sexy Tinas, she says, and more tears slide out her eyes. I don’t know how it’s possible but there’s a tear sliding down the rim of one monocle of her glasses. One circle? Half of her glasses? I realize I don’t know how to refer to half of one’s glasses. To her glass? I think this as I watch the transparent tear on the transparent medium. This was my niche, she says, no one was writing about this, and now this comes out, and the author is being written about in The New York Times as revolutionary, as radically reinventing and reinvesting an old form, and it has all the same themes as the ones I am writing about, immanence, transcendence, queer lyrics, radical ruptures, and now everyone will think I copied her, even though I’ve worked on this for nearly a decade now, not only because it’s about the same subject, but because it has the same name. And this bizarro double of me, this binary star Betelgeuse, has discovered the only name possible for the book—even if it resembles a joke, and maybe because it resembles a joke, it has to be the name of the book, it can’t be any other name, the name of the form demands it—and now I can’t call it that. Now my book has no name.
I look at the woman who looks ahead at the mirror on the back of the bar’s backing, reflecting her stare back at her. Then I look at the mirror and I see in my periphery my reflection, and see in my main focus her reflection. There’s a reflected baby foot high above us; I feel a tightening in my chest, suddenly, and the urge also suddenly to shit my pants. I turn myself on my stool to face her. Hey, I say. What’s your name?
She meets me almost as quickly, turns her torso for the first time, too, towards me. Her anxiety seems to mimic mine; it doesn’t feel authentic, I think, it’s mine, I think, it’s mine. Give it back, I think. She puts on a smile. Like it’s a hat she’s trying on. She says, My name’s Danny. What’s yours? she says.
Danny Joseph is boring.
Excerpted from Danny the Ambulance, originally published by Outpost19 (2023).
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