I met the first man as I was going home from a dance at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall. I was being taken out of the dance by my two good friends.
To assert that the structure of this collection of interrelated short stories departs from the norm would be an understatement. Not that we’re talking James Joyce-style impenetrability or anything that is particularly hard to read on each individual basis, but the author makes some choices that are just not conventional. One of the most accessible examples is this quote. It is the opening line of the collection’s second story. It is a simple, declarative sentence that is challenging to the average reader in no distinctive way. And yet, it turns out to be emblematic of the overall design. But more on that later.
I was in Pig Alley…People entering the bars on First Avenue gave up their bodies. Then only the demons inhabiting us could be seen. Souls who had wronged each other were brought together here. The rapist met his victim, the jilted child discovered its mother. But nothing could be healed, the mirror was a knife dividing everything from itself, tears of false fellowship dripped on the bar.
This is a description of a particular place. In fact, “Pig Alley was a cheap place.” Take away the setting and the address and what is left could almost be a description for the setting of every page in the collection. These stories inhabit fertile ground already plowed and reaped by everything from every novel William Burroughs ever wrote to Trainspotting. Tat ground is the low place where the low-life are busy shooting up drugs one minute and engaging in criminal activity to afford to buy the drugs they are shooting up the next minute.
It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
Another of the breaks with conventional structuring of short story collections occurs at the end of the very first story. The narrator jumps out of the story he has been telling and leaps a few years into the future. A full page of information about what occurs at that point of time is related. And then, suddenly, the reader stops his narrative, muses for a moment and then challenges the reader directly.
But I never finished telling you about the two men. I never even started describing the second one, whom I met more or less in the middle of Puget Sound, travelling from Bremerton, Washington, to Seattle.
Here’s the thing about that opening line to “Two Men.” The narrator takes us through his entire story about the “first man” he met while “going home from a dance” without ever getting to the implication that the story is going to be about at least two men. After all, that is the title and the opening line builds on that. “Two Men” is a story about meeting one man. But don’t despair. Six stories later the narrator picks on his train of thought and finally gets around to his story about the second man, better known, of course, as “the other man.”
