Leaning on Willy

Hey guess, what?  This isn't a book review, mostly just because I'm not in the mood to be coherent or make sense.

The new novel by Portland stalwart, Willy Vlautin, came out a few weeks back.  He did some readings from it last night at Powell's and that was pretty cool. The book is called "Lean on Pete" and I just have a few thoughts about it.

First, this is probably my favorite book of the three he's now written.  Furthermore, and call me a fanboy if you want, but this is probably my favorite book of books.  I have a love/hate relationship with books, but I went out last week, and picked it up.  Then I took it to a bar, and began reading, finishing it 3 days later.  That is probably my 2nd fastest read ever (I read "High Fidelity" in less 2 days).  I'm particularly fond of certain authors (Harry Crews, chief among them), and this one just blew me away.

Secondly, this is about maybe the saddest book I've ever read.  That list of sad books includes "The Road" which I just read last fall.  I don't know, "The Road" wasn't that sad to me.  Maybe that is because I knew what to expect - apocalypse, the boy and his papa, cannibals - and even with all of that, there was a beauty and hope there that somewhat dampened all the dreariness.  But with Willy's book... while I guess there are certain things that I was certainly expecting to happen that did, things just never seemed to be looking up for Charley Thompson.  He just keeps going from one bad situation to another.

Perhaps, more than any of his books, this one just hit pretty close to home for me.  I've never been much around horse tracks... but I've been around horses.  My uncle was a carriage racer.  So were some good friends of ours who just lived up from the farm, and I hung out there a bunch.  My sister was a barrel-racer at the county fairs, and her son was riding them suckers by the time he was 3 (No fear in that boy!). When I was a lard-ass 27 year old in a heap of financial woes, I supplemented my income by cleaning out horse stalls up the road from my house one summer.  I lost a shit ton of weight with that gig, lowered my cholesterol, and made money while doing it.  There were a certain few horses I was fond of, but for the most part, they were all assholes... especially the few that had been recently gelded.  Poor guys.

And there was the part with the jealous ex... the Samoan.  I remember being 17 years old, living on the farm with just my dad.  I often times slept in his bed because for the most part, my pops would never come home until the morning when it was time to feed the pigs, and it was a huge comfortable water bed.  One morning, he comes in, wakes me up and tells me that if I see anyone I don't know coming up the driveway... there's a pistol by my head behind the mattress, and I should take it and shoot over their head. WTF?!  I was 17!  Soon after, some dude was calling the house asking for my dad, and after about 3 or 4 times, I told him to never call there again or I would cut his nuts off.  He never did call again after that.  Anyway, I'm rambling... they're very different situations, but reading Willy's book brought a lot of that back for me.

That's really all I got to say about it.  I'm quite looking forward to the Richmond Fontaine show tomorrow night at the Doug Fir.  That's Willy's band.  They are one of the most positive, if not the most positive, forces going for me in this town.  I've had a terrible time of it lately, and I'm hoping they can bring it all into perspective for me.  Sometimes you gotta get down really low to the ground before you can stand back up.  Willy speaks a lot about using characters in his writing to help himself navigate through the trials of life, and well, I'm thankful to have his writing and music to do the same for myself.  Does that even make sense?  Well, I know what I mean, and that's all that really matters.

A small part of me hopes that "Lean on Pete" makes it to the big screen.