THOMAS LARSON

(River Teeth 18.2 Spring, 2017)

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As early as I can remember, my father hated Catholics. Actually, he despised all religious people. He called believers hypocrites; priests and pastors, pimps. He rarely spoke of this enmity or, for that matter, much else personal, including his years aboard a Pacific Ocean supply ship during the Second World War. “Hurry up and wait,” he told my brothers and me. That was the only combat he faced. No story bayoneting Japs ever emerged. Maybe, contrary to my comic-book idea of war then, there wasn’t any. So, when he unloaded on religion, I was piqued by the sibilant sounds of those scandalous words, hypocrites and pimps, and the frosty certainty with which he iced his dismissal.

His disdain for God’s henchmen on earth began and ended with two betrayals—one, his body, the other, his soul, though he would have denied the latter had any substance left. Born in 1914, in Evanston, Illinois, he was given up at birth, probably by immigrants, a Bohemian mother and a Swedish father. That day, he was adopted by the childless Larsons, (another) Swedish father who was irascible and belt-prone and an English mother who cradled the baby to daily mass. They named him John Joseph Milton, the first two referencing Jesus, the third an artistic aspiration. My mother said Dad figured out long before he asked them about his adoption that he wasn’t theirs—what gave it away was his swarthy skin and his inborn suspiciousness.

(Essay Daily December 16, 2015)

The surprise? That I single out the male authors. That I count twenty authors total, thirteen men. That my distaste is palpable. Find them sexist, show-off-y, self-infatuated. Was unprepared for such a response. In me. What the passage of twenty years (from 1995 to 2015) since I first read these pieces can do. It’s the self-righteousness that’s so bothersome. The wooliness of having put it behind me or I have no doubts so no reflection turns the bearing as though the past were father to the man. How glossily several pieces calibrate their inner Brett Easton Ellis in whom the boy demands—be he PFC, rookie, deckhand, red-shirt—to ring the remembrance.

What I mean is. John Turturro in Barton Fink. Michael Keaton in Birdman. The boy in the man who is ever what he was. Who LP’s Sticky Fingers or Blonde on Blonde with unclogged reverence. Boys in men other men admire. Who reel highlights, who wash-and-wield a Buick 6, who used to be, if not are, some woman’s used-to-be. Those literary varietals—the stooge incarnate or the male ingénue. Whose sense of self comes at the boy’s behest.

(Forth Magazine November 10, 2015)

Only later, walking back—after he attacks—do I realize that earlier, the first time by, I marked this tawny pit just as he raised his paw-lain head beside his seated keeper.

Both sat porch-fixed-safe behind a fenced-in yard—and before a rough brick, two-story duplex, dormers and posts Reconstruction-made.

Brow twitching, mouth shutting, the dog (like me) must have heard the woman whisper, “Now, Killer.” His glare more than reimbursed her: You’re too close. Get on by. I mean it.

I complied, quick-stepping, the danger flinching on my skin as though I’d stirred a serpent.

(Indiana Voice Journal November 5, 2015)

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One day, in 2014, in midsummer, I drive by a church in my San Diego neighborhood: there’s an intriguing announcement on the little brick-monument marquee out front, the Sunday homiletic: “God on Film: Noah.” The new film, which I’ve seen—bewitchingly watchable and, at times, mawkishly funny—was created and directed by Darrin Aronofsky and stars Russell Crowe. I’m intrigued by a host of questions. What do Christians think about this movie’s representation of their faith or, at least, one of their defining legends, Noah and the flood? What does a movie based on the Bible do to the Bible? How do we read Scripture after seeing the film? How do we judge what the movie should be faithful to, especially if the Bible is deemed sacred, which, in this case, it has, and the film, to some degree, has desacralized the book via film?

(Ray's Road Review Fall 2015)

This campus I’m walking through, once my undergraduate home, has tripled in size, as much up as out. Its new luxury condos loom above treeless sidewalks. Star-blocking apartment units squat on land once lazily humped by parking lots, Camrys and Accords now garaged underneath.

There, in an Italian restaurant/bar, where a jug band played every Thursday, a space-station-like admin-building has landed, glass-enclosed, a Chronos humming. Farther on, beside a six-story research lab, passels of students in football T’s, the black and the gold, recount in echoing swats their agony that the team, unbeaten till today, has lost. An alarm bleeps, a beer can rolls, and three pony-tailed blondes, their backwards-capped dates behind them, clop by.

(Lehigh Valley Vanguard October 3, 2015)

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Not long ago, my artist-friend Johanna and I were talking about why it is that some Christians believe only in the God of the Bible—the flood launcher, the sin avenger, Yahweh or Adonai or Jehovah or the God of Abraham, who watched without remorse, apparently wanting the Romans to nail Christ to the cross—when, in fact, many of the faithful don’t accept that version of the deity at all. Their idea of God is much more benign, Clara Barton-like, more Jesus-y than tyrannical. I knew that Johanna was raised a Christian and that later she rebelled. Anymore, I wasn’t sure how she defined God or even where he was in her life. Had he gone away? For good? Had he returned? With forgiveness? Just how Biblical of a God was he?

(Guernica August 5, 2015)

Is it just me or do you, too, notice that the preponderance of published and reviewed books about medical matters are by doctors, not patients? Is this just my ego griping, the author of a memoir about heart disease, who lingers, uncalled, in the waiting room of the healthcare debate? Perhaps. But I want my voice heard because patients speak to health and illness as participants and not, as doctors do, as witnesses. It’s a perspective largely neglected in our culture. If the media gatekeepers show any interest in what we write, it’s to question our credentials. What medical authority does the patient have in a system run by experts?

I’ll tell you mine. I’m a survivor of three heart attacks over a recent five-year period in which I was shocked awake to my problems: the deadline stress of a journalist, extra weight, crappy diet, and a lousy genetic hand—all of which caused the disease. I was saved by three angioplasties but I received no nutritional or lifestyle advice, and nary a nod to that health-trade axiom, “patient empowerment.” I got stents, I got drugs, I got fixed, but I felt a divide between me and my overburdened cardiologists. Every visit to the doc, I would count 20 other discouraged people waiting for their precious eight to ten minutes. I put these things in a memoir—a patient’s story. But mine, like thousands of others, has fallen by the wayside, due in part to our media’s imperial deference to doctors and advice-hawkers.