THOMAS LARSON

(Written February 2003)

Ever since that lunch-hour horror on April 21, 1999, when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris murdered 13 people, then killed themselves, at Columbine High School, there’s been controversy—not so much about the culture of violence that spawned the attack but the "new faith" that has risen in its wake. At issue in Watson’s short book is the "martyred" girls, Cassie Bernall and Rachel Scott, the two of the thirteen who were Christians. Their brethren, mostly evangelicals, maintain that the pair, separately, replied when asked by the gunmen whether they believed in God—both, supposedly, said yes, and then were shot, supposedly, for believing. Justin Watson’s fact-obsessed book about their martyrdom presents near-conclusive evidence that these statements were not true and that the evangelicals, among them Darnell Scott, the father of Rachel, have propagated the untruth ceaselessly. Taking this story to frightened young people in school assemblies, they insist that Christianity be put back into public schools and that violence in America is the result of godlessness or, better, Christlessness.

(San Diego Reader October 3, 2002)

In recent years, the 855 employees of the San Diego Water Department have faced scandals, alleged mismanagement, media scrutiny, and the rebuke of the City Council. All this began in 1999 when news stories appeared locally about water thieves and industrial hogs who didn’t pay their bills—accusations that proved true and forced changes in how the 100-year-old agency operates. Consequently, the department has new policies to deal with the press. Senior public information officer Kurt Kidman said that "10 years ago we might [have been] a whole lot more accommodating than we are right now." But today, he said, the department is "in a real difficult position. We’re definitely under the gun with Channel 10. When we breathe, they want to know how much it cost us." In 1999 KGTV/Channel 10 reported on how "big water customers are allowed to run up huge bills that go unpaid." In the "hidden meter" scandal, reporter Mark Matthews discovered one million dollars’ worth of unpaid bills, with "dozens of industrial water meters . . . recording only 10 percent of the water going through them."

(San Diego Reader September 12, 2002)

(Written Summer 2002)

In Des Peres, a comfy St. Louis suburb where my family lived when I was a teenager, Saturday afternoons about two my father would, following his nap, suddenly bound down the stairs. From second story to first hung a stairway (for his stair-assault) in the middle of the house, leading up to three bedrooms and two baths. Above a plant garden Mother tended with high-intensity light, the staircase seemed to float like a cataract, its thick maple steps, wrapped with plush carpet, bolted onto ruler-thin, wrought-iron black railings. The effect of his flurry was noisily musical, a run on the xylophone, fingers danced across a counter. You heard then felt before seeing the rumble of my Swede/Czech heavy-set father barreling down those nine steps. Brúm-brum-brum-brum-brúm-brum-brum-brum-brúm, and he’d be down, bicycling cartoon feet, all-hands-on-deck hurry-up, each step taken with no-hands fearlessness in two seconds flat. Like an iron-wired marionette, the hanging stairway quivered in his wake.

(San Diego Reader May 30, 2002)

A new, sparkling gray limestone church in Middletown, Ohio, and its knotty-pine basement, where this nervous, determined eight-year-old auditioned for the pastor and the pastor’s choir. I had wanted the tryout, told my parents it was important, bugged my mother until she got it scheduled. The pastor said,“Oh, so you’re the one who wants to join us. You’re ready then,” and I nodded. His hands moved me by my shoulders: “Stand here and hold on to the piano top; I’ll play a scale to warm us up. Up once, down once, sing!” he exclaimed, and “Again!” Halfway through he stopped, I kept going — so, fa, mi, re — while he inclined a hairy ear my way. “Ah, a baritone,” he said, as though it were secret knowledge only we and the other singers would share.

(San Diego Reader April 18, 2002)

Perched atop a flagpole at One Times Square sat the New Year’s Eve ball, ready for its traditional drop. For this drop, marking the end of the millennium, the famous orb had been sold to Waterford, legendary Irish glassmakers, and re-spangled. It was now the Waterford crystal ball. Such advertising was emblematic of the 1990s: From Tiger Wood’s hat to movie titles on NASA rockets, panoptic exposure seemed valuable at any price. Awaiting the Waterford’s fall, bodies had back-filled midtown Manhattan all day until, at 11:59, nearly one million gleeful voices began counting down the ball’s light-pulsing descent, synchronized to the (now-forgotten) "Anthem for the Millennium." In that moment, most revelers believed the Y2K scare was bogus and the new year would arrive intact, granting not so much a new age but, what was truly hoped, continuity with the one passing, its incontinent dot.com profits a testament to the prodigal investor. Everywhere people were betting that the American good life had another good act to go.

(The Gettysburg Review Winter 2001)

Impossible, he would have said, but he is flying. Air above, air below, sudden yet with a strange everlastingness. A splay of arms and legs, and still he is shooting higher, as in a scene from a novel or a movie script he has written, a back-lot stunt off a trampoline: the soldier’s life, from small-town romance to war in the trenches, has been told in flashbacks, then BOOM! a bomb blows his body skyward. Any moment now the director will bullhorn, “Cut.”

And yet this flight also feels larger, a world and time apart, novelistic. He is making mental notes already, everything expanding, not contracting—in the air.

**

The writer making notes is Nathanael West. He is a screenwriter for the motion-picture industry and the author, most recently, of a terrifying novel about Hollywood, The Day of the Locust. The story is about a group of misfits in Tinsel Town, drawn powerfully together until their amalgam of ambitions turns ugly. West has written four novels, but only this one concerns the people who “had come to California to die.” Each novel was published to small acclaim—and very few sales—during the 1930s, his decade of emergence.