The Best of Joe R. Lansdale Read Free Page B

started reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, bless her violent heart, and Carson McCullers and William S.
    Burroughs (interesting, but no fan here), and so many others, and they touched me, because they were about people, they were about ideas; and then came Chandler and Hammett and Cain with people who talked like people I knew. Complex stories, not necessarily always better, but different, and there was a bleed over in my mind between literary and pulp, comics and the art of Peter Max, Remington, and Dalí, men on horses and melting clocks.
    A wind started to blow, turned sour and hot, picked up in force. At first the wind just brought us tie-dyed T-shirts and longer hair than even Kennedy wore, some cool music with loud guitars, The Beatles, by God, and there were good things in this strong wind, like civil rights, and recognition that the Viet Nam War might not be one of America’s good wars. For a brief romantic moment it looked as if the world could change, that we could be those brave and good and heroic people of our comic book dreams… But it was just a moment. That door slammed, and then came too many disappointments, the stupidity of drugs, and finally hate, on both sides, and the wind became a tornado of confusion. Our country split between straights and freaks, liberals and conservatives. Kind of the way it is now, only worse.
    I dropped out of college.
    I was drafted.
    I refused to go.
    I was told I’d go to prison.
    I didn’t. Thank goodness.
    They ended up giving me a rating called I-Y, which meant they drafted criminals before they drafted me. I didn’t think right. I didn’t agree. There was, according to them, something wrong with my head. I was against America’s absolute and certain rightness, which, I no longer believed. Not because I had lost the ethics I had learned from my heroes, but because I suddenly realized our country, not as a whole, but in many places and a variety of ways, didn’t abide by the ethics, the goodness that it presented in its comics and TV shows. I was shocked to discover that life was more complicated and full of liars and back-stabbing assholes. Not just the obvious villains, but the folks we were supposed to respect.
    I learned from my mother that racial hatred was wrong. That women could be trained to do what men could do; that they weren’t inferior, just different. My father taught me to be a skeptic, not a paranoid, but someone who wasn’t afraid to question the “facts.” I dropped out. I didn’t drink and didn’t take drugs, but I did find a place to farm and relax and to avoid the world for a while. I went back to the land with a stack of books and a wonderful wife. I love
    my country, but not blindly. I love my wife blindly. I love my family blindly. And, of course, the dog.
    I began to write. I found it to be the best way to deal with life, all of my anger and disappointment went into the work; a reason so much of it is violent and weird, dear hearts.
    Life and literature and film and comics and race relations (or lack there of) and my disappointment over lying politicians and stupid wars and hatred of anything different or strange or not of America all rolled together with my new found interests in anthropology and archeology and sociology and psychology, surrealism and experimental ideas, and what first came out was just some rehash of things that had gone before, and then at some point, the scab popped off and the pus that was me leaked out, and it produced…
    Stories… so many stories. It’s hard to believe that it was me who wrote them. Or some version of me, the me that was me at the time.
    I apologize for the trip to get you here, to tell you some of the things that I loved that led to these stories based on my crucified dreams. Many of my early truths were sabotaged, but not entirely lost. Some, like a broken boat, are still floating on the surface of the water, but amidst a howling storm with nothing left but