THE PRODIGAL FATHER

nick flynn creates a harrowing memoir about two men bound by blood and by
the dark worlds they inhabit

BY MIKE MILIARD
24-30 Sept 2004

RISING SON: the publication of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City might be seen as a belated but
momentous gift from Nick Flynn to his father.

Clink/Clank/Clunk

I think that I am drunk.

Clunk/Clank/Clink

I really need a drink.

***

I’ll bend

each finger back, until the bottle

falls, until the bone snaps, save him

by destroying his hands.

The first is a scrap of doggerel, scribbled by Jonathan Flynn as he moldered in a holding

cell in 1964, a day after he’d stolen a sheriff’s cruiser in a drunken oblivion. The second is
from a poem, "Father Outside," by Jonathan’s son, Nick, published in his first book of
poetry, Some Ether (Graywolf Press, 2000). That book dealt primarily with the suicide of
Nick’s mother; his latest, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (W.W. Norton), is about
Jonathan, a wasted, garrulous man who’d been absent for the entirety of Nick’s
childhood and adolescence, but always somehow hovered like a phantom on the
periphery of his consciousness.

With his new memoir, Nick Flynn has crafted an astonishing, affecting work about a
father and a son, and the dark worlds they each inhabit. It’s a bracing, briskly paced
excavation of Nick’s conflicted reaction to Jonathan’s jarring re-entry, drunk and without
a home, into his life. Exquisitely and often experimentally written, it’s an unsparing look at
his father’s struggles, and his own.

Raised in Scituate by a single mother, Nick spent most of his 20s working at Boston’s Pine
Street Inn homeless shelter (he now lives in upstate New York). He came to poetry later
in life, but once he did, he found immediate success. Some Ether, his debut, won the
"Discovery"/The Nation and the PEN/Joyce Osterweil awards. His second volume, Blind
Huber (Gray wolf, 2002), was also well received. His works have appeared in the New
York Times Book Review and the Paris Review, and on NPR. And when the story of
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City was distilled into a long article in the New Yorker this
summer, the buzz only grew.
In some ways, Nick explains, assembling this book, his first nominally prose work, was
more difficult than writing about his mother’s suicide. She was gone, after all. His poems
about her were visceral reactions — pure, if pained, expressions from within himself. But
w riting Another Bullshit Night in Suck City meant having long and arduous conversations
with Jonathan (who still lives in Boston, in an apartment near the Fenway). It meant
reporting, looking through documents and notebooks. It meant dredging up memories, and
seeking ans wers to questions that might be unanswerable.

"It was very complicated," he says, via phone from New York City. "It went through many
emotional stages. It’s about my life and about my relationship with my father, and those
things are complicated for anyone. Encountering my father was painful and infuriating,
and also hopeful ... it was a whole range of emotions. To get into that psychic space, to
deal with those things psychically, it was a difficult book to write." At the same time, it
was something that, once he was ready, he felt compelled to do. "It’s almost like it wasn’t
really a choice to write it," Nick says. "This material was presented to me, and I’m a
w riter, and at a certain point, when I had processed enough of it, I just had to write it. It
started to write itself, almost."

Jonathan Flynn is a man who tells tall tales. Or, at least, he spins stories of questionable
veracity. He has claimed that his grandfather’s name is written inside the grasshopper
weathervane on Faneuil Hall, and that his father invented the life raft and power window.
(Or at times, Nick writes, "it is the life raft and the push-button locks on car doors. Or
some sort of four-gig carburetor that saves gas.") But Jonathan himself never invented
much of anything except a series of outsize, cobbled-together personas and a raft of
apocryphal adventures. In Palm Beach, Florida, he was "Barracuda Buck, Native Guide."
In Belmont, selling European sports cars (he was given the sinecure by the nervous
father of his pregnant wife), he was "Trader Jon." In Portsmouth, where he labored as a
longshoreman and fashioned furniture from driftwood, he was "Sheridan Snow."
Sometimes he concocted these aliases to suit the bohemian rogue he fancied himself.
Other times — as in the latter case — they served more practical purposes, like evading
warrants for nonpayment of child support.

Jonathan purported to be a descendant of Anastasia Romanov. He carried on one-sided

epistolary exchanges with Ted Kennedy and Judge Garrity. He once received a letter
from Patty Hearst — a boilerplate response to a note of encouragement he’d sent her —
and he showed it to all who’d look. ("If you don’t think a letter from Patty Hearst is heavy,"
he’d later write to his son, "you’re gone.") He wrote the occasional theater review for the
Cape Cod News; in 1969, he lauded a young Richard Gere for his performance in
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Provincetown Playhouse.

He was a writer, after all. He called himself the Next Great American Poet, and that made
it true. The fact that he spent most of his days dead drunk or working half-assed at
menial jobs was but a trifle. "To be a poet digging ditches," he’d say, "is very different
from being a mere ditch digger." Alas, ditch-digging was not his only calling. In the 1970s,
Jonathan was caught forging checks and spent several years in a federal penitentiary
for his troubles.

Playwright Brendan Behan once described himself as "a drinker with a writing problem."
Jonathan Flynn was one, too — his problem was that he barely wrote. If he had, he
scarcely could have invented characters more intriguing and infuriating than the ones he
inhabited. As he enacted the great play of his life, Jonathan was almost entirely absent
from the lives of his sons. Nick Flynn remembers a quick visit from Jonathan and his new
wife when Nick was eight, but that was the last time he’d see his father until the late
1980s. By then, a 27-year-old Nick was working at the Pine Street Inn and living in a
decrepit loft in the Combat Zone — as well as nursing a substantial alcohol and drug
problem, and grappling with the lingering wounds of his mother’s suicide five years
earlier.

Jonathan had slid further into dissolution by this point. And his sudden appearance,
startling and baleful like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, threw his son for a loop. Sometimes
Jonathan was lucid, but more often he was not. Almost always, he was drunk. And
before long, he was homeless, sleeping in ATM lobbies and on benches by the
Esplanade. At first, Nick looked on from a distance, even when Jonathan started arriving
at Pine Street during Nick’s shifts, even when he slept wrapped in newspaper, his toes
gnawed by frigid midnight. This man, this "blustering, damaged man," was all but a
stranger to him. Worse, he represented danger, the possibility that he could upend Nick’s
precarious sanity, drag him down. "I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my
floor," Nick writes. "But if I let him inside, the line between us would blur, my own slow-
motion car wreck would speed up."

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City — a phrase Jonathan used to describe his life on
Boston’s streets — is Nick Flynn’s first book of prose. But calling it "prose" does his work
a grave disservice. Alternately lyrical and clinical, laconic and verbose, Flynn’s gimlet-
eyed observations are marked by the simple but profound imagistic punch of the best
verse. The book is organized into several dozen vignettes, few longer than five or six
pages, many only two or three. They’re dotted with fragments of frayed letters, jingles,
experiments in experiential prose-poetry, stark playlets. These quickly limned but
penetrating scenes, resurrected from memories, flit from Jonathan’s young manhood in
1950s Scituate to his dissipation on the cold streets of Boston. They follow Nick, his older
brother, and their put-upon mother — Jody left Jonathan in 1960, six months after Nick
was born — as they move from house to house, scraping to get by.

It’s in detailing his childhood and his desperate, debauched adolescence that Nick’s
w riting is the most straightfor ward and brutally affecting. He tries his hand at more formal
experimentation later, as he relays his and his father’s separate but similar orbits:
Jonathan probing oblivion on Boston’s dark and bitterly cold streets, Nick drowning his
guilt and doubt at J.J. Foley’s or at the Middle East.

One playlet — reminiscent of the "Circe" chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses in form and dark
psychological implication (if not in length) — takes place in a Dunkin’ Donuts. Another
conflates Jonathan’s stint as a Salvation Army Santa with the tragedy of King Lear.
"Working with the homeless — and especially encountering my father on the streets — it
felt at times like a play," Nick says. "It really felt like the circumstances were sort of
heightened. You’re on a street at night, under a streetlight. The lighting is dramatic, the
costumes are sort of over the top."

In a tour de force of assaultive, staccato imagery, Nick relates the sensation of a brutal
bender in a four-page litany of inebriated imagery: "The usual I say ... Straight up. Two
fingers. A shot. A sip. A nip ... I say same again. I say all around. I say my good man. I
say my drinking buddy. I say get that in ya ... Down the hatch I say." The rhythmic brio,
the kaleidoscopic imagery seems to spiral out of control, and by the end, one feels
legless. "While you’re reading it out loud in front of an audience, you start to get sort of
off-centered, and you start to feel drunk by the end of it," says Nick, who quit drinking
when he was 30, and later tried fruitlessly to get his father to do the same. "It reaches
the experience of a night or a week or a life of heavy drinking, without laying it out in a
narrative way."
Ultimately, this fusion of the narrative and the lyrical, the poetic and the reportorial, was
how the book cried out to be written. "Being a poet primarily, it’s how I think. I think in a
very condensed, distilled way," Nick says. "The book is in very short chapters, and I
could almost see it as a collection of poems. When I do readings from the book, I don’t
always tell people that this is prose, and they assume it’s poetry." But, he says, with a
poem the risk is that the reader might reduce it to a mere metaphor, an abstraction. This
invented form, "hovering in between the two," allowed him to be artful but still "deal in a
documentary way with the world."

WHEN NICK was 16, his father started writing him letters from prison: "Tell me of yourself
— I regret our mutual loss — perhaps — soon — in our future — we can regain our lost
knowledge of each other." At first, these often went unread. "One of the things that
terrified me about the letters was his handw riting and my handwriting were very similar,"
Nick says. "Friends would see it, and they would assume I had written it. I would look at
my hand, and it would seem to be betraying me."

Their first face-to-face meeting as adults was hardly any better. In 1987, after Nick had
been in Boston and working at Pine Street for three years, he received a phone call. "Get
over here with your truck ... I’m sitting behind the door with my shotgun ... waiting for the
knob to turn." It was the first time Nick had heard his father’s voice in 19 years. He went
to the designated address, knocked on the door, entered. "I find him sitting naked in a
galvanized tin tub in the center of the room, bathing and drinking straight vodka from a
silver chalice, like some demented king from the Middle Ages," he writes. "He rises from
his bath and stands before me, naked. His breasts sag, soap funnels off his cock."

"That’s quite a set-up, when you’re gonna first meet your son for the first time, to stage it
so that you’re gonna be naked and rising out of the water," Nick chuckles, still seemingly
in disbelief. "I didn’t know if he always did that. Seemed like there might have been a
shower down the hall or something. I was thrown by it. It was one of those things that
will be forever burned in my mind."

Another came just a few months later. Unbeknownst to Nick, his father had been evicted.
Bicycling along the Charles, he saw Jonathan awakening from a night’s slumber on a
bench by the Esplanade. He writes the scene, as simple and imagistic as a haiku: "The
first beautiful day of spring, families out for a stroll. He staggers to the edge of the river to
piss, his cock wild in his hands. A little girl points."

What goes through a man’s mind at a moment like that? "I was pretty stunned," Nick says.
"It was clear that he was pretty intoxicated. And it was clear that he also, at that point,
was sleeping out. It was the first time I saw him since he came out of the tin tub. I sort of
knew, okay, he’s going downhill. And I didn’t know what would happen to him. But I didn’t
talk to him then, no. I was on my bike, and I rode away.

"I was drinking and doing some drugs back then," Nick explains. "Whatever emotions
went through my mind, I tried to get as far away from them as possible, and get rid of
them as quickly as possible. So I went and got high right afterwards. There was a lot of
shame around it. There was a lot of shame, and then a sense of powerlessness. The
world felt very off-balance."

The feelings of unresolved guilt as he watched his father drink his life away gnawed at
Nick, but they didn’t compel him to do anything about it, at least not at first. He was too
preoccupied with his own problems. And it wasn’t necessarily the altruistic impulse of a
good Samaritan that led him to start working at the Pine Street Inn.
"It was a year and a half after my mother died, and I was feeling so lost," Nick says. "The
intensity of her death ... I had to go someplace that was more extreme to get myself out
of it, to recognize that suffering is part of existence, part of everyone’s existence. I had
to go to an extreme place to find that, to connect with a larger suffering."

He didn’t expect to find that suffering in the form of his own father. When Jonathan
started shuffling through Pine Street’s doors, showing up for a free meal now and then,
then coming more frequently, then sleeping there, then causing trouble, then getting
barred for the night, Nick kept his distance. "We didn’t do a big reunion or anything," he
says. "Just sort of eyeing each other from across the room. And then, slowly,
organically, it would just happen. He and I would leave the building at the same time, or I
would see him on the street and we’d walk together on the street for a few hours and
talk. But in the beginning, I treated him just like every other guest."

When he was at his worst, Jonathan represented a frightening mirror — an object lesson
on how Nick’s life could disintegrate if he left those feelings about his mother’s death,
about his father’s absence, about his own failures, unresolved, blunted by a deluge of
booze. At one point, he writes of seeing his father at the shelter, "upright and ranting, his
head lolling from side to side, his naked body wrapped in a sheet ... his bare feet in a pool
of his own piss."

"I could see that it was harder and harder to deny it, to deny what I was doing to myself.
That I was really on a bad course," Nick says. "There was always this fear that I would
end up like him, because there was this similarity in our paths." But even when he was
driving Pine Street’s outreach van on the overnight shifts, delivering blankets to those
who slept outside, he confesses, "I was dreading encountering him." When he did, Nick
would brush the snow off his father’s recumbent form, wrap him tighter in his improvised
sleeping bag, and drive away.

Still, Nick insists, "I don’t feel guilty about what happened when he was homeless, really.
The big question, when you read the book, is why didn’t I help him? That’s sort of the
central question, which I don’t really answ er." He rationalizes it in two ways. First, that
almost every person on the street has a mother or a father or a brother or a sister or a
son. "If that question could be answered, it would sort of indict everyone else who
doesn’t bring their relatives in," he says. Second, "it’s possible that by me not — as they
say in this New Age–y way — ‘enabling’ him, by not giving him a place and letting him
keep drinking, it forced him to take it more seriously and say, ‘Okay, I have to help myself.’
" Indeed, once Jonathan turned 60, he became eligible for a modest subsidized apartment
that Nick, by then sober and seeing a therapist, and a few co- workers from Pine Street
helped secure. And now, Nick says, "he knows he has to hold on to it."

THE PUBLICATION of this book might even be seen as a belated but momentous gift from
son to father, from an acclaimed poet to an aspiring, unpublished writer. In one of the
many funny moments in Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick relates how his father
mailed his shambling, autobiographical roman à clef, a novel he’d been "writing" for years,
to Viking (per Kurt Vonnegut’s advice, of course) in the late ’60s. The rejection letter
came back, lauding the book as "a virtuoso display of personality," but demurring that "the
dosage would kill hardier readers than you’ve had here." For years Nick had doubted that
the book existed in anything more than a scattershot, skeletal form.

"I couldn’t imagine him ever sitting down and actually writing anything," he says,
"because there was never a writing surface [in his cluttered apartment]. I’m a writer. You
at least need a surface, a clear space. He claims to still be writing. If you ask him today,
that’s what he’ll say. That’s what he does! He writes every day! But if you go into his
apartment, there’s nothing obvious about that. There’s no desk, there’s no space, there’s
no place to write. And so, his idea of writing and mine were very different, and I came to
the conclusion that he was basically a storyteller. Storytelling is a social activity. You do it
in a bar, surrounded by friends. You get instant gratification from it. Well, part of his
‘story’ is that he’s a great writer. That doesn’t make him a great writer. Writing, for me,
requires solitude, being alone. You have to grapple with things, go deeply into things,
which didn’t seem to be his strength."

But to his surprise, Nick one day found four binders, typed up from Jonathan’s rambling
verbiage by an acquaintance. "The first 30 pages actually showed some promise," Nick
says. "But after 30 or so pages, it dissipates into incoherence, self-aggrandizing
incoherence. At some point, he was missing almost 100 pages. And for the life of me, I
don’t miss those 100 pages."

Striking, and a little eerie, however, was the fact that in the early going, Jonathan’s book
shared certain hallmarks with the one his son would write decades later. "It was sort of
like my book," Nick says. "It’s like a musical. It has lyrics in it, and fragments of letters. It
was actually sort of an interesting hybrid of styles. It’s interesting that it’s come to this:
I’ve written a book much like he perhaps would have written."

Toward the end of the Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick points out that "[T]he only
book being written about my father (the greatest writer America has yet produced), the
only book ever written about or by him, as far as I can tell, is the book in your hands. The
book that somehow fell to me, the son, to w rite. My father’s uncredited, noncompliant
ghostwriter."

For an "author" like Jonathan, of course, that’s cause for some jealousy. Nick says his
father sometimes mutters bemusedly about his own son "beating" him at writing. But Nick
seems to think he’s also, somehow, somewhat proud. Will Jonathan come to his son’s
Boston reading? "I don’t know. I don’t know if he’ll come. Since it’s at the end of the
month, he’ll probably be pretty good. He gets a check at the beginning of the month, and
he drinks until the money runs out, which is usually around the middle of the month, and
he’s sober for a couple weeks, and then it starts up again. So, maybe he would come,
but I don’t see him coming. He’s not a very social person in a certain way. He gets very
paranoid in crowds."

The past decade or so has seen Jonathan and Nick establish a more substantial
relationship, relatively speaking, and build on it. They visit, they phone. They talk. And
while Nick says that writing this book in fits and starts over the past seven years w as
cathartic, perhaps, and constructive, he doesn’t expect this book to solve the conundrum
of his filial relationship.

"It lines up your past in ways that it becomes comprehensible," Nick admits. "But the more
I got into writing it, the less I realized there were any ans wers to anything. It’s still pretty
incomprehensible, really: why he was homeless, why he is like he is, why I am like I am,
the phenomenon of homelessness itself. There are more questions than answers by the
end. I don’t feel like it’s done. I feel like there are more projects to work on. But I don’t think
I could have gotten to the next project without grappling with this."

Nick Flynn reads from Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir on September 23 at
Buttonwood Books, Route 3A, Cohasset, and September 24 at Barnes & Noble Boston
University Bookstore, Boston. Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard@phx.com