Baton Rouge

In response to the letters in the November 2008 Correspondence, I would like to put in my own two cents in defense of Louis E. Bourgeois’s essay “Baton Rouge” [July 2008]. I thought it was uplifting, with a twist of wry mystic optimism at the end. It actually made me smile and laugh. I was sorry to see that neither Les Brady nor Wallace Condon got it: that self-expression is catharsis; that good writing unites us; and that so-called nihilism is one step away from the All. Perhaps they have never quite touched bottom and are unconsciously wary of that deep, painful place of solitude: a great aloneness, so often followed by a great release.

My annoyance with Louis E. Bourgeois’s twenty-five-year-old self in his essay “Baton Rouge” [July 2008] is surpassed only by my annoyance with the writer in the present, who seems not to have moved past his nihilistic, self-indulgent youth. I can understand how losing his arm in an accident could make the young Bourgeois angry at the world, but does he still feel contempt for places he’s never visited, consider his few friends “detestable,” or see himself as “a boorish asshole”? A narrative doesn’t have to be “nice or pretty,” but it has to take us somewhere.

At least “Baton Rouge” reminded me of a hot summer day when I was twenty-five. I’d spent the morning writing and erasing and was still looking at a blank page. Giving up, I dragged myself and a basket of tennis balls to a local court to practice my serve. But I was serving as badly as I had been writing. On the next court two guys were playing a set. Something odd about one of the players caught my eye, and I turned to watch him serve. He held both racket and ball in the same hand, his first three fingers wrapped around the grip, index finger and thumb securing the ball. Then he tossed the ball high, brought the racket behind his head, and lunged upward, sending a powerful serve toward his opponent. The player wasn’t serving one-handed out of choice, I realized: he had only one arm.