Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Elliptically Blunt Tod Goldberg
by Travis Hedge Coke
“[A]ll these young guys from the neighborhood talked about greasing motherfuckers in Vietnam. Just a thing they did every day. Push a button and boom, done. You kill a guy with your hands, you punch his teeth into his throat, you beat his eyeballs into the back of his head, you break his windpipe and watch him choke on his own blood? Man, that’s yours.”
– The Spare, Tod Goldberg
Everybody who put a body in Lake Mead had to assume they would die before they were found out. I cannot think of that happening, right now, real life, the receding waters hit by real global change, outing crimes and no doubt distressing somebody. I cannot not think of Tod Goldberg, too, and his The Salt, a sharp short story so good its sediment silts on you and fucks you up.
Tod Goldberg, author of five Burn Notice books, co-host of Literary Disco and Open Book, a professor and director of the UCR Palm Desert low-residency MFA program, is a deceptive man. He is direct, but he is direct from an angle. His essay, When They Let Them Bleed could cover well-tread ground about a particular boxing match already turned around under a loupe and appraised in two famous songs, but in that essay, what we know is only a hook to get us into something deeper and more personal, an engineered blind spot of expectation in which Goldberg can throw his punch.
Goldberg’s short story collections, The Low Desert and Other Resort Cities, are window, for me, into the parts of a place I lived where, when I lived there, I could not go. One of our top living crime writers, it is the crimes he writes about that are not illegal which interest me the most, and whether or not he thinks they are crimes does not faze me. Country club people. Resort folks. Feds, sheriffs, rabbis, the idiot on the end of the stick. Golf club aficionados.
Golf shows up, explicitly, in seven of the ten stories in Other Resort Cities. It is endemic to the territory of all of them and to Low Desert.
These are wonderful windows into this world because you cannot spit through the glass, but they also cannot hear you if you yell at them, Fuck you.
Goldberg peppers his fiction with allure, from gold that is not there to steam rising off a takeout coffee. He knows that heavy weighs the crown in the mind of a pretentious asshole. That readers, like socially upward thieves and play-democratic businesspeople, pride themselves on seeing around the turn after the next turn.
“I went home for Christmas,” Kristy said. Not that she celebrated Christmas. She celebrated Hanukkah, but it was easier to just say what everyone else said.”
– Mazel, Tod Golberg
Tod Goldberg knows the significance of the comfortable lie. Whether one we tell ourselves or we tell others, it’s always to get a weight off our back. Fiction, itself, is often there to take a weight off our back. Even when fiction is posed as heavy, when fiction is positioned as intense or serious or engaged with consequences, it is lighter than the truth. Goldberg’s crime stories do not fuck around trying to be harder than they are, and when characters do, not only do we see something of our own friends, our own self, we know they are a lighter weight than they play at being, or we can see, maybe clearer than anyone in the stories, when they are in deeper, when they are standing under the sword of Damocles, when the pretentious efforts are about to blow up, when they are a bigger monster or a bigger screw up than they could ever let themselves anticipate.
We get rewarded. The stories and their characters, the schemes and flaws and fails and functions are for us.
The stories of The Low Desert are stories about living in time. Time is brutal and it moves whether you are conscious or not. Five seconds is five seconds if you are wide awake for it, or if you just got rabbit punched and blacked out for the three other jabs that went into your nose and cheek. Five years is five years whether you spend it listening to 2Pac or Chuck Berry. No matter how many golf balls you retrieve in waking life or dreams, time goes on without you.
Other Resort Cities is about time, too, but maybe time you can escape. Other Resort Cities came first, and that stands to reason. So, too, it stands to reason that The Salt appears in both collections. The Salt is an old man story that a young man would write.
“Beneath the water, beneath time, beneath yesterday, is the salt,” The Salt opens. “The” and “Salt” are wonderfully blunt words. A one-two. “The” is so oblique we see it a mile away, but no one really pays attention. In the title, in the spirit, it does its work in the rhythm, in precision. Not any salt. Not a salt. (If I learned anything from Goldberg’s prose, it is that you take your shots, no one else’s, so:) That is the assault of it. It is in your face before you have a chance, and it is an innocuous word. So is, “salt,” in the right circumstances, and Goldberg just has to keep those circumstances right out of reach. A story of first wives, last wives, money and hope and death, and what peace in death, what piece of death we can reach for.
The Salt in one collection is not, really, the The Salt of the other. There is a story between them we will never get, which might turn to a fresh little ulcer on the soul of its protagonist.
The Salt, like Mazel, Pilgrims, Ragtown, disguises its artistry to appear easy and blunt, and because it seems blunt, you do not register what a blunt surface will do at the right angle and speed even as you rush towards it and the flat, familiar, predictable plain you can measure and appraise is the face of a hammer and you are done.
“It’s done, he says.
The Russian thick in his mouth. He only ever dreams in the language now, never speaks it. Looping. Say it. Say it.
It’s done, he says.
It’s done, she says.”
– Ragtown, Tod Goldberg
It’s rhythms. Respecting rhythms and letting someone feel they have the upper hand, they are the smart one, the savvy, it suckers everyone every time. Goldberg’s fiction lifts weight, it entertains and it takes our time. It respects our time. And, it busts us up a little, too, in ways we might not notice immediately, but sit with us awhile, like a figure in the backseat who was not there when you stopped at the hotel just to go in and use their toilet.