The Book of Jon
By Eleni Sikelianos
City Lights Books
“This book is for all my tribe, and anyone like
them.”—Dedication
In The Book of Jon, one of three new books out by
Eleni Sikelianos in the past year, she tackles the difficult subject of
talking about her father’s dips in and out of addiction, and his
subsequent death in a motel in Albuquerque. The Book of Jon,
published by City Lights, is a hybrid memoir, using clever shifts from prose
to poetry and back. This is a difficult book to read because of the sadness, and I imagine an even
harder subject to write about from the first person.
Jon is a father
“sometimes out of his cracked mind, a person whose spinning thoughts could
never be predicted or duplicated—but here you are, part of a long boring
trend of absent fathers and junk-high assholes.” When you look back, it is
often hard to decide how you want to remember things, especially when you
have a parent as complex and erratic as Jon. From “Billy the Kid,”
Sikelianos writes, “I think I must be eleven. Maybe I am thirteen. My
father has taken me somewhere—why?” This articulates the free spirit
shown in their relationship. As a child, the author loved her father’s
stories about dogs or cats and his singing on the piano. Jon was a bohemian,
musician extraordinaire, tree surgeon, and nomadic spirit. Jumping in the
car with all the kids and driving across the West could be any kid’s
dream, or nightmare, depending on the circumstances, and the captain.
In A Woman Under The Influence, my favorite
Cassavetes film, Gena Rowlands plays an eccentric mother of three—four if
you count her immature and childish husband, Nick. In one poignant scene,
one of her sons says something to her about grown-ups and how grown-ups
wouldn’t lie. This is a myth that eventually becomes shattered in every
child’s life—the idea that parents are perfect and are almost
super-human infallible protectors of the truth. Finding out that our folks
are not perfect, and on top of that, just older versions of ourselves is a
marking point. If we see them as older versions of ourselves, but with a
closet of problems, then there drops the storm of intense burden that can
confuse and cloud a child’s life.
The way Sikelianos maneuvers around the problems of her
father is part of the beauty of this memoir. She is honest and critical, but
not without the caution and balance that needs to go with this type of
discourse. Every person touched by addiction wants to never give up hope;
therefore, keeping that hope is a major ingredient of not only how you treat
that person, but perhaps, by extension, the way you view yourself. Can I
save this person? How far should I go? Cutting off that person could feel
like cutting off a piece of you.
In “Zoo Stories,” she remembers when her father worked
at the Childs Estate Zoo and would bring home the occasional fox or chimp.
Or go swimming at night with the seals. Things like this can make a hero out
of a parent at that age.
“Nights, he might take his keys and go swimming with the seals in
an old holding pool
that had windows in it for
children to see the shadowy black shapes sliding through the
water.”
The author lets us know about the dangers that come with
seeing that kind of free spirit in a parent. She asks, “The slow or fast
slide into degeneracy, what caused it? / From childlike innocence to
now”/. In “The Trip,” her father takes Sikelianos and her siblings to
see the land—(New Mexico, Colorado, Utah). During the trip, her father
gets “sick,” and she later finds out he was trying to kick drugs. Years
later, brother Joe tells Eleni, it was like his family dream—“we were
all together, however much things had run amok.” Sections of The Book of Jon read as verse and could
stand separate from the story. This is part of the artistry of the
book—the blending of writing or remembering as process, like in Auster’s
The Invention of Solitude, or some of the work of W.G. Sebald. “A
Carnet for Popsicle,” asks questions about the process of remembering:
“Does or does/ not an event/ have a position/ in space?” “What can we
do in dark hours? / Abstain?”
In “Date Unknown,” she reflects on her father’s life
in Albuquerque, the city where he eventually dies in a motel room of an
overdose. He was camping near the dumpsters and had recently had his head
smashed in…
“It
is wearying to write about my father the big-bad-druggie-with-gun-dabblings-guy
over
and over. I’m tired of the
brilliantly-talented-tortured-father sometimes mean-guy
persona on him. I know this fatigue to be because I saw him
today and there before me
was my father.”
We are all familiar with the drug abuser, tortured artist
persona that has long become a cliché in art; now imagine that this persona
is closer that you could imagine—a father or mother. Could you handle it?
When it becomes closer than a cliché, it can easily become a breadth of
varied emotions, which Sikelianos conveys so well in The Book of Jon.
In
the last section, “Book of the Dead,” Sikelianos asks “For us humans,
it’s real when a person dies. / Life has ended. It is a life that belonged
to a person, a body, someone we loved. But whose life is it?” In this
section, she weaves poems and a dream into a prelude to what we know is
coming: the day she gets the call.
Jon Sikelianos
died in January 2000 at the De Anza Motor Lodge in Albuquerque. After 28
years of “intermittent drug use and alcoholism,” he died of a possible
brain seizure or heart stoppage. In the last pages, the author writes about
a picture of her father (page 100) wearing a scout uniform, looking up into
the sunlight. She remarks, “He is so full of sweetness, full of
potential.” The picture conveys all the hope and beauty of youth. In her
heart, it pains her to know that “my father died homeless, thin,
coughing…in a cheap motel.” To bear the weight of reliving this painful
journey is very brave. Sikelianos gives us a memoir that asks more questions
than it answers, which is realistic for the situation. How do you help a
parent? Aren’t they supposed to help us? How do you look back without
constant pain and guilt?
This memoir is a beautiful reminder that the paths in life
can lead us in all directions, but ultimately there are free spirits among
us who remind us of our free will. If we follow them, they can always break
our hearts, or make us stronger as love always wins.
Erik Sweet, 2005
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