Be Brief and Tell Them Everything

  MORE PRAISE FOR BE BRIEF AND TELL THEM EVERYTHING

  “Brad Listi uses sharp, crystalline prose to navigate through moments of failure, love, fatherhood, psychedelics, and the unknown. What does it mean to be an artist, a husband, a father? This novel’s reach toward meaning and understanding is truly unforgettable—I loved this book.”—CHELSEA HODSON, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else

  “I highly enjoyed Be Brief and Tell Them Everything, which I found funny and entertaining but also moving, serious, tender, and contemplative. It lives up to its title.”—TAO LIN, author of Leave Society

  “It’s a wonder the long-awaited second novel by Brad Listi didn’t kill him—or at least render him mad. Instead, he’s produced an enduring work of art and a moving guide to truth, love, and perseverance.”—MARCY DERMANSKY, author of Very Nice

  “We already knew that Brad Listi was a master of listening. His podcasts are a model for anyone: Brad asks a question and then is silent, and his silence draws us in. What we didn’t know is that Brad also listens while writing, that he can draw life in all its nakedness, in all its mystery, with all its pain and hope, into the pages of a book. That even when he speaks about himself, he holds the microphone out to the world.”—ANDREA BAJANI, author of If You Kept a Record of Sins

  Be Brief and

  Tell Them

  Everything

  Brad Listi

  New York, NY

  Copyright © 2022 by Brad Listi.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to:

  Ig Publishing

  Box 2547

  New York, NY 10163

  www.igpub.com

  ISBN: 978-1-63246-14-3-8 (ebook)

  This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author’s imagi-nation or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  To Kari, Evan, and River

  If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men—you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted that you will wish that you were dead.

  —Thomas Merton

  Short poem: be brief and tell us everything.

  —Charles Simic

  THIS BOOK TOOK twelve years to write. It started out as a novel and then it became a different novel and then it was another, different novel and then it was an essay collection and then it was nothing for a while and then it was a memoir and then it became a novel again and now it’s whatever this is.

  During the time it took to write this book, I met my wife, Franny, dated her, proposed to her, married her. We got a French bulldog and named him Walter. The global economy collapsed. Franny got pregnant and gave birth to a girl we named Alice. A close friend died of an accidental opiate overdose. I wrote a screenplay called Man of Letters, an absurd comedy about a forty-year-old spoken word poet who lives with his parents. It didn’t sell. I produced five hundred episodes of a podcast called Otherppl with Brad Listi in which I talk at length with other writers. We suffered through five miscarriages. I co-wrote a sitcom that sold but was never made. I worked several different media jobs and referred to myself in public as a “creative consultant.” We finally conceived a second child, a little boy named Oscar—joy!—and then, six months after his birth, he was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and epilepsy. Heartbreak.

  Also: Walter choked on a bagel and died. This was years ago. Franny gave him the Heimlich and we rushed him to the vet, but he didn’t make it.

  We now have another dog, a rescue mutt from Mexico. Alice named her Twiggy. She was born in a litter of eleven puppies and abandoned in the streets of Tijuana.

  We live in Los Angeles, a city about which almost everyone has something stupid to say. Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city. Makes the rest of California seem authentic. The plastic asshole of the world, William Faulkner called it.

  I’ve been here almost twenty years. Franny has been here since college.

  It’s like living on a soundstage, I sometimes say. And people who have never been here before like to tell you they can’t stand it here.

  The truth is that I’ve never felt like I fully belong here. But then who can be said to fully belong here. The region on its own terms should be, by rights, a mostly arid expanse of coastal sage and chaparral—but instead there exists an improbable, teeming metropolis, covering nearly 500 square miles. It is a city almost entirely without visual logic, no apparent unifying theme, no plan or system of organization. Walk out your front door and turn right or turn left, and within minutes you will encounter all manner of architectural possibilities, a chaotic hodgepodge, a warehouse, a church, a strip club, a Frank Gehry building. It makes no sense. And I suppose this is the point. The unifying theme of Los Angeles is that there is no unifying theme, the point is that there is no point. Everything is here and all of it is jumbled together and none of it is related to anything. Be whoever you want to be. Live however you want to live. Scrap and claw and fight and dream, and pretend to be infinite in your infinity pool. On some level, I’m able to appreciate it. On another level, I’m appalled.

  Occasionally I’ll tell myself that I should move my family out to the country, far off the beaten path, live someplace sleepy and beautiful, Oregon or Montana or Idaho or Colorado, tucked away up in the mountains, a small-town aerie under big sky. That or I should try to find work overseas in a place like Sweden or Denmark or Norway or New Zealand, where the happiness indices are reportedly high and infrastructure and education are supposedly first-rate, where government, rumor has it, functions with a reasonable degree of efficacy and where life would be, for us, I imagine, both simpler and more exotic at the same time.

  Maybe we should get out of here, I’ll say to Franny. Go be sane somewhere. But to do it, we’ll have to be bold. Anything normal feels crazy anymore. Try to give the kids an experience. Some kind of alpine village with a bookstore and a decent café. That’s all I want. I’m not greedy.

  The two of us lying in bed, flat on our backs, staring up into the blankness of the ceiling.

  Maybe Switzerland, I’ll say, dreaming. It’s expensive, on the one hand. But insulated and picturesque and trilingual.

  Let’s be neutral, Franny will say. Neutral and extremely calm.

  The thing that haunts me, I’ll say, is this feeling that we’re living through a uniquely stupid period in history. To be in opposition seems rational. But to actually do it, you have to take action. You can’t just sit around talking all the time. Otherwise what? The whole thing’s so embarrassing. And that’s really the word for it all. You wake up in the morning and you pick up your phone to read the news, and you feel ashamed to be alive.

  The conversation might then return to Switzerland, with talk of orderliness and air quality and the children able to play outside unsupervised. Cattle bells sounding in the valley. Universal healthcare. Bullet trains to France. But soon enough the fantasy will become unwieldy, collapsing under its own cartoonish weight, and I’ll find myself conceding that the logistics are overwhelming, not to mention the price tag, and anyway geography rarely changes anything anyhow.

  And this is where I always wind up, I’ll say. The real trouble is between my ears, and I know it. Imagine being miserable in the Alps, drinking hot cocoa, feeling like something’s missing. Which is exactly what would happen. But on some level I refuse to believe it.…

  And so on.

  And beyond that, of course, there would also be the issue of Oscar and his therapies and how living in any kind of remote location would likely be a nonstarter anyhow, as access to facilities and expert medical care is, for us, essential. And what about the language barrier? Taking such matters into consideration, our life in Los Angeles can be seen as a remarkable stroke of luck.

  Imagine, we’ll sometimes say to each other, what happens to disabled kids who don’t have access to resources. Parents left to their own devices. Families in dire circumstances, in jungles and mud huts and dismal urban slums. What about them? Who’s looking out for those poor kids? And meanwhile here we are, alive in a kind of paradise, dreaming about escape, nursing our wounds in a city where the weather—at least for now, anyway—barely ever changes. Yes, it’s completely insane here. But for the most part it beats the alternative.

  Los Angeles is a complete mess, I’ll say to Franny. It’s a terrible place to raise children. But a piece of wood doesn’t become smooth by rubbing it with velvet.

  Over the years this has become one of my go-to lines, something I read in a Buddhism book once, a nice little way to rationalize our decision to raise our kids in the eye of the storm. Though the question it begs is always one of proportion: Just how much sandpaper are we talking about here?

  Back when Franny was pregnant with Alice, I remember telling her, as we stood in the kitchen one night, how happy I was that we were having a baby. A sweet moment in a young marriage. The two of us, hugging by the stove. The roundness of her belly pressing against mine.

  I don’t always realize that it’s happening, I said, but every once in a while it hits me, and I just want you to kno
w that I’m excited about it.

  You are?

  I am.

  How so?

  I don’t know. I just am. It’ll be fun to hang out with her.

  What are you going to do with her?

  I’m going to … share all of my wisdom with her.

  Franny thought about it for a moment.

  And what are you going to do the next day? she said.

  The truth is that I don’t know what, exactly, to do. Ultimately there are no clean answers. We have to make our decisions and deal with the consequences. We live here, and most likely we’ll continue to live here, barring some unforeseen development. What matters most, we tell ourselves, is what happens at home: the manners we enforce, the values we champion, who we teach our kids to be by virtue of our own examples.

  And surely this is true enough. Still, I can’t help but wonder what this city might be doing to us, how it might be taking its toll. Has it robbed us of some critical perspective? Is sincerity even possible here? Can the mood of the place be avoided, the common Hollywood affect, the weary knowingness about everything, the cynical eye-roll at all of the cultural stupidities and excesses, even as one might participate in them and profit from them? Is it possible to live a life apart from this, within city limits, or are we all simply doomed to embody it, marching through our sun-bleached days, alive inside the machine? Or am I being melodramatic, tying myself into knots? This desire to be sure about things: a kind of fear. Maybe the wiser strategy would be to relinquish all prophecies of doom. Stop having so many opinions, and relax a bit. Lose the certainty. It’s nothing more than hubris anyhow. As if I actually know what this is, or where the world is headed. Please.

  I am, as best I understand it, the cosmos grown to self-awareness, an assemblage of infinite parts. Every thought I’ve ever had, every bite of food I’ve ever eaten, the sunlight, the birds, the rain, the trees—all of it locked together in an endless causal chain.

  And here I am.

  Nonlocal.

  I live in a place where the light pollution is so bad, you can barely see the stars.

  Bewilderment.

  Always best to respond to the quandary with something approaching lucid indifference. Bear witness, stay calm, and describe. Write it down. My distant ancestors were microbes, fish, mice, and arboreal apes, and every atom in my body is traceable to the explosion of high-mass stars, billions of years ago. Fair enough. The best I can hope for is to live for a century inside the mystery, hopefully in a state of relative comfort, take care of my wife and kids, and then die as everyone before me has died, absorbed, most likely, into an oblivion so total that I can’t even begin to fully comprehend it.

  Or maybe that’s wrong.

  Beats the shit out of me.

  A WHILE BACK, I interviewed Tim O’Brien for my podcast. National Book Award winner and author of the classic story collection The Things They Carried. O’Brien was seventy-five at the time. I found him to be wise, unpretentious, hugely likable. He showed up at my door on a Wednesday morning dressed in a baseball cap, a sweater, blue jeans, a bomber jacket, a pack of Carltons in his pocket. He burned through two of them before the interview, flicking his ashes in the driveway. We then went into the garage and sat across from each other for more than an hour, talking easily about all manner of things, including his military service in Vietnam, which forms the basis for much of his work.

  At one point, he was telling me about landmines, setting out on foot into the jungle, a young man in his twenties, sweating bullets, afraid that every step could spell his doom. As he was talking, I found myself thinking, of all things, about this book, my many failed attempts to write this book, and how over the years, in trying to write this book, another goddamned version of this book, I developed a certain edginess—creative anxiety mixed with creeping dread. This, I’m embarrassed to admit, was where my head went. A decorated combat vet and canonical author, describing in careful detail his near-death experiences in the fog of war. And me, thinking about my midlife creative troubles, my stupid little champagne problems.

  At the time, the book was really bothering me. And O’Brien, with his way of speaking in complete paragraphs, accidentally illuminated my difficulties. This basic idea of moving through a landscape slowly, with a gathering sense of dread, afraid to step—it resonated. The long and ridiculous struggle I had endured, trying to write something coherent. And how the process, over the years, had repeatedly been disrupted by calamity. How I would settle on an approach and be writing on a regular schedule, determined to see it through, and then, boom, something else would happen: another miscarriage, another untimely death, another diagnosis, some godawful job stress, what have you. Something in my life would explode, and the shockwaves would send me spinning into a different orbit. Whatever version I had been working on would suddenly seem alien, absurd, unrecognizable. That or I would tell myself that I had arrived at some other, better idea—a brand new shiny object—and off I would go in pursuit.

  Years ago, there was a version called Happiness is Chemical. A novel, roughly 80,000 words, a disjointed screwball comedy about a guy named Bill Tippet, a self-loathing high school chemistry teacher whose dog is dying of cancer.

  As the story unfolds, Bill has a fling with a colleague, the new art teacher, a blue-eyed redhead named Rose Carmody, a functional alcoholic with a sketchy ex-boyfriend. One night after school they get extremely drunk together and have bad sex at Rose’s house and pass out. Bill, who normally isn’t a big drinker, wets the bed in his sleep, and when he wakes up in the middle of the night and realizes what he’s done, he panics and tries to cover it up by dumping a bucket of water on her. He pretends to be in party mode. The whole thing spirals badly.

  Rose wakes up from a blackout to find Bill standing over her with a bucket in his hands. She’s soaking wet, disoriented, frightened. In her inebriated state, she conflates Bill with her sketchy ex-boyfriend, pulls some pepper spray from her nightstand drawer, and fires it into his eyes. Bill drops to the floor, writhing, and eventually flees in the nude. The following day, in a terrible state of humiliation, he writes Rose a rambling letter of apology, attempting to explain himself. The sketchy ex-boyfriend gets ahold of it. Chaos ensues.

  I finished the book, roughly 300 pages, in a frantic, ten-week push and emailed it to my agent.

  It’s about a chemistry teacher, I told her, who has very little chemistry with anyone.

  To my surprise, my agent read quickly, responding by the end of the week.

  I love the LA elements, she said, and I love the disaster at Christmas, and the emergency room set piece, but I’m desperate for something to go right for this guy. (The dog dying is almost too much.) I just don’t know if I have any faith that life is going to get better for him, and I really need it to.

  In response to this appraisal, I quickly shifted gears and started hacking away at the manuscript, thinking I could mold it into something else entirely, something better, more commercial, less depressing—and hopefully in quick turnaround. I was calling it The Dog Has a Problem. Gone were Rose Carmody and the bucket and the pepper spray, all of it excised in favor of a heavily streamlined narrative about a solitary man and his dog—and eventually there would be a woman. The basic structure was set. A romantic comedy of sorts—a story lighter and more playful than its predecessor. At the beginning of the book, it was just the man and his dog, so it was a very lonely period for the man. The problem, I found, was that the dog couldn’t talk, so there was no dialogue. It was just the man, all by himself, overthinking everything in the presence of his dog. I worked on this version for about six weeks before abandoning it in a state of terrible frustration.

  It’s obnoxious, I wrote in one of my notebooks during the aftermath, not to mention brutally funny, to focus all of this energy and attention on a single pursuit, to the exclusion and neglect of pretty much everything else in life, only to have the pursuit end, again, in utter failure, amounting to absolutely nothing at all, just another meaningless creative implosion, another stupid turd down the drain.