Boy With Loaded Gun: A Memoir - Hardcover

Nordan, Lewis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565121996 ISBN 13: 9781565121997

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 2000

Synopsis

The critically acclaimed author of The Sharpshooter Blues and Lightning Song presents an entertaining memoir about growing up in the Mississippi Delta town of Itta Bena, describing life in a sleepy Southern town, his education, military career, family life, and literary career. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Lewis Nordan is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh.

From the Back Cover

Nothing is sacred, off-limits, for Lewis Nordan...*

"As a prose stylist, Nordan is capable of a range of effects from the broadest slapstick comedy to the subtlest evocations of the lush, dangerous beauty of delta and swamp." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"What he alone brings to the page is the courage to use nothing less than black powder prose itself to blast some sense into us no matter where we've come to ground." --The Miami Herald

"In Nordan's skillful hands facts become slippery, magical, humorous, and black." --The Houston Post

"Flights of fancy keep bumping into the hard facts of life." --Newsweek

"He conjures up a Southern-fried childhood that's as dark, hilarious and affecting as any you're likely to encounter." --The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

"A master of 'the landscapes of the broken heart.'" --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"...The reason nothing is sacred to him is because everything appears holy with him." --*Nashville Banner

"If you call yourself a serious reader but still haven't discovered Lewis Nordan, shame on you." --The Seattle Times

From the Inside Flap

Lewis Nordan "gets us to laugh at the whole of human existence--the pity, the horror, the vanity, the courage--and leaves us with a more profound sense of it all." --Randall Kenan, The Nation

His own mother referred to him as a "nervous child," an "odd child." He was the class clown--the skinny kid with a cowlick, freckles, jug ears, and an overbite. He could wiggle his ears and fold his eyelids back. He was obsessed with sex, comic books, and beatniks. He tried to fly off his front porch like Superman only to land flat on his face. He was the boy who saved his money, bought a mail-order gun, and shot himself in the foot--over and over again.

How did this boy get to be the most famous son of Itta Bena, Mississippi? The floodgates of confession open in this funny, tragic, and bittersweet memoir about an awkward kid who dreamed of a world beyond his home in the Mississippi Delta.

From losing a father as a child to losing a child as a father, from the rawness of youth to the rage and redemption of adulthood, Lewis Nordan's Boy with Loaded Gun is a powerful elegy about a hopeful boy finding his way in a seemingly hopeless world.

Reviews

Nordan, a novelist (Wolf Whistle; Lightning Song) who savors the darkly comic possibilities of human folly, chronicles his own bad behavior in this rueful, notably candid memoir of an "odd child" who grows into a wayward adult. Grief, loss and dislocation are his earliest memories: when Nordan is 18 months old, his father dies and his mother moves them to tiny Itta Bena, Miss. After she remarries, Nordan longs for his lost father while gradually accepting his new one, a distant but loving alcoholic housepainter. Television introduces a wider world beyond the delta, which young "Buddy" begins contacting via mail-order. He buys a pistol through a magazine ad and tries to shoot his stepfather. Fortunately, the gun misfires, but the pattern is set: throughout life, Nordan will yearn for what's lost, reject what love he has and generally act like a destructive, self-centered jerk. His misadventures stem from bad judgment (to impress a woman, he puts his infant son on a neighbor's horse; the boy survives the incident, but the horse doesn't) and genuine tragedy (his second son dies hours after birth; his first son commits suicide while in college). Alcoholism, infidelity and an implausible knack for attracting weirdos are described with a bracing mix of forthrightness and novelistic exaggeration. Nordan's characteristic wit crops up, though the effect is more stinging (and the prose more subdued) than the redemptive humor of his acrobatically lyrical fiction. "The self-blame book is not the book I want to write, and not the one I suspect anyone wants to read," he contends. Not to worry: Nordan avoids self-flagellation and solipsism, fashioning instead a memoir that achieves hard-won introspection and strikes a tone of weary sadness and wonderment that Buddy turned out okay after all. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In reading Nordan's delightfully yarny but very moving memoir, one certainly recognizes the provenance of his delightfully yarny but very moving novels, including Wolf Whistle (1993), The Sharpshooter Blues (1995), and Lightning Song (1997). The author piles warm, humorous, and often poignant episode upon episode as he recalls his life. Nordan never knew his father, who died suddenly, and his father's absence in Nordan's life "has always been a significant blank spot in [his] imagination." Nordan grew up in Itta Bena, Mississippi, and it is within that evocative Delta setting that his early remembrances are set, including the first time he ever saw a television set. Nordan's mother remarried, and his stepfather occupies many pages of these recollections. When he was 15, he left home for the first time, taking a bus trip to Memphis; after that, Itta Bena couldn't hold him. He left home for New York, did a stint in the navy, attended college, and got married. As he came into writing as his life's purpose, darkness followed: a horrible car accident in which someone was killed, the suicide of a son, too much drinking, and divorce; remarriage and giving up alcohol have supplied the necessary light at the end of the tunnel. Nordan is a natural, honest, and widely appealing storyteller. Brad Hooper

Reminiscent of Bobbie Ann Mason's Clear Springs, Rick Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin', and all of Willie Morris, Nordan's memoir is the must-read Southern memoir of the season. Best known for his novels (Wolf Whistle; The Sharpshooter Blues; and Lightning Song) Nordan grew up in Itta Bena, MS. His father died while "Buddy" was quite young; his mother thought that he was an "odd child" because he was dreamy and loved television (particularly Superman) and comic books. Nordan's attraction to things outside of Itta Bena would eventually lead him to the world of mail order catalogs, Beale Street in Memphis, and smoke-filled rooms in New York City (where he heard the Beat poets and met the women of his fantasies). This is a memoir filled with loss--of a father, a beloved nurse, a stepfather, a son, and a marriage--as well as redemption in the form of a successful writing career and a second marriage. Nordan has wrestled with the demons of grief, infidelity, and alcoholism and tells his story with dignity, humor, and grace.
-Pam Kingsbury, Florence, AL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Zen and the Art of Mail Order

Sometime after school started in the fall of that year, I began to order things from mail-order catalogs. Montgomery Ward was my favorite, and my first order was a gift for my parents. Somewhere near the middle of the catalog I found the order sheet, which I ripped jaggedly out, and I began to fill it out in pencil in my pathetically childish hand. I carefully spelled out the letters of my name on the top line of the form, only to discover that I had failed to follow directions and should have noted "last name first" in the first blank. Laboriously I erased and, in the smudged space that resulted, began again. Name, address, telephone, name of item, item number, size, color, price, and so on. For the first time I felt in communication with an exterior geography, almost another world. That was the point of this exercise, far more than the gift that was its immediate object.

After the long night in Shiloh's, after falling in love with my father's midget, the city limits of Itta Bena began to seem a prison to me. I was not ready for my escape, but for the first time I could see beyond the walls. Would Ward's even send me what I ordered? Would my money disappear into the ether? I was not sure. I was not at all confident my message would reach its destination, any more than are those scientists who send out signals to the stars in hopes of contacting extraterrestrial life. They are not surprised or disappointed on a daily basis at the silence of their stars, nor would I be.

My task was made more difficult, though not less thrilling, by the fact that I had hidden myself in the clothes closet of my room, among the must of rubber boots and malodorous shoes and wool clothing on hangers. I don't know why the secrecy of this act was important to me. To have anyone suspect that I was so presumptuous as to believe I could actually make contact with the outside world-well, I had to hide, I couldn't face anyone with such a presumption. There was no light in the closet, so along with my pencil and the catalog I took a flashlight, which with difficulty I managed to balance and to shine upon the page, and with cramped-up joy I copied out the proper item numbers and other information. It was hot in the closet and I sweated like the Missouri.

Later my mother said she had heard me giggling in there, and I am sure this is true, so much happiness did this secret deed, this first communication with the universe, give me. My mother's use of the catalog was to inspire dreams of worlds she did not really believe existed and was resigned to know only in fantasy, but I saw real worlds toward which I might flee, if ever Itta Bena should nod and loosen its firm clutch on me. Montgomery Ward was an escape hatch, its opening as thin as a reed, but somehow I might squeeze through it and pop out the other end into rarer air. In the world beyond, Shiloh's Store and what I had seen there would not exist, or would do so only as a distant memory, itself more dream than true.

Mother's Day was near and Father's Day not far behind, and so when I saw in the catalog two painted oversized coffee cups and saucers, one with an image of a mustachioed, derby-hatted gentleman riding an old-fashioned big-wheeled bicycle, and on the other a lady in a long dress and plumed picture-hat riding a similar vehicle, I had all the excuse I needed to make first contact with whatever planets revolved around Ward's newly discovered sun. "Enclose check or money order," I read aloud, inside the closet, holding steady the flashlight's beam. "Do not send cash through the mail." I would have to figure this one out. Discovering a solution to paying for the gifts would be a valuable lesson, which would come in handy later on, with subsequent purchases.

I remember standing at a window in the old post office that I was scarcely tall enough to see into, and purchasing from the postmaster Mr. Banyon that first money order, or as I would have almost been able to say at the time, my first ticket out. I had money of my own. I had never had any expenses, so whatever money came my way had always been stuffed into a drawer and had been piling up for some time. My mother paid me an allowance for certain small jobs around the house, and occasionally I ran errands for older people in the neighborhood-trips to the market for bread and milk, or to Mr. Beard's Drug Store for a prescription-and sometimes I accepted a dime, a quarter, whatever was offered. We had a push mower that I used to mow our yard, for which task my father paid me more. Later I used the mower for the small yards of our neighbors, and then my father bought a power mower, with a bright yellow frame and a red Briggs & Stratton engine and a pull rope you had to rewrap each time, and my lawn-mowing business increased and made me rich.

By the time the package arrived at the post office-a yellow slip in our home mailbox addressed to me told me to pick it up-I had forgotten that I ordered the cups and saucers and felt a little frightened that somehow I might have done something wrong as I answered the summons of its message.

The gifts were a success, my parents loved them. The painted cups were more gay and fanciful in real life than in the catalog, everyone was impressed and pleased with my self-reliance and good sense and generosity. My mother was practically in tears. "You are the most thoughtful child. I'm sorry I said you were odd." None of that is important. The importance of this event was that it opened a universe to me. There was intelligent life on the stars, and I had made first contact, received the first clear signals. A power of distances built inside me. Now on to the galaxies, wherever mail order dwelled.

Comic books offered a host of send-away possibilities. I joined Junior G-Men, I got the badge, the code, the secret decoder ring, the fingerprinting kit, the collapsible spyglass. I joined the Dick Tracy fan club and got similar items. I joined several fan clubs, in fact, including Little LuLu (which encouraged me to keep a diary), Pogo, and Joe Palooka. I ordered fake money, sea horses, itching powder, invisible ink, a squirt flower, a palm buzzer, a nose flute, jacks and a rubber ball, a book of paper dolls. For a while I stuck with "free" items, which I understood were not really free and that I didn't want in any case-stamp collections, trading cards, Charles Atlas information, art lessons, and Mexican jumping beans. I sent back the stamps and jumping beans and did not follow through on the others. The whole point was to make contact.

At first it was. The world was out there. It knew my name, it knew my address. I went back to Ward's catalog reinvigorated. The items became more expensive. More money was required, so I worked twice as hard. I ordered a magic set. It had a collapsible magic wand, a top hat made of collapsible paper, decks of regular cards, decks of trick cards, in which every card was the same, and a book that described dozens of card tricks, almost all of them too complicated or requiring too much manual dexterity to be of any help to me. It had "magic" water glasses that you could pour water into and then turn upside down and they seemed to be empty. There was a similar trick with newspaper and a milk bottle. The set had steel rings that supposedly you could make come apart and put back together, though I never figured out how. It had colored scarves and devices with long rubber bands that would make those scarves disappear from your hand by jerking them quickly behind your back. I could only do about three of the tricks in this elaborate set. I was not discouraged, not in the least.

I ordered a ventriloquist's dummy. It was an amazing piece of work. I wonder whether such a thing can even be ordered so easily today, let alone priced so that a child in my circumstances might afford to buy it. The head and hands and feet were carved of wood. The dummy already had a name, printed on the box and on a tag around its neck, and coincidentally the name was the same as my own, Buddy. Buddy was painted with freckles and large stationary eyes and resembled Howdy Doody slightly, and eerily it resembled me a little as well. When you put your hand inside him, from the back, and got hold of the controls, the head and mouth moved with almost scary precision and reality. There was an instruction pamphlet describing ways to make the dummy move effectively and to create a comic impression of reality, and another pamphlet describing ventriloquism, which it insisted was an illusion, not a real "voice throwing," though both concepts were somewhat over my head and I got little out of them. The dummy's clothes, I was disappointed to see, were supposed to indicate a "hick" or "greenhorn," which I already knew myself to be, and so this part of the illusion was the opposite of what I had had in mind.

Nevertheless, I loved Buddy and practiced endlessly at throwing my voice and not moving my lips, reading and rereading the puzzling instructions. The reason I finally gave up working with the dummy was that I discovered I had nothing to say. I would hold Buddy and speak in my strained falsetto, but the words that came out were not interesting. "Hello, Buddy," I would say in my regular voice.

"Hello, Buddy," the dummy would say in his falsetto.

"Is there an echo in here?" I would say.

"Is there an echo in here?" Buddy would say.

I wanted more. I wanted the words that would go beyond mere contact with this exterior world. I wanted words that came from so deep inside me that when I heard their sound, perceived their meaning, I would become possessed of a new self, somehow, one that might someday leave Itta Bena and exist, nay thrive, in another world. I poked through the box the dummy came in, looking for a pamphlet telling me what words to speak to produce the interior, spiritual results I so vaguely, and yet so passionately, hoped to effect. I found nothing.

Use of this excerpt from BOY WITH LOADED GUN may be made only for purposes of promoting the book, with no changes, editing, or additions whatsoever, and must be accompanied by the following copyright notice:

Copyright c 2000 by Lewis Nordan. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1565121996
• ISBN 13: 9781565121997
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 290