E-Mail This Article to a Friend The prodigal father (continued)

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City — a phrase Jonathan used to describe his life on Boston’s streets — is Nick Flynn’s first book of prose. But calling it "prose" does his work a grave disservice. Alternately lyrical and clinical, laconic and verbose, Flynn’s gimlet-eyed observations are marked by the simple but profound imagistic punch of the best verse. The book is organized into several dozen vignettes, few longer than five or six pages, many only two or three. They’re dotted with fragments of frayed letters, jingles, experiments in experiential prose-poetry, stark playlets. These quickly limned but penetrating scenes, resurrected from memories, flit from Jonathan’s young manhood in 1950s Scituate to his dissipation on the cold streets of Boston. They follow Nick, his older brother, and their put-upon mother — Jody left Jonathan in 1960, six months after Nick was born — as they move from house to house, scraping to get by.

It’s in detailing his childhood and his desperate, debauched adolescence that Nick’s writing is the most straightforward and brutally affecting. He tries his hand at more formal experimentation later, as he relays his and his father’s separate but similar orbits: Jonathan probing oblivion on Boston’s dark and bitterly cold streets, Nick drowning his guilt and doubt at J.J. Foley’s or at the Middle East.

One playlet — reminiscent of the "Circe" chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses in form and dark psychological implication (if not in length) — takes place in a Dunkin’ Donuts. Another conflates Jonathan’s stint as a Salvation Army Santa with the tragedy of King Lear. "Working with the homeless — and especially encountering my father on the streets — it felt at times like a play," Nick says. "It really felt like the circumstances were sort of heightened. You’re on a street at night, under a streetlight. The lighting is dramatic, the costumes are sort of over the top."

In a tour de force of assaultive, staccato imagery, Nick relates the sensation of a brutal bender in a four-page litany of inebriated imagery: "The usual I say ... Straight up. Two fingers. A shot. A sip. A nip ... I say same again. I say all around. I say my good man. I say my drinking buddy. I say get that in ya ... Down the hatch I say." The rhythmic brio, the kaleidoscopic imagery seems to spiral out of control, and by the end, one feels legless. "While you’re reading it out loud in front of an audience, you start to get sort of off-centered, and you start to feel drunk by the end of it," says Nick, who quit drinking when he was 30, and later tried fruitlessly to get his father to do the same. "It reaches the experience of a night or a week or a life of heavy drinking, without laying it out in a narrative way."

Ultimately, this fusion of the narrative and the lyrical, the poetic and the reportorial, was how the book cried out to be written. "Being a poet primarily, it’s how I think. I think in a very condensed, distilled way," Nick says. "The book is in very short chapters, and I could almost see it as a collection of poems. When I do readings from the book, I don’t always tell people that this is prose, and they assume it’s poetry." But, he says, with a poem the risk is that the reader might reduce it to a mere metaphor, an abstraction. This invented form, "hovering in between the two," allowed him to be artful but still "deal in a documentary way with the world."

WHEN NICK was 16, his father started writing him letters from prison: "Tell me of yourself — I regret our mutual loss — perhaps — soon — in our future — we can regain our lost knowledge of each other." At first, these often went unread. "One of the things that terrified me about the letters was his handwriting and my handwriting were very similar," Nick says. "Friends would see it, and they would assume I had written it. I would look at my hand, and it would seem to be betraying me."

Their first face-to-face meeting as adults was hardly any better. In 1987, after Nick had been in Boston and working at Pine Street for three years, he received a phone call. "Get over here with your truck ... I’m sitting behind the door with my shotgun ... waiting for the knob to turn." It was the first time Nick had heard his father’s voice in 19 years. He went to the designated address, knocked on the door, entered. "I find him sitting naked in a galvanized tin tub in the center of the room, bathing and drinking straight vodka from a silver chalice, like some demented king from the Middle Ages," he writes. "He rises from his bath and stands before me, naked. His breasts sag, soap funnels off his cock."

"That’s quite a set-up, when you’re gonna first meet your son for the first time, to stage it so that you’re gonna be naked and rising out of the water," Nick chuckles, still seemingly in disbelief. "I didn’t know if he always did that. Seemed like there might have been a shower down the hall or something. I was thrown by it. It was one of those things that will be forever burned in my mind."

Another came just a few months later. Unbeknownst to Nick, his father had been evicted. Bicycling along the Charles, he saw Jonathan awakening from a night’s slumber on a bench by the Esplanade. He writes the scene, as simple and imagistic as a haiku: "The first beautiful day of spring, families out for a stroll. He staggers to the edge of the river to piss, his cock wild in his hands. A little girl points."

What goes through a man’s mind at a moment like that? "I was pretty stunned," Nick says. "It was clear that he was pretty intoxicated. And it was clear that he also, at that point, was sleeping out. It was the first time I saw him since he came out of the tin tub. I sort of knew, okay, he’s going downhill. And I didn’t know what would happen to him. But I didn’t talk to him then, no. I was on my bike, and I rode away.

"I was drinking and doing some drugs back then," Nick explains. "Whatever emotions went through my mind, I tried to get as far away from them as possible, and get rid of them as quickly as possible. So I went and got high right afterwards. There was a lot of shame around it. There was a lot of shame, and then a sense of powerlessness. The world felt very off-balance."

The feelings of unresolved guilt as he watched his father drink his life away gnawed at Nick, but they didn’t compel him to do anything about it, at least not at first. He was too preoccupied with his own problems. And it wasn’t necessarily the altruistic impulse of a good Samaritan that led him to start working at the Pine Street Inn.

"It was a year and a half after my mother died, and I was feeling so lost," Nick says. "The intensity of her death ... I had to go someplace that was more extreme to get myself out of it, to recognize that suffering is part of existence, part of everyone’s existence. I had to go to an extreme place to find that, to connect with a larger suffering."

He didn’t expect to find that suffering in the form of his own father. When Jonathan started shuffling through Pine Street’s doors, showing up for a free meal now and then, then coming more frequently, then sleeping there, then causing trouble, then getting barred for the night, Nick kept his distance. "We didn’t do a big reunion or anything," he says. "Just sort of eyeing each other from across the room. And then, slowly, organically, it would just happen. He and I would leave the building at the same time, or I would see him on the street and we’d walk together on the street for a few hours and talk. But in the beginning, I treated him just like every other guest."