POETS Day: The King of Sandusky, Ohio and RIP PJ O’Rourke

To be fair he was living on borrowed time. I nearly killed him in ninety-five.

He was doing a book signing at a now defunct Birmingham mall and thankfully the distracting woman I was driving with was not so distracted by me as she managed to keep an eye open and yell hysterically making me hit the brakes on the Toyota Four Runner to stop in its tracks as I was a mere three feet from running over one of my favorite authors in the parking lot.

I thought he’d be taller.

I wasn’t always a bookish kid. I would read what was required by my teachers and my parents would give me a title they thought I needed to pour over. Reading was a duty. Then things changed.

I stumbled upon two books that made me a dedicated reader. One was Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins. It was salacious and a teenage me thought it was hilarious that he wrote about masturbation with a papal candle and I read his stuff until I realized that I had the capacity to grow up. I’ll recommend his novels about big thumbed hitch hikers to those of a certain age but there comes a point of maturity and you have to move on. He was childish and I recognized that eventually.

The second book was Modern Manners, An Etiquette Book for Rude People by PJ O’Rourke. It was first printed in ‘83 and I met it in ‘88 or ‘89. I keep reading it over and over and it resonates with me in my late forties as it did in my late teens. That may be an issue I need to address but I suspect I’m okay. I think we all have a book or two that we’ve re-read a thousand times and have lent to friends knowing that we’ll never get it back so you go ahead and buy a copy, again and again, to keep your personal library as you wish it to be.

I’ve bought Modern Manners more times than I’ve bought Handling Sin by Michael Malone, and that says something because I toss those two titles about to friends like a parade Santa with hard candy.

Modern Manners hit me. I was a dumb kid with dreams of touching panties and finding out what beer tasted like and I thought those shameful endeavors needful of subterfuge. O’Rourke made fun of rules for coke fueled orgies. It was staggeringly eye opening.

PJ O’Rourke’s funniest essay has to be – doesn’t have to be actually because he hit so many bases over the course of a varied career and we won’t all agree so this is my opinion – “How To Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.” He’s fast and hits jokes every two or three breaths. I never read anyone who would jump so nimbly from quip to joke to offense but he did it at a neck breaking pace. It’s a masterpiece that I would put up against a Botticelli but he says blow job so those of quality would probably disqualify him from comparison.

I think people with comedic leanings recognize incongruity and seize on it, but those with comedic talent recognize the same and pair it with timing. There is an ability to knowing when to, and how to drop a line. That seems to translate from comedy to drama and argument.

Tom Hanks was in Bosom Buddies and then won all the Oscars. Timing.

PJ O’Rourke went from National Lampoon to political commentary and he took his comedic instincts with him. He was acidic and insightful.

Parliament of Whores should be required reading but it was another of his non gonzo works that I’ll remember him for.

PJ O’Rourke had a talent for titles and so his compilation contrasting his juvenile freewheeling publications versus his older and more considered pieces was called Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut – props for the Oxford comma.

One of the entries in the book is called “On First Looking into Emily Post’s Etiquette – Review of the fourteenth edition for House and Garden, 1984.”

It’s a look at the revamp of Emily Post from the eyes of a bookish eleven year old with an alcoholic step father – he noted that in the Etiquette they didn’t get drunk and yell at each other – in a house with very few books. He latched on to the original Emily Post and it makes Modern Manners as poignant as it is funny. I’ve searched for a link to the essay but came up empty. You may just have to buy it. Sorry. He inhabited that book, made the stock characters his friends and navigated a Where The Wild Things Are type imaginative world. It’s sad and wonderful. He emerged blazing. I can read it over and over.

In Age and Guile O’Rourke printed what he thought was poetry when he was drug addled doufus and it’s terrible. So here is some of his awful poetry for completion of the POETS Day concept but I can’t even write it so I took a picture. This is… I don’t even know what to say. This wasn’t his medium.  Drug addled.

I cried when I heard PJ O’Rourke died. Seriously. He wasn’t a favorite author. He was a doorway to understanding what thinking could be and what humor can do to the way you perceive the world. He showed that you can point and you can laugh without holding yourself up as the better person. PJ O’Rourke taught me that. In my reading I don’t think there’s been anybody more formative.

From “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.”

“Where does a crazy life like that lead? Look at all the people who’ve died in car wrecks. Albert Camus, Jayne Mansfield, Jackson Pollock, Tom Paine. Well, Tom Paine didn’t really die in a car wreck, but he probably would have if he’d lived a little later. He was that kind of guy. Anyway, death is always the first thing that leaps into everybody’s mind – sudden violent death at an early age. If only it were that simple. God, we could all go out in a blaze of flaming aluminum alloys formulated specially for the Porsche factory race effort like James Dean did! No Ulcers, no hemorrhoids, no bulging waistlines, soft dicks, or false teeth… bash!! kaboom!! Watch this space for paperback reprint rights, auction, and movie option sale! But that’s not the way it goes. No. What actually happens is you fall for that teenage lovely in the next seat over, fall for her like a ton of condoms, and before you know it you’re married and have teenage lovelies of your own – getting felt up in a Pontiac Trans Ams this very minute, no doubt – plus a six figure mortgage, a liver the size of the Bronx, and a Country Squire that’s never seen the sweet side of sixty.

It’s hard to face the truth, but I suppose you yourself realize that if you’d had just a little more courage, just a little more strength of character, you could have been dead by now. No such luck.”

I suspect that despite his writings PJ O’Rourke was glad I hit the brakes twenty-seven years ago. He didn’t die in a blaze of flaming aluminum alloys. He died of lung cancer. I watched my mother go down that road and it wasn’t easy for her. I guarantee it wasn’t easy for him either. But he carried on until. No such luck.

Godspeed.