An examination of Jesus' son's drug use.

Denis Johnson published Jesus' Son, a book of short stories, in 1992. The intertwining motif of drug use and addiction is an integral plot feature to most, if not all, of the main characters in the novel, which includes the stories "Car Crash While Hitchhiking," "Emergency," and "Beverly Home." This is particularly true of the narrator, who is often under the influence of one or more drugs, the sort of which he is frequently unsure of. The majority of the characters in the stories are down on their luck for one cause or another or have made dubious life decisions that have led them to their new situation. The use and abuse of drugs in Jesus’ Son is an essential element in the stories because they alter the narrator’s perception of the world leading to some interesting encounters with the real world which is illustrated by the narrator’s experiences after taking Georgie’s drugs in “Emergency”, after imbibing in alcohol and drugs during his hitchhiking prior to the tragedy in “Car Crash While Hitchhiking”, and, his fixation with the “woman in the shower” in “Beverly Home.”

The story in “Emergency” centers around the narrator’s work in a local emergency room and the characters which inhabit that domain. The narrator sets off in search of Georgie, the orderly, whom he knows always has access to drugs because he “often stole pills from the cabinets” (Johnson 57). He finds Georgie in the operating room mopping a clean floor which Georgie imagines is covered with blood. Apparently, Georgie had already raided the cabinets that night. The narrator searches Georgie’s pockets and finds his stash but not wanting to be greedy, he noted “I left him two of each, whatever they were” (Johnson 58). The night picked up when a man came into the emergency room with a knife sticking out of his left eye. At this point, the narrator starts taking the pills he had gotten from Georgie earlier. He described each as he ingested them, “Some of them tasted the way urine smells, some of them burned, some of them tasted like chalk” (Johnson 61). Apparently, the narrator just took a variety of pills which he had no idea what they were. At the end of their shift, the narrator and Georgie get into Georgie’s truck, and in their drug-addled state, end up driving around all day, getting lost in the process. As night fell again, they found themselves on a lonely road where Georgie pulled the truck over because he had apparently forgotten to turn on his headlights and thought they were broken. They decide to wait for morning to continue. In the meantime, they notice it starting to snow so they get out of the truck and wandered down an embankment where the narrator sees “an open field that seemed to be a military graveyard” (Johnson 66). Through the snow shower the narrator then sees “beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity” (Johnson 66). What the narrator “saw” was a drive-in movie theater abandoned by patrons during the snow but still showing the movie. The “grave markers” he had seen were racks for the speakers and the “angels” were the images projected onto the giant screen. Just more of the hallucinations brought on by his previous cocktail of pills.

In “Car Crash While Hitchhiking”, the narrator finds himself on the side of the road waiting for his next ride benefactor after a day which had included rides from “a salesman who shared his liquor…, a Cherokee filled with bourbon” (Johnson 3) and finally, the family who picked him up last and who had the car crash. In his drug and alcohol-induced state, the narrator falls asleep and only awakes to find himself amid a crash where he is tossed around the car by the impact. He stumbles out of the car, apparently uninjured, with the couple’s baby boy, proving the adage that God looks after drunks and babies in car crashes. He wanders around the crash scene with the baby and, at some point, the baby is taken from him but he never says when, how, or who took him, he talks to the police and is taken to the hospital where he refuses treatment. At this point his stupor kicks in as he sees the wife from the car crash coming down the corridor of the hospital, as he describes her “She was glorious, burning” (Johnson 11) and, as the doctor takes her into a room to inform her that her husband is dead, the narrator notes “from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if…diamonds were being incinerated” (Johnson 11). More of the narrator’s drug-induced visions are apparent here.

In the final story, “Beverly Home”, our narrator is on the road to recovery and is working at a home for the aged and disabled where he enjoys working because “counselors and Narcotics Anonymous members and such-seemed to think a job was a happy thing” (Johnson 116), so he believed it too. Although he was a recovering drug addict, the narrator still suffered from the after effects of his previous affliction, one of which seemed to be a fixation disorder. One day on his way home from work, he happened to walk through a town house community where he heard a woman singing in her shower. He described the scene with imagery that was likely a leftover from his drug days as he noted “I thought of mermaids: the blurry music of falling water, the soft song from the wet chamber” (Johnson 118). Over the next weeks, the narrator made a habit of stopping by the house to see if he could get another glimpse of the woman, even going as far as waiting around to see if the woman and her husband ever made love. Near the end of the story, our narrator describes his recovery “I was just learning to live sober, and in fact I was often confused, especially because some Antabuse I was taking was having a: very uncharacteristic effect on me” which he goes on to explain “I was in a little better physical shape every day, I was getting my looks back, and my spirits were rising, and this was all in all a happy time for me” (Johnson 133). It seems the narrator was going to be just fine.

Johnson masterfully used the theme of drug use in Jesus’ Son to weave together interesting stories told by the narrator about his experiences and the characters that he meets along the way. The altered state in which the narrator witnesses life, gives a sometimes humorous, sometimes bizarre, look at life, revolving around people whose circumstances or life choices have left them at the bottom end of society. In addition, Johnson also makes the point that if a drugged-out and down-and-out person like the narrator can turn his life around, then there’s hope for the rest of us whose problems may not be so severe.





Works Cited

Johnson, Denis. Jesus’ Son. Picador, 1992.