August 29th, 2022 - Roy Spivey
Dear TNY,
So, I think what you have done is reprinted “Roy Spivey” in the August 29th issue this week, but left it off the fiction list online?
I don’t know how you operate, which is crazy after all these years. Also, I only read this shit online, which I’m sure isn’t helping with my organization.
So, “Roy Spivey”. I liked it? I don’t think this is the type of story that is supposed to make us cry or anything. There’s nothing profound here. It is nice to look at, though. The good kind of clever. It has a sense of being alive. And tension that carries the reader through. Which I am thankful for, as about 15 years after you published this the first time, your fiction now seems to be devoid of tension. There was something sweet about this piece. Tender. Earnest (in the characters, not the writing). To the degree that I don’t necessarily care if it was realistic or not (I’ve heard more than one “I sat next to so-and-so on the airplane” stories so it’s pretty believable in that regard (my buddy who works with the TSA once sat next to Dave Navarro on a flight out of Fairbanks, AK, and said he wouldn’t stop cutting stank-ass farts)). So, yeah, I enjoyed reading this. Its pacing was right. The narration was good. It was easy. Yet, it didn’t feel like airport lit.
But I wasn’t moved. Instead, I was left feeling something akin to, “Oh, well that’s nice.”
Weirdly, the date of this publication got my brain going. See, in 2007, when this was originally published, I left the military (I left in October; this was published in July, when I was packing all my shit to move to Alaska; which, also, it’s crazy to think that this was published when I didn’t have a beard and I only had one kid and I was still confidently married…whoa). And then, a scant three or four years later, I bought a VW Van, the very same one I own today, Chuck, whose engine was a straight piece of shit advertised as a “good rebuild” (shout out to Accurate Imports for living up to their “the warranty is voided if the vehicle changes hands” policy, as I bought the van from a guy less than four months after the engine had been rebuilt (by Accurate for said guy), so they wouldn’t help, financially or otherwise, even though the case they had used in the rebuild had a rotten fucking lip at the head/case junction, some of that lip having areas with less than an 1/8” of mating surface, so that after I resealed it…TWICE…it still wouldn’t hold without minor leaks) so I pulled that bitch and sold it to a young couple with full disclosure on the leaky head issue and why it was leaky, and bought myself a Ford engine and took months to install it (as I am amateurish at best when it comes to being a mechanic) with the hope that I could quit my fucking depressing job (and daily life for that matter) and take my two kids and then wife on the road, living in Chuck, taking a break from being a fucking adult & doing adult things, and just fucking play, play like no one was watching, and swim and run and laugh and make good food and cry at how hard it would be, a small family on the road, but knowing that work was the right work, the kind of work that we are supposed to do as humans, instead of pretending to be this civilized species who, more than ever, craves meaning from this life yet only finds waves of consumerism, and now Chuck, circa 2011 could do that, in my eyes, having drastically been upgraded with the beating heart of America in the way of this never been run Ford (but really, the engine was designed in the U.K. by Cosworth and then manufactured in Germany (Deutschland Uber Alles!!! (and yeah, I mean the fucking third verse of the anthem, not the arcane first and second, you over-woke bushels of pubes)), but no, just a little while later, in that fateful Fall of 2012 (and boy did I fall), when subconsciously faced with the reality that no, the van thing would never happen because nothing that wasn’t exactly what was happening would ever happen, TV and jobs and Sunday brunch and doctor appointments and going to the same museum once a month and finding the next thing that would hopefully generate a modicum of interest in physicality, I threw my family dream in the fucking trash like so much uneaten yakisoba, and here I am now, 2022, that very same engine worse for wear, me, today, about to start taking pieces off of it and putting them on a new engine (new to me, unknown miles, out of a fucking junkyard, knock on wood), 48 states under mine and my children’s belts, most of them having been spun out in the last two summers, tens of thousands of miles in this fucking beautiful shuttlecraft from Star Trek: The Next Generation, Chuck, a glorious silver brick-like angel, so many hours laughing and crying and being angry and farting and killing mosquitoes and swimming and eating good food and finding places to shit and making fun of Rothko and singing the wrong words to every song on the fucking radio until my sons cry and hyperventilate from laughing and goddamn it if it wasn’t like touching the fucking sunrise, even on the bad days, and I’d do it all over again, starting right fucking now, hard as it was, hard as it is, hard as it will ever be, what a fucking privilege it has been.
So yeah, in 2007 when you gave us “Roy Spivey”, I was a rocket sitting on the platform, all systems go, T minus a few years here or there on a mission called, “Holy Fuck Have I Blown a Hole in My Life the Size of the Fucking Grand Canyon but Then Blasted Around Said Canyon With My Sons in the Glory That is Chuck, Praise be to Chuck, in All His Love and Wonder.”
And on that note, Chuck…Thank you. I love you so much. I’m sorry I’m so scared all the time, especially because you aren’t. You’re the swiftest and noblest of donkeys. You’ve done more than I could have ever asked. Thank you, again.
Well, I’m crazy.
And on that note, I guess I should get outside and work this engine. For my boy.
See you next week.
Nick
