Coming To Terms

"You're ugly," she hissed. "And you can tell your momma I says so."

Ruining it For EverybodySo says the high school girl to the scribbler. The crack comes from nowhere, completely unprovoked and surely unsolicited. And it cracks smack in the middle of Jim Knipfel's Ruining It For Everybody (Tarcher/Penguin $9.95).

Thing is, the bitch was probably right. Then. Knipfel was ugly. As ugly as he wanted to be.

We are what we reap.

Once upon a time New York Pressman Jim Knipfel "wanted" to be "a[n] asshole." A "monster." A "creep." He wanted to be rude; he wanted to be crude; he wanted to be utterly contrary no matter who it might hurt. If Ruining is any indication (and I've no reason to suspect otherwise), he succeeded. With aplomb. For a very bad long time.

Poor and mean and drunk in Madison, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and New York, Knipfel sets fires, slanders underground legends, spree steals, neglects his wife, yada yada yada. The damn schmuck's even unkind to strangers. In other words he's your basic all around general shit. And then some.

After awhile all that ugliness begins to take its toll. Staggering seizures and suspicious stigmata, unkillable cysts and uncountable pustules. A loony bin. Eventually even Knipfel's metaphors draw blood. He begins to lose more and more minutes. And he begins to lose his sight. Of course it is only then that he begins to see.

It's an old story, for an old soul, and Knipfel excels in the telling. Guy goes blind and sees the light. Few though learn to see with such clarity. Even fewer see things his way.

Fewer still can claim their insight came directly from Harry Crews, the wisest of seers.

Still suffering (but alas not yet smarting) from the now age-old thrashing of the good John Doe (was that in Terminal?), Knipfel prepares for his first NYP staff writer assignment as he prepares for everything else: he doesn't. No reading. No rereading. No notes. Nothing. Definitely not the best way to approach a veritable sage.

But sages are known for remarkable patience, and sage Harry is no different. Knipfel prods, plods, even insults the great man, and still Harry stays on the line, feeding huckster Jim enough rope to pull himself out of his own damn hole.

I won't spill the beans (buy the book), but I will say that Crews comes through with a zinger. He also comes through with some very simple truth: Everything's kinda cool. Not earth-shattering perhaps, but affirmation enough to get Knipfel off of his pity pot. Everything is kinda cool, Jim: your job, your place, your station.

Cool above all is Morgan, the great dame in Knipfel's increasingly moral story. She's the rock that keeps him outta the hard place, the chick that keeps him ticking. Knipfel may say that this newfound enlightenment is best-christened "Buddhism for Drunkards;" I say it's nothing more (and nothing less) than coming to terms. Morgan makes the man come to those terms.

Of course no scribbler worth his weight in words gets by simply on wisemen, wine, women, and song, and Knipfel is no exception. For the get-up and go he's got to credit Grandpa Roscoe; for the devil-may-care-but-I-don't he's got to blame a cat named Grinch. For the hat and the inquiring mind, he's got to thank Kolchak, The Night Stalker, who put in young Jim's head the notion of a good guy hack.

Mostly though Jim's got Jim, with whom he'll have to contend until he's outta contention. And to whom he'll ever have to turn. Like the game of spin-the-knife played in Bukowski's "question and answer": the point is saving yourself. Knipfel may have ruined it for everybody else, but he sure as hell saved something for his own damn self: Himself. Hank: Light a cigarette. Pour another drink. Give the knife another spin, Jim.

Note: This article was first published online in the now defunct Bully Magazine. Supplied with immense thanks to Ken Wohlrob.

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