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"I was riding the girl from behind and she was blowing Charlie, he said, 'Yeah bro, give her hard dick!' What a weirdo. Could never look at him the same way after that. Who the hell says something like that while tag-teaming a chick?"
Being a man is like playing a video game if you have no idea what the rules are. It's the best way I can explain it. The learning curve is met through crazy antics, experimentation and wrecking a lot of stuff. It's an existential thing. It's difficult to understand if you're not a man. One thing you could do though, is read Bud Smith's oddly beautiful novel F250, a story that I would label somewhere between rock n' roll memoir, German bildungsroman and Southern Gothic fiction. It's like nothing I've ever read before, but it speaks beautifully to every kid that once was lost and had to figure out a way to pick up the scattered pieces of their heart.
Lee Casey plays guitar in a noise band. He doesn't have much going for himself, except a Ford F250 pickup trick and a handful of loyal friends. He's also doing some construction in order to make ends meet and in exchange for studio time the band can't afford. The idea is to go to Los Angeles, or maybe Seattle, get a record contract and becomes rock stars, but they are yet so far from Shangri-La. Life in your twenties is complicated, or rather it "gets" complicated. Lee's trying to figure out a way to reconcile his everyday life with his lifelong dream, but the rules of the game keep changing and changing before his very eyes, everyday and he just has to keep playing it.
The writing of Bud Smith is poetic, understated and oddly efficient. The chapters alternate numbers and names, and are written in a raw, factual manners like journal entries. That alone wouldn't be interesting if what he wrote wasn't special and fortunately for the reader, it totally is. Lee's life is dripping with poetry and rock n' roll romanticism. That's how Bud Smith turned him into a tremendous protagonist: one moment he's fighting for a girl that isn't even his and the other, the appreciate the abstract, overflowing beauty of a moment. There are these scenes in F250 where reality becomes unhinged and chapters turn into punk rock Norman Rockwell paintings (the prose is sligtly too visual for me to call Smith a literary Raymond Pettibon), illustrating the American youth in a single image.
"How's it going?"
"Be careful of the deck. It's very expensive. Don't you dare nick it up."
She just kept staring at me. I kept staring at her.
I laughed, "That's it?"
"What," she called out. Her mouth opened like she was going to speak, and then she closed it again along with her window.
"Hold on, lady!"
She looked at me again, just another shirtless moron.
"What?"
"What happens if I smash one of these boulders into the deck like I've just scored a touchdown?"
The closest comparison I can find for Bud Smith's F250 is that it's somewhere between a contemporary, grungy spin off Jack Kerouac and Henry Rollins' published journals. Smith's prose is functional and descriptive, but his imaginary is an overflowing source of mythical realism and the beauty of F250 emerges from this clash between Smith's working class roots and poetic philosophy. I don't know of any other novel that does this so well, so cleanly and deliberately. F250 is not a novel you read for the plot, which is centered around the episodic adventures of a gang of friends, a little bit like a sitcom or a Young Adult series, it's a novel you read for the almost extra-sensorial experience of reading Bud Smith's larger-than-life prose.
I'm not a musician. I might be a tad of a music nerd, but I've never played any instrument in my life and yet F250 pulled me into the reality of Lee Casey and checked-in all my doubts and cynicism right at the entrance. It speaks a universal language that every young man who once didn't have his life together. It's an accessible, tender and oddly romantic novel that should be bound to become a cult classic if people get the word out about it. I sure wouldn't have it my man Gabino Iglesias didn't slip me a word about the existence of Bud Smith and his terrific fiction. So consider this a pay-it-forward kind of thing. No need to thank me, for enlightening you about F250, just make sure to enlighten somebody else, so that the ball keeps rolling and that Bud Smith keeps writing life-affirming novels.
I'm not a musician. I might be a tad of a music nerd, but I've never played any instrument in my life and yet F250 pulled me into the reality of Lee Casey and checked-in all my doubts and cynicism right at the entrance. It speaks a universal language that every young man who once didn't have his life together. It's an accessible, tender and oddly romantic novel that should be bound to become a cult classic if people get the word out about it. I sure wouldn't have it my man Gabino Iglesias didn't slip me a word about the existence of Bud Smith and his terrific fiction. So consider this a pay-it-forward kind of thing. No need to thank me, for enlightening you about F250, just make sure to enlighten somebody else, so that the ball keeps rolling and that Bud Smith keeps writing life-affirming novels.