Pulphead Essays

Review by New York Times Review

IT is something of a surprise that one of the best magazine profiles of the last decade is about Axl Rose. But such is the work of John Jeremiah Sullivan, who can take pretty much anything you never thought you'd want to read about respectably (Axl Rose, "Real World") or anything you never thought you'd want to read about at all (a Christian-rock festival, long-forgotten naturalist loons), and make of it the sort of essay-world you just want to dwell inside. Sullivan seems able to do almost anything, to work in any register, and not just within a single piece but often in the span of a single paragraph. Here, for example, is his first sketch of Rose in person, which can only be quoted at length: "To me he looks like he's wearing an Axl Rose mask. He looks like a man I saw eating by himself at a truck stop in Monteagle, Tenn., at 2 o'clock in the morning about 12 years ago. He looks increasingly like the albino reggae legend Yellowman. His mane evokes a gathering of strawberry-red intricately braided hempen fibers, the sharply twisted ends of which have been punched, individu ally, a half inch into his scalp. His chest hair is the color of a new penny. With the wasp-man sunglasses and the braids and the goatee, he reminds one of the monster in 'Predator,' or of that monster's wife on its home planet. When he first came onto the scene, he often looked, in photographs, like a beautiful, slender, redheaded 20-year-old girl. Now he has thickened through the middle - muscly thickness," not the larded "thickness of some years back. He grabs his package tightly, and his package is huge. Only reporting." Only reporting, indeed, but at the same time not at all. Sullivan's collection, "Pulphead," takes its title from a letter of resignation Norman Mailer sent to Esquire in 1960, and frames the work assembled here as bits of pop flotsam. One of his recurring subjects is, well, his own subjects; as he begins one of the essays in this collection, "Last year I was asked to write a magazine story about the future of the human race, a topic on which my sporadic descents to the crushing mental depths of pop-rock culture crit had quite predictably made me the go-to guy." But there's a wink to this anxiety, a modest introduction to stories that aim to invest a celebrity like Rose with persuasively mythic significance. Sullivan seems most interested in that rare cultural nexus where artistry - where something genuinely new, challenging - intersects with commercial popularity. What he writes of one blues scholar could easily be said about Sullivan himself: "He was interested, in other words, in culturally precious things that had been accidentally snagged and preserved by stray cogs of the anarchic capitalist threshing machine." To take, for example, the Axl Rose description, Sullivan there describes the various moments of a shape-shifting avatar: the Guns N' Roses frontman begins as a parody of himself, then melds with a lonely personal memory (a man alone at a truck stop) to emerge as an absurd, hale, monstrous, comic-monstrous, tenderly girlish, muscled, obscene legend. This is all in keeping with the broader portrait Sullivan sketches, of a rock star who raised himself out of nowhere ("'Central Indiana.' I'm not trying to say there's no there there. I'm trying to say there's no there") to become the leader of "the last great rock band that didn't think there was something a bit embarrassing about being in a rock band." This is perhaps the book's key line, the moral-aesthetic credo behind Sullivan's reluctant vocation as a magazine writer: he takes a subject on his or her own terms, keeps sacred the premise that his subjects are, unembarrassedly, doing exactly what they intend to be doing. This is argued most beautifully in his elegy for Michael Jackson, in which he explains that to pity the man's batty idiosyncrasies is to deny the artist's proud self-creation; it is argued most forcefully in his profile of Bunny Wailer, in which the aging reggae genius gets righteously indignant about GQ magazine's photographic demands, and in the end gives Sullivan the parting "gift of saying no"; and it is argued with the most intellectual rigor in his reckoning with the white authenticity-hound "rediscovery" of the great bluesmen. "The noble ambition not to be the kind of people who unwittingly fetishize and exoticize black or poor white folk poverty has allowed us to remain the type who don't stop to ask if the serious treatment of certain folk forms as essentially high- or higher-art forms might have originated with the folk themselves." In other words, the bluesman knew himself to be a "profound artist" before we ever congratulated ourselves for calling him that. The line about not being embarrassed ultimately reflects a set of ideas about self-consciousness. Sullivan's great magazine-writing antecedent is, along with Mailer himself and Terry Southern, clearly David Foster Wallace, and it doesn't seem to me any great exaggeration to say that "Pulphead" is the best, and most important, collection of magazine writing since Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." But where so much of Wallace, most notably in his extended profile of John McCain and in his tennis appreciations, turns on a distinction between instinctive action and self-conscious paralysis, Sullivan doesn't find this conflict worth worrying about. His writing about pop musicians gestures toward the idea that there is no heroic self-creation without self-conscious effort, and that just because you're aware you're performing doesn't make the performance any less authentic. But this emphasis on artistic fiat is ultimately balanced by the thrumming subtext of Sullivan's own search for roots. Toward the beginning of a moving, personal essay-remembrance of the Southern writer who was his college mentor of sorts, Sullivan writes that he "was under the tragic spell of the South, which you've either felt or haven't. In my case it was acute because, having grown up in Indiana with a Yankee father, a child exile from kentucky roots of which I was overly proud, I'd long been aware of a faint nowhereness to my life." ("I'm not trying to say there's no there there. I'm trying to say there's no there.") Sullivan's own act of self-invention has been not only to write himself into the sentence-level tradition of Southern literature, but to extend it. Where Wallace's style was so pugnaciously sui generis, Sullivan's writing is a bizarrely coherent, novel, and generous pastiche of the biblical, the demotic, the regionally gusty and the erudite. This personal search - for a balance between autonomy and tradition, entertainment and difficulty - runs through all of these essays, and makes of this collection a deceptively personal journey, one where Axl Rose reminds him of a man he saw eating alone in the middle of the night at a Tennessee truck stop. In the piece about the Christian-rock festival in Pennsylvania, a monumental work of tender hilarity, Sullivan takes up with a few beefy believers from West Virginia, eats their fried woodland critters and palavers with them about their faith. By the end of their time with him, Sullivan writes, "the guys had put together what I did for a living - though, to their credit, they didn't seem to take this as a reasonable explanation for my being there." Sullivan's writing is a pastiche of the biblical, the demotic, the regionally gusty and the erudite. Gideon Lewis-Kraus's book, "A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful," will be published next spring.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 30, 2011]

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Review by Booklist Review

Sullivan's first book-length title, Blood Horses (2004), which gave a revealing inside view of the American horse-racing industry, was an expansion of a feature article that garnered a National Magazine Award. Since then, Sullivan has become a hot commodity in periodical land, penning substantive pieces for magazines such as Harper's, GQ, and the Paris Review. His latest work collects the best of these from the last decade, showcasing Sullivan's literate, insightful prose and ability to remain eloquent whether he is writing about rock-icon Axl Rose or a shelter for survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Many of his topics have a distinctly southern focus, reflecting his Kentucky upbringing, as when Sullivan recounts his adventures at an Ozarks Christian rock concert or when describing his short-lived literary tutelage under the wing of the late southern writer Andrew Lytle. In every piece, Sullivan turns a probing eye on popular culture, uncovering the odds and ends other writers miss, and he does it with a panache that will keep readers on the lookout for even greater things to come.--Hays, Carl Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The age-old strangeness of American pop culture gets dissected with hilarious and revelatory precision in these scintillating essays. Whiting Award-winning critic and journalist Sullivan (Blood Horses) surveys 10,000 years of intriguing, inexplicable, and incorrigible socio-aesthetic phenomena, from the ancient Indian cave paintings of Tennessee (and their hillbilly admirers) to the takeover of his Wilmington, N.C., house by the teen soap opera One Tree Hill. Along the way he visits a Christian rock festival brimming with fellowship and frog-devouring savagery; witnesses the collapse of civilization in a post-Katrina gas line; hangs out in the professional-partying demimonde of MTV's RealWorld; marches with exuberant Tea Partiers; scouts the animal kingdom's gathering war on mankind; and traces the rise of rocker Axl Rose from his origins as a weedy adolescent punk in the small-town void of central Indiana. Sullivan views this landscape with love, horror, and fascination, finding the intricate intellectual substructures underlying the banalities, the graceful in the grotesque, the constellations of meaning that fans discern amid the random twinklings of stars. Sullivan writes an extraordinary prose that's stuffed with off-beat insight gleaned from rapt, appalled observations and suffused with a hang-dog charm. The result is an arresting take on the American imagination. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

National Magazine Award winner Sullivan's crackling, inquisitive collection of previously published essays is the kind of book you proselytize for. Comparisons to nonfiction greats-Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, and David Foster Wallace-are deserving but beside the point. Sullivan's voice, affectionate and grounded, is his own. (LJ 11/15/11) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Though many of the articles collected here illuminate the surfaces of popular culture, the best of them go deeper into the heart of America.Most of these essays are reported pieces, some of them profiles (of musical artists Bunny Wailer and Axl Rose), others long-form feature stories (on a Christian rock festival, reality TV, the Tea Party revolt). Yet New York Times Magazine contributing writer Sullivan (Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son, 2004) is always inherently a part of these stories, conscious of himself as an observer and of his perspective as an interpreter, though never gratuitously or self-indulgently intrusive. As a writer for publications ranging from GQ to the Paris Review (where he is the southern editor), the native Kentuckian now living in North Carolina shows his familiarity with what one piece terms "the tragic spell of the South," whether he's writing about his complicated relationship with a literary mentor or rekindling memories of an evangelical past while bonding with believers at a music festival. Throughout, he recognizes the danger of "a too-easy eloquence," and his appreciation of the "unknowable" Michael Jackson in particular challenges a facile understanding. As is usually the case in such collections, some of the pieces are slighter than others, though none seem journalistically dated. Even "At a Shelter (After Katrina)" comes alive on the page through the vividness of its sensory detail. Sullivan's ambition is evident and suggests that he has a much bigger book in him, whether he's examining "a historical portal [where] you could slip into it and get behind the eyes of the American mind for a minute" or contemplating "the future of the human race" (hint: It involves a war against the animal world, which may have some scientific basis or may be a flight of fantasy).Mostly impressive work from a writer who frequently causes readers to challenge their own perspectives.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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UPON THIS ROCK   It is wrong to boast, but in the beginning, my plan was perfect. I was assigned to cover the Cross-Over Festival in Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, three days of the top Christian bands and their backers at some isolated Midwestern fairground. I'd stand at the edge of the crowd and take notes on the scene, chat up the occasional audience member ("What's harder--homeschooling or regular schooling?"), then flash my pass to get backstage, where I'd rap with the artists themselves. The singer could feed me his bit about how all music glorifies Him, when it's performed with a loving spirit, and I'd jot down every tenth word, inwardly smiling. Later that night I might sneak some hooch in my rental car and invite myself to lie with a prayer group by their fire, for the fellowship of it. Fly home, stir in statistics. Paycheck. But as my breakfast-time mantra says, I am a professional. And they don't give out awards for that sort of toe-tap foolishness. I wanted to know what these people are, who claim to love this music, who drive hundreds of miles, traversing states, to hear it live. Then it came, my epiphany: I would go with them. Or rather, they would come with me. I would rent a van, a plush one, and we would travel there together, I and three or four hard-core buffs, all the way from the East Coast to the implausibly named Lake of the Ozarks. We'd talk through the night, they'd proselytize at me, and I'd keep my little tape machine working all the while. Somehow I knew we'd grow to like and pity one another. What a story that would make--for future generations. The only remaining question was: How to recruit the willing? But it was hardly even a question, because everyone knows that damaged types who are down for whatever's clever gather in "chat rooms" every night. And among the Jesusy, there's plenty who are super f'd up. He preferred it that way, evidently. So I published my invitation, anonymously, at youthontherock.com, and on two Internet forums devoted to the good-looking Christian pop-punk band Relient K, which had been booked to appear at Cross-Over. I pictured that guy or girl out there who'd been dreaming in an attic room of seeing, with his or her own eyes, the men of Relient K perform their song "Gibberish" from Two Lefts Don't Make a Right ... But Three Do. How could he or she get there, though? Gas prices won't drop, and Relient K never plays north Florida. Please, Lord, make it happen. Suddenly, here my posting came, like a great light. We could help each other. "I'm looking for a few serious fans of Christian rock to ride to the festival with me," I wrote. "Male/female doesn't matter, though you shouldn't be older than, say, 28, since I'm looking at this primarily as a youth phenomenon." They seem like harmless words. Turns out, though, I had failed to grasp how "youth" the phenomenon is. Most of the people hanging out in these chat rooms were teens, and I don't mean nineteen, either, I mean fourteen. Some of them, I was about to learn, were mere tweens. I had just traipsed out onto the World Wide Web and asked a bunch of twelve-year-old Christians if they wanted to come for a ride in my van. It wasn't long before the children rounded on me. "Nice job cutting off your email address," wrote "mathgeek29," in a tone that seemed not at all Christlike. "I doubt if anybody would give a full set of contact information to some complete stranger on the Internet ... Aren't there any Christian teens in Manhattan who would be willing to do this?" A few of the youths were indeed credulous. "Riathamus" said, "i am 14 and live in indiana plus my parents might not let me considering it is a stranger over the Internet. but that would really be awsome." A girl by the name of "LilLoser" even tried to be a friend: I doubt my parents would allow their baby girl to go with some guy they don't and I don't know except through email, especially for the amount of time you're asking and like driving around everywhere with ya ... I'm not saying you're a creepy petifile, lol, but i just don't think you'll get too many people interested ... cuz like i said, it spells out "creepy" ... but hey--good luck to you in your questy missiony thing. lol. The luck that she wished me I sought in vain. The Christians stopped chatting with me and started chatting among themselves, warning one another about me. Finally one poster on the official Relient K site hissed at the others to stay away from my scheme, as I was in all likelihood "a 40 year old kidnapper." Soon I logged on and found that the moderators of the site had removed my post and its lengthening thread of accusations altogether, offering no explanation. Doubtless at that moment they were faxing alerts to a network of moms. I recoiled in dread. I called my lawyer, in Boston, who told me to "stop using computers" (his plural). In the end, the experience inspired in me a distaste for the whole Cross-Over Festival as a subject, and I resolved to refuse the assignment. I withdrew. The problem with a flash mag like the Gentlemen's Quarterly is that there's always some overachieving assistant editor, sometimes called Greg, whom the world hasn't beaten down yet, and who, when you phone him, out of courtesy, just to let him know that "the Cross-Over thing fell through" and that you'll be in touch when you "figure out what to do next," hops on that mystical boon the Internet and finds out that the festival you were planning to attend was in fact not "the biggest one in the country," as you'd alleged. The biggest one in the country--indeed, in Christendom--is the Creation Festival, inaugurated in 1979, a veritable Godstock. And it happens not in Missouri but in ruralmost Pennsylvania, in a green valley, on a farm called Agape. This festival did not end a month ago; it starts the day after tomorrow. Already they are assembling, many tens of thousands strong. Good luck to you in your questy missiony thing. I had one demand: that I not be made to camp. I'd have some sort of vehicle with a mattress in it, one of these pop-ups, maybe. "Right," said Greg. "Here's the deal. I've called around. There are no vans left within a hundred miles of Philly. We got you an RV, though. It's a twenty-nine-footer." Once I reached the place, we agreed (or he led me to think he agreed), I would certainly be able to downgrade to something more manageable. The reason twenty-nine feet is such a common length for RVs, I presume, is that once a vehicle gets much longer, you need a special permit to drive it. That would mean forms and fees, possibly even background checks. But show up at any RV joint with your thigh stumps lashed to a skateboard, crazily waving your hooks-for-hands, screaming you want that twenty-nine-footer out back for a trip to you ain't sayin' where, and all they want to know is: Credit or debit, tiny sir? Two days later, I stood in a parking lot, suitcase at my feet. Debbie came toward me. Her face was as sweet as a birthday cake beneath spray-hardened bangs. She raised a powerful arm and pointed, before either of us spoke. She pointed at a vehicle that looked like something the ancient Egyptians might have left behind in the desert. "Oh, hi, there," I said. "Listen, all I need is, like, a camper van or whatever. It's just me, and I'm going five hundred miles..." She considered me. "Where ya headed?" "To this thing called Creation. It's, like, a Christian-rock festival." "You and everybody!" she said. "The people who got our vans are going to that same thing. There's a bunch o' ya." Her husband and coworker, Jack, emerged--tattooed, squat, gray-mulleted, spouting open contempt for MapQuest. He'd be giving me real directions. "But first let's check 'er out." We toured the outskirts of my soon-to-be mausoleum. It took time. Every single thing Jack said, somehow, was the only thing I'd need to remember. White water, gray water, black water (drinking, showering, le devoir). Here's your this, never ever that. Grumbling about "weekend warriors." I couldn't listen, because listening would mean accepting it as real, though his casual mention of the vast blind spot in the passenger-side mirror squeaked through, as did his description of the "extra two feet on each side"--the bulge of my living quarters--which I wouldn't be able to see but would want to "be conscious of" out there. Debbie followed us with a video camera, for insurance purposes. I saw my loved ones gathered in a mahogany-paneled room to watch this footage; them being forced to hear me say, "What if I never use the toilet--do I still have to switch on the water?" Jack pulled down the step and climbed aboard. It was really happening. The interior smelled of spoiled vacations and amateur porn shoots wrapped in motel shower curtains and left in the sun. I was physically halted at the threshold for a moment. Jesus had never been in this RV. *   *   * What do I tell you about my voyage to Creation? Do you want to know what it's like to drive a windmill with tires down the Pennsylvania Turnpike at rush hour by your lonesome, with darting bug-eyes and shaking hands; or about Greg's laughing phone call "to see how it's going"; about hearing yourself say "no No NO NO!" in a shamefully high-pitched voice every time you try to merge; or about thinking you detect, beneath the mysteriously comforting blare of the radio, faint honking sounds, then checking your passenger-side mirror only to find you've been straddling the lanes for an unknown number of miles (those two extra feet!) and that the line of traffic you've kept pinned stretches back farther than you can see; or about stopping at Target to buy sheets and a pillow and peanut butter but then practicing your golf swing in the sporting-goods aisle for a solid twenty-five minutes, unable to stop, knowing that when you do, the twenty-nine-footer will be where you left her, alone in the side lot, waiting for you to take her the rest of the way to your shared destiny? She got me there, as Debbie and Jack had promised, not possibly believing it themselves. Seven miles from Mount Union, a sign read CREATION AHEAD. The sun was setting; it floated above the valley like a fiery gold balloon. I fell in with a long line of cars and trucks and vans--not many RVs. Here they were, all about me: the born-again. On my right was a pickup truck, its bed full of teenage girls in matching powder-blue T-shirts; they were screaming at a Mohawked kid who was walking beside the road. I took care not to meet their eyes--who knew but they weren't the same fillies I had solicited days before? Their line of traffic lurched ahead, and an old orange Datsun came up beside me. I watched as the driver rolled down her window, leaned halfway out, and blew a long, clear note on a ram's horn. I understand where you might be coming from in doubting that. Nevertheless it is what she did. I have it on tape. She blew a ram's horn, quite capably, twice. A yearly rite, perhaps, to announce her arrival at Creation. My turn at the gate. The woman looked at me, then past me to the empty passenger seat, then down the whole length of the twenty-nine-footer. "How many people in your group?" she asked. *   *   * I pulled away in awe, permitting the twenty-nine-footer to float. My path was thronged with excited Christians, most younger than eighteen. The adults looked like parents or pastors, not here on their own. Twilight was well along, and the still valley air was sharp with campfire smoke. A great roar shot up to my left--something had happened onstage. The sound bespoke a multitude. It filled the valley and lingered. I thought I might enter unnoticed--that the RV might even offer a kind of cover--but I was already turning heads. Two separate kids said "I feel sorry for him" as I passed. Another leaped up on the driver's-side step and said, "Jesus Christ, man," then fell away running. I kept braking--even idling was too fast. Whatever spectacle had provoked the roar was over now: The roads were choked. The youngsters were streaming around me in both directions, back to their campsites, like a line of ants around some petty obstruction. They had a disconcerting way of stepping aside for the RV only when its front fender was just about to graze their backs. From my elevated vantage, it looked as if they were waiting just a tenth of a second too long, and that I was gently, forcibly parting them in slow motion. The Evangelical strata were more or less recognizable from my high school days, though everyone, I observed, had gotten better-looking. Lots were dressed like skate punks or in last season's East Village couture (nondenominationals); others were fairly trailer (rural Baptists or Church of God); there were preps (Young Life, Fellowship of Christian Athletes--these were the ones who'd have the pot). You could spot the stricter sectarians right away, their unchanging antifashion and pale glum faces. When I asked one woman, later, how many she reckoned were white, she said, "Roughly one hundred percent." I did see some Asians and three or four blacks. They gave the distinct impression of having been adopted. I drove so far. You wouldn't have thought this thing could go on so far. Every other bend in the road opened onto a whole new cove full of tents and cars; the encampment had expanded to its physiographic limits, pushing right up to the feet of the ridges. It's hard to put across the sensory effect of that many people living and moving around in the open: part family reunion, part refugee camp. A tad militia, but cheerful. The roads turned dirt and none too wide: Hallelujah Highway, Street Called Straight. I'd been told to go to "H," but when I reached H, two teenage kids in orange vests came out of the shadows and told me the spots were all reserved. "Help me out here, guys," I said, jerking my thumb, pitifully indicating my mobile home. They pulled out their walkie-talkies. Some time went by. It got darker. Then an even younger boy rode up on a bike and winked a flashlight at me, motioning I should follow. It was such a comfort to yield up my will to this kid. All I had to do was not lose him. His vest radiated a warm, reassuring officialdom in my headlights. Which may be why I failed to comprehend in time that he was leading me up an almost vertical incline--"the Hill Above D." Thinking back, I can't say which came first: a little bell in my spine warning me that the RV had reached a degree of tilt she was not engineered to handle, or the sickening knowledge that we had begun to slip back. I bowed up off the seat and crouched on the gas. I heard yelling. I kicked at the brake. With my left hand and foot I groped, like a person drowning, for the emergency brake (had Jack's comprehensive how-to sesh not touched on its whereabouts?). We were losing purchase; she started to shudder. My little guide's eyes showed fear. I'd known this moment would come, of course, that the twenty-nine-footer would turn on me. We had both of us understood it from the start. But I must confess, I never imagined her hunger for death could prove so extreme. Laid out below and behind me was a literal field of Christians, toasting buns and playing guitars, fellowshipping. The aerial shot in the papers would show a long scar, a swath through their peaceful tent village. And that this gigantic psychopath had worked her vile design through the agency of a child--an innocent, albeit impossibly confused child ... My memory of the next five seconds is smeared, but I know that a large and perfectly square male head appeared in the windshield. It was blond and wearing glasses. It had wide-open eyes and a Chaucerian West Virginia accent and said rapidly that I should "JACK THE WILL TO THE ROT" while applying the brakes. Some branch of my motor cortex obeyed. The RV skidded briefly and was still. Then the same voice said, "All right, hit the gas on three: one, two..." She began to climb--slowly, as if on a pulley. Some freakishly powerful beings were pushing. Soon we had leveled out at the top of the hill. There were five of them, all in their early twenties. I remained in the twenty-nine-footer; they gathered below. "Thank you," I said. "Aw, hey," shot back Darius, the one who'd given the orders. He talked very fast. "We've been doing this all day--I don't know why that kid keeps bringing people up here--we're from West Virginia--listen, he's retarded--there's an empty field right there." I looked back and down at what he was pointing to: pastureland. Jake stepped forward. He was also blond, but slender. And handsome in a feral way. His face was covered in stubble as pale as his hair. He said he was from West Virginia and wanted to know where I was from. "I was born in Louisville," I said. "Really?" said Jake. "Is that on the Ohio River?" Like Darius, he both responded and spoke very quickly. I said that in fact it was. "Well, I know a dude that died who was from Ohio. I'm a volunteer fireman, see. Well, he flipped a Chevy Blazer nine times. He was spread out from here to that ridge over there. He was dead as four o'clock." "Who are you guys?" I said. Ritter answered. He was big, one of those fat men who don't really have any fat, a corrections officer--as I was soon to learn--and a former heavyweight wrestler. He could burst a pineapple in his armpit and chuckle about it (or so I assume). Haircut: military. Mustache: faint. "We're just a bunch of West Virginia guys on fire for Christ," he said. "I'm Ritter, and this is Darius, Jake, Bub, and that's Jake's brother, Josh. Pee Wee's around here somewhere." "Chasin' tail," said Darius disdainfully. "So you guys have just been hanging out here, saving lives?" "We're from West Virginia," said Darius again, like maybe he thought I was thick. It was he who most often spoke for the group. The projection of his jaw from the lump of snuff he kept there made him come off a bit contentious, but I felt sure he was just high-strung. "See," Jake said, "well, our campsite is right over there." With a cock of his head he identified a car, a truck, a tent, a fire, and a tall cross made of logs. And that other thing was ... a PA system? "We had this spot last year," Darius said. "I prayed about it. I said, 'God, I'd just really like to have that spot again--you know, if it's Your will.'" I'd assumed that my days at Creation would be fairly lonely and end with my ritual murder. But these West Virginia guys had such warmth. It flowed out of them. They asked me what I did and whether I liked sassafras tea and how many others I'd brought with me in the RV. Plus they knew a dude who died horribly and was from a state with the same name as the river I grew up by, and I'm not the type who questions that sort of thing. "What are you guys doing later?" I said. Bub was short and solid; each of his hands looked as strong as a trash compactor. He had darker skin than the rest--an olive cast--with brown hair under a camouflage hat and brown eyes and a full-fledged dark mustache. Later he would share with me that friends often told him he must be "part N-word." That was his phrasing. He was shy and always looked like he must be thinking hard about something. "Me and Ritter's going to hear some music," he said. "What band is it?" Ritter said, "Jars of Clay." I had read about them; they were big. "Why don't you guys stop by my trailer and get me on your way?" I said. "I'll be in that totally empty field." Ritter said, "We just might do that." Then they all lined up to shake my hand.   Copyright (c) 2011 by John Jeremiah Sullivan Excerpted from Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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