Upstart Crows: An Excerpt from the Novel

One of my main failings was my powerful attraction to people who appeared most indifferent to me at first. Lila couldn’t have been cooler, while Max, well, getting to know him wasn’t unlike a balancing act in which one learned to keep one’s distance at all times. In fact he snubbed me the first time I approached him in our American Lit class. I asked him about some remark he’d made about Poe and he told me to take notes next time. I certainly wasn’t a model apartment where anyone could put their feet up on the sofa, but I wasn’t a fortress like Max, who didn’t seem to care if anyone liked him. I needed people and mistook his aloofness as confidence. “The big difference between us,” he told me early on, “is that I got the absurd and you’re still waiting in line for the next miracle. You belong too much to the world, Raphael. You’re a romantic.” That may have been true but there was more than a touch of romance in his poetry and music and his life wasn’t all despair and Knights of Infinite Resignation. But as far as he was concerned the glass was always half empty, or filled with piss and vinegar. Yes, Max was almost always angry; the world kept disappointing him. That’s a fact.

But there was more to him than that. For one thing,he had the best mind in town. Four of his poems had just come out in posh eastern journals and his translations from German, Spanish, and old French poems had won prizes, which wasn’t bad for East Manning, Michigan, where all the local heroes stunk of disinfectant. He was also one year away from his PhD in Comp Lit while I’d spent four years studying everything from Zen biology to Mesopotamian horticulture to keep my deferment and I was six months older! I never had the patience to spend whole afternoons holed up in some overstuffed room reading Liebnitz, Kierkegaard, and Boehme as he did. But that wasn’t all of it either. I had never heard anyone play the piano the way Max did and I wanted to know someone who gave that much of himself without appearing to want anything back. I was fresh off a plane from Europe and heard him play my second night in town and that was that. I had found a friend, whether he liked it or not.