The New Yorker - 28.10.2019

THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 59

riage Story,” “It feels very familiar. Just
trying to wrap your head around your
parents not being together anymore—
and not only that but you’re moving to
the Midwest. Like, the first time seeing
my father cry, as we’re leaving. It’s just
all those very raw feelings that stick with
you that you don’t articulate.” After the
divorce, Driver’s father left the church,
and he now works at an Office Depot

in Arkansas. While shooting “Marriage

Story,” Driver said, “something I thought

about all the time was the things that

my dad didn’t do that this guy does in

Noah’s movie. The fighting to get cus­

tody”—he took a long pause—“was

moving to me. My dad didn’t do any of

this. He didn’t put up a fight.”

Mishawaka was a jolt. “We were

living with my grandparents, and that

sucked,” Driver said. “I mean, they

were nice.” His father had shown him

grownup movies such as “Predator” and

“Total Recall,” but his new classmates

talked about “Saved by the Bell.” Nancy

got a job as a legal secretary in South

Bend (she is now a paralegal) and re­

connected with her high­school boy­

friend, Rodney G. Wright, who drove

a cab. With Nancy’s encouragement,

he became a Baptist preacher. He also

became Driver’s stepfather.

Driver began to pick up on strange

tensions in their religious community.

At Twin City Baptist Church, the pas­

tor refused to officiate at his mother’s

marriage ceremony, since she had been

divorced. Around the same time, a girl

in the Youth Department accused the

pastor’s wife of being a lesbian, an as­

sertion that split the congregation and

led to screaming matches that Driver

struggled to comprehend. “I remem­

ber this idiot yelling at my mom, say­

ing, ‘No wonder your husband left

you!’” he recalled. “Only recently did

I realize, Oh, I hate organized things,

because I feel like I’m missing some­

thing. I’m being told it’s one thing,

but it’s actually something else.” The

family soon joined another church

nearby, where Driver’s stepfather be­

came the preacher.

There wasn’t much to do in Misha­

waka, a blue­collar town that had been

devastated by the demise of a Uniroyal

plant. As teen­agers, Driver and his

friends Noah and Aaron would climb

radio towers or set things on fire.

(“Leaves. Clothes. Tires. Things like

that, that you have to really douse,” he

said.) They would dumpster­dive be­

hind a potato factory and feast on ex­

pired chips. They rented movies from

P. J.’s Video, down the street. “Because

my parents were religious, we wouldn’t

watch any of these movies in the house,”

he recalled, so he would go to his friends’

houses and binge on Scorsese and Jar­

musch and “Midnight Cowboy.” “I

started to form opinions on what was

good and what was bad, through con­

versation with those guys.” The first

time he saw “Fight Club,” he said, “I

felt kind of sick. It made me feel very

strange. But then I watched it again al­

most immediately.”

In the woods behind a Kroger su­

permarket, the trio made camcorder

Precise in their prissy,

hand­wringing way,

flies are by our lights

filthy, walking in shit,

though light, light on your brow

is their sixfold grip.

*

Some things in a life

happen once, but then again,

some happen twice.

More weeks away,

and I strode into my kitchen—wrong,

dark at noon,

its one window

inwardly black,

flat black with flies.

*

They are necrophiliacs,

sure, but shriven in passing

through the strait white gate

of a fly’s egg, maggots,

though they turn our stomachs, come out

pure as magnets.

So much more pointed than a scalpel’s

is their distinction, cell by cell,

of dead from viable flesh

that surgeons defer to their soft mouths

to clean wounds,

so hard and true it is

to leave life carefully behind.

—James Richardson