Damascus

Damascus
Joshua Mohr

They say that fiction should make the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar. I think there might be a third branch to that saying and that would be to make both the familiar and unfamiliar feel like a shared secret. I think it’s one of the reasons that I like picking up books set in locals where I’ve been – it’s always fun to see if our experiences or observations match up. That if we weren’t exactly like ships passing in the night, we were at least Muni buses barreling by in broad daylight.

The danger to this though, at least when it comes to San Francisco set writing, is that we all secretly want to be a Bukowski. And one of my problems with Damascus was that it can’t seem to make up its mind whether to be an SF Bukowski or to skewer the wanna-be Bukowski-ites that inhabit SF.

For example:

“And, of course, the next generation of alcoholics, the reinforcements, twenty-two, twenty-six, thirty-four years old, who came of age admiring Kerouac, Bukowski, Burroughs, and early Tom Waits. Turned on by their seductive tales of debauchery. They didn’t fathom that the movie Barfly wasn’t real, didn’t understand that they’d never meet Faye Dunaway while drinking bourbon in the afternoon. They didn’t know about years of diarrhea, of ulcers, anal fissures and hemorrhoids and shaking hands and dementia and memory uncoiling and nightmares and nigh-sweats and hangovers so brutally majestic you kneeled before them and wept.”

On the other hand, we have, among others, a prostitute (hand jobs only though) named Shambles and Owen, an alcoholic bar owner with a birthmark in the shape of Hitler’s mustache. These characters seem like they could have just as easily resided in a Bukowski book. However, Shambles and Owen lack the humor and the unexpected that coexist with Bukowski’s drunks and makes them more than a collection of sad stories.

The story itself centers around an artist whose performance art piece involves nailing live catfish to portraits of dead soldiers in a bar (Damascus). Which I wasn’t clear whether Mohr intended this to be a genuinely shocking piece of performance art, or was meant to skewer the performance art world, because…really? A catfish? I dunno. Maybe it’s because it’s precisely because I lived in the same area and time period as the story is set in (SF Mission during the Iraq War) that this seems so unlikely. Irony was, and is, the lingua franca and Damascus seemed to sorely miss that mark.