from Blood Horses

This is an excerpt from Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son by John Jeremiah Sullivan, a beautiful book I've been reading this spring and summer. (I read slowly, and tend to juggle multiple books at a time... )

The book is part memoir, part reportage, part history. It is a meditation on horse racing, beauty, and Sullivan's complicated relationship with his father. I read this bit last night and it shattered me. It's set on the evening of Sullivan's father's wake. I don't know if it will work as an excerpt, but I just had to post it here.

I think this writer gets the relationship between sadness and beauty better than just about anyone writing today. (Which is to say, you've been warned.)

Very late that night — It must have been early the next morning—my brother and I were in the hotel room that my grandmother had rented for those of our friends who had traveled to come [to my father's funeral]. There were clothed and sleeping bodies draped like refugees across the beds and floor. It was quiet. The two of us sat up Indian-style, facing each other with watery eyes, passing a bottle of Bourbon back and forth and whispering. We were going on about the Beach Boys, for some reason, and one of the last things I remember my brother saying before I fell back against the bed, was that in his opinion the greatest single moment in all of popular music was the complete bar of vocal silence near the beginning of "Good Vibrations," after Carl Wilson sings "I" but before he sings, "I love the colorful clothes she wears." My brother was weaving as he counted out the four empty beats on the carpet. "It's like..." he said, "it's like the whole universe is in that silence."

Then we were silent, drinking. Before it went black, my mind was already driving through the dark, with headlight vision, leaving the parking lot, taking a left onto Richmond Road, following Richmond as it turned one-way and become, without any signage to mark the change, Main Street, which I knew was deserted, the stoplights flashing yellow, then across the bridge, to where the cemeteries were, left into Calvary, curving along the paths back to a corner where two hedges met, where my father's body was already under the ground. Is it cold there, even in summer?

My brother shook his head. He said, "I can't believe Dad's dead."