A million years ago, when I lived in West Marin, I knew a drug dealer. Or two. (Didn’t we all?) One drove a battered Volvo and paid for everything in cash bundled in a briefcase in the trunk. Another lived in an Airstream on a friend’s ranch, where he hosted barbecues: free food and booze, with everyone welcome and no one snitched. Back then, rent could be met with a minimum-wage job that still left time to fish and f-off. And believe me, there was a lot of f’ing-off going on. Money was more like a running joke—sometimes a sick one—than a constant anxiety. Financial security often equaled one funky job that lasted at least seven months a year, plus a cadre of friends to help keep the truck running.
Fast forward to now, to an America where money defines almost everything, even character—except when it doesn’t—and where the difference between earning enough and making a killing isn’t easy to define. After all, what’s it mean when it takes more than two minimum-wage jobs to pay the rent, never mind buy a car or fill it with gas? In today’s America, doing almost anything to earn a fast buck can be tempting. Especially if you live in one of those places where the law feels remote, where stories persist across generations under the general heading of “How We Evaded the Building Inspector.” Such places share many values, even when they exist on opposite sides of a continent, with different histories and very different living conditions.
Which is why I recommend to West Marin readers a short new novel by Roger Salloch, now of Paris, France, but once of Inverness, about a fishing village on the coast of Maine, where a drug deal goes wrong—at least for some of the folks involved. And where the point of the story isn’t really the drug deal at all, but an underlying truth about another, much bigger deal—namely the collapse of this thing we call America. Which may have already happened. In our weird, shabby and disheveled country, one can only imagine happy endings to any story. And the consequence, the real outcome of a shady drug deal, is rarely the end of the story itself, but the possibility of whatever happens next. And the next thing depends less on the structure of the social relationships that used to make up the character and nature of the place itself than on the quality and strength of the people still standing after the collapse.
Roger Salloch first cooked up the idea for his novel while living in Inverness, and the book abounds with references, details, nuances and atmosphere that readers familiar with West Marin will easily recognize. First, there’s that land-that-time-forgot quality about coastal villages in both Maine and Northern California. There’s the blurring of rich and poor in places where the year-round population—never mind the pool of sexually active individuals—is too tiny to observe class lines. And then there’s the whatever-goes-on-in-our-small-coastal-village-stays-in-our-smal-coastal-village phenomenon. The “locals”—even those newly-minted ones—who might not mind sharing everybody’s business with everybody else internally suddenly go all tight-lipped about sharing information with perceived outsiders.
“Not When I’m Gone” is steeped in these odd mixtures of loneliness and fish-bowl exposure that characterize coastal villages and that make possible all those jokes and stories about village gossip in which everybody knows everybody else’s business but nobody really knows anything. In which you can feel both overexposed and invisible in the same moment. It’s a kind of truism about coastal villages that one of the only ways out is by water, and that land, or rather the place where the sea meets the shore, becomes both a barrier and a jumping-off point: a cloak and a dagger.
Salloch’s story often feels murky and dark. It reminds me, even though it takes place thousands of miles from West Marin, of nights after sunset anywhere from Stinson to Bodega Bay, when you can picture yourself almost alone on the planet, with only a few other souls not too close by and a lot of darkness between you and anything you’d call civilization. On such nights, individuals out by themselves or in small groups can seem like stranded ships in danger of vanishing. There’s a sense of people being isolated and lost, and although you ascertain the general outlines of what’s happening to and around the characters, you then lose the thread, as if somewhere out there in the dark, your whole sense of how anything happens disappears. You feel, in fact, like you do in broad daylight in much of America today: as if at any moment, out of nowhere, everything could blow up, burn down or fall apart, because in truth, the end’s already taken place. You’re not really waiting for the end anymore: you’re waiting for the next installment, the next incarnation, the next civilization. Because this one’s already gone.
And that’s the sad, truly tragic and at the same time hopeful part about Salloch’s story of a drug deal gone wrong. The kind of deal that could occur in any number of coastal villages in America at this moment. It’s the part about what happens next, after America vanishes, that we truly care about. Any story about a drug deal gone wrong in any part of the country today is really about what happens next to all of us—or to whoever runs the show—as we wonder and work on how to set things right. Surely not by recreating what we imagine we had (or truly did have). Even fools understand that going backwards isn’t an option. It’s up to all of us now to imagine, and then proceed to do the next thing.
The best part of Salloch’s book, and the part I love the most, is his words. The language is dreamy and alluring. It makes you feel like you’ve taken a bath in beautiful sentences, or like you’ve visited a maritime museum of mesmerizing images of harbors, lights, shadowy vessels and all those glittering reflections on the surface of a sea or a bay that leave you uplifted or transfixed, and either way, unafraid. Because you know you’ll get where you’re going so long as the words and images are strong enough to take you there, with people you trust enough to move with them into an uncertain future.
It’s one thing to lose faith in America (the old one) or even in friends and neighbors. But it’s another to lose faith in your ability to narrate your dilemma, to express and describe the dreams and aspirations that enable you and your compatriots to find your way to a better tomorrow. The new world will include the traditional elements we all recognize—rich and poor, good people and bad, hearts of gold and hearts of stone—but mostly it will root itself in evocative language. In words tender and strong that will carry us from where we are now to where we wish to be. To a reborn America, a place we all recognize and can feel proud of from sea to shining sea.
Roger Salloch was born in New York City, grew up in Long Island and graduated from Harvard University, after which he shifted gears, moved to France, married and became a writer. His stories have appeared in the Paris Review, Ploughshares, The North American Review and numerous other literary journals. He lived for a few years in the 1980s in Inverness with his French wife and two young sons, who attended school in Point Reyes Station. “Not When I’m Gone” will be published in June by The Permanent Press in Sag Harbor, New York. The book can be pre-ordered at www.thepermanentpress.com.
Marian Chatfield-Taylor lives in San Francisco. Years ago, she lived in Tomales and worked as a stringer and special features writer for the Light under Dave Mitchell. Her favorite story was about how local gardeners waged war against gophers.