Joanna Biggar's Blog

Happily, early on, James J. Patterson discovered that the bumpy road through life was lined with books. Clearly, somewhere along the way he pulled out a volume of Montaigne.
The young 20^th century rebel must have found much to admire in the French Renaissance thinker’s essays, and especially the meaning of the word essayer, to try – both as a philosophy of living and as a style for writing. The essays in Patterson’s delightful volume, Bermuda Shorts, highlight the ways in which life and literature intertwine. And, like the 16^th century master, Patterson makes this literary form his own invention.

His essays are by turns insightful, funny, poignant, polemical and intimate. Above all, they are conversational. You find yourself engaged in a conversation that you really don’t want to end, so you stay with him in a dimly lit bar somewhere, one that never seems to close, and glass in hand,  you’re good for another round.

When he tells you of the importance of solitude, his life alone on the Canadian island of his youth, you are there too. You can picture him living amongst the squirrels, lying “naked on the gravestone beneath Elephant Rock” reading John Keats; you seem to know the place. And when he says he sang to the loons and read hundreds of books, and “when the people in town would stop me on the street and ask me if I was okay, I had to think about it,” you know this is true.

You also come to appreciate that this “Reluctant Scholar,” as he calls himself, has an authenticity of intellect, driven by a passion to learn, not by coercion and never by conformity. In the essay “The Conversation We Are Born Into,” he explains the exit from academe that propelled him, like Montaigne cogitating in his tower, into the life of the autodidact. In college, he’d had a row – another – with a professor about a grade and was trudging once again to the dean’s office to explain himself, when, as he says, the wind left his sails. He realized the book that consumed him had nothing to do with required reading and that it was a far, far better thing to “walk off this campus right now, go somewhere pleasant, and finish this marvelous book in peace.” And so he did.

Thus, loaded down with the books of his own choosing from the campus bookstore, he quit college and initiated the pursuit of his true education. In time he became the boy in the band  who would lie in the van on tour, relishing the words of Edward Gibbons, or escape to a dingy Italian restaurant to sit with a glass of wine and the poems of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. His reading and thinking led to an acute sense of justice, which showed up in his songs and later his writing. Throughout, he tips his hat to many heroes who showed him the way: Thomas Paine and Winston Churchill, Thomas Jefferson and Voltaire, Henry Miller and Hunter Thompson. He takes on ignorance, hypocrisy, religion, corporate greed, corruption and stupidity. He even fantasizes about an “alternate universe,” one “where Jack and Bobby Kennedy spent sixteen years in the White House…Where Martin Luther King became Secretary of State in the second JFK administration…Where there was no Vietnam War…” He goes on, and you find it is easy to go with him.

But “trying on” life for size also requires experience outside the mind, and cheerfully acknowledging his three guilty pleasures – alcohol, sports, and rock n’ roll – Patterson  charged with gusto into all of them.

Alcohol runs fluidly, you could say, throughout his essays. Beer and whiskey appear to be the predominant food groups on Lovesick Lake as well as both goal and fuel for the itinerant musician, the raconteur and the ardent sports fan. It was in a club in Georgetown, beer in hand that the young musician in “Huidekoper,” named after the street where he and his renegade buddies lived together, realized that everything was about to fall apart. His girlfriend would dump him, a friend would defect, the band would fail. It was then he thought of Winston Churchill – no stranger to imbibing himself – who said, “A success is someone who can go from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.”

And so Patterson charged ahead – to other bar scenes, certainly – but to other bands, other passions. Although he only devotes one chapter, “That Was Then, This Is The Pheromones,” to it, he and his pal Al toured the road for a dozen years with their two-man band. Rock n’ roll with a bite, folk with a political twist, they perfected the high art of satire and political commentary as a raucous, rockable moment. Highly popular on college campuses,  “the brothers” Al and Jimmy kept true kept the faith with their young fans.

“Young male intellectuals crave some form of initiation,” Patters son writes. “We carry a bottle of Wild Turkey 101 with us at all times for that very purpose. Al passes it around after a show and makes them recite passages from [Henry] Miller. Their devotion is true.”

However, nowhere is the writing more moving than in the section entitled “It Isn’t Whether You Win or Lose, It’s How You Watch the Game,” where the sports lover bares his soul. He does not reveal that he went on to publish SportsFan Magazine both in print and online for many years, but in these pages you understand how he came to his passion for football, hockey, baseball. You see the young boy going through the turnstile with his father who tutored him in the importance of “being counted,” and in the ways of befriending everyone from the ticket takers to the fans around him. You meet his mother, such a baseball fanatic that on opening day of baseball season, she would write him phony excuses to get him out of school. In that manner, he writes, “She wanted me to be able to say I saw Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. I saw them and I’m glad.” He saw his only World Series in 1996 with scalped tickets she’d obtained.

But Patterson’s games are populated with more than his family. He finds sports arenas a crossroads where the whole world comes together. In his pages you meet baseball great Walter Johnson, but you also meet the characters who populate section 417 at the hockey games of the Washington Capitals. There are the Italian brothers, the Irish Barrister, the Conscience, and the Jewish Mother of 417; there’s also the Rainbow Fascist, the Quiet Man, the Blonde Bombshell, and the Sage. There’s even the Mayor. Patterson’s account goes like this, after meeting a woman he doesn’t know who asks if he isn’t a season ticketholder in section 417. “My friends and I sit a dozen rows behind you. Every game we watch you arrive and shake everyone’s hand. We call you the Mayor of 417! We think it’s good luck to watch you make your entrance!”

And so the conversation with Patterson weaves in unexpected and delightful ways through his stories. He is a writer of such intelligence, with such a true voice, and such heart, you’ll want to lift a glass with him and keep it going.