“I want to fall on my face and be done with it, go screeching into an extensive fall, like a car on the outbound direction, the motor on fire and the axle cracked. I want to be so gone that there is nothing anymore to salvage, an old hack at a new game, playing starlings in your direction, while shuddering at myself in the mirror. I want to be the one that they drag from the river in the evening papers and the one that finds you at the gazebo with my tie swaying in the breeze. That’s who I want to be.”
In the summer of 2003, Gabriel Boyer toured America in a 1971 VW Minibus with a woman named Jill. The plan was to perform plays in the bedrooms of strangers from Boston to New Orleans to LA to Seattle and back again—casting these strangers and their friends in an impromptu performance as a deranged neurosurgeon, say, or in an anarchist musical. The plan did not go according to plan.
This book is a journey into the America of a decade ago, and the mind of a single neurotic man and a single unfortunate love affair that never went anywhere even though it went all over America. It was a summer that began beautifully, but what could have been perfect was destined to end in tears. Welcome to Weltschmerz.