Emergency

In interviews, Johnson often noted that Jesus’ Son relied heavily on events that had happened to him or to people he knew. Writing about the cultural underbelly of drug addiction in the Midwest, Johnson’s stories offer a blunt vision of both the beauty and the violence inherent to life, offering characters full of benevolence and cruelty, hope and misery. In “Emergency,” Johnson utilizes an unreliable, dreamlike sense of time, evoking and mirroring Fuckhead’s intoxication, thus allowing a sense of empathy between the reader and the character. Through Fuckhead, Johnson articulates both the desperation and the humanity of a man addicted to drugs and examines the possibility of natural beauty and sublime experiences as avenues of mental escape.

Early on, Johnson establishes Fuckhead’s inability to grasp time and his desire to escape the confines of his world. Fuckhead is blasé, saying, “I’d been working the emergency room for about three weeks, I guess” (57). His menial job holds no value or meaning for him, and he cannot recall why or how he got the job or how long he has actually been there. His shifts consist of wandering around the hospital, looking for his friend Georgie the orderly, who can provide him with drugs—a way to make it through the grind of his job and his life. To the sober eye, Georgie’s behavior is ridiculous as he mops up blood that does not exist, but Fuckhead is envious, wanting the escape the pills will grant him.

After Fuckhead takes the pills, he feels unrooted from place and time, constantly mentioning this to Georgie as they drive around after their shift. He has a keen eye for detail and observes both the grotesque and the lovely with vivid detail, both when he is sober and high. He can go from describing a high Georgie as “bent over in the posture of a child soiling its diapers” (58) to observing “the daylight knocking against our eyelids and the fragrance of alfalfa thickening on our tongues” (63) as the two of them sit in Georgie’s truck bead. Fuckhead sees both beauty and sadness in a profound way, and his experience with both make him yearn even more for a transcendent experience.

At key points in the story, Fuckhead identifies moments that approach beauty and even the sublime—a quality beyond beauty, so great as to be beyond the full grasp of the intellect, leading to an experience of transcendence. As he and Georgie drive around, Fuckhead says they have a terrific time: “For a while the day was clear and peaceful. It was one of those moments you stay in, to hell with all the troubles of before and after. The sky is blue and the dead are coming back” (63). Fuckhead finds a moment of peace within the chaos of his life, and he relays it in a voice that captures his ambivalence. The clarity of the day offers peace but also the suggestion that the dead could come back, something simultaneously comforting in its suggestion of returning loved ones and terrifying in its subversion of the natural order. Fuckhead’s tone is matter-of-fact and colloquial but shot through with gravitas. He consistently uses language that examines both the depravity and ecstasy of his surroundings.

Later, when he and Georgie make it back to the truck after their experience at the drive-in, Fuckhead’s narration identifies both the terror of the modern world—“We listened to the big rigs going from San Francisco to Pennsylvania along the Interstate, like shudders down a long hacksaw blade, while the snow buried us” (68)—and the joy of the natural world, identifying this particular kind of beauty as the most important thing for his current self. He says,

What’s important for me to remember now is that early the next morning the snow was melted off the windshield and the daylight woke me up. A mist covered everything and, with the sunshine, was beginning to grow sharp and strange [...] there was nothing on my mind. I felt the beauty of the morning (69).

Again, Fuckhead has a complex understanding of the natural world; for him, it is all the more precious because it holds an undercurrent of sharpness and strangeness, an almost unnatural force that deepens his appreciation for it.

Fuckhead is passive throughout the story, letting Georgie drive the action. As the story develops, it becomes clear that Fuckhead seeks a certain degree of redemption and love, or perhaps salvation. He acknowledges his constant failures, assenting to Georgie’s claim that “everything [Fuckhead] touch[es] turn[s] to shit” (69) by replying with a resigned, “no wonder they call me Fuckhead” (69). Fuckhead feels deserving of his nickname and undeserving of the world’s beauty, even though he grasps at it through his language. Eventually, after experiencing a sublime-like event in the snowstorm, in which he misperceives the actors on the movie screen as angels, Fuckhead awakes the next morning feeling different, with a new appreciation for the “beauty of the morning” (69) and the preexisting beauty—the “blossoms that were always there” (69)—that surrounds him. This transformed vision allows him to also see Georgie differently, and the story ends with Fuckhead also seeing Georgie in a new light. When Georgie tells Hardee that he “save[s] lives” (71), Fuckhead suggests that he now understands the key difference between the two of them: that Georgie is someone who acts and who sees himself as a savior, whereas Fuckhead sees himself as embodying his moniker. The realization alludes to a change in Fuckhead; identifying this difference suggests that he is looking for ways to change and thinking about the notion of salvation or redemption.