His Motherland

J.J. Dufresne’s niceness comes from having grown up in Minnesota, where nice is the state adjective, and also from his parents, for whom niceness is the highest of all qualities. I never met Nancy and Ted Dufresne, but I’ve seen photographs of them in wooden frames that J.J. keeps on the mantle over his fireplace. J.J.’s mother and father are middle-aged and stout, gray-haired and smiling open, friendly smiles. They look nice. Generous. The kind of neighbors who’d collect your mail for you when you go out of town or let you borrow their rake, their snow shovel, their jumper cables. Nancy and Ted look like what they are: educators, a special ed teacher and a superintendent of schools, smiling for the photographer at the local Sears Portrait Studio.

Nancy, especially, looks nice. When her sons were small, she promised she would always buy them whatever books they wanted, and last summer when she and J.J. browsed at Barnes and Noble, he wanted The Only Living Witness: The True Story of Serial Sex Killer Ted Bundy and The Ghosts of Sodom: The Secret Journals of the Marquis de Sade. Nancy quietly took the two books up to the counter where she paid for them, but a few days later she nicely told J.J. if he didn’t mind, she’d didn’t want to buy any more books like those two. Those books made her feel uncomfortable.

When I first met J.J. Dufresne, he lived in a crummy apartment in Small City, Minnesota. He had long dark hair that he gathered into a low ponytail. That rope of hair was his best feature – glossy, shiny, thick – and it was on impulse that he got cut it short. But it looks good short. Now he has the kind of haircut mothers like, the one boys end up with when their mothers say to the barber, “Just give him a regular haircut”: short but a little fluffy, tight around the ears, with tiny bangs that fringe across the forehead.

At six feet tall, one hundred and eighty pounds, J.J. Dufresne is soft-bellied and slouchy. He’s chipmunk-cheeked. He always looks like he needs a shave. His ethnic makeup is Swedish, Norwegian, Indian (“Feather, not dot,” he says), Luxembourgian, Irish, French (“Cheese-eating surrender monkey,” he says) and Scottish. He holds himself like a guy who’s just gotten out of bed or one who wishes he was still in bed: heavy limbed, slump shouldered, and reluctant to move too far or too fast. When he’s drunk, his mouth hangs open slightly.

J.J. Dufresne is drunk a lot. He loves beer and whiskey, rum and vodka and wine. He’s the guy at a party you don’t give the good liquor because what’s the point of that? Why waste the good stuff on the guy who will swill the rancid? When he’s drunk, he’s silly and clumsy and a lot of fun. He loves to talk on the telephone, I’ve spent hours just chatting with him on the phone. He’ll let you wrap a blanket around him like it’s a sari or a diaper. He’s always up for going to the greasy all-night diner for middle-of-the-night eggs. He’ll pose questions you can’t answer, questions like why don’t monkeys get Down’s Syndrome? and why aren’t there autistic monkeys?

When J.J. Dufresne is sober, he can look tired, or sort of cute, depending on how much sleep he’s had, how much day-old pizza he’s consumed, when’s the last time he ate a vegetable, and how hard he’s been trying to get his life on track. Sometimes, he’s perky with optimism and schemes. He’s going to rake in some cash by selling some plasma, some sperm, he’s going to win a bundle betting on horses at the race track. He’s going to meet a girl, a hot girl, of course, but she’s also smart and sweet, and she doesn’t mind being the one on top all the time, and they’re going to fall in love, get married, have some kids, and live happily ever after in the great state of Minnesota.