I wrote a couple of emails to GenXCore after I read California Roadkill. Something in it felt familiar, and I guessed that he had studied, as I once did, at California State University, Long Beach. I went to Cal State, Long Beach in the 1990s soon after Charles Bukowski, who always loomed large there because he lived nearby and would visit, had passed away. His influence on the students and faculty was large and a lot of people were writing what you might call bad Bukowski, work that was a pale imitation, where the writer pretended at the lifestyle and attitudes Bukowski had. Others took the lessons of his work, that it should be true to who you are, and were influenced by him. They didn’t write bad Bukowski but good and honest work of their own.
When I started to read California Roadkill, I was worried that it would be bad Bukowski, which is often pointlessly jaded and simply unkind, but what GenXCore is doing in it is allowing himself to be influenced and to learn from writers like Bukowski but taking those lessons to create something new. California Roadkill is in part about recovery from drug abuse. We have seen a lot of that kind of work and much of it is great. This novel is too, but its focus is something that I have not really seen. It follows Jimmy, a punk rocker and adjunct English professor, who has been in recovery for a long time. The idea of following someone through his day-to-day struggles years after he has become clean distinguishes this novel for me from anything I have seen. Certainly, Bukowski didn’t write about that, but had he been through this experience, he might have. We are not given the saccharine story of someone who swore off drugs and whose life is now eternally better. What we are shown is how difficult the day to day life of an addict is, and how it can be impossibly hard some days. What we are shown is that in California, life can be exceptionally difficult, and money and work are hard to obtain.
GenXCore’s description of adjunct life is more realistic than any I have ever seen. I was an adjunct English Professor for 5 years and a full-time faculty member for 20, and one of the dirty secrets of the profession is that most of the people who work there are treated as though they are disposable. They make little money, they have few benefits, and they are abandoned when it is expedient to do so. They can be driven out of their profession by a department chair who doesn’t like them or is just forgetful through under-employment. To be clear, that does not usually happen. The chairs I worked with were generally good people, but that fact hangs over every adjunct teaching today even though such behavior is illegal. On top of that, the large bureaucratic machinery that controls how people in education act and how little they are able to effect change makes it difficult to treat adjunct professors with the compassion they are due. In California Roadkill, one of Jimmy’s students has attacked him, slashing his face with a knife. The response from the university is predictably underwhelming, and now Jimmy, understandably, does not feel comfortable going back to the classroom. Where does that leave him? It leaves him where so many educators who want to teach in college in the United States are. He has the expertise and the desire to do work that he is good at, but he isn’t able to do any longer. He is underemployed and living in a city where his job would not pay him enough to afford a stable rent in any case. He is a professional who is unhoused and food insecure.
California Roadkill is powerful in these places, talking about addiction and the educational system and California in general because GenXCore permits himself to write about the actual experience of these things. They are hard and often painful, but they are real. I have a personal bias against movies that applaud the idea that teachers are heroic when they sacrifice their happiness and health for their work. Teaching should not contain the false dilemma that if teachers are good then they must be sacrificial lambs, but that idea is built into the educational system. This portrayal is accurate to so many educators I know, especially those who are unable to get one of the rare full-time positions that actually have decent pay and security. It is accurate to the way that many of the unhoused live, in that he is not always sleeping outside but living a life of chaos trying to stay in different places as often as he can.
California Roadkill is the kind of novel I would hope to write if I were to write about the problems that I see in California, especially among those who live on the fringes of the city and the academic world. It is a beautiful novel that asks us to reconsider preconceptions, and to think about the ways the world has changed in the last decade. It is not the only book to understand these problems, not the only legitimate point-of-view, but it is a point-of-view that I have not seen represented yet, and it is a book that should be read, discussed, and thought about.
John Brantingham 20th June 2023
