Brief Encounters With Che Guevara

Brief Encounters With Che Guevara (2006) by Ben Fountain

Genre: A series of short stories broadly involving socialist countries or cultures that does not necessarily try to make a final statement about the merits of socialism versus capitalism, because, above all else, that is not what short stories do.

Recommended For: Someone who has read all of Raymond Carver’s work, is OK with a successor that is in a different vein as long the possibility of trying on someone else’s emotions like a pair of pants is on the table but have been burned by hack imitators. In other words, someone looking for a Poor Man’s Ramond Carver Who Still Scratches The Itch.

Buy here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).

In the 1960s, an astronaut might have lived in the house my wife and I are about to buy. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself. Built in 1962. A skylight in the main living space. It hasn’t been flipped in the awful generic way every house has been flipped since 2010, so you can imagine it in that era: Father coming home. Taking his astronaut helmet off and placing it on the coat rack. Kissing his wife who thinks it’s uncouth to vote and is too embarrassed to ask anyone what the point of going to space is. Giving his two twin children Abba Zabba bars and watching them eat them like dog treats.

There is also a world where someone like Che Guevara sets my house on fire and spits on my feet for claiming “ownership” over the house and the land it sits on.

Then there’s Dallas, Texas in 2026, where this is a good house for us, one where we should be excited about, but still the kind of house in the kind of neighborhood where people talk about how the neighborhood will be great down the line. The implication isn’t supposed to be that the neighborhood isn’t good now. The implication is supposed to be that this is an investment, because a lot of money is being required here and a lot of money needs to be centered in the conversation. The neighborhood will improve over the time that you own the house due to a variety of reasons. Where you, a person entering the neighborhood, fall in the equation of the neighborhood improving is never made implicit. You are, after all, someone who could only afford a home in a neighborhood that will improve down the line, so much help could you really be moving the needle?

—

The truth is none of us improve the property value of a neighborhood. If we try hard enough, we can decrease it, but when it comes to hard numbers, a person buying a house and being a citizen of the neighborhood won’t improve the property value, unless the neighborhood literally did not have any residents prior, in which case you couldn’t really call it a neighborhood in the first place.

There’s an understood mobility in America that hums under the surface of our lives like an icon that can be dragged left to right on a computer screen. Whatever checkpoint or life essential you run up against (where you work, where you reside, who you love, etc.) is vaguely rated by you or by others or by traditional metrics of society. And we are conditioned to know and believe we can improve them.

Take that for what you will. It’s obviously not bad that people can improve their lot in life. But it’s certainly complicated (perhaps it is made more complicated by the fact that often people with lesser lots in life are victims of the systemic greed of others, making the onus to improve that lot a tough one to bear).

This is the second house that my wife and I have bought together. When I was 30, I’m not sure I believed I would ever own a house, but when life’s biggest opportunities come, you tend to be in situations to react to them quickly or not react at all, so six years later, I have a wife and kid and am trying to sell the first house in order to move in to the second home.

The first home is small, and we never had a problem with that. The second home is only a little bit bigger, but in ways that we think will feel much bigger. When the baby is napping there is no part of the first house that doesn’t require tiptoeing, so when we saw an affordable house that was an upgrade in all the ways that matter to us (that kept us in the city, only 10 minutes away from our current house) we said of course.

What we’re losing here is neighbors. In four years, we built up a lot of equity with neighbors. Many people who considered us good people and we considered them good people. Something you want your child to know and feel. Every few months, our next-door neighbors, whom we love, go hard with cases upon cases of Coronas, four separate grills for tacos and Tejano music until 2:00 am. We had previously only joined once, and they tried to get us extremely drunk. Last night, as I write this, we stopped by, as we had promised, since we’re moving. The matriarch, whose only child is 18, took our four-month-old immediately and sent us to the tacos and sat us down with the three other people at the party who spoke English, while she walked our baby around. Finally, a little after 9:00 pm, (well after his bedtime), we took our leave.

This house - the one that is smaller - is, you might deduce, also in a neighborhood that will someday be a good neighborhood. The people who decide these things are planning a slightly later arrival date for the neighborhood we’re leaving to become a good neighborhood (nevermind that it is full of great people). One of these neighbors that we have formed a bond with and are more or less our same age, are also moving. The moving trucks were just here yesterday actually. Some of these neighbors we love have been here for decades. Some of us have not.

What an individual resident does to a neighborhood is not connected to its property value, which is the concern of institutions and developers and not people who are trying to use a home in order to live a life inside of it. What an individual resident can do to a neighborhood is holistically improve it in a way that has nothing to do with how much any of his neighbors would make if they sold their houses. They can go out of their way to make people in their vicinity feel welcome. They can bring them into the fold. They can attend neighborhood association meetings. They can advocate for the nearest school regardless of if they have school-aged children.

But then there’s a pull. That mobility. To something better. And to leave behind the people who were there and welcomed us. That puts a pit in my stomach, and I’m typing it out, not to be dramatic but to reckon with it.

—

Ben Fountain does a lot of interesting stuff in his short stories. They are clearly written for Americans to read. I don’t think a devout socialist would necessarily approve of them, but their tone suggests they are almost meant to be read by a lazy free market leaning American who needs to see some degree of perspective for once in his god damn life.

He doesn’t answer questions about socialism, but then you settle into each story, and you realize that the text doesn’t really contain those questions. They are character-driven stories of intense humanity and adventure or personal crisis within a revolution-adjacent context. But you do have to settle into that notion, because it’s tempting to look for that final political judgement.

—

There’s a reckoning that you don’t expect with going through home buying for the second time. I’m not an expert on the investment strategy of continually buying houses, but I can tell you that this is it for me. Both my wife and I are in unstable career fields, so we have to be theoretically open to the unlikely possibility of moving, but assuming we are staying in Dallas, this is our forever home.

For much of my adult life, my contentment in life has always been accompanied by this undefined possibility that an extra big break could also emerge. This idea that the door remains open for much more money or a sharp jolt in career excitement; in ways that are different from the active tracks I am working towards. This is nagging mobility. A sense of ambition for its own sake.

I think about this house, and I think about my job, which has many elements that I do not enjoy. But I have worked very hard to turn that job into something that is good for the planet and makes my conscious rest easy and is creating a better world for my son to live in. I haven’t finished achieving that goal, but it will mean a great deal to me when I get there, and I won’t take it for granted. It won’t be my dream job, but that’s OK.

The house I can afford with a job that does a little something for the values I want to reflect back to my son is the house I want to come home to forever. The property value of the house will do things that I will have to monitor but have no control over, like the weather. My family will invest in neighbors again. And make it a long-term investment.

This new house, while not big, does have a pool. Of course it does. An astronaut used to live there, I assume. We are leaving neighbors, but they and their children have all been invited to pool parties. We’ll follow up this summer.

—

More as an obligation is a trick. More out of boredom is a disease. Revolutions are born out of it.

3 More Things You Can Read Today:

-The Iranian Diaspora is fracturing in real time, across dinner tables, on WhatsAp, in the silences of blocked numbers

-I will not lie I will not lie I will not lie

-I make good money. Why do I still feel like this?