“Embrace Your Madness”

The stories about El Oso (“The Bear”) were true, as far as they were verifiable. His real name was Brad Evans. He was a fiction writer of real talent; one of his short stories, about a slaughterhouse in Louisville, earned him a fan note from Norman Mailer. His hero was Hemingway, and like Hemingway, he had adventures, then wrote about them. He studied theology. He worked a freight barge on the Ohio River. He wrote speeches for GOP politicians and claimed to have run guns to Guatemala during its civil war. He once shoved a wooden cross into the door of an abortion clinic and got arrested for assaulting a cop; the protest, which he helped organize, made the front page of the June 7, 1970, Washington Post. He was physically enormous, a six-five brawler with a thick chest and a fine blond beard — a man of epic dimensions and mythic appetites. He was also, ultimately, an epic failure, both as a writer and as a human being — a junkie who abandoned his kids when they were little, cutting off almost all contact. He overdosed on cocaine when Tristan was 15. He never published his novel.

But Tristan didn’t like hearing that part of the story. As much as Paula and Gretchen tried to tell him that Brad was no romantic figure — “He did whatever he wanted,” says Gretchen, “and he didn’t even do that particularly well” — the mythic aspects of El Oso exerted a powerful pull on Tristan’s young imagination.

El Oso was a novelistic character:

The worst catholic in America and one of the finest drinking partners this side of the cross.

Tristan wrote these words three or four years after Brad died. They appear in his first draft of Lord of the Barnyard, alongside pages and pages of hallucinogenic resurrection. There was an indistinct, fuzzy quality to the writing. As hard as Tristan tried to make his father come to life, the man on the page only receded into cliché.

Maybe it was the pot talking. Tristan was in Philly now, stoned out of his gourd. He was a freshly minted Temple dropout, living in complicated squalor. “I think he bought into that whole idea that artists had to go through a lot of pain,” says Kathy, “and it was normal.” Sharpening his misery would sharpen his writing.

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