Red Stick Men

Tim Parrish has written a collection of stories from his experiences living in and around New Orleans. The title reflects the nickname given to the men who worked around the Mississippi. The rain,floods and humidity invasively turn everything wet,soggy and a dull reddish hue. There are five stories in this collection that center around growing up at the time of the Vietnam War. The characters are Jeb and a few buddies going through the rights of passage from boys to men. In one scene they are boys daring the river currents and amusing themselves by throwing stones to break up treebranch jams. Their talk and interest turns to the war and the news Jeb is able to surreptitiously overhear about his older brother, Bob, who is serving in Vietnamin. Though the setting is precise, the conditions and conflicts of getting their first kiss,getting jobs and fearing their own possible fate as soldiers are universal. That Parrish can tell it so well is a compliment to his skll at making his characters real and believable.He does this by using dialogue in the Creole vernacular. The reader can feel the red dust on one's face, smell the damp and dank moisture in the walls of the house, one clothes and emanating from the river. It is also possible to imagine the turmoil of a hard existence with little to hope for except more of the same.His character's personalities are well drawn and the contrast betweeen his Mother and father, for instance, underlines the difficulty the young man has in making decisions about his life. Jeb's older brother returns from the war and goes through many of the tortured mind battles of veterans in those years. If you were too young to know it then, you can get a good feel for the difficulty of the times when Americ was cought up in a controversial war. Parrish joins the ranks of many short story writers by presenting true pictures of growing up but sets the tales in a unique environment. Another author to consider, for a view of the same but in early Oklahoma, is Rilla Askew's Strange Business.I have enjoyed both and look forward to discovering other authors and other areas of the U.S. that put forth unique societal values.

Tim Parrish captures the essence of all things southern, as he understands everthing, good or bad, flows downstream . Case point - the mighty Mississippi River. In lives that have arrived somewhat left of center, we are allowed to share in this intimate observation. Shattered dreams, economic hardships, run away passions, and early dead-ends all frame "misery loves company" lifestyles. Not quite the hard bite and humor as Larry Brown's "Face the Music" and "Big Bad Love", we can form fondness for his characters. A forgiving grace and compassion permeates the river bottom fog as we recognize these people as those we know - our friends, ourselves. Americans lost in the wilderness of an unpredictable today. No solutions, no excuse, just acceptance.

Reading the stories of Red Stick Men gives you access to worlds remote from the babble of the Information Age. These are stories rooted firmly in places far from the glib and predictable itineraries of the Travel Channel and National Geographic. Tim Parrish recreates the toxic world of Baton Rouge with precision and poetry and populates it with characters whose fates you care about. In describing the setting so well, he takes us on a tour through the outer rings of a modern inferno, with extraordinary characters who are able to extract beauty and redemption from the most unlikely of places, through the most unlikely of acts. Here are just a few examples of Tim's descriptive power. To immerse us in the world of the welder in "Free Fall," he writes: "He drifts, returns to where he does not want to go, two hours earlier, crouched inside a chemical tank, acetylene fumes fat in his nostrils. His torch hissed like a leak from a giant balloon." In "Roustabout" Tim takes us on a different kind of cruise, to an oil production platform, where all sorts of unconventional love is flowering. Of Nikki, the sexy petroleum engineer who strips to swim with dolphins beneath the platform, he writes: "Her skin was dark except for pale stripes across her breasts and hips and her abdomen swelled out like a tiny dolphin's head." In the disturbingly powerful final story, where nature itself seems to rebel against the toxic world and folks are partying to celebrate impending doom, Tim describes water "nippy as bream's teeth." As an old friend of Tim Parrish, I'll admit I've read most of these stories before and enjoyed them. But returning to them and rereading them in this fine collection gave me an even greater appreciation of his vision and storytelling power.

Having grown up in south Louisiana, I can identify with the characters and life struggles that Tim Parrish portrays in his impressive collection of short stories, Red Stick Men. We all know a hardware man, an exterminator and a foreman that has unassumingly crossed our path in life, `just doing their jobs'. It is underneath this superficial blue-collar identity, that we come to know what is REAL about these people, their innermost thoughts, feelings and dreams. In reading Parrish's book, we become privy to the lives of `common folk' in Louisiana. We learn of the pains of growing up from Jeb ("Bonnie Ledet", "It Pours"), the struggles of love and healing from Bob ("Hardware Man," "Exterminator") and the future of life as we think we know it ("After the River"). It is in this ability to portray the humanness of people without loosing sight of the meaning in life, that Tim Parrish succeeds in giving us a slice of Louisiana's "joie de vie". No matter how long ago, nor how far I may live from my native Louisiana, memories of the people and places that make it `home' come flooding back as a result of reading Tim Parrish's book. For those that are intrigued by the culture of south Louisiana, or are just interested in reading stories of REAL people living life as it is, Red Stick Men by Tim Parrish, is a must read.

Although I'm not male--and have no brothers--these stories really opened a vein for me. The author's exploration of the sibling relationship between Jeb and Bob was rich and finely drawn. In "It Pours," the complexity of the father/son relationship also moved me. And the sense of place--the humidity, the insects, the creepy-crawliness of the South--was established with great authority.