Jesus' Son

Of all the stories in the collection, “Dirty Wedding” explores the theme of Violence as Inevitability in the most depth. This story relates several methods of what can be perceived as committing violence or harm of some kind (whether to oneself or another): abortion, stalking, and domestic abuse. The inciting factors for this violence in “Dirty Wedding” are twofold: First, the narrator and Michelle aren’t responsible enough to raise a child together; and second, the narrator is bored. This boredom leads to his compulsive wandering, with the wandering leading to his drug use, making an explicit connection between F**khead’s depression and boredom with his ongoing Substance Use Disorder.

The narrative shows that F**khead judges Michelle harshly for having the abortion. However, Johnson is willing to demonstrate the extent to which his narrator is a hypocrite. Michelle is, to F**khead, “a woman, a traitor, and a killer” (83). While the terms “traitor” and “killer” can directly apply to Michelle through F**khead’s perspective—due to her earlier abortion and her shooting at him with a gun—he also calls her a “woman” in the same list, demonstrating his misogyny through equating Michelle’s womanhood with a list of her crimes. To F**khead, just being a woman is a treacherous act, and throughout this story, and the rest of the collection, he consistently demonstrates how little he values women, with most either portrayed as sex objects or people who deserve pity.

However, despite his sexism, F**khead still demonstrates an understanding and empathy for Michelle’s state of mind. When describing a time in which Michelle shot at him five times, missing each time, he writes, “It wasn’t my life she was after. It was more. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she’d done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother” (84). As with the bartender from “Work,” F**khead is positioning himself here as a child and Michelle as a mother. This equating of himself with a child has the rhetorical effect of allowing the narrator to absolve himself of responsibility for his actions—his substance use disorder has put him in a childlike state, and he feels as if what he does is subject to forces outside his control. Second, the equivocation puts Michelle in a position of power over him. However, throughout “Dirty Wedding,” F**khead has demonstrably more power in the relationship than Michelle. Michelle is the one who must go through with difficult, both potentially physically and emotionally, medical procedures against what her partner wants. Additionally, Michelle dies by suicide with another partner, demonstrating her emotional state after her relationship with F**khead, which is portrayed as turbulent and generally negative. With the added context of F**khead’s low regard for her, at least in this story, potentially traumatic events combined with an emotionally explosive boyfriend did not leave Michelle in a state through which to thrive. However, in the final lines of the story, F**khead declares, “I know they argue about whether or not it’s right, whether or not the baby is alive at this point or that point in its growth inside the womb. This wasn’t about that… it wasn’t what the woman did. It was what the mother and father did together” (84). In this line, he’s putting the responsibility of pregnancy on both their shoulders, but in more fundamental ways, F**khead still avoids direct responsibility for his actions, as he does through most stories in the collection. This lack of direct responsibility is highlighted in his use of the third person, describing “the mother and father” and not himself and Michelle explicitly. Further, at the end of Michelle’s life, the text highlights the idea that substance use disorder and violence as inevitability are intertwined, which is echoed through the other characters throughout the collection, too.