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Benjamin Percy’s short story “Refresh, Refresh.” brings back the language of men as it once was. At a time when Maxim, GQ and Esquire serve to define the new softer American male as an emotive, talkative, perfumed and spa-treated mannequin whose most conspicuous association with masculinity is the size of his SUV, Percy’s observations of two friends growing into young adulthood in the backwoods of Oregon remind us of the manhood that defined Ernest Hemingway’s generation. “Dancing with the Stars” isn’t a topic of conversation. Designer vodka isn’t the preferred bar drink. And the scream of a motorcycle speeding into the night is just as likely to be a scream for answers to questions about the main characters’ search for their own identities. This is an American story. It’s a tale of beer, guts, war and a search for personal identity.

Like the combative nature of the story’s two protagonists – Josh, the narrator, and his best friend, Gordon -- Percy’s prose doesn’t pull any punches. And, like a good boxing punch, his sentence structure is short and direct for maximum impact: “Every round went two minutes. If you stepped out of the ring, you lost. If you cried, you lost. If you got knocked out or if you yelled stop, you lost. Afterward we drank Coca-Cola and smoked Marlboros . . .” Percy’s spare use of language and the pacing of his sentences makes you feel almost as breathless as the boxer at the end of a 120 second round of fighting. And you’re just as grateful for the slow sip of Coca-Cola at the end of the paragraph.

However, Percy doesn’t want us to relax too long before he pushes us back into the ring for the delivery of the next verbal blow: “He wanted to be ready. He wanted to hurt those who hurt him. And, if he went down, he would go down swinging, as he was sure his father would. This is what we all wanted: to please our fathers, to make them proud, even though they had left us.” The rapid, clipped style of the author’s sentences reinforces the masculinity of the story’s characters. The typical lack of male communication is made up through action-packed language that adds to the intensity of the characters and their stories.

Despite the spare language, every word is carefully chosen for its ability to create imagery. This attention to detail makes the reader better know and believe the characters the author describes. For example, when the Marine fathers return home after military exercises, Percy writes: “They would talk about ECPs and PRPs and MEUs and WMDs and they would do pushups in the middle of the living room and they would call six o’clock ‘eighteen hundred hours’ and they would high-five and yell, ‘Semper fi’.” This and other rich character studies serve as stories within the story that help move the plot along and assist us in visualizing the world in which it is being told.

Just as rich as his character studies are Percy’s depictions of the environment, or the setting, in which we see the characters living. The juxtaposition of individuals against the Oregon wilderness – or even the cosmos– contributes to the sense of desperation of the young men who are struggling against large odds to find their identity without the help of their fathers or even a nearby masculine figure they can respect. Nowhere is this more true then when Josh, sitting on the edge of the Hole in the Ground meteor crater looks heavenward and says, “In the near distance Crow glowed grayish green against the darkness – a reminder of how close to oblivion we lived. A chunk of space ice or a solar wind could have jogged the meteor sideways and rather than landing here it could have landed at the intersection of Main and Farwell. No Dairy Queen, no Crow High, no Second Battalion. It didn’t take much imagination to realize how something could drop out of the sky and change everything.” This celestial metaphor is played out on earth when the boys’ fathers are shipped off unexpectedly to the Iraqi war.

The entire story is seen through the eyes of Josh, whose father, like many other fathers in his small town, has been sent off to the Iraqi war. By using this perspective the author gives us more personal insight into the anguish and conflicting emotions the narrator feels about his situation. It also helps us more strongly empathize with him. And the colloquial style of the story telling makes it all the more real.

The detailed depiction of the settings and events is helped by the author’s background. Having grown up in central Oregon, Percy understands small town America, the fraternity of men raised on hunting trips, the camaraderie found in American Legion halls and the simpler definitions of right and wrong that belong to a simpler time. And, as a contemporary of America’s Iraqi wars, he borrows on news stories and personal knowledge to accurately allude to the larger world in which the story is set. He compresses these experiences into nineteen tightly edited pages, which originally began as forty. In doing so, he loads every word for maximum explosiveness and creates a rhythm with his use of language that drives us faster and faster to the conclusion.

It’s a conclusion that comes to a screeching halt, as the two protagonists who, after beating and kidnapping the local military recruiter and threatening to kill him by tossing him into the meteor crater, relent and head off to their local recruiting station to enlist in the Marines. Perhaps it’s an ending we should have seen coming, as Percy smartly led us from their boxing matches to their deer slaying and from whoring with older, local women to pitying a young man with the return of his stolen rifles and a few dollars of cash in sympathy for his loss of his father in Iraq. All of these events and more are rites of passage of a sort in their move from youth to an adulthood that has been defined by their fathers as military service. As one older man describes it, “It’s just the way the game is played.” And it’s an American game -- told in an unique American way by Benjamin Percy.

Works Cited
Percy, Benjamin. “Refresh, Refresh.” The Best American Short Stories. Edited by Ann Patchett. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. 91-104

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Recent college graduate seeks motivated employer that desires Web technical proficiency or writing skills -- preferably both -- for a long term relationship.     The right company values leadership,  initiative and team work in all its employees from the top to the bottom of the business, which is where I'm willing to begin.    A passion for excellence and a sense of humor are definite pluses.   Give me the opportunity to put my foot on your ladder and let's climb together to the top.

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