THE CHEMISTRY OF FIRE

In the heartbreaking titular essay, Gonzales describes his ex-wife’s long battle with ovarian cancer, chronicling the progression of her illness and reminiscing about their early days together: “We talked about literature late into the night. We were in our early twenties, dazzled by life. We were beautiful. We were immortal. We were heedless, burning the days.” In these wide-ranging, welcoming pieces, the author shows himself to be a caring, questioning man with a dry wit and big heart. He once played in a band with the “gentle” albino guitarist Johnny Winter, who had “an unearthly way of moving his fingers.” Visiting him years later, Gonzales saw a man who ruined his life with drugs and careless sex. One night, writes the author, Winter “laid open a medicine chest he carried with him. Inside were a paper of heroin, one of coke, some PCP, MDA, THC, LSD, weed, hash, ups, reds, and a few assorted devices for the administration of those potions.” In “The All-Seeing Eye,” Gonzales writes about his father, a scientist who “loved things with lenses.” While visiting Las Vegas with some friends and his movie agents, he saw a sign that read, “Change Redemption,” which “struck me as an oddly spiritual concept in the midst of all this avaricious compulsion until I realized that it was referring to coins, not souls.” In an essay about hiking Mount Washington, which “has the worst weather in America,” the author recounts the deaths of two lost climbers and confronts the “mystery of why rational people do irrational things.” Writing about motorcycles, Gonzales learned the hard way that riding one is “about the most dangerous thing most people can figure out how to do.” Whether he’s swimming in an underwater cave or touring a NASA center in Huntsville, Alabama, “a kind of hillbilly heaven,” these savvy essays are a pleasure.

An appealing collection about all the “rough and joyful realities” of life.