Gallows humor along his path to enlightenment

“Whenever I hear the word ‘spiritual,’ I reach for my revolver,” opens Jim Knipfel in his latest memoir, “Ruining It for Everybody.” Knipfel, a columnist for the alternative New York Press, has made a name for himself with his biting bleak humor, misanthropic tendencies and the brutal honesty with which he writes about his difficult life.

His first memoir, “Slackjaw,” told of the failures of his body due to progressive blindness from the degenerative eye disease retinitis pigmentosa, a situation complicated by an inoperable brain lesion that caused seizures. “Quitting the Nairobi Trio,” his second memoir, focused on the failures of his mind and detailed the six months he spent in a psychiatric ward after a suicide attempt. The next logical step, he tells us in “Ruining It,” “[i]f you cling to tired Western notions of what constitutes a human being ... would be to consider the failure of my spirit.”

As spiritual memoirs go, this one is more nihilism than transcendence, more anti-spiritual than soul-seeking, although sparks of redemption occasionally flicker and Knipfel’s journey toward shaky enlightenment is littered with mordant laughs.

The first part of the book details the rotten things Knipfel participated in during his college years with his buddy Grinch. Before the two became friends, Knipfel tells us he’d been content with petty vandalism and some minor shoplifting. “[A]fter we met, he taught me how to break into buildings, steal for real, drink, and smoke. We smashed a lot of things.... We sabotaged a local gubernatorial candidate for no reason .... [W]e encouraged each other on to greater and greater heights (or depths) of depraved, antisocial behavior .... Grinch taught me the wonder, value and joy in sociopathology. Whatever we felt like doing, we did.” This “whatever we felt like doing” includes setting fire to the school’s administration building and other mayhem, all of which Knipfel details with a kind of glee.

Between scenes in which he confesses to general confusion, drunkenness and abhorring much of the human community, Knipfel doesn’t really wade into the realm of mystical understandings. He does include moments that may be considered tangentially spiritual, although these scenes too are overlaid with cool derision: Jesus showing up in Knipfel’s bedroom when he was 7; Knipfel experiencing the stigmata (but only on one foot); his concerns that he might need an exorcism; and a weird series of episodes in which he perceives someone who looks exactly like him sitting nearby in a dark bar, his body double bathed in a spear of heavenly white light.

Reading it, one might wonder whether it’s maybe a New York thing, this hard-edged yet comic stance that makes fun of just about everything while bemoaning the uselessness of personal action. In contrast to that of the quintessential California spiritual seeker, this New York-style timbre is thick with irony, striking a hyper-cool attitude that eschews any kind of sacred quest and parodies that which others may revere. It’s all very funny, but painfully so, the kind of humor we resort to when tears have failed us.

Eventually, the author softens and abandons his destructive ways, only to grapple with an identity crisis. Much of the acclaim he’s achieved, he tells us, has been based on the fact he was a snotty, hate-filled person “who did terrible things, both to himself and others. Now that I didn’t feel that way anymore, what would become of me?”

Although readers are never sure exactly when and why the transformation takes place, he moves from being a destructive force to a man who, on his best days, strives for basic human kindness. Since so many people spend most every day ruining things for other people, he explains, he’s not going to be that way anymore. He calls this spiritual wisdom “Buddhism for Drunkards” and sums it up as follows: Don’t be a jerk.

There are times that the work is monstrously funny and we can laugh at the outrageousness of the narrator and the idiosyncrasies of the human condition. Other times, the author’s tales are poignant and genuine, even earnest. Ultimately, though, the book fails to inspire passion. Knipfel is so busy making fun of himself that there’s little room left for us to feel anything -- derision, compassion, understanding or anger -- even when he drops his edgy persona and the writing becomes sincere.