by Tom Bissell
When he woke up from his nap, he realized he wanted to tell me something, which was his dislike of “nifty gear” outdoormanship, such as the kind he imagined was favored by the readers of Outside. He wanted to make sure I got that into the piece. He quickly had second thoughts, though. “Take that out,” he said, waving his hand. A moment later he said, “No, put it in; they need to hear it.”
Sometimes when you are talking to Harrison he gets incredibly still. He looks away and starts breathing wheezily from his chest, and his eyes fade, and you begin to worry that he is in the middle of some kind of cardiac event. Other times, when he is talking about drinking or writing or his wife or his daughters or grandchildren, he becomes boyish, all the wrinkles ironed out of his face and his eyes slits of joy. Other times, when he is losing his patience, he resembles some kind of Indian werebear with a face wrecked by pit fighting. With Harrison it was impossible to feel something so simple as friendship. He suddenly seemed to me like the closest thing we have to a tribal elder. If writers ever needed permission to raid another tribe and steal its corn, we would need to ask Harrison. He would listen carefully and judge prudently. We would never doubt his judgment, even when we saw him playing in the stream an hour later.
Harrison lives close to his mind. You sense this more and more the longer you stay with him, especially if, like me, you sometimes have to swim across an electro-plastic sea of junk to reach your own mind. You want to know or touch that unmediated part of Harrison, to tell him things. I was not the only one. At one point in Livingston, during our drive-around, we ran into a young friend of his, who immediately launched into a story about how he and his now-ex-girlfriend had recently decided to abort their child. But the younger man danced around mentioning this explicitly, forcing Harrison to say, “You mean you killed it?” His younger friend swallowed with a big-eyed blanch, and so did I. Later still, we met an aspiring screenwriter, who asked Harrison if he would have a look at one of his screenplays. “I couldn’t read a screenplay without puking,” Harrison said. Sometimes politeness was just a way to escape what needed to be said.
Before I left him, Harrison wanted to take me for a quick, gorgeous drive down the road, toward the foothills of the Rockies. There was a question I had been wanting to ask but was slightly afraid to. Since we only had an hour or so left together, I let it fly: “What did you think when you heard that one of John Bissell’s sons had become a writer?”
He looked on toward the road. “I thought, Boy, isn’t this odd? I’d heard rumors, right along. And the main thing that always gets to me is just worry. I’m capable of worrying about anything and anyone. And I thought, Oh God, what will happen to him? Why has he chosen this bloody voyage? That’s McGuane’s term for being a writer: a bloody voyage. But I was so pleased with your early successes.”
“What are these hills here?” I asked, motioning out the window.
“What do you mean?”
“What are they called?”
“They don’t call ’em anything.”
How about those bushes? “Juniper,” he said, and pointed up along the hills’ escarpment. “See those rock formations? Full of rodentia. And rattlers.” We circled back to his house and saw, in quick succession, a western tanager and a yellow-rumped warbler, Harrison’s first of the season. A deer ran alongside the truck, and I asked Harrison why the deer in Montana looked different from the deer in Michigan. Montana deer are mule deer, he said. Dumber, lower, mangier, grayer than Michigan’s whitetails. We passed the big pink tree that grew next to his driveway’s entrance. What’s that called? “Ornamental crab apple,” he said.
We came back to the house and Harrison wanted to know if I was going to continue teaching, which, I had told him the day before, was increasingly cannibalizing my writing time. Over the years, Harrison said, he had been offered several “really cushy jobs” by various creative writing departments. “And I said, ‘Why me?’ And they said, ‘We need some kind of name.’ However minimal.” He always said no. “I turned one down for $75,000 in a year that we made $9,000.”
“How were you able to do that?”
Harrison told me what he told them: “‘Somebody’s got to stay outside,”’ he said. “And I still think that’s true. Somebody’s got to stay outside.”
Before leaving Montana, I decided to drive through Yellowstone Park. Once more I was listening to conservative talk radio, and the voices were shrill and formless in my little rental, beneath the mountain cathedrals. While Sean Hannity spent an hour rhetorically decapitating President Obama, I looked at the landscape, feeling the pressure between Americans and America, between body and being, between reality and aspiration. I wound up at Old Faithful, which Harrison said had been weakened in recent years; it might not even blow, he warned me. I wanted to see it blow. Maybe it would relieve the pressure. After an hour, it had not blown, and I had to catch a plane home. I knew by then I would be quitting my teaching job. It felt too good to be outside.
—2011
Different versions of these essays were originally published in the following magazines and journals: “Unflowered Aloes” in the Boston Review; “Escanaba’s Magic Hour” in Harper’s Magazine; “Grief and the Outsider” in the Believer as “Protesting All Fiction Writers!”; “Writing about Writing about Writing” in the Believer as “Sir, Permission to Go AWOL from the Interesting Sir!”; “Rules of Engagement” in the New York Times Magazine; “Euphorias of Perrier” in the Virginia Quarterly Review; “Still Rising” in the Believer; “The Secret Mainstream” in Harper’s Magazine; “Kapuscinski’s Last Journey” in the New York Times Book Review as “On the Road with History’s Father”; “Great and Terrible Truths” in the New York Times Book Review; “Cinema Crudité” in Harper’s Magazine; “A Simple Medium” in the New Yorker; “Invisible Girl” in the New Yorker as “Voicebox 360”; “The Theory and Practice of Not Giving a Shit” in Outside as “The Last Lion.”
My deep thanks to editors Neil Gordon, Donovan Hohn, Heidi Julavits, Alex Star, Ted Genoways, Roger D. Hodge, Leo Carey, and Abraham Streep. Thanks also to my agent, Heather Schroder, and to Dave Eggers, Chris Ying, Michelle Quint, and Adam Krefman at McSweeney’s. Thank you, finally, to Gabriel Reeve, who provided some crucial last-second help in putting this collection together.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Bissell was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974, and is the author Chasing the Sea and The Father of all Things, both travel books; Speak, Commentary, a volume of fake DVD commentaries he co-wrote with Jeff Alexander; God Lives in St. Petersburg, a story collection; Extra Lives, a work of criticism; and The Art and Design of Gears of War, a short book about the art and design of Gears of War. He is a past winner of the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship, and his work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Since 1997 he has lived in New York City, Ho Chi Minh City, Rome, Las Vegas, Tallinn, and Portland. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
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1 This Herzog quote, like many others throughout this piece, comes from the invaluable Herzog on Herzog, edited by Paul Cronin.
2 Chickens (and roosters, and hens) are Herzog’s objective correlative and play some role in dozens of his films. A film as early as Even Dwarves Started Small contains a disquieting sequence in which a chicken eats a dead mouse. “Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity,” Herzog has said. “It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.”
3 Herzog: �
�Years ago I was searching for the biggest rooster I could find and heard about a guy in Petaluma, California... I went out there and found Ralph... who weighed an amazing thirty-two pounds! Then I found Frank, a special breed of horse that stood less than two feet high. I told Frank’s owner I wanted to film Ralph chasing Frank—with a midget riding him—around the biggest sequoia tree in the world.... But unfortunately, Frank’s owner refused. He said it would make Frank, the horse, look stupid.”
4 In an outtake of Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, a documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo, we witness one of Kinski’s Pompeiian outbursts as he screams at Herzog’s production manager, Walter Saxer: “You can lick my ass! I’m going to smash your face!” This was nothing, as Herzog himself points out. During the filming of Aguirre, Kinski opened fire with his Winchester rifle on some extras. Herzog says it was a “miracle” no one was killed. Elsewhere Herzog has said, “Kinski was probably the most difficult actor in the world to deal with. Working with Brando must have been like kindergarten compared to Kinski.”
5 Herzog maintains he helped Kinski write many of the book’s anti-Herzog diatribes, and Herzog’s take on their relationship, the documentary My Best Fiend (1999), is notable for its searching tone and gentle touch. (The last minute or so of the film, which shows an outtake [shot by Les Blank] of Kinski playing with a butterfly, rates among the loveliest sequences to be found in any of Herzog’s films.)
6 Thomas Mauch, Herzog’s cameraman, split his hand down the middle while filming the sequence and had to undergo some impromptu thatch-hut jungle surgery without the benefit of morphine.
7 In a victory-lap interview filmed for The Room’s DVD release, we find Wiseau’s disarmingly frank explanation for why he chose to shoot his film with two cameras: “Because at the time I did not have sufficient information and was confused about these two formats.”
8 This has resulted in the film’s central ritual of audience participation: whenever the framed spoons appear, anyone holding must throw their own plastic spoons at the screen.
9 In one scene, Lisa orders Johnny a pizza with his favorite toppings: half Canadian bacon with pineapple, half artichoke with pesto, and “light on the cheese.” As Wiseau later explained, there is a binary symbolism at work here: one, Wiseau likes pizza; two, the exotic toppings represent the freedoms all Americans enjoy.
10 Wiseau has, in fact, made one non-bizarre film.This is Homeless in America, a somewhat naive but rather touching 30-minute-long documentary of which Wiseau is justifiably proud.
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eISBN : 978-1-938-07310-6
