The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  —Nerve, 2005

  The Drew Barrymore Stories

  1. I was riding in an elevator in a London hotel with Alfred Hitchcock and Drew Barrymore. Alfred Hitchcock said, “Do you think he’s opened the box of poisoned chocolates yet?” Though I knew it was only one of Alfred Hitchcock’s deadpan jokes, I grew nervous. Drew Barrymore smiled and laughed, so infectiously that I couldn’t help laughing myself. She said, “I took the poisoned chocolates out and replaced them with chocolates filled with sympathy and affection.” Even Alfred Hitchcock began laughing now.

  2. John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Drew Barrymore and I were backstage at a nightclub in Chicago. Miles Davis was berating John Coltrane for playing a twenty-minute solo. I was trying not to be noticed. Drew Barrymore was picking through a box of chocolates an admirer had sent backstage, biting into several of them to examine the filling. John Coltrane said, “I don’t know how to stop playing.” Miles Davis said, “Just take the damn horn out of your mouth.” Drew Barrymore said, “Or if you wanted to you could just begin playing very softly, until you were so quiet that the others could play over you.” Miles Davis said, “That would be fine too, yes.”

  3. Ernest Hemingway and Howard Hawks and John Coltrane and Drew Barrymore and I were in a fishing boat on the Snake River in Colorado. John Coltrane and Drew Barrymore were baiting fishhooks with whiskey-filled chocolates an admirer had sent to Hemingway. I was trying to make coffee on a Bunsen burner. Howard Hawks said to Ernest Hemingway, “I bet you I can make a good movie out of your worst book.” Ernest Hemingway said, “What book is that?” Howard Hawks said, “That piece of shit known as To Have and Have Not.” Drew Barrymore said, “Look over there!” We all turned, and Drew Barrymore pushed Howard Hawks out of the boat.

  4. Gertrude Stein and Jack London and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jack Kerouac and Truman Capote and Drew Barrymore and I were in a large outdoor hot tub in Sausalito, playing a drinking game called What’s Your Secret? Gertrude Stein said, “Small audiences.” Truman Capote said, “It’s not your turn, Gertrude, it’s Scott’s.” F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “There are no second acts in American lives.” I started to ask him whether he meant that American lives skipped straight to the third act, but the others ignored me. Jack London said, “If you put some eggshells in with the coffee grounds it leaches the acid out of the coffee and it tastes a lot better.” Jack Kerouac mumbled something nobody could make out, and Truman Capote said, “That’s not writing, Kerouac, that’s typing.” Drew Barrymore got out of the hot tub and put on her robe and said, “Does anyone want hot chocolate instead of coffee? I don’t have any eggshells, but I do have marshmallows.”

  5. I was running in the New York Marathon with Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman and John Coltrane and Drew Barrymore, only Laurence Olivier was riding a banana-yellow moped. Drew Barrymore was accepting orange slices and Dixie cups of chocolate milk from the crowds at the police barriers and laughing infectiously, but Dustin Hoffman and John Coltrane and I were too out of breath to join in. By the time we crossed the Kosciusko Bridge into Long Island City Dustin Hoffman looked terrible and I was concerned he wouldn’t be able to finish the race. Laurence Olivier said, “What’s the matter?” Dustin Hoffman said, “I was up all night last night because I wanted this scene to look realistic.” Laurence Olivier said, “Why don’t you try acting, my boy?” We all looked at Laurence Olivier like he was an asshole. Drew Barrymore said, “I know a shortcut.” Dustin Hoffman said, “To acting?” Drew Barrymore said, “No, a shortcut,” and she pointed past the police barriers at our left. We all turned our heads and when we looked back she was gone.

  —AnOther Magazine, 2005

  V

  WALL ART

  I thought I’d be a painter before I knew I’d write. The company of artists still makes sense to me, and sometimes my artist friends ask me to write about their work, a flattering and impossible request. Unlike music or film writing, which I devour, art writing mostly leaves me cold. I can’t make that vocabulary my own. So I’ve offered artists stories instead. The artists, in return, give me pictures for my walls. Since I’ve always felt a little bereft of the paintings I never painted, this is a good thing.

  The Collector (Fred Tomaselli)

  The collector started with pennies. Or seashells. He could no longer recall. The two were opposites married in his obsessive vision. The seashells, indifferent and precultural, washed out of circulation on the shore, or came to him in tissue-paper-cushioned packages from a warehouse inventory. No two were alike, as with fingerprints or snowflakes, yet they conformed to hierarchies of scarcity and value, made a subject for catalogs and lists. That these were also skulls, an assembly of carapaces, opened a first doorway into the morbidity of his love. Abraham Lincoln was a crazed worthless token, brown and bearded, a filthy tide of unsilver pouring from his parents’ pockets, but subject to secret reorganization in embossed cardboard folders. A penny was not so much money as the DNA of money. Spotting the year and the mint signatures under Lincoln’s nose was the first act of reading the secret inscriptions that underwrote the universe, a child’s garden of conspiracy. Wheat-backed pennies were the essential evidence that the past was a purer land, that Americans had been expelled from a garden. The wartime aluminum cents were evidence of life on Mars.

  Putting Lincoln’s head upright in orderly rows was something, anyway, a sport for bleary afternoons. The staccato profile made a wedge of digits, ones-not-zeros, accumulating in an arrow moving past-to-future. Though pointing to a time when he’d jar or shelve them with his father’s cavalier disdain, the precision and recursiveness of the pennies riveted him inside his present, the dawdling idle hours spent within the brackets of the blue-embossed cardboard holders. The shells were more troubling, harder to quantify. The boxes in which they were stored accumulated crumbs in the corners, evidence of dissolution, of the shells’ complicity with stardust, with the antihuman ebb of entropy. One day on a visit to his grandparents’ neighbor he spotted on a coffee table a hideous decorative clock from Florida ornamented with affixed shells, several valuable specimens possibly ruined with clumps of glue and glitter. Shells grew, he understood now. They were clocks themselves. They lurked in fathomless beds of frond and mud, were exuded in octopus and shark shit.

  These were his first two ruined collections, early maps of shame. The hinges frayed on the gap-haunted blue cardboard penny books. Pennies from a certain mint refuse to migrate to the coast. Perhaps some doppelgänger boy elsewhere held the reverse of your collection, hoarded your missing pieces, like a game of Gin Rummy or Go Fish. Speaking of fish, the shells stunk. They delivered up not only sounds but odors from elsewhere. They refused to be decanted, were just passing through.

  He began to associate the shells with the curls of yellow, calcified snot he’d accidentally archived beneath his desk.

  One day his mother presented him with a bankbook containing a balance begun by the birthday check from his grandmother. She showed him paper rolls for gathering pennies, for proving their value in weekly schleps to the teller’s window, then offered him the flood of crappy pennies wedged in drawers and overrunning jars everywhere. He capitulated, quit examining the coins for their pedigree, quit yanking them from circulation. They had their pitiful denomination after all. Savoring the rarity of one in a thousand was too much like staring at your feet as you walked. After a while you had to just accept that each foot flopped in front of the previous, forever, even when you took your eyes away.

  He wondered if he was doomed to collect everything before he was done. He fell for the whole baseball-card thing for about five minutes, long enough to pass through mannerist, modernist, minimalist, and postmodern periods at the speed of sound. The flashy cards revealed too much, bright emblems, team trademarks smeared everywhere and disguising nothing, the pitiful, needy eyes of dying veterans and no-hope rookies, faked smiles to mortify your glance. Gray cardboard flip sides loaded with inane jokes and statistics, prehistories of minor-league stru
ggle, and dusty with starch. Did anyone collect the gum? The cards were for statistical study—no, for flipping—no, for protecting in laminated folders—no, they were only a product, a scam, the grocery clerk annoyed that you didn’t figure it out sooner and just get your dad to buy the whole carton on one visit instead of slouching around the joint bugging him for weeks.

  At the end he wrecked the whole relationship in one resentful, shattering act, a spasm of appropriation and collage involving toy scissors and a bottle of Elmer’s. On the inside of his notebook binder the California Angels fluttered, pinkish baseball putti, over a roaring inferno of flame-licked Reds and Dodgers. Disembodied mitts swarmed the scene like luna moths, horrified and attracted as he himself had been.

  Ground zero for all collections, it seemed, was the glue bottle, the lumps of pearly translucent white that held the swirling chaos of the world in place even as they officially devastated the value of any item affixed, according to all known specialists. You were a fucking idiot to glue anything to anything else but you did it all the time. A “real” collector tolerated the slippage, the loose and therefore implicitly temporary nature of his hoard, by capturing coins and cards and shells and stamps in sheaths and slipcases, delicate frames. You glued shit to backgrounds like a maniac. You’d have sealed the books on your shelves in laminate if you could. Superglue, which was reputed to solder fingers to eyeballs, was too scary to even let into the house, knowing your propensities.

  The gluing impulse was especially treacherous when it came to stamp collecting. He’d been given the albums and a head start of a million torn-off corners of envelopes by an uncle from Vegas. Here was another precise history to duplicate, every stamp ever issued in the United States, plus their dark cousins, the postage-due stamps. In fact, in two years of solid work he’d never catch up with the backlog of stamps to soak or steam off envelopes. The ideal stamp had nothing to do with this bogus labor anyway, but was clean of postmark, never licked, perhaps even in an intact block of four. These were purchased at the Collector’s Counter on the eighth floor of the department store, a somber ritual, religious possibly, related to visits to the bank window, and with no overtones of the grocery-store baseball-card gum-and-garbage runs. Yet faced with a pristine stamp and its appointed place in an album, a date with destiny, how to keep from just licking the thing and pressing it into place? What the fuck was a dry mount, anyway? On a humid day they licked themselves, self-ruining, so why lose the chance? Thirty-year-old stamp glue had the titillating savor of an old wine uncorked. Who was it waiting for, if not for him?

  Maybe the only thing you collected, after all, was glue itself.

  Drugs and music made another set of twins. Each were like seashells or stardust you took into your body. Living where he did, in the city locked in pavement to the sea, the drugs and the music were his first chance to import nature beyond his own boundaries. They made tidy analogues for sex or the forest, possibly more satisfying than any wider exploration would ever be, certainly safer. Drugs and songs were seashells he could seek to turn into pennies. First you saw a band, absorbed the essence of live moments which like drug fumes evaporated into your organs and left no evidence apart from your altered sense of self and any bragging rights you’d risk. Then you collected their albums, all the B sides and rarities from the Denver mint. In drugs he dabbled, a ready tourist, stopping nowhere but gathering sample flavors like stamps in a passport: Quaalude, Mescaline, Amsterdam Hash. His record collection, on the other hand, was a plummet into addiction. He’d boarded a carousel of pure and infinite unsatisfaction, where solid ground whirled beneath his gaze, no chance of stepping off. He rarely listened to a song to its end anymore, perpetually upping the dose with a junkie’s agitation. The connoisseur soon learned every song had “versions,” which raised the stakes. Music was a kind of fractal disaster area.

  The first time he put blotter acid on his tongue he thought: They printed the player’s statistics directly on the gum. And the player is me. The whole team, pitcher, catcher, batter, even the third-base coach frantically signaling from his lime-drawn grass box in the foul area, touching his nose, his ear, his crotch, the bill of his cap—hey, what’s he trying to say to me?

  If I’m the coach, why don’t I grasp the coach’s signals?

  If I am my own collection, why am I scattered outside of my body?

  If that’s my favorite band, why don’t I enjoy any of their albums?

  Now somebody started a band, four guys in a basement, pawnshop instruments reflecting no consensus as to whether stickers were cool or not, in a sea of amplifier wires in a concrete zone cleared in the clutter of abandoned family stuff, including, he couldn’t help noticing, a pile of rotting stamp albums, lurching herky-jerky song openings with no firm conclusion in mind, except perhaps the ongoing argument certain to escalate to band-breakup level sooner or later, which would easily enough solve the problem of how to end the song. Somebody else renovated a two-story house in Culver City to make an indoor marijuana factory, sun-spectrum light fixtures, sprinkler hoses for nutrient-enriched water, rows of green plants throbbing with redolent active ingredient, flower buds rupturing, the plants’ overwhelmed stalks needing support from slings, crutches, buttresses. This was a going concern, you could splice the DNA of the best weed you’d ever toked into the mother plant in the closet and like a science-fiction monster you’d rule the earth, exactly as you couldn’t splice the Sex Pistols’ DNA into your shitty band and were destined to rule exactly nothing.

  One day a bunch of them drove down into Borrego Springs on mushrooms and it was exactly as good as Disney’s The Living Desert and at that moment he realized that everything he loved most was a seashell. Maybe it was time to get out of the city.

  Now he was a bird-watcher, with binoculars and a field guide. He walked in the woods but also sought to draw his collection to himself, magnetize his subjects like iron filings. He lured them to the edges of the house, to miniature platforms and chimney-shaped feeders mounted and hung in the trees, with piles of seed and corn and dried berries, bait for feathered creatures. He spied at them through his windows, enumerated them in his book, a reverse Peeping Tom. Sparrow, wren, cardinal, crow. The house resembled a big knocked-out cartoon head, circles of birds wreathing it as he dashed, like a lone pupil in kooky eye sockets, from window to window. He got himself a bird-watcher’s clock, too, which chimed a different birdsong at each hour. On a day trip to the beach he garnered pipers who ran like tidy punctuation at the edge of surf, then was taken aback at two lumpen terns nosing for clams at the breakwater rocks. Guiltily he noted these rarities in his book. Not all birds were birds, he felt. Category errors nagged his psyche. He wanted a division between water and sky. He saw he was trying to purify, the collector’s fatal mistake. Repentant, he logged the dirty-looking terns. Between birds he picked mushrooms, not psychedelic things, and at night he gazed at the stars. His militarysurplus thigh pockets bulged with field guides. At night a single light brought flat moths of all sizes to his windows, self-adhering decal-souls. But he hadn’t glued anything to anything else in what felt like years. Whatever he’d wish to affix was beyond reach of Elmer’s nozzle.