The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  Then came the squirrels. These anti-birds clarified things radically. They filched seed and corn, clambered along wires, defeated all measures, and, bad actors, screeched off the visiting birds. The vermin needed to be thwarted, which gave his life a new grim purpose. A war of logistics rapidly escalated: how to feed one kind and starve another. The squirrels twitched past any obstacle. Soon enough he concluded death was not only the preferred solution, it was too good for the bastards. He’d been converted into Elmer Fudd, a poker-in-holes. The wabbit kicked the bucket. The day he found his first victim curled like an ampersand in dead leaves, tiny mouth pursed in disdain, tail rigid, he understood. It wasn’t really about the birds anymore. Poison was the new glue.

  Years later he attended a party at the home of a wealthy big-game hunter, a man of feral leisure. The hunter had a carriage house behind his mansion, full of trophies. He’d left it open for the guests to peruse. Wandering in among a gaggle of partiers, bearing drink and ice in a plastic cup, expecting perhaps a few tattered moose heads, he was shocked instead at entering a multichambered temple of earthly death. The walls were heaped everywhere with stuffed and mounted corpses, ibex, yak, water buffalo, Scottish goats with wiry beards. Room after room, countless bodies leaped from the walls, cougars and pythons arranged in elaborate tableaux, miming attack, their frozen moments of death, perhaps an argument that the hunter had only shot in self-defense. The floor beneath guests’ strolling feet was a bear’s skin, then a tiger’s, then a crocodile’s pebbly back. Plaques accompanying the stuffed heads accounted for the dates of the kills, a regimented life’s work, no time wasted in the global hopping. Photographs showed the teams of natives who’d assisted in trapping the victims, framing them for the hunter’s bullet. The hunter the triumphant white face in their center, boot on a head with a lolling tongue.

  Staring at the uncredited taxidermist’s eyeball work, he spotted the telltale glue.

  Back in the main house, they were introduced. The ruddy-faced hunter’s eyes glistened with impatience at the inadequate hairless apes circulating among his kills. In that razor look the collector felt himself collected, or at least browsed. The hunter had worked out a handshake unlike any other, encircling a proffered hand in a tight ring and squeezing the line of knuckles together to produce unmistakably intentional pain. You had to grant it was an accomplishment: a handshake you’d gnaw your arm off to get free of.

  “Sometimes when I see a Lincoln-head penny I still think that an uncirculated 1909 S-V.B.D. would be the ideal one.”

  “Remember William Burroughs in Drugstore Cowboy, searching through that whole bedspread covered with pharmaceuticals, just looking for one Dilaudid? He tells them the rest of their stuff is crap, that the Dilaudid was the only pill worth anything.”

  “When I was a kid I used to get confused about the difference between astronauts and dinosaurs. The only evidence of either one was basically just footprints. And rocks.”

  “Dude, what if bird-watching was not about watching lots of different birds, but watching just one. Pick a bird—not a species, but a sole, actual bird—and follow it anywhere, watch it forever. Like, vertical instead of horizontal bird-watching. That would be pretty fucking cool.”

  “You know those machines that smash a penny into a souvenir image of some local building or monument? I can’t begin to explain how depressing I find that.”

  “What I find depressing is that you can pay to have your filthy name put on a star or a crater on the moon that never did anything to hurt you in the first place, never so much as glanced in your direction.”

  “I once put a quarter in a vise and cut it in half with a hacksaw. Then walked around with the halves in my pocket, trying to figure out if it was still money.”

  “Me and my brother once spent a five-dollar bill that was autographed by Muhammad Ali. We basically just needed five bucks that day.”

  “I heard this comedian say that he keeps his seashell collection scattered on the beaches of the world.”

  “I still like birds, though.”

  “I like birds fine, man. Just not at the expense of other things. Like, say, mammals.”

  His uncle, who’d lived alone in an apartment, had to be moved into a home. His father asked him to drive out to Vegas to help. In an instant, walking through the door, a lifetime’s romance with his uncle’s bachelorhood was shattered, a romance he hadn’t noticed himself sustaining. The rope-tied newspapers and unopened mail formed a maze for a creature barely human, a rot-gnawed Habitrail space, demanding contortions just to reach the bathroom door, the toilet itself a barely visible outpost in a mouse hole carved in mountains of bathroom magazines. A sofa had been buried under what a quick inspection proved was nineteen years before, Newsweek with Bhopal on the cover.

  When he got home he tried to flush the stamp collection down the toilet. They reeked of putridity to him now, a flaky carcass, skin of so many lost years, steamed off envelopes whose overlaid routes would describe the nervous system of the world. The plumbing choked on the stamps. He ended up plunging the toilet. The stamps, moistened a third time for their final voyage, swam on his tiles and over the bathroom’s threshold, to be wrecked on the reef of the carpet. Others invested in the toilet’s crannies, where he had to scour them free with a brush, one curved like the mirrors a dentist uses to get an angle on a molar. He felt by the end like a toilet-cleaner bird, picking at the porcelain mouth of a miniature hippopotamus.

  These days he wondered if all the aspirins and cigarettes in circulation resembled pennies, whether they were issued from different mints, and whether their point of origin as well as their date of issue could be ascertained by examining microscopic serial-number imprints.

  He began to consider the possibility of an aspirin or cigarette collection mounted into embossed cardboard holders, as with his lost penny collection.

  Such a collection would of course be destined like all others for failure, the die-cut cardboard slots intended to bear the earliest and scarcest aspirins or cigarettes reproachfully empty.

  He had fantasies of flash-laminating his coffee table, capturing everything on it in a plastic glob, magazine, coins, half-eaten sandwich, ashtray.

  The truth was he needed to quit smoking, clean his apartment, scoop up the pennies everywhere. He’d laminate when he was dead, what was the hurry? Stuff was collecting everywhere you looked.

  He’d be okay. The universe was the glue that held him together.

  —ArtReview, 2004

  An Almost Perfect Day (Letter to Bonn)

  October 2004

  Dear Elena,

  Yesterday I made a visit to an artist’s studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. My friend Fred Tomaselli is a painter and collagist who has become notorious for using real drugs in his paintings—marijuana leaves, psychedelic mushrooms, Ecstasy tablets, as well as legal pharmaceuticals and over-the-counter remedies such as Pepto-Bismol and Bayer aspirin. He arranges the leaves and pills and other substances in beautiful arrays, much in the manner that a child builds gorgeous artifacts out of Lego blocks, or a pointillist creates illusions of shimmering color by daubing paint. He also uses tiny cut-out images from magazines and books: birds, body parts, and pictures of toys and machines. These are always placed on the canvas surface with the scrupulous attention of a surgeon or diamond cutter. His work sometimes has a resemblance to Arcimboldo, the painter who made human heads out of meats, vegetables, and books. Some of Fred’s pictures are abstract and some are pictorial, but in every case a close examination reveals some unusual detail or image or object on the canvas. The result is fabulously beautiful. His work is celebratory, and I find it explosively happy even when the drugs or some of the other imagery takes on a somewhat ominous overtone. The paintings are full of love. I visited his studio because I’m going to try to write about his work soon, for a catalog to accompany an exhibition in Scotland, although I have no idea what to say. The trick will be avoiding the cliché of calling his work “transgressive”—I think Fre
d’s become bored with that misunderstanding about his efforts. The drugs are a part of his life and the world around him that Fred became curious about collecting and reorganizing, and giving a new purpose. There’s no attempt to assault or dismay the viewer, and I don’t think the work is actually transgressive in any way, despite the fact that occasionally it happens to be illegal.

  It was pouring rain as I approached Fred’s warehouse studio, but despite the weather, after spending a while looking at his work and talking about my plans to write about it, Fred and I decided impulsively to go out for a hamburger lunch at Peter Luger’s, a famous steak restaurant about a mile away, under the Williamsburg Bridge. Peter Luger’s, which was opened by a German family nearly a hundred years ago, is the most famous and also the most eccentric and old-fashioned restaurant in Brooklyn—and one of the most celebrated restaurants in all of New York. They grow their own beef and have a very simple menu consisting of steaks, hamburgers, and a few simple side items like creamed spinach, scalloped potatoes, and onion rolls. The point of going there is to gorge yourself on the best cow meat available in New York, as well as to savor the atmosphere. The place looks like a German inn of the previous century, or at least a New Yorker’s idea of one, with heavy wooden paneling and various decorations suggesting chivalry, hunting, the Black Forest, etcetera—shields, horns, giant brass beer steins, etcetera. The floors are covered with sawdust. The waiters are famous for their hostility and bullying, and for forcing you to order what they think is the best meal, or for sneering at you if you go outside their recommendations. This reputation is obviously something they cultivate and cherish because they know people come expecting to be given a hard time. They never fail. For instance, when Fred ordered his burger, he made the mistake of hesitating when the waiter asked if he wanted fries. You could see the waiter get a gleam in his eye. The scene went down like this:

  Fred: I’ll have the burger.

  Waiter: Fries?

  Fred: Um, just the usual burger order … um …

  Waiter: (Says nothing, just scowls at Fred.)

  Fred: Um … don’t some fries come on the side with that?

  Waiter: That depends on whether you say yes or no when I ask you if you want fries.

  Fred: Um, okay, sorry, yes, I’ll have the fries.

  Waiter: See, now fries come with that.

  The meal was incredibly satisfying—they really do have the best cows in the world hidden away somewhere, their own private supply. After eating the beef Fred and I made the somewhat self-destructive decision a person always makes after a meal at Peter Luger’s. Again, the decision was made with the assistance of some serious strong-arming by the waiter. He said, “Coffee and dessert?” and we could see he’d be enraged if we said no. Dessert at Peter Luger’s is just an excuse for what they like to call “schlag,” which they bring in a gigantic bowl and dump all over whatever poor little piece of pie or strudel you happen to have ordered. As hard as this may be to believe, especially for you where you’re reading this letter, Peter Luger’s schlag is the thickest and most delicious in the world, I believe, and impossible not to eat until you are groaning. If you’re smart you remember that it is permitted to order “just the schlag,” because whatever is beneath it is really beside the point.

  Afterward we drifted out to the street, back into Fred’s car, and returned to his studio. He showed me his secret stash of raw materials—drawers full of pills, and other drawers full of envelopes loaded with tiny pictures of different flowers, and birds, and human body parts, all cut very carefully out of books and magazines with an X-ACTO knife. Feeling quite jolly—and perhaps just a tiny bit transgressive—Fred showed me envelopes full of tiny photographs of penises and vaginas, all about an eighth of an inch long. Then he showed me a few rare books he’d collected, including an early issue of the Harvard Review with the first articles on LSD written by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. We talked about Fred’s family, his wife, Laura, and their beautiful boy, Desi, and we talked about our friends, and we didn’t talk about politics at all, not even the politics of art. We were high on beef, coffee, and schlag, and it was an almost perfect day.

  Give my best to my friends in Germany, and I’ll see you in Bonn.

  Jonathan

  The Billboard Men

  NIGHT AND THE SUBLIMINAL CITY

  By night (though it was as bright at midnight as at noon) Salem and Marlboro had begun converting the billboards to better reflect the recent mood of the time-ruined city. They forged a language to describe the city’s fugitive pockets of mercenary industry, those portable stalls of black-market wares that flared up and vanished at the side of the highway without warning, stalls selling items both necessary and absurd: glass doorknobs mounted on walking sticks, useless princess telephones, bundles of multihued television cable and flamboyant pre-knotted neckties, T-shirts bearing the images of forgotten cartoon stars, grapefruits and oranges permanently on fire. Though the city was painstakingly dying—and indeed Salem and Marlboro found they could travel vast miles of elevated asphalt with no visible indication of the life that still scurried on the widening avenues below—it had far from emptied entirely. The city was in fact expanding across the desert, in the manner of the galaxy itself, the bleached-bone spaces that had always underlain the vast human outcropping now rising from between the stretches of paving, between the flat-topped, sun-worn buildings, between the fields of parked or abandoned cars. Tides of commerce had long ago thrown up the improbable oasis of steel and concrete on this parched desert, had rerouted rivers and commanded the water to sustain the lives here for a time, and then time and the waters had come to a halt, the sun frozen at perihelion in the sky. Now, in this long dying, it might be the commercial impulse that would outlive the city itself.

  Salem and Marlboro worked in silent tandem, the instinct and understanding quick between them, and with no fear of exposure for the period it took them to complete the alterations. Like plastic surgeons the two carved differences into the grinning faces that beckoned to the absented highways. They found it surprisingly easy to uncover the cravenness just below the surface, the subcutaneous accusations and complicity inside the seductions, as though the billboards’ own self-reproach had actually ached to be freed. Elsewhere they merely echoed the non sequiturs of life in the amnesiac suburbs, making surrealist enunciation out of what no one even remembered well enough to take for granted: the maps and place-names of the defunct empire, the charts and graphs of the business elites, the textbook illustrations and dissection diagrams of the absconded natural sciences. Material was anywhere they looked. Everything they tried worked.

  Returning to the billboards days and weeks after an intervention, Salem and Marlboro frequently found testament to the persuasive power still residing in the medium, and to their ability to capture and redirect it: little honorific shrines of cactus and cabbages, arranged as if gazing upward at the advertisements, or small encampments of stubbed cigarettes and crushed beer cans, where bands of rovers had stopped to contemplate or briefly worship at their results.

  A BESEECHING COMES ACROSS THE SKY

  Kent was lodged as usual in a tremendous traffic jam, a speck in a flotilla of cars that crept like some great windless island of kelp and plastic flotsam caught in the ocean’s stream, the first time he noticed one of the billboards, the ones that seemed to have him particularly in mind. YOU’RE LIVING ALL OVER ME. WE MAKE YOU US. EVERY GOOD REASON IS NO LONGER ENOUGH. MY BEST FRIEND IS TRYING TO KILL ME. More and more lately Kent seemed to live in his car, his apartment an adjunct, a kind of garage for his driver’s body, his true life and the true life of the city actually taking place on the overpasses, the ostensible byways from one ebbing destination or another. The value of arrival diminished daily. What mattered were the products one could adapt to use inside the vehicle itself, and also those items one could acquire without exiting the freeway system, at the monstrous commercial pull-offs, which had become Potemkin villages, false fronts where life could be en
acted if one didn’t examine the details too closely. Drive-thru windows were most perfect of all, and someday, Kent envisioned, he’d be able to make purchases without even slowing to a stop. Or was it one of the uncanny billboards that had made that prediction? WHOSE NEWS ABUSES YOU? Kent no longer felt clearly the difference between those insights arising on the inner or outer surface of his mental windshield.

  YOU’RE TWO OF A KIND, the newest billboard had read, AND ONE OF YOU MAY BE REDUNDANT. Kent found he couldn’t agree more.

  THE SKY WAS THE COLOR OF A TELEVISION TUNED TO THE MILLION-DOLLAR MOVIE

  Vantage and Strike mostly found that the more things were ruined the better they liked them. Perhaps the destruction enunciated something lurking in the things themselves at the outset, but Vantage and Strike could never have bothered with this perception: They were too deep inside the fact of the city to parse it as a concept, or to figure any possible alternative. The city was their natural world. Perhaps it was their irritation at the possibility of anything preceding the city that motivated their urge to shift it more deeply into a state of randomness, of an entropy to echo cosmic ruin. In any event, their tools were cruder than those of Salem and Marlboro, and their results more utterly violent. Vantage and Strike worked with spray cans and crowbars, with pots of unstable home-brewed acid concoctions and fecal smearings, but this was only because blowtorches, bullets, and bombs were not available to them. They worked not in silence but with screams of laughter. The things they did to the billboards sometimes rendered whole zones unstable, and certainly struck fear in passersby. Yet they, too, were in a conversation with the ancient marketing voices. They’d heard them their whole lives and in many senses could be seen as the children of those voices.