Barrel Fever and Other Stories

by David Sedaris

  That old guy is probably still sitting in the bar, using his nap-kin to mop up the vomit and trying to convince the waitress that the world is good at heart. He'd come over to my table and asked to join me, and I looked up from my writing and said, "Go ahead, sit down," not because I wanted company, but be-cause he obviously needed to sit someplace and all the other chairs were taken. This man walked with two canes and his legs were twisted. Each foot pointed off in a different direction as though they had been attached sideways. He sat down and asked the waitress to bring us her finest bottle of champagne. The waitress asked, "What are you celebrating?" and the man just spread out his arms and looked back and forth across the room. I said, "You're celebrating this bar?" and he said, "No, I'm celebrating life!" I should have gotten up and left; but instead I saw this man as someone I can use for a piece I'm working on. He's someone whom Malison would describe as a self-hypnotic, one of those people who convinces himself that his life is meaningful only because the truth would destroy him. It's as if someone has hypnotized him by waving a turd back and forth in front of his face and saying, "You're getting sleepy. . sleepy."

  When the champagne arrived at the table, the crippled man grinned from ear to ear. And I mean that literally. He had the widest mouth I have ever seen on a human. I think he could have fit a saucer in there with no problem. He had this wide mouth and sandy blond hair growing in tufts along the sides of his head. The top of his head was bald and covered with spots and freckles. He made a big production of popping the cork off the champagne bottle, and the people at the other tables all looked our way and cheered him on. Everyone acted as if this were important and memorable. The man poured two glasses and then noticed my journal and said, "So, I see you're a writer." This would be like me noticing his two canes leaning against the table and saying, "So, I see you're a cripple," but I bit my tongue and just said, "Yes, I'm a writer." The man said he'd never written much besides letters but that reading was his greatest pleasure. Then he rattled off a list of the writers he admired fussy, middle-of-the-road contemporaries and I said, "Aren't all those people dead?" and he grabbed at his heart and said, "I hope not!" It went right over his head. He asked who I like reading, and when I answered, "Malison," he winced. You'd think I'd spat in his drink. It pissed me off. I don't need this man's approval to readanything. I'm not here to live up to his expectations. I'd rather die than live up to his expectations. His attitude was getting on my nerves, and I should have just packed up my shit and left. I asked if he'd actually read any of Malison's work, and he said as a matter of fact, yes, he had. He said he'd recently found himself on a Greyhound bus to St. Louis and had discovered too late that the attache case containing all his books had been stored below along with his luggage. He said he'd spent eight hours reading a copy ofRotunda Surf he'd found abandoned on the seat beside him. He used that word,abandoned, to suggest that someone had deliberately walked away from a hardcover Malison.

  This man proceeded to question what he called Malison's "defensiveness" and said he doubted the wisdom ofRotunda Surf's prologue. It is supremely ironic that this man, this joker with the canes and the wide mouth, would question Malison. Who does he think he is? That prologue is one of my favorite parts of the whole book. In it Malison writes: "If you, reader, can yank your head out of your own asshole long enough to finish the first chapter, don't make the mistake of congratulating yourself. You possess nothing but fleeting, momentary courage. The shit on your face is still wet. It is your mask." It is so true, but I could see that this crippled guy couldn't digest it at all because Malison was directing the prologue at people just like him people who wear masks. While I respected this widemouthed man for taking the chance to break out of his mindless existence, I could see that he hadn't taken a hard enough look at Malison's world. He poured us some more champagne, and I said that I didn't think it was Malison's job to create a comfortable world for escapists, some flowery paradise where Mr. and Mrs. America could walk hand-in-hand and think of themselves as wonderful people. Malison's whole point is that hardly anyone is a wonderful person. There was a reason all the characters in Rotunda Surf had transparent bodies: most people are transparent. Malison can see right through middle-class people, and so can I. Some of us just have that ability. Malison and I are the type of writers who will always be on the outside looking in. Looking in but not banging to be let in. We don't want in if it means we'll have to pay the price by becoming as shallow and transparent as everyone else.

  The crippled man couldn't handle this at all. He said, "No one on this earth is transparent. Not even us." I thought he was talking about himself and the other people in the bar, and I felt sorry for him. Then it hit me he was referring to himself and me. He put us in the same boat when we're not even in the same fucking ocean. He said that we're lucky to live in a world populated with unique, complex people. That was when I lost it and threw up on the table. It was perfect timing. All those people who had watched him pop the cork looked our way again but with a different sort of expression on their faces. I just grabbed my shit and ran out, ran into the rest room in the lobby.

  Luckily I've brought a change of clothes. The fresh outfit was in my duffel bag along with a hairbrush, flat shoes, my tooth-brush, all of Malison's books, a Walkman, tapes of several of Malison's readings, the last three term papers I wrote on his last three novels (scarred with the ludicrous comments of my teachers), copies of all the supportive letters I've written Malison over the years, some dope, two Valiums, my diaphragm, all the short stories I've written since I was fifteen, my novel in progress (which I really need his opinion on), some Scotch tape, and the solution for my contact lenses. I'm not taking any chances tonight!

  11:22. I've been standing in the hallway outside Malison's hotel room for the last half-hour rereading my favorite passages ofMagnetic Plugs andSmithy Smithy. His lecture must have ended by now, and I fear they are holding him hostage with another mindless question-and-answer session. My God, how much do they expect him to take?!

  He'd looked so tired when I saw him this afternoon before my master's class. I'd left my desk and was on my way to the bathroom when I passed him in the hail. It was incredible. The air was charged. Malison was wearing a pair of camouflage fatigues and a sports coat made of something rough, something like burlap. I thought he had silver hair, but up close I could see it was kind of a flat gray color, a color I like a lot more than silver. His eyelids were dark and puffy because the department heads had tired him out, but the eyes themselves were a rare in-tense shade of brown, like two clean pennies shining. Malison was walking toward the classroom with Brouner, the department head, who was running off at the mouth about his favorite subject himself. Brouner was saying, "You might have heard of me. I had an essay on art and analysis in last month'sForefront," and Malison said, "If you've been published inForefront, then no, I haven't heard of you." Malison is so blunt, so matter-of-fact, so uninterested in playing games. He wouldn't be caught dead readingForefront.

  I tried to catch his eye in the hallway. I wanted to let him know that everyone knows what an asshole Brouner is, but then Professor Nobody came up and started yapping at me about my overdue essay, and Malison was herded into an office. I can't imagine what's keeping him now. If I know Malison, he's fed up with the English Department; he's not going to jump through any more of their hoops. Where could he be? I'll wait here for a few more minutes, and if he doesn't show, then I'll head over to the Pavilion of Thought. The suspense is killing me.

  12:09. I'm standing in a sheltered bus stop on west campus wait-ing for this fucking rain to let up so I can return to the hotel. The Pavilion of Thought was empty when I arrived. The show was over. I was on my way back to the hotel when I ran into Bethany in front of the Rathskeller, where she was taking pot-shots at people with her video camera (as if that hasn't been done thousands of times before). Bethany started in about the Malison reading. She said, "Where were you? My God, you missed it. I don't believe you." Sometimes Bethany takes a very cock
y, very inside attitude that infuriates me. She lies a lot, too. Sometimes I don't even think she realizes she's lying. She took this superior attitude and told me that just before tonight's reading Malison approached her, bummed a cigarette, and passed some time with her.

  Right, Bethany.

  She said that Malison said he'd remembered her from the master's class and that he'd like to read her work someday.

  Right, Bethany.

  Then she told me that he read a chapter-like passage from a new work in progress, and I covered my ears because whatever it is, I don't want to hear it from Bethany. She is an abysmal storyteller and I don't want Malison's work chewed by her translation. She said she had the lecture on videotape but that no tape could capture the intensity of the reading. She said I can watch the tape but I probably won't be able to understand it, not having been there in person.

  This attitude of hers really makes me sick.I might not be able to understand Malison?Me? This is very ironic, especially coming from Bethany, who had never even heard of Malison before I loaned her my copy ofSmithy Smithy last semester.I might not be able to understand it?

  So I said, "Bethany, Malison ismy writer, and I think I could understand him if he were speaking Egyptian." And she said, "I didn't realize you owned any writers, Anastasia. Are there any others in your stable?" Stable is a familiar word to Bethany. Before I turned her on to Malison, she was wearing fucking jodhpurs to class, arranging her hair into a French braid, and drawing horse profiles in the margins of her notebook. Before I turned her on to Malison, Bethany's writing consisted of florid little sentences beginning with "'Tis" and "Ofttimes," as if she'd been writing with a fucking quill that she dipped into an inkwell while sitting on an embroidered chair bathed in soft candlelight. Then, overnight she started writing like Malison and going out of her way to mention his name in class. Then in critique she trashed my story, saying that my writing is obviously based on Malison. I was writing like Malison before I even knew who Malison was. I've always written like Malison, so I said, "Maybe Malison is writing like me," and she said (in front of the whole class), she said, "Andwhere exactly would Malison have read any ofyour work?" She's so full of herself since she had that story published inPost-Plane. Who readsPost-Plane?

  Bethany is so transparent. I'm sure if Malison did talk to her he only did it in order to get a feel for the stupidity of his audience. She told me she'd invited him out for a post-lecture drink, but he'd said he needed to get right back to New York because his wife was expecting a baby. This was just an excuse to get rid of Bethany. Malison was lying, giving her the shake. I know, because Russell Marks told me that he saw Malison's wife, Teresa Compton, at a restaurant in New York City two months ago, and Mark told me that it looked like Teresa Compton had lost weight. Lost weight! How pregnant can she be? Mark also told me that Malison and Teresa are filing for a divorce and living in separate apartments, so I highly doubt she's pregnant. Malison was just throwing up a smoke screen to protect himself from Bethany. I know this for a fact because directly after talking to Bethany I called The Chesterton and asked them if A. Davenport had checked out. I had them connect me to Room 822. When Malison answered, I hung up. I didn't want to introduce myself over the phone, so I politely hung up, and if this rain doesn't stop within the next sixty seconds I'm going to say to hell with it and run back to that hotel, rain or no rain.

  12:54. I'm back at The Chesterton, in the lounge area of the women's rest room, waiting for my hose to dry. I've got them stuffed into the chute of the hot-air hand dryer, and it's very annoying because women keep coming in here and giving me a hard time about it. Let them dry their hands on their skirts, it won't kill them. Who are they? My second outfit is soaking wet, so I'm back in my original choice. I rinsed most of it out earlier in the evening, and you can hardly notice any vomit except on my blouse. If I thought that one of these women had an ounce of compassion I would ask to borrow a shot of perfume that would solve the lingering odor problem, but understanding seems to be in short supply here at The Chesterton. I've redone my makeup and used the hot-air hand dryer on my hair before putting the hose in. It's hard to style your hair when you're lean-ing over like that. It came out looking very '70s, a sort of Jerry Hall over-the-shoulder thing, but I guess I'll have to live with it.

  Later. I knock on Malison's door, room 822. I can hear the tele-vision very ironically tuned to The Hour of Prayer, so I know he's in there. I knock a little harder and am embarrassed when, after my fifth round and I'm really pounding away I hear the toilet flush. I hate it when that happens, I really do. I take a step back and compose myself and look down at the carpet, and someone answers the door but it's not Malison. It's that man from the bar, the man with the two canes, and he's relying on them and grinning like a carved pumpkin. And the worst part, the most revolting part of it all, is that he doesn't seem the least bit surprised to see me.

  Barrel Fever

  SHORTLY after my mother died, my sisters and I found ourselves rummaging through a cabinet of papers marked "POISON," and it was there, tucked between the pages of a well-worn copy ofMein Kampf, that I discovered fifteen years' worth of her annual New Year's resolutions. She took up the practice the winter after my father died, the same year she found a job and bought her first rifle. Every Christmas afternoon, after placing the artificial tree back into its box, she would grow reflective. "Do you think I overuse the word 'nigger'?" she would ask. "Was it wrong of me to spit on that Jehovah's Witness girl? Tell me the truth here. I need a second opinion."

  On New Year's Eve she would sit with her notes and a coffee cup of champagne, glancing at her watch and tapping a pencil against the legs of her chair. She would write something on an index card and, moments later, shake her head and erase it. The process was repeated until she wore a hole through the card and was forced to start fresh on another.

  The next morning I would ask, "So, what was on your list, Mom?"

  "Smother those homely teenagers who call themselves my children is at the top. Why do you ask?"

  "No reason."

  I always got a great kick out of my mother, but my sisters, for one reason or another, failed to get the joke. They have grown to be humorless and clinically sensitive: the sorts of people who overuse the words "rage" and "empowerment" and constantly ask, "What do youreally mean by that?" While I would often call and visit our mother, they kept their distance, limiting their postal or telephone contact to the holidays.

  "Did I tell you what your sister Hope sent me for my birthday?" my mother asked during one of our late-night phone calls. "A poncho. Who does she think I am that I might want a poncho? I've written her back saying I'm sure it will come in very handy the next time I mount my burro for the three-day journey over the mountains to the neighboring village. Poncho, indeed. I've thrown it into the garage-sale box along with the pepper grinder joy sent me. The thing is two feet long, black and shiny what do I need with a thing like that? It doesn't take a psychiatrist to recognize that pepper grinder for what it truly is. I bet she spent weeks knocking that one around with her therapist. And, oh, it arrived in a fancy box wrapped in tissue paper. You can bet she paid out the ass for it but that's joy for you, thinking she can impress people with the money she makes 'consulting.' That's what she calls herself now, a consultant, as if that means anything. Anyone who answers questions can call them-selves a consultant, am I wrong? A telephone operator is a consultant, a palm reader: they're all consultants. I thought I'd seen it all but then Faith sent me a subscription to that trade paper she's working for. She calls it a magazine. Have you seen it? Why would anyone subscribe to a magazine devoted to adobe? Is this a big trend? Is there something I've missed? I've got a house made of bricks but who wants to read about it every month? Adobe? She circled her name on the first page where she's listed as 'Features Editor.' When people ask what she's up to I always tell them she's a secretary it sounds better. So then, a week after my birthday I got a call from your sister Charity. .

  Faith, Hope, Jo
y, Charity and me, Adolph.

  See, she just couldn't help herself.

  While my mother might threaten a yard sale she was not the type of person to invite people onto her property or make change. Following her death my sisters were horrified to discover, sealed in boxes, every gift they had given her.

  "How could shenot want a first edition by M. Scott Peck?"

  "I made these wind chimes with my own two hands. Didn't that count for anything?"

  "What did she have against pepper grinders?"

  Aside from a few stiff wallets fashioned in summer camp, there was nothing of mine in those boxes as, at an early age, I discovered that postage stamps, cartons of cigarettes, light bulbs, and mailorder steaks are the gifts that keep giving.

  "How could she possibly be so cruel?" my sisters asked, coming upon the unmailed notes and letters stored in the "POISON" file. "I am not the 'missing link,' I am not, I amnot," Joy chanted, holding a draft of her graduation card. "I amnot 'God's gift to fraternity beer baths,' I am not, I am not, I am not." Charity and Faith gathered round and the three of them em-braced in a circle of healing. There were letters to me, comparing me unfavorably to both Richard Speck and the late Stepin Fetchit, but in all honesty it really didn't bother me too much. We all entertain hateful thoughts every now and then, and afterwards they either grow stronger or fade away. From one day to the next, in tiny ways, our opinions change or, rather, my opinions change. Some of them anyway. That's what makes me either weak or open-minded, depending on what it was I promised the last time we talked. I'm sure that Richard Speck had his share of good qualities and Stepin Fetchit was a terrific dancer, so I try not to take it too hard. My mother hadn't mailed those letters; she simply left them to be discovered after her death. Hey, at least she was thinking about us.