Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
Page 16
WAITER: If y’all can do me a favor, and kinda just make a little bit more room. Your food’s ready. I’ll bring that out for you. All right, thanks.
[Another groaning table of food: three glasses, one less see-through for David’s tobacco, big Midwestern ceramic platters of iceberg salad and thick-cut fries and gravy and beef and slightly char-lined buns and icy-looking tomatoes. He seriously likes to eat.]
[Break]
So I was pushing you on the rec drugs angle.
Right.
And drinking was a harder thing for you?
I was sort of a joyless drinker. I mean, I think I just used it for anesthesia. I also remember, I mean really buyin’ into—I don’t know how much you yourself escaped this. And I realize the references to you will be cut. But it’s fairly hard to get a book taken, you know, when you’re in grad school. And to get a whole lot of, you know—to get your juvenile dreams fulfilled real fast.
I think I had this idea of: you know, went to Yaddo a couple times. And I saw that there’s this whole image of the writer as somebody who lives hard and drinks hard. You know, is found in amusing postures in gutters and stuff. And this whole … And I think when you’re a kid, you know, and you don’t have really kind of any idea of how to be what you want to be, you fall for these sort of cultural models. And the big thing about it is, I don’t have the stomach or the nervous system for it. I get really, really drunk. Then I’d be sick for two days. Like sick in bed, like a bad flu. Just kind of debilitated.
What were the years on this? When you were drinking heavy …? Were you a falling-down drinker? A waking-up-in-the-curb drinker? Can we have some more napkins by the way? I hate to trouble you …
No, that’s the whole thing. A lot of my reticence about this is it just won’t be very good copy. Because I wudn’t that way at all.
[I begin talking like him too; saying “dudn’t” and “real” and things like that. His tug, on the objects around him, is that strong.]
It was a—had six shots of Wild Turkey, two cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. And then get violently ill, and be throwing up. Throw up for most of the rest of the night. And then throw up for most of the rest of the next day. And lie in bed and not get any work done.
I’m gonna stop pushing in a second. This book contains all of your emotional experience with geography. Boston, Tucson, New England … everything else in your life is in there.
But no. In fact, the schema of various things are, but—
I don’t mean it’s autobiographical—which for me by the way isn’t a negative term …
I would expect—don’t fall for this, because you yourself know it. I mean, I don’t know if The Art Fair was an autobiographical—but from the fact that your mom, who’s an artist, was in some sense in there or whatever, don’t fall for the fact that this is some sort of coded story, of kind of my own experience.
I don’t think it was code. I think the things that interested you and grabbed you over the past thirty-four years are in that book. And since one of the dominant themes is addiction, I would assume that that was one of the things that interested you or appealed to you or to which you had some natural affiliation.
But I’m also aware … that some addictions are sexier than others. And that there’s going to be an idea, you know, this whole heroin-addict thing. I think my primary addiction in my entire life has been to television. And that the fact that I don’t have a television, but now enjoy sitting in the second row of movies where things blow up—this is not an accident. But I am aware that that makes, that that’s of far less interest, you know, to readers. Than the idea of like heroin, or of some grand, you know, something that confirms this mythos of the writer as some sort of titanic figure with a license to, you know …
You know I don’t believe that myth.
I know you don’t believe that. But I also know that among the things swirling around here is you want the very best article you can have. And you can write whatever you want, but the fact of the matter is, I’m not being disingenuous. I wasn’t—I wasn’t an interesting or Falstaffian or larger-than-life type of addictive figure.
What I am is—and it’s the same thing—Betsy a couple days ago was doing this, like, “How did you do all this work on corporate culture and the corporate mentality and how corporations work?” And you’re probably sorta the same way. One of the things about being a writer is you’re able to give the impression—both in the lines and between the lines—that you know an enormous amount. That you know and have lived intimately all this stuff. Because you want it to have that kind of effect on the nerve endings. And it’s like—it’s something that I’m fairly good at. Is I think I can seem, I think I can seem like I know a whole lot about stuff that in fact pretty much everything that I know is right there. It’s a very tactical research-type thing.
It was funny watching you yesterday, because after we watched the movie, it seemed like that part of your brain awakened. Because then we went and watched television at your friend’s house. And then even when the first TV movie was over, you wanted to watch more television. And then went back to your room, and watched still more television.
And it’s not—you know, it’s not that that’s damaging or fatal or anything. But it’s—I mean, I think—the thing about the addictive mind-set and the addictive continuum, I think some of that stuff is really me, ’cause I see it.
I see that, for instance, my nicotine use has taken off on this tour. I mean, I’m somebody who normally chews tobacco five or six times a day, and uses it for work. I’m now smokin’ and then chewin’. Chewin’ and then smokin’. Wantin’ you to buy a Diet Pepsi so I’ll know I’ve got something to spit in, I mean, I can see it. It’s the way I as an organism react to stress.
But I don’t think I’m all that different. I’ll bet you’ve got three or four things, you know, that you’re like that with. And one of the things I noticed in the halfway house is the difference between me and like a twenty-year-old prostitute who is dying of AIDS, who’d been doing heroin since she was eleven, is, is a matter of accidents. Choices of substances. Activities to get addicted to. And having other resources, you know? I mean, I really love books and I really love writing, and a lot of these folks never got to find anything else they loved.
Before we go into that, you do keep going back and forth on whether or not your drinking was something you couldn’t control, or something that got out of control at a certain point.
[Nods to machine: wants to sound out his answer first] OK. [Break]
With your drinking …
I would say yeah. Because, basically because I wasn’t gettin’ any work done. And it wasn’t helping me work. And it also—I was sick all the time. And so if by “out of control” you mean wanting to stop … or realizing that once I started, I would always get to the point where I would get sick—and not being able to help that? Yes. If you mean, was I somebody walking, I was not somebody walking around with like a flask. It was not like The Lost Weekend. It was not the—nor was it like any of the romantic writer-as-alcoholic-type thing.
It was just unpleasant?
It was unpleasant and wasteful. And I began to see more and more that I was doing it, that I wasn’t doing it the way grown-ups do. There’s this guy named Schacht in the book who’s sort of—he’s kind of sketchy, because I didn’t understand his mentality very well.
But he’s supposed to be sort of the way a normal grown-up is. I mean, he uses stuff occasionally, to make a fundamentally OK life even better. You know? And that’s like, for instance, how my parents are. My dad will have one gin and tonic before dinner. And he likes it. It makes him feel mildly good, loosens him up, helps him relax.
I don’t know about you, I was never like that. You know? I would drink … I don’t know that I ever had just one shot of Wild Turkey. Or one beer. I would have, like, twelve. You know? And then I would always feel shitty, and always pound my head and wonder why I did it. And then like a week later, I’d do it again.
Probably about a year and a half, or two years. Here’s where it got scary to me. And I don’t mind telling you about this.
The scary thing to me was that … I mean I was going through a lot of confusions about sort of writing, and art, and all this kind of stuff at the time. And I thought quitting drinking would help.
It made things worse. I was more unhappy, more scared, more paralyzed when I quit drinking. And that scared me. And I think the period that I really consider a kind of dark—
WAITER: You guys still doing all right …?
The period that I think you know about, where I went in on suicide watch, was months after I had stopped drinking.
And what had caused that …
(Testy) We have already gotten to it earlier. You asked me about that at the airport.
We got there halfway and we weren’t quite finished. That’s the cool part and the problem with having done this on a trip, in a fractured way. You mentioned being addicted to TV, that appeals to me, because I’ve had to go through that sort of my whole life. TV addiction. I’ve had to go through that for as long as I’ve been alive …
I sort of think, anybody our age has, whether they recognize it or not.
I wonder if people who have the ability to finish a long book, to see a task through till it’s finished, have a particular weakness. … The problem with TV watching is, it’s never finished. So you have the capacity to do something intensively for a long period of time, and perhaps a little bit past what’s useful, and it gets applied …
Yeah, you’re right. I’ve actually got friends—Betsy, for example. I was shocked that she has a TV, she never had one the whole time. It was one reason why in grad school we had very little to talk about. Most of my matrix of experience has to do with television, she would not understand references.
Huh. How much TV did you watch when you were a kid for example …?
I had to be limited. I was limited to two hours a day on weekdays, and four hours a day on weekends. And I could only watch one rough program. My parents determined the definition of rough up until I was like seven or eight. And I can remember once doing something really terrible, like I think hurting my sister badly, or uh making a terrible mess. And having Saturday morning cartoons denied me. And feeling almost like I was going to die, the sense of deprivation. This was in—this was in Champaign, so I would have been like four or five.
What cartoons were you watching?
What were the big cartoons back then? (Voice gets momentarily expansive, self-searching, Garrison Keillor and spooky. A reminiscence sound) I remember Space Ghost. Jonny Quest was really big. But there were also really cheesy shitty ones back then too. It’s odd, I remember cartoons once we moved to Urbana and there were things like Scooby-Doo, or the Super Friends where Ted Knight was the voiceover. But I was older then, I was like eight or nine then. There was some period when I was a very little kid that I had a very intense relationship with cartoons. Kind of like what Julie was talking about, like little kids with cars and trucks. But I don’t remember the specific cartoons very much. I remember the show Wild Wild West.
Oh—I adored that show.
And I remember being really upset during the Vietnam War, because they would keep intruding on that show, to give updates on the war. And the violence and battle and the war of course didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t exciting, it was just mostly jerky cameras and, you know, bad, bad film—like bad film quality. And people in kind of ugly khaki, and I never understood it.
[I ask David what else he liked as a kid: it’s the big, fish-out-of-water family shows—Beverly Hillbillies, The Munsters—actioners like Mission Impossible and Batman.]
How did your parents enforce the two-hour thing?
Well, they were home. Mom didn’t start work until I was almost in sixth grade.
So they would say: “That’s enough. That’s enough, David, it’s been two hours, you have to stop”?
No, it would be like, I would get home, and they’d help me plan out how I wanted to spend my two hours. I mean, it was a very intense thing.
Debate the choice with you? Like …
I got one rough program a week. And I remember they had, I remember Wild Wild West was a young prog—was a—I’m sorry, was a rough program. And that I always spent my rough program on that. They didn’t count Batman as rough, which I remember at the time seemed like this incredible mistake on their part. But looking back on it, it was very cartoonish.
Campy. What about like the bionic shows …? I mean, you mentioned Charlie’s Angels, it’s the same era …
Bionic Man came out when I was ten or eleven. So that—I was quite a bit older. I mean, I remember watching those. I remember even at the time, I could tell Lee Majors was a pathetic actor. And I remember wondering why, if he was running sixty miles an hour, his hair didn’t move.
Ha! That’s a good question, actually.
Which in a way is significant. ’Cause I think it means that my total, entranced, uncritical absorption into this fantasy world of TV was starting to be over. Like I remember noticing in Scooby-Doo that Thelma always lost her glasses at some point. And it was always the amusement camp operator going around in a costume, and feeling pissed off, that like it couldn’t be any more sophisticated.
But what you’re describing doesn’t sound addictive at all. It seemed like your parents had it under control. As you got older, did you start watching more television?
Look, I’m not talking about one of these … this—I mean, this in a way is what the book’s about. It’s not about, “He watched television until his bladder let go,” or something like that—it’s more just, it’s a reliance on something.
What I’m talking about is, my mom would joke that it was dangerous for me as an adult to have my own television. I could start watching TV at nine on a Friday night. With people waiting for me. Wouldn’t stop still two or three on Saturday morning.
Yeah. I’m with you.
I’d say I was going to make plans for after work in the morning, I’d turn on TV just while I was getting dressed, and end up watching TV till about ten or eleven at night again. So I had to get rid of cable.
Yeah. Yeah.
But when did that happen to you?
In college we never had it—we never had a TV in the room. Mark, who was my roommate all through college, didn’t like TV. And I knew—and I was a complete just total banzai weenie studier in college. But I remember there—um, I mean I was really just scared of people in college. I remember, for instance, I would brave sitting in the TV Pit. There was like a central TV room—to watch Hill Street Blues, in college, ’cause that was a really important show to me. In grad school, when I lived in an apartment, and could have my own TV, um, I remember I began watching a hell of a lot more. Although I made a decision that I would never write when it was on. You know: that I would never sit there and clip stuff off while watching TV. Which is—have you had a similar—?
Yeah, I wouldn’t do it. I mean, I’ve done spell-checks with TV on, but I know I can’t do that. I remember trying to write some book when I was in high school during that McEnroe–Borg tiebreaker at Wimbledon. Was it like ’81 or somethin’ like that?
[His speech fully infiltrating mine.]
The first one was 1980. That one Borg won. And then McEnroe ended up winning the U.S. Open.
We’re talking about in 1980 …
So you would have been fourteen.
I remember that, and I remember trying to do that and being very happy I could do both things at once. But it proved not to be the case.
During high school, when you went to your friends’ houses, would you watch more than you watched at home?
When I went to my friends’ houses we would do bones. That’s what I went to friends’ houses for.
I preferred my dad’s house over Mom, one reason, because no restrictions on TV at all. But there was no place where you had free—
It’s just more like it, it’s got to do with this—here’s this easy, passive, I-can-feel-like-other-people-are-in-the-room, but I don’t really have to do anything. (Laughs) That it’s just, that it’s real easy. And I think I’ve, my whole life, had a real penchant for avoiding the hard and doin’ the easy. And then part of, you know, part of why we’re here is to kinda learn how to not do that so much. That it’s ultimately less painful not to do that. Which I know sounds like a piety. But …
No. It’d be a good end quote. Don’t edit yourself. I think that’s a great remark. What’s the most TV you ever watched?
In a sitting? I remember watching the entire Jerry Lewis telethon one time. But that was sort of, just to see whether I could do it.
How old were you then?
Fifteen, sixteen years old.
Could you?
Yeah. I watched the entire thing.
How did you manage that, if you had this restriction on your TV?
Not when I was fifteen, sixteen. That was when I was a very small child. At some point, particularly—both Amy and I, once we got into school and began getting grades, and my parents figured out finally that we could get our homework done, function, be on athletic teams, and still watch what seemed to them to be just absolutely mind-crushing amounts of TV. They really relaxed about it all. I had the restriction until I think I was about eight or nine.