A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers

  “This is the cover!” I say.

  “Okay!” she says, and I wonder if this will help my chances with her.

  The streaker on the cover spawns another idea: We, too, will be naked! Yes, on the cover will be Debra’s streaking boyfriend (a live-in, alas) and on the inside will be hundreds of streaking young people! We will imitate the light and look of the first one, but aha! it’ll be hundreds of us, all running together on the beach, a herd of bare and hopeful flesh, sprinting from left to right, of course symbolizing all the things that that would obviously symbolize. We call Debra and set it up and then start calling about for naked models—we call friends, everyone we know.

  The idea gets scaled back. We don’t need hundreds. (How could we have fit hundreds in the frame, anyhow?) We only need a few people, ten maybe, eight, five. Of course we’ll be there, for starters. So Moodie, Marny, and me. Now to diversify. We are obsessed with seeming diverse. Not in terms of actually having an incredibly diverse staff or anything—but in terms of appearing diverse, thus when photo opportunities arise, we panic. We must look like the perfect cross section of young America! For the cameras we need three men and three women; three whites, one black, one Latino, one Asian— But instead we have just us, three/four white people {and not even a Jew!). For the naked shoot we need an African-American, a Latino. A Latina. Whatever. We need somebody Asian. Lily says no. Ed, a circulation expert guy we know at Wired, who is black, says no. Desperate, we wonder: would Shalini, being Indian, pass for a more well-known minority? Would she show up in a blurry picture as clearly ofco/or?

  “Will you—“

  “No,” she answers.

  We call June.

  June Lomena is our black friend. She works occasionally in the building, for one of the other magazines, had stopped by to say hi one day, and had subsequently written something oblique about male-female relationships for the first issue. And did we mention she’s black? (She also might be Latina, we think, because of the name and all, but then we do not ask.) She is by training (at Brown) an actress and so when we ask her to run around naked, she readily says yes. So there are four of us. Everyone else we know refuses. We finally find one more guy, through a friend, who we figure will be good because his head is shaved.

  “We can’t pay you,” we say.

  “That’s okay,” he says.

  We do not know why he wants to do this, to get in a car with four strangers and run naked on a beach and be photographed doing it, and come to think of it, we do not want to know.

  So then we are on the beach, Black Sands Beach in the Marin Headlands, on an unseasonably cold October morning. We have just become naked, and have noticed that, right where the fifth guy’s regular penis is supposed to be, there is a penis with a gold thing through it. Like a needle, or a nail or something—it’s hard to tell without staring. When I glance at it I feel woozy. As a reverent and terrified Catholic I hadn’t seen my penis until my teens, hadn’t touched it until college, so to see this, which I didn’t even know was being done— I turn my attention to Marny’s breasts, which look different unclothed than clothed, and, come to think of it, are kind of uneven. June looks normal, lithe and strong, certainly the only one among us with everything perfectly in place. Then I try to discern if Moodie’s penis is noticeably bigger than mine, and decide that at least flaccid, it’s a draw. Just about. Good. Good.

  We are young and naked and on the beach!

  Debra gets set up, sitting on a log, facing the water. We get a twenty-yard head start and then we run past her, along the shore, at full sprint. We try to space ourselves out so when we pass her we will be spread out, everyone visible, all colors and sizes. It will be beautiful and poetic and it hurts like a motherfucker. Our penises flop up and down, and then as we pick up speed, slap left to right, back and forth—who would have thought left to right? The pain! People should not do this. Penises were not built for running. I think of a distended muffler scraping the pavement; I think of a bird shaking the life out of a worm— The agony is ridiculous. We run past her, she gets maybe two frames off, and then we do it again. A dozen times at least. I begin to hold my penis for the majority of the run, letting go only when passing directly in front of her. I can’t imagine what it’s like for the pierced-penis guy. It’s definitely not helping to keep it in place. If he had some kind of hookup, like to his navel—

  We do one where we run away from Debra and straight into the water, which is frigid, as always. Then we get dressed and go home. When we get the pictures back we are all hopelessly blurry, and the pertinent demographic efforts we have made—two women, one black—are barely visible. All the running past her pictures are unusable, meaning that all the penis abuse was for naught. We are left with the last picture, that which shows all of our bare asses, running into the Pacific. We use that one.

  It is the last picture of the first issue’s opening six-page spread, a visual montage that precedes the manifesto reprinted earlier. Each page has a grid of sorts, with photographs abutting each other. And over each picture is typeset a word. To wit:

  Over a picture of a spoiled-looking young woman: Nope.1

  Over a display of guns for sale: Nope.2

  Over two Kewpie dolls in marriage gear: Nope.3

  Over a televangelist extolling his flock: Nope.4

  Over a detail of the Rape of the Sabine Women: Nope.5

  Over a close-up of a young man sneering: Nope.6

  Over a bunch of women’s high-heeled business shoes: Nope.7

  Over a close-up of a collar and tie: Nope.8

  Over Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden: Nope.9

  We are fairly convinced that what we have here is a work of such powerful genius and prophecy that it may very well start riots. Should the meaning prove elusive, a key:

  1 We are not spoiled and lazy!

  2 We do not think guns should be sold at counters

  3 We are not for marriage.

  4 Or religion.

  5 And we’re definitely against rape.

  6 And sneering.

  7 And heels.

  8 Same with ties.

  9 And also being expelled by God from gardens. Or being ashamed of being naked. Or eating apples. [This last one was unclear.}

  Then, in the spread, after all this negativity, all the things that we reject out of hand, is the kicker, the finale: a full-page photo of five people running, naked, their backs to the camera, into the ocean. Over that picture, emblazoned in black against the sky (this is in black and white), is one word: Might.

  Boom!

  In general, we are sure that we are on to something epochal, and our work hours reflect this. They are tests of will and examples of the deleterious effects of peer-pressure and guilt, because as non-traditional as we clearly are, we begin to keep standard daylight hours, nine to five, and add to them two or three bonus rounds, depending on what needs, for the sake of ourselves and mankind, to get done by the next day.

  It must be done! Waiting is obscene!

  During the day Moodie and I do our graphic design work, primarily for the San Francisco Chronicles internal promotions department. Moodie is still doing other marketing work, and I am still temping, usually at the Pac Bell headquarters in San Ramon, where I spend eight-hour days designing certificates commemorating exemplary achievement (fig. 3). Marny is waitressing four

  nights a week, but increasingly, our bills are being paid by the Chronicle, the heads of which took pity on me early on—

  the eyes of Dianne Levy, a single mother of a teenaged daughter, welled up when I told her that I, too, had a

  youngster at home—and now they count on us to do ads, posters, and campaigns that promote the paper’s

  various sections and columnists. We do the work with the radiant acuity for which we are known.

  “We need an ad for the business section,” they say.

  Sure, we say. The result:

  The Chronicle. Make It Your Business.

  “Now one for th
e sports section.”

  Chronicle Sports. We Know the Score.

  We are tired of such misuse of our creative powers, and have decided that we will not wait to raise money this way to fund Might. While we tell anyone who asks that Might was started on overworked credit cards, on the runoff from our graphic design business, the terrible, unspeakable truth is that I simply wrote a check. It was about ten thousand dollars for the first print bill, constituting a hulking portion of the insurance and house money that came my way after the estate was settled. I thought, at first, that we should tell everyone the truth. What better metaphor for our endeavor? Rising from the ashes—literally—of our parents, this smallish amount of money enabling us to do it the way we want, to save us from having to sell the idea to others, to raise money, or to abandon it altogether when it would become obvious—as it surely would—that no one would put such funds behind such a ridiculous enterprise. But this way there is no waiting for approval. This way there are no strings. Moodie and Marny know that this is how the magazine has been funded, but no one else is told, ever. Maybe they wouldn’t understand; maybe they would understand all too well. After that first investment, though, future contributions will be minimal, as the operation begins almost immediately to pay for itself, though hopes for it paying us are very dim and far away. Then again, things could change quickly. Things could turn around if, say, we weren’t just a bunch of anonymous half-wits putting out an underfunded zine...but, rather, the same half-wits, admittedly, but one of whom was the star of a widely watched and wildly influential MTV real-life-revealing television phenomenon?

  We get applications.

  Marny and I decide we’ll both apply. We fill out the short questionnaires. As required, we both make videotapes of ourselves talking and doing something that we hope they will find diverting. Some people skateboard. Some tap-dance, introduce their families, play with their dogs. For mine, I sit at my desk in the warehouse, and Moodie videotapes me as I talk about nothing and then, kind of suddenly, I start drumming, epileptically. I do a routine where I’m the drummer for Loverboy, who for some reason couldn’t drum without blinking and twitching like he was sitting on loose wiring. The videotape is kind of funny, we think. It’s likely more scary than funny, but Moodie laughs. We send it in.

  Two days later a woman, Laura, calls. She is one of the show’s producers or casting agents or whatever, and she has obviously recognized me as the sort of person who belongs on TV, inspiring a nation of disaffected youth. I am to go into the new Real World headquarters for an interview, half an hour or so, which will also be videotaped.

  The interview is on a Sunday. As Toph is still sleeping, I drive in from Berkeley, over the bridge, miles above the water, to the makeshift MTV offices in North Beach, next to the Embarcadero and, appropriately enough, lodged among a good portion of the city’s ad agencies. I am filled with pride and terror. Of course I wanted to be asked to audition, wanted them to see all there is to see in me, but I had no real intention of following through with it all. And now that I’m actually going through with it, I’m petrified someone—Beth, Toph, David Milton—will find out. I convince myself that this is just for sociological or journalistic reasons. What a funny story this will make! But really: Am I just curious? Or do I want this? And if I did want this, what sort of person am I?

  When I arrive, the neighborhood is deserted and I am twenty minutes early. Because people who appear on MTV are not early, are not anxious and responsible enough to be early, I walk around until it’s time. When I’m two minutes late, I walk in. The office, only a few weeks old, already has, over the receptionist’s desk, a huge, perfect MTV logo fashioned from corrugated steel. As I wait, the young assistants chat with me, attempting to make me feel comfortable. While waiting and chatting, I realize that, duh, I’m already auditioning. I begin to think harder about my words, making them more memorable, wanting to be at once fun, cutting edge, soulful and midwestern. I notice my legs; they’re crossed. But how to cross my legs? The guy-guy way or the women’s—older man’s way? If I do the latter, will they think I’m gay? Will that help?

  Then a woman walks in—glides in. She looks down at me. She is my mother, my girlfriend, my wife. It is Laura, the producer/casting person who called. She has an Ali MacGraw look about her—her skin lightly tanned, her eyes dark, with straight, milk-chocolate hair, soft on her shoulders, a velvet curtain touching a velvet stage.

  She invites me into another room, where she will conduct the interview. I follow. I am ready to give myself to her. She will listen and when she listens, she will know. But my hair is probably all wrong. I meant to check it in the bathroom beforehand but didn’t get a chance. Ridiculous. On what could be the most important day ever, for me, for my hair, I leave it to chance—and if I asked to check it now, she’d think I was vain, self-conscious—and we can’t let her get the wrong idea. Of course, maybe she wants someone vain. I could be the Vain Person. There’s always someone vain. Of course, they’re usually models. I could never qualify, never— Unless I was one of those Benetton models, strange and homely. I could do that. Odd-looking, but defiantly so—like the heroin people, or the ones with freckles and huge hair. That could be me—

  Oh look at her. More than I want to be on Laura’s show I want to settle down with her, to raise a family with her, on ten or so acres on the North Carolina coast. We’ll have a dog named Skipper. We’ll cook together, for her parents, for the neighbors. Have a crowd of kids that look not like me but like her, with strong, delicate features, that wonderful nose—

  “Okay,” she says, sitting down behind the video camera.

  The tape starts, the red light, everything.

  “Where did you grow up?” she asks.

  “Oh. I know this. A little suburb of Chicago, Lake Forest. It’s about thirty miles north—“

  “I know Lake Forest.”

  “Really?” I say, feeling a format change coming, one where quotation marks fall away and a simple interview turns into something else, something entirely so much more. “It’s just a little suburb, about seventeen thousand people. I’m surprised that—“

  Please. Lake Forest is one of these towns, like Greenwich or Scarsdale—/ mean, isn’t this one of the wealthiest towns in America? Is it? I guess it is. I guess. I don’t know. But I didn’t know any rich people. We weren’t rich. My friends’ parents were teachers, sold medical supplies, ran frame shops... My parents drove used cars, my mother bought all of our clothes at Marshall’s. That kind of thing. We were on what I guess would have been the town’s lower socioeconomic half.

  What did your parents do?

  My mother didn’t work until I was about twelve. Then she was a teacher. Montessori. My father was a lawyer, a commodities-oriented lawyer in Chicago. Futures trading.

  And your siblings?

  My sister’s in law school at Cal. My brother Bill works at a think

  tank in L.A.

  What does that mean?

  Well, he started out at the Heritage Foundation, traveling eastern Europe, advising the former Soviet republics, whatever they’re called, on conversion to free-market economies, et cetera et cetera. Then he wrote a book about downsizing government here, at the local level. It’s called Revolution at the Roots: Making Government Smaller, Better, and Closer to Home. You should see it. It’s even got a quote from Newt Gingrich right there on the cover; something to the effect that all Americans, if they’re good Americans, should read this book.

  take it you two don’t talk politics much. No, not too much.

  And did you have money growing up?

  I don’t know. Sometimes. Sometimes not. We were never really lacking for anything, but my mom had a way of making us feel like we were just scraping by. “You’re driving us to the poorhouse!” she would yell, usually to our dad but also to anyone, to no one in particular. We never really knew what was going on, but it would be ridiculous to complain. We lived in a house in this nice town, had our own bedrooms, clothes, food, toys,
went on vacation in Florida—though we always drove, mind you. We all worked from the time we were thirteen or so, all summer, Bill and I cut lawns, Beth was up at the Baskin-Robbins in brown cords, of course had to buy our own sad, short-lived used cars, Rabbits and rusty Camaros, all went to public schools, state schools for college. So no, I wouldn’t think of us as having much money—there was certainly never anything saved, we found that out when they died...

  Hmm.

  So am I on?

  What do you mean?

  Did I make the show? Am I on?

  Wait a second. We just started. Oh.

  So did you feel different—were there social divisions based on wealth? Hardly. But if there were, it was an inverse relationship. The kids who acted and dressed like they had money were outcasts, were pitied, weren’t really allowed to be popular. It’s just like anywhere—children in public schools are trained, have it pounded into them by their peers, that to stand out is to attract possibly unfavorable attention. So being obviously wealthy was the same as being too tall, too fat, having a boil on your neck. We all gravitated toward the middle. This was the case all through school—the richest kids were usually seen as the wannabes, were the most desperate, were constantly throwing parties to get the attention of kids whom everyone really envied, like the guy on the football team who lived in the old wooden house behind the high school. The popular kids drove trucks, bought the shittiest cars, had parents who were divorced or drunk or both, who lived far from the areas considered desirable. The rich kids, like the ones whose shirts were always tucked in, whose hair was always just so, or those who went to the private schools in town, were considered hopeless, troubled, eccentric. I mean, can you imagine being in a town like Lake Forest, with these excellent public schools—and still blowing ten grand a year to send your kid to a school called Country Day? These were the freaks. You know what we called that school?