Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (11 page)

A lot of the stuff that comes off as drugs in the book is intended to be more or less plausible.

2015 is when it takes place?

I had to get the dates right—I believe it’s 2009, but don’t quote me.

You know, I wanted it set in just enough so our kids would be in adolescence.

[Interesting and very sad: setting the novel the year after his death, somehow this is heartbreaking. His having no idea this is coming.]

I don’t think it’s as late as 2015.

So when you say a late puberty—sixteen, fourteen?

I’m not talking about when you have nocturnal emissions, I’m talking about when your physique changes. There’s this huge deal in junior tennis between whether you’re playing with the physique of a boy or a man. And like I didn’t start to put on any kind of meat until I was in college. So I was basically playing with the body of a boy until I was seventeen years old.

I had withdrawn before—

I started to smoke a lot of pot when I was fifteen or sixteen, and it’s just hard to train when you smoke a lot of pot. You don’t have that much energy. (Laughs) So I was, like—you know, I was still going to tournaments. But I was mostly doing it, going to like hang out with the guys and party. And I was getting to the quarters instead of the semis of these tournaments. And there was just a general kind of slippage.

Second year of high school then?

Yeah: fifteen, sixteen, somethin’ like that. I mean, starting really to kind of like it. And also other stuff: did a lot of Quaaludes. And by the way, there’s certain stuff about this stuff that I won’t talk about.
This
I don’t mind talking about.

Heroin?

No. I didn’t like it that much. I didn’t have the constitution for it. And I’m serious—I’m not. There’s no way to be a heroin addict and work that hard.

You could dispel that rumor?

Yeah—except what if they just think I’m lying?

People in New York have heard this rumor—what came down to us is that in Boston you’d gotten very involved with drugs and had some kind of breakdown
.

Heroin doesn’t make you break down until you stop doing it. I don’t know if I had a breakdown, I got really really depressed, and had to go on a suicide ward in Boston. It had nothing to do with drugs. It had nothing to do with drugs. I had already started to lose a lot of interest in drugs sort of before then.

Worried by this rumor in publishing circles?

No, although I’d heard—Adam Begley [the
New York Observer
] had reported this rumor that I was a cocaine addict. He said Vollmann told him that, which I didn’t really believe. But it just seems laughable to me, because I did I think once at a party, and I found it excruciatingly unpleasant, like drinking fifty cups of coffee or something.

It just, it seems odd to me. There are fairly well-known writers, and I don’t just mean Burroughs, but writers who are big now, like with the initials D. J., who are fairly well known to have been heroin addicts who got straight. And they don’t make it a secret. If I’d ever been a heroin addict, I don’t think I’d have a problem saying it.

It’s weird—I, like—I mean, I’m somebody who spent most of his life in libraries. I just, um, never lived that kind of dangerous life. I wouldn’t even stick a needle in my arm.

How do you think that rumor got started?

Who—whom did you hear the rumor from?

Don’t know
.

[What do I say? From my office this early morning, while you were doing good work with shampoo, hair brush, and towel?]

It’s very odd—I’ve got no idea how it got started. None. I think the only thing that I ever conceivably had a problem with was marijuana, and marijuana was a huge deal for me when I was about the age of Hal in the book. And then once I got to college, I mean, college was just so
hard
, it was hard to get stoned and read. And I just, it sort of melted away.

Getting-clean stuff is what you can’t talk about—a program? Or what you were getting clean from?

[He looks at me, turns off tape.]

[Break]

I’m not in the program, and I wouldn’t want it to come off like somebody who’s in the program. And that’s just how it’s gotta be. [AA] And ask your friend—your friend will enlighten you about it. Talk to him. From what little I understand about it, talking to private citizens about it is very different. I believe, I don’t know that much about it, but I
believe
the phrase in the eleventh tradition is “Maintain anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films.” About which, it’s one of the few things they’re adamant about. Again, that’s from … from what very little I understand. From what very little I understand.

Smoking out a lot in high school, less in college, then involved with drinking at Harvard?

Mmmm. I drank a lot in grad school, I drank a lot at Yaddo. But everybody did. You know? It’s real weird. I don’t know what—maybe it was a little different five years later, but the young writer deal, the thing was to go out and pound ’em with people and trade
bon mot
. And feel
pleased
at how successful we all were. And to do a little kinda, my dick’s bigger than your dick, kinda contest of wit.

My
mot
is more
bon
than yours
.

Exactly. Which is a pretty unsettling analogue to dick size, in a way.

This period—lasted from
’
87 to—

What, of drinking a lot?

It’s, it’s, I’m not trying to be disingenuous, I honestly don’t remember. And I, I, just to tell you truly, that if you structured this as some—“and then he spiraled into some terrible alcoholic thing,” it would be inaccurate.

It was more just like, I got more and more unhappy. And the more and more unhappy I would get, the more I would notice that I
would be drinking a lot more. And there wasn’t any joy in the drinking. It was more like—it was literally an
anesthetic
. I mean, I just wanted to be dulled and blunt all the time. But the reasons for being unhappy I don’t think had very much to do with drugs or alcohol.

So
’
85 out of Amherst
, ’
87 leaving Arizona, then you go to Harvard …

Yeah—I started partying a lot in grad school.

Summer of
’
87 at Yaddo?

Yeah.

Then Harvard that fall?

No—I went back and lived in Tucson. I was finishing the book of stories. Let’s see. I lived with my folks for like two months, went out to Tucson, lived there for a while.

Foundation Grant your folks gave you? That joke on the Girl with Curious Hair copyright page
. [Sandwiched between the impressive “Corporation of Yaddo” and “The Giles Whiting Foundation,” there’s “The Jim and Sally Wallace Fund for Aimless Children.”]

The “Fund for Aimless Children”—right? Yeah. Exactly.

Yeah, they were
very
nice. They were like, you know, I was upstairs working all the time. And they would, like, not only cook the food, but they’d go to the store and get it. You know? It saved me a lot of time.

Only a two-month grant, though
.

True. But I’m, as you can probably gather, not the most pleasant person in the world to live with.

And then applied, I remember, to Harvard and Princeton, in ’88, and decided to go there.

Why? Weren’t you bored and done with the academic environment by then?

Yeah—I was just really stuck about writing. And um, like a lot of the reasons why I was writing, and a lot of the things that I thought were cool about writing, I’d sort of run out of gas on. And I didn’t know … I didn’t know … what to do. I didn’t know whether I really loved to write or whether I’d just gotten kind of excited about having some early success. That story at the end of
Curious
, which not a lot of people like, was really meant to be extremely sad. And to sort of be a kind of suicide note. And I think by the time I got to the end of that story, I figured that I wasn’t going to write anymore.

That my whole take—that at first I thought writing was empty and just all a game. And then I realized that my take on it was hopelessly empty, and that it
was
a game. And it was after finishing that and doing the editing on that, that I remember getting really unhappy.

And it
sounds
weird—but I think it was almost more of a like, sort of an artistic and a religious crisis, than it was anything you would call a breakdown. I just—all my reasons for being alive and the stuff that I thought was important, just truly at a gut level weren’t working anymore. Does this make sense to you personally at all?

[Gentlemanly: He believes he’s flattering me by treating me as a matching peer.]

It also makes sense to me in terms of what you were telling me about your history. But tell me more about it personally
.

What do you mean in terms of my history?

Well, I mean you had done football for a while, and then you’d stopped because there were guys who were bigger than you. And then you’d done tennis for a while—I guess for about five years
.

Yeah, except that stuff’s all, you can tell by external measurements, how well you’re doing with that. The writing stuff’s all internal.

But it may have felt to you as if there was a sort of pattern. Where you would do something for five years, and then there’d be some reason you’d be required to stop?

Yeah—and I did heavy-duty like semantics and math logic for about five years, and then switched to writing. Yeah, you’re right; I think I really perceived myself as kind of a dilettante. Um, I don’t know, you’re right. I hadn’t realized that. I owe you sixty dollars.

So for that reason, it would make sense that there would be a five-year point where there’d be a moving-on crisis. Except there was no physical and no intellectual reason for you to stop writing
.

It’s weird though—but I started hating everything that I did. I mean I did, I remember I did two different novellas after “Westward,” that I worked very hard on, that were just so
unbelievably
bad. They were, like, worse than stuff I’d done when I was first starting in college. Hopelessly confused. Hopelessly bending in on themselves in all kinds of …

And um, anyway, the reason I applied to philosophy grad school is I remembered that I had flourished in an academic environment. And I had this idea that I could, uh, that I could read philosophy and do philosophy, and write on the side, and that it would make the writing better.

’Cause see, by this time, my ego’s all invested in the writing, right? It’s the only thing that I’ve gotten, you know, food pellets from the universe for, to the extent that I wanted.

So I feel really trapped: Like, “Uh-oh, my five years is up. I’ve gotta move on, but I don’t want to move on.” And I was really stuck. And drinking was part of that. And it’s true that I don’t drink anymore. But it wasn’t that I was stuck because I drank. I mean, it was
more that—and it wasn’t, it wasn’t like social drinking going out of control. It was like, I really sort of felt like my life was over at twenty-seven or twenty-eight. And I didn’t wanna, and that felt really bad, and I didn’t wanna feel it.

And so I would do all kinds of things: I mean, I would drink real heavy, I would like fuck strangers. Oh God—or, then, for two weeks I wouldn’t drink, and I’d run ten miles every morning. You know, that kind of desperate, like very
American
, “I will fix this somehow, by taking radical action.”

And uh, you know, that lasted for a, that lasted for a couple of years.

Like Jennifer Beals, more or less. In Flashdance, solving Pittsburgh
.

And it’s weird: I think a lot of it comes out of the sports training. You know? (Schwarzenegger voice) “If there’s a problem, I vill train my way out of it. I vill get up earlier, I vill vork harder.” And that shit worked on me when I was a kid, but you know …

Everyone I know—and then people like Michael Chabon—has had second-book crises
.

But my second book, it was weird, was “Westward,” and it itself went pretty well, it was just a …

This is what’s embarrassing. I know it’s not that powerful for anybody, but I really felt like I’d blown, I’d blown out of the water, my whole sort of orientation to writing in that thing. Um, and had kind of written my homage and also patricidal killing thing to Barth. Who wasn’t the only postmodern master I’d loved. But he was, I mean, “Lost in the Funhouse” is kind of the—what would you call it?—the trumpets, the trumpet call of postmodern metafiction.

Texture stuff in that book is really terrific also
.

Now, do you really like it or are you just being nice? Not many people like that, and what I was told is you cannot really expect the reader to have read something twenty years earlier in order to get your thing. That’s very pretentious but …

[He thinks I mean his story, not Barth’s.]

Um, you talk about, I’ve said that three or four times somethin’ came alive to me, and started kind of writing itself, and that was one of them. Although it wasn’t a very happy experience.

I have other friends who hid out in academic environments afterwards, on later books, missed the discipline, the clear hours
.

Well, it’s pretty, it’s pretty obvious, you know, what it is. What it is, is that, at a certain point you really, you have to grow up a little bit. You have to impose your own discipline—you’re not in a workshop anymore.

I mean, my first two books had been written sort of under professors. Um, that’s very hard. Um—and you also, I mean, your first book is play, and it’s all possibility and promise. And then in the second book, it’s sort of like, “All right, the first book was very lucky and you got a chance to do this. Now are you gonna do it or not?” And it’s this whole—I don’t know. Yeah, I think, I doubt what I went through is very different than what anybody else went through. The only difference for me is that it was very sharp, and very … and it was of reasonably short duration. I mean, it was like a little under two years. But it was exquisitely—it’s the most horrible period I’ve ever gone through.