Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (20 page)

It’s
factually
false. It is true that I was drinking
a lot
when I was there.

When did you stop smoking pot?

I stopped smoking pot—I think I stopped smoking pot right about the time I got out of grad school. You know, it wasn’t any kind of big decision. I just, it wasn’t shutting the system down anymore. It was just making the system, it was just making the system more unpleasant to be part of. My own system.

W
AITER:
Has anybody helped you all yet?

Not one bit.

[Break]

To avoid this being turned into a locus of indictment, not by you but
by somebody else who reads this, I would say that—I mean, I think there’s nothing trivial or unimportant in the book. And that one reason for that is that Michael—I mean, I was really able to take some help from Michael on it.

Who do you suggest I talk to about the book? Your agent? Michael? Who else?

I’ll tell you, there was a guy … One of the guys who really helped me about this is an editor—did you see that magazine that Betsy said “Do you want to borrow” that’s at my house? His name is Steve Moore at Dalkey Archive Press. D-A-L-K-E-Y, it’s in, that’s actually in Normal. He’s sort of the guy who got me my job, told me about it. He’s an editor of this review and he read it in manuscript, read the thing early. And actually—I don’t know if he recommended cuts, he had me move a certain amount of stuff around. This was I think in the next-to-last draft—moved some stuff closer up to the front. It was real weird, it was a toss-off suggestion, but it was very helpful because it helped me structure the thing differently. But
he
was somebody who read the thing in manuscript. Umm …

I will talk to him. Anyone else? How can I reach Mark Costello, do you think? Actually, the odds are I’m gonna want to talk to your parents
. [Dave shakes his head.]
You don’t want me talking to your parents?

They’re real, they’re real private people, and would have a hard time with it. I hereby request you don’t. They also—

You don’t have to go any further
.

OK. Just to tell you, they also wouldn’t be that
helpful
. They didn’t read the thing until—like—

Now, I would ask them about what you were like as a kid …

I’ll tell you, I can—I can give you—I can give you Mark, and Bonnie would be able to tell more about that. (Thinking) Costello, Costello …

Give it to me over the phone. We don’t have to use Denny’s time for it
.

Turn it off for a second. [Break] It was real cerebral—

Do you think you’ve gotten less cerebral since?
[David nods.]
I think you have too
.

But I think a lot—maybe at least for somebody who comes out of a more theoretical avant-garde tradition, I think the aging process is a thawing process. I think you can see that.

Some people never thaw that way, though
.

Manuel Puig, Márquez, Cortázar, all of them thawed.

W
AITER:
You all OK so far?

… Even Nabokov didn’t deal so well with it. His first remark, after Lolita, was: “Of course, this should all have happened thirty years ago.” With attention, he became crazy
.

Really?

The last twenty years … Read his collected letters. After
’
59, his letters have this seigneurial sound … A perils-of-celebrity story. I don’t want to tell you what to read, but …

That’s just the name of it:
The Collected Letters?

In the beginning, they’re very charming. He’s this young writer. And then later on all the charm gets squeezed out of them
.

“Seigneurial” means what?

… like a kind of baronial tone, inviting you to walk outside and tour the grounds …
’Cause
now he can begin throwing his weight around …

He had
enormous
weight before that, though.

Yes, but in a very small readers’ group. If you check it he began acting very, very differently
.

W
AITER:
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.

Now, how long did that last? That period?

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—

W
AITER:
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.