Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (26 page)

That a major magazine would pay all this money to send you—who are not an idiot or an unbusy man, to come repeat stuff I said into a tape recorder? I mean, it gets
very
confusing.

And I’m trying to make these decisions about “Do this, don’t do this, what are my reasons for this, what are my reasons for that?” It’s one reason I want this phase over. It’s
extraordinarily
, it’s very hard work inside your head. And I think it’s one reason I’m like, you know, smoking three packs of cigarettes and chewing two cans
of tobacco a day. (Laughs) It’s just—it’s fine. But one reason it’s fine is, it’s going to be
over
. Like starting some time tomorrow. And I’ve already got assurances from Little, Brown, there’s no more of this. That like—that I’ve been a good little trouper, and there’s no more of this.

What’s scary to me is, I’ll bet two weeks are going to go by. And I’m going to wish you were back with your tape recorder—you know what? Then I’m going to have to like, you know, um, then I’m going to have to like
decompress
from getting a whole lot of attention. Because it’s like getting
heroin
injected into your cortex. And where I’m going to need balls is to be able to sit there and, and go through that. And try to remind myself that, you know … And you know it’s the same. That what the reality is, is being
in
a room with a piece of paper. And that all this, this is tangential stuff, and some of it feels real good and some of it doesn’t. But this is all—that’s
—that’s
what’s real, and the rest of this is just conversation around it.

It is frightening, as I think about it. Must be like an astronaut stepping back to his house: He’s been directed by people in a different state, shot up somewhere, outside people planning everything. And then he drives home. And his life has been invaded to some degree, and it’s suddenly uninvaded. And then you have to go back …

Yeah, it’s been invaded. That, that’s less troubling to me than to what extent have I been a willing accomplice in that invasion, you know? To have written a book about how seductive image is, and how very many ways there are to get seduced off any kind of meaningful path, because of the way the culture is now. But what if, you know, what if I become this grotesque parody of just what the book is about? And of course, this stuff drives me
nuts
.

To get back to addiction metaphor for a second. You’re someone who had to fight an addiction to being interested in approval, the same way you fought connections to substances, or to television
.

Yeah.

And you’ve solved those problems by trying to keep those things away from your sideboard, and yet—

Sideboard?

Keep it off your table, so it wasn’t within easy reach. And this has been put on your table. And I wonder if you’re afraid that the part you trained away will jump back in, the same way that alcoholics are afraid that they’ll go on a bender if they drink just one glass
.

I’m worried a little bit. But you know it seems like taking this stuff off your sideboard, its location is less, is less important than getting in the psychic space where you’re willing to take it off your sideboard. You know what I mean? So the next level of complication is, do I congratulate myself on my worry and concern about all this stuff, because it gives a sign that I’ve
not
been seduced about it? And of course then if I get
happy
about
that
, then I’ve lost the edge—I mean, there’s just no end to the little French curls of craziness you can go through about it.

The thing that I like about it is that—is that Little, Brown is fairly
decent
. They want money and they want the book to be a big deal. And me doing a certain amount of stuff about me helps the book, and that’s cool. But they’ve already like, you know—they’re not like “Oh, the book’s really hot, we’ve been in touch with ISU, you have the semester off, you’re going to go on a whirlwind tour of
Europe,”
you know? I mean they’re like, they’re halfway cool. And you know, I’ve talked to a couple of people and they’re like, “You’re right. You know, you gotta teach, you got to get this manuscript ready for Michael, enough of this.”

Really?

Yeah. Yeah. Which—so everything’s real complicated. They’re not
saints, ’cause you know they would prefer to have me be in
People
magazine or whatever. But they’re not, they’re not
assholes
, either. Who just want to like burn me out, and use up this thing, and get their cash while they can and then fuck you. I mean, nothing’s ever that simple.

So you acknowledge the book as a big deal?

What do you mean?

Is it a big deal?

To whom?

Has it been received as a big deal … I just wanted to have you saying that. Is this why you live in Bloomington?

Why I live in Bloomington is I got a job that I turned out—I’ll tell you what. It ups my—I feel real lucky living in Bloomington. It’s way better for me to be living in Bloomington.

Why?

Because every time I go to New York, I get caught up in—what do you call it? Now, see, then you’re gonna make it
my
phrase—what you have called?—

What’s your phrase?

I just—I just think of this enormous
hiss
of egos at various stages of inflation and deflation. It’s just this whole—like I remember bein’ in New York and Will Blythe’s thing in
Esquire
came out. And
just
being, you know, wanting to cry. Wanting to run over and punch him in the nose. “How could he do this to me?” When I got home and a week later realized that, You know what? He wanted to do—the
hype thing pissed him off, he wanted to do something about it, ran into this problem of actually kinda liking the book, so what’s the poor guy going to do? But when I’m in New York, it’s all about me-me-me-me. And how could he do it and where do I—you know, is he ridiculing me in the red hot center of the artistic cosmos, and all this, and uh—

Esquire
.

Excuse me?

Esquire. You remember, that phrasing is from that article in Esquire, with the Literary Universe
.

Yeah, you would have been like an
infant
when that came out! I was at Yaddo when that came out. It was all like, “Who is on the horizon!” “Who is in the Orion constellation?” This whole like—um, God, what
craziness
.

So actually you really
were
a student of this?

What do you mean?

You were paying real close attention to the vacillations of literary fame
.

That was in 1988—no, ’87. That the
Esquire
—no, as a matter of fact, I know
exactly
. It was in July of 1987, ’cause I remember me and Lorrie Moore and Jay McInerney [Transcriber didn’t know these names: the true parameters of literary fame] were all at the same table, all looking at our own little
Esquire
that summer. And I didn’t go to—at Yaddo—and I didn’t go to Yaddo till 1987.

You were in there
.

I was “On the Horizon.” (Smiles) I was on the horizon.

How did that feel to you …

Oh
, I remember, it was absolutely
exhilarating
. It was absolutely exhilarating. But of course I forget who it was—oh, it was Alice Turner. It was like, “OK, kid, now you’re on the horizon, now we’ll see what you can do.”

[The tape side runs out.]

So you felt thrilled seeing that?

Yeah.

[Windows closed: we’re back to smoking, chomping, sipping.]

… Lorrie and Jay also …

Yeah, I recall they were
somewhat more prominent
. Can you hit that thing that will
crack
this just a tiny bit?
Thank
you. How about we turn this off unless you’re absolutely quoting, because it makes it hard to steer? No, you want something more interesting about that. I remember—I mean that’s a good example of why, like you know, I mean, I—you know, I probably like that stuff as much as the next person. But it was really
awful
because there was this whole—let me see, it was thrilling and really scary at the same time. Because it’s like, “Oh, no, that means the
next
time this thing comes out, I need to be, you know, three inches closer to the sun.” And God forbid, you know, any of the other On-the-Horizon people are closer to the sun and I’m not. And it’s this whole—

And I don’t think it’s any different if you’re like an
accountant
for Andersen & Andersen, you know? Some big accounting firm and that you know four or five other junior accountants get promoted ahead of you. Or the guys who got out of law school with you make partner before you do. I mean the
craziness
is exactly the same. I mean, I
don’t
think—I don’t think it’s really sort of any different.
It might be a little bit more powerful if it’s taking place in
Esquire
, you know? And it’s unavoidable. I just—what I’m saying isn’t that dramatic, I’ve just
learned
that the farther away I can stay from it, the better it is for me.

I’d be awfully surprised if it wasn’t the same for you, unless you’re just a
tremendously
strong person.

[Flirting]

… people I know who’ve gone through this have had a very hard time with transition … and then—

And then, what’s the next thing? And what’s going to make the next thing as good as it can be? This stuff is not going to help me. [Break]

… I’m way into—I’ve decided that I need, I really need to find a few things that I believe in, in order to stay alive. And one of them is that this is—that I’m
extraordinarily
lucky to be able to do this kind of work. And that along with that luck comes a tremendous obligation to do the best, to do the very best I can.

Which means that I have to
structure
my life, you know, sort of like anybody who’s dedicated to something. To maximize my ability to do good stuff. And it’s just like, and it doesn’t make me a
great person
. It just makes me a person that’s really exhausted a couple other ways to live, you know? And really taken them, taken them to their conclusion. Which for me was a pink room, with no furniture and a
drain
in the center of the floor. Which is where they put me for an entire day when they thought I was going to kill myself. Where you don’t have anything on, and somebody’s observing you through a slot in the wall.

And when
that
happens to you, you get
tremendous
—you get
unprecedentedly
willing to examine other alternatives for how to live. (Laughs in satisfaction)

We’re rushing. You’re at Amherst and while you were in Arizona it gets published
.

No, it came—yeah, it came out in the winter of my last year at Arizona.

So then you go to Yaddo the next summer, and find yourself in that list, right?

Interesting. Yeah.

Then take me through from then until the room with the drain on the floor
.

I’ll try my best, believing in your talent for compression. ’Cause I can’t be—we can never be linear about ourselves.

It’ll end up being radically compressed, with some nice sound bites coming from you
.

[We’d almost run out of gas before, when we stopped at Denny’s. That’s how focused on the talk we’d become.]

Uh-oh—what is that, do you suppose?

I think someone’s trying to build a scale model of the set from Blade Runner as a hobby
.

(Laughs) Either that or Fritz Lang is alive and well in the heart of Illinois. [Break] He has his
Unforgiven
, David Webb Peoples’s movies in general.

I didn’t want to ask about Blade Runner. Too obvious and embarrassing. I mean: everyone loved it
.

Godfrey, who wouldn’t? Although Pauline Kael didn’t like
Blade Runner
.

Yes, she didn’t
.

[Break]

About heroism and redemption in a corporate culture. I mean that’s what makes it a great movie. Is that the machine thing is the barest and most skeletal of metaphors in that; Rutger Hauer is
us
. It’s sort of like, I don’t know, now you’ve got me thinking—there’s so much beauty and profundity in all kinds of shitty pop culture all around us.

Like living in Bloomington: one of the things that I do, I mean, you have to listen to a lot of shitty country music. ’Cause that’s like pretty much all there is on the radio, when you’re tired of like, listening to Green Day on the one college station. And these country musics that are just so—you know, “Baby since you’ve left I can’t live, I’m drinking all the time” and stuff. And I remember just being real impatient with it. Until I’d been living here about a year. And all of a sudden I realized that, what if you just imagined that this absent lover they’re singing to is just a metaphor? And what they’re really singing is to themselves, or to God, you know? “Since you’ve left I’m so empty I can’t live, my life has no meaning.” That in a weird way, I mean they’re incredibly existentialist songs. That have the patina of the absent, of the romantic shit on it just to make it salable. But that all the pathos and heart that comes out of them, is they’re singing about something much more elemental being missing, and their being incomplete without it. Than just, you know, some girl in
tight jeans
or something.

And it’s so weird. It’s like you live immersed in this stuff, it’s very Flannery O’Connorish. And then every once in a while you realize that it’s all the same, and it’s all about the really profound shit. And that it’s adjusted in various ways to talk to various demographic groups for commercial reasons. But that if you cock your ear and listen real close, it’s—that it’s
deep
, you know?

Where else do you see that kind of nice stuff rising out of shit pop culture?

Wow. Oh, God, everything. I mean even—we were making jokes about
Love Boat
and
Baywatch
. These
really
—the
really
commercial,
really
reductive shows that we so love to sneer at. Are also tremendously compelling. Because the
predictability
in popular art, the
really
formulaic stuff, the stuff that makes
no
attempt to surprise or do anything artistic, is so
profoundly
soothing. And it even, even the densest or most tired viewer can
see
what’s coming. And it gives you a sense of order, that everything’s going to be all right, that this is a narrative that will take
care
of you, and won’t in any way challenge you. It’s like being wrapped in a chamois blanket and nestled against a big, generous tit, you know? And that, OK, artwise maybe not the greatest art. But the function it provides is
deep
in a certain way.