Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (30 page)

OK, in ’88 I lived at home. And then I lived in a little cabin in the desert in Tucson for a while. I was rewriting—there were like three or four things that had to be rewritten for the book. [
Girl with Curious Hair
.]

And then this—there was this whole messy thing, and I don’t know what you know about it. Stories that were in that book appeared in various magazines. And one was the Letterman story. Which, um, the version in the book was very different than the version that I turned in. Or that sold to Alice, had sold to Alice at
Playboy
. Because the first version had a
whole lot
of stuff that was from an actual Letterman interview. And, um, it never occurred to me to tell ’em this, I mean the whole story was structured so that you couldn’t tell what was made up and what was true. But anyway, um, like two weeks before
Playboy
went to press, they reran that interview. It was one of those Letterman rerun nights. And the shit really hit the fan.
Alice had this idea that I’d like intentionally tried to embarrass her, somehow. She really went on this paranoid fantasy. And actually, the thing ended up coming out … meanwhile,
Playboy’s
lawyers called Viking’s lawyers, and clued them in about what was going on, and then they started looking at the
Jeopardy!
story. And at “Westward,” and the Johnson story, and the fact that a lot of the minor characters were real people.

And so a lot of the time in Tucson—I lived in Champaign winter of ’88. And then I moved to Tucson for four months, and then I moved back to Champaign for like five months all through ’88, early ’89. And basically, the book got killed. Viking already put a cover—it’s weird. A collector showed me, the collector’s got a bound galley of the Viking version of the book. Which, you know, for collectors now apparently it’s like an upside-down postage stamp, it’s just worth thousands of dollars, because Viking killed it. It’s weird—they didn’t even think they were gonna lose, they just thought they’d get sued.

Hey, Drone! Are you gonna eat my chair?

How’d you feel?

It was a very confusing time. Because they invoked the principle of what they called the right of publicity. Not right to privacy, but a right to publicity, such that publishing the
Jeopardy!
story would be the equivalent of my capitalizing on a physical resemblance to Pat Sajak—like running around at mall openings
as
Pat Sajak, and receiving income that was rightfully his. Which seemed to me so utterly bizarre.

But of course, the letters I’m writing were legally stupid. They’re these long, impassioned, rhetorical things invoking literary principles and broad social, you know: “these people impose themselves on our consciousness but we are not allowed to reconfigure them …”

So it was a very weird time. And this was also a time when—I really think that for me just personally, “Westward” was this real
seminal thing, like I really felt like I’d killed this huge part of myself doing it.

Nabokov says same thing: you write a book to get rid of, do away with that part of yourself
.

This was about a whole orientation to fictional theory. I’ve always wondered if Barth read it, it’s simultaneously absolutely homicidal and a fawning homage.

And then during all this time, I really, I mean I was really in a
panic
. Because I didn’t think I was gonna be able to write anymore. And I got this idea that I’d started while being a student, and the writing was recreation from the student work. And what I’d do is contrive a situation where I applied to Princeton and Harvard in philosophy. Got a very sweet deal from Harvard. And so went out there early in ’89, and moved into Boston, moved into this apartment with my friend Mark Costello.

Let me see: well, I did a bunch of stuff while I was there. That’s when he and I wrote
Signifying Rappers
. And I wrote—I never published it—wrote a really long essay about video pornography. That actually
Playboy
helped me get on these sets by claiming I was a
Playboy
writer. I have some really riveting taped interviews with porn stars, too. And uh, did that, did a bunch of stuff, the long essay about
Wittgenstein’s Mistress
.

Anyway, started at Harvard. And it was just real obvious that, like, I was
so
far away from that world. They had this idea that a grad student—I mean, you were a full-time grad student. I mean, there wasn’t time to write on the side, there was four hundred pages of Kant theory to read you know every three days.

[Drone’s stomach goes off. Loudly.]

And then Girl with Curious Hair was resold to Norton?

What happened was Gerry Howard, who was the editor at Viking, left
for unrelated reasons. Went to Norton. Somehow he really believed in the book, and convinced Norton just to buy it. And to get Viking to give like—had me change some names like Leo Burnett and stuff like that. And then published it with Norton. So it’s weird. I mean, there’s all this stuff about that Norton didn’t publish the book well, that nobody paid any attention to it. And it’s more like, Man, if it hadn’t been for him, that book wouldn’t’ve (“wouldn’ta”) come out at all.

That book gets passed around a lot
.

[Jeeves now going crazy; batting things, barking.]

Yeah. I think it was fairly big in a kind of underground, New York way. But in terms of like, I mean
Broom of the System
sold
way
more than that did. That just
died
. Fell stillborn from the presses, as Hume said of his book.

Hey Jeeves! We’re trying to talk, I’m going to put you in your crate. You need to
hush
.

How well did Broom sell?

I don’t know. But I know they made their money back on it. And I know that Norton never made their money back—no, Norton did make their money back, ’cause of what Avon paid them for the paperback. But
Avon
hasn’t made their money back yet.

Yeah, Norton’s got a new paperback, which actually … I
gave
them, just ’cause of Gerry. Because they couldn’t really offer me money for it. But I just—that’s as much Gerry’s book as it is mine. So anyway, and so—that was also the fall, I mean I got to Harvard, I quit drinkin’ that summer.

And the thing at Harvard was just unbelievably bleak. [Strange. So calm about it here in his living room, his house. Willing to just talk, no chess or feints, just tell his story.] But that’s the semester that I went into McLean. That’s the semester that I got really worried I was going to kill myself.

And so—and it was a big deal for me, because I was so embarrassed going in. But I think it was the first time I’ve ever treated myself like I was worth something. Was, I mean—having to go to the Harvard shrink, and say, “Look, I think there’s this issue, you know? I don’t feel real safe.”

She had me go in, which meant droppin’ out of Harvard, which meant I had to talk to Warren Goldfarb, the chair at Harvard. And it was just unbelievably mortifying. And I was willin’ to do it. I guess to stay alive. Which in retrospect was probably promising.

This is …

This is late fall of ’89. And then I never went back. I mean, I got out of McLean’s fairly quickly. And uh, I never went back.

Curious Hair comes out when? Same time?

I think it did. But I didn’t really notice it coming out. I mean, I think I gave, I remember I gave one reading at the Cambridge public library. That had thirteen people in the audience, one of whom was a schizophrenic lady who kept shrieking during the reading. (Laughs, shakes head) It was just a
bleak
, just a bleak time.

But reviews were really strong
.

The only one I remember is that somebody said it was kind of exhibitionistic. And they thought it was show-offy. I don’t remember—I don’t even think—did it even get reviewed in
The New York Times?
It was a bleak time. I don’t think I was payin’ much attention to anything other than good old yours truly.

Happy to see it coming out then, though? What was bothering you at that time? Some connection between desire for approval and your writing?

I was just unbelievably sad. All the time. And didn’t think I was going to be able to write anymore. And I think that book’s coming out was sort of, seemed more like a kind of, a kind of shrill jagged laugh from the universe. About, you know, I’m done, and now this
thing
, what was it like? This thing sort of lingers like a really nasty fart behind me. You know? For like a further—you know, and if it does really well, then it’s a further reminder of the fact that I’m like, that I’m
screwed
.

Because you thought you’d lost the ability to write?

Well, I just thought I’d, I just didn’t see the
point
of it anymore. I mean, the stuff that I was interested in seemed—I mean, I really felt like “Westward” had, at least for me, had sort of folded it up into this tiny, infinitely dense thing. And that it had kind of exploded.

But which makes it sound like I’m talking very grandiosely about the story. And it’s much more about—um, it was partly that. It was partly, I think a lot of it was I think I’d really for two or three years leaned on, ah, leaned on drinkin’ hard as a way to deal with stuff. And it’s real weird, you do that, and then you take it away—yeah. Things get tense. And you know, I just made
enormous
mistakes.

I think going to Harvard was a huge mistake. I was too old to be in grad school. I didn’t wanna be an academic philosopher anymore. But I was incredibly, um, humiliated, to drop out. Let’s not forget that my father’s a philosophy professor, that a lot of the professors there were revered by
him
. That he knew a couple of them. [In a sense, the
Moby-Dick
thing again.] There was just an enormous amount of terrible stuff going on. But I left there and I didn’t go back.

I remember I was so embarrassed, my mother had sent me a vegetable juicer. That had arrived in the mail soon after I’d left there. And for some reason they’d taken it into the department office. And I’d always wanted to get that vegetable juicer back. And I never had the balls to go back and get it back. Because I couldn’t tell if I could face those people.

And then Mark got a law firm job in New York. So he moved away. And I lived in that apartment alone, for quite a while. Um. Yeah. Got a job teaching. That spring. Started—no, I’m sorry, that spring I worked as a security guard at the Lotus Software Corporation. Which was weird.

What’d you do there?

I have yet to integrate that into my experience. I’ve never worn polyester every day for three months. [Funny, my phone conversation with Amy, his sister Amy, a few weeks later: Amy’s stories about David loving cotton. Purloining any shirt of hers, even the girliest, if he liked the weave.] And I had to wear polyester. And I carried what was called a service baton. And this other security guard showed me, you know, the tricks cops have. The various ways—which I wasn’t great at, but I was fairly good at. And I just remember
walkin
’—my shift was, ah, it was weird, it was half third, half first. So I’d go in super early in the morning until like midmorning, and in the early morning, nobody’d be there. And I’d just walk under these fluorescent lights, twirling my baton, thinking about as little as possible.

Did you think you were done then?

Yeah. I was pretty sure life was over.

This is after suicide watch is over?
[Bonnie told me when she came to visit McLean and saw him, the first thing she did was find a scissors so she could cut his hair, it looked so awful to her.]

Mm-hmm. That was actually a fairly grim—I think I was in McLean’s for a total of eight days. And then, I was really there just mostly ’cause I was scared I would do something stupid. And I’d actually had a friend from high school, who tried to kill himself by sitting in a garage with the car runnin’. And what it turned out was, he didn’t
die
, but it really, it fucked up his brain, sort of. It fucked up the
affective
part. So that he was in terrible pain apparently all the time. But like I was just—and I
knew
, that if anybody was fated to fuck up a suicide attempt, it was me.

Which gives you some idea of my mind-set at the time: And I’ll fuck up even that, and then I’ll be a quadriplegic.

[I tell him Van Gogh story. Van Gogh went into a field to shoot himself, in the chest, with a single-shot pistol. And
missed
. And had to walk back through town, where everyone thought he was sort of foolish already: terminally wounded but not in fact dead.]

I didn’t know that story. [Doesn’t find it that funny at first; then laughs.] Yeah, like I can’t catch a
break
.

You were somewhat in pain about your desire to become a sort of successful literary person?

Yes, but also an awareness—I mean, I was in my late twenties then. And you know, and I was sort of aware that that was fairly empty. But the only other thing that seemed to be pulling me was the really sort of intense theoretical interest in fiction. Which then
also
seemed empty.

Metafiction. And postmodernism. And what came after metafiction—like what would meta-metafiction be like? And what were ways to co-opt pop culture? And it’s very hard to explain. I think probably the not very sophisticated diagnosis is that I was just depressed.

Do you think the person you were in 1986 and 1987 would have disliked the work you did for Harper’s, for example? Because it’s pretty straightforward?

Yeah. I don’t think he would have hated it—I just don’t think he woulda
read
it. I think he would’ve looked at the first two pages and gone, “Huh! Wonder who likes this kind of stuff?” And then looked for something else.

How would he have felt about this book?

Boy—that’s a very good question. I think he would’ve admired a certain amount of it: the stunt pilotry and the humor of it. And some of the prose. But I don’t think he would’ve got it real well. I don’t think he woulda got what I would hope people could get out of it.