Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (37 page)

New York?

New York was very interesting because my friend Erin, who’s the wife of a good friend of mine here, who’s a forty-eight-year-old Mennonite lady, came with me the first two days. So it was—I mean, she came with me to the reading at KGB and she’d never been to a
reading
before. And she, I think, had this idea that they really were sort of like MTV Unplugged concerts, and there were lines, you know, out the door and stuff.

So I sort of got to experience it through her eyes. And like, she stayed with me in the hotel. It was funny, we got a crazy cabbie. You know, a guy who was schizophrenic and weaving all over the road, so we had to get out of the cab. I just said, “This is close enough, this is fine”—I mean, the guy was crazy. His license was also expiring the next
day
. Clearly, there was just all kinds of bad karma.

And she almost got chain-snatched. You know: a guy came out, started the you-better-watch-that-chain-somebody’ll-grab-it shit. And I got to like seem like I was a New Yorker, and y’know do this quick smooth move between her and him. Like without ever meetin’ his eye and ever breakin’ stride. My point is I think I felt cool about it, because having somebody even more inexperienced than me along made me …

Read in New York before?

Yes.

How’d it go?

It’s run the gamut. I’ve given readings where nobody showed up. I’ve given readings—first reading I ever gave—at the Ninety-second Street Y, with T. C. Boyle and Frank Conroy. When I was twenty-four. And then I’ve given, y’know, Cafe Limbo readings, that are OK, but also people are eatin’ and talkin’ while you’re reading.

KGB. You arrive there at what time?

We got there fairly late. We got there about ten minutes before the reading was supposed to start.

What’d you see?

Lisa Singer—who’s about five two and ninety pounds—and Erin
and I all pulled up. And we thought maybe it was a building that also had a bar in it, because there were people waitin’ on the
street
. And Lisa freaked.

See, this is the nice thing: you have them with you, they freak for you, you know what I mean? It’s what the escorts are for too, so you can just be detached, because they’ll do the worrying.

It was just funny, we just couldn’t get in. I think I had a bandanna on, and at some point, people got an idea that this was actually the author on the staircase. And so various Old Testament, you know, gaps opened up at various points. It was, to be honest, it was very weird because it was simultaneously very ego gratifying and also just terrifying.

Why terrifying?

It was terrifying because the room was packed, everybody was looking right at me. Clearly if I
fucked up
a little bit, if I
didn’t
… y’know what I mean? It felt like there was a lot at stake, socially. There was a
New York Times
lady with a flashbulb going that made it hard to read. And I had to stop, and say no to that, and worry about lookin’ like an asshole.

Did you go to that one? It was like being in the subway at five o’clock. I mean, people were standin’ like mashed up. … And the guy who read before me was the bartender, who read this thing about a Nazi conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

Actually, this was supposed to be a kind of warm-up—I mean, the real reading was supposed to be at Tower [Tower Books; also now gone], and this was supposed to just be … I thought this’d be good practice. And I don’t think it was supposed to be publicized, it was supposed to just be a read-to-the-bar thing …

Everyone there from literary industry?

Yeah, I recognized a lot of people.

Asked to stop photographing?

When I was readin’, yeah. Have you ever had someone—you try to read, you get that purple dot, and then you can’t follow the words.

Gratifying?

Havin’ a whole lot of people there, because of you: y’know? And you know it’s because of you. And to see that there were that many like heavy hitters there.

Who?

I can’t even quite remember. There were just all people whose faces I kind of vaguely remembered from sort of big parties and publishing things. And you can also kind of tell by the way people are dressed. I was
clearly
the least well-dressed person in the room.

Book party?

I wasn’t able to talk to my friends.

Mirror? Policy not to look?

These situations where you are at least ostensibly the center of attention, it’s very easy to worry about what you’re lookin’ like to other people. And then you can run in and check and try to compose a self. And it’s just crazy—you just end up going crazy. I’m not sure I made a promise to myself. But I know that I went to the bathroom a bunch of times to take my tobacco out—I also didn’t have any clean
clothes
, and I had
just
gotten off this car from Boston. I mean, I was like, I was a
mess
, and I knew if I started worrying about it, it would just be nuts.

Often best way; you looked cool, green knit polo shirt, white jeans
.

If it looked right, it’s one of the great ironies of life that I’ve learned. Had I had another hour to prepare—when I have a lot of time to dress, I end up looking ridiculous. You know? And this way, this was just, I think, the thing that had the least crusty armpits.

[Quoting from his list of cities]

Seattle?

I’m trying to think of highlights.

San Francisco?

A big one was L.A.

L.A.?

Because at this bookstore in L.A., this was Dutton’s. [Also gone] And it was OK, it was just, they didn’t have seats, so everybody was standing in the aisle, and I had to stand on a box. And when I read, I normally—I’ve got the thing they blew up, and I’ve made some footnotes, and there was no way to hold the book.

And then there was a serious problem with—the worst thing about the signings were the book dealers. And you’ve probably had—you know what I mean. They come up—I remember the first time a book dealer ever came up to me, I thought, “Wow, this guy
really
likes my work.” It’s sort of like [the guy in Updike’s]
Bech Is Back—
because they’re all carefully wrapped in plastic. But they don’t want any kind of salutation, they just want it signed. And pretty soon, you figure out that it just ups the value for them.

But these guys would get in line—and there’s always a type, they’re always sort of the type you can imagine. Just the sorta
collector
, this obsessive, anal, unhappy, tight-mouthed person. And they’ve always got eight to ten books, and I think it was in San Francisco that I figured out the rule, that I’ll sign two at any one time,
and then once everybody’s out of the line, Yeah, I’ll stay around and I’ll sign your books, but I’m not gonna do it while people wait.

Nice
.

It’s nice, but it’s also smart, because it avoids some big imbroglio. But this guy in L.A., this dealer showed up with it had to’ve been a hundred things. Books, magazine articles, all this stuff. And there was clearly no joy in it for him and all this. And Bonnie the agent was there, and she said that I would sign twenty, and he began to make a fuss. And I lost my temper, and I said if he said one more word I wouldn’t sign
anything
. And then I had anger adrenaline in me.

Iowa?

Iowa City was terrible because I ran out of money, and Western Union wouldn’t give me money. Because the guy, the Western Union guy at the Iowa City bus station—a little troll-like, red-haired man—is evil and deserves to be stamped out. He—I had a
cab
waiting outside. He first claimed that he hadn’t gotten the order, then he claimed that he had. Then he gave me a
check
, and told me to go to the bank, saying he didn’t have enough cash. The bank was closed. I mean, and I … he goes … If I coulda gotten a lock of his hair, he’d feel stabbing in his
buttocks
right now.

How’d you run out of money?

I had petty cash. I mean I took like $500 with me, and I just spent it all on like cabs and tips. And the hotel was way outside town, and I hadn’t slept, because Houston was so hot.

And then at the reading, the bookstore owner gave me Jay McInerney’s review like literally two minutes before I went into the reading. And the reading turned out to be on the radio, which they hadn’t told me. And there were cuss words, you know, so I ended
up saying inadmissible words on public radio. Then there was a Q and A they hadn’t told me about. Then at the start of the signing, a lady who’d read some catalog copy that I’d written claimed that I was incredibly insensitive to deformed children.

From Mao II, right?

[“The best metaphor I know of for being a fiction writer,” David writes, “is Don DeLillo’s ‘Mao II,’ where he describes the book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer (i.e. dragging itself across the floor of restaurants where the writer’s trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, etc.) …”]

(Unhappy) Yeah. I had written this thing in an hour, about how DeLillo’s analogy was correct. It was funny, but on top of everything else, I almost started to cry. That was like the nadir of the whole thing. It got radically better after that. Chicago was fine. Minneapolis was fine.

L.A. versus New York?

They seemed more like
tourists
to the book world. I mean they were dressed in like cardigans and slippers, you know what I mean? Whereas the readings in New York, you could tell, people were used to them as public events, they were there to see and be seen.

Which actually takes some of the heat off you the reader, because you feel like people are looking at each other—that they all feel they’re on display too. So actually, I’ve figured it out now, I prefer reading in New York to anywhere else.

[We hear whining, can’t identify it.]

Oh—that’s Jeeves in the crate! We forgot about the Jeevester!

[We walk, Dave releases Jeeves.]

Meet with movie people out there?

No, nein.

Dinner at Bonnie’s?

This friend that I’d made doing the Lynch piece, who’s a unit publicist, she was there. Streitfeld was there.

[Ear-flapping sound as Jeeves shakes off]

I’m not bein’ cagey or withholding anything from you, I just haven’t heard anything about that.

[The tape side runs out.]

Do you wonder if books are passé? Do you worry about that? As we were talking about yesterday, Rolling Stone hasn’t covered a writer your age in ten years
.

I think books used to be real important parts of the cultural conversation, in a way that they aren’t anymore. And the fact that
Rolling Stone
, which is a pretty important mainstream magazine, doesn’t cover them that much anymore says a lot. Not so much about
Rolling Stone
. But about how interested the culture is in books.

For me—and you know this, you get together with writers, and this is a great topic of conversation, ’cause we’ll all just bitch and moan. We’ll talk about the decline of education and people’s declining attention spans, and the responsibility of TV for this. For me the interesting question is, what’s
caused
books to become kind of less important parts of the cultural conversation?

A minority taste?

Yeah, in a certain way. The thing that I think a lot of us forget is, part of the fault of that is books. Is that probably as, you know—you get this sort of cycle, as they become less important commercially and in the mainstream, they’ve begun protecting their ego by talking more and more to each other. And establishing themselves as this tight kind of cloistered world that doesn’t really have anything to do, you know, with real regular readers.

And uh, so, so no, I don’t think they’re passé. I think they’ve gotta find fundamentally new ways to do their job. And I don’t think for instance we as a generation have done a very good job of this.

Hey, Jeeves—shut that off for a second. [Jeeves whimpers, sits.]

Must find new ways to make books—what new ways?

You know what? I don’t know. My guess is, it’s gonna involve some way of making sort of old eternal verities and questions comprehensible—I can’t think of a way to say it that isn’t academic.

Could you loosen it?

(Silent verbal scowl) Well, it’s not just a question of loosening up, it’s that it’s very hard and complicated, and to try to compress it into a couple of sentences …

[Tape off, break]

[We talk it out for a few minutes; then, when he thinks he’s ready—and this must be what it’s like to watch him go through a few drafts, as he said in the car; he’s found a way to do answer drafts on the spot, by regulating the tape flow; clever—he turns the tape back on.]

I’m not sure about “give movies that” [the audience], but you’re right, do you want me to just say it over? Yeah, there’s stuff that really good fiction can do that other forms of art can’t do as well.

And the big thing, the big thing seems to be, sort of leapin’ over that wall of self, and portraying inner experience. And setting up, I think, a kind of intimate conversation between two consciences.

And the trick is gonna be finding a way to do it at a time, and for a generation, whose relation to long sustained linear verbal communication is fundamentally different. I mean, one of the reasons why the book is structured strangely is it’s at least an
attempt
to be mimetic, structurally, to a kind of inner experience. And I know we disagreed in Monical’s about whether experience really feels like that. I mean, I don’t know whether I’ve done it, it’s something that I’m interested in, and am trying to do.

Subject matter untackled too?

Yeah. I guess …

[To tape] David is talking about today people watch more MTV and more movies and more TV, and so that the world in which readers move is very different than the world in which, say, you know our parents moved.