Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (40 page)

Walking into your house there were a lot of things I expected to see, but this was not one of them
.

Well, I mean, I’m susceptible like everybody else.

I’d been listening to cheesy Bloomington radio, and heard, “I Want You to Know.” I never even would’ve known who she was. My girlfriend, who was living here over the summer, was really into Ani DiFranco and P. J. Harvey, and what’s her name? Tori Amos. All of whom are—you know, they’re OK. They’re just … but Alanis Morissette. If by some paradox, this whole fuss could get me some kind of even just like a five-minute cup of tea with her, that would be more than reward enough.

Although, of course, I’d never do it. I’d be too terrified. “So,
what’s it like to be you?” “I don’t know—shut up. Keep the fuck away from me.”

But you’d go if she called? And said, “Let’s have that tea, I’m gonna be at the Drake in Chicago.”

Yeah—except this is gonna look ridiculous. It’s gonna look, if you put this in the essay, it’ll look like I’m using the essay as a vehicle to try to—but you know what, I’d go in a heartbeat. Perspiring heavily all the way up there, shoving Certs in my mouth. Goin’ nuts. It would cost me like a week of absolute trauma, and I would do it in a heartbeat.

[Break]

[Children are somehow on his mind: he compares raising children to raising books, you should take pride in the work you do inside a family and not from how they make out in the world. “It’s good to want a child to do well, but it’s bad to want that glory to reflect back on you,” is what he says.

And then we’re back with Alanis. I say it wouldn’t be so awful to use the book to meet someone he thought he might like; that would be white magic, rather than black magic.]

My point is that it’s very weird because I think, I mean, I think I’m as worried about the changing from white magic, using white magic—that’s actually a nice way of thinking about it. I always think that it’s just, it’s leading with the karmic chin. You know, setting yourself up for shit.

But it’s real weird—like a date with Alanis Morissette? Where I would clearly be on the, the power dynamics, I’d be on the downside of the power dynamics, and I would just get mostly to gawk and ogle. Doesn’t strike me that way—sleeping with a groupie does. And I think it’s one reason why even though I bantered to you about it, when push came to shove, I just, I just didn’t do it.

It’s a nice thing, a reality gauge, thinking about Alanis: in the real scale of the world, to a certain segment of the population you’re extremely important. In the eyes of her or her fans …

And it’s not even an entirely nice thing. I mean, one reason why it was so riveting when we all watched, you know, my college colleague in that HBO thing, is that I realized that more people were watching him do this than would ever, in the sum total of … ever read my thing.

Might not be true
.

HBO’s got what, five, six million subscriptions?

That’s probably real interesting about
Rolling Stone
. You get to see the machine. You get to see what the real stuff looks like. I don’t see how they stand it. I don’t see how they stand both the good of it and the bad of it. I mean it would be like
this
, with a three-digit exponent. You know, it’s no wonder it drives them mad.

[Tears down tour schedule, and throws it away.]

Are you done in the bathroom? Because I’ve gotta wreak some havoc in there.

[And there is something he’s excited about. Tonight, a few hours after I roll away from his house, and pass Circus Video, and a beef chain called Steak N’ Shake, and flip away from Phil Collins on one radio station to find him still upright and singing on another, and past the sign that lists Bloomington’s sister cities—through a program called “People to People” at the State Department—as Canterbury, England, Vladimir, Russia, and Asahikawa, Japan, past a town called Money Creek, as if the surveyors ran short on names and just decided to talk turkey, David will get to be by himself for a while. And then he’s going to get dressed, and go to a Baptist church. For a dance.]

It’s a black Baptist church, but a lot of people come, because black Baptists can
dance
.

You dance?

I’ve just discovered in the last few years that I could do it, and I’ve discovered that I really like it. Although I’m still not very good. I tend to do the jerk and the swim. Which is the nice thing in Bloomington, you’re completely hip if you do that. I don’t Vogue. That’s the one thing I refuse to do. I will not Vogue.

Where’s the church?

Dance Night is at a thing called—this is going to sound very rural. There’s the Plumber’s Hall, that’s out actually where we ate. And there’s another thing called the Machinist’s Hall. Kind of big, kinda smooth tile floors. It’s cool. All the people come in, and they’ve all got their dancing shoes on and stuff.

[A friend just called to invite him, he’s going. It’s nice to think; because as much as he’s talked about being alone, he hasn’t been the whole time I’ve seen him, and for weeks, and my sense is he might not be ready for it. It’s the end of the book for him, after all.]

What kind of music?

Everything from cheesy ’70s disco to cheesy ’90s top forty. You don’t go for the music.

People from State Farm?

Nah. This isn’t really a white-collar thing. Races don’t always mix in this town, but when they do it’s nice. There’s a few of us who go to
this, there’s this church up near campus, and that church is kind of good friends with this black Baptist church.

So you’ll have friends there?

Sure. It’s put on by this, I forget what it’s called, Some Number Baptist Church of Bloomington. But they—it’s nice. Everybody’s just, everyone more or less wants to leave each other alone.

Cheers
, NBC, 1982–1993. (“I submit, it’s kinda like a Sam and Diane thing.”)

When Harry Met Sally
, Rob Reiner, 1988.

Lost Highway
, David Lynch, 1996.
David later told an NPR interviewer the movie had been, in fact, not so good; he called it “kind of a dink.” The Lynch piece appears in his 1996 collection,
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
, under the title “David Lynch Keeps His Head.” He told NPR, “There’s a coldness and a meanness about Lynch that I don’t like and that also kind of fascinates me. You know, we like to watch sadism from a distance.”

Miller’s Crossing
, the Coen Brothers, 1990.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars books. (A
Princess of Mars
, etc.) 1917–1964
A series of novels about a Civil War veteran finding love and six-armed aliens on the red planet.

TENNIS

The story he discusses from
Girl with Curious Hair
—stolen in Washington Square Park, rewritten at Yaddo—is called “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” David says, “It’s also a kind of sequel to John Barth’s ‘Lost in the Funhouse.’”

“Lost in the Funhouse,” John Barth. Collected in
Lost in the Funhouse
, 1968, and one out of four college short-story anthologies.

Thief
, Michael Mann, 1981.

Die Hard
, John McTiernan, 1988.

David wrote about religion—“It’s very hard to talk about people’s relationship with any kind of God, in any book later than like Dostoyevsky. I mean the culture, it’s all wrong for it now”—in
a Dostoyevsky piece in 1995. “Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky” is in
Consider the Lobster
.

The Stand, Firestarter
, “Stand by Me” (as “The Body” in
Different Seasons
), Stephen King; 1978, 1980, and 1982, apparently a sweet spot for King.

David’s cruise-ship piece is the title essay in
A Supposedly Fun Thing
. When David turned it in to
Harper’s
in 1995, his editor Colin Harrison remembers, “It was very clear to us that we had pure cocaine on our hands.”

“The Balloon” is a Donald Barthelme story. It’s collected in
Sixty Stories
, 1988. In a 1996
Salon
interview, David told Laura Miller it was “the first story I ever read that made me want to be a writer.”

What David discusses about “And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn’t all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being?” sounds very much like the subject of his final novel,
The Pale King
, forthcoming from Little, Brown.

Metropolis
, Fritz Lang, 1927.
You can find the photo I think David is talking about as a proposed
Infinite Jest
cover at
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3271/2692735429_fa52fdda7e.jpg
.

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
, Robert Weine, 1920.

Mark Leyner.
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist; Et Tu, Babe
, 1990, 1992.
Here’s Leyner from
My Cousin
describing a drive across David’s home state: “Corn corn corn corn Stuckey’s. Corn corn corn corn Stuckey’s.”

Wild Wild West
, CBS, 1965–69.

Batman
, ABC, 1966–68.

Braveheart
, Mel Gibson, 1995.

Schindler’s List
, Steven Spielberg, 1994.

Always
, Steven Spielberg, 1989.

The Hardy Boys
, Franklin W. Dixon, 1927–2005;
Nancy Drew
, Carolyn Keene, 1930–2004. With great, reassuring covers: mysterious paintings and a bold typeface that suggested order would soon be restored.

DAVID LYNCH

Brazil
, Terry Gilliam, 1985.

On not having a TV: “Having to go over to friends’ houses to watch TV
works
. It’s very much like taking an Anabuse or something. I mean, it just lowers the amount that I can watch.” David writes about going to a church-friend’s home to watch broadcasts on September 11, 2001, in “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s,” collected in
Consider the Lobster
.

Pauline Kael. Former
New Yorker
film critic. Her two omnibuses are
5001 Nights at the Movies
, 1991, and
For Keeps
, 1994.

True Romance
, Quentin Tarantino (directed by Tony Scott), 1993. The scene David discusses—Chris Walken’s verbal square-off with an eventually heroic Dennis Hopper—begins at minute 45:40, ends at 56:00.

The End of Alice
, A. M. Holmes, 1996.

Angels
, Denis Johnson, 1981.

Crimson Tide
, Tony Scott, 1995.
The “you got a lot of heart, kid” actor David noticed—spoon-size roles in
True Romance
and
Crimson Tide
—is a young, pre
-Sopranos
James Gandolfini.

Glory
, Marshall Herskowitz, 1989.

Broadcast News
, James L. Brooks, 1986.

The Hit
, Stephen Frears, 1984.

Four Rooms
, Quentin Tarantino, et al., 1995.

Blade Runner
, Ridley Scott, 1981.

The Screwtape Letters
, C. S. Lewis, 1942.

“Strange Currencies,” R.E.M., 1994. (From the album
Monster
.)

“(What If God Was) One of Us,” Joan Osborne, 1995. (From the album
Relish
.)

“Glycerine,” Bush, 1995. (From the album
Sixteen Stone
.)

“The Big Ship,” Brian Eno, 1975. (From the album
Another Green World
.)

The Letterman story—“My Appearance”—gets collected in David’s
Girl with Curious Hair
. An actress is so nervous about appearing on the talk show she arranges for her husband to feed her answers via a hidden earpiece. The
Jeopardy!
story, “Little Expressionless Animals,” and the Johnson story, “Me and Lyndon,” are in the same collection.

The TV essay, “E Unibus Pluram,” appears in
A Supposedly Fun Thing
.

The State Fair piece—“Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All”—premiered in
Harper’s
, is collected in
A Supposedly Fun Thing
.

The Dirty Dozen
, Robert Aldrich, 1967.

Kelly’s Heroes
, Brian G. Hutton, 1970.

Gravity’s Rainbow
, Thomas Pynchon, 1973.

Ada
, Vladimir Nabokov, 1967.

David wrote about the Guggenheim Grant in “Death Is Not the End,” the second story in 1999’s
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
. The main character is America’s most successful poet, “known in American literary circles as ‘the poet’s poet,’” with a bucketful of grants and prizes, including a Nobel. Here’s the quote: