by Susan Orlean
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
THE AMERICAN MAN, AGE TEN
MEET THE SHAGGS
SHOW DOG
THE MAUI SURFER GIRLS
LIVING LARGE
I WANT THIS APARTMENT
DEVOTION ROAD
AFTER THE PARTY
SHOOT THE MOON
SHORT PEOPLE
HER TOWN
KING OF THE ROAD
TIFFANY
A GENTLE REIGN
THIS IS PERFECT
SHORT CUTS
FIGURES IN A MALL
THE THREE SISTERS
SERIOUSLY SILLY
LA MATADORA REVISA SU MAQUILLAJE/
(THE BULLFIGHTER CHECKS HER MAKEUP)
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT PAGE
For John Gillespie
who makes me so happy
INTRODUCTION
ENCOUNTERS WITH CLOWNS, KINGS, SINGERS, AND SURFERS
I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE A WRITER. IN FACT, as far as I can recall, I have never wanted to be anything other than a writer. In junior high school I took a career guidance test that suggested I would do well as either an army officer or a forest ranger but I didn’t care: I wanted only to be a writer, even though I didn’t know how you went about becoming one, especially the kind of writer I wanted to be. I didn’t want to be a newspaper reporter, because I have never cared about knowing something first, and I didn’t want to write only about things that were considered “important” and newsworthy; I wanted to write about things that intrigued me, and to write about them in a way that would surprise readers who might not have expected to find these things intriguing. During college I kept a journal with a section called “Items Under Consideration,” which was a meditation on what I was going to do once I graduated. It was filled with entries like this:
What to Do/Future Plans
Why I Should Go into Journalism
PRO:
Fun!
Interesting!
Writing!
Activity and excitement!
Good people (maybe)
Social value
CON:
No jobs available
Have to live in NYC for serious work on a magazine
Talent is questionable
Except for some interstitial waitressing, my first job out of college was writing for a tiny magazine in Oregon, and I made it clear at the interview that I would absolutely, positively die if I didn’t get hired. After all, I knew being a writer would be “Fun! Interesting!” and full of “Activity and excitement!” I had no experience to speak of, except that I had been the editor of my high school yearbook. When I went to the job interview in Oregon, I brought a copy of the yearbook and a kind of wild, exuberant determination, which was the only thing that could account for my having gotten the job.
What I wanted to write about were the people and places around me. I didn’t want to write about famous people simply because they were famous, and I didn’t want to write about charming little things that were self-consciously charming and little; I wasn’t interested in documenting or predicting trends, and I didn’t have polemics to air or sociological theories to spin out. I just wanted to write what are usually called “features”—a term that I hate because it sounds so fluffy and lightweight, like pillow stuffing, but that is used to describe stories that move at their own pace, rather than the news stories that race to keep time with events. The subjects I was drawn to were often completely ordinary, but I was confident that I could find something extraordinary in their ordinariness. I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it. The challenge was to write these stories in a way that got other people as interested in them as I was. The piece that convinced me this was possible was Mark Singer’s profile of three building superintendents that ran in The New Yorker when I was in college. The piece was eloquent and funny and full of wonder even though the subject was unabashedly mundane. After I read it, I had that rare, heady feeling that I now knew something about life I hadn’t known before I read it. At the same time, the story was so natural that I couldn’t believe it had never been written until then. Like the very best examples of literary nonfiction, it was at once familiar and original, like a folk melody—as good an example as you could ever find of the poetry of facts and the art in ordinary life.
My first feature for The New Yorker was a profile of Nana Kwabena Oppong, a cabdriver in New York City. Nana’s life as a cabbie was the embodiment of ordinariness, but he also happened to have the extraordinary honor of being the king of his tribe, the Ashantis, in the United States. His life seesawed between its two extremes, between the humdrum concerns of daily life, like doing maintenance on his cab and prodding his kids to do their homework and looking for a new apartment, and his royal concerns, like resolving property disputes and officiating at Ashanti ceremonies and overseeing the transportation of deceased members of the tribe back to Ghana so they could be buried in their motherland. I spent months on the story. When I would get together with him, I never knew whether I was meeting with Nana the cabdriver or Nana the king. By the end of our time together, of course, I realized that there was no real difference, and that the marvel was watching him weave together these strands of his life.
Just before I profiled Nana, I had been asked by Esquire to write a piece about the child actor Macaulay Culkin, who was ten years old at the time. I don’t rule out doing celebrity profiles, but I wasn’t in the mood to do one right then and I wasn’t very interested in Macaulay Culkin. Then my editor told me that he was planning to use the headline THE AMERICAN MAN, AGE TEN. On a whim, I told my editor that I would do the piece if I could find a typical American ten-year-old man to profile instead—someone who I thought was more deserving of that headline. It was an improbable idea since they had already photographed Macaulay for the cover of the magazine, but my editor decided to take me up on it. I was completely dismayed. First of all, I had to figure out what I’d had in mind when I made the suggestion. Obviously, there is no such thing as a “typical” boy or girl, and even if I could establish some very generous guidelines for what constitutes typicalness—say, a suburban kid from a middle-class family who went to public school and didn’t have an agent, a manager, or a chauffeur—there was the problem of choosing one such kid. I considered going to a shopping mall and just snatching the first ten-year-old I found, but instead I asked my friends to ask their friends if they knew anyone with a ten-year-old, and eventually I got the name of a boy who lived in the New Jersey suburbs. I liked Colin Duffy right away because he seemed unfazed by the prospect of my observing him for a couple of weeks. He was a wonderful kid, and I still marvel at how lucky I was to have stumbled on someone so endearing, but the truth is that if you set out to write about a ten-year-old boy, any boy would do. The particulars of the story would have been entirely different with a different boy, but the fundamentals would have been the same: An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and complicated and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain.
THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS I’m interested in writing about that settling on one drives me crazy. Usually it happens accidentally: Some bit of news will stick in my mind, or a friend will mention something, and suddenly a story presents itself or a subject engages me. For instance, I decided to profile Felipe Lopez, a star high school basketball player, because I had stumbled across a headline in the paper one day that said CHRIST THE
KING AIMS FOR REVENGE. It was one of those headlines that stops you dead in your tracks, and even after you figure it out, you can’t quite get it out of your mind. Christ the King turned out to be a Catholic school in New York, and its basketball team was bent on avenging an embarrassing loss to another school. Before reading the story I hadn’t realized that there was a Catholic basketball league in the city, and that alone got me interested. But what really hooked me was remembering how ardent people are about high school sports—I guess it was the fierceness of that headline—and that led me to thinking about how a kid who was really good at some sport must lead a very unusual sort of life, and then I started wondering who was the best high school basketball player in the country. I could only hope and pray that he went to a school as evocatively named as Christ the King. As it turned out, Felipe didn’t—he went to a school with the very homely name of Rice—but he did live in New York, not far from my apartment, and, like Colin, was happy to have me follow him around.
Some of these stories are about people who are well known, such as the designer Bill Blass and the Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding, and almost all of these were suggested to me rather than having been my own ideas, which tend to be about people who are not yet well known nor ever will be. Bill Blass was suggested to me by Tina Brown, who was editor of The New Yorker at the time, and I accepted the assignment when I found out that he still made personal trunk show appearances in small cities around the country, even though most people at his level in the fashion world had long since given it up. I loved the idea of profiling a world-class designer not in New York or Paris or Milan but in Nashville, at a ladies’ luncheon in the middle of the week. Writing about Tonya Harding was a different kind of challenge. She had been in the news constantly after the attack on Nancy Kerrigan, and it was hard to imagine that there was a story left about her that hadn’t already been told and retold. But I had noticed that all the newspaper stories mentioned she was from Portland, Oregon, which wasn’t true: She was from the exurbs twenty miles or so outside of Portland. Because I used to live in Oregon, I knew the two places were entirely different, even antithetical, and I was convinced that Tonya Harding made a lot more sense if you understood something about where she was raised. I assumed that I wouldn’t get to interview her when I went out to Oregon, so I interviewed people who cared about her and who lived in her town. It was a little like studying animal tracks and concluding something about a creature from the impression it has left behind. I still wish I could have talked to her, but maybe that will be another story another time.
I LOVE WRITING about places and things almost as much as I like writing about people, and I probably spend half of my time on stories that are primarily about a particular landscape or environment or event. For this book, though, I decided to gather together only pieces that center on people, to present an assembly of the various characters I’ve profiled so far in my career. There is nothing harder or more interesting than trying to say something eloquent about another person and no process is more challenging. It’s much easier to, say, climb Mount Fuji and write about the experience (which I’ve done) than it is to hang around with a ten-year-old boy or an unemployed Hollywood agent or a famous fashion designer trying to be both unobtrusive and penetrating, and then try to make some sense out of what I’ve seen. It’s just that people are so interesting. Writing about them, in tight focus, is irresistible. I am sure that I will continue doing profiles as long as I’m still writing, stepping in and out—lightly, I hope—of other people’s lives.
Readers often ask me if I stay in touch with anyone I’ve written about. It’s an understandable question; after all, when you profile people, you spend a lot of time with them, and you do come to know them very well—sometimes even better than people you think of as your friends. But writing a profile is a process that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Usually when it has ended, the writer and the subject have very little in common except for the fact that they were for a while a writer and a subject. There are some notable exceptions. Robert Stuart, the hairdresser I wrote about in a piece called “Short Cuts,” still cuts my hair, so I see him every six to eight weeks. Bill Blass (“King of the Road”) invited me to his runway shows for years after my piece ran, so I would see him—from a distance—every fall and spring, when he would come out to take his runway bow. He recently retired, so I won’t be seeing him in spotlights anymore. Jill Meilus, the real estate broker (“I Want This Apartment”) became a friend, and I have lunch with her now and again; if I sell my apartment, I will probably ask her to handle it. I’m certainly not in touch with Tonya Harding, but I always pay attention when I hear about her in the news; I think she was arrested recently for hitting her boyfriend on the head with a hubcap. As far as I can tell from the coverage of the tennis circuit, the Maleeva sisters (“The Three Sisters”) have retired from the professional circuit. Felipe Lopez, after an erratic four years on the St. John’s University basketball team, achieved the almost impossible dream of becoming an NBA player. The Jackson Southernaires (“Devotion Road”) are still singing gospel and have performed in New York several times since I wrote about them. I’ve gone to hear them a couple of times. Right after my piece was published, a French movie company made a documentary about them that was shown on European TV. I still read the Millerton News, where Heather Heaton was an ace reporter (“Her Town”), but I no longer see her byline, so I assume she’s moved on to a bigger paper in a bigger town. The Shaggs (“Meet the Shaggs”) played together for the first time in seventeen years after my story came out. I went to the sold-out show and couldn’t believe I was seeing it, and I think they couldn’t believe it was happening, either. When a young man came up to Dot and showed her his Shaggs tattoo, it was as if time had not just stopped but had doubled back on itself, and the Wiggin sisters were teenagers again in New Hampshire, trying their best to play “Philosophy of the World.”
Inevitably, though, I lose track of many of the people I’ve written about, people like Colin Duffy, Nana Kwabena Oppong, Big Lee, Tiffany, Biff, Silly Billy, Leo Herschman, and on and on and on. It’s the one part of the job—this “Fun! Interesting! Active! Exciting!” job—that makes me melancholy. I know it is unrealistic and impractical to think I could stay close to everyone I’ve profiled, and even if I could, we would never be as close as we were when I was writing about them; still, it’s hard not to feel attached to people once you’ve been allowed into their lives. So what I have of them, and always will have, is just that moment we spent together—now preserved on paper, bound between covers, cast out into the world—and they will never get any older, their faces will never fade, their dreams will still be within reach, and I will forever still be listening as hard as I can.
April 10, 2000
THE AMERICAN MAN, AGE TEN
IF COLIN DUFFY AND I WERE TO GET MARRIED, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter. We would sleep in our clothes. We would both be good at Nintendo Street Fighter II, but Colin would be better than me. We would have some homework, but it would never be too hard and we would always have just finished it. We would eat pizza and candy for all of our meals. We wouldn’t have sex, but we would have crushes on each other and, magically, babies would appear in our home. We would win the lottery and then buy land in Wyoming, where we would have one of every kind of cute animal. All the while, Colin would be working in law enforcement—probably the FBI. Our favorite movie star, Morgan Freeman, would visit us occasionally. We would listen to the same Eurythmics song (“Here Comes the Rain Again”) over and over again and watch two hours of television every Friday night. We would both be good at football, have best friends, and know how to drive; we would cure AIDS and the garbage problem and everything that hurts animals. We would hang out a lot with Colin’s dad. For fun, we would load a slingshot with dog food and shoot it at my butt. We would have a very good life.
&nb
sp; HERE ARE THE PARTICULARS about Colin Duffy: He is ten years old, on the nose. He is four feet eight inches high, weighs seventy-five pounds, and appears to be mostly leg and shoulder blade. He is a handsome kid. He has a broad forehead, dark eyes with dense lashes, and a sharp, dimply smile. I have rarely seen him without a baseball cap. He owns several, but favors a University of Michigan Wolverines model, on account of its pleasing colors. The hat styles his hair into wild disarray. If you ever managed to get the hat off his head, you would see a boy with a nimbus of golden-brown hair, dented in the back, where the hat hits him.
Colin lives with his mother, Elaine; his father, Jim; his older sister, Megan; and his little brother, Chris, in a pretty pale blue Victorian house on a bosky street in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. Glen Ridge is a serene and civilized old town twenty miles west of New York City. It does not have much of a commercial district, but it is a town of amazing lawns. Most of the houses were built around the turn of the century and are set back a gracious, green distance from the street. The rest of the town seems to consist of parks and playing fields and sidewalks and backyards—in other words, it is a far cry from South-Central Los Angeles and from Bedford-Stuyvesant and other, grimmer parts of the country where a very different ten-year-old American man is growing up today.
There is a fine school system in Glen Ridge, but Elaine and Jim, who are both schoolteachers, choose to send their children to a parents’ cooperative elementary school in Montclair, a neighboring suburb. Currently, Colin is in fifth grade. He is a good student. He plans to go to college, to a place he says is called Oklahoma City State College University. OCSCU satisfies his desire to live out west, to attend a small college, and to study law enforcement, which OCSCU apparently offers as a major. After four years at Oklahoma City State College University, he plans to work for the FBI. He says that getting to be a police officer involves tons of hard work, but working for the FBI will be a cinch, because all you have to do is fill out one form, which he has already gotten from the head FBI office. Colin is quiet in class but loud on the playground. He has a great throwing arm, significant foot speed, and a lot of physical confidence. He is also brave. Huge wild cats with rabies and gross stuff dripping from their teeth, which he says run rampant throughout his neighborhood, do not scare him. Otherwise, he is slightly bashful. This combination of athletic grace and valor and personal reserve accounts for considerable popularity. He has a fluid relationship to many social groups, including the superbright nerds, the ultrajocks, the flashy kids who will someday become extremely popular and socially successful juvenile delinquents, and the kids who will be elected president of the student body. In his opinion, the most popular boy in his class is Christian, who happens to be black, and Colin’s favorite television character is Steve Urkel on Family Matters, who is black, too, but otherwise he seems uninterested in or oblivious to race. Until this year, he was a Boy Scout. Now he is planning to begin karate lessons. His favorite schoolyard game is football, followed closely by prison dodgeball, blob tag, and bombardo. He’s crazy about athletes, although sometimes it isn’t clear if he is absolutely sure of the difference between human athletes and Marvel Comics action figures. His current athletic hero is Dave Meggett. His current best friend is named Japeth. He used to have another best friend named Ozzie. According to Colin, Ozzie was found on a doorstep, then changed his name to Michael and moved to Massachusetts, and then Colin never saw him or heard from him again.