(Not that You Asked)

by Steve Almond

  Of course, plenty of aspiring writers and publishing folks also read lit blogs. With coverage of books all but disappearing from corporate media, these sites serve as instant clearinghouses for news items, local readings, and reviews. Many (Sarvas’s included) advocate for favorite writers. They allow people to feel connected to the world of letters.

  All this is perfectly commendable. At their finest, these blogs contribute to a serious discussion of literature and the world at large, which is why I happily write pieces for the more thoughtful ones. But lit bloggers also have a tendency to boil that world down to a series of conflicts and controversies. Reading them often becomes a legitimized form of scandalmongering, a chance to revel in the failings of others.

  The impulse is natural enough. The modern writer is engaged in an enterprise almost guaranteed to crush the spirit. Blogs merely serve as bulletin boards for the resulting feelings of despair and envy. Their chosen topic happens to be literature, but it could just as well be sports or politics.

  In this sense, Sarvas has less in common with his hero James Wood than he does with Rush Limbaugh. Both are part of a burgeoning culture of grievance. They engage their audiences not through serious critical analysis of their alleged domain (policy, literature) but through a demagogue’s excitation of spite. If this era has proved anything, it’s that the demagogues win unless you smack them back.

  FOR THOSE OF YOU wondering why I would lavish all these words on a twerp like Sarvas, there’s your answer. I am well aware that in the process, I have made a dream come true for the guy. Yes, he has officially infiltrated my world. And all it took was two years of sustained slander.

  He hasn’t realized this—and he never will—but his subconscious motive for attacking me was the hope that I would someday write this very piece. He envisioned something truly vicious, something he could feed off for a good long time. I’ve tried to oblige. But I’m also going to offer him something he wasn’t bargaining for: my forgiveness.

  I don’t mean pity. I do pity the guy. But that’s a condescending posture, and it only gets you halfway to the truth. I mean forgiveness. I forgive the guy for hating me so much. If I were in his position, I would feel the same way. And I have. I’ve felt the same burning jealousy he has, toward those writers whose artistic and commercial success shames me. If I haven’t broadcast those feelings to the world, it is only because my act is a little more polished than his.

  But we’re basically the same guy. We both face the same doomed task: to write in an era that has turned away from the written word. I wish Sarvas the best. May his finest motives win out in the end. That would be a triumph no one could ever take away from him, or diminish. Shit man, it might even be a work of art.1

  HEART RADICAL

  I can’t remember the particulars, how it started with Barry Hannah. I’m pretty sure I was in grad school, turning my tender ambition at words into an endless feud. Nothing made much sense. I lived in the South (how had I wound up in the South?) in this crappy carriage house with a mattress on the floor. I cooked quesadillas over an open gas flame and drank cherry Coke from the big bottle. From time to time, a lady spent the night, but she always smelled the loneliness and I couldn’t bring myself to beg. My stories were great gray puddles of blah.

  I was working so hard at being a laudable young writer, but no one was giving me any eggs. I wasn’t getting what I deserved. I was getting ripped off. So every day I sat there in that broiling apartment, in a fog of resentment, pumping out B.O. and wondering when things were going to change. Someone must have read the symptoms, or maybe I had the good sense to go to the library on my own—whatever the case, I found myself with a paperback of Airships, dating to 1979 and showing all of those years.

  The first line I read was this:

  “My head’s burning off and I got a heart about to bust out of my ribs.”

  You’ll have to remember that this was in grad school, where, by no exact fault of anyone on the premises, the herd was pushed (and pushed itself) in the direction of serious and subtle prose, where the high crime of any workshop was overt emotionalism, the abject declaration that what we were up to mattered.

  So there was Barry Hannah and his weird, scampering, unstoppable blood leaping against all that.

  “I got to be a man again,” he wrote.

  And: “When it comes off, I see she’s got great humpers in her bra.”

  And: “Everyone is getting crazier on the craziness of simply being too far from home for decent return.”

  He was a guy in whose presence I could actually, finally, breathe. It didn’t matter that his stories were loose and Southern and baroque—things I would never be—only that they were authentic. And this wasn’t because of his great bulging brain (like Faulkner) or his macho restraint (like Hemingway). It was because he used language to express extreme feeling states with such naked precision. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that his extreme feeling states summoned the language. I knew this much: His insides were soft and red, like a tomato. It was that way for both of us. Only he was able, somehow, to make gorgeous frescoes where I made only pulp.

  I read Airships chronically, maybe a dozen times, and each time I wanted to lick the pages. Those stories! All full of death and sex and grotesque types chewing to the end of their tethers. What kind of world was this? Why, in the face of such pain and humiliation, did I want never to leave them?

  I can remember the long August days of nothing, the dumb, stoned parties, my idiot heart clutching at anyone who came close and driving them off. I was living in the Bible. Everything was wrath and betrayal. I took it all twice as hard. I shaved my head. I wanted to look like the freak I was.

  There was one party in particular, later on, in autumn. This was the night I was supposed to consummate matters with my love interest, a fraudulent poet with a nice big caboose. The energy between us was deep and crazy. We were going to electrocute one another with desire. We were going to bleed the same blood. But before I could touch her in any real way, she turned away and fled into the sticky night, and another friend, just about to dump me also, stared down at the concrete pilings of my porch and said, “Well, you know, you are kind of a train wreck.”

  Everyone else left too, off to be happy and normal, to dream in placid colors, and I went inside my place and looked at the mess from the party, the beer bottle ashtrays and burnt tortillas, and my ears were ringing with the hurt. I was disgusted with myself: my dull sentences, my social failures, my inability to feel less about the world.

  Those were the nights I sought out Airships. I’d sit there and read a sentence like “I’m going to die from love” and start crying. And what’s strange is that it felt so good to cry, there was a kind of joy in it, because all feeling is joy, because the capacity for feeling is the great unstated human achievement, and because somewhere, off in the distance, I could see that my capacity to feel wasn’t going to mess me up forever, and that someday, if I kept at it, the writing thing, if I kept myself open to the lashings of the world, the true, brutal hurt of the place, I might start to get somewhere.

  So that’s what Airships was about for me: coming out of hiding as an emotionalist. Realizing that, amid the vanities and elisions of the Southern literary tradition, there was a deep, Christian possibility: that confession might actually cure, that love might act as a revolutionary force, that the chaos of one’s past and present, if fully experienced, might portend some glowing future.

  All of which sounds hopelessly lofty. All I mean is that reading the guy made me a more forgiving person. There’s room in this world for all of us freaks.

  PRETTY AUTHORS MAKE GRAVES

  There’s a helluva lot more of us…than you.

  —FRANK ZAPPA

  I was an ugly kid. Buck teeth. Fat cheeks. Bad hair. Terrible hair. You look at the old albums and it’s a museum of bad hair. I should have had myself shellacked.

  But listen: Most of the good writers out there are ugly. Butt ugly. Plug ugly. Fugly.
I’d give you a long list of examples, but I’m not interested in research. Research bores me. You know what I’m talking about, anyway. All that literary dogmeat. Except for Faulkner. Faulkner was hot. But he was a drunk, and he was mean to his kids.

  I only trust the ugly writers, anyway. Deep down, those are the ones who have earned their wrath. All the rest of them, the pretty boy and girl authors, fuck them. Or, better yet, don’t fuck them. Get them all hot and bothered. Tell them you know Terry Gross, you once dated her former personal assistant, then leave them there, lathered up and grinning in a hot cloud of their own fabulous bone structure.

  As for author photos, they’re a goddamn fraud. The photo on my first book is Exhibit A. It’s the most pathetic sensitivo-beefcake shot of the century. My friends tell me I look like a gay porn star. Maybe I am a gay porn star. Maybe my gay porn star name is Maxi Spray. Doesn’t matter. Anyone who’s seen me in person knows the truth.

  If you want to make art in this culture, if you want to shake people down for their feelings, you’re ugly by proxy anyway. All that’s going to happen is this: You’ll sit down and decide you’re profound and you’ll write a lot of dreck for a long time and various people along the way will feed you little niblets of praise, which you deserve, but not for what you’re actually writing, which is still a stinking heap of narcissism. Then, eventually, you’ll start to send your work out to the bad parents of the world and they’ll find it (and you) ugly and send you little slips of paper with passive-aggressive inscriptions printed by machines and you’ll start to see yourself, finally, as they do: an ugly little wannabe freak with a car that makes guys stop you in the parking lot of your supermarket and offer body work for cheap. This is called progress.

  Because what you’re aiming for here is to rediscover that inconsolably ugly little kid inside you, because that’s what triggers the beauty jones.

  One measure that will help: Stay away from healthy romantic interaction. The worst thing you can do is to use the funk of sexual success as a hedge against the appropriate depths of self-horror. Remember, you’re probably clever enough to fool someone better-looking for a while. But in the end, you’re ugly. That’s where you live, and you live there alone.

  The rest (bad news!) consists of the dogged, lonely work. You sit there. You push your characters around. And when you, or they, feel ugly enough, have felt ugly enough for long enough, a little thrush of beauty unfurls to rescue both of you. Then it disappears.

  If you’re truly unlucky, some of the bad parents out there will start to accept your crap and you’ll move on to the next set of bad parents until finally you’re dealing with the world of New York Publishing, which is inhabited by bright, ambitious people who hate your guts for still trying. They will make you feel worse and worse and uglier and uglier and in the end you’ll need to thank them, because they, too, are helping you find that inner ugly schmuck kid I keep mentioning.

  It is perfectly reasonable to fantasize about punching these asswipes. But they are only emissaries from the world of commerce, bit players, pimps and petty tyrants, and they have only the numbers to defend them, which is to say they have no defense, whereas all of us, the artists, we have our ugliness and the resultant beauty pinned to our lapels.

  Are you picking up what I’m putting down?

  Let me tell you a little story.

  When I was in seventh grade I fell in with a crowd of pretty people. At my school, they were called rah rahs. They were viewed with derision by the rest of the population, who were either physically ugly or wrongly colored or suffered from the ultimate form of disfigurement, which, in this culture, is poverty.

  I myself was plain ugly, but I’d gone to a grade school that nobody recognized and so I was a novelty and eager to please and, as such, was adopted by the rah rahs. There was one girl in particular, Nicole Taylor, and she was absolutely stunning: blond hair, blue eyes, ski jump nose, just what you’d expect. She was also—and I’m not sure why I’m mentioning this, but it seems obscurely relevant—a Mormon.

  One night, we were at a party up in Los Altos Hills, the wealthy part of town, and we started playing spin the bottle. Nicole spun the bottle and it pointed at me. I was absolutely terrified. She knee-walked over and she set her lips to mine and stuck her tongue out. What I’m telling you: She pried my mouth open with her hard little tongue and jabbed it around once or twice and then pulled away and returned to her place with an icy expression. She never forgave me for that indignity, which was the indignity of the beautiful having to embrace the ugly.

  At a party some months later, at her own lavish home, I and a kid named Troy took part in an impromptu chugalug contest. Troy was as boring as a stump, but he was also the most handsome boy in the history of the world. He was so handsome you wanted to lick his skin. So we chugged our bottles of Sprite and let the carbonation burn our throats and suddenly Nicole appeared in front of us and said: Steve Almond, if you spit that soda on me I’ll have my boyfriend kick your ass!

  I spat the soda on her.

  I didn’t mean to. It was a reflex. Nicole burst into tears. She spent the rest of the party in a state of puffy bereavement. Everyone shook their heads. Nicole got what she wanted; I was neatly expulsed from the rah rahs.

  The lesson is this: Justice can be its own form of beauty. And this: The ugly are doomed to a certain kind of solitude. All right, fine. What else is the life of a writer? We’re all frauds waiting to be found out. We’re all cowering dogs. We’re all hoping to wring a little beauty from the neck of shame. Fine. Fine fine fine.

  Let me tell you another story.

  When I was in tenth grade I went to see a play at the local high school auditorium. It was a play about Vietnam, something righteous and tragic. I got there late, so I had to sit in the front row. (Do I need to tell you that I was alone? That I could not find anyone to accompany me?) Just at the end of the second act, during the big, tense soliloquy by the star—who was supposed to be ugly, mangled by the war, but was in fact as handsome as James Dean—I cut a fart. It wasn’t a very loud fart. Just a quiet little fart that slipped out. But it came during one of those hushed, actorly pauses and caused the people sitting in the front three rows to start laughing in soft convulsions. When the lights went up I hurried from the theater and went to get my bike from the racks. A bunch of kids were behind me, laughing. When I turned around they stopped abruptly and one of them, a sweet homely girl named Kendall, came over and asked me how I was doing. She felt bad for me. I was The Boy Who Farted. For the rest of high school, I would be The Boy Who Farted. I would be renowned, in the small, merciless universe of my high school, for having let a little cloud of ugliness escape my body in public.

  When people ask me how I came to write and why I write so much and why there’s such an embarrassing yearning for beauty in the shit I write, I often feel like telling them this story. Asking them: What would you do if you were The Boy Who Farted? Wouldn’t you want to persuade the world to regard you in some more flattering light?

  A few more items:

  Buy art. Quit mucking about like a cheapskate and wolfing down burgers from Fat Food. Stop throwing your money down Hollywood’s sewers. Vote with your dough and vote for the stuff written or sculpted or sung by the ugly. Actually concentrate on who you’re fucking. Hold your one and only heart to a higher standard. And so on. I’m proud to be ugly, and proud to make pretty things.

  What are you?

  DEATH BY LOBSTER PAD THAI

  A COUNTERPHOBIC PAEAN TO FRIENDSHIP, CRUSTACEANS, AND ORAL TRANSCENDENCE

  I am frightened of many things: death, Mormons, Stilton cheese, scorpions, Dick Cheney, the freeways of Los Angeles. But I am perhaps most frightened of lobsters. The spiny antennae, the armor-plated cephalothorax, the serrated claws—they are, to my way of thinking, giant aquatic cockroaches who can snap your finger off.

  I mention this because for the past few years now I have been heading up to Maine to visit my pals Tom and Scott, and specifically to parta
ke of the transcendent Lobster Pad Thai that they prepare together, lovingly, painstakingly, over the course of a long, drunken summer afternoon. And because this past summer I played an unwitting (and reluctant) role in the preparation of the greatest single Lobster Pad Thai in the history of man. And lobster.

  It began with a simple request: Would I be willing to stop by an establishment called Taylor Seafood to pick up some things?

  Of course I would.

  “We’ll need a pound or two of shrimp,” Tom said. “And some lobsters.”

  I swallowed.

  “They’re selling four-pound lobsters at a great price.”

  I now spent perhaps half a minute trying to imagine myself picking up a four-pound lobster, with my actual hands, but blood kept getting all over the lens.

  “Hello?” Tom said. “Hello?”

  “Yes,” I said miserably.

  “Did you get that?”

  “Yeah. I got it. Four-pound lobsters.”

  “Four of them. We’ll reimburse you when you get here.”

  You’ll reimburse me, I thought, if I live that long.

  I’M NOT SURE how many of you out there have seen a four-pound lobster. (Most of what you see in the grocery stores or restaurants are less than half that.) Neither my partner in crime Erin nor I was quite prepared.

  The creatures were—as Tom would later observe unhelpfully—larger than many newborn infants. Their tails were Japanese fans. Their claws were baseball mitts. They squirmed unhappily as the guy working the counter packed them into flimsy plastic bags. The biggest one swung toward me before he was lowered down and I am here to tell you there was murder in those beady stalked eyes.