The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Well, I need to get this VW back to Colorado,” he said, and explained something about driving back with a girlfriend. It was too easy. By the end of the ride we’d struck a deal, exchanged phone numbers and Eliot’s address. A week later, at an appointed hour, he dropped the Bug at Eliot’s and vanished.

  I want to say: We drove that car as far as we could, abandoned it out West, and we did—amid a thousand jokes about how the hollow surfaces were likely packed with a million dollars in cocaine, we drove it precisely as far as Golden, Colorado, where we found a giant “M” carved into a mountain and a pizzeria with a whole stuffed moose spread around the four walls—head, hide, and hooves. It was farther west than I’d been and it was where Melvin lived and it was where Eliot and I realized we hadn’t considered how to cross the last third of this great land, hadn’t even broached the subject.

  We fooled around for three days in Colorado, at one point going to the Denver airport to try to cadge a lift on a mail plane, a useless notion we’d picked up who knows where. Then we found a ride board at the university in Boulder and scored Eliot a ride to Berkeley in a two-seater convertible driven by a reputedly beautiful girl—I never did lay eyes on her. That was the sole ride offered and so I volunteered to hitchhike to Berkeley, which I’d been daring myself to do for days. I knew how to hitchhike, right?

  This was an error of scale. Route 80 between Cheyenne, Wyoming, and San Francisco is a vast wasteland of desert and mountain dotted with a minimum of battened-down outposts offering gas, food, and gambling. Salt Lake City and Reno are the only hubs for a thousand miles; the rest is Little America and Elko, names you’d know only if you’d stopped there to repair a tire or wolf a hoagie. Hitchhiking in this Martian zone, where anyone who stops has per se volunteered to spend forty-five minutes to two hours with you—unless they mean to leave you somewhere between towns, and let’s not think about that, please—is a different proposition from hitchhiking in New England.

  In fact it stands in relation somewhat as facing major-league pitching does to swatting at a Wiffle ball. I offer this with equilibrium now. But when the insight came to find me, which it did roughly fifty miles out of Cheyenne, between the ride with the Christian who’d warned me extensively about accepting rides from the lawless wildcat oilmen in western Wyoming, and the next ride—for which I waited an hour—in a pickup truck full of what were unmistakably lawless wildcat oilmen, with rifles and open beers in the cab, well, when that insight first came over me it felt like getting diagnosed with a fatal illness.

  See me: hair growing back from a buzz, Elvis Costello nerd glasses, plaid shorts, Chuck Taylors, discernibly Jewish features (for anyone who’d seen those before), and with preparations for the desert consisting of a Meat Puppets T-shirt. Had I considered where I might spend the nights? No. Mothers, quake for your sons. I was not a stupid boy. I showed no particular signs. I did my homework and got into college and then one day stepped out onto Route 80 in August without any sunscreen.

  I remember every ride. I remember a ride with a Chinese shopkeeper inexplicably delivering a vanload of soda ninety miles through Nevada, and I remember a ride in a rig with a trucker who had a sleeping baby on the bedroll in back and wanted me to sit and make sure the baby didn’t roll off, and I remember a ride with a daredevil salesman, a professional speeder with radar and a CB radio who advanced me a hundred miles in under an hour. I remember them all but the story I want to tell is of Wendover, on the Utah-Nevada border.

  The ride that got me out of Utah—I thought—was with a guy who booked rock acts at one of the two large casinos in Wendover, Nevada, just over the line. The town is a speck in the Great Salt Lake Desert, the easternmost place to gamble on Route 80. He picked me up at four on a Friday for the two-hour ride into Wendover. We listened to Neil Young’s Everybody’s Rockin’ and I soaked in his air-conditioning and stared out the window at the marvelous, impossible salt flats, where lovers had trod off the highway to spell out their names in rocks now shining like black eyes against the white. The booker told me he’d been Three Dog Night’s road manager in his glory days. He was friendly, but after gauging my naïveté he mentioned casually that all rooms in the casinos were likely to be booked, then gently drew a line in the salt: After he dropped me off on the highway outside of Wendover, I was not to look him up and ask him for favors. He’d see the last of me on Route 80. No hard feelings.

  I waved off this weirdly prescient ultimatum, saying I meant to keep moving tonight, to push toward Reno. The sky had begun to glow when he deposited me on the off-ramp outside of town, a mile or so into Nevada. Oh, how I’d come soon to loathe that spot! I waited an hour at least, hungry and exhausted, gazing at the twinkle of Wendover across the highway, and at the expanse of waste that surrounded it and me. There’s nothing to stretch time like sticking your thumb out as darkness gathers in the desert, and that spot, on a Friday night when each car was packed with weekending Mormons, was the next thing to a hitchhiker’s worst nightmare.

  The nightmare itself strolled along at around seven: a drifter with a walking stick and Charles Manson eyes. He appraised me in one hungry glance.

  “Tough spot for a ride, huh?”

  Impossible, I thought, with you standing anywhere in sight. “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well, if you can’t get a lift and you want to crash, I’ve got a little camp …” He pointed past the highway, over a barren, scrubby hill.

  “I’m moving on.” Now more than ever.

  “Well, if you can’t …”

  “I’d probably just go get a room in town—” I stopped, but not before painting a bull’s-eye on my forehead.

  “Right … okay.”

  His posture said: I can take this kid.

  “In fact,” I said, “I think I’ll just go in now.” And, feeling the drifter watch my back, I walked the semicircle of ramp, into Wendover.

  There isn’t a town in America without a cheap motel, right? No cheap motel. Wendover was two things: a pair of glossy, booked-up casinos full of clean-cut couples and Mormon families, and a sprawl of shanties and trailers which housed the suspicious, hard-bitten croupiers and security guards and maids who serviced the casinos. I walked toward the neon, my skin alive with fear. Now I understood the booker’s admonition. If he hadn’t given it I’d absolutely be on his doorstep.

  I went into the Stateline Casino. You’ve seen a giant neon cowboy with a rising-and-sinking neon gun arm: that’s it. They’d been booked full for this weekend long ago. The woman at reception stared at me, with my sunburn and knapsack and stink. I asked if there was a deadline for cancellations.

  “Eight o’clock. Sometimes a room or two opens up. No guarantees.”

  Get lost! screamed her look. She couldn’t know I was measuring her hostility against the wolfish eyes of the drifter, a contest she couldn’t win. I camped in the lobby, eavesdropping for clues, watching her watch me. A young couple asked and got the same reply, and when I saw they were sticking around I went and stood righteously at the desk, marking my precedence. It was a quarter to eight.

  The couple queued behind me. I overheard their whispers. Somehow I was transparent here.

  She: “If there’s only one room we could let him spend the night in our car.”

  Yes, I thought. I had maybe ninety dollars left. The cheapest rooms were seventy.

  He: (long pause) “I don’t think so.”

  I hoped there was only one room. They deserved it. I think they got a room. I only remember my flood of relief as I handed over sweat-soaked cash for a key. I’d meant to put this creepy town behind me; now coughing up my nest egg for a night inside the castle walls was a triumph. Upstairs I cranked the air, showered for the first time in two days, and donned my good shirt. On the bedspread was a complimentary roll of quarters, to ensure that road-weary voyagers to Reno drop at least a bit of boodle here first. I figured I’d spend it on dinner and went downstairs.

  That night’s still my only night in a Nevada casino. I’m in t
he black: I took that ten-dollar roll of quarters to a slot machine and turned it into fifteen dollars. Then I quit, bought a shrimp salad with my winnings, and retired to a movie on cable: Farrah Fawcett and Charles Grodin in Sunburn. The next morning I checked out of the Stateline and walked back to my spot on the off-ramp, headed west.

  That’s when it got silly. I stood there in the sun from nine to noon. I counted cars, promised God I’d never hitchhike, and counted cars again. One hundred more, I decided. The hundred passed and I had no alternative but to clear the score and start again. Three times that morning I was cruised by the highway patrol, but I didn’t think much of it. I’d been searched and questioned once in Wyoming and survived. Anyway, I was still worried the drifter would reappear. Cops were my friends.

  Sometime after noon, when I’d begun to wonder if I was doomed to Wendover forever, they pulled over for a talk. Did I know hitchhiking was illegal in Nevada?

  No, I told them, I didn’t. “I’m just trying to get out of your town, sir, I’ll be gone as soon as I can.” This line had played in Wyoming, but it didn’t play here.

  It’s illegal, they explained. You can hitch in Utah, but not here.

  I just came from Utah, I explained. I’m headed west.

  Too bad, they explained. Utah was a mile that-a-away—east—and I ought to walk back there, with my thumb down, please, so I wouldn’t be in violation of the law.

  But I’ll only be coming back this way, I pleaded.

  But you won’t be committing a crime in Nevada.

  So I became a speck on a page, a token moved in an absurd symbolic action across a cartographic line in real space. I trudged under slow-crawling police escort along the shoulder in midday sun through a stretch of desert until reaching a road sign which read WELCOME TO UTAH!

  Follow: Westbound, Wendover was the first stop on that road in hours. Follow: Every car would stop for at least gas and a piss. Follow: I could stand there forever and die. No one would pick up two minutes before pulling in for a rest stop. I’d already failed for hours standing on the other side, the right side. The instant the Nevada police abandoned me to Utah, I turned and walked back in. I didn’t pause at the spot I’d worn on the off-ramp, the drifter spot, the counting spot, the death spot. I slogged past it, went into town as far as the nearest gas station. I was humbled, ready to beg, to make intimate appeal to drivers filling their tanks. Up close I’d persuade someone, anyone, to get me a mile or two west and break the jinx.

  I approached the attendant, to make him understand I was harmless, to get him on my side. He was an ancient Negro (I feel certain this is the word he’d have applied to himself), the first black face I’d seen in days. In a film he’d have been played by Scatman Crothers. In a film it would be hackneyed and in a certain sense even a borderline-racist gesture, to cast this first black person as my angel in a paleface-gambling-Mormon nightmare, but this was what happened. He listened to my story and he laughed and he spoke in a patois so thick I could barely make it out.

  “You want to wait for me to get off work, I’ll get you to the next town going west,” he said, or words to that effect.

  “I’ll wait.”

  “You can sit back there.”

  I sat and waited and when the time came I climbed into the attendant’s battered Reliant, to share space with his dog, whom the attendant explained he’d rescued from the road and taken in, likely, according to the corny script I’d begun playing in, so I’d understand I was truly a stray, a whelpling, a pup. And then the attendant got me out of Wendover before I went under. Or at least before going under for a third and final and famously fatal time.

  Eliot still doesn’t believe me, and neither, I trust, do you.

  —Rolling Stone, 2000

  Zelig of Notoriety: Bret, Donna, and Some Others

  What “The Used Bookshop Stories” elides in smash-cutting from New York to California is the same thing “Going Under in Wendover” skates over with the glib phrase “shrugging off college”: Leaving Bennington was costly, but I didn’t let myself feel the cost for years. Eventually I contended with it in an essay called “Defending the Searchers.” That piece cut a lot deeper than “Going Under in Wendover,” enough to key a cycle of self-exfoliating essays, which made up a book called The Disappointment Artist. Yet I still hadn’t made full accounting of my throes at the little private arts college in Vermont.

  Bennington was under my skin before I could define myself against it. Having made it through high school insulated from the facts of class by my parents’ bohemianism, on arrival at Bennington I was in for a shock. I projected the place as the emblem of all unfair privilege in the world of the arts; this was a grudge on behalf of my father, really, but held as if it had injured my own chances before I’d begun. Later my grudge was modulated by the sense that Bennington was an innocent outpost of a system I deplored, rather than some pernicious headquarters. It was then that the assorted generosities I’d thrown over as if in a juvenile fit began to be apparent to me, and with them the sickening possibility that I’d injured my own chances more than a little by running away. In 2005 I went back to Bennington to give the commencement address. I’m not sure how much my speech could have meant to the students; I kept it deliberately wry and undeep, told jokes, riffed on the irony of their having invited back a “sophomore on leave.” I’ve never struggled not to weep in public in such a sustained way, yet I didn’t weep.

  What’s still left out is Bret and Donna. It was already overdetermined that my first brush with private school was at the (then) most expensive college in the country, an art school gone decadently haywire, and soon to suffer a well-publicized purge of the scandal-plagued faculty and renunciation of its cocaine days. That as a naïve teenage wannabe I should have been a classmate of Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt, emblematic prodigal royalty of a glittering instant in the history of publishing, was too much, too on the nose. There were others there in those years who’d write and publish: Jill Eisenstadt, Reggie Shepard, Lawrence David, Joseph Clarke. But according to the deep law of charisma, the “story” of that time, whenever I’m asked about Bennington by others, is always Bret-and-Donna. When Bret’s first book was published I’d already fled across the country, though I preferred to claim I’d scampered (see: “Going Under in Wendover”). By the time Donna’s Secret History came out I was a clerk, handling copies of her book. I sold plenty of both of their books.

  The college was tiny. You knew everyone. At nineteen both Bret and Donna were brilliantly formed, complete, and charismatic as Oscar Wilde or Andy Warhol. I wasn’t as vivid a persona, but I was briefly true friends with Donna and spent time in Bret’s company, too. Bret stood perfectly for what outraged me at that school, and terrified me, too, the blithe conversion of privilege into artistic fame. It was inconvenient that I liked him. He’d read and watched and listened to everything. I remember most a humbling talk about movies, which I considered my forte since I’d seen Hitchcock, Godard, and Nashville. Bret at nineteen had weary capsule takes on Altman films I’d never heard of—A Wedding was a masterpiece, HealtH vapid—opinions that still persuade me. Bret’s reading was current and fashionable, mine was trapped in countercultural/used-bookshop amber where Richard Brautigan remained an important American novelist. Bret was close with Joan Didion’s daughter and had, at the insistence of a Bennington professor, an agent. At that school at that moment I was not so much out of my depth as I was out of someone else’s. Anyway, I was surely out of it.

  Donna was among the first friends I made at college, in the scant weeks before my disenchantment. My roommate Mark and I helped her move an ancient and gigantic trunk from the maintenance building to her room, as if she’d arrived in Vermont on a steamship. She and I spoke across a temporal gap: none of her cultural references newer than J. M. Barrie, none of mine older than Foghorn Leghorn (the only Southern accent I knew). I exaggerate: Donna was a transfer student, had enjoyed the mentorship of Willie Morris and Barry Hannah, just as I’d recently
enjoyed smoking pot with my high-school math teacher, who sometimes like to declaim passages from Frazer’s The Golden Bough. But Donna really could converse in perfect wistful epigrams, seemingly pointed at posterity. With her, as with others in that first flush, I passed through a dazzlingly quick intimacy, to violent disagreement, then silence. What compels me now is that in each of these cases the friend was another like myself: a financial-aid case there, stranded amid the heirs to various American fortunes and the shah of Iran’s daughter (who’d brought her bodyguards). At the time I couldn’t have allowed myself to notice this, and so blamed the falling-out on personality defects in the lost friend.

  In friendship Donna had a rarefied talent for secrecy and fantasy, exactly as her books suggest. We began by passing furtive notes to each other in a classroom of only seven or eight students, flash parodies of our professor’s sonorous wisdoms. Even casual strolls to Bennington’s “End of the World,” a green slope at the foot of the commons lawn, were occasion for Donna’s mock-formal notes of invitation in my campus mailbox. She once arranged a tea party for me at an undisclosed location off campus, to which I was led as if to a secret garden, or an execution. I relished sharing Donna’s trancelike aura until the star of our friendship suddenly fell, and then I became paranoid, so positive Donna was dangerous to me that I discounted my own obnoxious tantrums. I missed how Donna’s airs of belonging were on-the-spot inventions, born as much of need as my own airs of not-belonging.

  There’s a peculiar spirit of abjection to my situation in Berkeley, stranded what seemed a lifetime’s distance from my glimpse of the action in Vermont, working on my fourth unpublished novel in my off-hours, shelving and stickering and gift-wrapping Bret’s and Donna’s books at the shop while mostly not wanting to admit I’d known the two of them. They were part of so much I couldn’t think straight about for a very long time. Perhaps you could say I was jealous and refused to be jealous, which left silence. Yet when American Psycho came along I found myself defending Bret at the shop, not only from customers but from other clerks who wanted to fall in with the censoring frenzy and bar his book from the store. I’m a free-speech absolutist, I’ve learned, though this was yet another of the endless series of lessons that arrived backward for me, thanks to the prevailing background of my upbringing—wait, I’d think: Others actually don’t see the vindication of Tropic of Cancer and Lolita as a permanent and self-evident triumph of reason over nonsense? The argument’s still open? I felt outraged (and still am) by anyone interested in books who’d condemn one they hadn’t read. I took it, therefore, as my duty to read American Psycho, the first time I’d more than skimmed one of Bret’s. It was a satirical bludgeon: stultifying, cruel, hilarious, worth defending. But my secret was that I felt I defended a friend, though I had no reason then to know whether Bret would remember my name if he heard it aloud.