The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  Halloween

  When the children appear at my door I invite them inside. I offer them plankton sandwiches and glasses of tea. Most of them leave quickly, but a few are still living with me, quiet as cats. They sleep in the loft rafters, and sometimes share in the housework and gardening.

  Zeno’s Day

  Zeno’s Day grows shorter every year, but it will never completely disappear.

  Thankstaking

  The vacuum cleaner has replaced the cornucopia in most traditional Thankstaking ceremonies.

  Horizon

  For seven nights the beehives are moved inside the house. The youngest child will be responsible for asking the bees the ritual questions, the eldest for hiding the honey. No fax machines are to be operated during the week of Horizon.

  Christmas

  Christmas holds us in its deathly grip. The dictionary defines it as “the state of one who has committed an offense, esp. consciously,” but I do not believe small children who experience Christmas are aware of their culpability. I ask, at what point does Christmas truly live in us? Is it when the men burst in to smother the flaming tree? Is it during the shaping and dressing of the tar baby? No one knows.

  We all tremble in the grasp of Christmas. It is unsafe and unfair. We should not have to endure it. There should be a single Christmas, held at a previously agreed location, by a family of actors. It could be broadcast, safely mediated by the information handlers. Christmas ought to be enacted by astronauts, on the moon, or deep under the sea.

  Perhaps the men who don the Santa suit understand Christmas, but they are never permitted inside the house. They gather in tribes under bridges and highways to build fires and eat plankton sandwiches, and their laughter stops whenever anyone comes close enough to hear.

  —Crank, 1996

  Crazy Friend

  1.

  There’s a street corner in Brooklyn, Seventh Avenue and Flatbush, a place I associate with—well, I associate it with plenty of things. In my mind this corner hinges Park Slope and the neighborhoods on Flatbush’s far side: Prospect Heights and Fort Greene, which were, for various complicated reasons over which I’ve wrung my hands elsewhere, racially intimidating to me. As a white kid, I’d charted the safe hours and itineraries nearer to home, and forged a few vital truces, but in these Flatbush-north territories I’d have been without passport or compass. Park Slope intimidated me, too, but differently. As with Carroll Gardens, that other far border of my personal Brooklyn: the white Irish or Italian precincts had their own way of making me feel mocked, socially disjointed, or even physically endangered. Yet there was another trail to follow in Park Slope in the ’70s, the sons and daughters of book editors and psychotherapists who’d fashioned there a less qualified, less bohemian, more posh, and tree-lined version of the gentrification that made my own home turf so varied, enthralling, and treacherous. If I could crack this group of teenagers—they were a group, the Slopies—I’d find untold alliances. My disadvantage was that I went to public school, and the way in was through cliques joined at the various private academies, or at Catholic school.

  And then, almost as suddenly as I knew I wanted it, I did find a way in. But this was loaded, too: a pair of girls a bit older than I was (and all girls are older than all boys at the ages we were at, and I was especially young), and brilliant, and attractive to me, and well integrated into the Slopies’ network of influence and high-level flirtation, play, and art-making. They might be curious about me, but they didn’t need me the way I needed them. These girls, Deena and Laurene, were dancers, musicians, painters, writers—it wasn’t obvious which, yet, but they might have their choice. They were crazily verbal, crazily charismatic, crazy with talent. They sang songs they’d written themselves, parodic and brilliant, like a private language: I memorized them, as I would in those days memorize a record by the Residents or Frank Zappa.

  These weren’t like my earlier friendships, found spilling outdoors onto the sidewalks, nor did they clarify in the way my friendships with male schoolmates did. I couldn’t seem to get these girls on the phone. Months would pass. I’d change, or feel I’d changed, sexually, socially, artistically, somehow, and want desperately for them to notice, to get word of it. But I wasn’t on their radar, it seemed, except when we were directly hanging out. And then, if I caught up with Deena and Laurene, they were changed, too. I had to learn about the new black or Puerto Rican boyfriend, the new favorite band or other infatuation, and everything I’d studied in them previously had become old currency, not even fit to trade for the new. I had to remember not to mention what they’d left behind for fear I’d be next. These girls blew hot, and could be mockingly affectionate or even briefly lusty in my direction, but in their willingness to show disdain, to crush unworthiness like a bug, they were fundamentally cool, cool, cool. I had a lot to learn, and I put my own enthusiasms and provenances on the table very carefully, or so it felt to me. They had a name for what they despised, “green,” a word which seemed to encapsulate being lame, unenlightened, feeble, corny, overreaching or straining for effect, and much else. I lived in fear of being cast in that shade.

  The corner of Seventh and Flatbush was a meeting point, a place I’d have to walk to get to their zone, if only because the crow-flies direction took me through too many bad patches. Most crucially, past Sarah J. Hale High School, which might as well have been a city block of pure quicksand. So I drew a triangle, up Flatbush to that corner, then south, as if walking into their neighborhood meant opening up Brooklyn like a door and slipping through. The subway stopped on Seventh and Flatbush, too, so if the girls were going to sweep me up to Manhattan, as they sometimes did, the portal was there. The corner also featured a movie theater, a first-run palace called the Plaza, one safe enough to attend at night, unlike those in downtown Brooklyn. The theater marked the corner as a site of some first experiences to come. It throbbed with potential for “a date.” In fact, in my mind, the intersection was the Brooklyn equivalent of the Rolling Stones’ lyric, from “Dance (Part 1)”: Mick Jagger’s sleazy, cursory intonation, “Hey, what am I doing standing here on the corner of West Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue and … / Ah, skip it. / Nothing. Keith! Watcha, watcha doing?” The corner knew something about what I wanted to get over as, but couldn’t yet.

  So it was that standing there one day, under wider circumstances I could no better reconstruct than the tatters of some former civilization, one of these girls made a random taunt that struck me as a meaningful bolt from the blue, and which I’ve never forgotten but never completely understood, either. I’d said I had to go meet a friend, I think, but left the friend unnamed, whether out of shame or awkwardness or some combination of the two. Deena, the verbally wilder and more freely hostile of the two, said, sneering in bogus accusation, “Who—Eldridge Palmer?” Deena didn’t mean anything important by it, was just amusing herself, I think, by acting as if I was hiding something. It might provoke something funny along the lines of defensiveness from me—couldn’t hurt to try.

  The name Deena had plucked up from thin air seemed—if one was reasonable—to be a riff on Eldridge Cleaver, and therefore on the fact of my parents’ radical political affiliations, or on the fact that a lot of my friends from my other world, away from Park Slope, were black. But I didn’t hear it that way. The latest sensation in my life, the revolution in my cultural appetite and worldview, one I’d have probably been unable to coherently share with these two under even the best of circumstances, was for science fiction generally and for Philip K. Dick specifically. I’d just weeks before read, with tumultuous, revolutionary excitement, A Maze of Death, Ubik, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Each book depicts the infiltration of reality by an intoxicatingly malignant death force. In Three Stigmata, that force is Palmer Eldritch, a man who’s become a monstrous god, a kind of living drug or cancer. In the end, everyone and everything shows Palmer Eldritch’s face, like evil DNA. Now my friend had seemed to name him by accident. Only it couldn’t be an accident
. Palmer Eldritch was everywhere, the novel was merely testament to cosmic conditions! I began trying to describe this. Gibbering, I’m sure it seemed from the perspective of the girls.

  “Of all the possible names, how’d you pick that one?” I demanded. “It can’t be a coincidence!”

  She immediately scorned my excitement. “Who cares?” she said. “What did I even say? Eldridge Hoover? Elron Seaver? Whatever!”

  I’m guessing here, but I must have gone on trying to explain, ever more pedantically, grinding my axles into a morass of embarrassment. Science fiction, it turned out, was green.

  You never forget the site of a schooling in shame.

  2.

  Where Philip K. Dick had come from, for me, was my best friend Jake’s dad, Harry. Harry was younger than Jake’s mom, and when they divorced, as everyone’s parents seemingly did, Jake’s mom retained the family home and maintained the upstanding parental postures—in fact, she was one of the most reliable parents around if, in those prodigious slippery days in our unreliable neck of the woods, you were looking for someone to chide or encourage you or to make you a sandwich, as if you were still a younger child. We counted on her for that. Harry, though, became like Jake’s erratic and brilliant older brother, or his crazy grown-up friend. He slipped back toward adolescent enthusiasms, and took Jake along for the ride. Jake got to see all the Pink Panther movies, for instance, and Kentucky Fried Movie and Groove Tube, too. Harry took Jake out to Junior’s Restaurant, the legendary Brooklyn cheesecake palace, for dinners consisting of little more than shrimp cocktail and an egg cream. And, seeing Jake’s enthusiasm for comics, Harry started bringing around his own just-read copies of mass-market paperback science fiction. This wasn’t the old “classic” ’50s-vintage stuff I’d discovered on my mother’s shelves, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, but the latest hip, psychedelically packaged material: Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison, and fatefully for me, Philip K. Dick. The first of Dick’s books I laid eyes on was A Scanner Darkly, from 1977; the second might have been The Zap Gun or Clans of the Alphane Moon. From Jake’s shelves I also recall The Golden Man, though this would have been a bit later, since that book wasn’t published until 1980. A collection of Dick’s stories selected by a young editor named Mark Hurst, The Golden Man was prefaced by Dick with a famous—at least to me—personal reminiscence called “The Lucky Dog Pet Shop.” There, Dick defines his sense of his own status, the artist-as-depraved-outsider, knocking helplessly on the windows of “serious” literature, reduced to batting out pulp tales while eating horse meat intended for dogs—acquired at the pet shop of the essay’s title—because he couldn’t afford human food.

  Jake cared more for Zelazny, whose fantasies of superpower and martyrdom better dovetailed with the ’70s Marvel Comics we both adored. And, though I was alive to something in the presentation, I didn’t plunge into reading Dick, not immediately. I circled the books, soaking in random vibrations they gave off. My reading began a year or so later, though it felt like a lifetime’s distance from Jake’s comics-lair bedroom, when I scored used copies of Ubik and A Maze of Death and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, matching black Bantam paperbacks, less zany-looking, more enticingly ominous, than the books that Jake’s father had delivered to our attention. Reading these three, I made Dick my own, forging a relationship into which I’d pour vast personal capital over the decades that followed. But if I’m honest with myself about provenance, Jake’s too-fun dad hovered oddly in the background of the affair.

  3.

  I had a girlfriend by the last year of high school, Lorna. Time-wise, we’re talking about a scattering of fifteen or twenty months from the scene of the kid who stood at Seventh and Flatbush trying so earnestly to explain to the Slopie girls who Palmer Eldritch was, but in the time-lapse nature footage of childhood memory, this is a lifetime’s distance. For one thing, I’d somehow, absurdly, consumed another twenty or so Philip K. Dick novels in that interval, taken the author into my body like wine and wafer. If, previously, I was alerted to Palmer Eldritch’s presence all around me, now I was Palmer Eldritch. And I liked it. Also I had a girlfriend. That poor kid a year and a half ago didn’t.

  I’ve written about Lorna elsewhere. She’s the girl I pathetically stalked home from the subway station in an essay called “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn.” Teenagers who’d figured out how to fuck should, you’d think, enjoy themselves, but in fact Lorna and I had a neurotic and tempestuous romance, full of elaborate betrayals and pleading arguments. The summer of 1982, the summer between high school and college, the year Philip K. Dick died, Lorna and I broke up three times, and we were in an extended fight that sweltering June afternoon when I took her with me to see Blade Runner, which had opened a day or two before. Of course we walked up Flatbush Avenue to Seventh, to see the film at the Plaza.

  I was in a funk, angry at her, angry at myself for reasons I couldn’t admit or articulate. My expectations for the film were a tormented muddle—I’d heard it committed injustices to the book, and that it wasn’t going over well with those who lately rooted for science-fiction movies to take over Hollywood. After Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this film wasn’t about to find any comfortable place in the culture. Worse, I was crossed up in the opposite direction, too: Much like a fan who resents seeing his favorite underground band sign with a major label, I worried Dick was being stolen from my exclusive purview. I’d been planning to make a pilgrimage to California to meet Dick, and then learned he’d died, in February that year. Absurd as it was to take his death personally, I did.

  So, victim to all this and our native bile, Lorna and I fought outside the theater, right there at my thorny intersection, in sight of all the avenues crisscrossing through my past and future. I threw a sweaty little tantrum because we’d arrived late, pedantically asserting how crucial this viewing was to me, and how badly I hated being late to movies. Of course by the time I’d settled myself down and we purchased our tickets and went inside, the trailer reel had just finished. We were exactly as late as the duration of my tantrum.

  I watched Blade Runner with a grudge in several directions. Lorna’s only reaction was to find the violence upsetting, and we left the theater in a worse funk yet. I couldn’t defend the film against her distaste, nor adopt her rejection of it as an adequate response for myself. I’d sat tabulating the film’s failings against the book, not grasping what was sensationally vivid and original in the experience. I thought the hard-boiled voice-over embarrassing and derivative, totally green. I revere the film now, have seen it in its various versions at least a dozen times, but I still dislike that voice-over.

  Six weeks later I was in college in Vermont, self-exiled from my unresolved dilemmas at Flatbush and Seventh. Lorna, and the Slopie girls, remained with me in ways I could and couldn’t acknowledge. I’d become an early member of the Philip K. Dick Society, the grassroots posterity-boosting coalition lead by the rock critic Paul Williams. A society newsletter was among the first mail I ever received at my campus mailbox, and I stared at the return address dreamily, already plotting some more decisive evasion or exile, a leap to get me onto Philip K. Dick’s map and off my own. Dick might be dead, but I could still make a pilgrimage to the Lucky Dog Pet Shop.

  4.

  I wrote to Paul Williams to introduce myself, my pretext an interest in adapting Dick’s Confessions of a Crap Artist into a screenplay. An absurdist domestic tragedy set in ’50s California, Confessions, in my dream, could become a script an Altman or Hal Ashby might shoot, a class-conscious period melodrama. The urge to bring one of Dick’s realist novels to light as a major film—I envisioned several Oscars—was a glimmer of my yearning to rehabilitate him for traditional literary taste, rather than leave him to the sub(cult)ure where I’d found him. Advertising Dick as a writer per se, installing him in a shame-free canon, reflected the wish to join my own weird enthusiasms to my aspirations as a legitimate artist, but also to repair the shame I’d learned to feel on Seventh and Flatbush
, or any subsequent instant when I was reminded, and I was constantly reminded, that science fiction was a “subliterary” pursuit.

  But I wasn’t a filmmaker, or screenwriter, or any kind of writer yet. I also didn’t have any way of securing the adaptation rights Paul was obligated to protect for the interests of Dick’s heirs, so my request was foolish. Paul treated it kindly. The exchange of letters between us, anyway, put a more definite image in my mind, a shape for my defection to California.

  5.

  It took two years to carry out that defection, to manifest the self-exiling urge to work from what would appear to others, and myself, as a margin, a position of disenfranchised minority. Dick’s margin, science fiction, was a working proposition I could use. Other writers I now relished operated from inside that exile zone, that quarantine: Disch, Delany, Ballard. Science fiction was a literary Brooklyn for me.

  I introduced myself to Paul Williams at the Claremont Hotel in Oakland, at a science-fiction convention called SerCon One. Every name I’d spent teenage years reading seemed to be there in human form, from Delany to Terry Carr and Ian Watson. I’d known two novelists growing up, Stanley Ellin and L. J. Davis. I’d met Bernard Malamud and John Ashbery at Bennington, but hadn’t declared myself, just skulked, sniffing like a hound. Here, the hotel held a literary universe, weird wizened men who still recalled L. Ron Hubbard as an irritating colleague; William Gibson, mellow prescient icon, calm in the inflamed ranks of the Cyberpunk Politburo. I had reservations: The science-fiction world looked like a cultural cul-de-sac, detached from all I was otherwise immersed in, in my life with my friends. Then Paul appeared wearing a Meat Puppets T-shirt—at that time I called them my favorite band—and I decided it might be all right.