I Think You're Totally Wrong

by David Shields

  Tyrone says, “What’s up, Caleb? You’re silent.” I say, “Tyrone, sorry, I’m tripping. My wife just had a miscarriage.” So Tyrone tells me about his sister and how she had a stillbirth and that I better get home. I say, “Yeah.”

  In my version of the story I dawdle twenty minutes. Terry calls it an hour and a half. A couple weeks later I’m playing, she comes by, and Tyrone’s on the sideline and starts chatting her up, asking if she’s watching her “boyfriend.” Anyway, she hasn’t forgotten.

  DAVID: Obviously, it was a serious misstep.

  CALEB: I can see us as eighty-year-old grandparents and she’ll say, “Remember when I miscarried and you chose beer with Tyrone over coming home to me?”

  DAVID: To me, the most interesting aspect of the whole thing is your obsession with entrée into black culture. You wanted to drink a beer with Tyrone, so you shunned Terry. If it had been a white guy, you wouldn’t have gone. You wouldn’t have felt the same pressure.

  CALEB: I’ve thought about that. I made a conscious decision to get into the culture. I became a regular at Green Lake. I started pushing back. I got sick of the way white guys would get bullied and took it. I didn’t want to be like that. When I first started playing there, they’re choosing teams and no one picks me, so I call next, and this other guy says, “No, I got next.” I say, “We’ll run together, then.” He says no. Fourteen guys in the gym and ten are playing. I say, “You’re not going to pick me up? My game ain’t that bad.” He says no. This one guy, Nando, says, “Hey, some guys don’t pick up white guys.” I say, “What if I was six-foot-six?” Nando says, “Wouldn’t matter.”

  DAVID: Nando just pulled you aside and told you this?

  CALEB: Yeah. He and I are still cool. So, after a while, I got aggressive, in other people’s face. When you get challenged, you puff up and challenge back. I’ve almost come to blows with Ed Jones. He was talking trash, I called him out, and Ed started threatening me, saying he’d get his piece and leave my daughters without a father. Tyrone and some others got my back, got between us and started threatening Ed. Ed backed down.

  CALEB: Immediately after graduating from the UW with a degree in poli-sci, Terry worked in supermarkets, hanging up advertising, and she’s still with the same company. She became a vice president, then a director of retail sales accounts.

  DAVID: What’s the company?

  CALEB: It became News America Marketing when it was bought by NewsCorp.

  DAVID: In other words, Murdoch.

  CALEB: In LA she’s worked out of the Fox Studios building. She travels a lot: LA, San Fran, New York. She met Henry Kissinger at a party, has ridden in an elevator with Bill O’Reilly.

  DAVID: So on some level she’s working for Fox News?

  CALEB: No. Both her company and Fox News belong to NewsCorp. She negotiates advertising between producers and retailers. If Sara Lee wants product placement in Albertsons, they talk to someone like her.

  DAVID: Sure. Just like publishers pay to have books displayed in the front of the store. Is she someone who likes to work?

  CALEB: She says no, but if she’s not working, she gets restless. She likes aspects of the job, the responsibility and satisfaction. She feels that, well, my friends and I are artists and have relatively stunted careers, but we made a choice not to get a job that demands a certain commitment. I’ve got friends close to fifty, and they have the typical liberal take: they want the government to pay for their health care and so forth.

  DAVID: That’s a right-wing caricature of the typical liberal take.

  CALEB: They think corporations are greedy and predatory, whereas, to Terry, corporations employ thousands of people, and these people work hard but are well compensated. We have health insurance and security because of her, and it was a choice she made.

  DAVID: She thinks you guys are a bunch of spoiled brats?

  CALEB: She tells me, “I wanted financial security. That was important to me, and I work my ass off.” And she does. She’s the ant and we artists are grasshoppers, writing songs and poems and novels as we curse this cold and dark planet.

  DAVID: Got it in one.

  CALEB: Her job is hard. It’s fatiguing and stressful, so she deserves to come home and watch mindless TV and relax with a glass or two of wine.

  DAVID: Does she make a good salary?

  CALEB: Around one twenty-five, counting bonuses. She flies a lot, so we can take vacations on her frequent flyer miles. What do you make at the UW?

  DAVID: Same.

  CALEB: One twenty-five and you work six months of the year?

  DAVID: I teach two quarters a year. It’s more like five months a year.

  CALEB: You have to read and prepare, but still, $125,000?

  DAVID: Does that seem like a lot?

  CALEB: Yes. And you were worried about money in 1996?

  DAVID: When I first came to the UW, I was making twenty-seven. Salaries at the UW are pretty bad, due to state cutbacks. The only reason I have a decent salary is I keep getting recruited by other schools. It’s like anything: you become more desirable when someone else desires you. My salary went up considerably, from sixty to ninety. Then I got another offer and it went from ninety to one-ten.

  CALEB: Amazing.

  DAVID: That’s what Laurie says. She thinks I have the cushiest job in the world, but I’ve worked unbelievably—

  CALEB: Heard it. Heard it.

  CALEB: In business journals, when a writer touts a company or stock, at the end of the article there’s usually a disclosure saying whether the writer, the writer’s employer, or the writer’s family members own the stock, so if there’s a conflict of interest it’s transparent. The lit world should be so forthcoming. The lit community praises the lit community, there’s a dearth of constructive criticism, and there’s a fuck of a lot of praise for boring books.

  DAVID: You’re preachin’ to the choir, brother.

  CALEB: We need more of Dale Peck’s Hatchet Jobs and Anis Shivani’s “The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers.” Shivani went after Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Díaz and Sharon Olds.

  DAVID: That would be just the beginning of my critique.

  CALEB: If we can’t criticize, we stay in the muck, and the literary world shrinks proportionately to the culture. Who trusts or even reads positive reviews? Would you rather have a positive review read by a hundred people, or a negative review read by a thousand? You wrote about how painful negative reviews were in the past, and now you don’t care. You were inferring, almost, that it’s more painful if some intimate shows disinterest.

  DAVID: One of the accomplishments for me of middle age is, boy, can I shrug off criticism. It used to be, I’d get a bad review in the Orlando Sentinel, and I’d dwell on it inordinately. Now I literally don’t have time. Somebody writes a six-thousand-word attack on Reality Hunger? I’m thrilled the book got so deeply under his skin.

  DAVID: How’s Scott Driscoll doing?

  CALEB: He read Reality Hunger. He’s a very good critic. He loves fiction.

  DAVID: Yeah, and?

  CALEB: He’s responsible for that opening of our interview in the Rumpus, when I asked, “You began writing fiction; it turned out not to be your forte. Why the attack? Isn’t that like an impotent man vowing abstinence?”

  DAVID: Only about fifty other reviewers used the same trope. I’d say I’m more like a man in love pointing out to the man on Viagra that he’s fucking a sex doll.

  CALEB: How long have you been rehearsing that one?

  DAVID: You’re a funny intersection of hippie and military.

  CALEB: My dad was in Saigon for a year, and my parents were in Asia for eight years. He has no clue about art, and she’s creative, quasi-bohemian. She knew I smoked pot and kept it from him. My dad won’t watch movies about genocide, anything negative, anything “depressing.” He’s “Who cares about the Holocaust? It’s over. Who cares?”

  DAVID: He’s anti-intellectual, but is he smart?

  CALEB: After Co
oper Union he got a master’s from NYU in engineering. He’s very organized.

  DAVID: Is your mom intellectual at all?

  CALEB: She used to be well-read and big into art. Completely stopped.

  DAVID: What books would they be reading? She was reading something when I stopped by.

  CALEB: Probably People magazine. Their house is a museum. Every National Geographic since before 1920. Four sets of encyclopedias. There are probably over five thousand books. The classics: Homer, Shakespeare, Melville. I remember being forced to listen to Beowulf when I was ten. My dad, though, has a huge collection of Carter Brown mysteries, Alistair MacLean spy novels, and romance novels. He’s addicted to romance.

  CALEB: In high school I just read mystery, science fiction, and sports magazines, but I did browse our books and the Nat Geos. Not until college and wanting to become a writer did I read. I was getting into philosophy, Christianity.

  DAVID: Your book is definitely coming back to me. It deals with those three friends—Mark, Vince, and “you.” Still seems like it could be a good book.

  CALEB: You’re misremembering a little. It was based on Mark and Vince, but I made them into one character whose dad’s dead. Both Mark and Vince lost a parent in high school. You said about it, “I’m especially impressed by the narrator’s ability to compress his meditations into startling aphorisms, and at crucial moments—sex, love, drugs, religion, nature, death—the prose is joyful, even ecstatic.”

  DAVID: That sounds like me.

  CALEB: You thought it should begin in Seattle, because the first part was slow.

  DAVID: Where was the first part set?

  CALEB: A small town. The story was set chronologically. You wanted the novel to begin after the father died. You wanted flashbacks.

  DAVID: I do remember that. I remember I wanted to steal that line of yours.

  CALEB: And I should have let you. Then I could have said, “Gimme a blurb.”

  CALEB: Last night I woke up at four a.m., thinking about your X factor. And mine. I’m fascinated by death, but especially killing. There’s no more dramatic moment in life than killing, or watching someone dying. But killing entertains us. Why? Answer that, and you get to suffering. And where we fit in. How do we stop suffering? How do we love? Are you familiar with Haing Ngor and Dith Pran?

  DAVID: Of course. In Swimming to Cambodia, Spalding Gray talks about how Ngor played Pran in The Killing Fields.

  CALEB: Both of them thought The Killing Fields tamed death, made it palatable. In Silence of the Lambs Jodie Foster finds skinned corpses in swamps, but that’s okay. That’s entertainment. You ever read A Cambodian Odyssey?

  DAVID: I haven’t.

  CALEB: Haing Ngor’s autobiography, told to someone or other. Ngor witnessed a Khmer Rouge cadre get angry because this pregnant woman wasn’t working hard. The cadre took his bayonet, disemboweled her, sliced out her fetus, tied the fetus to a string, and hung it from a porch. There were about a dozen other small, shriveled, shrunken clumps hanging from the porch rafters, and until this moment Ngor hadn’t realized they were fetuses.

  DAVID: There’s nothing I can say.

  CALEB: In college I chose art before politics, but I changed. Politics, art, love, life—they converge. Brian Fawcett concluded Cambodia by meditating on Prince Sihanouk’s words: “The Khmer Rouge withheld the basic human right to be loved.” This platitude scores a direct hit on my X factor.

  DAVID: I’m sure I sound like a complete asshole, but that’s the problem: it’s a platitude. It’s not taking us anywhere interesting.

  CALEB: (handing David a manuscript) This is “The Biography of Davy Muth,” a Cambodian woman, pronounced “Dah-vee” but spelled like Davy Crockett. She’s been writing her autobiography for twenty years and recently asked me if I’d help. She lived in Phnom Penh, was a teacher, had four children and a husband who was a professor at a military academy. April 17, 1975, rolled around: over the next weeks she saw her husband loaded onto the back of a truck—last time she saw him. Her family then splits up: two of her children go with her sister and mother, and she takes two. They die—one executed, one poisoned. She doesn’t hear anything about her family until January of 1979, when Vietnam invades. She goes to a refugee camp in Thailand, is reunited with her other two children. Thai soldiers rape Cambodians; she and her sister dig holes and hide every night. She finally made it to Seattle. Through her story I weave: Why do we kill? Why do we enjoy killing if we think it’s fictional? Why are we fascinated with serial killers? Can this fascination lead to solutions? Can we develop empathy through imagination to finally arrive at action?

  DAVID: (looking at the manuscript) That doesn’t sound that far from my own Iraqi-Afghani-Vietnamese idea.

  CALEB: In your writing, you have a hesitancy to judge—a moral relativism that allows anything into play, and it comes across as amoral. You’re so hesitant.

  DAVID: You have a much more public and political imagination than I do. And I’d love to see if I can’t burn your village down to the—

  CALEB: I—

  DAVID: Let me finish, Caleb. It’s not as if you’re a hugely right-on person who is out there manning the barricades, but you think of yourself as more politically engaged than I am. Okay. Well, I want to investigate that. Even though you’re twelve years younger than I am, you remind me, in a way, of my mother and father. You probably think of me as—I don’t know—neurotic, overly interior, solipsistic, whatever. But I find you extremely didactic, moralistic, polemical, self-righteous, preachy. Is that unfair? You say I’m hesitant to judge, but—hey—I’m happy to judge anything anytime.

  CALEB: You judge subjective taste issues: a book, a movie, a painting, but on moral issues, no.

  DAVID: I think of myself, in fact, as trying to scrutinize each choice. Can you think of an example where I’ll give someone too much benefit of the doubt?

  CALEB: You paint a picture of people taking advantage of their race—the NBA as reparation theater.

  DAVID: I would certainly write that book differently now.

  CALEB: Your interpretation of Fawcett’s Cambodia was off. You wrote, essentially, “Brian Fawcett uses juxtaposition as a way to show that mass culture is as insidious as the Khmer Rouge.”

  DAVID: But in his email to us, he actually seemed to agree with me. Otherwise, there’s no point to that book; there’s no other way to make sense of the bifurcation of the page into media parables and war atrocity.

  CALEB: I just reread Cambodia. Your interpretation isn’t so far off, but that just means that both you and Fawcett are wrong. Any Cambodian who lived through the Khmer Rouge would not think the invasion of McDonald’s and Walmart and TV into their homes is so terrible. That’s a Howard Zinn/Noam Chomsky–level analogue. Absurd.

  DAVID: “When you ask me if I’m political, what you’re really saying is, ‘Do you identify your critique of everyday life as a political one?’ It seems to me a politics of consciousness and a politics of awareness are so lacking in most of what are considered to be political viewpoints that I’m not sure I want to call it politics. Before I can begin to discuss the kind of questions that people normally call ‘politics,’ I would have to solve perceptual and mental and emotional confusions that seem to me to so surround every discourse that I certainly haven’t gotten anywhere close to ‘politics’ yet.”

  CALEB: Who’s that?

  DAVID: Lethem.

  CALEB: Let’s talk about Human Smoke.

  DAVID: Nicholson Baker is sympathetic to Quakerism, is essentially a pacifist. And he wanted to give himself the toughest possible case to make for pacifism: World War II. Most people would support the Allied effort to stop the Nazis.

  CALEB: Even Chomsky.

  DAVID: Baker doesn’t, in any way, justify what Hitler did, but he wants to show you Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s warmongering, their death-dealing. The book is trying to show you that, finally, if Germans die, if Japanese die, if Americans die, if British soldiers die, it’s all human smoke. W
e’re all people. We’re all mortal beings. That’s the book, and it’d be hard to argue otherwise.

  CALEB: I’ll argue otherwise.

  DAVID: You see it differently?

  CALEB: Baker showed the warmongering of the Allies, but the book doesn’t say, “We’re all human smoke.” Baker says that despite the degradation war brings, “we must fight. We must stop evil at all costs.” And that’s the message.

  DAVID: It is?

  CALEB: In the final scene, two Nazi soldiers are outside a concentration camp. One takes a whiff of the ash in the air and says, “Ahh, human smoke!” This macabre image contradicts your forced metaphor.

  DAVID: You’re right to focus on that paragraph, but to me you’re reading it way too literally. If that’s all he was saying, why would he even have bothered to write the book? Why did the book receive so many reviews that were beyond negative? The entire strategy of the book—interpolating hundreds of paragraphs, all from different sources—militates against your reading.

  CALEB: Baker illustrates the moral ambiguities of the Allies, but in no way does he make a case against World War II.

  DAVID: Jews in ovens. Jews as candles. We’ve been there a million times.

  CALEB: Six million times.

  DAVID: Baker is trying to take you someplace stranger and, to me, more interesting. Am I a moral relativist and are you a moral absolutist—is that what this is about?

  CALEB: I struggle with that myself.

  DAVID: I really like that line of Goethe’s: “I’ve never heard of a crime I couldn’t imagine committing myself.” To me, one way that human beings can become better, or at least that art can serve people, is if the writer or the artist shows how flawed he or she actually is. Basically, the royal road to salvation, for me, lies through an artist saying very uncompromising things about himself. And through reading that relentless investigation, the reader will understand something surprising about himself. I always come back to the idea that we’re all bozos on this bus. If my work has value, which I have to believe it does, it’s in the realm of helping—or more like forcing—other human beings to confront their/our shared humanity/flawedness. If every single person in the world read my books—