I Think You're Totally Wrong

by David Shields

  So I replied, “Not really. Everyone seems happy, and happiness is pretty boring subject matter.”

  DAVID: And really fleeting.

  CALEB: Ennui sets in. I’d rather be interested and engaged and passionate than happy. Karen smiles and the subject changes. Turns out she stars in her own “good bad novel,” as you like to say. Money may not buy happiness, but it alleviates suffering. At about the age of eighteen she started having faints and seizures and was diagnosed as a type 1 diabetic. She went to college and found a husband. When she married Bob, they tried to have children: the first one was a stillbirth and the second was delivered alive but died a few days later, due to doctor error. At the time, doctors used forceps, and it was a—what do you call it?—a feet-first delivery.

  DAVID: Breech birth.

  CALEB: The doctor crushed the baby’s skull.

  DAVID: That enough suffering for you?

  DAVID: You say that I wish I suffered more, that I wish I’d survived the Gulag or something. I’d say I’ve taken my obsessions—miscommunication or mortality or whatever—and gone as far as I can with them. The goal is to face your own contradictions and blow them up until they become emblematic of human tragedy. It’s all anyone does—from Pascal to Maggie Nelson. The Montaigne thing: “Every man contains within himself the entire human condition.”

  CALEB: Every person has a novel inside.

  DAVID: Well, to me, not a novel. I’m not interested in your dream life. I’m interested in your sadness, your self-knowledge. I don’t think you have to have survived the Khmer Rouge or come back from Vietnam or served in Churchill’s cabinet or been a member of the Mafia. That’s history; that’s journalism.

  CALEB: Does suffering make a person noble or petty?

  DAVID: Well, in my case, it’s obviously made me incredibly noble.

  CALEB: Would you agree that life, condensed, has plot?

  DAVID: Sure, you’re born, you live, you love, you die, but who cares about that story? That’s—

  CALEB: I—hey, hey, how’s it going?

  FIRST HIKER: Pretty good. How far to the lake?

  CALEB: You got another half hour.

  SECOND HIKER: Sweet.

  DAVID: It’s really beautiful.

  FIRST HIKER: After Lake Dorothy, we’re going on to Bear Lake.

  CALEB: Wow.

  DAVID: You guys going to camp?

  FIRST HIKER: Two days.

  CALEB: Awesome.

  DAVID: Nice. Stay warm.

  CALEB: That recorded. I’ll insert them.

  DAVID: Great! Add them for drama. Plot!

  CALEB: In How Literature Saved My Life, you graphically describe an erotic relationship, and how you wore an earring because of her.

  DAVID: You’re mixing up girls.

  CALEB: The last line—

  DAVID: I’ve changed that.

  CALEB: But in the last line you say she’s a fictional character.

  DAVID: I don’t say that.

  CALEB: Then you say she was quite the tiger in bed, but “there wasn’t an ounce of genuine feeling” in her performance.

  DAVID: I don’t think I say that. I can dig it up later on my laptop.

  CALEB: Your point, at least in the draft I read, was how her erotic self was her fake self. That in bed she wasn’t “real.” But I’d say the opposite. People suppress their erotic selves in life and in bed they become their true selves.

  DAVID: I don’t know if you do this—google people?

  CALEB: Old-girlfriend-google?

  DAVID: You can’t help be curious. What do they look like now? How have they aged? I googled Jessica Nagel. I found a video of a little interview she did about a novel she wrote. She was a debater in high school, and she’s written a couple of novels about debate.

  CALEB: Published?

  DAVID: Yes, but I haven’t read them. All her limits as a person are grafted directly onto her writing. She’s deeply shallow—“deeply shallow”? whatever—but that was the very quality, of course, that made her so sexy to me. I last saw her more than twenty-five years ago, but suddenly, watching this interview, my whole body was plugged right back into her: the things about her I was drawn to, the things about her I was put off by, and it was all pretty overwhelming. I just started taking notes. At one time I thought I might write a whole book about her, but that little riff is as far as I got.

  CALEB: Writing about sex is just—no matter what—it’s just a penis and a vagina. Scientific sex becomes too analytical. Graphic sex becomes porn. In Aleksander Wat’s My Century, he says sex is the most important thing, yet it’s rarely discussed. And then he doesn’t say much else about it. We’re not able to write freely about it or, better said, we must be very careful.

  DAVID: I want to write a book about all that, but I have no idea how to do it without talking about Laurie and she says I better not. I’ll write a whole book about Jessica!

  CALEB: Perhaps it shows my own insecurity, not as a writer but as a person (I know there’s overlap), but I did a lot of kiss-and-tell when I was younger.

  DAVID: Who would you tell?

  CALEB: The guys. “I went to third base with her …”

  DAVID: I see. In high school. Well, that would be part of the appeal: you may not have been connecting much with the girls as people, so it was, Okay, I’m going to tell the whole world I’m having sex. Were your friends the same?

  CALEB: Lame role models. One of the guys recorded sex with this girl, and it became his brag tape. She’s saying stuff like “Oh, fuck me, fuck me.”

  DAVID: There wasn’t videotape?

  CALEB: No. Just a cassette recorder underneath the bed. It disgusted me more and more. I overcompensated and went from shallow asshole to preachy asshole. I’m very judgmental of my youth. I was such a creep. I’d be preachy, smothering, and hesitant with girls I wanted to love. Then, when I wanted to fuck, I’d go all Gadarene swine. I’m not sure if I want to write about that part of my life.

  DAVID: I would. The more embarrassing and awful, the better.

  CALEB: I’m a Nazi in the kitchen. I could give you mushrooms to cut.

  DAVID: I’ll do cleanup.

  CALEB: Okay. What should we have, other than salmon and pasta? Green beans?

  DAVID: I can’t eat green beans: oxalates. Kidney stones. I could have an apple.

  CALEB: I’ll eat the green beans, and I have red bell peppers. Pasta is pretty filling.

  DAVID: Pasta with salmon sounds great. Who are the Huskies playing this weekend—Utah?

  CALEB: Sounds right.

  DAVID: I find them oddly likable. I like Sarkisian. I like Chris Polk. I like Keith Price. Saturday rolls around and I inevitably find myself running errands and listening to the game on the car radio. What do you think of Hugh Millen on KJR?

  CALEB: He’s not bad.

  DAVID: I think he’s amazing. I love how he brings incredibly rococo analysis to bear upon the simplest plays. In a way, life is very simple. What’s interesting is the meditation on it.

  CALEB: I’ve tried Brock and Salk, the 710 guys. They’re monotonous, say the same thing eight different ways. They’re talking about where Jake Locker will go in the draft. Switch channels, turn back to 710 an hour later, and they’re talking about where Jake Locker will go in the draft. And they yammer on and on about their personal lives. Once they spent fifteen minutes on how to grill a burger.

  DAVID: Is it hyper-macho talk? Isn’t that station much more amped up? “Let’s be very testosterone-driven men.”

  CALEB: Perhaps.

  DAVID: My favorite thing on KJR is when the Huskies or Seahawks suffer a devastating defeat—all the people calling in, trying to process loss. I’m in heaven.

  CALEB: You’d love soccer culture.

  DAVID: Through Natalie I’ve come to know soccer.

  CALEB: Kapuściński’s The Soccer War.

  DAVID: Everyone worships that book. I absolutely loved the first twenty pages or so, then it goes completely slack for me. Kitchen
-sink is not a writing strategy.

  CALEB: There was that Colombian guy, Andrés Escobar, who scored an own goal in the World Cup against the U.S. in LA in 1994. He came home and was murdered in a parking lot. Before the killer fired, he said, “¡Gracias por el gol en su propia puerta!” The guy, Humberto Castro Muñoz, was a hit man for a drug lord who lost money gambling on the game. Muñoz went to prison for eleven years. Pretty light sentence, if you ask me.

  CALEB: My parents were blind to my drug use. Terry’s parents aren’t so naive.

  DAVID: Have you ever tried LSD?

  CALEB: Yeah. Have you?

  David shakes his head.

  CALEB: It creates an illusion of self-knowledge, but—

  DAVID: If someone has dropped acid more than, say, a dozen times, I can tell in an instant.

  CALEB: It’s a laser show: your pixels and rods and cones blend and your mind forms images, hallucinations. Your subconscious creates shapes. It’s not like you see an elephant walk out of the forest, but the colors and images merge with your subconscious.

  I did LSD and mushrooms, too—always in controlled environments. I quit pot when I was nineteen. I made a couple exceptions after. Last time I smoked pot was at Autzen Stadium, Eugene, Oregon, summer of 1990, at a Grateful Dead concert. And I combined it with LSD. Last time.

  DAVID: You’re protesting too much.

  CALEB: No, really.

  DAVID: I’ve never taken any hallucinogenic drugs.

  CALEB: I’ve done cocaine maybe four or five times in my life.

  DAVID: Me, too.

  CALEB: It was like strong coffee.

  DAVID: I didn’t get it.

  CALEB: Lasts for twenty minutes at twenty times the price. I had a friend who loved it. I said why? He said I’d never had “good” coke, so he and another guy got this “great” coke. After a couple hours I went to bed. I mean, it was okay, but I didn’t get it, either. I woke up in the morning and they were in the same place, loving every minute of it. They went through two hundred dollars’ worth in one night and then passed out.

  DAVID: Laurie smoked pot in high school, did some coke in college, tried acid a couple of times. You might think I’d be the more—

  CALEB: Experimental?

  DAVID: Maybe, but she’s a little out there in a good way.

  CALEB: I did LSD with my two closest friends in high school, Vince and Mark, right after Mark’s father died. And then Mark said he never did it.

  DAVID: That’s what I would have done: pretended to take it and pocket it instead.

  DAVID: Sometimes, at a hotel, I’ll call and say, “Could you send up an extra pillow?” And they’ll say, “We’re happy to do that, ma’am.”

  Caleb laughs.

  DAVID: I’ll get so mad. It’s not their fault. But I’m a man. My voice isn’t that high, is it?

  CALEB: Try speaking lower.

  DAVID: If I consciously try, I can get low—pretty deeeeep.

  CALEB: You’re not that low—not soprano, but maybe alto. Certainly not a sexy female voice, mind you. Some women have deep, throaty, sexy voices. You don’t. It’s a bad woman’s voice.

  DAVID: Certain times my voice can just deepen. Deeeeep. For some reason, on the phone or on tape, it comes out a little higher than it is.

  CALEB: Practice lowwwww. I think I can hit tenor—baaaaysss.

  DAVID: Sometimes in class I’ll feel very relaxed, very authoritative, and my voice will deepen.

  CALEB: One last chance, for the DVR.

  DAVID: Grrreeeeeeoaaarrr! There. Low enough?

  CALEB: Hmm.

  DAVID: That’s maybe a segue to this: I’m curious how students, including you, processed my stuttering. Was that something students talked about?

  CALEB: Not really. Even twenty years ago, it was barely noticeable.

  DAVID: That’s good to hear. A lot of people say it’s no big deal. To me, though, it is.

  CALEB: Disfluent speech, to me, is when I try to speak in a foreign language.

  DAVID: You tend to stutter?

  CALEB: I feel incredibly self-conscious. I fake competence. I can function one-on-one, but not in groups. I ask the speaker to slow down or speak clearly or use simple sentences. When I developed friendships, the friend would learn how to converse and compensate for my weaknesses. I couldn’t worry about nailing grammar or pronunciation. I’d just butcher language and make communication the priority. ¿Puedes hablar español?

  DAVID: No muy bien.

  CALEB: We’re going to an all-inclusive, in Mexico, in a couple of months.

  DAVID: What does that mean—“all-inclusive”? Hotel, the flight?

  CALEB: The price includes hotel, all meals and beverages, including liquor. It’s heaven. Primarily because they have day care.

  DAVID: Is there a pool?

  CALEB: Adult pools, kid pools, pools where you swim up to a bar. Cafeteria and sit-down dining.

  DAVID: All in the same site? And it’s all paid for?

  CALEB: Except tips. We’ll bring a few hundred for tips. Eight days, family of five, direct flight to Cabo: $2,500. I sound like an advertisement, but if you include airport shuttle and tips, it’s still a vacation for less than three thousand bucks.… Oh, hi. How you doing? Congrats.

  FEMALE HIKER: (with baby in front pack) Thanks.

  CALEB: I did this trail with my wife and newborn. Great hike.

  MALE HIKER: Definitely.

  CALEB AND DAVID: Take care.

  FEMALE HIKER AND MALE HIKER: Bye.

  CALEB: In my Notes of a Sexist Stay-at-Home Father blog, when I wrote about one of our vacations, I called it “A Supposedly Fun Thing the Powell Family Will Do Again.” One of the segments I titled “All-Inclusive Jest.” I “rail” against greedy capitalists creating local jobs outside the drug trade.

  DAVID: It’s not that unusual of an idea to me—the stay-at-home dad—but maybe it could be an idea for a book.

  CALEB: Half of all stay-at-home parents (or it seems like half) blog.

  DAVID: Terry likes the blog a lot?

  CALEB: Sometimes. I make fun of us. Well, her. I think she’s soft on punishing the kids. I call her method “Crime and Reward.”

  DAVID: You’re more the disciplinarian?

  CALEB: Yes and no. She wants to be the treat-giver, so she gets on me for buying them doughnuts, but then she makes brownies for dinner.

  DAVID: I know what you mean. Competition between the parents. Laurie and I do that. Did you want to have a boy?

  CALEB: I didn’t want a boy bad enough to push for a fourth.

  DAVID: I very much wanted a girl. Xenogenesis: the greater likelihood that your offspring will be completely different from you if they are of the opposite sex.

  CALEB: You want to stand by the Dorothy Lake sign?

  DAVID: I can’t believe that was only a mile and a half.

  Returning on the forest service road.

  DAVID: How about if tonight we watch My Dinner with André? They worked together at two facing typewriters: “Okay, André, you go off on that long aria about your friends mock-burying you on Long Island. And I’ll write about how addicted I am to my electric blanket.” I love when Wally has had enough. He pushes back and says, “Surely, life is not like that. Surely, if life is interesting at all, you can find majesty at the local cigar shop as easily as you can in a Peruvian rain forest.”

  CALEB: Or in the Polish countryside.

  DAVID: And then, at the very end, Wally is talking about how all the streets look magical, and André is saying, Yes, I really love my wife and kids. There’s a very subtle changing of the guard. Which I think is crucial to this genre. Sideways, My Dinner with André, The Trip: at the end the characters switch roles in a way that feels credible. Something we should obviously aim for. I thought we did that a little as we were arguing about Bush.

  CALEB: That’s all great, but I don’t know if I’m willing to flip, or make a gesture, because of “art.” I don’t want to be David Lipsky to your David Foster
Wallace.

  CALEB: In Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore goes across Lake Michigan to Toronto, knocking on doors and checking to see if they’re locked. Moore would say, “I’m sorry, I’m just filming a movie, and I’m checking to see why Canadians don’t lock their doors.” Brian Fawcett opened one of the doors.

  DAVID: Moore just happened to be in Fawcett’s neighborhood?

  CALEB: Yup. I liked the movie and I’m against gun ownership, but Moore’s like Oliver Stone in that, whether you agree or not, it’s propaganda and straw-man arguments.

  DAVID: But you’re obviously capable of a certain amount of political posturing yourself. I actually like Michael Moore and I can sort of tolerate Oliver Stone.

  CALEB: Today’s artists too often adopt the same liberal ideologies. I’m disillusioned with the left.

  DAVID: In what areas are you moving away from the left?

  CALEB: Too often, I just find the left absolutist and delusional.

  DAVID: Any particular issues you find the left wrong on?

  CALEB: Unions. The film Waiting for “Superman” does a good job on how unions protect incompetent public school teachers. In Chicago the union is so strong they put three waste-disposal employees on every truck. In every other municipality in the U.S., each truck has two employees. Rahm Emanuel has been trying to clean up Richard Daley’s mess, and the union won’t let him fire anyone. Go to South Korea or Taiwan or Thailand: you got workers on the job twelve hours a day, six days a week. In these places, you get hurt on the job and you’re fucked. Let’s bring in unions. But the left has this “union: good/capitalism: bad” shtick.

  DAVID: I’m detecting NewsCorp’s influence.

  CALEB: The director of Waiting for “Superman” is a big Obama supporter. It’s the left policing the left. We need more of that.

  DAVID: I like Chomsky’s view that the United States is the freest country on earth, but that it’s still incredibly flawed. Even if he often overshoots the mark, he’s still a valuable voice.