I Think You're Totally Wrong

by David Shields

  CALEB: He was a superior court judge: The Honorary James Wilson. He molested some of his daughters, my aunts. They went to my grandmother and wanted her to go to the police. Grandma Betty didn’t.

  DAVID: How does anyone do that?

  CALEB: It’s unimaginable. My grandmother protected my grandfather. My mother didn’t go to the funeral of either of her parents.

  DAVID: Was she molested?

  CALEB: If she was, she would never say. It’s murky; she claims he did something to them but not to her, though he didn’t molest them all. We, meaning my sisters and I, have debated how screwed up my mother’s family was. My mother was the oldest of six children—five girls. This we know: of the five girls, the third and fourth oldest were molested and made a fuss, warned the youngest, and protected her. Locked doors.

  DAVID: That is a weird fucking impulse. You have three daughters, I have one, and I could no more molest Natalie than—

  CALEB: I don’t know any of my aunts, except one: she’s the San Francisco poet, Aunt Grace, and she was one of the two who were molested; hers is a real-life version of distorted memory. Grace’s stories change depending on the listener. She has talked to Terry, my sisters, me, and told the horror story: Grandpa was a pedophile. But even Grace doesn’t want to tarnish the family name. It’s not my pain to own.

  DAVID: My advice to J.E.W. would have been, “Just go to a prostitute and dress her up in pigtails if you need to.”

  DAVID: There was this beautiful thing in the New Yorker recently by Joan Acocella about the novelist Paula Fox, who is Courtney Love’s grandma, believe it or not. Fox grew up with a very cold mother who had five abortions, didn’t want Paula, was inordinately neglectful. Acocella argues through Fox that when people grow up in an emotionally barren landscape, they tend to (1) become passive, (2) think of themselves as not being sure of their feelings and/or not sure they have feelings, and (3) if they’re writers, get their revenge by not forgetting a thing and analyzing everyone, including themselves, in a harsh light.

  CALEB: You identify.

  DAVID: You might say.

  CALEB: It sounds like you didn’t have much “like,” not to mention “love.” Between you and your sister, your mother, there may have been love, but there wasn’t warmth.

  DAVID: My father was severely manic-depressive, in and out of mental hospitals his entire life, and my mother was extremely autocratic. Did you grow up in a much more nourishing family? You definitely felt loved?

  CALEB: My mom was happy and enthusiastic but lazy—a horrible cook.

  DAVID: How would you know she loved you?

  CALEB: She told us all the time. She’d go to my sports games and howl my name every time I came to bat. She smothered.

  DAVID: Your mother hugged you?

  CALEB: You saw her. She gave you a hug.

  DAVID: Was she affectionate?

  CALEB: She smothered us, but she didn’t do the heavy lifting.

  DAVID: How about your dad?

  CALEB: Humorless and boring. Strict. By the book.

  DAVID: He’s mellowed a little, though?

  CALEB: He’s aged well. More easygoing.

  DAVID: Your daughters softened him.

  CALEB: He plays “pease, porridge, hot” with them, takes them to parks. I don’t remember him smiling nearly this much when I was a kid. I never faced the coldness you seem to remember from your parents, though. Sure, growing up, I was left to myself. We didn’t do much as a family. I had my friends Mark and Vince, for example, and they had much more influence. But I had two stable parents who loved each other, loved their children, and this was their sole purpose and meaning in life.

  DAVID: Wow. That’s a lot.

  CALEB: My dad was my Little League coach. He likes baseball but never played. He was at the game Bobby Thomson hit the “shot heard round the world.”

  DAVID: He better have been pulling for the Dodgers.

  CALEB: Big Brooklyn Dodgers fan, like your dad. He always kept score, so he had the scorecard of the “shot heard round the world” game. He was in the outfield, upper level, and the ball went out of view, so he could tell it was a home run only by the reaction of the crowd. When he went to Vietnam, he put the scorecard in his mom’s attic. She threw it out. In good condition, it would be worth $100,000 now.

  DAVID: He should have kept it in a glass case.

  CALEB: Knowing my dad, he probably did.

  DAVID: What does he think life’s about? Does he ever show a spark? What are his passions?

  CALEB: He thinks the same way about everything as he did fifty years ago. He was a captain in the navy; the next change of command would have made him an admiral, but he says he lacked the necessary political savvy, so after thirty years he retired. They have only one TV, no cable, and the TV is used only for movies. He and my mom rate movies, from one to ten—every movie they’ve ever watched. For my dad, movies must have a happy ending. Period.

  CALEB: My mother always covered for me. Once she kept a few speeding tickets from my father. The insurance company raised family rates exorbitantly high, and my dad found out. He wasn’t happy.

  DAVID: Did he yell?

  CALEB: He did.

  DAVID: What would he say—“Goddamnit, Caleb, I can’t believe you did this!”?

  CALEB: He doesn’t swear.

  DAVID: What did he say?

  CALEB: “How could you lie, Trice—why? Of all the stupid things, to let that son of ours keep driving!” My dad’s nerdy. He rarely gets angry these days.

  DAVID: I hope Natalie has children, because I think I’d be a good grandparent. I would love to have grandkids and get to be silly again. It would be fun.

  CALEB: I hope that happens.

  DAVID: The girls must be so fun for your parents.

  CALEB: Whenever I give them a treat—say, ice cream—they all sit down with big eyes, and I give them a chocolate-chip-size dollop.

  DAVID: The tiniest bit?

  CALEB: A pinprick of ice cream.

  DAVID: Each time?

  CALEB: The joke never gets old. They get the bowls, look with sad eyes, and say, “No, Daddy.” I ham it up for as long as I can, and then I give them a regular-size portion. One time Terry asked the kids who’s funnier, and they said, “Dad!” She asked, “Why?” And they said, “Because he always gives us small ice cream.”

  DAVID: Darling.

  CALEB: Grandkids would be fun.

  CALEB: Your mom died a long time ago, right?

  DAVID: 1977.

  CALEB: When you were an aspiring writer.

  DAVID: I was twenty and just starting to publish in my college magazine, similar to the point you were when you were in my class.

  CALEB: Would she have been happy?

  DAVID: I sometimes think I’ve spent the last thirty-five years trying to make my dead mother proud of me.

  CALEB: Your dad seemed more ambivalent.

  DAVID: When he was around me, he was always incredibly competitive and reluctant to offer praise of any kind. When he was with other people, he talked endlessly about me, apparently. I think of him as a Zen genius in reverse: wherever he was, he wasn’t.

  CALEB: “But the less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion. Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole—”

  DAVID: “Brute soul”?

  CALEB: “Boot sole.” Like a shoe. “… boot sole of postmodernism. At the same time, young writers will have to swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers. I’m saying that writers need to venture out from under the protective wing of academia, to put themselves and their work on the line.”

  DAVID: Who are you quoting?

  CALEB: Ted
Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

  DAVID: It’s just a regurgitation of the Tom Wolfe argument that we’re all supposed to write about … wait—are we out of batteries?

  DAY 4

  CALEB: (to DVR) October 2nd, 2011, Skykomish, Washington. Last day of the trip. Nothing like a sober rant first thing in the morning. Two things piss me off: Cruel and unusual punishment is a tautology. Cruel, to me, is releasing a rapist-murderer into society after he “pays his debt” because that shows cruelty toward the victim. What’s cruel? Manson’s victims’ relatives having to endlessly appear at parole hearings because the law grants Manson the possibility of being set free.

  Second, I think drugs, prostitution, gambling—all these so-called vices—should be legal but regulated and controlled. And if you commit crimes when using, rather than it being a mitigating factor, it should be aggravating.

  DAVID: Good luck getting that one through.

  CALEB: Did you put the sugar and other stuff back over here?

  Oh, I see. Garbage is right there.… The thing you realize with drugs is, there’s a cost. I stopped smoking pot at nineteen. And with other drugs, after you do them, you don’t need to do them. I mean, an altered state can be fun, but drugs have a detrimental effect. Long- and short-term.

  DAVID: How much acid have you done?

  CALEB: Maybe a half dozen times.

  DAVID: Huh. I would have thought maybe more. You’re definitely a brother from another planet.

  CALEB: Did you put the milk over there?

  DAVID: Over here.

  CALEB: I’m no doctor, but I’ve heard that organs and tissue can regenerate when young: smokers who stop at thirty can have almost full recovery—

  DAVID: That’s when Laurie stopped smoking. We hope and assume—

  CALEB: At fifty the lungs get only so much back, and at seventy or eighty they will never regenerate. That’s how it works with the brain. When I took acid, I could feel this searing inside my head. Acid isn’t addictive, but it was obvious it could make you crazy.

  DAVID: I love what the comedian Rick Reynolds says about the Bible: “Great story. Wish I could believe it.”

  CALEB: You ever read Barabbas?

  DAVID: The Marlowe play?

  CALEB: The Pär Lagerkvist novel.

  DAVID: It was originally a Christopher Marlowe play. Barabbas goes back to the Bible.

  CALEB: Lagerkvist was familiar with the play, but Marlowe’s Barabbas is a sociopath, full of rage, an unrepentant killer. Lagerkvist’s Barabbas comes across as searching and humble.

  DAVID: I’m Lagerkvist’s Barabbas. You’re more—

  CALEB: Not funny.

  CALEB: Let’s bring out the riding lawn mower. Time for a morning beer.

  DAVID: Beer?

  CALEB: Shakespeare: “Every morning just before breakfast, I don’t want no coffee or tea. / It’s just me and my good Buddy Weiser, that’s all I ever need.”

  DAVID: Shakespeare?

  CALEB: A lesser-known character: The Duke of Thorogood. Can’t mow without beer—you want one?

  DAVID: No thanks.

  They depart from Khamta’s house for a short walk in the woods before leaving.

  DAVID: That was fun. I’ve never driven a lawn mower. So we hike, go back, have lunch, and maybe we can watch the Seahawks game somewhere, but I need to be back in time for Natalie’s call. I can’t miss that.

  CALEB: You bet. Even though you claim Heroes is your mediocre first novel published thirty years ago and is invented “whole cloth,” it takes from your knowledge of life, which isn’t invented. Your personality controls every word. In some ways it’s more you than anything you’ve written. It says a lot about you: What sort of man are you? What is your morality? What sort of husband would you become, what sort of father? The idea that the main character would cheat and feel guilt, feel overburdened with a diabetic son, worry about being an inadequate parent—of everything you’ve written, Heroes most accurately predicts your apprehension of fatherhood, marriage, and not wanting a second child. I could argue it’s your most autobiographical book.

  DAVID: And I could argue This Seething Ocean, That Damned Eagle is a brilliant title.

  DAVID: Through my early thirties, against a lackadaisical defender, I could look like a genius on the basketball court, but the moment someone stronger and quicker D’d-up against me, I would completely vanish.

  CALEB: It’s part mental: just get the shot off.

  DAVID: But it’s also physical. It’s real. If he’s hand-checking you, you have to be able to put the ball on the ground and take it to the hoop. And I couldn’t.

  Nearing the end of a road completely washed out by a flood.

  CALEB: Let’s check out the washed-out bridge.

  DAVID: Can we really just walk over it like this?

  CALEB: Interesting, how the river veered here and swept the earth out from underneath the road.

  DAVID: How could the water wash out the road? That would have to be an awfully strong current.

  CALEB: Maybe heavy rains and ice pack melt, and it all came rushing down the mountain. Let me take a picture.

  DAVID: Jump in the water, take a little swim.

  CALEB: Freeze to death for dramatic purposes?

  CALEB: Kosinski’s Steps—good stuff, no argument—but The Painted Bird provokes thought and leaves the reader alone.

  DAVID: I don’t want to be left alone.

  They walk down a dirt road toward a vacant monastery.

  DAVID: I love in The Ambassadors when Strether says, “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?” It’s easy for Henry James to write that toward the end of his life. He’d devoted himself entirely to art.

  CALEB: Maugham said James wrote as if there were a lively cocktail party next door, but the voices were too far away to hear, and the fence was too tall to peer over.

  DAVID: To Maugham, that was probably a criticism, but to me that’s what makes James great. Life feels like that to anyone who’s a serious artist.

  CALEB: That’s not really life.

  DAVID: I remember once, toward the end of high school, I performed some chore incompetently—vacuum my room, I forget what—and when I romanticized my incompetence, my mother said, “Just because you’re a ‘writer’ doesn’t mean you have to be a schlemiel.” Laurie and I met at an artists’ colony outside Chicago called Ragdale, where her job was to fix stuff and make dinners. And now sometimes, when she’s a little drunk, she’ll say, “You just married me so I’d take care of you.”

  Caleb laughs.

  DAVID: You wanted to become an artist, but you overcommitted to life. I wanted to become a human being, but I overcommitted … Oh my god …

  CALEB: The crematorium.

  DAVID: It’s not Tibetan, is it?

  CALEB: Chinese characters. mountain temple.

  DAVID: Only the chimney remains.

  CALEB: A few years ago people used these grounds. The monastery must have been lovely. The deck doesn’t seem so solid. We could fall through.

  DAVID: That would be totally schlemiel.

  CALEB: Still life: David Shields in pond.

  DAVID: Wonder if they’ll ever rebuild.

  CALEB: I stayed at a monastery in the backwaters of Thailand. You want to contemplate eternity and suffering and the ten Buddhist precepts—hang out at a monastery.

  DAVID: Are you and Terry equally competent?

  CALEB: She seems to think she’s more competent, and I agree. I’m the schlemiel.

  DAVID: You’re still the artist figure, even though you take care of the kids?

  CALEB: We’ve got a good balance. I don’t know about opposites. There’s no such thing. The opposite of “artsy” isn’t practical or businesslike or mathematical.

  DAVID: There is a yin and a yang. I do think that Laurie and I are more different than some couples are. Some
people marry others who are quite similar to themselves, and I always thought I would, and to my surprise and delight, I didn’t.

  CALEB: There’s almost more friction between artists. What if your wife wrote ultra-conventional novels?

  David laughs.

  CALEB: I had a musician friend who dated a singer. She had all this musical equipment, microphone, sound systems, but she had no talent. My friend said he couldn’t go forward in a relationship with someone who was so blind to her own faults.

  Even two artists who love the same form might clash. One could be a messy night owl, the other tidy and an early bird. One’s vegetarian and one isn’t. One drinks too much; the other hates drinking.

  DAVID: To be very honest, in previous relationships with either writers or visual artists, they would look to me to take care of them. I was supposed to be the strong, silent, competent, sane one. My reaction was always, You’re not serious—you want me to be the rational one? No, I get to be the overanxious artist. A composer named David Del Tredici once said to me, “One Jesus child per family.”

  They walk down another forest service road.

  CALEB: I’m going to get them to take a picture of us.

  DAVID: Do you know them?

  CALEB: No. (to a couple on their front lawn) How you doin’?

  WOMAN: Great.

  CALEB: Could you do us a favor?

  WOMAN: Sure.

  CALEB: Take three or four. Click here.

  WOMAN: Do you want a close-up or far away?

  CALEB: Where we are will be fine. Great. Thanks.

  MAN: Where you guys off to?

  CALEB: Just taking a walk. I’m a journalist, and this guy I’m with is from out of state. Witness protection. His memoir is coming out—under a pseudonym, of course.

  David laughs quietly.

  CALEB: Seriously.

  WOMAN: Can we read about it?