DAVID: What are the three titles?
CALEB: Chinoku, This Seething Ocean, and The World is a Class. My publisher spelled “is” with a lowercase “i.”
DAVID: What do you mean? Did you just not correct it?
CALEB: I didn’t catch the error. I read galleys. She sent me a proof. I must have seen it a dozen times. The World is a Class.
DAVID: It’s funny how your mind can fool you.
CALEB: Have enough Caleb for one weekend? Normally, friendship is marked by long periods of silences interrupted by selective extroversion, but I felt like silence wasted time and opportunity.
DAVID: I know what you mean.
CALEB: Every time I thought of something, I had to mention it. Earlier you said, “Caleb, we have to get to the point, not waste time, be succinct.” But how can we do that? Conversation is a rough draft.
DAVID: That’s where editing will come in. We’ll cut from live moment to live moment, getting rid of the dross. Argue, asterisk, argue, asterisk, argue.
We need to make sure we go at each other. Life against art. I do think we embody those two antipodes. Not that I’m not interested in life or that you’re not interested in art, but we need to ferociously defend how we have lived our lives. I have to say, “It’s okay that I’ve never changed a tire, isn’t it?” Or I say, “It’s amazing that you speak all these languages and have traveled so extensively, but at age forty-three you’re not yet the writer you want to become.” Sound good?
CALEB: No. It doesn’t sound good.
DAVID: Okay, then. If I’m being totally honest, I must admit I find it sort of depressing how much you’ve driven the conversation.
CALEB: That’s not true.
DAVID: You have more stories. You’re a better storyteller. I’m out of stories, out of new ideas. I need to change my life.
CALEB: That’s taken straight from that Rilke poem. Even your big heartfelt revelations are borrowed from books!
DAVID: It was an allusion, and you—
CALEB: Also, I don’t want to fictionalize anything.
DAVID: What?
CALEB: What we say goes. I mean, yeah, add on a thought to a conversation—fine. Or if I paraphrase a quote and when I transcribe, I look up the exact quote, that’s okay, that’s in the spirit. Or if we talk about something on the second day, but it makes sense to bump it to the first day, I’m down with that. But I don’t want to fictionalize some conversation with two bicyclists we never met. It didn’t happen. I don’t want to cross that line.
DAVID: Fine, but I can—
CALEB: If it didn’t happen, I don’t want to say it happened.
DAVID: I do.
CALEB: How often do you have life talks with Natalie? Who told her about the birds and the bees?
DAVID: In school, when she was twelve, they had to watch a movie called Boys Like Breasts. Basically, “You’re about to get your breasts, and boys like them, so don’t worry about it,” that sort of stuff. We’ve had relatively few such talks with her.
CALEB: You talk about abstinence, condoms?
DAVID: She struggles with her weight due to the insulin issue and so—
CALEB: How’s her esteem?
DAVID: That’s a good question. She’s a mixture of tremendous self-possession and deep insecurity (unlike the rest of us). The weight thing is a major problem for her. It’s heartbreaking. She’s beautiful.
CALEB: Life can be cruel. Kids can be cruel.
DAVID: Alert the media.
CALEB: Has she been asked to prom or homecoming?
DAVID: A bunch of people went together as friends. People like her, she has a lot of friends, and boys like her.
CALEB: Does she get any counseling for—
DAVID: She’s seen so many doctors and nutritionists and specialists. She’s been on so many medicines. We so hope she can break the cycle with diet, exercise, and meds. She’s having good success of late.
CALEB: Have you ever been to counseling?
DAVID: Here and there. Nothing serious.
CALEB: What made you go?
DAVID: I saw speech therapists on and off until my early thirties. When I was trying to decide whether I wanted to be a father, I saw one psychologist a few times. He was pretty bad. He just kept saying, “What else are you gonna do?” Have you ever talked to someone?
CALEB: When I had my accident. I had serious bruising in the brain—in a coma for four days. Then I had a seizure right after waking up from the coma. My mind wasn’t ready, and then they took off my cast. They set the bones wrong. I had a bulge in my wrist, so they had to rebreak it, set it with metal screws, and put it together again. I really took advantage of this and played the victim. But my head wasn’t well.
I had the accident at the end of July and stayed at St. Luke’s in Bellingham. I missed the first two weeks of senior year and was let out of the hospital in late September. My first week back, I had an episode at a football game. I had started at quarterback as a junior, and now I’m on the sideline with a back brace and a broken arm, telling everyone that I’ll be ready to play in a couple of weeks. I’ll get good real soon. The eyes of my former teammates and coaches were saying, “You’ve got a cast and shell around your chest, scars all over your face. Yeah, right.”
A couple of my friends were going to the Oak Harbor High School dance afterward, and I wanted to go; the plan had been my mom would take us, wait outside, and then drive us home. But my mom wanted to take me straight home because I was acting nuts. I really wanted to go. It’d be my first dance in months, but she said, “No way—we’re going home.”
I became enraged, punched the door, opened it while she was driving, threatened to jump. My friends calmed me down. She dropped my friends off, took me home, and I’m raving and angry, still. Then she called 911 and a policeman came to the house. Not an ambulance but a policeman. I didn’t know why. He came in and said that he just wanted to take me to the hospital for a checkup and I’d come right back, and I said, “Why? I’m fine. There’s nothing wrong with me.” The policeman explained that I had to go, I’d be examined, and if I was fine I’d come right home. So I went in the back of the police car. My mom followed. My dad stayed home with my sisters. They take me to Whidbey General, put me into a room, tell me that I’m not fine, that I’m going to have to go back to St. Luke’s for further examination.
I exploded. I screamed, “Let me out!” I punched walls until I was exhausted. They strapped me down, took me in an ambulance to Bellingham. They said I bent the metal plate in my wrist slightly. I remember going nutso toward my mom, saying stuff like “Fuck you, you bitch. You betrayed me, you bitch.”
DAVID: What meds were you on?
CALEB: Dilantin. I’d already had the one seizure in August. This time I blacked out, had another seizure, and woke up strapped to a bed in the psych ward of the hospital. They told me I’d gotten violent: they had to monitor me, and I couldn’t leave. I asked one of the nurses to take the straps off. After a little bit they did, and I just started asking questions. I was completely normal, or so I believed. As if I woke up normal, and now I was in this mental ward.
There were other patients—men and women, and they all hung out in a common area, playing games or watching TV. I played chess with a Vietnam vet, and I made a few friends, if you want to call them friends. We each had our own room. I stayed there for two weeks.
I asked one older woman why she was there. She had outbursts/breakdowns, and she was maybe fifty. She was beginning to go bald, a little overweight, had gray hair and enormous breasts, and when I asked her when she was going to go, she said, “Whenever I want. I’m a voluntary patient.”
I couldn’t believe it. She volunteered? I asked her why. She didn’t want to go into it but said that she sometimes felt like killing herself. So I went to the nurse, a guy with a beard, and asked about this. He told me I was also a voluntary patient. So I said, “I’d like to go.” I didn’t know that my parents had admitted me as a voluntary patient.
CALEB: I got angry. It wasn’t a psychotic rage, though—more like I was rationally annoyed. I just tried to tell them I was fine, and this was ridiculous.
DAVID: I wonder if the meds wore off, or what caused the outburst.
CALEB: I’m not sure. I remember the hospital stay vividly. The Vietnam vet had been a Navy SEAL. He and I would play chess, and he had a very beautiful wife and daughter; the daughter was my age, too. I wanted to hear Vietnam stories, which he definitely didn’t want to talk about. I told him he seemed normal, and he said, “Not on the inside.”
The woman who was suicidal and going bald—she lost it once, just yelled and talked about killing herself, and the bearded nurse had to gorilla-hug her and calm her down. Her smock had slipped off and her breasts were showing, she was slobbering and drooling, and there were seven or eight patients watching.
My parents and friends visited, and I could take supervised walks—sometimes with this very kind nurse I had a crush on. She was maybe thirty. Very beautiful and calming. We’d take walks and converse, and I’d say how I didn’t belong there, and she’d explain how they had to make sure. By now it’s October—been over two months since the accident.
The last week or so I just played chess or card games and watched a little TV and read books, and waited, and gave up trying to argue, and that’s how they knew I was sane. They knew I was sane because I no longer struggled; I accepted the situation.
DAVID: Part of it must have been that you saw yourself surrounded by truly crazy people.
CALEB: I couldn’t make comparisons to McMurphy/Nicholson because I hadn’t yet seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but when I saw the movie I knew I’d been there—at least a slice. I’d thought about killing myself in a not completely serious way. Maybe I’m in denial, even now. I imagined it.
After they released me I had to see a counselor in Coupeville once a week, and occasionally I’d go back to St. Luke’s. My parents had to agree that I’d be kept under counseling. And I had to take all these personality tests before I could take a full course load at high school.
DAVID: What’s that famous test, the Minnesota Multiphasic?
CALEB: Could have been. These questions were all over: Have you ever had a homosexual fantasy? Have you ever thought of killing yourself? Have you ever wanted to kill your mother? Have you ever wanted to sleep with your sister? When they finished, they told me I was in denial, according to “expert” evaluation. The only denial might have been about killing myself. I debated that one. I could imagine what it might be like to murder someone, but that’s not the same as being murderous. I had a writer’s imagination before I started writing, is how I look at it.
I’d taken these same tests in early September—same answers, and the psychiatrists had let me return to school; they hadn’t seen my “denial.” After the second test, the head counselor talked to me for a grand total of fifteen minutes and said, “Oh, I’ve looked at your results.” She had practically no interaction with me and came up with this “expert” analysis. When I’d been truly insane, they let me out. When I was sane, they said I needed more counseling.
The school counselor and principal met, looked over these results from the hospital, and disregarded them. They put me back on a full course load. My parents stopped the counseling, but my depression was real. I mean, having broken bones and scars and not being able to play sports is depressing. It’s not mental disease. You lose your wife or children or parents, something much more serious than what I went through, and you’ll be depressed.
About four years after the accident I asked out a Coupeville girl, Michelle, I always thought was cute. In high school I wore heavy-metal clothes and had a mustache; she never paid attention to me. But in college I picked up a little fashion sense, and over summer vacation we were at a party on Whidbey Island, and she said something flattering about me in front of other people, so I asked her out. She accepted, we went out, she seemed awkward all night, I tried to kiss her, and she gave me a peck and left. Then I called, left a couple messages but never talked to her, and after a few days Brenda, a mutual friend, called to tell me Michelle wasn’t interested. I’m twenty. It’s not seventh grade.
I asked Brenda why, and she told me that Michelle thought I was odd. Brenda said that Michelle said, “I don’t feel comfortable; he’s weird.” Brenda said, “That’s just Caleb. Since the accident he’s changed.” And then Michelle said, “Caleb was off before the accident.”
David laughs.
Thus my interest in the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders], leading to stuff like the Rape Crisis Intervention Handbook. Doctors try to evaluate rapists based on science. The conclusion always is, “This guy’s going to rape again, and he’ll be let out someday.” I diverge. My point is I realized how important it is to appear sane. In Speedboat, Renata Adler says, “Sanity is the most profound moral option of our time.”
DAVID: Don’t I know it.
CALEB: Therefore, for the immoral, the criminal, it’s to their benefit to appear insane. Any quasi-sane sociopath just needs to read the DSM in order to work the system.
DAVID: Do you see the world through the lens of the DSM?
CALEB: So you’re familiar with the DSM?
DAVID: I practically wrote the fuckin’ thing.
CALEB: It’s riddled with uncertainty. A careful reading should make any doctor even more agnostic. I don’t understand how any psychiatrist can testify at a trial as an expert. Rape and recidivism correlate—why do we need a psychiatrist to tell a judge that this or that rapist may or may not be a risk to reoffend? “This offender has a less than fifty percent chance of reoffending, so let’s set him free.” Why should society worry about violent recidivists? If you’ve committed a violent rape, not to mention murder, you never get set free. The end.
CALEB: Sometimes Terry suggests marriage counseling.
DAVID: When you guys are going through a rough patch?
CALEB: It’s tongue-in-cheek. We watch Curb and Larry is getting counseling, and she’ll say, “Doesn’t that look like fun? Do you think marriage counseling could settle our differences?” I’ll say, “You want to pay someone $150 an hour to tell him how you wish I vacuumed more often, and if I did you’d be in the mood more often?” The sex-for-chores carrot is a turnoff. Whenever she pulls that, I tell her I’ll fuck her more often if she lets me drink more beer.
DAVID: You guys seem to get along pretty well.
CALEB: We rarely have arguments, although we disagree about everything.
DAVID: Same.
DAVID: I’m interested in how you had this brief flirtation with imbalance and how, from then on, you resolved to become a highly rational person. You decided you weren’t going to go back there anymore.
CALEB: It made me an artist.
DAVID: That’s a pretty fancy thing to say.
CALEB: My senior year, after the wreck, I was very introverted with occasional outbursts. It was when I “discovered” nature. I took walks or drives on Whidbey Island by myself, and I looked at myself, from the outside, for the first time.
There was a girl, Cathy, who I had kissed a couple days before my accident. I thought about her continually in the hospital, and she seemed glad for my recovery. We went out. My cast had been removed, I had a back brace, the bones in my right forearm bulged grotesquely; the surgery to reset hadn’t happened. I wanted her to touch the bone. My arm is an orange-and-purple-and-blue deformed mess. She’s trembling. Later I tried to kiss her. She gave me vomit face.
I get through my senior year. For the first time in my life I became contemplative. I started examining Christianity and went from drugs and alcohol to periods of abstinence followed by more periods of experimentation.
DAVID: But why do you think it turned you toward writing per se?
CALEB: Mark and Vince were the only two I could talk to about these things; each of them had a parent who had died. B
ut some thoughts I wanted for myself, and I had these thoughts and needed to write. I started writing poems my senior year but didn’t consider myself a “poet”—just writing thoughts and notes down on a piece of paper. Writing led me to philosophy and the Bible, and literature was the next step.
DAVID: I suppose it’s pretty obvious how the stutter drove me inward as a survival mechanism. So, too, for you, this accident, though in a different way. “How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” You went for suddenly. I went for gradually.
CALEB: I’m not bankrupt.
DAVID: Neither am I.
Both laugh.
CALEB: I wasn’t a typical jock: I’d missed football and part of basketball. I scored high on the SAT, I graduated third in my class, and I got this army scholar-athlete award that they give to only a thousand people in the nation.
DAVID: Did you have to be from a military family?
CALEB: No. An army officer spoke at our high school assembly, mentioned various achievements, I was zoning out, and then he announced my name. I shook the guy’s hand wearing a Judas Priest T-shirt, a mustache, and a quasi mullet. I finally realized how dumb the mustache looked and shaved it off before starting college. I met you two years later.
DAVID: I’m not sure how to articulate this exactly, but I forget that if a teacher comes along at the right time, that person can have a dramatic effect on a student’s trajectory.
CALEB: Fishing for compliments?
DAVID: Trying to get us an ending.
CALEB: Your class humbled me.
DAVID: How so?
CALEB: You pooh-poohed everything I wrote.
DAVID: (laughing) I don’t remember that. Didn’t I criticize everybody’s work?
CALEB: Of course, but you gave me a 3.0.
DAVID: Was that lower than usual?
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