Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

by David Lipsky

  I remember I was so embarrassed, my mother had sent me a vegetable juicer. That had arrived in the mail soon after I’d left there. And for some reason they’d taken it into the department office. And I’d always wanted to get that vegetable juicer back. And I never had the balls to go back and get it back. Because I couldn’t tell if I could face those people.

  And then Mark got a law firm job in New York. So he moved away. And I lived in that apartment alone, for quite a while. Um. Yeah. Got a job teaching. That spring. Started—no, I’m sorry, that spring I worked as a security guard at the Lotus Software Corporation. Which was weird.

  What’d you do there?

  I have yet to integrate that into my experience. I’ve never worn polyester every day for three months. [Funny, my phone conversation with Amy, his sister Amy, a few weeks later: Amy’s stories about David loving cotton. Purloining any shirt of hers, even the girliest, if he liked the weave.] And I had to wear polyester. And I carried what was called a service baton. And this other security guard showed me, you know, the tricks cops have. The various ways—which I wasn’t great at, but I was fairly good at. And I just remember walkin’—my shift was, ah, it was weird, it was half third, half first. So I’d go in super early in the morning until like midmorning, and in the early morning, nobody’d be there. And I’d just walk under these fluorescent lights, twirling my baton, thinking about as little as possible.

  Did you think you were done then?

  Yeah. I was pretty sure life was over.

  This is after suicide watch is over? [Bonnie told me when she came to visit McLean and saw him, the first thing she did was find a scissors so she could cut his hair, it looked so awful to her.]

  Mm-hmm. That was actually a fairly grim—I think I was in McLean’s for a total of eight days. And then, I was really there just mostly ’cause I was scared I would do something stupid. And I’d actually had a friend from high school, who tried to kill himself by sitting in a garage with the car runnin’. And what it turned out was, he didn’t die, but it really, it fucked up his brain, sort of. It fucked up the affective part. So that he was in terrible pain apparently all the time. But like I was just—and I knew, that if anybody was fated to fuck up a suicide attempt, it was me.

  Which gives you some idea of my mind-set at the time: And I’ll fuck up even that, and then I’ll be a quadriplegic.

  [I tell him Van Gogh story. Van Gogh went into a field to shoot himself, in the chest, with a single-shot pistol. And missed. And had to walk back through town, where everyone thought he was sort of foolish already: terminally wounded but not in fact dead.]

  I didn’t know that story. [Doesn’t find it that funny at first; then laughs.] Yeah, like I can’t catch a break.

  You were somewhat in pain about your desire to become a sort of successful literary person?

  Yes, but also an awareness—I mean, I was in my late twenties then. And you know, and I was sort of aware that that was fairly empty. But the only other thing that seemed to be pulling me was the really sort of intense theoretical interest in fiction. Which then also seemed empty.

  Metafiction. And postmodernism. And what came after metafiction—like what would meta-metafiction be like? And what were ways to co-opt pop culture? And it’s very hard to explain. I think probably the not very sophisticated diagnosis is that I was just depressed.

  Do you think the person you were in 1986 and 1987 would have disliked the work you did for Harper’s, for example? Because it’s pretty straightforward?

  Yeah. I don’t think he would have hated it—I just don’t think he woulda read it. I think he would’ve looked at the first two pages and gone, “Huh! Wonder who likes this kind of stuff?” And then looked for something else.

  How would he have felt about this book?

  Boy—that’s a very good question. I think he would’ve admired a certain amount of it: the stunt pilotry and the humor of it. And some of the prose. But I don’t think he would’ve got it real well. I don’t think he woulda got what I would hope people could get out of it.

  ’Cause he thought things like character were pointless …?

  Not pointless but that they were easy. And that the hard stuff was more, you know, front of the head. It’s never as stark as pointless or not pointless. It’s, you know, what’s interesting, what’s advanced, what’s next? It’s gotta be—right? Not what’s true, but what’s fresh and novel and whatever. It’s very difficult to get out of that.

  [Nudging me again here; an invitation to leave that behind.]

  But anyway. And then you know, the next couple of years are fairly dull. I finally got a job I think the next fall—

  Let’s do it chrono. It’s interesting about the crap jobs …

  OK—then I’ve got an even better one. You don’t know what I’m going to talk about, man.

  OK, so I worked for a while as a security guard at Lotus. And then quit for the incredibly brave reason that I got tired of getting up so early in the morning.

  How long?

  Three and a half months.

  Faulkner worked that kind of job too. When he wrote As I Lay Dying, at night …

  How do you know all this stuff? Is there some like masterwork of biographies of writers that you just …

  Yeah, there’s a little baseball-card series you can collect—stats on the back—you have to subscribe to it …

  Yeah, this wasn’t great though, because you had to keep, you had to check in every ten minutes and give meaningless reports. “All clear here at this cubicle!” [He mimes a walkie-talkie.] You know, like, Lotus was incredibly paranoid about industrial espionage. But I was so new that I wasn’t given access to any of the cleared areas. So I had to go around like, “This hallway looks secure.” And they were incredibly—they were always worried you were gonna not clock in. I don’t know—what was it like? It was like, um, every bad ’60s novel about meaningless authority. And it was just …

  And were you walking around thinking, “My God, I had two books come out when I was very young …”?

  No. As a matter of fact, I remember one reason I liked that job is, I walked around not thinking. You know? In a really like, “Huh: there’s a ceiling tile.” “Huh: there’s a, there’s a cubicle.”

  [Jeeves whines; I tap him on the nose, to quiet him; Dave looks as if I’ve overstepped my bounds. It stops him talking.]

  Sorry.

  Actually, he needed it. Jeeves, see look, you’re pissin’ even the guest off. Even the guest is swattin’ ya. He just gets upset when Drone eats his bone. Drone is kind of being a bully.

  [But me too.]

  All right, but anyway, I quit that job basically because I just didn’t want to wake up in the morning early anymore.

  Hush, sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Good dog, now you stay, you hush.

  Um, and then I got a job—this is the worst—I worked as a towel boy at something called the Auburndale Health Club in Watertown. Which was a very chichi … They called me something other than a towel boy, but I was in effect a towel boy. Who every once in a while was entrusted with the job of checking people in, and having them show their card, and then working out on an unbelievably inelegant and clunky computer system how many visits they’d had.

  But anyway, OK, here’s why I quit that job. Is that I’m sitting there working that job, and who should walk in, um, to get their towel, but Michael Ryan. Now Michael Ryan—who’s best known now for a book called Secret Life, which was this kinda pretty hair-raising memoir. But at the time—yeah, not to mention as we’re petting a dog [the big conversation starter of Secret Life is teenage Michael Ryan attempting sex with his dog. David and I are both now petting Drone]—but at the time, um, um …

  But anyway, Michael Ryan had received a Whiting Writer’s Award the same year I had, like two years earlier, in 1987. So I see this guy that I’d been up on this fucking rostrum with, having Eudora Welty give us this prize. And two years later, I’m like … And I can remember, I can see—it’s the only time I’ve l
iterally dived under something, to have somebody avoid seeing me. Like he came in, and I pretended, I pretended not very subtly to slip, and went under the counter, and had the lady that was there … And I forget: I think I lay facedown, and didn’t respond. And she of course didn’t want to be going, “David, what’s wrong?” while a guest was there. So she gave him the towel.

  And I remember, I somehow worked the rest of that day. I think I would peer around corners to see what room (small laugh) he was in, and then dash and put the towel in a towel bin. And I remember I left that day, and I, I didn’t go back.

  And that was in, let’s see, yeah, that was in June. And then I lived on extremely meager savings for two months. But finally, a couple of friends—I don’t even remember who, Mary Karr and Debra Spark—do you know who Debra Spark is? She had a book called, um, Coconuts for the Saint come out from Faber and Faber last fall, which was actually very good. But anyway, she teaches at Colby now. They got me this job, with DeWitt Henry, who edited Ploughshares, a part-time job teaching at Emerson. And I did that, I did that for the next two and a half—OK, started in the fall of ’90. No, exactly two years. Four semesters of doing that. And it was probably about, Oh God, what did I do? I did the TV essay that’s in the Review. And I lived on that.

  Oh! I moved to Brighton. Oh! OK! I moved to Brighton, across from this thing called Foster Park on Foster Street. And nearby there was this halfway house, I can’t remember its name. And anyway, a couple of the people I met at the Y across from the Foster Street house went to this halfway house that had some kind of free pass to it or something. I remember meeting them like in the weight room, you know? I think initially because I would—when there were these big guys in the room, I’d put too much on the bench press and it would fall on my chest and I couldn’t get it off. And I’d ask these big bruiser guys. But anyway I remember meeting them, and their telling me about the halfway house. And I didn’t do anything about it at the time, but I remember going, “Hmm, that might be an interesting little thing for a novel.” And then that same fall—winter of ’91—I had, like, three friends who I was fairly close to all go into AA. And one of them lived there in Boston. And I remember drinking a lot of coffee with them, and kinda hearing them talk about it. And then, um—

  Oh, and then I hadn’t played tennis for years, and I played tennis with a couple of guys. Who saw that I was good, and set me up with this friend that they had to play with. Um, at a club out in Winchester or Lexington. But this guy who had taught years earlier at a tennis academy on Long Island.

  [Too neat-sounding, in a way.]

  Ah! OK. Yeah, and I remember, when I was in McLean’s, they were gonna put me on something, and I had so decided—all that stuff, I just didn’t want to take anything anymore. This was antidepressants. Which they were fairly persuasive about, but I just didn’t want any part of it. But I remember I’d been reading up on like tricyclics and MAO inhibitors and quadracyclics and all this stuff. And then another friend—not one who was in AA but one that was in, I forget, some kind of deal. Had gone on Prozac, and was talking about Prozac, and I remember reading about Prozac. So there was just kind of a lot of this stuff going on. But I—ah! And OK, and also one of the classes that I took at Harvard was Stanley Cavell on film. Stanley Cavell is an American philosopher who’s kind of a specialist in, like, Emerson and Thoreau. But he’s sort of uh—he’s got a book on movies called Pursuits of Happiness, he’s real good on, like, American film.

  Mark Crispin Miller.

  I think he’s the best writer on television alive. Um um um um. So anyway, so all this—I mean, I was always, I was at Emerson. And Emerson had a library, and I was always in the library. And in the library, I don’t know what you do, but it’s mostly just kind of wandering around. And I’d started in the last year, I’d probably started two different fairly long stories, both of which were just not working. And stopped doing that. Oh, and then I wrote the Michael Martone—Michael Martone called and wanted a thing about my hometown, and growing up. He wanted a thing about the Midwest and different townships. And I ended up doing this thing about tennis and math. And um—[soft sound of brain machinery clicking: tch tch tch tch!]—I think that was after I’d already sort of started. I don’t know: I just remember doin’ a lot of reading on a lot of different subjects, and at a certain point …

  [Nabokov: somehow grown the claws and wings of a novel]

  And this was of course at a time when I’d really kind of given up. I wasn’t even that upset about not writing anymore. It was just more like … and then at a certain point, there seemed to be some kind of system for my reading.

  And I decided that maybe being really sad, and really sort of directionless, wasn’t just that I was fucked up. Maybe there was, maybe it was interesting in a way. Because I can’t really tell you about it in detail, just my friends—I just had so many friends, who went through terrible times exactly when I did. In so many various different ways. And so many of them seemed to have so much going for ’em. And so I think—

  What kind of people?

  Oh, lord. We’re talking: lawyers, stockbrokers, young promising academics, poets, tch tch tch tch. Um … one guy who sold advertising for a string of television stations.

  Like Billy Crystal in City Slickers.

  I didn’t even see that movie. Jack Palance scares me. I don’t see anything with Jack Palance.

  You saw Shane?

  Yeah, that’s why he scares me. Just those cheekbones, you know? Anyway, just a lot of …

  People who were promising, who—

  Just, what was Carter’s word? Malaise. Just the very air seemed sad, and kind of jagged. And then at a certain point, I mean, I always wrote, sort of every day. And at a certain point, I remember writin’ an early, like a very early draft of that first chapter. About somebody who couldn’t make themselves understood. [Jeeves grunts.] Boy, that went through fifteen or twenty drafts.

  I read that out loud to my girlfriend.

  Wow!

  Just really funny, a great opening.

  There are little bits of my experiences with college towns in there.

  We’re in like extremely late—Jeeves, you know what, I’m gonna put you in your crate. Sit and hush—Jeevesmeister—Drone: Good dogs. [Swats them] Now, Jeeves, why don’t you withdraw to chew on that, instead of gloating. You watch: he’s gonna drop it, in one second, and be outraged. [Good dog psych from Dave: one second, and then—] There it goes.

  No, that section was written between Thanksgiving and Christmas of ’91, and I remember I was home with my parents for ’91. And that’s when—I don’t even think they saw me much that vacation. Because that was when a lot of the really short opening sections were written. And then when I came back—I just, I don’t know, I got really bold. I started going to a lot of places and lurking and doing research.

  What’s weird is—OK, there was one in Brighton, there was one in Somerville, there was one in Medford, these halfway houses. And we’d sit around—and it was real weird, these places. They didn’t ask why you were there, they didn’t much care why you were there. And you could sit around, drink as much coffee as you wanted. And I got to sort of like some of these people. And heard a lot of their life stories, some of which in vestigial form are in the book. But I liked them so much that I twisted everything way around.

  [Dogs—Jeeves—crazy again]

  I didn’t like the halfway house parts as much.

  It’s very odd, because everybody says they either prefer those parts or the tennis parts. When of course the fantasy is that neither part is separable from the other.

  I think probably on a second reading …

  [The tape side runs out.]

  [He’s watching the leader on the tape: has interestingly taken this over.] You have to give it a certain amount—oh no, it’s already past it.

  And that’s pretty much when I started it. And then—meanwhile, there’s all this other stuff going on with this person I can’t tell you about. And
I ended up—this is just something I can’t talk about, but I ended up moving to Syracuse.

  Unhappy relationship?

  Not unhappy. They moved away and I missed ’em, and I wanted ’em, I wanted to be able to move there. Except the thing about it is, man, I really can’t use any of it because this person who’s name I’m not saying …

  Well …

  [Shuts the tape off]

  And at some point, I realized this was going to be a book, and that I couldn’t both teach and work on it. It just took too much time. It was extremely expensive to live in Boston, I had some friends in Syracuse where—I remember Jon Franzen and I drove up there to look at places, because he was thinkin’ about moving too. And I liked the area and thought it was really cheap and ended up moving there. And most of the book was written—I didn’t have a job, I didn’t do anything.

  I took an advance and lived in an apartment that was seriously the size of like, um, the foyer of an average house. I don’t know, I really liked it. It was incredibly tiny. You know, the front hallway that’s got like a coat closet in it? I mean it was, it was very cool, because it was literally—I mean, there were so many books that you couldn’t move around. And when I would want to write, I would have to put all the stuff from the desk on the bed. And when I would want to sleep, I would have to put all the stuff on the desk.

  But things were so tight and so orderly. And the book was … I mean, there was just, I’ve never had to hold that much different information in my head at any one time. And it was nice to be in a little, a little sort of tiny—and it was so snowy, they got record snowfall that year. And it was almost impossible to go anywhere. But there was a grocery store that was close by, and I had a friend who lived very close by that I could go and spend time with.